US waves white flag in disastrous ‘war on drugs’

After 40 years, Washington is quietly giving up on a futile battle that has spread corruption and destroyed thousands of lives Read the full story

Just months after rushing to order enough swine-flu vaccine to protect their citizens, European governments are canceling orders and trying to sell or give away extra doses as they sit on a glut of the vaccine.

The main reason: European health officials decided that only one shot per person was needed, instead of the two originally planned. Low demand is also to blame. Many Europeans believe the pandemic has turned out to be fairly mild, and don’t see a reason to get vaccinated. Some are also concerned that they will suffer side effects from the shots, despite assurances otherwise from global health officials. Read the full story

Signs of what could be a previously unknown ancient civilisation are emerging from beneath the felled trees of the Amazon. Some 260 giant avenues, ditches and enclosures have been spotted from the air in a region straddling Brazil’s border with Bolivia.

The traditional view is that before the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th century there were no complex societies in the Amazon basin – in contrast to the Andes further west where the Incas built their cities. Now deforestation, increased air travel and satellite imagery are telling a different story. Read the full story

The Netherlands were the surprise beneficiary of FIFA’s late decision to abandon the principles of the 2002, 2006 World Cup draw’s seeding formula.

In those cycles, FIFA assigned weights to the two preceding World Cup finishes along with the end-of-year FIFA World Rankings from the last three years.

Today, when announcing the eight seeded teams that will be draw into separate groups for World Cup 2010, FIFA disclosed that the only factor in this year’s seeding was the October 2009 FIFA World Ranking.  The top seven nations from that last will join host nation South Africa as seeds for Friday’s draw. Read the full story

Drinking alcohol every day cuts the risk of heart disease in men by more than a third, a major study suggests.

The Spanish research involving more than 15,500 men and 26,000 women found large quantities of alcohol could be even more beneficial for men.

Female drinkers did not benefit to the same extent, the study in Heart found.

Experts are critical, warning heavy drinking can increase the risk of other diseases, with alcohol responsible for 1.8 million deaths globally per year. Read the full story

2009-11-12

MADRID — Spain wants EU naval forces to blockade three Somali ports used to launch pirate attacks against ships in the Indian Ocean, Defence Minister Carme Chacon said Wednesday.

She said Spain will call on European Union foreign and defence ministers to concentrate military efforts on blockading the ports at a meeting next Monday and Tuesday.

“We know that it is from these three ports that most, if not all, ‘mother ships’ used by pirates reach up to one thousand miles away from the coast — as they did yesterday — and carry out kidnappings far from the coast,” she told RNE public radio.

Chacon also said the pirate gangs “have ties to sophisticated law firms in London,” and she called for the international community to do more to track ransoms given to pirates to release hostages.

Several law firms in London, business capital of the world’s maritime industry, have handled piracy kidnap and ransom cases in recent years.

They help ship owners deal with the legal aspects of paying a ransom and engage private security contractors to negotiate with pirates and carry out the ransom drop.

Pirates on Monday launched their longest range hijack attempt to date by opening fire on the Hong Kong-flagged oil tanker BW Lion 1,000 nautical miles east of Mogadishu, the EU naval force in the region said.

The next day pirates attacked the Danish-flagged container ship Nelle Maersk, also some 1,000 nautical miles east of the Somali capital.

Both ships escaped their attackers but the incidents demonstrated how beefed-up security off the Somalia coast appears to be leading pirates to move deeper into the Indian Ocean and its shipping lanes linking Asia and Europe.

Chacon said the attacks so far from the Somalia coast were a “giant step” for the pirates who she said were becoming bolder.

The pirates usually use “mother ships” to sail hundreds of miles out to sea and then attack in small skiffs, sometimes using high-grade weapons such as rocket-propelled grenades.

“These are not romantic pirates which some may be led to imagine, they are authentic criminal organisations which are focused on kidnappings of all types merchant ships, fishing trawlers, ships belonging to the World Food Programme,” said Chacon.

The minister said Somali pirates were currently holding 12 boats and their crews hostage, including the Spanish trawler Alakrana which was seized with its 36 crew on October 2, as well as vessles from Britain, China and Malta.

The pirates are demanding four million dollars (2.6 million euros) ransom as well as the release of two suspected pirates who were detained a few days after the trawler was seized and brought to Spain to face trial.

The Spanish government has ruled out freeing the two suspects but Chacon said they could serve their sentence back in Somalia if found guilty of any crime.

