A New, Global Oil Quandary: Costly Fuel [+biofuels] Means Costly Calories .. and riots

A New, Global Oil Quandary: Costly Fuel Means Costly Calories | By KEITH BRADSHER | Published: January 19, 2008

KUANTAN, Malaysia — Rising prices for cooking oil are forcing residents of Asia’s largest slum, in Mumbai, India, to ration every drop. Bakeries in the United States are fretting over higher shortening costs. And here in Malaysia, brand-new factories built to convert vegetable oil into diesel sit idle, their owners unable to afford the raw material.
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The food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, based on export prices for 60 internationally traded foodstuffs, climbed 37 percent last year. That was on top of a 14 percent increase in 2006, and the trend has accelerated this winter.

In some poor countries, desperation is taking hold. Just in the last week, protests have erupted in Pakistan over wheat shortages, and in Indonesia over soybean shortages. Egypt has banned rice exports to keep food at home, and China has put price controls on cooking oil, grain, meat, milk and eggs.

According to the F.A.O., food riots have erupted in recent months in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen.
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A startling change is unfolding in the world’s food markets. Soaring fuel prices have altered the equation for growing food and transporting it across the globe. Huge demand for biofuels has created tension between using land to produce fuel and using it for food. ...

European Union is watching by as Israel tightens its barbaric siege around Gaza, collectively punishing 1.5 million Palestinian civilians

January 21, 2008 | Never Again? | Europe's Collusion in Israel's Slow Genocide | By OMAR BARGHOUTI

The European Union, Israel's largest trade partner in the world, is watching by as Israel tightens its barbaric siege around Gaza, collectively punishing 1.5 million Palestinian civilians, condemning them to devastation, and visiting imminent death upon hundreds of kidney dialysis and heart patients, prematurely born babies, and all others dependent on electric power for their very survival.

By freezing fuel and electric power supplies to Gaza, Israel, the occupying power, is essentially guaranteeing that "clean" water -- only by name, as Gaza's water is perhaps the most polluted in the whole region, after decades of Israeli theft and abuse -- will not be pumped out and properly distributed to homes and institutions; hospitals will not be able to function adequately, leading to the eventual death of many, particularly the most vulnerable; whatever factories that are still working despite the siege will now be forced to close, pushing the already extremely high unemployment rate even higher; sewage treatment will come to a halt, further polluting Gaza's precious little water supply; academic institutions and schools will not be able to provide their usual services; and lives of all civilians will be severely disrupted, if not irreversibly damaged. And Europe is apathetically watching.
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Now, Israel's crimes in Gaza can accurately be categorized as acts of genocide, albeit slow. According to Article II of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the term is defined as:

"[A]ny of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; ."

Clearly, Israel's hermetic siege of Gaza, designed to kill, cause serious bodily and mental harm, and deliberately inflicts conditions of life calculated to bring about partial and gradual physical destruction, qualifies as an act of genocide, if not all out genocide yet. And the EU is suspiciously silent.
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After Israel, the US is, without doubt, the guiltiest party in the current crime. Under the influence of a fundamentalist, militaristic, neo-conservative ideology that has taken over its helms of power and an omnipotent Zionist lobby that is unparalleled in its sway, the US is in a category by itself. It goes without saying that the PA, the UN, as well as Arab and international world governments maintaining business as usual with Israel should all be held accountable for acquiescing, whether directly or indirectly, to Israel's crimes against humanity in Gaza. It is also true that each one of the above bears the legal and moral responsibility to intervene and apply whatever necessary pressure to stop the crime before thousands perish. But the EU commands a unique position in all this. It is not only silent and apathetic; in most European countries Israel and Israeli institutions are currently welcomed and sought after with unprecedented warmth, generosity and deference in all fields -- economic, cultural, academic, athletic, etc. For instance, Israel was invited as the guest of honor to a major book fair in Turin, Italy. Israeli-government funded films are featuring in film festivals all over the continent. Israeli products, from avocadoes and oranges to hi-tech security systems, are flooding European markets like never before. Israeli academic institutions are enjoying a special, very lucrative, association agreement with the relevant organs in the EU. Israeli dance groups, singing bands and orchestras are invited to European tours and festivals as if Israel were not only a normal, but in effect a most favoured, member of the so-called "civilized" world. Official Europe's once lacklustre embrace of Israel has turned into an intense, open and enigmatic love affair. ...

