Secret memos expose link between oil firms and invasion of Iraq

...The minutes of a series of meetings between ministers and senior oil executives are at odds with the public denials of self-interest from oil companies and Western governments at the time.

The documents were not offered as evidence in the ongoing Chilcot Inquiry into the UK's involvement in the Iraq war. In March 2003, just before Britain went to war, Shell denounced reports that it had held talks with Downing Street about Iraqi oil as "highly inaccurate". BP denied that it had any "strategic interest" in Iraq, while Tony Blair described "the oil conspiracy theory" as "the most absurd".

But documents from October and November the previous year paint a very different picture.

Five months before the March 2003 invasion, Baroness Symons, then the Trade Minister, told BP that the Government believed British energy firms should be given a share of Iraq's enormous oil and gas reserves as a reward for Tony Blair's military commitment to US plans for regime change.

The papers show that Lady Symons agreed to lobby the Bush administration on BP's behalf because the oil giant feared it was being "locked out" of deals that Washington was quietly striking with US, French and Russian governments and their energy firms.

Minutes of a meeting with BP, Shell and BG (formerly British Gas) on 31 October 2002 read: "Baroness Symons agreed that it would be difficult to justify British companies losing out in Iraq in that way if the UK had itself been a conspicuous supporter of the US government throughout the crisis."

The minister then promised to "report back to the companies before Christmas" on her lobbying efforts.

The Foreign Office invited BP in on 6 November 2002 to talk about opportunities in Iraq "post regime change". Its minutes state: "Iraq is the big oil prospect. BP is desperate to get in there and anxious that political deals should not deny them the opportunity."

After another meeting, this one in October 2002, the Foreign Office's Middle East director at the time, Edward Chaplin, noted: "Shell and BP could not afford not to have a stake in [Iraq] for the sake of their long-term future... We were determined to get a fair slice of the action for UK companies in a post-Saddam Iraq."

Whereas BP was insisting in public that it had "no strategic interest" in Iraq, in private it told the Foreign Office that Iraq was "more important than anything we've seen for a long time"...

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Haia officers get training to combat black magic

JEDDAH: A total of 30 officials of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (Haia) have been trained on how to deal with cases of black magic.

The three-day training program was held in the Eastern Province city of Al-Ahsa.

The commission has achieved remarkable successes in combating black magic in various parts of the country. It has set up nine specialized centers in the main cities to deal with black magicians.

The majority of people arrested for practicing black magic in the Kingdom are Africans and Indonesians.

According to a report received by Arab News, a single specialized center had dealt with 586 cases involving black magic, showing the enormity of the problem.

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Japan's nuclear history in perspective: Eisenhower and atoms for war and peace

...Eisenhower decided that the best way to destroy that taboo was to shift the focus from military uses of nuclear energy to socially beneficial applications. Stefan Possony, Defense Department consultant to the Psychological Strategy Board, had argued: "the atomic bomb will be accepted far more readily if at the same time atomic energy is being used for constructive ends" (p. 156). On December 8, 1953, Eisenhower delivered his "Atoms for Peace" speech at the United Nations. He promised that the United States would devote "its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life." He pledged to spread the benefits of peaceful atomic power at home and abroad.

But the subsequent March 1954 Bravo test almost derailed those plans. Fallout from the US hydrogen-bomb test contaminated 236 Marshall Islanders and 23 Japanese fisherman aboard the Daigo Fukuryu Maru ("Lucky Dragon no. 5"), which was 85 miles away from the detonation and outside the designated danger zone. A panic ensued when irradiated tuna was sold in Japanese cities and eaten by scores of people.
The international community was appalled by the bomb test. Belgian diplomat Paul-Henri Spaak warned, "If something is not done to revive the idea of the President's speech -- the idea that America wants to use atomic energy for peaceful purposes -- America is going to be synonymous in Europe with barbarism and horror." Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru declared that US leaders were "dangerous self-centered lunatics" who would "blow up any people or country who came in the way of their policy."

Eisenhower told the NSC in May 1954, "Everybody seems to think that we are skunks, saber-rattlers, and warmongers." Dulles complained, "Comparisons are now being made between ours and Hitler's military machine."

Criticism was fiercest in Japan. In Tokyo's Suginami ward, housewives began circulating petitions to ban hydrogen bombs. The movement caught on across the country. By the next year, an astounding 32 million people, or one-third of Japan's population, had signed petitions against hydrogen bombs.

Long-suppressed rage over the 1945 atomic bombings, squelched by US occupation authorities' total ban on discussion of the bombings, had finally erupted. The Operations Coordinating Board of the NSC recommended that the United States contain the damage by waging a "vigorous offensive on the non-war uses of atomic energy" and even offer to build Japan an experimental nuclear reactor. AEC Commissioner Thomas Murray concurred, proclaiming, "Now, while the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain so vivid, construction of such a power plant in a country like Japan would be a dramatic and Christian gesture which could lift all of us far above the recollection of the carnage of those cities."...

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Secret Weapons Program Inside Fukushima Nuclear Plant?

