Italian judge indicts US soldier for Calipari-Sgrena shooting in Iraq

This video from the USA is called Giuliana Sgrena Italian Journalist press conference in Judson Church New York.

From Italian news agency ANSA:

Judge orders trial for US soldier

Mario Lozano accused of killing Italian agent in Iraq

ROME (ANSA) – A Rome judge has indicted Mario Luis Lozano, the United States soldier accused of murdering an Italian secret agent in a controversial ‘friendly fire’ incident in Iraq in 2005.

Judge Sante Spinaci granted an indictment request made seven months ago by prosecutors in the capital, who want the trial to go ahead even though Lozano will not be present.

Proceedings are set to begin on April 17 in Rome.

Lozano is accused of firing on an Italian car carrying Italian Military Intelligence Service (SISMI) officer Nicola Calipari and a released hostage to Baghdad airport late on March 4, 2005.

Calipari died shielding hostage Giuliana Sgrena, who was slightly wounded. A Carabinieri officer was also wounded.

As well as homicide, Wednesday’s indictment also cited attempted double homicide on the part of Lozano, whose current whereabouts are unknown.

“I am very satisfied by this first step towards the truth,” commented Calipari’s widow, Rosa Villecco, who is now a senator for the centre-left coalition of Romano Prodi.

Poland: 80% of people oppose presence in Iraq.

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Salamander replaces toad as world’s strongest animal

From New Scientist:

Salamander trumps toad as Mr Universe

10 February 2007

HOP away toads, you’ve lost your title as the world’s strongest animal.

That honour now passes to the giant palm salamander Bolitoglossa dofleini, whose tongue explodes outward with more instantaneous power than any other known vertebrate muscle.

At 18,000 watts of power per kilogram of muscle, the salamander, from the forest floors of Central America, is nearly twice as strong as the previous champ, the Colorado river toad Bufo alvarius.

The palm salamander’s strength doesn’t come from muscle power alone but from elastic tissue that researchers believe stores up energy before exploding on release.

“It’s kind of like stretching out a rubber band and letting it snap back, or shooting a bow and arrow,” says biologist Stephen Deban of the University of South Florida in Tampa.

High-speed video revealed that plethodontid salamanders released their tongues at a rate faster than could be achieved through muscle contraction alone.

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• Once-Extinct Toads Reintroduced to Wild (scientificamerican.com)
• Salamander (dungeonsanddrawings.blogspot.com)
• Zoo tadpoles released in Puerto Rico (newsnet5.com)
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Sex abuse of US prisoners of war in Afghanistan

This video is called US War Crimes In Mazar (Afghanistan) – Documentary reported by Jamie Doran.

From the Courier-Mail in Australia:

Sex abuse at Hicks prison camp

Exclusive by Stephanie Balogh in New York

February 06, 2007 11:00pm

A US military officer claims to have witnessed a guard sexually abusing a terror suspect at the same Afghanistan processing camp where Australian David Hicks was taken after his capture.

In a two page statement, seen by The Courier-Mail Online, the unnamed officer says they saw one of the MPs at the joint interrogation facility “perform the anal probe instead of the medical person’’.

“He pushed both his fingers into the EPW’s (enemy prisoner of war) anus. This caused the EPW to scream and fall to the ground violently,” the source wrote.

“His leg irons which, I suppose, were not locked, came open by the force of his reaction.”

The statement was sworn in February 2002 in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

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Another US helicopter down in Iraq

From Associated Press:

BAGHDAD, Iraq – The U.S. military said it was investigating reports that an aircraft went down Wednesday in Iraq.

Witnesses said a helicopter had gone down in a field in the Sheik Amir area northwest of Baghdad, sending smoke rising from the scene, in a Sunni-dominated area between the Taji air base 12 miles north of Baghdad and Garma, 20 miles to the west of the capital.

“We are looking into initial reports of a possible aircraft down,” U.S. military spokeswoman Lt. Col. Josslyn Aberle said.

The reports came five days after a U.S. Army helicopter crashed in a hail of gunfire north of Baghdad, police and witnesses said — the fourth helicopter lost in Iraq in a two-week span.

The U.S. command said two crew members were killed in that crash.

UPDATE: the US military now have confirmed the downing of the helicopter, described as a Sea Knight.

Associated Press says that seven people on board died.

US secret air war in Iraq: here.

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Rudy Giuliani, US Republican Presidential candidate

This video from the USA is called Rudy Giuliani in Drag Smooching Donald Trump.

After Senator McCain, another Republican wants to succeed George W Bush.

From Crooks and Liars in the USA:

What America Needs to Know About Rudy Giuliani

By: Barbara O’Brien on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007

Word is that former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani is now the front runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. …

Here are a few things America really needs to know about Rudy Giuliani:

Had Rudy Giuliani been mayor of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit, no one would be talking about what a great leader Giuliani is today.

I was in lower Manhattan on 9/11, and as I was working in Manhattan I spent most of my time there in the days and weeks after.

So you can take my word on this: Rudy’s post-9/11 “leadership” amounted almost entirely of the mayor appearing on television.

He did a fine job of appearing on television, and he managed to set the right tone and say the right things — abilities Hizzoner did not always draw upon in the past.

I give him credit for his performance. But that performance did not constitute “leadership.”

It was all public relations. It was all about Rudy.

See also here.

9/11 families and firefighters on Giuliani: here.

Gary Hart’s letter to Giuliani: here.

Iraq: the ‘man in the hood’ of Abu Ghraib speaks

From the New Straits Times in Malaysia:

‘Man in the Hood’: Never do this again

07 Feb 2007

V. Vasudevan

KUALA LUMPUR: He went through hell at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and now, Ali Shalah wants to do his best to prevent it from happening to other people.

