A case study in spreading a false rumor I think is developing right now over the internets and the tweeters... The story goes like this: Chavez claims that the US used tectonic weapons technology or whatever it's supposed to be called, to cause the earthquake in Haiti, as a test for the real target which is Iran!
There is even a video from Russian TV titled "Chavez: US weapon test caused Haiti earthquake", a report that shows a (stock?) video of Chavez speaking without being heard and which basically claims that Chavez told the Spanish daily ABC, about the U.S. Navy using a weapon that induced earthquakes on Haiti, as preparation for a "tectonic" attack on Iran. This is quoted approvingly and sarcastically literally all over the www.

The problem is that it doesn't seem likely that Chavez ever claimed such a thing. ABC, which certainly doesn't read like the type of newspaper Chavez would be giving exclusive and incredible interviews to, isn't clear on that at all, although admittedly it goes out of its way to spin it otherwise:

"El antiamericano Gobierno de Venezuela, en su habitual paranoia contra el imperio yanqui, asegura que el seísmo de Haití «es resultado de una prueba de la Marina estadounidense», y denuncia que lo que devastó el país caribeño fue «un terremoto experimental de EE.UU.»."

Notice that it's the "Venezuelan government", not Chavez making the claim...

Greece is holding parliamentary elections, today, Sunday, October 4. I have mentioned some basic facts about the road to the early elections announced by Kostas Karamanlis, the current, though not likely future, prime-minister, in a comment a couple of weeks ago.

The rather subdued electioneering is in full swing now, with both debates (the broad debate with all six europarliamentary parties present and the duel between George Papandreou and Kostas Karamanlis) broadcast already and party candidates and cadres running from tv studio to public gatherings and using everything from spam sms messages to postal brochures to attract attention.

Front-paged by afew

Following on a comment I made on the (soon to be elected) Greek Socialists and the Tony Blair candidacy for president of the European Council, I had the opportunity today of publicly asking PASOK's leader George Papandreou himself about the issue...

By all accounts Alexis Grigoropoulos was an unlikely martyr. A "good kid", top student and nice with friends, he was born into relative upper middle class privilege and wealth. He attended good private schools. His mother and father were successful professionals. He didn't hang out in Exarchia regularly, and all his friends agree that he wasn't some sort of anarchist. A progressive kid, sure, but not someone who habitually clashes with the police.

He seems to have been, however, in the wrong place, the wrong time and he didn't realize the "cops" who are patrolling Exarchia, meant deadly business - more like rival gang members than cops. This was about to cost him his life and produce the most violent extensive and persistant rioting the country has ever seen in peacetime, since the Polytechnic uprising against the Junta in 1973.

promoted by afew

AR Geezer's comment in yesterday's Salon de News, mentioned David Hassett and the book which he co-wrote in 1999, rather extravagantly titled Dow 36,000. Mr. Hassett is today apparently "working at the American Enterprise Institute... and serves as the senior economic adviser to the presidential campaign of Senator John McCain" - where his has abandoned his cornucopianism and just peddles fears of voter fraud by the Democrats to the more paranoid part of McCain's fan base - an act of unparalleled shamelessness, coming from this republican party.

Looking up the "Dow 36,000" book, I came upon such wealth of hope-mongering, that I'm posting the content of my comment on the thread as a diary, here. I had too much fun reading about this stuff not to share...

Chris Cook describes the recent developments in Iceland in his latest diary. Here I would like to highlight a few things leading to the disaster.

...It transpires that Milton Friedman visited Iceland in the 1980s and made quite an impression there.

There's even a relevant lemma in Wikipedia, where it is explained that:

Friedman made a great impact on a group of young intellectuals in the Independence Party, including Davíð Oddsson who became Prime Minister in 1991 and began a radical program of monetary and fiscal stabilization, privatization, tax rate reduction... definition of exclusive use rights in fisheries, abolition of various government funds for aiding unprofitable enterprises and liberalization of currency transfers and capital markets. In 1975, Iceland had the 53rd freest economy in the world, while in 2004, it had the 9th freest economy, according to the Economic Freedom of the World index designed by Canada's Fraser Institute.

David Oddson would later describe the influence of Friedman's ideas in a 2004 talk he gave at the American Enterprise Institute, the US neo-con think tank.  

Promoted by Colman

Or rather the exiled: And they're pissed. If you believe them, and you certainly don't have to, they're in Panama.

Previously on Eurotrib...

Tales of organ trafficking by the KLA during the Kosovo campaign  surfaced recently:

BELGRADE, Serbia: Serbia's war crimes prosecutor is looking into reports that dozens of Serbs captured by rebels during the war in Kosovo were killed so their organs could be trafficked, the prosecutor's office said Friday.