U.S.-Japan security treaty fatally delayed nuclear workers' fight against meltdown

by Yoichi Shimatsu, Global Research

Confused and often conflicting reports out of Fukushima 1 nuclear plant cannot be solely the result of tsunami-caused breakdowns, bungling or miscommunication. Inexplicable delays and half-baked explanations from Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) seem to be driven by some unspoken factor.

The smoke and mirrors at Fukushima 1 seem to obscure a steady purpose, an iron will and a grim task unknown to outsiders. The most logical explanation: The nuclear industry and government agencies are scrambling to prevent the discovery of atomic-bomb research facilities hidden inside Japan's civilian nuclear power plants.

A secret nuclear weapons program is a ghost in the machine, detectable only when the system of information control momentarily lapses or breaks down. A close look must be taken at the gap between the official account and unexpected events.

Conflicting Reports

TEPCO, Japan’s nuclear power operator, initially reported three reactors were operating at the time of the March 11 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Then a hydrogen explosion ripped Unit 3, run on plutonium-uranium mixed oxide (or MOX). Unit 6 immediately disappeared from the list of operational reactors, as highly lethal particles of plutonium billowed out of Unit 3. Plutonium is the stuff of smaller, more easily delivered warheads.

A fire ignited inside the damaged housing of the Unit 4 reactor, reportedly due to overheating of spent uranium fuel rods in a dry cooling pool. But the size of the fire indicates that this reactor was running hot for some purpose other than electricity generation. Its omission from the list of electricity-generating operations raises the question of whether Unit 4 was being used to enrich uranium, the first step of the process leading to extraction of weapons-grade fissionable material.

The bloom of irradiated seawater across the Pacific comprises another piece of the puzzle, because its underground source is untraceable (or, perhaps, unmentionable). The flooded labyrinth of pipes, where the bodies of two missing nuclear workers—never before disclosed to the press— were found, could well contain the answer to the mystery: a lab that none dare name.

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Virgins recruited to pick tea with their lips

A Chinese tea company is seeking busty virgins to pick tea leaves with their lips in a bid to keep their brew as pure as possible.

Lip tea is reportedly billed as the most refined in the world, and the company behind it believes virgin leaf pickers are the key to keeping it that way.

The Jiuhua plantation has advertised for pickers in Gushi, Henan province, specifying applicants must be women with no sexual experience and a bra size of a least a C cup, the Daily Mail reports.

Virginity and curviness are believed to promote well-being and purity.

The girls are paid more than $75 a day, a fortune in China.

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New particle find turns physics upside-down

"If this signal is what we think it is, we could be on the verge of understanding why matter has mass, whereas light doesn't," said Professor Kenneth Lane, a theoretical physicist at Boston University. "We might be seeing the signal for a new kind of nuclear interaction which we have called 'technicolour'. This scenario basically replaces the Higgs boson."

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Scientists Abuzz Over Controversial Rumor that God Particle Has Been Detected

A rumor is floating around the physics community that the world's largest atom smasher may have detected a long-sought subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, also known as the "God particle."

The controversial rumor is based on what appears to be a leaked internal note from physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 17-mile-long particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland. It's not entirely clear at this point if the memo is authentic, or what the data it refers to might mean — but the note already has researchers talking.

The buzz started when an anonymous commenter recently posted an abstract of the note on Columbia University mathematician Peter Woit's blog, Not Even Wrong.

Some physicists say the note may be a hoax, while others believe the "detection" is likely a statistical anomaly that will disappear upon further study. But the find would be a huge particle-physics breakthrough, if it holds up.

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The Mother of All Languages

By Gautam Naik, Wall Street Journal

The world's 6,000 or so modern languages may have all descended from a single ancestral tongue spoken by early African humans between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, a new study suggests.

The finding, published Thursday in the journal Science, could help explain how the first spoken language emerged, spread and contributed to the evolutionary success of the human species.

Quentin Atkinson, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and author of the study, found that the first migrating populations leaving Africa laid the groundwork for all the world's cultures by taking their single language with them—the mother of all mother tongues.

"It was the catalyst that spurred the human expansion that we all are a product of," Dr. Atkinson said.

About 50,000 years ago—the exact timeline is debated—there was a sudden and marked shift in how modern humans behaved. They began to create cave art and bone artifacts and developed far more sophisticated hunting tools. Many experts argue that this unusual spurt in creative activity was likely caused by a key innovation: complex language, which enabled abstract thought. The work done by Dr. Atkinson supports this notion.

His research is based on phonemes, distinct units of sound such as vowels, consonants and tones, and an idea borrowed from population genetics known as "the founder effect." That principle holds that when a very small number of individuals break off from a larger population, there is a gradual loss of genetic variation and complexity in the breakaway group.

Dr. Atkinson figured that if a similar founder effect could be discerned in phonemes, it would support the idea that modern verbal communication originated on that continent and only then expanded elsewhere.

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~ See Also: Language universality idea tested with biology method and Weak Evidence for Word-Order Universals: Language Not as 'Innate' as Thought? ~