Month: November 2009

Physicists in the US have created the world’s thinnest high-temperature superconductor, demonstrating that the phenomenon can exist over a thickness of a few atoms.

Gennady Logvenov and colleagues at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, have created layered films of copper-oxide or “cuprate” materials and have discovered that they can localize the superconducting behaviour to a single atomic plane. They say that the discovery will help theorists to build more comprehensive models of high-temperature superconductivity, and lead to thin-film devices that have their superconducting properties tuned by electric fields.

“We wanted to answer a fundamental question about such films,” says team member Ivan Bozovik. “Namely: how thin can the film be and still retain high-temperature superconductivity?”

No resistance

Discovered at the beginning of the 20th century, superconductivity is a phenomenon whereby a material’s electrical resistance can suddenly drop to zero as the substance is chilled below a specific temperature – known as the transition temperature (Tc). It exists in some pure metals close to absolute zero, and scientists believe that this is because electrons distort the metal lattice to let subsequent electrons flow freely, a mechanism outlined in so-called Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory.

In 1986, however, physicists discovered that superconductivity also exists in certain compounds, including cuprates, at much higher temperatures of 30 K and more. This discovery of high-Tc superconductivity triggered a lot of initial excitement due to suggestions that, if extended up to room temperature, it could lead to novel applications such as levitating trains and ultra-efficient power cables. Over the past 20 years, however, these exciting new technologies have not materialized because physicists and engineers have struggled to understand the mechanism behind the phenomenon.

Now, Logvenov and colleagues have performed an experiment that could help to point theorists in the right direction. They have created a “bilayer” film with one layer of a cuprate metal and another of a cuprate insulator, using a technique called molecular beam epitaxy. Superconductivity in such bilayers tends to manifest at the interface between the layers, so the researchers were able to isolate where the effect occurs by carefully doping atomic planes within the layers with zinc, which suppresses superconductivity.

Physics World

Zionism is Not Just a Threat to Arabs Any More

By BOUTHAINA SHAABAN

At a time that most countries of the world felt a sense of relief for the positive steps taken by Iran and the West, which promise a let up in tensions on the regional and international level, Israeli analysts, writers and rulers single themselves out by expressing exasperation at this agreement and concern regarding the call for international monitoring of Israel’s nuclear facilities.

It is useful to recall that Israel does not respect its signature on international agreements as in the case of the Oslo accord or with any other Arab party. That is why Israelis are saying today that signing the Vienna agreement with Iran is not worth its ink and paper. It is a racist position, an expression of racial superiority of one of the signatories and an undermining of the status, dignity and credibility of the others signatories.

Israel was the main stoker of doubts in recent years about Iran’s nuclear projects. It was also behind drumming up war against Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza, and promoting a military strike against Iran following the same strategy it followed before the war on Iraq. It was the main power behind the decision of the United States and some Western states to launch this war which failed to convince any one of its real objectives since claims of the existence of mass destruction weapons proved to be false.

Israeli media activity aiming at imposing strict sanctions against Iran is a copy of their media, political, diplomatic and intelligence activity before the war on Iraq. That is why they are depressed now because Iranian behavior was completely different from that of Iraq. The behavior of president Obama is also different from that of president Bush. Obama, so far, thinks primarily of America’s interests, not Israel’s interests like Bush. The military correspondent of Haaretz, Amos Harel, acknowledges that the agreement is an achievement for the United States while it puts Israel in a real dilemma: “should it behave as a player in the team and partake of the general optimism or continue to spread doubt and threats?” The danger of the agreement for Israel is that it manifested, maybe for the first time a real difference between the American and Israeli positions, although statements made by secretary of state, Hilary Clinton, still aim at obscuring this difference.

The Israeli media machine is creating a world of its own, bursting with aggressive plans against the peoples of the region.

