Serious Nuclear Accident at Iran’s Primary Enrichment Plant.

The Resignation of, Atomic Energy Organization President, Deputy Reza Aghazadeh may have been the result of a serious, recent, nuclear accident at Natanz the primary location of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program a source associated with Iran’s nuclear program confidentially told WikiLeaks.org last month.

WikiLeaks had reason to believe the source was credible however contact with this source was lost.

Aghazadeh told ISNA Thursday that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has accepted his resignation. However, he gave no detail about the reason behind this decision.

Sources:

Wikileaks.org

http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Serious_nuclear_accident_may_lay_behind_Iranian_nuke_chief%27s_mystery_resignation

Iranian Students News Agency

http://isna.ir/ISNA/NewsView.aspx?ID=News-1371331&Lang=E

Iran Blocks Leading Whistleblower Website

Iran has blocked the main addresses of the whistleblower site WikiLeaks. In doing so, it has crossed an important human rights line.

A middle-sized developing country, such as Iran, which is faced with wealthy adversaries, may argue that it needs to censor “enemy media” in order to maintain itself as an independent nation.

Since 2007 the United States has publicly earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars for Iranian destabilization efforts, a good portion of which has gone into funding anti-government media.

You can read about one such US-Israeli media effort exposed by WikiLeaks here.

While funding for farsi media outside of Iran can be well intentioned, often this funding is concealed and comes from Iran’s long standing adversaries. Unfortunately such efforts have the side effect of legitimizing Iranian trans-border censorship.

Yet whatever concerns Iran has with foreign destabilization campaigns, its blocking of WikiLeaks can not be justified.

Far from being an anti-Iranian propaganda site, WikiLeaks has often exposed other countries’ plans actions or plans in relation to Iran. And while much of the anglophone press ran clearly fabricated documents showing a Mousavi landslide in the country’s Presidential elections, WikiLeaks did not (this is not to say that there was no election fraud).

But Iran has not blocked WikiLeaks to stop foreign influence pouring into the country. It has blocked WikiLeaks to try and prevent Iranian whistleblowers getting the truth out.

In censorship terms, the blocking of WikiLeaks is Iran’s Berlin wall moment; it is not an attempt to keep enemies out, rather, it is an attempt to lock Iranians in, and as such must be condemned.

Thu Jul 16 20:37:43 GMT 2009

“Iran blocks Wikileaks”

WIKILEAKS PRESS RELEASE

Man had boss killed to save his job

Spanish police have arrested a man whom they suspect hired a contract killer to murder his boss in a desperate bid to avoid being laid off, newspaper El Pais reported on Tuesday.

It is believed that the head of audiovisual services, at the Barcelona International Convention Centre, contracted a Colombian man who shot and killed the director of the convention centre on Feb 9, according to police.

The director had planned to lay off the arrested man as part of a restructuring project, police said.

In fear of losing his job, the head of services, through his sister, contracted a team of six Colombians who planned and carried out the killing.

Police have also detained the sister and six Colombians.

The shooting marks one of the most extreme actions by Spaniards who fear losing jobs, homes and businesses during a recession in which unemployment is rising faster than in any other developed country.

Other cases include an indebted Spanish builder who kidnapped his bank manager at gunpoint and the head of a construction firm who threatened to set himself on fire unless debts he was owed were paid.

Mitsuharu Misawa 1962-2009 RIP

The wrestling world is still in shock after the tragic and shocking death of one of the most legendery names in Japanese wrestling. Original story from PWInsider. by Mike Johnson @ 2009-06-13 10:32:26.

I am extremely saddened to report that one of the greatest in-ring workers of the modern age and the founder of Pro Wrestling: NOAH, Mitsuhau Misawa, just a few days short of his 47th birthday, died earlier this morning (tonight in Japan) following an in-ring accident stemming from a suplex.

PRO WRESTLING NOAH FOUNDER MITSUHARU MISAWA PASSES AWAY AFTER COLLAPSING IN-RING

Misawa was wrestling in a tag team bout at the Hiroshima Green Arena, teaming with Go Shiozaki to challenge Bison Smith and Akitoshi Saito for NOAH’s Global Honored Crown Tag Team championships Around 15-17 minutes in, Saito delivered with what was described to me as looking like a “routine” back suplex. Misawa went over for the bump but didn’t get back up. The entire roster surrounded the ring as they attempted to revive him. The crowd, realizing something was wrong, went silent and then began chanting Misawa’s name.

It is believed Misawa may have suffered a heart attack as he immediately stopped breathing. EMTS attempted to revive him in the ring via AED in the ring and he was rushed out to an ambulance.

In the wake of the Misawa incident, the show was immediately halted. The NOAH roster were instructed to return to their tour buses and were later informed Misawa had passed away.

