AKUFO –ADDO: He Plays On The Age Factor

Nana Addo Danquah Akufo Addo

By Ebow Mensah

Nana Akufo-Addo’s tribute to Nelson Mandela is more than interesting.

It deliberately plays on the age factor and makes the point that even though Nelson Mandela became President at the ripe age of 76, he was nonetheless a good one.

The point is also made that although Nelson Mandela served only one term, he managed to achieve a lot for the people of South Africa.

The fact however shows that Nelson Mandela did not achieve that much for his people as a one term President.

In that period at least unemployment rose from 10 per cent to 40 per cent and most black people still live in poverty and squalor.

Nelson Mandela at 76 is not and cannot be Nana Akufo at 72.

Indeed, the two men may have different health conditions and may respond to political and physical stimuli differently.

In any case if Nana Akufo – Addo wants to be treated and accepted as Nelson, then we may want to start from 2 years in jail.

Editorial

STOP AND LISTEN
Ghana is in serious danger from the Plant Breeders Bill currently before Parliament.  The bill is a giveaway of our agricultural heritage and our agricultural future to western multinational corporations.  In return, Ghana gets nothing but false and empty promises. MPs have been promised investment will come from the bill.  It will be the same extractive investment that has plagued African countries for centuries, investment designed to extract the wealth from Ghana, including our water and soil nutrients, for the benefit of western investors and the expansion of western monopolies.

The Plant Breeders Bill destroys farmers’ rights and freedoms and expands the rights and reach of multinational corporations. The bill is based on UPOV 1991, a restrictive and inflexible legal regime.  It is focused solely on promoting and protecting industrial seed breeders that develop genetically uniform seeds/plant varieties suited to mechanized large-scale agriculture growing monocultures for export.

The history of UPOV laws such as the Plant Breeders’ Bill is one of an ongoing and apparently limitless expansion of seed company rights while farmers’ rights and freedoms shrink to nothing. 

The Plant Breeders Bill will make it illegal for farmers to engage in their age-old practice of freely saving, using, sharing and selling seeds.  They will not be permitted to freely save, share, or sell seeds from previous seasons for planting in subsequent seasons.  Farmers using saved seed may be required to pay royalties to the multinational breeders.  Saved seeds may even be confiscated and destroyed.  In this respect, the Plant Breeders’ Bill literally outlaws the business of farming.

SEED MONOPOLIES, GMOS AND FARMERS SUICIDES IN INDIA 

Dr Vandana Shiva

Response by Dr Vandana Shiva to an article published on 1^st May 2013 in Nature by Natasha Gilbert titled “Case studies: A hard look at GM crops”

The article by Natasha Gilbert begins a section entitled GM cotton has driven farmers to suicide by quoting me:

“During an interview in March, Vandana Shiva, an environmental and feminist activist from India, repeated an alarming statistic: ‘270,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide since Monsanto entered the Indian seed market,’ she said. ‘It’s genocide.’”

Yes, I am an ecologist and feminist. But I am also a scientist - a fact that Natasha intentionally avoids mentioning. As a Quantum Physicist, I have been trained to look at the interconnectedness and non-separability of processes, which in a mechanistic and reductionist paradigm, are seen as separate and unrelated.

As a scientist, I have tried to understand what is driving our small farmers to suicide. Two things are evident. One, the suicides begin with the period of globalization which allowed MNC’s  entry into India’s Seed Sector, making seeds a non-renewable ‘input’, to be bought every year.

Secondly, the suicides have further intensified after the introduction of GMO Bt cotton. GMOs are intrinsically linked to Intellectual Property Rights, which in turn are linked to royalty payments. Royalties are extracted from poor farmers through credit and debt. The Monsanto representative, who appeared before India’s Parliamentary Committee on Agriculture, admitted that Monsanto was collecting Rs 700 as royalty for a 450 gm packet of seed costing Rs 1600. The shift to Bt cotton meant a jump of 8000% in the cost of seed. This is at the root of the farmers’ distress in the cotton areas of India.

As a human being, it concerns me deeply that 284,694 small farmers of India, the most resilient and courageous people I have known, have in recent times been driven to the desperation of taking their lives because of  a debt trap created by a corporate  driven economy of greed that profits from selling them costly chemicals and non-renewable seeds. And we must not forget that the agrochemical industry is the biotechnology industry is the global seed industry.

