Experts reveal definitive link between drug and mental illness, paving way for rethink on lenient penalties

Tony Blair is planning a controversial U-turn on cannabis laws and the reintroduction of tough penalties after an official government review found a definitive link between use of the drug and mental illness.

The Independent on Sunday can reveal that the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) has detailed evidence showing cannabis triggers psychosis in regular users. The findings are expected be used by Mr Blair to overturn the decision made two years ago to downgrade the drug. The reports makes it "an open door" for ministers to change the law, according to one official.

Mr Blair is keen to reverse the controversial decision to downgrade its status from B to C, taken by David Blunkett. His successor as Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, asked the Government's official advisory body to reassess the classification of the drug after a public outcry.

A senior Whitehall aide said: "There is no barrier to reclassification of cannabis on the grounds of political embarrassment. This was David Blunkett's decision, not something agreed by the Cabinet."

Pressure for a U-turn will intensify once the ACMD report is published. It will detail evidence that varieties of "skunk", high-strength strains of cannabis, can cause psychosis in some people and that cannabis can exacerbate the condition of users who are already mentally ill.

An Ethiopian claims that his confession to al-Qaeda bomb plot was signed after beatings

An Ethiopian student who lived in London claims that he was brutally tortured with the involvement of British and US intelligence agencies.
Binyam Mohammed, 27, says he spent nearly three years in the CIA's network of 'black sites'. In Morocco he claims he underwent the strappado torture of being hung for hours from his wrists, and scalpel cuts to his chest and penis and that a CIA officer was a regular interrogator.

After his capture in Pakistan, Mohammed says British officials warned him that he would be sent to a country where torture was used. Moroccans also asked him detailed questions about his seven years in London, which his lawyers believe came from British sources.

Western agencies believed that he was part of a plot to buy uranium in Asia, bring it to the US and build a 'dirty bomb' in league with Jose Padilla, a US citizen. Mohammed signed a confession but told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, he had never met Padilla, or anyone in al-Qaeda. Padilla spent almost four years in American custody, accused of the plot. Last month, after allegations of the torture used against Mohammed emerged, the claims against Padilla were dropped. He now faces a civil charge of supporting al-Qaeda financially.

A senior US intelligence official told The Observer that the CIA is now in 'deep crisis' following last week's international political storm over the agency's practice of 'extraordinary rendition' - transporting suspects to countries where they face torture. 'The smarter people in the Directorate of Operations [the CIA's clandestine operational arm] know that one day, if they do this stuff, they are going to face indictment,' he said. 'They are simply refusing to participate in these operations, and if they don't have big mortgage or tuition fees to pay they're thinking about trying to resign altogether.'

 

SKY NEWS -  

There has been a large explosion followed by several smaller blasts in the Hemel Hempstead area, around 25 miles north of London.

See my diary ...

"Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason."

▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY

'Sapere aude'

The waters have receded but the mainly black, low-income citizens of New Orleans are now the victims of rising rents, forced evictions and plans that favour the better off

Miss Mildred's piano lies where the water knocked it down three months ago, amid ruined photographs and clothes. Her favourite chair is jammed in a corner; the wooden tiles of her tiny clapboard house muddy and peeled loose. There is nothing to salvage from a thrifty, industrious life, so she has come to see her home in New Orleans' devastated Ninth Ward for one last time.

'I don't have anything to come home to. No food, no water or electricity,' said the 74-year-old, whose family has been scattered. 'I can't afford to live in the French Quarter and there is nowhere else to rent. I have three more years on the mortgage to pay for this.' She will not sell the property, she says, but she also will not return. And Mildred W Franklin is angry. In a city where the wealthy areas are buzzing with reconstruction, her neighbourhood, one of the worst affected, is silent and ghostly. 'They want us to be disgusted. They don't want us to return.'

She is not alone in thinking this. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans it was the city's poor - almost exclusively African Americans - who were left to fend for themselves as the city drowned in a lake of toxic sludge. Now, three months on, the same people have been abandoned once again by a reconstruction effort that seems determined to prevent them from returning. They are the victims of a devastating combination of forced evictions, a failure to reopen the city's public house projects, rent gouging and - as in the case of Mildred - a decision to write off whole neighbourhoods

David Cameron has catapulted the Tories into a lead over Labour, according to two opinion polls published tomorrow.

