665,000 Iraqis killed since the "liberation"

According to a study led by Gilbert Burnham of Johns Hopkins University, there have been approximately 655,000 casualties in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003:

Methods Between May and July 2006 a national cluster survey was conducted in Iraq to assess deaths occurring during the period from January 1, 2002, through the time of survey in 2006. Information on deaths from 1,849 households containing 12,801 persons was collected. This survey followed a similar but smaller survey conducted in Iraq in 2004. Both surveys used standard methods for estimating deaths in conflict situations, using population-based methods.

Findings Death rates were 5.5/1000/year pre-invasion, and overall, 13.2/1000/year for the 40 months post-invasion. We estimate that through July 2006, there have been 654,965 “excess deaths”—fatalities above the pre-invasion death rate—in Iraq as a consequence of the war. Of post-invasion deaths, 601,027 were due to violent causes. Non-violent deaths rose above the pre-invasion level only in 2006. Since March 2003, an additional 2.5% of Iraq’s population have died above what would have occurred without conflict.
The proportion of deaths ascribed to coalition forces has diminished in 2006, though the actual numbers have increased each year. Gunfire remains the most common reason for death, though deaths from car bombing have increased from 2005. Those killed are predominantly males aged 15-44 years.

The study is published in The Lancet.

Link: Burnham, G. & Lafta, R. (2006). Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: A cross-sectional cluster sample survey. The Lancet DOI:10:1016/S0140-6736(06)69491-9.

5,000 years of Middle Eastern history in 90 seconds

Via Mitchieville:



from Maps of War.

Naguib Mahfouz dies, aged 94

Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt's greatest writer and the first Arab Nobel laureate, died today, aged 94.

Here's an obituary from the Guardian.

Lebanon is on its knees

Click to enlarge

Demonstrators in London yesterday

Thousands gathered in London's Trafalgar Square yesterday to protest against Israel's attacks on Lebanon. The photographs below were taken by me.

More photos of the demo can be found here.

Hassan Nasrullah interview

Here's a full, translated transcript of Al Jazeera's interview with Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrullah.

Israel's real intentions in Lebanon

Israel's bombing of Lebanon enters its third week, with the most intense bombing yet taking place on Tuesday.

The effect of Israel's air strikes on Lebanon is utterly devastating and is in violation of humanitarian law. 13 Lebanese were killed early this morning; most of Lebanon's cities have been attacked by Israeli war planes; entire villages in southern Lebanon have been 'flattened'; the Lebanese infrastructure has been severly damaged; and a humanitarian crisis looms as Israel deliberately targets food and medical supplies.

Approximately 600 have been killed in the last two weeks; the vast majority of these have been lebanese civilians. Four United Nations peacekeepers were killed in an Israeli air strike earlier this week; it turns out that the UN urged Israeli troops no less than 10 times not to open fire on the post.

Israel's response to the kidnapping by Hisbullah of two soldiers is hugely disproportionate. The attacks on Lebanon, have, in fact, been planned for over a year, and the kidnapping of the Israeli troops by Hizbullah was an event that catalyzed these plans.

So, if the taking of hostages by Hizbullah is not the real reason behind this war, what are Israel's real intentions in Lebanon?

Israel intends to gain control of the Litani, a river in southern Lebanon. Water is the most essential substance for all forms of life on Earth, and will soon become a valuable commodity. Israel is one of the most arid countries in the world, and it desperately needs water.

To this end, Israel has stated that it intends to control a 'buffer zone' in southern Lebanon. This buffer zone could penetrate as much as 20 km into Lebanese territory.

Israel's military strategy appears to be to pound southern Lebanon so hard that all those who normally inhabit the buffer zone decide to abandon their homes.

The Litani river rises west of Baalbek, emptying into the Mediterranean north of Tyre. It is a major water supply for southern Lebanon. On its southward course, the Litani bends westwards and comes within 4km of the northern Israeli border.

Control of the Litani was an underlying motive for Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Israel claimed that the reason for its 1982 invasion was the attempted murder of Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador in London, by the PLO. It was in fact another faction, Abu Nidal, who were responsible for the attempt on Argov's life.

Israel tries to justify civilian casualties

The Evening Standard ran this dispicable front page last week.

In an attempt to justify the civilian casualties it has inflicted, Israel claimed that it believed Hizbullah was using Lebanese children as sandbags.

It doesn't surprise me that the Standard jumped on Israel's statement, but can intelligent people actually be fooled by this nonsense?

The Standard's front page is but one example of biased reporting of the Middle East in the British press. Israel, and Jews in Europe and the U.S., claim that the british media is openly anit-Israeli. The truth, however, is that the British media is very pro-Israeli.

Israel is routinely reported as being a David waging war against the Arab Goliath. Whereas Israel has one of the mightiest armed forces in the world, the Palestinians have no army at all. None of the Arab states surrounding Israel, all of whom apparently would like to destroy the Jewish state, have an army that can be compared to Israel's.