cruelty inflicted by Stalin’s Checka on Ukraine ... led the victims of Red Terror to blame the Jewish people for both communism and their suffering

Foreign Affairs Editor for Sun Media Newspapers | London Free Press | December 12, 1998 | London, Ontario, Canada | - by Eric S. Margolis

… In 1932, Soviet leader Josef Stalin unleashed genocide in Ukraine, Stalin determined to force Ukraine’s millions of independent farmers - called kulaks - into collectivized Soviet agriculture, and to crush Ukraine’s growing spirit of nationalism.
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Six million other farmers across the Soviet Union were starved or shot during collectivization. Stalin told Winston Churchill he liquidated 10 million peasants during the 1930s. Add mass executions by the Cheka in Estonia, Lativia and Lithuania, the genocide of three million Muslims, massacres of Cossacks and Volga Germans, and Soviet industrial genocide accounted for at least 40 million victims, not including 20 million war dead.

Kaganovitch and many senior OGPU officers (later, NKVD) were Jewish. The predominance of Jews among Bolshevik leaders and the frightful crimes and cruelty inflicted by Stalin’s Checka on Ukraine, the Baltic states and Poland led the victims of Red Terror to blame the Jewish people for both communism and their suffering. As a direct result, during the subsequent Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe, the region’s innocent Jews became the target of ferocious revenge by Ukrainians, Balts and Poles.

While the world is now fully aware of the destruction of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis, the story of the numerically larger holocaust in Ukraine has been suppressed, or ignored. Ukraine’s genocide occurred eight to nine years before Hitler began the Jewish Holocaust and was committed, unlike Nazi crimes, before the world’s gaze. But Stalin’s murder of millions was simply denied or concealed by a left-wing conspiracy of silence that continues to this day. In the strange moral geometry of mass murder, only Nazis are guilty. ...

Bloody reality bears no relation to the delusions of this President: bomb blows up embassy staff, Israelis kill 15, Bush sells weapons ... blames Iran

Bloody reality bears no relation to the delusions of this President | By Robert Fisk | Jan 15, 2008, 23:56

As a bomb explodes in Beirut and Israel kills 19 in Gaza raids, Bush takes his Middle East peace mission to Saudi Arabia (and signs off $20bn weapons deal with repressive regime)

16 January 2008 - Twixt silken sheets – in a bedroom whose walls are also covered in silk – and in the very palace of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, President George Bush awakes this morning to confront a Middle East which bears no relation to the policies of his administration nor the warning which he has been relaying constantly to the kings and emirs and oligarchs of the Gulf: that Iran rather than Israel is their enemy.
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You wouldn't think it though, watching this preposterous man, prancing around arm-in-arm with the King, in what was presumably meant to be a dance, wielding a massive glinting curved Saudi sword, a latter-day Saladin, who would have appalled the Kurdish leader who once destroyed the Crusaders in what is now referred to by Mr Bush as "the disputed West Bank".

Is this how lame-duck American presidents are supposed to behave? Certainly, the denizens of the Middle East, watching this outrageous performance will all be asking this question. Ever since the 1979 Iranian revolution, a Muslim Cold War has been raging within the Middle East – but is this how Mr Bush thinks one should fight for the soul of Islam?

Already by dusk last night, the US President's world was exploding in Beirut when a massive car bomb blew up next to a 4x4 vehicle carrying American embassy employees, killing four Lebanese and apparently badly wounding a US embassy driver. And while Mr Bush was relaxing in the Saudi royal ranch at Al Janadriyah, Israeli forces killed 19 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, most of them members of Hamas, one of them the son of Mahmoud Zahar, a leader of the movement. He later claimed that Israel would not have staged the attack – on the day an Israeli was also killed by a Palestinian rocket – if it had not been encouraged to do so by George Bush.

