I’ll do a full review in a few months, when We Steal Secrets comes out, but I bring it up now because the whole issue of secrets and how we keep them is increasingly in the news, to the point where I think we’re headed for a major confrontation between the government and the public over the issue, one bigger in scale than even the Wikileaks episode.

We’ve seen the battle lines forming for years now. It’s increasingly clear that governments, major corporations, banks, universities and other such bodies view the defense of their secrets as a desperate matter of institutional survival, so much so that the state has gone to extraordinary lengths to punish and/or threaten to punish anyone who so much as tiptoes across the informational line.

This is true not only in the case of Wikileaks – and especially the realsubject of Gibney’s film, Private Bradley Manning, who in an incredible act of institutional vengeance is being charged with aiding the enemy (among other crimes) and could, theoretically, receive a death sentence.

Did the Mainstream Media Fail Bradley Manning?

There’s also the horrific case of Aaron Swartz, a genius who helped create the technology behind Reddit at the age of 14, who earlier this year hanged himself after the government threatened him with 35 years in jail for downloading a bunch of academic documents from an MIT server. Then there’s the case of Sergey Aleynikov, the Russian computer programmer who allegedly stole the High-Frequency Trading program belonging to Goldman, Sachs (Aleynikov worked at Goldman), a program which prosecutors in open court admitted could, “in the wrong hands,” be used to “manipulate markets.”

Aleynikov spent a year in jail awaiting trial, was convicted, had his sentence overturned, was freed, and has since been re-arrested by a government seemingly determined to make an example out of him.

The Brilliant Life and Tragic Death of Aaron Swartz

And most recently, there’s the Matthew Keys case, in which a Reuters social media editor was charged by the government with conspiring with the hacker group Anonymous to alter a Los Angeles Times headline in December 2010. The change in the headline? It ended up reading, “Pressure Builds in House to Elect CHIPPY 1337,” Chippy being the name of another hacker group accused of defacing a video game publisher’s website.

Keys is charged with crimes that carry up to 25 years in prison, although the likelihood is that he’d face far less than that if convicted. Still, it seems like an insane amount of pressure to apply, given the other types of crimes (of, say, the HSBC variety) where stiff sentences haven’t even been threatened, much less imposed.

A common thread runs through all of these cases. On the one hand, the motivations for these information-stealers seem extremely diverse: You have people who appear to be primarily motivated by traditional whistleblower concerns (Manning, who never sought money and was obviously initially moved by the moral horror aroused by the material he was seeing, falls into that category for me), you have the merely mischievous (the Keys case seems to fall in this area), there are those who either claim to be or actually are free-information ideologues (Assange and Swartz seem more in this realm), and then there are other cases where the motive might have been money (Aleynikov, who was allegedly leaving Goldman to join a rival trading startup, might be among those).

But in all of these cases, the government pursued maximum punishments and generally took zero-tolerance approaches to plea negotiations. These prosecutions reflected an obvious institutional terror of letting the public see the sausage-factory locked behind the closed doors not only of the state, but of banks and universities and other such institutional pillars of society. As Gibney pointed out in his movie, this is a Wizard of Oz moment, where we are being warned not to look behind the curtain.

What will we find out? We already know that our armies mass-murder women and children in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, that our soldiers joke about smoldering bodies from the safety of gunships, that some of our closest diplomatic allies starve and repress their own citizens, and we may even have gotten a glimpse or two of a banking system that uses computerized insider trading programs to steal from everyone who has an IRA or a mutual fund or any stock at all by manipulating markets like the NYSE.

These fervent, desperate prosecutions suggest that there’s more awfulness under there, things that are worse, and there is a determination to not let us see what those things are. Most recently, we’ve seen that determination in the furor over Barack Obama’s drone assassination program and the so-called “kill list” that is associated with it.

Weeks ago, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul – whom I’ve previously railed against as one of the biggest self-aggrandizing jackasses in politics – pulled a widely-derided but, I think, absolutely righteous Frank Capra act on the Senate floor, executing a one-man filibuster of Obama’s CIA nominee, John Brennan.

Paul had been mortified when he received a letter from Eric Holder refusing to rule out drone strikes on American soil in “extraordinary” circumstances like a 9/11 or a Pearl Harbor. Paul refused to yield until he extracted a guarantee that no American could be assassinated by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime.

He got his guarantee, but the way the thing is written doesn’t fill one with anything like confidence. Eric Holder’s letter to Paul reads like the legal disclaimer on a pack of unfiltered cigarettes:

Dear Senator Paul,

It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: “Does the president have the additional authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?” The answer is no.