Had scholars found the time to examine Israeli racist statements against Arabs, they would have been surprised by the volume, implications and objectives of such statements which express deep hatred. The latest of these statements was made by Dan Schueftan, a lecturer in Tel Aviv University in a special course for high ranking officials at political and security institutions, when he said: “The Arabs are the biggest failure in the history of the human race. There’s nothing under the sun that’s more screwed up than the Palestinians. And those who do not say so subject themselves to miserable political correctness (October 21, 2009).” On the Iran-Iraq war, Schueftan says that it was “seven years of pure pleasure!” The Israeli role in Iraq is not my analysis or personal conclusion. I refer readers to the lecture given by Avi Dechter, the Israeli security minister on September 4, 2008, when he said: “No one can deny that we have achieved a lot on this arena (Iraq). We have even achieved more than we planned for. We should recall what we wanted to achieve from the beginning of our intervention in Iraq since the early 1970s. Our strategic goal is still not allowing this country to restore its Arab and regional role because we are the first to be affected. We are trying to keep Iraq outside the circle of Arab countries. We are negotiating with the Americans to prevent Iraq from ever returning to the position of being in confrontation with Israel. The American administration is keen on securing our interests and providing these guarantees through different means. Our overriding equation in our strategic movement in Iraq is based on undermining Arab capacities in the main Arab countries in order to achieve national security for Israel”. He adds: “Iraq is disintegrating as a military power and united country. Our strategic objective is to keep it divided. Neutralizing Iraq by maintaining its current condition is of special strategic significance to Zionist security”.

CP
(Submitted by Ingrid B. Mork)

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR and JOSHUA FRANK

The beard is graying. The hair is clipped military-short. He is a large man, oddly shaped, like a cross between a grizzly and a javelina. It’s Roselle, of course, Mike Roselle—the outside agitator. He and a fellow activist have just spread an anti-coal banner in front of a growling bulldozer in West Virginia on a cold February morning in 2009. He’s in this icy and unforgiving land to oppose a brutal mining operation and will soon be arrested for trespassing. Massey Energy, the target of Roselle’s protest, is the fourth largest coal extractor in the United States, mining nearly 40 million tons of coal in Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee each year.

The arrest was nothing new for Roselle, who cut his teeth in direct action environmental campaigns decades earlier as a co-founder of Earth First!, top campaigner for Greenpeace U.S. and later as the wit behind the tenacious Ruckus Society. Unlike most mainstream environmentalists you are not likely to see Roselle sporting a suit and lobbying Washington insiders on the intricacies of mining laws — you are more apt to see this self-proclaimed lowbagger (one who lives light on the land, works to protect it and has few possessions to show for their hard work) engaged in direct, but non-violent, confrontations with the forces of industrialization, using tactics honed during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. And his dissent in West Virginia is more than justified.

The mountaintops of the Appalachia region, from Tennessee up to the heart of West Virginia, are being ravaged by the coal industry — an industry that cares little about the welfare of communities or the land that it is chewing up and spitting out with its grotesque mining operations.

The debris from the mining pits, often 500 feet deep, produce toxic waste that is then dumped in nearby valleys, polluting rivers and poisoning local communities downstream. Currently no state or federal agencies are tracking the cumulative effect of the aptly named “mountaintop removal,” where entire peaks are being blown apart with explosives, only to expose tiny seams of the precious black rock.

On December 22, 2008, a coal slurry impoundment at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston coal fired power plant in Harriman, Tennessee spilled more than 500 million gallons of toxic coal ash into the Tennessee River. The epic spill was over 40 times larger than the Exxon Valdez in Alaska. Approximately 525 million gallons of black coal ash flowed into tributaries of the murky Tennessee River – the water supply for Chattanooga and millions of people living downstream in the states of Alabama and neighboring Kentucky. The true costs—environmental and social–of the spill are still not known.