I look at GMOs as a system of corporate control over seed, a system of Intellectual Property, a system of ecological impacts on soil and biodiversity, a system of health impacts on humans and animals, a system of socio-economic impacts on the livelihoods and survival of farmers.

GMOs are not a “thing”, they are a set of relationships, and it is the context created by these relationships that is driving farmers to suicide. GMOs are not a disembodied “technology” as so many pro-GMO commentators try to present. These commentators then proceed to protect this abstract construction of GMOs as disembodied technologies from the evidence of reality. In reality, what exists is a GMO complex, or nexus, that has an impact on real ecosystems and real farmers.

Shutting out evidence from reality is a completely unscientific approach. Reality cannot be cooked up in papers, no matter how prestigious the journals in which these concoctions are published.  Reality is what happens in reality - the reality of farmers’ suicides, reality of the emergence of super-pests and super-weeds, the reality of rising costs of seed as royalties are extracted from poor peasants. These are no abstractions; rather, they are the lived realities of the consequences of GMOs.

In a systems framework, the scientific approach is to identify the interconnections in reality, and identify systems causality and contextual causation. In the cotton areas, farmers’ suicides started in a context of seed monopolies and destruction of alternatives. And that is the context that must be understood. Contexts require the understanding of contextual causality. Systems require an understanding of systems causation.

The figures of farmers’ suicides are not mine. They come from government statistics of the National Bureau of crime records. The latest figure updated up to 2012 is 284,694.  Any human being anywhere should be outraged at this tragedy. And any scientist working for social and ecological responsibility should want to go to the roots of the crisis, not try and cover it up with unscientific analysis and false claims.

As Natasha’s quote makes clear, I link farmers suicides, which are concentrated in the cotton areas, to Monsanto’s entry into the Indian seed market and its establishment of a monopoly in the cotton seed market.  However, Natasha leaves out the role of Monsanto’s monopoly in her article, and reduces the issue to GM cotton. This is not a hard look, but a blinded, blinkered and biased delusion. What Natasha, in her article, brushes off as an ‘oft repeated story of corporate exploitation’ is a story that is deeply grounded in both human and scientific realities. It is, indeed, a genocide.

The Emergence of Farmers’ Suicides

When the role of seed monopolies in cotton as contributing to farmers suicides has to be studied, one must focus on the cotton areas, not on the entire country . All studies that try and disconnect suicides in the cotton areas from Monsanto’s seed monopoly take the aggregate national data, not the figures of the regions and states where cotton cultivation and cultivation of Bt cotton is concentrated. It is equivalent to declaring that a patient suffering from throat cancer is fine by looking at the health of cells in the entire body, instead of focusing on the cancerous cells in the throat.

We have been studying the creation of seed monopolies since 1987, during the period of the Uruguay Round of the GATT, when corporations like Monsanto pushed intellectual property rights over seeds and life forms into trade treaties. This led to the TRIPS agreement of WTO. Monsanto has admitted that it was the “patient, diagnostician, and physician” in defining intellectual property in WTO. In this way, GMOs are the vehicle for introducing patents and IPR in order to collect royalties. With the introduction of Bt. cotton, the price of seed jumped 8000% because of royalties. Every year more $200 million flows from the Indian peasants to Monsanto. This is at the heart of the intensification of farmers suicides in the cotton belt of India.

We have been studying farmers’ suicides on the ground since 1997 when we first witnessed a suicide of a farmer in Warangal, who had shifted from mixed dry land agriculture to hybrid cotton cultivation and gotten into debt for seeds, fertilizer, pesticides and irrigation. We have issued reports entitled ‘Seeds of Suicide’ since 1997, based on field research on the ground, not secondary data analyzed incoherently in distant places.

In 1997, Monsanto started its illegal field trials of Bt. cotton in India. We had to sue them in the Supreme Court of India, and as a result they could not commercialize their Bt cotton until 2002. But the consolidation of the seed industry and the erosion of farmers’ seed sovereignty through creating dependence on purchase of non-renewable seed was already underway.

Farmers’ suicides started in 1995 when globalization enabled seed MNCs like Monsanto to enter the Indian seed market and start establishing seed monopolies. The suicides have increased with the commercial sales of GMO Bt. cotton. Bt. cotton currently accounts for 95% of the cotton seeds commercially sold in India. Famers have adopted Bt. cotton not because it gave higher yields or gave them higher incomes, but because all alternatives have been destroyed.