The election of the new Tory leader has given his party a "bounce", pushing David Cameron into a two-point lead over Tony Blair.

The two polls, by ICM and YouGov, put the Tories on 37 per cent, two points up on last month. In one, Labour is a point behind; in the other, two points.

Francis Maude, the Tory Party chairman, said the polls showed the Conservatives were "at the dawn of a new era. There is much work still to be done, but this is a great start." The polls, for The Sunday Times and The Sunday Telegraph, showed that the Tory lead over Labour would widen under a Labour Party led by Gordon Brown.

David Cameron is to take radical action tomorrow to boost the number of Tory women MPs at the next election and announce an immediate freeze on the selection of party candidates.

WASHINGTON (Washington Post) - Poland has asked for additional U.S. military assistance to modernize its own forces as it considers whether to extend the presence of Polish troops in Iraq next year, according to Polish and U.S. officials.

Although Warsaw has stopped short of conditioning its Iraq decision on the request for aid, it has made it clear that the two are linked, saying the $600 million it has spent on the Iraq operation has siphoned funds from plans to upgrade its own military.

Radoslaw Sikorski, defense minister in Poland's new conservative government, raised the issue in a meeting here this week with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and presented other Pentagon officials with a list of desired spending options. A senior Pentagon official said on Thursday that the list is being reviewed.

The deliberations come at a time when other key partners in the U.S.-led coalition are withdrawing their forces or debating pullouts or reductions.

Several U.S. officials familiar with efforts to hold the coalition together confidently predicted that nearly all of the 30 countries in the multinational force will keep some troops in Iraq next year. But the officials acknowledged that the number is certain to dwindle from the current total of about 21,000, and to change in character from combat infantry to training advisers.

On 10 January 1975, Michelle Bachelet, a 23-year-old medical student in Chile, was arrested with her mother by General Augusto Pinochet's secret police. The pair survived three weeks of torture, but Ms Bachelet's father, arrested earlier, did not.

This weekend Ms Bachelet, now 54, could become the first elected female president of a South American nation. Gen Pinochet is now the one under arrest, on multiple charges of rights abuses and corruption.

The former paediatrician was 24 points ahead going into today's presidential election in Chile, and if shedoes not win outright, she will be the favourite for the run-off vote.

The 54-year-old has taken Chile by storm. Commenting on Chilean Catholicism and conservatism recently, she said: "As the old joke goes, [to Chileans] I have all the sins together. I am a woman, socialist, separated and agnostic." Joke or not, it seems to be working.

The White House was forced into a U-turn on climate change yesterday after appearing to misjudge critically the international and domestic mood on its efforts to tackle global warming.
After American delegates walked out of the United Nations climate change conference in Montreal over the wording of a draft statement calling for international co-operation on the issue, they signed a revised version after making only 'trivial' changes.

The move came as 157 other countries agreed separately to extend the Kyoto international agreement aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The US has not joined Kyoto, so it was not involved in the talks on its future.

Environmental campaigners hailed the Kyoto breakthrough as 'a historic step forwards'. Tony Juniper, executive director of Friends of the Earth, said: 'The rest of the world is right to push ahead and leave the obstructive US behind.'

One senior British official said the US negotiators shifted their position on the joint statement because the Bush administration was stung by criticism of its stance at the meeting in the US press. 'Washington are really feeling the heat on this,' the official said.

The chief US negotiator Harlan Watson walked out of talks on Friday after complaining that draft text proposals amounted to a call for negotiations which President George W Bush opposes.

Baffling some foreign ministers, Watson told the high-level meeting: 'If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it's a duck.' US green campaigners quickly bought all the plastic ducks they could find in surrounding shops and handed them out to delegates and the media.

There are 27,000 nuclear warheads in the world and that is '27,000 too many', said International Atomic Energy Agency director Mohamed ElBaradei after he received the Nobel Peace prize in Norway yesterday.

Just hours before ElBaradei received the £750,000 prize, Iran appeared to reiterate its intention to defy attempts by America and the United Nations atomic watchdog to curb its nuclear ambitions. In Tehran, the country's top nuclear official, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, said there was 'no doubt' Iran would enrich uranium and produce nuclear fuel.