CP

By Patrick O’Connor

Last month marked the tenth anniversary of the Australian-led military intervention into the previously Indonesian-controlled territory of East Timor. It is also a decade since a layer of pseudo “left” organisations organised a series of “troops in” demonstrations just prior to the deployment—performing a vital service for the government of Prime Minister John Howard and the Australian ruling elite.

The Timor operation was driven by Canberra’s desire to maintain control over the lucrative Timor Sea oil and gas reserves and prevent rival powers, above all former colonial ruler Portugal, from gaining a foothold at its expense in the strategically crucial region. These calculations could not be publicly aired, for obvious reasons, and so a “humanitarian” pretext was concocted for public consumption. Australian troops, the government insisted, were required to halt the destruction and violence unleashed by the Indonesian military and its anti-independence militia proxies after the Timorese people voted to secede.

The public campaign recalled the methods used by the US and its European allies in the lead up to the NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia between March and June 1999. British Prime Minister Tony Blair even outlined a new doctrine—dubbed “ethical imperialism”—which insisted on the right of the major powers to disregard international law and national sovereignty, on the basis of so-called “humanitarian concerns” whenever they saw fit. The European ex-left played a critical role in this campaign. The “pacifist” Greens in Germany lent much needed political weight to the bogus humanitarian pretext for the bombing campaign that marked the German army’s first foreign intervention since the defeat of Nazism.

In Australia, the self-styled “radical” groups—working hand-in-hand with the Labor Party, Greens, and trade unions—played a no less vital role in relation to the Timor campaign.

In 1999, in the months prior to the intervention, hostility to the Howard government had been escalating. A year earlier, the prime minister had narrowly avoided losing office after one term—the conservative parties lost the popular vote to the Labor Party but held onto power due to the vagaries of Australia’s electoral system. Just four months before the troops went into Timor the government had succeeded in pushing through a widely despised goods and services tax.

In this context, the Howard government’s ability to posture as a friend and even saviour of the Timorese population was dependent on the political cover provided by the ex-left, led by the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP)—now Democratic Socialist Perspective, the main affiliate within the misnamed Socialist Alliance. The DSP organised rallies demanding that the government intervene to rescue the Timorese masses from violence by pro-Indonesian militias.

In the period immediately prior to the intervention, the DSP’s Green Left Weekly newspaper effectively functioned as the mouthpiece for the most aggressive elements of the Australian military and foreign policy establishment, and for the Fretilin and National Council of Timorese Resistance (CNRT) leadership in East Timor, which had concluded that its road to power was via Australian military intervention.

In the September 15 edition of the newspaper, DSP member Pip Hinman provided legal and military advice to the government in an article titled “Why Howard refuses to send troops to stop genocide”. Noting the objection that to send Australian troops in without a UN mandate would be illegal, Hinman countered: “This claim has absolutely no foundation … There is no legal obstacle to the Howard government immediately dispatching the 4,500 troops it has said it could have in Dili within 24 hours … Indonesia’s armed forces have little capacity to carry out a war against Australia. While Indonesia’s armed forces are five times larger than Australia’s in numbers, they are vastly outclassed in weaponry, organisation, and training.”

The “Resistance” lift-out of the same Green Left Weekly edition declared: “Rather than strengthening the hand of imperialism, sending troops in runs directly counter to the interests and wishes of imperialist countries like Australia, which do not want to undermine the power or authority of the Indonesian military … If the movement is strong enough to force an intervention, it would be a massive victory [because] if the solidarity movements and the liberation struggle in East Timor are powerful enough to force the UN or the Australian government to intervene, they will gain confidence that they have the power to force the government to act elsewhere.”

On September 29 Green Left Weekly readers were told: “The decision to send troops was a massive defeat for Howard.”

