"Lcpl Boudreaux killed my Dad, th(en) he knocked up my sister!"

Fascist shrieking Nazi party... er National party MP Wayne Mapp (so insignisficant is he that thankfully I've never even heard of him till now) today referred to me as a "cringing, screaming lefty.'

Now, Mr Wayne Mapp, you fucking wanker, I am neither cringing, nor screaming.

The Government is preparing to give itself the power to decline and even revoke New Zealand passports and citizenship for security reasons as part of the international "war on terror". Its powers could also extend to New Zealand-born citizens.

Those with concerns about the human rights aspects of the bill were dismissed last night as those of "cringing, screaming lefties" by National MP Wayne Mapp.

May I be the first to suggest that Wayne Mapp's citizenship be revoked.

This is possibly the most dangerous bill to ever come before parliament.

The UN's 1987 Montreal Protocol, agreed to by 180 countries, banned use of the ozone depleting pesticide methyl bromide and is supposed to have been phased out by next year.

However 11 of the world's most impoverished countries have received an exemption so they can continue using it on their high value crops.

The countries are:
Australia (145 tonnes), Belgium (47), Canada (56), France (407), Greece (186), Italy (2,133), Japan (284), Portugal (50), Spain (1,059), Britain (129) and the United States (8,942).

In Britain innocent victims wrongly jailed by the courts and subsequently freed are now being billed £3000 a year for their "accommodation expenses" by the government.

The Home Office said an “independent assessor appointed by the Home Secretary takes into account the range of costs the prisoner might have incurred had they not been imprisoned”. The spokesman said the assessor was “right” to do this, adding: “Morally, this is reasonable and appropriate.”

Robert Brown was 19 when he was jailed for life for murdering a woman in 1977. He served 25 years before he was finally freed in 2002 after the courts ruled him innocent of the crime. He is now facing a bill of around £80,000 for the living expenses he cost the state.

Vincent Hickey who was wrongly convicted for killing a paperboy, was charged £60,000 for the 17 years he spent in jail. He said: “If I had known this I would have stayed on hunger-strike longer, that way I would have had a smaller bill.”

Mike O’Brien spent 10 years in jail wrongly convicted of killing a Cardiff newsagent. While he was incarcerated his baby daughter died. He was charged £37,500 by the Home Office..

Paddy Hill was one of the Birmingham Six. He was locked up for 16 years behind bars for the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings by the IRA. He has been charged £50,000.

It wasn’t until two years ago that Hill was finally awarded £960,000 in compensation. However, during the years since his release, while waiting for the pay-out, the government had given him advances of around £300,000. When his compensation came through, the £300,000 was taken back along with interest on the interim payments charged at 23%!!!!! – that cost him a further £70,000.

Pentagon officials say they do not expect to be able to provide space for representatives of human rights advocacy groups to observe any military tribunals at the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

In letters last week to Amnesty International, Human Rights First and Human Rights Watch, a senior military official said it was unlikely that they would be allowed to attend any military tribunals at Guantánamo. The official, Brig. Gen. Thomas L. Hemingway, a chief legal adviser in the office of military commissions, wrote that space would be limited if and when tribunals were held at Guantánamo.

"It is expected that limited courtroom seating and other logistical issues will preclude attendance by many who desire to observe military commission proceedings," he wrote.

General Hemingway noted that there would be seats for the news media as well as for representatives of the International Red Cross. There will probably be arrangements for some members of Congress to attend the trials and perhaps for officials of organizations that represent victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Don Brash, leader of the National Party in NZ, has stated that should his party come to power that he will withdrawal funding from universities that run entry schemes for Maori students. He is really on a roll with his race-baiting; odd considering when he was governor of the Reserve Bank he instigated a Maori scholarship scheme.
You will note though that discrimination on favour of rural students is acceptable to him.
From the University of Auckland Medical School website:

... the Faculty offers two special entry quotas:

* Maori and Pacific Admissions Scheme (MAPAS)
* Rural Origin Medical Preferential Entry scheme (ROMPE)

But there's no political mileage to be made with baiting the rural folk.

On February 10, Dr Rouse wrote to the BMJ explaining that he and his colleague, Yaser Adi, had spent 100 hours preparing a report, Hutton, Kelly and the Missing Epidemiology. They concluded that "the identified evidence does not support the view that wrist-slash deaths are common (or indeed possible)".

To bleed to death from a transected artery goes against classical medical teaching, which is that a transected artery retracts, narrows, clots and stops bleeding within minutes. Even if a person continues to bleed, the body compensates for the loss of blood through vasoconstriction (closing down of non-essential arteries). This allows a partially exsanguinated individual to live for many hours, even days.

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The criminal organisation known as Monsanto has been granted a patent on Nap Hal wheat, used to make chapatis, despite the fact that in fact it is the collective result of generations of farmers in India who spent years crossbreeding for its special properties.
There is little hope of the Indian government intervening to fight the patent - it simply cannot afford the legal fees, having spent hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting a US decision to grant a Texan company a patent on basmati rice in 1997.

And the most comprehensive study yet made of chemical use on genetically modified crops, which Monsanto pushes heavily in conjunction with it's herbicide Roundup, shows that in the long term more herbicides and pesticides are used.
When first introduced most of the GM crops needed up to 25% fewer chemicals for the first three years, but afterwards significantly more. During 2002-2003, an average of 29% more herbicide was applied per acre on GM maize.

If you know where there are any weapons of mass destruction tell the CIA, pretty please.