Yomuri Online in Japan reported that Misawa passed away en route to the hospital at 10:10 PM Japanese time. It’s possible he passed away before that, but 10:10 is the official time in media reports.

Misawa was groomed for stardom from the day he was brought into All Japan by Shohei “Giant” Baba after being successful amateur High School wrestler. He became the second Tiger Mask (under the hood, he wrestled Bret Hart in 1990) before eventually competing under his real name.

Misawa’s classics with Toshiaki Kawada and Kenta Kobashi were the stuff of immediate legend, with Japanese photos of the bouts showing hard-hitting still photos that looked more like boxing matches. Then, when you’d see the tapes via trading, you were awe-struck at how intensely athletic and competitive the bouts were. Before hardcore was a buzz word used to promote a certain style, that’s what All Japan main events were – a hardcore, physically brutal style of storytelling in professional wrestling that was unlike anything else in the era.

When All Japan Pro Wrestling owner Shohei “Giant” Baba passed away in 1999, issues with Baba’s widow, Motoko Baba eventually led to Misawa leading an exodus of most of the core All Japan talents from the company a year later, forming Pro Wrestling NOAH. The biggest hold-out was Toshiaki Kawada but every other major AJPW name at the time jumped. NOAH, almost immediately, became one of the top in-ring products anywhere in the world, with Misawa as one of the key figures in and out of the ring. All Japan was never the same, although it continues to live on under the ownership of Keiji Mutoh.

Stateside, Misawa made very few trips to the United States to perform, working a pair of shows for Ring of Honor and Harley Race’s WLW last year as well as appearing for California’s Pro Wrestling Iron, an American satellite promotion for NOAH a few years prior run by Mike Modest and Donovan Morgan.

In Japan, Misawa was one of the all-time greatest in-ring performers and in many ways, was still carrying the torch for the style that Baba and All Japan, in their prime, excelled at. He wasn’t in his prime shape anymore and physically, was beaten down by the punishment he put his body through, but when needed, could still perform at an incredible level in comparison to others half his age.

I can’t even begin to express what an awesome performer Misawa in his prime was. In many ways, the style that he, Kenta Kobashi and Toshiaki Kawada, among others, popularized in the United States via tape traders helped inspire the entire “strong style” phase of wrestling on the independent level of the United States. It’s impossible to even access the influence his work had on the entire wrestling industry.

To read a translated version of a Yomuri Online report, click here.

Our deepest condolences go out to Misawa’s family, friends and fans on a truly sad day for this business.

No more words need to be said.

RIP.

Iran is next on the US agenda.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the senate on Wednesday that if Iran obtains a nuclear weapons capability, it would trigger an arms race in the Middle East and beyond. “A nuclear-armed Iran with a deliverable weapons system is going to spark an arms race in the Middle East and the greater region.” she said.

Republican Senator Judd Gregg, called Iran a terrorist state and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said preventing a nuclear Iran should take precedence over Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking. Obama made it clear that he is “committed to preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons with all of the consequences that that would entail. But at the same time we cannot wait on the Palestinian-Israeli efforts regarding peace. So we think they have to proceed simultaneously,”

On Tuesday Obama suggested the United States would pursue tougher sanctions against Iran if diplomatic efforts fail to make progress by the end of this year. The Obama administration, which had been concerned about Pakistan’s willingness to take on Islamic extremists, now believes it is making an “all-out” effort to take back areas recently seized by the Taliban repeatedly stating that more troops are necessary.

The new U.S. strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan was unveiled in late March. A central focus of the strategy will be the injection of 17,000 new troops in Afghanistan, with an additional 4,000 to train the Afghan security forces. The plan also calls for the increased capability of the Afghans in restoring and maintaining security.

Moreover, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) has asked Washington to help bring its forces to a strength of 400,000 in five years, according to MOD chairman of the Public Affairs Office Muhammad Ishaq Payman.

The U.S. military is likely to maintain and may even increase its force of more than 140,000 troops in Iraq through next spring, the top American commander, John Abizaid, commander of the U.S. Central Command, in the region said Tuesday: “If it’s necessary to do that because the military situation on the ground requires that, we’ll do it,” Abizaid said of longer deployments. “If we have to call in more forces because it’s our military judgment that we need more forces, we’ll do it.”

On July 2nd, Obama spoke in Colorado Springs and hit themes of national service, foreign policy, and national security. “We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.” If history has tought us anything. The United States is preparing for a campain of a magnitude the world has not seen since September 1st 1939.

Bilderberg Group Meet in Greece – and here’s their address

By Roger Boyes and John Carr (The Times, UK)

Don’t tell anyone, don’t breathe a word, but the world’s most powerful men are meeting secretly again to save the planet from economic catastrophe. Oh, and their address, should you want to send them your opinions, is: c/o Nafsika Astir Palace Hotel, Apollonos Avenue 40, 16671 Vouliagmeni, Greece.