Destruction of Choice

Farmers are not choosing Bt. cotton. They have no choice left. The systematic wiping out of non Bt. alternatives from the market and the aggressive marketing of Bt. cotton has created a monopoly. It is not profits, but deliberate destruction of alternatives that have pushed farmers into the Bt. cotton trap, and as a consequence, into the suicide trap. Farmers’ varieties are displaced through the very clever strategy termed as “seed replacement”. Public varieties have mysteriously stopped being released. And most Indian companies are locked into licensing arrangements with Monsanto, and can only sell Monsanto’s Bollgard Bt. cotton seeds.

The Standing Committee on Agriculture of the Indian Parliament went to Vidarbha, an area where farmers been deeply affected, to hold public consultations. Here they found the reality to be entirely different from what promoters of Bt cotton had been telling them about increased production, productivity, and prosperity. The report from the committee states, “The last 10 years of Bt cotton also establish the fact that monopolies in the seed sector could be a great concern. In the current scenario, 93% of Bt. cotton has the propriety gene of Monsanto, the American seed giant, which is the world’s largest seed company. This monopoly has also given Monsanto the power to arm twist governments to increase prices of seeds.

Strangely, this lack of choice for the farmers is drummed around as farmers accepting Bt. cotton seeds.” (Report of Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture, Indian Parliament, 2012).

Failure to Yield

Yields of cotton have not grown since Bt. cotton was introduced. Cotton yields were higher before Bt cotton than after. Our field surveys reveal frequent failure. There has been a trend of declining yields as corroborated in the paper by Dr. Keshav Kranthi (CICR) reviewing the 10 years of Bt Cotton. “Currently the main issue that worries stakeholders is the stagnation of productivity at an average of 500 kg lint per ha for the past seven years. The gains have been stagnant and unaffected by the increase in area of Bt cotton from 5.6% in 2004 to 85% in 2010. The yield was 463 kg per hectare when the Bt cotton area was 5.6% in 2004 and reached a mere 506 kg per hectare when the area under Bt cotton increased to 9.4 M hectares at 85% of the total 11.1 M hectares.” (Kranthi.K (2011), “10 years of Bt. in India”

http://www.cotton247.com/article/27520/part-ii-10-years-of-bt-in-india

Increase in Pests and Pesticide Use

Secondly, contrary to the claim of the GMO lobby, pests have increased not reduced, and therefore pesticide use has gone up, not come down. Insects which were not cotton pests have become pests. These include aphids and jassids, mealy bug, army bug. The mealy bug was not observed in India before the introduction of Bt. cotton. The increase in no target pests is as high as 300%. In his 2011 report Dr. Kranthi states, “Productivity in north India is likely to decline because of the declining potential of hybrids; the emerging problem of leaf curl virus on the new susceptible Bt-hybrids; a high level of susceptibility to sucking pests (straight varieties were resistant); problems with nutrient deficiencies and physiological disorders; and mealy bugs, whiteflies and miscellaneous insect problems that are likely to increase (Kranthi.K (2011). Part-3: “10 years of Bt. in India”

http://www.cotton247.com/article/27614/part-iii-10-years-of-bt-in-india

Meanwhile, the bollworm, which was supposed to be controlled by the Bt. toxin in Bt. Cotton, has become resistant. This is admitted by Monsanto, which has now introduced the more expensive Bollgard II to replace the Bollgard I.  (Sharma, D (2010). Bt cotton has failed, admits Monsanto. India Today, March 6, 2010 http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/86939/India/Bt+cotton+has+failed+admits)

Bollworm resistance to Bt. resistance monitoring studies done at CICR have demonstrated that bollworm (helicoverpa armigera), the target pest of Bt cotton, has developed tolerance for it. Other studies have also shown bollworm surviving and reproducing in Bt. Cotton, in both single gene and double gene Bt.

(M.T. Ranjith, A. Prabhuraj, & Y.B. Srinivasa. (2010). Survival and reproduction of natural populations of Helicoverpa Armigera on Bt. cotton hybrids in Raichur, India, Current Science, 99, (11) 1602-1606)

Our field studies in Vidarbha show a 13 fold increase in use of pesticides after Bt cotton was introduced. Farmers’ profits have not increased; in fact, the farmers have got into debt, and that is the reason they are committing suicide.