Sincerely,

Eric Holder

You could drive a convoy of tanker trucks through the loopholes in that letter. Not to worry, though, this past week, word has come out via Congress – the White House won’t tell us anything – that no Americans are on its infamous kill list. The National Journal’s report on this story offered a similarly comical sort of non-reassurance:

The White House has wrapped its kill list in secrecy and already the United States has killed four Americans in drone strikes. Only one of them, senior al-Qaida operative Anwar al-Awlaki, was the intended target, according to U.S. officials. The others – including Awlaki’s teenage son – were collateral damage, killed because they were too near a person being targeted.

But no more Americans are in line for such killings – at least not yet. “There is no list where Americans are on the list,” House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers told National Journal. Still, he suggested, that could change.

“There is no list where Americans are on the list” – even the language used here sounds like a cheap Orwell knockoff (although, to be fair, so does V for Vendetta, which has unfortunately provided the model for the modern protest aesthetic). It’s not an accident that so much of this story is starting to sound like farce. The idea that we have to beg and plead and pull Capra-esque stunts in the Senate just to find out whether or not our government has “asserted the legal authority” (this preposterous phrase is beginning to leak into news coverage with alarming regularity) to kill U.S. citizens on U.S. soil without trial would be laughable, were it not for the obvious fact that such lines are in danger of really being crossed, if they haven’t been crossed already.

This morning, an Emory University law professor named Mary Dudziak wrote an op-ed in the Times in which she pointed out several disturbing aspects to the drone-attack policy. It’s bad enough, she writes, that the Obama administration is considering moving the program from the CIA to the Defense Department. (Which, Dudziak notes, “would do nothing to confer legitimacy to the drone strikes. The legitimacy problem comes from the secrecy itself — not which entity secretly does the killing.”) It’s even worse that the administration is citing Nixon’s infamous bombing of Cambodia as part of its legal precedent.

But beyond that, Obama’s lawyers used bad information in their white paper:

On Page 4 of the unclassified 16-page “white paper,” Justice Department lawyers tried to refute the argument that international law does not support extending armed conflict outside a battlefield. They cited as historical authority a speech given May 28, 1970, by John R. Stevenson, then the top lawyer for the State Department, following the United States’ invasion of Cambodia.

Since 1965, “the territory of Cambodia has been used by North Vietnam as a base of military operations,” he told the New York City Bar Association. “It long ago reached a level that would have justified us in taking appropriate measures of self-defense on the territory of Cambodia. However, except for scattered instances of returning fire across the border, we refrained until April from taking such action in Cambodia.”

But, Dudziak notes, there is a catch:

In fact, Nixon had begun his secret bombing of Cambodia more than a year earlier. (It is not clear whether Mr. Stevenson knew this.) So the Obama administration’s lawyers have cited a statement that was patently false.

Now, this “white paper” of Obama’s is already of dubious legality at best. The idea that the President can simply write a paper expanding presidential power into extralegal assassination without asking the explicit permission of, well, somebody, anyway, is absurd from the start. Now you add to that the complication of the paper being based in part on some half-assed, hastily-cobbled-together, factually lacking precedent, and the Obama drone-attack rationale becomes like all rationales of blunt-force, repressive power ever written – plainly ridiculous, the stuff of bad comedy, like the Russian military superpower invading tiny South Ossetia cloaked in hysterical claims of self-defense.

Why Rand Paul’s Filibuster Matters

The Wikileaks episode was just an early preview of the inevitable confrontation between the citizens of the industrialized world and the giant, increasingly secretive bureaucracies that support them. As some of Gibney’s interview subjects point out in his movie, the experts in this field, the people who worked on information security in the Pentagon and the CIA, have known for a long time that the day would come when all of our digitized secrets would spill out somewhere.

But the secret-keepers got lucky with Wikileaks. They successfully turned the story into one about Julian Assange and his personal failings, and headed off the confrontation with the major news organizations that were, for a time, his allies.

But that was just a temporary reprieve. The secrets are out there and everyone from hackers to journalists to U.S. senators are digging in search of them. Sooner or later, there’s going to be a pitched battle, one where the state won’t be able to peel off one lone Julian Assange or Bradley Manning and batter him into nothingness. Next time around, it’ll be a Pentagon Papers-style constitutional crisis, where the public’s legitimate right to know will be pitted head-to-head with presidents, generals and CEOs.

My suspicion is that this story will turn out to be less of a simplistic narrative about Orwellian repression than a mortifying journey of self-discovery. There are all sorts of things we both know and don’t know about the processes that keep our society running. We know children in Asia are being beaten to keep our sneakers and furniture cheap, we know our access to oil and other raw materials is being secured only by the cooperation of corrupt and vicious dictators, and we’ve also known for a while now that the anti-terror program they say we need to keep our airports and reservoirs safe involves mass campaigns of extralegal detention and assassination.

We haven’t had to openly ratify any of these policies because the secret-keepers have done us the favor of making these awful moral choices for us.