Israel in Lebanon

WARNING: EXTREMELY GRAPHIC IMAGES BELOW

Israel continues to pound Lebanon and kill innocent civilians.

Shine on you crazy diamond

Syd Barret, founder and lead singer of the legendary Pink Floyd, has died at the age of 60 of diabetes-related complications.

Apologies for my absence

Regular readers of this blog (if there are any!) will notice that I haven't posted anything for about 2 weeks.


I've been preoccupied with other things recently, but normal services will resume soon!

The chameleon snake and a nanotube film

The Kapuas mud snake, Enhydris gyii, was recently discovered in the forests of Borneo. It is the first new snake species to be discovered in over 5 years. The snake is venemous, measures half a metre in length and is capable of changing colour.

Scientists at Rice University have produced a film clip of carbon nanotubes, using standard optical microscopes and video cameras. The nanotubes in the film are in a drop of soapy water trapped between two pieces of glass. A fluorescent dye in the water droplet makes the nanotubes visible. The film shows that the nanotubes can be bent, or 'plucked' like guitar strings, when bombarded by individual water molecules.

Carbon nanotubes are 100 times stronger than steel despite being only one-billionth of a metre in diameter; by comparison, a human hair has a diameter of 80,000 nanometres).

Discovery of 100,000-year-old jewellery

These beads, discovered by archaeologists and dated to 100,000 years ago, are the oldest known examples of jewellery.

The ancient ornaments were found at Oued Djebbana and Skhul, in what are now Algeria and Israel, respectively. They are made from the shells of Nassarius gibbosulus, a marine gastropod, and are perforated, so it seems that they were hung around the neck or wrist.

The Algerian site is 120km from the sea, so the presence of shells at the site provides evidence that they were traded and transported. The discovery of the beads therefore suggests that human culture emerged far earlier than was previously thought.

The leggiest animal in the world is rediscovered

(Nature)

The millipede Illacme plenipes is the leggiest animal in the world - an adult of this ancient species can have up to 750 legs.

There are 10,000 known species of millipede; this particular one is extremely rare, and has only been seen once before, over 80 years ago in California.

The scanning electron micrographs above show the complex internal structure of I. plenipes. The fine hairs covering each segment (visible in c and d, above) secrete a silky substance whose function is yet to be determined. The image on the bottom right shows the male copulatory organ.

I smell something fishy about this...

According to Seed Magazine, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will be spending $15 million next year on the "Unique Signiture Detection Project," the aim of which is to be able to identify terrorists from scents secreted in bodily fluids.

The project is based on the idea, for which there is little evidence, that the Major Histocompatability Complex (MHC) genes of the immune system are responsible for a unique odour given off by every person.

NSA to Digg social bookmarks for personal data

Let's face it: what the U.S. and British governments refer to as 'intelligence' is actually nothing of the kind. The information obtained by the so-called intelligence agencies is often inaccurate or completely wrong, and there have been tragic consequences as a result, such as the killing of Jean Charles de Menesez two years ago and, more recently, the fumbled 'terror raid' in Forest Gate.

According to New Scientist, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) "is funding research into the mass harvesting of information [from] social networks".

The popularity of social bookmarking sites such as Digg, del.icio.us and Blinklist has grown enormously in recent months. These sites are part of the 'semantic web', a project to create a universal medium for the exchange of information, based on placing documents whose meaning (or semantics) can be processed by computers, and information from them could easily be combined with other personal data from online banking and retail records. Social bookmarking allows for the easy sharing of information between people of similar interests and, therefore, the creation of online 'communities' focused around a particular topic.

The revelation that the White House has been tapping telephones and logging calls since the attacks on the World Trade Centre shocked Americans. More recently, the Bush administration requested internet search data from companies such as Google, Yahoo and MSN in an effort to harvest information about suspected terrorists.

A paper entitled Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, presented at the W3C web standards organization's WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh last month, reveals how much personal information can be obtained by mining the social web. The paper describes work by an international research team that is partly funded by Advanced Research Development Activity (ARDA), a U.S. government agency whose main aim, according to a Congressional Research Service report, is to analyse data obtained by the NSA.

This is no mean feat, as the NSA is accumulating data at the rate of millions of gigabytes a month. But perhaps the NSA should bear something in mind: as policemen trying to infiltrate paedophile rings well know, people are not always completely truthful abouot their online identity. The intelligence obtained by mining social web data may not, therefore, be as 'intelligent' as they would hope.

Al-Zarqawi killed in air raid

"Arguably, over the last several years, no single person on this planet has had the blood of more innocent men, women and children on his hands that Zarqawi."

U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The names of two people who certainly do have more blood on their hands than Zarqawi immediately spring to mind: Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush.

Nour speaks from behind bars

Below is a translation of a letter written by Ayman Nour, smuggled out of prison by his wife (from The Arabist).