WS

By Satheesan Kumaaran

The 86-year-old cunning, southern Indian State of Tamil Nadu politician, Muthuvel Karunanidhi, popularly known as Kalaigner, entered politics at the age of 14. He was inspired by Alagiriswamy of the Justice Party’s speech, and has done nothing for the Tamil society for their empowerment, although he claims he is working hard for the Tamils’ empowerment and to establish their rights. His real motives have been exposed through many events, but the latest one is through the drama that he was the saviour of Sri Lankan Tamils when they were facing genocidal war instigated by the Sri Lankan State, which ended grief stricken in May this year, with the loss of nearly 30,000 civilians, while incarcerating another 300,000 civilians in the barbed-wires camps where the Sri Lankan State prohibits visitors, including the UN agencies, with the exception to the ten-member Indian parliamentary delegation, who had the first opportunity to pay visit to the camps.

After the Indian MPs delegation returned to India, they submitted the reports to Karunanidhi, and later on, to Indian Prime Minister and Indian Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi. The latter two people who are, in reality, taking revenge on the LTTE for the murder of Rajiv Gandhi, the former Indian Prime Minister and husband of Italian-born incumbent Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi.

Karunanidhi’s DMK is an ally of the ruling Indian central government, led by Manmohan Singh. When the Tamils were dying, India allegedly provided weapons to Sri Lanka to launch military attacks against the LTTE. When the opposing parties in Tamil Nadu exposed the real face of Karunanidhi, he and his allies issued contradictory statements. One said India did not provide weapons to Sri Lanka. Then, they acknowledged that India provided the weapons to Sri Lanka on the plea that India wanted to maintain friendship with Sri Lanka, as if India’s reluctance to provide weapons will force Sri Lanka to join hands with India’s enemies, Pakistan and China.

Also, he held several demonstrations, including fast protest, which was nothing but to ease the tension that arose due to the ongoing suffering of Tamils in Eelam, and also to counter the chain of protests conducted by the opposing parties.

The Indian delegation’s visit was nothing but a showpiece to hoodwink the international community in general, and Tamils around the world in particular, which would only serve Karunanidhi to show that he is doing everything for the welfare of the Tamils. He has the belief that the Tamils will celebrate his death when he dies in the future, as how the Tamils were celebrating the former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, the late M. G. Ramachandran, who broke out from DMK, and formed ADMK, and ruled Tamil Nadu without a break for 13 years, and did not even give a chance for Karunanidhi to become Chief Minister. Ramachandran was a great patronage of Tamils, who even gave money in the early 1980s to the LTTE from his pocket and allocated funds for the LTTE from the Tamil Nadu treasury to fight against the Sri Lankan State, as it was treating the Tamils as second class citizens. And Tamils all around the world keep Ramachandran in their hearts and souls. So, Karunanidhi is trying his best to show that he, too, helps the Tamils as Ramachandran did, but no one needs to be a rocket scientist to realize the Karunanidhi’s real motives, because without a doubt, he will hoodwink the uneducated and poor Tamil Nadu people forever with his literature and dramatic talents. However, it is unlikely that he can hoodwink the Eelam and Diaspora Tamils. They will never be convinced by his speeches, arguments and actions.

Karunanidhi done enough damage to Tamil society

SLG

Bearing the Scars of Canadian Intelligence

By David Parker

One hundred and sixteen Canadians broke federal law to purchase a plane ticket for Abousfian Abdelrazik’s return to Canada, despite UN regulation 1267, which makes it an offence to donate or give any financial aid to a person on the no-fly list. Photo: Rick Cardella
HALIFAX – Abousfian Abdelrazik toured Canada this fall after six long years spent in forced exile in Sudan where he was detained and tortured. He has returned to Canada, despite the efforts of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), or as Abdelrazik calls them, the Canadian Muhkabarat. Mukhabarat is an Arabic word meaning ‘intelligence’, and refers to state security intelligence agencies known for their brutality, torture, arbitrary detentions and human rights violations.

He related his story of the Canadian Muhkabarat at a public presentation in Halifax in September.