But the stink is rising to the surface. It’s all coming out. And when it isn’t Julian Assange the next time but The New York Times, Der Spiegel and The Guardian standing in the line of fire, the state will probably lose, just as it lost in the Pentagon Papers case, because those organizations will be careful to only publish materials clearly in the public interest – there’s no conceivable legal justification for keeping us from knowing the policies of our own country (although stranger things have happened).

When that happens, we’ll be left standing face-to-face with the reality of how our state functions. Do we want to do that? We still haven’t taken a very close look at even the Bradley Manning material, and my guess is because we just don’t want to. There were thousands of outrages in those files, any one of which would have a caused a My-Lai-style uproar decades ago.

Did you hear the one about how American troops murdered four women and five children in Iraq in 2006, including a woman over 70 and an infant under five months old, with all the kids under five? All of them were handcuffed and shot in the head. We later called in an airstrike to cover it up, apparently. But it barely registered a blip on the American consciousness.

What if it we’re forced to look at all of this for real next time, and what if it turns out we can’t accept it? What if murder and corruption is what’s holding it all together? I personally don’t believe that’s true – I believe it all needs to come out and we need to rethink everything together, and we can find a less totally evil way of living – but this is going to be the implicit argument from the secret-keeping side when this inevitable confrontation comes. They will say to us, in essence, “It’s the only way. And you don’t want to know.” And a lot of us won’t.

It’s fascinating, profound stuff. We don’t want to know, but increasingly it seems we can’t not know, either. Sooner or later, something is going to have to give.

Author: Matt Taibi: Rolling Stone Magazine

The League Against Cruel Sports will use cameras mounted on remote-controlled aircraft to monitor land previously off-limits. The charity said it was targeting people hunting illegally, hare coursing, badger baiting and other wildlife crimes. The charity is working with non-profit aerial surveillance and monitoring organisation ShadowView to use the drones.

Chief executive Joe Duckworth said: “There is a war in the countryside and whilst there are still individuals determined to flout the law and seek new ways to avoid detection, the League will continue to explore safe, tested and innovative technology to further our charitable aim of ending cruelty to animals in the name of sport.”

The charity said the use of drones would support its teams on the ground already gathering intelligence and evidence of illegal activity. It maintained that all its operations were “proportionate, necessary and justified” and were only carried out when there was a “strong possibility of cruel criminality taking place”.

Mr Duckworth added: “We are excited to be the first animal welfare charity in Great Britain to be exploring drone technology. We are confident that it will make a fantastic contribution to bringing wildlife criminals to justice.”

Tim Bonner, of the pro-hunting Countryside Alliance, said the League Against Cruel Sports was becoming “increasingly desperate” and was living in “cloud cuckoo land”. “We think this is completely impractical and the League Against Cruel Sports has spent the last three years talking about the investment in what it calls ‘surveillance’,” he said.

“They haven’t had a single conviction under the Hunting Act of a hunt as a result of their activities in the last three hunting seasons. We think they are increasingly desperate. The idea that flying a drone over a hunt is suddenly going to lead to convictions is… they are living in cloud cuckoo land.

“The fact is that the law is unworkable and in our view a ridiculous piece of legislation. The chance of multiple prosecutions of hunts are very, very limited.”

Mr Bonner said there were also civil liberty questions to answer on drones flying over private property filming. “They are some really quite profound arguments going on about whether a non-governmental organisation should be able to carry out these sort of activities without proper scrutiny,” he said.

“There are nearly 300 hunts in the country and between 20,000 to 25,000 individual hunting days each season, and from that you are seeing a tiny number of prosecutions – most of which fail,” he added.

A multitude, shrieking and singing with glee, joined him in jogging alongside the motorcade of Haiti’s then President Rene Preval on its way to the National Palace (later destroyed in the 2010 earthquake).

There, Chavez announced that Venezuela would help the impoverished Caribbean half-island by building power stations, expanding electricity networks, improving airports, supplying garbage trucks, and supporting widely-deployed Cuban medical teams.

But the centerpiece of the gifts Chavez brought Haiti was 14,000 barrels of oil a day. This was a godsend in a country that has been plagued by blackouts and power shortages for decades.

The oil was part of a PetroCaribe deal that Venezuela had signed with Haiti a year before. Haiti had only to pay 60% for the oil it received. The remaining 40% could be paid over the course of 25 years at 1% interest.

Under similar PetroCaribe deals, Venezuela now provides more than 250,000 barrels a day at sharply discounted prices to 17 Central American and Caribbean countries.

The cost of the program is estimated at US$5 billion annually. But the benefits to, and gratitude from, PetroCaribe recipients are huge, particularly during the on-going global economic crisis.

In short, Caracas is underwriting the stability and energy security of most economies in the Caribbean and Central America, at the same time challenging, for the first time in over a century, US hegemony in its own “backyard”.