Nour is the founder of the Egyptian political opposition party Ghad. He was charged with forging signatures to register his party, which was formed in October 2004. The U.S. pressed the Egyptian government into delaying his trial until last year's presidential election, in which Nour won 8% of the votes, a result he insisted was rigged.

After the election, Nour was put on trial for fraud, and the jury delivered a verdict of guilty. Nour is now serving a 5-year term in prison. His imprisonment is politically motivated, serving to stifle his calls for reform of the Egyptian political system.

30 May 2006. Tura Mazraa Prison, South Cairo.

From: Ayman Nour

To: Esteemed Members of the European Union Deputy Head of the European
Parliament

I address this very short letter to you and to all the honorable and free people in the world, to all the representatives of the free people and those whose consciences refuse oppression, injustice, false accusations and merciless murder.

My letter is very short due to the circumstances out of my control restricting my freedom and depriving me of my human rights, the foremost of which is the right to write, express and reject the injustice and suffering I am subjected to!!

The day my freedom was taken away in January 2005, your great efforts –after God and combined with the efforts of my supporters- played a crucial role in my release. The first faces I saw –an honor to me- were the faces of a delegation of European male and female parliament representatives. Your visit to me during my imprisonment is not only reason for breaking the doors of this prison and my temporary release, it also gave me the possibility of exercising my right in running for the first presidential election. I was imprisoned to prevent me from running for the election in January 2005. With God’s grace and the enthusiasm of the reformists
I was able to come in second to the president and be the only competitor to him
and his son despite the rigging and all forms of injustice, defamation and
changing the results. I also paid an extra price when my constituency’s election
results were rigged thus causing me to lose my permanent seat in the parliament
due to blatant rigging. Some of you were in Cairo and witnessed a part of the
tragedy.

Today I pay a new and high price as punishment for having run for the presidential election. I am also being prevented from continuing the democratic reform path in Egypt so that the current regime can strengthen its presence by claiming there is no alternative for it other than fundamentalism and terrorism, thus forcing people inside and outside Egypt to accept its presence.

Unfortunately, ladies and gentlemen, I do not pay this price alone. My children, family, party, my whole generation and all the reformists in this country pay the price, too. I lost my freedom, my work as a lawyer, journalist and chairman of the first and only civil political party to be established in a quarter of a century, the duration of Mubarak’s rule. I am threatened of remaining in prison for five years and prevented from exercising my political rights for another five years to guarantee that Egypt is inherited by Mubarak’s son, as well as making me an example to anyone who thinks of breaking the power monopoly not only in Egypt but in the Arab world!!

I call upon you to exert every effort to defend my fair case not for my sake, nor
for the sake of my children or my party that is being destroyed, my human rights
which are violated in this prison every morning, or my life which illness, injustice and oppression are eating away at. I ask you to defend my fair case to keep hope alive for the coming generations which we do not want to lose hope. It is for these generations that I call upon you to exert every effort to defend my fair case and to visit me in prison to witness the truth which the Egyptian regime is very good at concealing and telling lies to prove the opposite. Free people of the world. I am dying alone for a principle, for my country and for freedom. Please raise my voice before my spirit departs this world.

Ayman Nour

A volcanic eruption observed from space

This photogroah of a plume of volcanic ash spewing out of the Cleveland volcano in Alaska was taken by Jeffrey N. Williams, a flight engineer on the International Space Station.

The volcano, located on Chuginadak Island, erupted on 23rd May. The ash plume visible in the photo is moving west-southwest from the volcano's summit and may have been as high as 6,000m (20,00ft.) above sea level, according to the Alaska Volcano Observatory.

Also visible in the photo is a bank of fog (upper right), a common meteorological feature of the Aleutian Islands.

The Cleveland volcano is one of the most active of the volcanoes in the Aleutian Islands. It is a stratovolcano, consisting of alternating layers of volcanic rock, compacted volcanic ash and hardened lava. Its summit is 1,730m high, and its activity is produced by the northwestward movement of the Pacific tectonic plate under the North American plate.

Blix: "Abandon the War on Terror"

Despite its rhetoric about spreading freedom and democracy throughout the world, the United States remains the biggest threat to peace.

Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix, one of the few people whose integrity remained intact throughout the Iraq war debacle, has said that the U.S. must abandon its 'war on terror' to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

In a report by the WMD Committee, published earlier this month, Blix warns that the U.S. policy of pre-emptive strikes against 'rogue' states believed to possess WMDs, and its development of the Star Wars II missile defence shield and new types of nuclear weapons, are likely to bring about a new global arms race.

"The U.S. missile shield may be triggering countermeasures by China and Russia," states Blix in the preface to the 231-page report. The world's major military powers, he says, should develop new security strategies without the use of WMDs, and the U.S. should stop testing nuclear weapons to encourage countries such as India and pakistan to comply with the UN's test-ban treaty.

Blix is chairman of the WMD Commission, which was set up by the Swedish government in 2003, "to respond to the recent, profoundly worrying developments in international security."