Archive for February 3rd, 2012

03/02/2012

The Untold Slaughter in Iraq

Human Wrongs Watch

By Danny Lucia – Socialist Worker*

Over a million Iraqis are dead from America’s war… That sentence is a cognitive litmus test. Some people’s immediate reaction is, “That can’t be right,” because the United States couldn’t do that. Or because crimes on that scale don’t still happen. Or because they do happen, but only in horrible places that the United States hasn’t rescued.

Source: Socialistworker.org

One million is a “Grandpa, what did you do to stop it?” number. It’s a number that undeniably puts the American state among history’s villains. Those who are not willing or able to accept this are physically unable to retain the fact that over a million Iraqis are dead. Their brains expel it like a foreign germ.

Noam Chomsky once wrote that the “sign of a truly totalitarian culture is that important truths simply lack cognitive meaning and are interpretable only at the level of ‘Fuck You,’ so they can then elicit a perfectly predictable torrent of abuse in response.”

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03/02/2012

Criminal Gangs Steel Ice from Glaciers

Human Wrongs Watch

Criminal gangs are becoming a threat to the world’s glaciers, which are already receding as a result of climate change, the UN reported, citing a case in Chile where police are investigating the theft of some 5,000 kilograms of millennia-old ice from the Jorge Montt glacier.

*Perito Moreno Glacier, Patagonia, Argentina. Author: Luca Galuzzi http://www.galuzzi.it | Wikimedia Commons

Mining for ice could pose a major additional threat to the 454 square-kilometre glacier, which is situated in Chile’s Bernardo O’Higgins National Park, and is part of the 13,000-square kilometre Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the third largest frozen land mass in the world after Antarctica and Greenland, according to the UN International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR).

The Jorge Montt glacier is melting at a rate of one kilometre per year, making it one of the world’s most iconic symbols of global warming, UNISDR noted on 2 Feb.The Jorge Montt glacier is melting at a rate of one kilometre per year, making it one of the world’s most iconic symbols of global warming.

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