The difference between reality and the dream-world of the US government could hardly have been more savagely illustrated. After promising the Palestinians a "sovereign and contiguous state" before the end of the year, and pledging "security" to Israel – though not, Arabs noted, security for "Palestine" – Mr Bush had arrived in the Gulf to terrify the kings and oligarchs of the oil-soaked kingdoms of the danger of Iranian aggression. As usual, he came armed with the usual American offers of vast weapons sales to protect these largely undemocratic and police state regimes from potentially the most powerful nation in the "axis of evil". ...

Every country in the world, except America, knows by now that the US is the world's leading state sponsor of terror ...

January 17, 2008 | Bringing Death and Destruction to Muslims | Leader and Vassal | By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

After pandering to Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert's right-wing government last week, US president George W. Bush carried the Israeli/neoconservative campaign against Iran to Arab countries. Sounding as authentic as the "Filipino Monkey," Bush told the Arab countries that "Iran is the world's leading state sponsor of terror," and that "Iran's actions threaten the security of nations everywhere."

To no effect. Every country in the world, except America, knows by now that the US is the world's leading state sponsor of terror and that the neoconservative drive for US hegemony over the world threatens the security of nations everywhere. But before we get into this, let's first see what Bush means by "terrorist" and Iran's sponsorship of terrorism.

Bush considers Iran to be the leading state sponsor of terror, because Iran is believed to fund Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian ghetto. Hezbollah and Hamas are two organizations that exist because of Israeli aggression against Palestine and Lebanon. The two organizations are branded "terrorist" because they resist Israel's theft of Palestine and Israel's designs on southern Lebanon. Both organizations are resistance organizations. They resist Israel's territorial expansion and this makes them "terrorist."

They are terrorists because they don't receive billions in US military aid and cannot put armies in the field with tanks, fighter jets and helicopter gunships, backed up by US spy satellites and Israel's nuclear weapons--although Hezbollah, a small militia, has twice defeated the Israeli army. However, Palestine is so thoroughly under the Israeli heel that Hamas can resist only with suicide bombers and obsolete rockets. It is dishonest to damn the terrorist response but not the policies that provoke the response.

The US is at war in Iraq, because the neoconservatives want to rid Israel of the Muslim governments--Iraq, Iran and Syria--that are not American surrogates and, therefore, are willing to fund Palestinian and Lebanese resistance to Israeli aggression. Israel, protected by the US, has disobeyed UN resolutions for four decades and has been methodically squeezing Palestinians out of Palestine.

Americans do not think of themselves or of Israel as terrorist states, but the evidence is complete and overwhelming. Thanks to the power of the Israel Lobby, Americans only know the Israeli side of the story, which is that evil anti-semite Palestinians will not let blameless Israelis live in peace and persist in their unjustified terror attacks on an innocent Israeli state.

The facts differ remarkably from Israel Lobby propaganda. Israel illegally occupies Palestine. Israel sends bulldozers into Palestinian villages and knocks down Palestinian houses, occasionally killing an American protester in the process, and uproots Palestinian olive groves. Israel cuts Palestinian villages off from water, hospitals, farmlands, employment and schools. Israel builds special roads through Palestine on which only Israelis can travel. Israel establishes checkpoints everywhere to hinder Palestinian movement to hospitals, schools and from one enclave or ghetto to another. Many Palestinians die from the inability to get through checkpoints to medical care. Israel builds illegal settlements on Palestinian lands. Israeli Zionist "settlers" take it upon themselves to evict Palestinians from their villages and towns in order to convert them into Israeli settlements. A huge wall has been built to wall off the stolen Palestinian lands from the remaining isolated ghettos. Israeli soldiers shoot down Palestinian children in the streets. So do Israeli Zionist "settlers."

Canada puts U.S., Israel on torture watchlist

Canada puts U.S., Israel on torture watchlist -CTV | Thu Jan 17, 2008 10:32am EST

OTTAWA, Jan 17 (Reuters) - An official Canadian government document has put both the United States and Israel on a watch list of countries where prisoners run the risk of being tortured, CTV television reported on Thursday.

The revelation is likely to embarrass the minority Conservative government, which is a staunch U.S. ally. ...
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It said the document mentioned U.S. interrogation techniques such as "forced nudity, isolation, and sleep deprivation." ...