27 August

Returning home after 10 valuable days in Sweden it was with a sense of relief that we embraced the newspapers and tuned in to BBC news programmes, both radio and television. The Swedes probably have good news coverage but the language isn’t exactly an easy one to get the anglo-saxon tongue around. Added to which those English papers which were available are limited and very, very expensive. We tried to listen to the BBC World Service but it only broadcasts between 6.00 and 8.00 each morning accompanied by interference. But now, having caught up with everything, we are beginning to wish we had stayed in Sweden!
Do you really understand what is happening in the world today? Do you realise just how serious things are! You would probably say yes, you do! After all don’t you see the TV pictures of the floods in Pakistan. Of course you do, but just read these extracts from the press as it greeted us! Together with cuttings sent to us.

PAKISTAN – The Guardian – 2nd August - Its troubles and role in terror make Afghanistan a sideshow. Pakistan, a nuclear state with a population seven times bigger than its troublesome neighbour, is the main event. Where (with help from the CIA) were the original Taliban recruited, trained? Where are the masters of 9/11 still hiding? Where did virtually every bomb plotter of the last nine years do his ignition course? Which country is still fighting a desperate battle to keep its own fundamentalists at bay? Which country has seen more of its troops die in the “war against terror” than NATO? And its citizens slaughtered in huge bomb blasts? Which country, if it became a failed state, would be the biggest disaster of the lot? Pakistan ticks every box.
Our comment: The suffering of the tens of thousands of the people of Pakistan is without precedence. And still the flooding goes on! It’s become a nearly impossible task to get food, fresh water, and shelter to them. The chances are very high that thousands are going to die. It could well be that the Taliban would move in and displace the present government. What will the West do then! It’ll be the wrong thing whatever course is taken.

AFRICA (Niger) – The Guardian – 2nd August - Markets are full yet famine and death shadow the dusty roads. Expensive imports and aid remain out of reach for 12 million people facing country’s worst food crisis in years. Fields of stunted millet stand baking in the 35C heat, a land pocked by dry river beds …. Nearly 12 million people in Niger – about 80% of the population are now affected by food insecurity, a status that indicates they have as few as 10 days food supplies remaining with all other income-generating activities exhausted. Without urgent assistance, there are fears that many will starve. The causes of the crisis are complex. Last year, exceptionally heavy rainfall destroyed crops and devastated this year’s harvest. …. ‘Save the Children’ now estimates that as many as 400,000 children in Niger are facing starvation. …. The extent of today’s food crisis – and the deterioration of so many children’s nutritional status in particular has taken many by surprise. …. (Colonel Goukoye, head of a high commission for food security and a member of the junta) said: “Over the last week the first rains have caused heavy flooding. There are villages where everything has been completely destroyed.”
Our comment: It isn’t just the one nation of Niger that is affected. Similar accounts concern adjoining nations such as Chad and the rest of Central Africa.

HEALTH – The Guardian – 12th August – Are you ready for a world without antibiotics? ‘We have a window of maybe 10 years’ Antiobiotics are a bedrock of modern medicine. But in the very near future, we’re going to have to learn to live without them once again. And it’s going to get nasty. The era of antibiotics is coming to a close. In just a couple of generations, what once appeared to be miracle medicines have been beaten into ineffectiveness by the bacteria they were designed to knock out. Once, scientists hailed the end of infectious diseases. Now, the post-antibiotic apocalypse is within sight. Hyperbole? Unfortunately not. The highly serious journal Lancet Infectious Diseases yesterday posed the question itself over a paper revealing the rapid spread of multi-drug-resistant bacteria. “Is this the end of antiobiotics?” it asked. Doctors and scientists have not been complacent, but the paper by Professor Tim Walsh and colleagues takes the anxiety to a new level. Last September, Walsh published details of a gene he had discovered, called NDM1, which passes easily between types of bacteria called enterobacteriaceae such as E. coli and Klebsiella and makes them resistant to almost all of the powerful, lastline group of antibiotics called carbapenems. …. NDM1 is widespread in India and has arrived here as a result of global travel and medical tourism for, among other things, transplants, pregnancy care and cosmetic surgery. “In many ways, this is it,” Walsh tells me. “This is potentially the end. There are no antibiotics in the pipeline that have activity against NDM1 producing enterobacteriaceae. We have a bleak window of maybe 10 years, where we are going to have to use the antibiotics we have very wisely, but also grapple with the reality that we have nothing to treat these infections with.”
Our comment: Yet another shot in the satanic locker of death and destruction.