Table 1: Increasing Cost of Pesticide in Maharashtra

Year	Maharashtra
	Area under Bt Cotton Million Hectares	Cost of Pesticide (Rs. Crores)
2004-05	0.200	92.10
2005-06	0.607	273.45
2006-07	1.840	847.32
2007-08	2.880	1326.24
2008-09	2.984	1335.34
2009-10	3.315	1483.22
2010-11	3.9	1654.00
2011-12	4.095	1858.00

•        

The increase in pesticide use in Maharashtra is confirmed by the official statistics. The pesticide usage trends in the major cotton-growing states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka are shown above. While Maharashtra shows a significant upward trend from 3198 MT to 4639 MT, the other states show only marginal change, except for the downward trend in Andhra Pradesh. The decline in Andhra Pradesh is because of a major government programme to promote sustainable, non pesticide farming.

Table 2: Pesticide usage in Metric Tonnes technical grade

	2005-06	2006-07	2007-08	2008-09	2009-10
Andhra Pradesh	1997	1394	1541	1381	1015
Gujarat	2700	2670	2660	2650	2750
Karnataka	1638	1362	1588	1675	1647
Maharashtra	3198	3193	3050	2400	4639
Punjab	5610	5975	6080	5760	5810
Madhya Pradesh	787	957	696	663	645
All India	39773	41515	43630	43860	41822

Source: Directorate of Plant Protection, http://ppqs.gov.in/IpmPesticides.htm

Seeds of Suicide: GMO Bt. cotton has contributed to an increase in farmers’ suicides

The combination of high costs of seed due to royalty collection, failure to increase yields or control pests, Bt. cotton has intensified the agrarian distress faced by farmers in the cotton areas of India.

Maharashtra is the state which today has maximum area under Bt. cotton. In the state there were 1083 farmer suicides in 1995 which increased to 3695 in 2002, more than three times jump; coinciding with the year when Monsanto introduced Bt Cotton. The scenario of Vidarbha, which is the epicenter of Bt. cotton cultivation, and the epicenter of farmers suicides, clearly shows that suicides increased after the introduction of Bt. Cotton. There were only 52 farmer suicides in 2001 but since 2002 suicides increased alarmingly as the area under Bt. cotton increased.

Year	No of Suicides
2001	52
2002	104
2003	148
2004	447
2005	445
2006	1148
2007	1246
2008	1248
2009	916
2010	748
2011	916
2012	927

Graph 1: Farmer suicides over the years in

 Vidarbha, Maharashtr

The figures went down in 2008 after the announcement of the Rs. 169.78 billion debt relief package by the Prime Minister.

Experimenting With Life

David Suzuki

By David Suzuki

I am a geneticist by training. At one time, I had one of the largest research grants and genetics labs in Canada. The time I spent in this lab was one of the happiest periods of my life and I am proud of the contribution we made to science. My introductory book is still the most widely used genetics text in the world.

When I graduated as a geneticist in 1961, I was full of enthusiasm and determined to make a mark. Back then we knew about DNA, genes, chromosomes, and genetic regulation. But today when I tell students what our hot ideas were in '61, they choke with laughter. Viewed in 2013, ideas from 1961 seem hilarious. But when those students become professors years from now and tell their students what was hot in 2013, their students will be just as amused.

At the cutting edge of scientific research, most of our ideas are far from the mark - wrong, in need of revision, or irrelevant. That's not a derogation of science; it's the way science advances. We take a set of observations or data, set up a hypothesis that makes sense of them, and then we test the hypothesis. The new insights and techniques we gain from this process are interpreted tentatively and liable to change, so any rush to apply them strikes me as downright dangerous.

No group of experts should be more aware of the hazards of unwarranted claims than geneticists. After all, it was the exuberance of geneticists early in this century that led to the creation of a discipline called eugenics, which aimed to improve the quality of human genes.

These scientists were every bit as clever, competent, and well-meaning as today's genetic engineers; they just got carried away with their discoveries. Outlandish claims were made by eminent geneticists about the hereditary nature of traits such as drunkenness, nomadism, and criminality, as well as those judged "inferior" or "superior." Those claims provided scientific respectability to legislation in the US prohibiting interracial marriage and immigration from countries judged inferior, and allowed sterilization of inmates of mental institutions on genetic grounds. In Nazi Germany, geneticist Josef Mengele held peer-reviewed research grants for his work at Auschwitz. The grand claims of geneticists led to "race purification" laws and the Holocaust.