In his acceptance speech in Oslo, ElBaradei, 63, said the world should work towards nuclear weapons being seen as immoral. 'The hard part is how do we create an environment in which nuclear weapons - like slavery or genocide - are regarded as a taboo and a historical anomaly?'

After receiving a gold medal and diploma with the IAEA chairman Yukiya Amano, ElBaradei said the world faces 'threats without borders' - weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, organised crime, war, poverty, disease and environmental degradation - that can only be tackled through multilateral cooperation.

'In regions where conflicts have been left to fester for decades, countries continue to look for ways to offset their insecurities or project their power. In some cases, they may be tempted to seek their own weapons of mass destruction, like others who have preceded them.

MOSCOW (AFP) - European Space Agency (ESA) officials said that European countries remained interested in a Russian plan to build a new crew-carrying spaceship known as the Clipper.

"I shall make all the efforts I can in the next few months to secure wide participation for Clipper among member states," ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain said after meeting Russian space agency officials in Moscow.

Dordain said he would push the project to be approved before June 2006 by the 17-member ESA, which backed off a decision on approval at a ministerial meeting in Berlin earlier this week.

"A final decision has not been taken but neither has a negative decision. This is very important for us," Anatoly Perminov, head of Russia's federal space agency, said.

Earlier this week, Perminov said Russia could push ahead with the Clipper project without European backing and mentioned China as a possible alternative partner.

Russian scientists envisage that the Clipper would weigh 14.5 tons and would carry up to six people on voyages to the International Space Station (ISS) or on interplanetary trips.

SANYA: Miss Iceland, Unnur Birna Vilhjalmsdottir, a part-time police officer who wants to be a lawyer, was crowned Miss World 2005 on Saturday. Miss Mexico, Dafne Molina Lona, was the first runner-up, and Miss Puerto Rico, Ingrid Marie Rivera Santos, was second runner-up in a field of 102 women in the contest in Sanya, a southern China beach resort.

Vilhjalmsdottir, 21, a part-time airport police officer, is studying anthropology and law. She was born in her country's capital, Reykjavik, and enjoys hiking, camping and playing the piano.

She said her motto is, "You are what you do." Miss Mexico is a 23-year-old model from Mexico City who wants to be an interior designer. She enjoys riding horses, listening to jazz and reading. She told the audience, "My friends tell me, through my eyes, they see a good heart."

Molina Lona said her favorite saying is, "With strength and enthusiasm I will make things happen." Miss Puerto Rico is a part-time model that studies marketing and finance at the University of Puerto Rico.

Bill Gates Sr., co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, gave a CityClub gathering their money's worth Friday at a luncheon to review the year almost gone.

As a participant on a panel that included Sen. Patty Murray, state Secretary of Health Mary Selecky and Issaquah developer George W. "Skip" Rowley, Gates, along with the others, was asked to tell about someone he'd been impressed by and to say why.

He picked Wall Street big shot Pete Peterson, who, Gates said, has warned against "the pending bankruptcy of the U.S."

His response drew shocked laughter from the crowd. But Gates wasn't kidding, and he would return to that theme later in the luncheon.

Gates said he is worried about a lot of things -- the Bush administration's tax-cutting policies at a time of war, the financial problems forecast for Social Security and Medicare and a national debt that appears to be flying off the chart as it is being underwritten by foreign governments.

Now is the time to do something about these issues, "not 10 years from now," Gates said. "But all we hear about is cutting taxes."

I have here with me a draft press release which says the following:

Following the failure of the EU Budget talks today because most EU member states refused to accept a generous, innovative new budget proposed by HMG, the UK Gov announces that it is going to set aside a good chunk of the money it was prepared effectively to deduct from its rebate under the current proposals, 5 billion pounds, to set up a new Strategic European Development Fund - the Mother of All Know How Funds, but on steroids.

This Fund will be accessible for those of the V4 plus Balts who agree to join its programme - if they all feel too humiliated by our lack of EU solidarity to join, that's great - we'll keep the money for ourselves. If only some of them join, that's great too- those who do will get proportionately more.

The Fund will cut out all the bollocky EU bureaucracy which comes with the current spending round, which means that for every pound we pay into the EU pot for Structural Funds for new MS about a [make up a suitable percentage] goes in sticky transaction costs, local and Brussels corruption, overhead and other rubbish, and so does not benefit the intended recipients.