“I work day and night helping to make sure this does not happen again,” said Ali, 45, who came to be known throughout the world as the “Man in the Hood”.

The image of Ali in a hood, standing on a block with arms outstretched and wires attached to his fingers, was among the most definitive visuals of the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison managed by the American army.

Ali yesterday related his six- month experience at the Perdana Global Peace Organisation’s “Expose War Crimes Criminalise War” conference.

During a half-hour presentation, Ali related how he was tortured by American soldiers.

He was picked up on Oct 13, 2003.

“I was given electric shocks on three separate sessions.

In the last session, I bit my tongue and was bleeding from the mouth,” he said through an interpreter.

He was burnt with cigarettes, made to sit in a small toilet flooded with sewage and had objects stuffed repeatedly into his anus.

He said while all this was painful, a more spiritually challenging torture came during the fasting month.

“Food was served at midnight and during the fasting period.”

A lecturer at the Al-Alamiya Islamic Institute in Baghdad, Ali said he was picked up by American troops while on his way for prayers.

He said charges were levelled at him when he refused to declare if he was a Sunni or Shia.

Ali said the torture stopped one day, and 49 days later, he was taken out of the prison to a camp.

There, another prisoner told him he had overheard guards saying Ali had been wrongfully arrested.

“I was put in a truck and taken to a highway and thrown out. A passing car stopped and took me home.”

Although his ordeal has ended, it continues in different ways for others in Iraq.

“My experience is a drop in the sea,” he said, while calling on Malaysians to pray for his compatriots.

“Don’t forget us in your prayers,” said Ali, who now resides in Amman, Jordan.

A US interrogator on torture in Iraq: here.

USA: big women’s lawsuit against Wal-Mart for sex bias

From the Mail & Guardian in South Africa:

Wal-Mart faces biggest sex bias case in US history

Jim Christie | San Francisco, United States

07 February 2007 12:18

The biggest sexual discrimination case in United States history advanced against Wal-Mart on Tuesday when a top court ruled that more than a million women could join a suit charging bias in pay and promotions.

The plaintiffs estimate they could win billions of dollars in lost pay and damages and that as many as two million women who have worked for Wal-Mart in its US stores since 1998 could join a class-action lawsuit.

“It is time for Wal-Mart to face the music,” Brad Seligman, a lawyer for the Impact Fund, a non-profit group in Berkeley, California representing the female plaintiffs, told reporters.

“Two courts now have ruled that Wal-Mart is going to have to face a jury …

We fully expect Wal-Mart to keep appealing but we’re very confident now that two courts have upheld this [class] certification,” he said.

Lead plaintiff Betty Dukes (56) who works as a greeter at a Wal-Mart east of San Francisco, said she had let out a cheer while at work.

“I am absolutely overjoyed,” Dukes said.

Wal-Mart and Japanese whaling: here.

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China: world’s oldest animal fossils

From the People’s Daily in China:

Chinese, US scientists find earth’s oldest animal in SW China

Scientists from China and the United States have moved a step closer to decipher the development biology of the oldest animals on earth, after their research on 600 million years old embryos fossils in southwest China’s Guizhou Province.

The paleontologists’ study has revealed how the ancient animal embryos developed into mature adult forms, according to the front-page article published in the February issue of Geology, the journal of the Geological Society of America.

The scientists studied on some 80 pieces of fossilized embryos, which were formed almost 600 million years ago and showed the embryos in the act of cleaving, said Yuan Xunlai, a member of the Sino-U.S. embryos research team that carried out the study.

Yuan, from Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Xinhua on Tuesday that each embryo is about the size of a grain of sand, and is composed of two to nearly 1,000 cells.

The embryos cloaked themselves inside an envelope with tiny holes in a pattern similar to stitches on a baseball that they use to transport, store or metabolize molecules, he said.

Scientists used X-ray computed tomography and other scanning equipments to peel off the envelope and discovered that the embryo cells are dividing and unfurling.

“Previously we discovered that some cells were clustered together, but they showed no signs of dividing,” Yuan said.

About a decade ago, paleontologists from the United States and China discovered thousands of 600-million-year-old embryo microfossils in Doushantuo Formation, a fossil deposit near Weng’an, Guizhou Province.

Later they unearthed fossils of a tubular coral-like animal, which they named Megasphaera ornata for its appearance, and found them to be the grown-ups of the embryos.

The new fossils could provide the missing link between the egg and adult of one of Earth’s earliest animals, said Zhou Chuanming, a researcher with the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology,

Zhou said the discovery could hint towards how ancient animals developed and reveal the unending evolvement journey of earth’s life forms.

But scientists added they need other intermediary stages to complete the developmental journey of the ancient animals.

Jay and magpie

This morning, still snow on the branches of the trees opposite my window.

A jay, clearly visible as there are no leaves this time of the year.

Ten metres to its left, a magpie.

Skiing may threaten rare alpine birds

This is a video of a singing rock bunting.

From BirdLife:

With poor snow conditions blighting prospects for skiing at many of Europe’s resorts, developers are casting their eyes on the upper slopes, where snowfall is more reliable.

But Italian ecologists warn that construction of pistes above the tree line results in fewer species and lower numbers of birds, compared with natural grassland at similar altitudes.

Without much more environmentally sensitive ways of constructing and managing ski runs, species of European conservation concern, such as Rock Partridge Alectoris graeca, Red-billed Chough Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax, Black Grouse Tetrao tetrix and Rock Bunting Emberiza cia, will be put under additional pressure.