Today, the leading-edge of genetics is in the field of biotechnology. The basis of this new area is the ability to take DNA (genetic material) from one organism and insert it into a different species. This is truly revolutionary. Human beings can't normally exchange genes with a carrot or a mouse, but with DNA technology it can happen.

However, history informs us that though we love technology, there are always costs, and since our knowledge of how nature works is so limited, we can't anticipate how those costs will manifest. We only have to reflect on DDT, nuclear power, and CFCs, which were hailed as wonderful creations but whose long-term detrimental effects were only found decades after their widespread use.

Now, with a more wise and balanced perspective, we are cutting back on the use of these technologies. But with genetically modified (GM) foods, this option may not be available. The difference with GM food is that once the genie is out of the bottle, it will be difficult or impossible to stuff it back. If we stop using DDT and CFCs, nature may be able to undo most of the damage - even nuclear waste decays over time. But GM plants are living organisms. Once these new life forms have become established in our surroundings, they can replicate, change, and spread; there may be no turning back. Many ecologists are concerned about what this means to the balance of life on Earth that has evolved over millions of years through the natural reproduction of species.

Genomes are selected in the entirety of their expression. In ways we barely comprehend, the genes within a species are interconnected and interact as an integrated whole. When a gene from an unrelated species is introduced, the context within which it finds itself is completely changed. If a taiko drum is plunked in the middle of a symphony orchestra and plays along, it is highly probable the resultant music will be pretty discordant. Yet based on studies of gene behavior derived from studies within a species, biotechnologists assume that those rules will also apply to genes transferred between species. This is totally unwarranted.

As we learned from experience with DDT, nuclear power and CFCs, we only discover the costs of new technologies after they are extensively used. We should apply the Precautionary Principle with any new technology, asking whether it is needed and then demanding proof that it is not harmful. Nowhere is this more important than in biotechnology because it enables us to tamper with the very blueprint of life.

Since GM foods are now in our diet, we have become experimental subjects without any choice. (Europeans say if they want to know whether GMOs are hazardous, they should just study North Americans.) I would have preferred far more experimentation with GMOs under controlled lab conditions before their release into the open, but it's too late.

We have learned from painful experience that anyone entering an experiment should give informed consent. That means at the very least food should be labeled if it contains GMOs so we each can make that choice.

---

David T Suzuki PhD is an award-winning scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster. Web:www.davidsuzuki.org

Tributes of Shameful Hypocrisy

US President Hussein Obama

Accusing politicians or former politicians of "breathtaking hypocrisy" is not just over used, it is inadequacy of spectacular proportions. Sadly, searches in various thesaurus' fail in meaningful improvement. The death of Nelson Mandela, however, provides tributes resembling duplicity on a mind altering substance.

By Felicity Arbuthnot

President Obama, whose litany of global assassinations by Drone, from infants to octogenarians - a personal weekly decree we are told, summary executions without Judge, Jury or trial - stated of the former South African's President's passing:

"We will not likely see the likes of Nelson Mandela again ... His acts of reconciliation  ... set an example that all humanity should aspire to, whether in the lives of nations or our own personal lives.  

"I studied his words and his writings ... like so many around the globe, I cannot fully imagine my own life without the example that Nelson Mandela set, (as) long as I live I will do what I can to learn from him ...  it falls to us ... to forward the example that he set:  to make decisions guided not by hate, but by love ..."

Mandela, said the Presidential High Executioner, had: "... bent the arc of the moral universe toward justice."(i)

Mandela, after nearly thirty years in jail (1964-1990) forgave his jailors and those who would have preferred to see him hung. Obama committed to closing Guantanamo, an election pledge, the prisoners still self starve in desperation as their lives rot away, without hope. 

The decimation of Libya had no congressional approval. Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan's dismembered Drone victims are a Presidential roll call of shame and horror and the Nobel Peace Laureate's trigger finger still hovers over Syria and Iran, for all the talk of otherwise. When his troops finally limped out of Iraq, he left the biggest Embassy in the world and a proxy armed force, with no chance of them leaving being on even the most distant horizon. 

  

Clearly learning, justice and being "guided by love" is proving bit of an uphill struggle. Ironically, Obama was born in 1964, the year Mandela was sentenced to jail and his "long walk to freedom."