The Serbian prosecutor's office said it received "informal statements" from investigators at the U.N. tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, that dozens of Serbs imprisoned by Kosovo Albanian rebels were taken to neighboring Albania in 1999 and killed so their organs could be harvested and sold to international traffickers.

Bruno Vekaric, the Serbian prosecutor's spokesman, said later on B92 radio that Serbian war crimes investigators have also received their own information about alleged organ trafficking, but not enough for a court case. Vekaric said Serb investigators also received reports suggesting there might be mass graves in Albania containing the bodies of the Serb victims.

Serbian media reported that the issue was brought into the open in a book written by former U.N. war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte that is to be published in Italy on April 3.

According to Serbia's Beta news agency, which carried parts of the book in Serbian, Del Ponte said her investigators had been informed that some 300 Serbs were killed for organ trafficking.

The Beta report quoted Del Ponte as saying in the book that her investigators were told the imprisoned Serbs were first taken to prison camps in northern Albania where the younger ones were picked out, and their organs were later sold abroad.

Here's the more detailed story from Belgrade's B92 and here is the story in Russia Today.
Update [2008-4-11 7:57:9 by talos]:: April 11, The Daily Telegraph has published the relevant excerpts from Carla Del Ponte's book and they're quite unsettling. Meanwhile Russia has apparently filed a request to the ICTY regarding this case.

Promoted by Migeru

A bit more than a year ago, noting Ramush Haradinaj's immense luck (a streak which, goes way back), I made the point that "the Haradinaj case is a litmus test for the impartiality of the Hague tribunal - at least as far as any credibility it might still have among Serbs".

The test results are in. They're negative.

Well I haven't been able to write much on events in Greece after the last elections, so here's a quick review of a very eventful past five months that has seen social protest, sex scandals, financial scandals, both mainstream parties struggling in opinion polls and the "hard"-left reaching unprecedented opinion poll ratings, while an international crisis is brewing concerning the name of Greece's "unspeakable" northern neighbor.

...today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.  
General Jack D. Ripper - Dr. Strangelove

Promoted by Migeru

On August 16, a day after the major Greek summer holiday and as mount Penteli and a part of Athens' Northern suburbs were burning, yet another fire in what was becoming a disastrous forest fire season (with the worse still to come), prime-minister Kostas Karamanlis, announced early elections for the 16th of September (today). The snap elections were of course widely expected, but the date chosen was the earliest possible. August is the holiday month in Greece and thus a majority of the electorate were relaxing, swimming or lying on some beach, a situation which was to last more or less (public servants' leaves were canceled - and a lot of people headed for their homes in a hurry) until the end of the month. Thus the pre-election period was shortened to four weeks - and for two of these weeks the major cities were half-empty. Then the huge forest fires in the Peloponnese and Evia erupted and for another ten days the country's attention was focused on the evolving catastrophe...

Polls until the great fire disaster were showing that the conservatives, Karamanlis' New Democracy (ND) Party, were holding a comfortable yet narrowing lead over the Socialists (PASOK) led by George Papandreou, despite a series of scandals, the largest of which was about corruption and mismanagement of public pension funds. Sensing that the pension funds scandal was not going away as details of the affair crept out slowly to Greek media, Karamanlis opted for the snappiest of snap elections possible, under flimsy pretexts (the proper scheduled date for the elections was March 2008), in an obvious effort to limit discussion and catch his opponents unprepared.

From the diaries ~ whataboutbob Update: with 99.54% of the precincts reporting, the final seat and vote tally is as follows:
ND (conservative) 152 41.84 % (-13 seats -3.52 percentage points re the 2004 elections)
PASOK 102 (socialist) 38.10 % (-15, -2.45%)
KKE 22 (old school communist) 8.15 % (+10, +2,26%)
SYRIZA 14 (antineolib left - greens - radicals) 5.04 % (+8 +1.78%)
LAOS 10 3.79 % (not in the 2004 parliament)
ND has a narrow parliamentary majority, PASOK reached its lowest parliamentary electoral percentage since 1977 and the combined left has had its pest result in years. The extreme right (some very disturbing characters among them) makes it after a very long time to the parliament...

I've been away on holidays for a few weeks (working holidays up to a point) and usually with not enough time or opportunity to post. However despite the saying that there are no news in August, two major events happened in Greece while I was away:

1. One of the greatest peacetime disasters in modern Greek history, as fires razed (and are still razing) >2000 sq. km of forest and farmland and something like 120 villages in the Southern Peloponnese and the island of Evia, killing 65 firefighters and residents and destroying livelihoods, affecting as many as 16.000 people directly. Fires were occurring simultaneously in Attica (the prefecture that Athens is part of), for the fifth time or something this season, Western Greece, a few islands and pretty much all over. (more below)

From the diaries - with format edit ~ whataboutbob

This is so bizzare yet scary a statement of the Commission's disdain for democracy, coming from so legitimate a source, that it should be more widely disseminated:

I quote from the rather unradical EUobserver:

The new EU reform treaty text was deliberately made unreadable for citizens to avoid calls for referendum, one of the central figures in the treaty drafting process has said.

