ISTANBUL – Daily News with wires

AP photo

The state-run Turkish Radio and Television Corporation, or TRT, has removed scenes of Israeli violence against Palestinians from the TV series “Ayr?l?k,” which caused a diplomatic row with Israel, the producer was quoted as saying Thursday, reported Agence France-Presse.

A scene showing Israeli soldiers shooting a row of blindfolded Palestinians was cut from the second episode, broadcast on Tuesday, Selçuk Çobano?lu told Milliyet daily. “Each broadcaster has its own regulations of supervision. … We don’t have objections to this situation,” he said.

Çobano?lu rejected accusations that the series incited hatred against Israel, insisting that the main theme was about love, which “will become more obvious in the upcoming episodes,” he said.

Meanwhile, Hürriyet daily reported on Thursday that “Ayr?l?k” also caused tension to rise between Turkey and Iran.

TRT failed to pay the balance due for the hotel bill in Tabriz, Iran, where some of the scenes were shot. The Iranian foreign ministry stepped in and gave Turkey a diplomatic note.

Nam?k Güler Erpul, deputy general director of the Foreign Ministry’s bilateral cultural relations department, sent an official letter to TRT on May 8 asking for the sum to be paid for Turkey’s dignity. The amount was paid on May 11.

HDN

Documents reveal Italian dictator got start in politics in 1917 with help of £100 weekly wage from MI5

Tom Kington in Rome

Benito Mussolini was paid £100 a week by MI5 to keep Italy in the first world war. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

History remembers Benito Mussolini as a founder member of the original Axis of Evil, the Italian dictator who ruled his country with fear and forged a disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany. But a previously unknown area of Il Duce’s CV has come to light: his brief career as a British agent.

Archived documents have revealed that Mussolini got his start in politics in 1917 with the help of a £100 weekly wage from MI5.

For the British intelligence agency, it must have seemed like a good investment. Mussolini, then a 34-year-old journalist, was not just willing to ensure Italy continued to fight alongside the allies in the first world war by publishing propaganda in his paper. He was also willing to send in the boys to “persuade” peace protesters to stay at home.

Mussolini’s payments were authorised by Sir Samuel Hoare, an MP and MI5’s man in Rome, who ran a staff of 100 British intelligence officers in Italy at the time.

Cambridge historian Peter Martland, who discovered details of the deal struck with the future dictator, said: “Britain’s least reliable ally in the war at the time was Italy after revolutionary Russia’s pullout from the conflict. Mussolini was paid £100 a week from the autumn of 1917 for at least a year to keep up the pro-war campaigning – equivalent to about £6,000 a week today.”

Hoare, later to become Lord Templewood, mentioned the recruitment in memoirs in 1954, but Martland stumbled on details of the payments for the first time while scouring Hoare’s papers.

As well as keeping the presses rolling at Il Popolo d’Italia, the newspaper he edited, Mussolini also told Hoare he would send Italian army veterans to beat up peace protesters in Milan, a dry run for his fascist blackshirt units.

“The last thing Britain wanted were pro-peace strikes bringing the factories in Milan to a halt. It was a lot of money to pay a man who was a journalist at the time, but compared to the £4m Britain was spending on the war every day, it was petty cash,” said Martland.

“I have no evidence to prove it, but I suspect that Mussolini, who was a noted womaniser, also spent a good deal of the money on his mistresses.”

After the armistice, Mussolini began his rise to power, assisted by electoral fraud and blackshirt violence, establishing a fascist dictorship by the mid-1920s.

His colonial ambitions in Africa brought him into contact with his old paymaster again in 1935. Now the British foreign secretary, Hoare signed the Hoare-Laval pact, which gave Italy control over Abyssinia.

“There is no reason to believe the two men were friends, although Hoare did have an enduring love affair with Italy,” said Martland, whose research is included in Christopher Andrew’s history of MI5, Defence of the Realm, which was published last week.

GOU

(Submitted by Dirk Chardet)

SMALL MINDS Using genetic manipulation and light beams scientists created a memory in a fly’s brain that made a tennis shoe smell something to avoid.

By NICHOLAS WADE

As part of a project to understand how the brain learns, biologists have written memories into the cells of a fruitfly’s brain, making it think it had a terrible experience.

The memory trace was written by shining light into the fly’s brain and activating a special class of cells involved in learning how to avoid an electric shock.

The goal of the research is not to give flies nightmares but rather to understand how learning in general works, from flies to people. “In the case of the fly, where we have a numerically rather simple nervous system that does something rather complex, I think we have a chance to break open the black box and understand it,” said Gero Miesenböck of the University of Oxford, leader of the team that has developed the new technique.

Psychologists study learning by running rats through mazes, but biologists want to learn the actual mechanics of how a memory trace is laid down in a nerve cell or neuron. So they need an organism whose genes can be easily manipulated.