Washington’s alarm over and hostility to PetroCaribe is laid bare in secret diplomatic cables obtained by the media organisation WikiLeaks.

Then-US ambassador to Haiti Janet Sanderson rebuked Preval for “giving Chavez a platform to spout anti-American slogans” during his 2007 visit. This was revealed in one cable cited in an article that debuted in June 2011 as part of a WikiLeaks-based series produced by Haiti Liberte and The Nation.

Reviewing all 250,000 secret US diplomatic cables that were later released reveals Sanderson was not the only US diplomat wringing her hands about PetroCaribe.

“It is remarkable that in this current contest we are being outspent by two impoverished countries: Cuba and Venezuela,” noted US ambassador to Uruguay Frank Baxter in a 2007 cable released by WikiLeaks.

“We offer a small Fulbright program; they offer a thousand medical scholarships. We offer a half dozen brief IV programs to ‘future leaders’; they offer thousands of eye operations to poor people.

“We offer complex free trade agreements someday; they offer oil at favorable rates today. Perhaps we should not be surprised that Chavez is winning friends and influencing people at our expense.”

We can expect Washington’s “contest” with Venezuela to escalate dramatically. It will try to take advantage of the Bolivarian government’s vulnerability during the transition of power after Chavez passed away on March 5.

Already, interim president Nicolas Maduro, the United Socialist Party candidate for presidential elections on April 14, has sounded the alarm.

Maduro announced on national television on March 5 “that a US Embassy attache was being expelled for meeting with military officers and planning to destabilise the country,” Associated Press reported. A US Air Force attache was also expelled.

In short, just as the imperative to secure oil has driven the US to multiple wars, coups, and intrigues in the Middle East over the past 60 years, it is now driving the US toward a major new confrontation in Latin America. With Chavez’s death, Washington sees a long awaited opportunity to roll back the Bolivarian Revolution and programs such as PetroCaribe.

In recent years, Chavez has led Venezuela to nationalise dozens of foreign-owned undertakings, including oil projects run by Exxon Mobil, Texaco Chevron, and other large North American corporations.

The future of the hydrocarbon resources in Venezuela’s Maracaibo Basin and Orinoco Belt, recently declared to be the world’s largest, will soon reveal itself to be the central economic and political issue, and hottest flash point, in the hemisphere.

In the case of Haiti, Chavez often said that PetroCaribe and other aid was given “to repay the historic debt that Venezuela owes the Haitian people”. Haiti was the first nation of Latin America, gaining its independence in 1804.

In the 19th century’s first example of international solidarity, Haitian revolutionary leaders provided Francisco de Miranda and Simon Bolivar, South America’s “Great Liberator”, with guns, ships and printing presses to carry out the anti-colonial struggle on the continent.

And this was the dream that inspired Chavez: a modern Bolivarian revolution sweeping South America, spreading independence from Washington and growing “21st century socialism”. PetroCaribe was Chavez’s flagship in that “contest”, as the US ambassador called it.

Ironically, it was former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide who first foiled US election engineering in Latin America in December 1990, but his electoral victory was cut short by a September 1991 coup.

Chavez was the next Latin American leader to successfully carry out a political revolution at the polls in 1998 and 2000. His people defeated the US-backed coup that tried to unseat him in April 2002.

Due to his strategic acumen, his popular support, and the goodwill created with PetroCaribe, Chavez’s prestige grew in Venezuela and around the world during his 13 years in power until his death, which brought a huge tide of mourning across Latin America.

The eulogies are many, but former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who personally knew and worked with Chavez, made a prescient observation in January: “In my opinion, history will judge the contributions of Hugo Chavez to Latin American as greater than those of Bolivar.”

Follow the link to listen to and share Manning’s full statement as well as excerpts that may be of particular public interest. Transcript courtesy Alexa O’Brien. Hear the statement at this link. https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/blog/2013/03/help-spread-bradley-mannings-words-across-internet

Freedom of the Press Foundation is publishing the full, previously unreleased audio recording of Private First Class Bradley Manning’s speech to the military court in Ft. Meade about his motivations for leaking over 700,000 government documents to WikiLeaks. In addition, we have published highlights from Manning’s statement to the court. The following story was prepared by Press Freedom Foundation

While unofficial transcripts of this statement are available, this marks the first time the American public has heard the actual voice of Manning.

Download
full_statement.mp3 (63M)
full_statement.ogg (37M)

He explains to the military court in his own cadence and words how and why he gave the Apache helicopter video, Afghanistan and Iraq Wars Logs, and the State Department Diplomatic Cables to WikiLeaks. Manning explains his motives, noting how he believed the documents showed deep wrongdoing by the government and how he hoped that the release would “spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan.” In conjunction with the statement, Private First Class Manning also pleaded guilty to 10 of the 22 charges against him.