RESERVES RUNNING OUT – The Independent – 23rd August – Take a deep breath -… why the world is running out of helium. It’s the second-lightest element in the Universe, has the lowest boiling point of any gas and is commonly used through the world to inflate party balloons. But helium is also a non-renewable resource and the world’s reserves of the precious gas are about to run out, a shortage that is likely to have far-reaching repercussions. Scientists have warned that the world’s most commonly used inert gas is being depleted at an astonishing rate because of a law passed in the United States in1996 which has effectively made helium too cheap to recycle. …. Liquid helium is critical for cooling infrared detectors, nuclear reactors and the machinery of wind tunnels. The space industry uses it in sensitive satellite equipment …. It is also crucial for research into nuclear fusion. …. (to run out of helium will be disastrous for hospitals, where MRI scanners are cooled by the gas in liquid form. Half the world’s reserves of helium are stored underground in the USA. The US Helium Privatisation Act, directed that this reserve should be sold by 2015 at a price that would substantially pay off the federal government’s original investment in building up the reserve.) ….Helium is used for :- Airships, MRI scanners – Deep-sea diving – Rockets – Dating of minerals etc – Telescopes as well as other uses.
Our comment: Putting everything together it is apparent that the days left for man on earth are numbered unless that strong hand from somewhere takes action. Just how can anyone possibly waste so arbitrarily such a vital resource as helium, a non-renewable resource. That means we can’t make more of it! Once it is used it has gone! We could recycle some of it, but it would run out in the end but we don’t even do that! Are we totally insane!

CLIMATE CHANGE – The Guardian – 11th August – Greenland ice sheet faces ‘tipping point in 10 years’. The entire ice mass of Greenland will disappear from the world map if temperatures rise by as little as 2C, with severe consequences for the rest of the world, a panel of scientists told Congress yesterday. Greenland shed its largest chunk of ice in nearly half a century last week, and faces an even grimmer future, according to Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University. “Sometime in the next decade we may pass that tipping point which would put us warmer than temperatures that Greenland can survive” Alley told a briefing in Congress, adding that a rise in the range of 2C to 7C would mean the obliteration of Greenland’s ice sheet …. “What is going on in the Arctic now is the biggest and fastest thing that nature has ever done,” he said. …. Greenland is losing ice mass at an increasing rate, dumping more icebergs into the ocean because of warming temperatures, he said. …. The briefing (of Congress) also noted that the last six months had set new temperature records.

The Guardian – 13th August – Seventeen countries suffer record heatwaves. 2010 is becoming the year of the heatwave, with record temperatures set in 17 countries. Record highs have occurred in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine …. But also African, Middle Eastern and Latin American countries. Temperatures in Moscow have been consistently 20C above normal – they have now fallen to 31C. ….Wildfires have swept through northern Portugal…. Some 600 firefighters (have been) struggling to contain 29 separate fires….. But the extreme heat experienced in Europe would barely have registered in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Niger, Pakistan and Sudan, all of which have recorded temperatures of more than 47C (115F) since June. The number of record highs is itself a record – the previous record was for 14 new high temperatures in 2007. The freak weather conditions, which have devastated crops and wildlife, are believed to have killed thousands of elderly people, especially in Russia and northern India. …. Pakistan…. Had Asia’s hottest day in its history on 26th May when 53.5C was recorded. …. The heatwaves have also been occurring in the US, where Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Washington, Baltimore and Trenton all documented their highest ever temperatures in July. …. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has data collated on 11 different indicators …. Which showed temperatures rising around the world since the 1850s. This June was also the hottest ever on record and 2010 is on course to be the warmest year since records began. ….
Our comment: The British Meteorological Office is also on record as saying that the evidence for a warming world is unequivocal. We find it interesting that the 1850s are stated as being the point when world temperatures began to climb. Do you think that that might have something to do with the industrial revolution? We’re not looking at a normal climate cycle, we are looking at global warming caused by man’s activities. And the piper is about to be paid!