In the early days of molecular biology, when others were working on DNA, the biologist Seymour Benzer decided to dissect behavior by studying the fruitfly. His student Chip Quinn discovered in the early 1970s that fruitflies, surprisingly, could learn. If exposed to a chemical odor and at the same time given an electric jolt big enough to kill a person, the fruitflies associated the two and would in the future avoid the odor.

Of the two chemicals that Mr. Quinn picked, one smelled like licorice and the other “a lot like tennis shoes in July,” according to Jonathan Weiner, author of “Time, Love, Memory,” an entrancing history of Benzer’s work. Biologists ever since have used the same system to train fruitflies. With the aid of the licorice and tennis shoe odors, Dr. Miesenböck’s team has now managed to peer deep inside the black box of the fly’s learning system.

NYTS

By B. R. Gowani

10% is the official unemployment rate
Nor is the unofficial rate too great:
The Economy is on a downward slide
And by now, people’s hopes have died

So all of the employed make a plan
To join the jobless; to form a clan
They declare a total general strike
To break the rulers’ disparity-dyke

Most dependent is the capitalist class
That forms a part of the exploiting brass
To maintain the greatest democracy façade
They appealed calmly while hiding the rod

Patriotism, nationalism, enemy, and flag
The usual bull shit were used to gag
But the people have really united this time
And are in no mood to join the elite’s chime

Technical support in foreign countries can
Guide; but to collect garbage you need Tom or Anne
Every general, CEO, and politician are in a rage
And feel like malnourished animals in a cage

The US ruling class is now extremely mad,
Consider Martial Law as an option, it had,
For the president it is an easy task,
Cause commander-in-chiefs don’t have to ask

Martial Law is justified by the regime
The media drowns people’s collective scream
The so called “choice” the people supposedly had
Vanished in the air like Osama bin Laden bad

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

Tate Modern’s latest spectacular show in the Turbine Hall coincides with the Frieze fair and a proliferation of gallery displays. Is this conclusive proof that Britons are no longer scared of art?

Olafur Eliasson with his installation ‘The Weather Project’ in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern. Photograph: Dan Chung

Dust off your glad rags, culcha bunnies, and stiffen your Resolve, because this week is the biggest in the UK’s art calendar. The Frieze fair of international contemporary art, open to the public from 15 to 18 October, will be accompanied by a dizzying array of museum-based exhibitions.

Tate Modern’s 10th Turbine Hall commission, unveiled on Tuesday, is by Miroslaw Balka; the institution’s John Baldessori retrospective opens on the same day. The Modern’s near neighbour, the Hayward Gallery, will from Wednesday be presenting Ed Ruscha: Twenty Years of Painting. The Serpentine is already showing Gustav Metzger, and next weekend hosts a special two-day poetry marathon in its Pavilion, with Brian Eno, Gilbert and George, Nick Laird, James Fenton, Tracey Emin and Alasdair Gray among the performers. The Whitechapel is opening Sophie Calle on Friday, to accompany its Jeremy Dellar and Alan Kane-curated selection from the British Council Collection and Goshka Macuga’s response to the gallery’s Guernica tapestry. Oh, and there’s the small matters of Turner and the Turner Prize, both at Tate Britain.

Not to mention Zoo 2009, the fringe art fair turned East End event, which brings together 50-plus smaller arts organisations and practitioners; the Museum of Everything, for non-mainstream art; plus all the commercial galleries, busily lining up their big boys: Anselm Kilmer at White Cube, Grayson Perry at Victoria Miro, Anish Kapoor at Lisson, chiming with his lauded Royal Academy show.

GCO

By Ram Puniyani, Countercurrents.org

The rising tide of communal violence from the decade of 1980 has consolidated the communal politics, politics in the name of religion. The party riding on the chariot of religious nationalism became the second largest party and tasted power at center for six long years and is now entrenched in few states and is knocking at the door of power in few other states. The hope that its recent defeat in Lok Sabha elections will reduce the impact of communal politics in society or will ensure that all communities can breathe the air of civil rights and equal citizenship rights with ease, seems to be like distant drums!

The impact of the rise of this politics and accompanying effect on minorities has resulted in worsening their lot. This downward slide in the condition of minorities is very obvious, is going from bad to worse, to worst. It has resulted in the conditions for minorities where they have to live in fear, alienation and the impact of constant profiling in different walks of life. This communal politics has been talking of Hindu nation, has been spreading hate against minorities, against Muslims in particular. The Muslim community has been the major target of attack and has been bearing a huge brunt of the divisive politics being spearheaded by RSS, its progeny and by those influenced by the RSS ideology. They are not only there in the state machinery and media but also in other crucial spots of Indian social, economic and political life. The worsening plight of Muslim community got reconfirmed in the recently held national meet on ‘What it means to be a Muslim in India Today’, organized by Anhad in Delhi (Oct 3-5).