Freedom of the Press Foundation is dedicated to supporting journalism that combats overreaching government secrecy. We have been disturbed that Manning’s pre-trial hearings have been hampered by the kind of extreme government secrecy that his releases to WikiLeaks were intended to protest. While reporters are allowed in the courtroom, no audio or visual recordings are permitted by the judge, no transcripts of the proceedings or any motions by the prosecution have been released, and lengthy court orders read on the stand by the judge have not been published for public review.

A short film by Laura Poitras

A group of journalists, represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), has been engaged in a legal battle to force the court to be more open. While the government has belatedly released a small portion of documents related to the case, many of the most important orders have been withheld—such as the orders relating to the speedy trial proceedings or the order related to Manning’s prolonged solitary confinement.

Michael Ratner, president emeritus of CCR, called the government “utterly unresponsive to what is a core First Amendment principle.” Ratner noted this is a public trial, the information being presented is not classified, and that contemporaneous access to information about the trial is necessary to understanding the proceedings. Nonetheless, the lawsuit has been tied up in the appeals court for months.

Freedom of the Press Foundation’s mission is to support and defend cutting-edge transparency journalism by supporting those organizations that publish leaks in the public interest. We often report on news surrounding government secrecy, educating the public about the important relationship between leaking and independent journalism. When we received this recording, we realized we had a unique opportunity to bring some small measure of transparency directly by allowing the world to hear for itself the voice of someone who took a controversial and important stance for government transparency.

We hope this recording will shed light on one of the most secret court trials in recent history, in which the government is putting on trial a concerned government employee whose only stated goal was to bring attention to what he viewed as serious governmental misconduct and criminal activity. We hope to prompt additional analysis of these proceedings by other journalistic institutions and the public at large. While we are not equipped (technically or as a matter of human resources) to receive leaked information nor do we plan on receiving them in the future, we are proud to publish and analyze this particular recording because it is so clearly matches our mission of supporting transparency journalism.

The information provided by Manning has uncovered stories of wrongdoing by the United States, as well as by leaders and politicians around the world. The cables were reportedly one of the catalysts that led to the Arab Spring and sped up the end of the Iraq War. To this day, more than two years after their release, the information provided by Manning is used every day by journalists and historians in major publications are the world to enlighten and inform the public, both in the United States and around the world. In a time when the extent and reach of U.S. government secrecy is unprecedented, and there are credible reports that the government has abused its secrecy and classification systems to cover up numerous illegal and unconstitutional activities, Manning’s actions should be seen as an overdue sliver of sunlight into an overly secret system rather than as a basis for a prosecution seeking decades of imprisonment.

By releasing this audio recording, we wish to make sure that the voice of this generation’s most prolific whistleblower can be heard—literally—by the world.

Regardless of whether one believes that Manning’s acts were right or wrong or a mix of both, he has taken responsibility for them by pleading guilty to ten charges, for which he faces up to twenty years in prison. The government however, is continuing to pursue all of the charges against him, including charges under the Espionage Act and “aiding the enemy” —which could have huge consequences for press freedom and the First Amendment. The ACLU has expressed concern that this “aiding the enemy” charge could criminalize speech for all sorts of active military members, noting that “In its zeal to throw the book at Manning, the government has so overreached that its ‘success’ would turn thousands of loyal soldiers into criminals.”

And Harvard Law professor Yochai Benkler has argued that this prosecution could decimate national security journalism by outlawing whole categories of journalist-source relationships in the future: “[T]he prosecutors seem bent on using this case to push a novel and aggressive interpretation of the law that would arm the government with a much bigger stick to prosecute vaguely-defined national security leaks, a big stick that could threaten not just members of the military, but civilians too.”

Extreme secrecy in our courts, just like in our government’s policies and our politics, is an anathema to democracy. Whether military or civilian, this type of closed-door legal process impairs the public’s right-to-know and journalists’ ability to report on matters of deep public concern. The courtrooms of America should be open to the public, so they can see and hear what is being done in their name.

You can donate to aggressive journalism outlets dedicated to transparency and accountability on the Press Freedom Foundation homepage. You can learn more about Bradley Manning’s case by visiting the Bradley Manning Support Network.

Hemp (from Old English hænep) is a commonly used term for varieties of the Cannabis plant and its products, which include fiber, oil, and seed. In many countries regulatory limits for concentrations of psychoactive drug compounds (THC) in hemp encourages the use of strains of the plant which are bred for low tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) content or otherwise have the THC removed. Hemp is refined into products like hemp seed foods, hemp oil, wax, resin, rope, cloth, pulp, and fuel.