“Between 1997 and 2003, [CSIS] started to follow me everywhere. They started bothering my [sick] wife, they even went to her family and to her father at work. ‘Give us information about your husband, and we will give you better treatment for your cancer,’ they said.”

In 2003, On the eve of his departure from Canada to Sudan to see his mother who had fallen ill, Abdelrazik, a Canadian citizen who had never been charged with a crime, had an encounter with CSIS in Montreal.

“Two days before leaving for Sudan, two agents from CSIS came to my apartment and asked me about my travel. One of them said, ‘We know you’re planning on going to your country, Sudan.’ I went back inside and called the police. The police arrived in the parking lot, and asked the CSIS agents to leave. While they walked away, one of them turned to me and said to me, ‘You’re going to Sudan, you will see.’”

While in Sudan in September of 2003, he was detained by Sudanese state security and initially held in prison in Khartoum. In Sudan, where he was being interrogated and tortured, the same CSIS agents visited him.

“One evening, the same men who arrested me, came and took me. They said ‘Your friends, the Canadian Mukhabarat, have come to talk to you.’ They brought me to the office, where I found the same two guys who visited me my last night in Montreal, sitting at a table, with nice drinks, cakes, and coffee. One of them, the one who turned to me in Montreal and said ‘you’re gonna see’, said to me, ‘Remember what I said to you in Montreal? Now you’re going to see! Sit down!’ And they interrogated me for two days.”

“He said to me ‘You’re not Canadian, you’re Sudanese. You’re going to stay forever in Sudan, my country doesn’t need you!’” said Abdelrazik, relating some of the verbal harassment.

DP

The yellow spice gives curries their bright colour

An extract found in the bright yellow curry spice turmeric can kill off cancer cells, scientists have shown.

The chemical – curcumin – has long been thought to have healing powers and is already being tested as a treatment for arthritis and even dementia.

Now tests by a team at the Cork Cancer Research Centre show it can destroy gullet cancer cells in the lab.

Cancer experts said the findings in the British Journal of Cancer could help doctors find new treatments.

Dr Sharon McKenna and her team found that curcumin started to kill cancer cells within 24 hours.

‘Natural’ remedy

The cells also began to digest themselves, after the curcumin triggered lethal cell death signals.

Dr McKenna said: “Scientists have known for a long time that natural compounds have the potential to treat faulty cells that have become cancerous and we suspected that curcumin might have therapeutic value.”

BBC

By David Sugar

A proposal for alternate models of social-economic development in the surviving indigenous nations of North America
Information in the computer age is the last genuine free market left on earth except those free markets where indigenous people are still surviving (Russell Means)

Some of the surviving nations in North America have tried Casinos and call centers. Others have tried meat packing for freedom. Yet, unemployment remains high, over 80% for some communities, such as on the Lakotah reservations. Similarly, per capita income often remains below the poverty line. On the Lakotah reservations, per capita income is less than $4,000 annually. The exact story is of course different for each nation, but the overall results of these efforts have usually been rather bleak.

Worse still, each of these efforts require nations to participate in a culturally foreign social-economic model. Each time doing so, a small part of the culture dies in the process. That is because this model requires people to compete against each other, often by any means necessary, and to do so while using the labor of others for personal gain in a market that is often closed and where goods and services often become artificially scarce and demand is artificially generated to further extract wealth rather than meeting real needs.

Certainly, for the American Indian working at a meat packing factory or a call center a job is a means of survival for a family. But it leads to no real economic development or further growth, whether for the worker or for the nation. It is a relationship that exists because the cost of bargained labor is so very cheap on the reservation. If the standard of living and income expectations did actually rise, those so eager to place some temporary facility or industry on the reservation will often simply pull up and leave to someplace cheaper. In fact, this relationship specifically discourages investment in the kind of economic development that would produce long term growth, infrastructure, and economic facilities, because doing so both will create higher future labor costs and make it far more difficult to later leave.