A lawyer for one of the two detained suspected pirates, Javier Diaz Aparicio, told Spanish daily newspaper El Mundo he was trying to reach a plea bargain agreement with Spanish prosecutors.

In an interview with news radio Cadena Ser on Tuesday he suggested that his salary was being paid for by the interior ministry.

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Defense Minister Ehud Barak told world diplomats on Tuesday that the Goldstone report, which accuses Israel of having committed war crimes in Gaza, is “false, distorted and promotes terror.”

Speaking to the foreign ministers of France, Britian, Spain and Norway, among others, ahead of a United Nations debate on the report scheduled for Thursday, Barak said that adopting the report would give terror organizations around the world an advantage.

“The democratic nations of the world must understand that adopting the report will cripple their ability to deal with terror organizations, and terror in general,” Barak said.

On Wednesday, it emerged that the UN Human Rights Council’s debate over the Goldstone report will also deal with Jerusalem, the Temple Mount riots and the siege of Gaza, according to a resolution the Palestinian Authority and a group of countries intend to submit.

Haaretz has obtained a copy of the document: Click here for the full text of the Palestinian draft resolution.

According to a political source in Jerusalem, the PA’s ambassador to UN institutions in Geneva, Ibrahim Khraishi, told the ambassadors of the countries involved, most of them Arab and Muslim, that the main motivation behind the Palestinian request to discuss the Goldstone report stemmed from “Israeli provocations in Jerusalem.” The Palestinians had originally decided not to have the report discussed.

The Palestinian ambassador said Israel must be shown that it cannot evade international law.

The new draft resolution is entitled “The human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.”

The resolution, which Foreign Ministry sources have described as “very extreme,” has three parts: East Jerusalem, the Goldstone report on Operation Cast Lead, and the report by the UN’s human rights commissioner on conditions in the Gaza Strip.

An official at the Foreign Ministry says the draft “will only serve to show how excessive the Palestinian claims really are.”

The deliberations at the council will take place Thursday and Friday, with a vote on the resolution on Monday.

http://www.haaretz.com/

Spanish Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, has admitted that he understands why some Spanish media, printed the photo of his family with Barack and Michelle Obama.

Zapatero has always made it clear that he did not want the press to take photos of his two daughters as they are children, currently 16 and 13, but the photo concerned which showed them was released by the White House, before a request from the Spanish Prime Minister later saw it removed. Many have commented that the Prime Minister cannot take his daughters on an official trip, at taxpayers’ expense, and keep his privacy demands in place. Read the full story

(CNN) — Scientists have discovered the first confirmed Earth-like planet outside our solar system, they announced Wednesday.

“This is the first confirmed rocky planet in another system,” astronomer Artie Hatzes told CNN, contrasting the solid planet with gaseous ones like Jupiter and Saturn. Read the full story

MEXICO CITY — Gangland violence punctuated Mexico’s Independence Day celebrations in Ciudad Juarez, the troubled city bordering El Paso, with two separate attacks killing at least 15 people.

Gunmen assaulted a drug rehabilitation center on Juarez’s poor west side about 10:30 p.m. Tuesday, killing eight patients and two doctors, including the director of the center. Shortly after midnight Wednesday, another group of killers stormed into the Coco Bongo nightclub and mowed down five revelers with assault weapons, police said. Read the full story

Remember a little thing called the space-time continuum? Well what if the time part of the equation was literally running out? New evidence is suggesting that time is slowly disappearing from our universe, and will one day vanish completely. This radical new theory may explain a cosmological mystery that has baffled scientists for years.

Read the full story

(Video was from Last Year)

(CNN) — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez returned home Friday after a sometimes controversial nine-country tour and said he had purchased weapons from Russia.

Chavez appeared on Venezuelan news channel Globovision in Caracas, and he had a message about a purchase he made in Russia. Read the full story

ANCIENT Egyptian temples were aligned so precisely with astronomical events that people could set their political, economic and religious calendars by them. So finds a study of 650 temples, some dating back to 3000 BC.

For example, New Year coincided with the moment that the winter-solstice sun hit the central sanctuary of the Karnak temple (pictured) in present-day Luxor, says archaeological astronomer Juan Belmonte of the Canaries Astrophysical Institute in Tenerife, Spain. Read the full story

Brazil retained its top spot in the FIFA world rankings released Wednesday by soccer’s international governing body.

Canada remained at No. 66, sandwiched between Saudi Arabia and Wales.

Brazil ended Spain’s one-year supremacy atop the FIFA rankings in July, taking over the top position after winning the FIFA Confederations Cup the month before in South Africa. Read the full story