Speaking at a meeting of the Centre for European Reform in London on Thursday (12 July) former Italian prime minister Giuliano Amato said: "They [EU leaders] decided that the document should be unreadable. If it is unreadable, it is not constitutional, that was the sort of perception".

There is an audio file (mp3) of Amato's speech and he is being very open about it.

IEEE Spectrum has an excellent article, written by two Greek Computer Scientists (V. Prevelakis and D. Spinellis) about last year's wiretapping scandal, a scandal about which I reported here in the European Tribune at the time (1, 2, 3, 4, see also the relevant Wikipedia article, and former US diplomat's Brady Kiesling summing up of the affair)

The article provides an astonishingly detailed investigation on the technical aspects of the wiretap, and explains the highly sophisticated methods used. This highlights the fact that the operation was surely the work of highly skilled professionals, with intimate knowledge of Vodafone's and Ericsson's systems (Prevelakis and Spinellis mention in a sidebar the various scenarios circulating). It's also a great introduction to various technical aspects of mobile telephony BTW.

Update: One of the two authors (Dr. Spinellis) of the IEEE Spectrum article was kind enough to comment on the issue in the discussion thread.

Promoted by afew

The only facts you need to know to understand the enormity of what the following video shows is this: it was taped on a cell phone in a Central Police station in Athens, approximately a year ago. The two guys in blue and orange shirts are teenage Albanian immigrants (update: one Albanian and one Greek from Kazakhstan) arrested for armed robbery. The guy in black is a police officer. The two detainees are hitting each other because the police officer shown, orders them to do it. When the police officer thinks that they are not slapping each other hard enough, he beats the suspects. At the end the two immigrants are ordered to shout out loud "I'm an asshole", "I'm a big asshole", in Greek before hitting each other. The video is this:

The latest issue of Eurotopia [pdf file] - published on the Trans-National Institute's website - is about Public Services in Europe, their privatisation and the grass-roots efforts to build alternatives to it, all around Europe. It highlights the problems of accountability, democratic participation and efficiency that the privatisation process has created. It also showcases some of the (mostly but not totally) municipal-level grass-roots reactions to the privatization of the commons in Europe - thus its title: "Public Services in Europe: From privatisation to participation"

From the diaries ~ whataboutbob

New Left Review published two extensive articles on the Russian economy and the Putin regime's handling of it. Together they provide a summary of the economic and social situation in Russia, providing information not readily found in much of the western press - well beyond the usual stereotypes.

Vladimir Popov, in Russia Redux?, discusses Russia's "recent social and economic fortunes" that reveal "a number of problems that Putin's successor will inherit, presenting him with a difficult agenda".

Tony Wood from NLR, in Contours of the Putin Era, responds to Popov and "examines the geographical and social distribution of Russia's recent economic growth. What are the priorities and outlook of the emerging business-state elite--and whom will Putin's `stabilization' benefit?"

From the diaries ~ whataboutbob

Matt Taibbi has yet another excellent piece over at Rolling Stone magazine, this time about proposed new Bush tax cuts and what they mean for the average US taxpayer - as well as about the utter indifference shown by the corporate media to a story with great "shock value" - because it's the wrong value.

The story is brilliantly written and worth your while anyway, but the way it illustrates the economic facts (as given to MT by the folks over at rep. Bernie Sanders' office, the socialist congressman from Vermont) is impressive and should be emulated. And so should its tone, because what is being presented is the sort of information that in the not-so-distant-past made peasants and craftsmen grab bats, pitchforks and torches - and march menacingly towards the palace...:

Raed Jarrar has obtained a copy of the Iraq Oil Law that will be heading to the Iraqi cabinet for approval. Jarrar has translated the Law in Eglish [pdf here] and comments that:

...This law legalizes PSAs (production sharing agreements) in Iraq. Iraq will be the only country in the middle east with such contracts privatising Iraqi oil and giving foreign companies crazy rates of profit that may reach to more than three fourth of the general revenue. Iraq and Iraqis need every Dinar that comes from oil sales. In addition to the financial aspects of this law, it can be considered the funding tool for splitting Iraq into three states. It undermines the central government and distributes oil revenues directly to the three regions, which sets the foundations for what Iraq's enemies are trying to achieve in terms of establishing three independent states.

From the diaries -- whataboutbob