(Try looking around in USA, I think you'll find plenty there).

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Bush's budget for 2005 is $2,400,000,000,000. This is roughly $20 for every human who has ever lived.

Of this $512,000,000,000 is to be borrowed from the rest of the world. This is roughly the amount as the USA spends on it's military machine. The world is loaning the USA the money with which to terrorise, exploit or bully them with.

Even when adjusted for inflation this is more than the cumulative total the USA government spent between 1787 and 1900.

In the streets behind the drugs and vice headquarters at Charing Cross police station, two young policemen are just finishing their rounds. 'What would happen if I started smoking this?' I ask, producing the spliff. They blanche. 'Put that away while you're talking to us,' one says. 'Put it this way - if you were smoking that in your car, you would be arrested.' But aren't you allowed to smoke in private premises? I ask; isn't a car private?

There is a pause. 'That's true,' he concedes. He looks tense. 'Well, perhaps if you were in a car, travelling slowly in a built-up area, you'd be arrested,' he tries.

What about personal use? I ask. I wave the spliff around again. I've hardly got any dope at all in this, I say. 'The amount you've got there is clearly for personal use, so that's fine,' says the second officer.

'So if I was smoking this in my car, that would be legal?' I ask. 'I thought you said ... ' He breaks in: 'You're confusing us now: I'd just advise you to take it home and smoke it there.

'The truth of the matter is that the exact rules haven't filtered down to us yet, so we're none of us too sure,' he tries to smile. 'Please, miss, please put it away now.'

I collar another pair of officers. 'It's different in different areas of London,' explains one. 'If you want to smoke that, I'd suggest you crossed over to Lambeth.'

'We're more prudish here,' his younger colleague adds, folding his arms behind his back. 'Put that away now, miss, you're embarrassing me.'

From the Observer

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Zvi Mazel was expelled from Stockholm's Museum of Antiquities on Friday after he threw a spotlight at the exhibit, called "Snow White".

He denounced the work as "obscene" and a "monstrosity", saying it insulted the victims' families.

It depicted a woman bomber, Hanadi Jaradat, who killed herself and 19 Israelis in Haifa.

The artwork in fact does not glorify this bomber. However here is a little more information not provided by the main news reports:

Who was Hanadi Jaradat? Jaradat was a 29 year old lawyer from Jenin. She had lost a lot to the Israelis and the intifada--eight years earlier, the distant cousin whom she was to marry and whom she loved was killed in an encounter with Israeli security forces before they could marry. Her cousin, Salah, and brother, Fadi were shot down in cold blood on the night of June 12 at the family home in front of her eyes and those of the cousin's pregnant wife and two year old son. Fadi, initially wounded, was taken by soldiers and shot again to make sure he was dead. When the family got the body back to bury it, Hanadi reported to Al-Arab Al-Yum that her brother had been shot in every part of his body. Her brother's wedding would have happened three days later, on June 16, to eighteen year old Abir. After Fadi died, Hanadi became the breadwinner for the family because her father was ill with cancer and could no longer work. The only thing that had improved his health was Fadi's upcoming wedding. With Fadi's death, her father was left a broken man.

She said: "If our nation cannot realize its dream and the goals of the victims, and live in freedom and dignity, then let the whole world be erased."

-Singapore executes 3 times more victims per capita than Saudi Arabia (mostly for drug trafficking, and with little impact on drug use levels)
-Has only in the last year legalized chewing gum - but only for medicical use
-Recentaly legalized bungi jumping
-Oral sex is currently illegal

From Top Ten Drug Stories of 2003

--Afghanistan is now the world's leading supplier of opium for the heroin trade. Under the Taliban regime, which banned opium, annual production bottomed out at 77 tons in 2001, produced only in areas controlled by the Northern Alliance. American military, as part of its "War on Terror," allied with Northern Alliance warlords to overthrow the Taliban regime and keep Al Qaeda at bay. Afghan opium production has since skyrocketed to about 3,600 tons of opium this year, or 75 percent of global production.

Early in December 2003, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld traveled to Afghanistan and publicly embraced warlords Abdul Rashid Dostum and Ustad Attas Mohammed, for calling off armed struggle with the fragile government in Kabul headed by Hamid Karzai. Abdul Rashid Dostum was rewarded by being named Deputy Secretary of Defense for the Karzai government.

Dostum has been described as a "war criminal" by groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, for killing thousands of civilians in the Afghan civil wars of the 1990s and for his merciless treatment of prisoners and, occasionally, his own soldiers.

--Switzerland's Addiction Research Institute calls tobacco the number one killer addiction, responsible for 71 percent, or 4.9 million of the world's 7 million annual drug-related deaths. About 1.8 million deaths, or 26 percent, were attributed to the use of alcohol, while illicit drugs caused about 223,000, or 3 percent, of all worldwide drug-related deaths.

In Hebron I shot the legs off of two kids, and I was sure I wouldn't be able to sleep anymore at night, but nothing happened. Two weeks ago I hurt a Palestinian policeman, and that didn't affect me either. You become so apathetic you don't care at all. Shooting is the IDF soldier's way of meditating. It's like shooting is your way of letting go of all your anger when you're in the army. In Hebron there's this order they call "punitive shooting": just open fire on whatever you like. I opened fire not on any sources of fire but on windows where there was just wash hanging to dry. I knew that there were people who would be hit. But at that moment it was just shoot, shoot, shoot... shoot at everything you see. Cars, things, anything that moves. It's like taking out your anger on everything. Shooting relaxes you, like meditation.

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