The Fund will go for any sensible strategic development idea that comes along, with emphasis on R&D and Innovation, plus reform of the region's abysmal legal systems, the main Communist - era legacy problem in Europe. But if you want to build some new roads, that's OK too.

Intense discussions are already underway with Brussels on the new regime to apply to the stallion industry, with the existing zero-tax regime to be phased out by 2008.

The industry is certain to be allowed to "write-off'` the value of stallions over a number of years, in the same way that a business can write off plant and machinery investment.

Also, there are discussions on whether existing stallions may be exempted for tax, as their owners would have invested in them at a time when the tax-free regime applied.

On budget day, Brian Cowen announced that the exemption of horse and greyhound stud fee income from tax would end on July 31, 2008. As the Northern Hemisphere breeding season ends on July 15, this gives the industry three more tax-free seasons.

The interview with Chouet comes from la Repubblica on December 1st "Nigergate, French spymaster debunks Sismi version". Impolite of them not to cite their source.

A translation of the article appeared here at Eurotrib on the same day.

Confusing Reports

There is a lot of outrage about something the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is supposed to have said. The UN security council condemns him, the EU is chipping in and several states had harsh talks with their respective ambassador from Iran.

The papers report Ahmadinejad "denied the holocaust" and "called for Israel to be relocated to Europe". But did he really say so and when and to whom?

Ahmadinejad spoke on December 8th. He was in Mecca at an Organization of the Islamic Conference summit which just published a very significant declaration calling for modernization of the Ummah and a jihad on terrorism. (Not that you will read about it elsewhere, the western press hardly mentioned it.)

But other than that, the sources are divide about who Ahmadinejad talked to and what he said. No media source I found seems to have had a reporter in place. Everybody is relying on news agencies reports.

So here are the three major western agencies. Please read their dispatches with a mind to details.

...
But is this an all out holocaust denial? None of the agency reports would deserve that headline. Is this a call to move Israel to Europe? I read a big if there that only intends to challenge European support for Israel. But then, your mileage may vary. I for one would prefer much better reporting on this before anything else.

deadissue.com: It Takes a Potemkin Village

WHEN a government substitutes propaganda for governing, the Potemkin village is all. Since we don't get honest information from this White House, we must instead, as the Soviets once did, decode our rulers' fictions to discern what's really happening. What we're seeing now is the wheels coming off: As the administration's stagecraft becomes more baroque, its credibility tanks further both at home and abroad. The propaganda techniques may be echt Goebbels, but they increasingly come off as pure Ali G.

The latest desperate shifts in White House showmanship say at least as much about our progress (or lack of same) in Iraq over the past 32 months as reports from the ground. When President Bush announced the end of "major combat operations" in May 2003, his Imagineers felt the need for only a single elegant banner declaring "Mission Accomplished." Cut to Nov. 30, 2005: the latest White House bumper sticker, "Plan for Victory," multiplied by Orwellian mitosis over nearly every square inch of the rather "Queer Eye" stage set from which Mr. Bush delivered his oration at the Naval Academy.

And to no avail. Despite the insistently redundant graphics - and despite the repetition of the word "victory" 15 times in the speech itself - Americans believed "Plan for Victory" far less than they once did "Mission Accomplished." The first New York Times-CBS News Poll since the Naval Academy pep talk, released last Thursday, found that only 25 percent of Americans say the president has "a clear plan for victory in Iraq." Tom Cruise and evolution still have larger constituencies in America than that.

Mr. Bush's "Plan for Victory" speech was, of course, the usual unadulterated nonsense. Its overarching theme - "We will never accept anything less than complete victory" - was being contradicted even as he spoke by rampant reports of Pentagon plans for stepped-up troop withdrawals between next week's Iraqi elections and the more important (for endangered Republicans) American Election Day of 2006. The specifics were phony, too: Once again inflating the readiness of Iraqi troops, Mr. Bush claimed that the recent assault on Tal Afar "was primarily led by Iraqi security forces" - a fairy tale immediately unmasked by Michael Ware, a Time reporter embedded in that battle's front lines, as "completely wrong." No less an authority than the office of Iraq's prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, promptly released a 59-page report documenting his own military's inadequate leadership, equipment and training.