Hemp is one of the earliest domesticated plants known. It has been cultivated by many civilizations for over 12,000 years

Hemp is considered by a 1998 study in Environmental Economics to be environmentally friendly due to a decrease of land use and other environmental impacts, indicating a possible decrease of ecological footprint in a US context compared to typical benchmarks. A 2010 study, however, that compared the production of paper specifically from hemp and eucalyptus concluded that “industrial hemp presents higher environmental impacts than eucalyptus paper”; however, the article also highlights that “there is scope for improving industrial hemp paper production”. Hemp is also claimed to require few pesticides and no herbicides, and it has been called a carbon negative raw material. Results indicate that high yield of hemp may require high total nutrient levels (field plus fertilizer nutrients) similar to a high yielding wheat crop.

Hemp is used for a wide variety of purposes including the manufacture of cordage of varying tensile strength, durable clothing and nutritional products. The bast fibers can be used in 100% hemp products, but are commonly blended with other organic fibers such as flax, cotton or silk, for apparel and furnishings, most commonly at a 55%/45% hemp/cotton blend. The inner two fibers of hemp are more woody and are more often used in non-woven items and other industrial applications, such as mulch, animal bedding and litter. The oil from the fruits (“seeds”) oxidizes (commonly, though inaccurately, called “drying”) to become solid on exposure to air, similar to linseed oil, and is sometimes used in the manufacture of oil-based paints, in creams as a moisturizing agent, for cooking, and in plastics. Hemp seeds have been used in bird seed mix as well. A survey in 2003 showed that more than 95% of hemp seed sold in the EU was used in animal and bird feed. Hempseed is also used as a fishing bait.

In modern times hemp is used for industrial purposes including paper, textiles, clothing, biodegradable plastics, construction (as with Hempcrete and insulation), body products, health food and bio-fuel.

Food
Hemp seeds can be eaten raw, ground into a meal, sprouted, made into hemp milk (akin to soy milk), prepared as tea, and used in baking. The fresh leaves can also be consumed in salads. Products include cereals, frozen waffles, hemp milk icecream, hemp tofu, and nut butters. A few companies produce value added hemp seed items that include the seed oils, whole hemp grain (which is sterilized by law in the United States, where they import it from China and Canada), dehulled hemp seed (the whole seed without the mineral rich outer shell), hemp flour, hemp cake (a by-product of pressing the seed for oil) and hemp protein powder.

Market share
Within the UK, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has treated hemp as purely a non-food crop. Seed appears on the UK market as a legal food product, and cultivation licenses are available for this purpose. In North America, hemp seed food products are sold, typically in health food stores or through mail order. The United States Department of Agriculture estimates that “the market potential for hemp seed as a food ingredient is unknown. However, it probably will remain a small market, like those for sesame and poppy seeds.” Since 2007 the commercial success of hemp food products has grown considerably.

Nutrition
Approximately 44% of the weight of hempseed is edible oils, containing about 80% essential fatty acids (EFAs); e.g., linoleic acid, omega-6 (LA, 55%), alpha-linolenic acid, omega-3 (ALA, 22%), in addition to gamma-linolenic acid, omega-6 (GLA, 1–4%) and stearidonic acid, omega-3 (SDA, 0–2%). Proteins (including edestin) are the other major component (33%), second only to soy (35%).

Hempseed’s amino acid profile is close to “complete” when compared to more common sources of proteins such as meat, milk, eggs and soy. Hemp protein contains all 21 known amino acids, including the 9 essential ones adult bodies cannot produce. Proteins are considered complete when they contain all the essential amino acids in sufficient quantities and ratios to meet the body’s needs. The proportions of linoleic acid and alpha-linolenic acid in one tablespoon (15 ml) per day of hemp oil easily provides human daily requirements for EFAs.

Planetsave reports:
Almost 1000 acres of maize found to have been ground with genetically modified seeds have been destroyed throughout Hungary, deputy state secretary of the Ministry of Rural Development Lajos Bognar said. The GMO maize has been ploughed under, said Lajos Bognar, but pollen has not spread from the maize, he added.

Unlike several EU members, GMO seeds are banned in Hungary. The checks will continue despite the fact that seek traders are obliged to make sure that their products are GMO free, Bognar said.

During the invesigation, controllers have found Pioneer Monsanto products among the seeds planted.

The free movement of goods within the EU means that authorities will not investigate how the seeds arrived in Hungary, but they will check where the goods can be found, Bognar said. Regional public radio reported that the two biggest international seed producing companies are affected in the matter and GMO seeds could have been sown on up to the thousands of hectares in the country. Most of the local farmers have complained since they just discovered they were using GMO seeds.

With season already under way, it is too late to sow new seeds, so this year’s harvest has been lost.