Bed space is a bit tight there for the next two days while the Bilderberg illuminati hold their private conclave in the five-star Greek hotel. Every year since 1954 a club of about 130 senior or up-and-coming politicians gather at the fireside of a secluded hotel with top bankers and a sprinkling of royalty to discuss burning issues, to trade confidences and just stay abreast of the I-know-something-you-don’t-know circuit. No lists of participants are disclosed, no press conferences are held; spill the beans and you’re out of the magic circle.

For those of us standing outside the locked gates all that is left is to hope that they will sleep well, avoid jet ski injury and solve our problems for us. For the Bilderbergers it is a little like that recent MI5 recruitment ad: “See all your best work go unnoticed!”

Each country delegates two people to the steering committee that is the intellectual hub of Bilderberg. In the past Kenneth Clarke, the Shadow Business Secretary, and Martin Taylor, formerly head of Barclays Bank, have had their hand on the British tiller.

This year the club is going to talk about depression. “According to the pre-meeting booklet sent out to attendees, Bilderberg is looking at two options,” says the Bilderberg-watcher Daniel Estulin — “either a prolonged, agonising depression that dooms the world to decades of stagnation, decline and poverty — or an intense but shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency.”

Since Bilderberg does not officially exist, it cannot deny anything and is therefore manna from heaven for the conspiracy theorist. Eurosceptics are convinced that the future development of the European Union was plotted here — EU commissioners have always been welcomed into the coven, with Peter “We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” Mandelson a particular favourite. Margaret Thatcher, it is said, was a shy debutante at a Bilderberg meeting in 1975.

Jim Tucker, veteran stalker of the Bilderberg club meetings, claims that Mrs Thatcher was ordered “to dismantle British sovereignty, but she said, ‘no way’, so they had her sacked”. Left-wing conspiracy theorists believe that Bilderbergers form a capitalist nucleus, and there is a germ of truth in this. The meetings were started in the Netherlands, in the Hotel de Bilderberg, near Arnhem, by the Polish exile Joseph Retinger. He was worried about growing anti-Americanism and the advance of Communism in Western Europe. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands agreed to sponsor the idea, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Walter Bedell Smith, threw his weight behind it and so did the White House.

The Bilderberg consensus is that national problems are best solved by an internationally oriented elite, that a global network of decision-makers should have a common language and that the boundaries are fluid between the monied and the political classes.

And so there has been a natural bias towards inviting conservatives and market liberals. The only socialists invited are those who “understand money”.

Ed Balls has taken part and the most indiscreet Bilderberger of all time was Denis Healey, the former Labour Chancellor and fierce Atlanticist.

“To say we were striving for a one-world government is exaggerated, but not wholly unfair,” Lord Healey told the author Jon Ronson for his book Them: Adventures with Extremists. “Those of us in Bilderberg felt we couldn’t go on for ever fighting one another for nothing. So we felt that a single community throughout the world would be a good thing.”

Another way of viewing the club is that of Metropolitan Seraphim, the bishop of Piraeus, who said that the Bilderbergers represented a “criminal cabal of world Zionism and its efforts to set up a cruel world dictatorship under the headship of Lucifer”. This line is quite common on the blogosphere, where the club’s secrecy is taken as evidence of evil intentions.

Whether Lucifer will be down there on the sun-loungers remains to be seen. But what we have been able to establish from a World Bank spokesman, Alexis O’Brien, is that the organisation’s president, Robert Zoellick, will be in Athens on unspecified business on May 14. And that US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s public schedule is mysteriously empty for the next two days. Jo Ackermann, head of Deutsche Bank, will be travelling “somewhere in Europe”. Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank, will not be around until the end of the week.

You get the drift. Something is going on. If only somebody would let us in on the secret.

Thanks to Roger Boyes, John Carr and The Times for covering this issue. Copyright remains with the aforementioned.

References:

Wiki Leaks Bilderberg Documentation Collection

Censored: How to Spot a Hidden Religious Agenda

Summary: “Article self-censored by New Scientist magazine, rumored to be as a result of a UK libel law threat. UK libel law can bankrupt publishers with legal fees even if the case never reaches a conclusion.” wikileaks.org

“New Scientist has received a legal complaint about the contents of this story. At the advice of our lawyer it has temporarily been removed while we investigate. Apologies for any inconvenience.” newscientist.com

Sensored Article: As a book reviews editor at New Scientist, I often come across so-called science books which after a few pages reveal themselves to be harbouring ulterior motives. I have learned to recognise clues that the author is pushing a religious agenda. As creationists in the US continue to lose court battles over attempts to have intelligent design taught as science in federally funded schools, their strategy has been forced to… well, evolve. That means ensuring that references to pseudoscientific concepts like ID are more heavily veiled. So I thought I’d share a few tips for spotting what may be religion in science’s clothing.