Bill Clinton, who (illegally, with the UK) ordered the near continual bombing of Iraq throughout his Presidency (1993-2001) and the siege conditions of the embargo, with an average of six thousand a month dying of "embargo related causes", paid tribute to Mandela as: "a champion for human dignity and freedom, for peace and reconciliation ... a man of uncommon grace and compassion, for whom abandoning bitterness and embracing adversaries was ... a way of life. All of us are living in a better world because of the life that Madiba lived." Tell that to America's victims.

In the hypocrisy stakes, Prime Minister David Cameron can compete with the best. He said: 

"A great light has gone out in the world. Nelson Mandela was a towering figure in our time; a legend in life and now in death - a true global hero.

... Meeting him was one of the great honours of my life."

On Twitter he reiterated: "A great light has gone out in the world. Nelson Mandela was a hero of our time." The flag on Downing Street was to hang at half mast, to which a follower replied: "Preferably by no-one who was in the Young Conservatives at a time they wanted him hanged, or those who broke sanctions, eh?"

Another responded: "The Tories wanted to hang Mandela.You utter hypocrite."

The two tweeters clearly knew their history. In 2009, when Cameron was pitching to become Prime Minister, it came to light that in 1989, when Mandela was still in prison, David Cameron, then a: "rising star of the Conservative Research Department ...  accepted an all expenses paid trip to apartheid South Africa ... funded by a firm that lobbied against the imposition of sanctions on the apartheid regime."

Asked if Cameron: "wrote a memo or had to report back to the office about his trip, Alistair Cooke (his then boss at Conservative Central Office) said it was 'simply a jolly', adding: 'It was all terribly relaxed, just a little treat, a perk of the job ... ' "

Former Cabinet Minister Peter Hain commented of the trip:

"This just exposes his hypocrisy because he has tried to present himself as a progressive Conservative, but just on the eve of the apartheid downfall, and Nelson Mandela's release from prison, when negotiations were taking place about a transfer of power, here he was being wined and dined on a sanctions-busting visit.

"This is the real Conservative Party ... his colleagues who used to wear 'Hang Nelson Mandela' badges at university are now sitting on the benches around him. Their leader at the time, Margaret Thatcher described Mandela as a terrorist." (ii)

In the book of condolences opened at South Africa House, five minutes walk from his Downing Street residence, Cameron, who has voted for, or enjoined all the onslaughts or threatened ones referred to above, wrote:

" ... your generosity, compassion and profound sense of forgiveness have given us all lessons to learn and live by."

He ended his message with: "Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God." Hopefully your lower jaw is still attached to your face, dear reader. If so, hang on to it, worse is to come.

The farcically entitled Middle East Peace Envoy, former Prime Minister Tony Blair (think "dodgy dossiers" "forty five minutes" to destruction, illegal invasion, Iraq's ruins and ongoing carnage, heartbreak, after over a decade) stated:

"Through his leadership, he guided the world into a new era of politics in which black and white, developing and developed, north and south ... stood for the first time together on equal terms.

"Through his dignity, grace and the quality of his forgiveness, he made racism everywhere not just immoral but stupid; something not only to be disagreed with, but to be despised. In its place he put the inalienable right of all humankind to be free and to be equal.

"I worked with him closely ... " (iii) said the man whose desire for "humankind to be free and equal" (tell that to the Iraqis) now includes demolishing Syria and possibly Iran. 

As ever, it seems with Blair, the memories of others are a little different:

"Nelson Mandela felt so betrayed by Blair's decision to join the US-led invasion of Iraq that he launched a fiery tirade against him in a phone call to a cabinet minister, it emerged.

"Peter Hain who (knew) the ex-South African President well, said Mandela was 'breathing fire'down the line in protest at the 2003 military action.

"The trenchant criticisms were made in a formal call to the Minister's office, not in a private capacity, and Blair was informed of what had been said, Hain added.

'I had never heard Nelson Mandela so angry and frustrated." (iv)

On the BBC's flagship morning news programme "Today", former Prime Minister "Iraq is a better place, I'd do it again" Blair, said of Nelson Mandela:

" ... he came to represent something quite inspirational for the future of the world and for peace and reconciliation in the 21st century."

Comment is left to former BBC employee, Elizabeth Morley, with peerless knowledge of Middle East politics, who takes no prisoners:

"Dear Today Complaints,

"How could you? Your almost ten minute long interview with the war criminal Tony Blair was the antithesis to all the tributes to the great man. I cannot even bring myself to put the two names in the same sentence. How could you? 