And to make things even worse for the farmers, the company that distributed the seeds in Baranya county is under liquidation. Therefore, if any compensation is paid by the international seed producers, the money will be paid primarily to that company’s creditors, rather than the farmers. Source: Natural Society

The epic poem The Iliad, set amid the final year of the Trojan War, is attributed to the ancient Greek poet Homer and is foundational to Western literature, but scholars have not reached a consensus about whether it was written shortly after the war or centuries later. Archaeological and historical evidence have placed the text’s origins in the 7th or 8th century BCE, but such records are sparse and often have an uncertain validity.

Santa Fe Institute External Professor Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at Reading University (UK), and colleagues decided to ask what scholars refer to as “The Homeric Question” using a quantitative approach borrowed from study of evolution.

In determining when species emerged and in gauging their relatedness to others, biologists compare genetic and physical traits along with novel adaptations. Similarly, linguists compare words that share an ancestor (e.g., water in English and wasser in German both come from the proto-Germanic wator), as well as words that supplant earlier terms (the modern English dog, for example, largely replaced the Old English hund), to pinpoint when a lexicon or language was in fashion.

Pagel’s team compared the Greek vocabulary in Homer’s Iliad to modern Greek, relying on a 200-word lexicon found in every language and contrasting the distantly related Hittite as an indicator of divergence.

Achilles sacrificing to Zeus, from the Ambrosian Iliad or Ilia Picta, a 5th century illuminated manuscript thought to have been produced in Constantinople – Credit: Wiki Commons

Their methods date Homer’s language to 762 BCE. The statistical model, says Pagel, “is completely ignorant to history — it doesn’t know who Homer is and doesn’t know Greek.” Accordingly, the potential date ranges from the improbable extremes of 376 BCE to 1157 BCE. But the estimate attaches a robust likelihood to the date, and it ties nicely to Nestor’s Cup, a vase dated to 723 BCE that is thought to carry an inscription from The Iliad.

The study reveals “an astonishing regularity in the way languages evolve,” notes Pagel. “That we can blindly apply rates of language change to Homeric and modern Greek and come up with 762 BCE tells us language is behaving in a regular and predictive way.”

Their study was published in BioEssays online on February 18.

Source: Santa Fe Institute [February 27, 2013]

Palestinian refugees in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria suffer a daily humiliation at then hands of their Arab brothers. It is way past time that they were given dignity, equality before the law and Iraqi, Jordanian, Lebanese or Syrian citizenship.

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Aleppo’s medieval covered market has already been gutted by fires which also ripped through the city’s Umayyad mosque. Illegal excavations have threatened tombs in the desert town of Palmyra and the Bronze Age settlement of Ebla, and Interpol is hunting a 2,700-year-old statue taken from the city of Hama.

In a country which also boasts stunning Crusader castles, Roman ruins and a history stretching back through the great empires of the Middle East to the dawn of human civilisation, the task of safeguarding that heritage from modern conflict is a daunting responsibility.

Maamoun Abdulkarim, head of Syria’s antiquities and museums, says it is a battle for the nation’s very existence.

The Aleppo castle where pro-government forces are based is seen in the Old Town of Aleppo as clashes continue with the Free Sysrian Army – Credit: Reuters

“We emptied Syria’s museums. They are in effect empty halls, with the exception of large pieces that are difficult to move,” Abdulkarim told Reuters during a visit to neighbouring Jordan.

Tens of thousands of artefacts spanning 10,000 years of history were removed to specialist warehouses to avoid a repeat of the storming of Baghdad’s museum by looters a decade ago, in the wake of the U.S. invasion and overthrow of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, he said.

Syria’s own 23-month-old conflict is tearing the country apart and has raised international concerns over the fate of one of the richest and most diverse historical collections of any single nation.

The UN cultural body UNESCO says it is concerned for the fate of six World Heritage sites including the old cities of Damascus, Aleppo and Bosra and the imposing Crusader castle, Crac des Chevaliers.

Many have become battlegrounds between rebels taking cover among ruins and troops who shell indiscriminately, the damage recorded in relentless video images of the fighting.

If looters ever got their hands on the museum treasures, that would mark the final demise of Syria, Abdulkarim said.

“If they reach these places then my conviction is that Syria would no longer exist… It would signal the end of the end,” said the 46-year-old French-educated archaeology professor who took over as Syria’s Director General of Antiquities and Museums six months ago. “Syria as we know it would then be over.”

Bronze Statue

Numerous Bronze Age civilisations left successive marks on Syria including Babylonians, Assyrians, and Hittites. They in turn were replaced by Greeks, Sassanians, Persians, Romans and Arabs, many choosing Syrian cities for their capitals.

European Crusaders left impressive castles and the Ottoman Empire also made its mark over five centuries.

Abdulkarim said the most significant pieces to go missing since the start of the conflict were a gilt bronze statue from around 2,000 years ago that was stolen from the city of Hama – and placed on Interpol’s ‘Most Wanted’ list of art works a year ago – and a marble piece looted from the garden of Apamea museum.