Even in the case of Casinos, there are issues. Where a nation is fortunate enough to be the direct beneficial owner of a casino rather than simply licensing the rights and profits to an outside entity, this casts the nation itself in the role of extracting wealth through deliberate deception of others. It may be ironic, given that this is essentially a reversal of roles, since often indigenous lands were acquired through such tactics, but this too means people must forget who they are and what their lifeways mean and take up the very same behaviors of the invader that they found to be so very offensive. In this way, also, the nations and culture can surely also slowly die.

GN

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) estimates that in 2010 and 2011, states will face a combined budget deficit of $350 billion. As states grapple with the recession and search for the best methods to alleviate economic and budgetary pressures, some lawmakers continue to propose privatization as an effective policy. In the past few months, there have been proposals to privatize functions across the board: county zoos, libraries, custodial services, parking enforcement, youth shelters, group homes, ambulance services, airports, and transit networks. Wisconsin, for instance, has increasingly privatized the construction engineering services. Just in the past two years, the state outsourced 125 construction engineering jobs, each of which could have been completed by a state worker at a lower cost. Unfortunately, some officials are embracing this “everything must go” attitude towards public assets and services.

The lure is the supposed promise that privatization will deliver a short-term budget fix. Yet many privatization efforts, as this Dispatch will highlight, have cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and botched services for the public. That privatization continues to move forward despite such a poor track record reflects pure ideology that the private market delivers the most efficient outcomes, even without demonstrable results. Some states may also be making the more cynical decision to pursue immediate short-term infusions of capital at the expense of long-term financial cost in pursuit of short-term electoral gains. In any case, privatization comes at the expense of long-term investments in the community, sustainable budget policy and public accountability. This Privatization Update is part of a series; for past analysis, please visit the Reform Government Contracts and Restrict Privatization section of our website and see our March 2009 and November 2008 Stateside Dispatches

PS

By Michael Schaffer

Some simple rules of thumb for the foreign ex-dictator out to make a mint on the U.S. lecture circuit: Get yourself included in a speakers’ series that features non-controversial names like Laura Bush and Jean-Michel Cousteau. Promise your “august audience” a “frank exchange.” Maybe drop the names of one or two revered American leaders who are your close friends. And perhaps it is best not to admit that you wish you still had the power to “sort out” an impolite member of the audience.

That last nugget seemed to trip up Pervez Musharraf, the former Pakistani president, when he brought his coast-to-coast road show to Baltimore one recent evening. Musharraf was methodically explaining America’s pre–September 11 foreign policy failures to a crowd of about 2,000 well-heeled locals when unintelligible catcalls started ricocheting through the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. At first, Musharraf ignored the shouts, but the refrain, in a heavy South Asian accent, eventually grew clearer: “Dictator!”

For many speakers, responding to this sort of interruption might involve that most basic maneuver of war and politics: seizing the high ground. The audience, after all, had paid between $265 and $395 for a series of lectures from prominent people, not taunts from anonymous hecklers. A few words about civility and politeness and respect might have gone a long way–especially for a guy determined to recast himself as a statesman. Musharraf, alas, rose to the bait.

“Yes, I was,” Musharraf shot back at the man who called him a dictator. “I wish you were there so I could have handled you also.” After some murmuring, things settled back down, but the distractions started up again a few minutes later. Eventually, as talk turned to Pakistan’s relations with India, the general decided to engage again. “Maybe the gentleman who’s talking belongs to India,” he said of the Joe Wilson figure in the upper balcony.

This was apparently too much for the gentleman, who shouted back that he was in fact from Baluchistan, the perpetually restive southwestern province that borders Afghanistan and Iran. “In Baluchistan, people like you who want to get away from Pakistan need to be sorted out,” Musharraf thundered. “That is what I did. .?.?. If you were there, you would have been sorted out by me. He thinks I’m a dictator. I’m a dictator for people like you!” Tonight, at least, the line worked: The crowd applauded as the heckler was silenced.

TNR