"Blair has the blood of millions of Iraqis on his hands. Blair has declared himself willing to do the same to Iranians. How many countries did Mandela bomb? Blair condones apartheid in Israel. Blair turns a blind eye to white supremacists massacring Palestinians. And you insult us by making us listen to him while our hearts and minds are focussed on Mandela.

How could you?" (Reproduced with permission.)

As the avalanche of hypocrisy cascades across the globe from shameless Western politicians, Archbishop Desmond Tutu reflected in two lines the thoughts in the hearts of the true mourners:

"We are relieved that his suffering is over, but our relief is drowned by our grief. May he rest in peace and rise in glory."

Real reasons behind US-China tensions

Chinese President, Xi Jinping

The escalation of military tensions between Washington and Beijing in the East China Sea is superficially over China’s unilateral declaration of an air defense zone. But the real reason for Washington’s ire is the recent Chinese announcement that it is planning to reduce its holdings of the US dollar.

That move to offload some of its 3.5 trillion in US dollar reserves combined with China’s increasing global trade in oil based on national currencies presents a mortal threat to the American petrodollar and the entire American economy. 

This threat to US viability - already teetering on bankruptcy, record debt and social meltdown - would explain why Washington has responded with such belligerence to China setting up an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) last week extending some 400 miles from its coast into the East China Sea. 

Beijing said the zone was aimed at halting intrusive military maneuvers by US spy planes over its territory. The US has been conducting military flights over Chinese territory for decades without giving Beijing the slightest notification. 

Back in April 2001, a Chinese fighter pilot was killed when his aircraft collided with a US spy plane. The American crew survived, but the incident sparked a diplomatic furor, with Beijing saying that it illustrated Washington’s unlawful and systematic violation of Chinese sovereignty. 

Within days of China’s announcement of its new ADIZ last week, the US sent two B52 bombers into the air space without giving the notification of flight paths required by Beijing.
American allies Japan and South Korea also sent military aircraft in defiance of China. Washington dismissed the Chinese declared zone and asserted that the area was international air space. 

A second intrusion of China’s claimed air territory involved US surveillance planes and up to 10 Japanese American-made F-15 fighter jets. On that occasion, Beijing has responded more forcefully by scrambling SU-30 and J-10 warplanes, which tailed the offending foreign aircraft. 

Many analysts see the latest tensions as part of the ongoing dispute between China and Japan over the islands known, respectively, as the Diaoyu and Senkaku, located in the East China Sea. Both countries claim ownership. The islands are uninhabited but the surrounding sea is a rich fishing ground and the seabed is believed to contain huge reserves of oil and gas.
By claiming the skies over the islands, China appears to be adding to its territorial rights to the contested islands. 

In a provocative warning to Beijing, American defense secretary Chuck Hagel this week reiterated that the decades-old US-Japan military pact covers any infringement by China of Japan’s claim on the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. 

It is hard to justify Washington and Tokyo’s stance on the issue. The islands are much nearer to China’s mainland (250 miles) compared with Japan’s (600 miles). China claims that the islands were part of its territory for centuries until Japan annexed them in 1895 during its imperialist expansion, which eventually led to an all-out invasion and war of aggression on China. 

Also, as Beijing points out, the US and its postwar Japanese ally both have declared their own air defense zones. It is indeed inconceivable that Chinese spy planes and bombers could encroach unannounced on the US West Coast without the Pentagon ordering fierce retaliation.

Furthermore, maps show that the American-backed air defense zone extending from Japan’s southern territory is way beyond any reasonable halfway limit between China and Japan. This American-backed arbitrary imposition on Chinese territorial sovereignty is thus seen as an arrogant convention, set up and maintained by Washington for decades. 

The US and its controlled news media are absurdly presenting Beijing’s newly declared air defense zone as China “flexing its muscles and stoking tensions.” And Washington is claiming that it is nobly defending its Japanese and South Korea allies from Chinese expansionism.
However, it is the background move by China to ditch the US dollar that is most likely the real cause for Washington’s militarism towards Beijing. The apparent row over the air and sea territory, which China has sound rights to, is but the pretext for the US to mobilize its military and in effect threaten China with aggression. 