But priceless artefacts in the northern town of Maarat al-Noman were saved when the local community ensured the museum’s famous mosaic portals were kept safe during fierce clashes.

In Hama, local neighbourhood youths protected the museum’s Roman and Byzantine statues from looters until they were taken to safety, Abdulkarim said. “They closed the doors of the museum and were able to protect it from disaster.”

Dozens of archaeological sites have been targeted by illegal excavation and trafficking, though they account for less than one percent of the 10,000 sites across the country, he said.

The diggers concentrate mainly on sites which have long been the focus of illicit trafficking, such as the ancient city of Apamea, north of Hama, that flourished during Roman and Byzantine periods, and is famous for its 1,850-metre colonnade.

“Vandalism in the city is an old phenomenon and is not related to the crisis, but the thieves who are active in this area have found greater freedom to operate during this crisis,” Abdulkarim said.

Video footage from March last year, documented in a report by archaeologist Emma Cunliffe at Britain’s Durham University, also appears to show tanks stationed alongside the Apamea colonnade.

Abdulkarim appealed to the warring parties to spare the country’s many Crusader castles, some of which have been in the thick of the conflict and even been converted into army barracks or rebel hideouts.

Crac des Chevaliers, the supreme example of Crusader castle building, has suffered minor damage while Aleppo citadel’s main gate was sightly damaged along with its northern tower, he said.

Gutted Souks

The greatest damage has been to a collection of seven old markets in Aleppo, unsurpassed in the Middle East, that were gutted by fire that also damaged the city’s Great Umayyad Mosque, Abdulkarim said.

“We have lost the seven souks completely, forever,” he said, although the continued fighting had prevented any mission from assessing the full extent of the structural damage.

In northeastern Syria, major ancient sites in Tell Mozan near Qazmishli were well protected by Kurdish groups that have taken control in the region, Abdulkarim said.

U.S. historian Giorgio Buccellati, who has worked at Tell Mozan and checks photos of the site daily on the Internet, told Reuters there had been “absolutely no looting” there.

In southern Syria, army shelling had damaged some ancient homes but not the ruin of Bosra, which contains one of the best preserved Roman theatres and a major monument, Abdulkarim said. His comments were confirmed by a refugee who spoke to Reuters this week after fleeing the town.

“The army had shelled the old quarter where rebels had dug in and there has been damage to an old church,” Abdullah Zubi said after crossing into Jordan. But the Roman theatre, in an army-controlled sector, suffered no damage although army troops are dug in nearby, he said.

The ruins of what may be the world’s first city, a mound near the Syrian-Iraqi border town called Tell Brak, have so far been spared, while illegal excavation of unexplored tombs in the ancient desert city of Palmyra had halted, Abdulkarim said.

In some cases those illegal digs stopped simply because thieves failed to locate any treasures, as happened at the Bronze Age site at Ebla after they dug holes in an ancient courtyard at the royal palace.

More than 4,000 items, including beads, coins, statues and mosaic panels, were turned over by Syrian customs last year to Abdulkarim’s department, although nearly a third of those turned out to be counterfeit.

The department is also working with UNESCO and Interpol to track down 18 mosaic panels smuggled to Lebanon.

Combined losses so far remained just a modest fraction of Syria’s priceless collection, Abdulkarim said, but added that protracted and escalating violence could usher in anarchy and more brazen theft.

“So far the gangs and thieves are small scale operators and no organised international gangs have surfaced,” he said. “But what could be terrifying is that column heads and columns and large stones could be stolen…and smuggled out of Syria.”

“If this happens, God forbid, then we are approaching the start of the tragic demolition of our past and future.”

Author: Suleiman Al-Khalidi | Source: Reuters [February 20, 2013]

Charities criticised an episode of the Miracle Hour show, on Faith World TV, during which a diabetic caller was told he was “set free” from the disease.

“It is particularly dangerous and puts his life at risk,” said African Health Policy Network head Francis Kaikumba.

UKWET, which produces the show, said it was “reviewing” its “new programmes”.

The organisation, whose full name is the UK World Evangelical Trust, said: “We are now reviewing our new programmes to make sure our standards meet good practice.”

Miracle Hour is filmed at Faith World TV’s studio in south London. It is hosted by Bishop Simon Iheanacho, who is chairman of Minority Ethnic Christian Affairs (Meca), which supports black and minority ethnic Christians and is part of ecumenical body Churches Together in England.

In an episode broadcast on 4 January, on channel 591 on the Sky platform, a diabetic caller named Bode, from Leyton in east London, telephoned the programme.

‘Set free’
Bishop Simon told him to lay his hand on his leg and said: “I cause diabetes to die in your body.

“I lose you and declare you set free from the power of diabetes. Continue to source and video, BBC