The meeting was addressed by the victims and social activists working in the area of human rights particularly of minorities. The pain and anguish of the Muslim community was heart rending, coming through different narrations of illegal arrests, tortures, detentions and adverse judgments. The latest trick is to implicate the Muslim youth in multiple cases in different states. This will ensure their being behind the bars for good. The communal violence which has broken the back of the Indian community is being supplemented by the intense and blind police action against innocent Muslim youth, in the name of terror attacks. While the communal violence is now being orchestrated at low intensity and is scattered far and wide, in the post 9/11 period another front for torturing the community has been opened. Here the modus oprendi is simple enough, there is ‘Intelligence’ tip and that makes our efficient police machinery to arrest the Muslim youth, being Muslim is the major ‘tip’ for arresting and torturing innocent youth by the guardians of law. Many a youth in the middle of their education for professional lives face immense obstacles, their illegal arrests are never compensated for and nor are they supported to complete their education despite being proved innocents.

CCO

A nuclear weapons free world is within grasp if concerted action is taken at all levels, write Gareth Evans and Yoriko Kawaguchi

The Middle East has long been a testing ground for achieving the ultimate goals of peace. In 1978, Egyptian president Anwar El-Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin sat down with president Jimmy Carter at Camp David and agreed on a historic framework for peace in the Middle East. If nothing else, Camp David is an example of collaboration between former enemies resulting in breakthroughs of the kind needed for nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament today.

Since that historic event, Egypt has courageously undertaken further initiatives, most prominently, its decision to embark on the difficult road to nuclear non-proliferation. The Sadat government’s decision to ratify the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1981 was a defining moment for Egypt’s nuclear programme. Soon after, with the 1982 entry into force of its International Atomic Energy Agency Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement (INFCIRC 302), Egypt’s facilities were brought into the verification and inspection components of the non- proliferation regime. This reflected a clear commitment by Egypt to non-proliferation with full transparency under the international safeguards system of the IAEA.

Egypt, today, is a member in good standing of the NPT and the leading proponent of establishing a zone free of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the Middle East. While Egypt has consistently led efforts to establish a Middle East zone free of nuclear weapons (and since 1990 zone free of WMDs), there have been roadblocks along the way.

It is our strong hope that the Middle East peace process can produce results that will allow the region to address the issues of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation from a new perspective. The prospect of nuclear threats in the Middle East is deeply disturbing for the security of all states, and has the potential to initiate an arms race that will further destabilise the region, and divert resources from social and economic uses.

It is highly encouraging that global momentum is building to ensure that the 2010 NPT review does not succumb to indifference and lost opportunities. There have been a range of appeals from current and former world leaders and nuclear decision-makers urging a renewed effort to move the nuclear disarmament agenda forward: for new cuts to nuclear arsenals, bringing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) into force, and to immediately commence negotiation of a treaty to end the production of fissile material for weapons use. It is highly significant that President Barack Obama has chosen to convene this month a special meeting of the UN Security Council on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament.

The International Commission on Nuclear Non- proliferation and Disarmament, which we have the privilege to co-chair, seeks to contribute to this global effort to help build a new momentum towards reconsideration of the role of nuclear weapons in international relations and eventually to eliminate them.

WA

By Jennifer Loven, WASHINGTON

Now that he’s Nobel laureate Barack Obama, will he find smoother sailing for his plans to rid the world of nuclear weapons, to forge Mideast peace and stabilize Afghanistan, to halt climate change?

Not likely.

The Nobel committee members made no bones about it: Helping Obama achieve ambitious peacemaking goals was their goal in awarding the prize Friday to an as-yet mostly unaccomplished U.S. president.

But while the prestige could give Obama and his efforts a boost, nations steer their courses according to their own interests and little else. U.S. lawmakers, too, aren’t going to be influenced in politically difficult votes on climate change legislation or nuclear-reduction treaties by the Nobel Peace Prize, no matter who wins it.

That’s not to say it wasn’t an impressive achievement.

At just 48 years old and not even nine months in office, Obama became only the third sitting U.S. president to win the prize.

The widespread reaction, however, when the stunning news hit the nation was: For what?

Obama said so himself. “To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize,” he said hours after being awakened — and surprised — by spokesman Robert Gibbs.

Comments from Nobel committee members revealed that they fully intended to encourage, not reward. Consider this: The nomination deadline was only 12 days after Obama first entered the Oval Office. It’s an enduring myth that the prize is only about accomplishment — it actually was created as much to supply momentum for peace as to celebrate it.

Indeed, with a leftist slant, the five-member committee was applauding Obama as much for what he’s not — his predecessor. Former President George W Bush was much reviled overseas for “cowboy diplomacy,” the Iraq war and his snubbing of European priorities such as global warming.

So some cheerleading probably can’t hurt, as Obama presses forward on efforts to repair America’s relations with Muslims, bring Israelis and Palestinians into fruitful negotiations and turn back climate change. The committee especially singled out Obama’s aims to create a nuclear weapons-free world and to set out a new, more cooperative diplomatic doctrine.

JT