In recent years, China has been incrementally moving away from US financial hegemony. This hegemony is predicated on the US dollar being the world reserve currency and, by convention, the standard means of payment for international trade and in particular trade in oil. That arrangement is obsolete given the bankrupt state of the US economy. But it allows the US to continue bingeing on credit. 

China - the second biggest economy in the world and a top importer of oil - has or is seeking oil trading arrangements with its major suppliers, including Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, which will involve the exchange of national currencies. That development presents a grave threat to the petrodollar and its global reserve status.
The latest move by Beijing on November 20 giving notice that it intends to shift its risky foreign exchange holdings of US Treasury notes for a mixture of other currencies is a harbinger that the 

American economy’s days are numbered, as Paul Craig Roberts noted last week.
This is of course China’s lawful right to do so, as are its territorial claims. But, in the imperialist, megalomaniac mindset of Washington, the “threat” to the US economy and indebted way of life is perceived as a tacit act of war. That is why Washington is reacting so furiously and desperately to China’s newly declared air corridor. It is a pretext for the US to clench an iron fist. 

Bone mystery: Did ancient humans have sex with other species than Neanderthals?

The knowledge of our human origins has taken a huge leap forward after anthropologists decoded the DNA of a bone as old as 400,000 years old, revealing that our ancestors may have had sex with more species of early humans than previously thought.

A bone was dug up at what appears to be an ancient burial site in Sima de los Huesos, in Spain. Its genome indicates that the early European was more closely related to a much earlier species of human dating as far back as 700,000 years ago than to our immediate ancestors, the Neanderthals. Neanderthals lived as recently as 30,000 years ago, before humankind’s modern incarnation, Homo sapiens, appeared on the scene. Homo sapiens were previously thought by scientists to have interbred with Neanderthals, but not with other hominid species.

The bone owes its good condition to the subterranean climate in the northern highland area of Sierra de Atapuerca. The find was at a depth of about 30 meters, where the temperature is a little more than 10 degrees Celsius.

Svante Paabo, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, was one of the key participants in the research, which was published in the journal Nature. He points out that the results extracted from the study of the bone “show that we can now study DNA from human ancestors that are hundreds of thousands of years old.”

That is a substantial achievement in itself, as such old DNA had until now only been studied when found in permafrost – mountain soil that is frozen over and allowing for preservation of bones and flesh, like the ones we often find when conducting animal studies.

But the technique does little to reduce the mystery the anthropologists are faced with now.

Sima de los Huesos – in English it can be translated as ‘Pit of Bones’ – is famous for harboring the largest collection of hominid fossils dating back anywhere from 100,000 to 700,000 years ago, to the Pleistocene period. Scientists have so far discovered 28 skeletons.

The individuals found there were previously thought to be ancestors to Homo heidelbergensis, which itself is thought to be a common ancestor to us – Homo sapiens – and our immediate cousins, the Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthals).

According to later studies, Paabo and team assumed that this bone would share an ancestor with the Neanderthals.

But what the bone’s mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) revealed after a couple of grams of bone powder were studied were more questions than answers.

They went about sequencing the genome from the mtDNA, which is passed down through the maternal line, and found a mysterious relation, after comparing their results with the modern human one, then that of an ape, a Neanderthal and a Denisovan.

The last on that list is a mysterious, recently discovered branch of Asian hominids considered to be a sister group to the Neantherthals. Therein lay the surprise: the studied sample was found to have a stronger relationship to the far-more distant Denisovans than to the Neanderthals, which still roamed the Earth some 30,000 years ago.

To put this into perspective, the previous oldest bone we have studied belongs to a Denisovan that dates back to 80,000 years ago – and is also the oldest DNA we had studied until now.

Furthermore, this comes on the heels of another recent and no less staggering revelation.

"The fact that the mtDNA of the Sima de los Huesos hominin shares a common ancestor with Denisovan rather than Neanderthal mtDNA is unexpected since its skeletal remains carry Neanderthal-derived features," said Matthias Meyer, a co-author of the study.

This could mean one of several things: that the newly discovered Spanish bone could belong to an ancestor of both the Neanderthals and the Denisovans; another is that an entirely new branch of hominids is in question – one related to the Denisovans.

Director at the Center for Research on Human Evolution and Behaviour in Madrid, Juan-Luis Arsuuga explained the result as pointing to a “complex pattern of evolution in the origin of Neanderthals and modern humans.”

This is just the latest in a series of startling recent discoveries that put into question our origins, pattern of movement, as well as inter-breeding.