Red flag number one: the term “scientific materialism”. “Materialism” is most often used in contrast to something else – something non-material, or supernatural. Proponents of ID frequently lament the scientific claim that humans are the product of purely material forces. At the same time, they never define how non-material forces might work. I have yet to find a definition that characterises non-materialism by what it is, rather than by what it is not.

The invocation of Cartesian dualism – where the brain and mind are viewed as two distinct entities, one material and the other immaterial – is also a red flag. And if an author describes the mind, or any biological system for that matter, as “irreducibly complex”, let the alarm bells ring.

Misguided interpretations of quantum physics are a classic hallmark of pseudoscience, usually of the New Age variety, but some religious groups are now appealing to aspects of quantum weirdness to account for free will. Beware: this is nonsense.

When you come across the terms “Darwinism” or “Darwinists”, take heed. True scientists rarely use these terms, and instead opt for “evolution” and “biologists”, respectively. When evolution is described as a “blind, random, undirected process”, be warned. While genetic mutations may be random, natural selection is not. When cells are described as “astonishingly complex molecular machines”, it is generally by breathless supporters of ID who take the metaphor literally and assume that such a “machine” requires an “engineer”. If an author wishes for “academic freedom”, it is usually ID code for “the acceptance of creationism”.

Some general sentiments are also red flags. Authors with religious motives make shameless appeals to common sense, from the staid – “There is nothing we can be more certain of than the reality of our sense of self” (James Le Fanu in Why Us?) – to the silly – “Yer granny was an ape!” (creationist blogger Denyse O’Leary). If common sense were a reliable guide, we wouldn’t need science in the first place.

Religiously motivated authors also have a bad habit of linking the cultural implications of a theory to the truth-value of that theory. The ID crowd, for instance, loves to draw a line from Darwin to the Holocaust, as they did in the “documentary” film Expelled: No intelligence allowed. Even if such an absurd link were justified, it would have zero relevance to the question of whether or not the theory of evolution is correct. Similarly, when Le Fanu writes that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species “articulated the desire of many scientists for an exclusively materialist explanation of natural history that would liberate it from the sticky fingers of the theological inference that the beauty and wonder of the natural world was direct evidence for ‘A Designer’”, his statement has no bearing on the scientific merits of evolution.

It is crucial to the public’s intellectual health to know when science really is science. Those with a religious agenda will continue to disguise their true views in their effort to win supporters, so please read between the lines.

Update: “This article was temporarily taken down on legal advice after New Scientist’s editor, Roger Highfield, received a letter from a law firm on behalf of James Le Fanu, the GP and author of the book Why Us? Following discussions, New Scientist has now reinstated the article accompanied by a comment from Dr Le Fanu.” newscientist.com

James Le Fanu writes in response: The critical website Reponses to Ms Gefter’s article (‘epistemological hubris’, ‘straw-man argument’, ‘dualism a valid field of study’, [the necessity to distinguish between] ‘assertions that contradict the best scientific thinking from those that cannot be resolved by the techniques of science’ etc etc) speak for themselves. But her specific allegation against myself of covertly promoting ‘pseudoscientific concepts’ in pursuit of a hidden religion agenda is unfairly prejudicial to my reputation.

My interpretation of the recent dramatic findings in genetics and neuroscience, as set out in my book, ‘’Why Us?’ is that they are so extraordinary and unexpected as to challenge the prevailing view that the phenomenon of life – and in particular the twin enigmas of ‘form’ and ‘mind’ – can be accounted for by the materialist properties of the chemical genes and the electrochemistry of the brain alone.

This interpretation requires, by necessity, an examination of philosophical notions such as scientific materialism and Cartesian dualism that Ms Gefter alleges is typical of arguments deployed by closet creationists who “disguise their true views in their effort to win supporters”. But to whom can she be referring? Scarcely the protagonists of Intelligent Design, whose theistic inferences could not be more explicit. Perhaps she has in mind the many respected biologists, philosophers and science writers who, in different ways, are sceptical of the explanatory power of science’s radical reductionist programme to account for ‘form’ or ‘mind’ – but are we to assume they too are motivated by a covert religious agenda? And if not them, whom?

Ms Gefter’s supposition that there is a genre of science books written by creationists ‘disguising their true views’ is, I would suggest, a mirage invoked to condemn by association those like myself who draw attention to the limits of science and its exclusively materialist explanations and theories. I believe that the New Scientist should do more to examine such ideas to promote the spirit of open and intellectual enquiry.