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BREAKING: Discover How A Slacker Makes $100,000 A Year! |
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| During the period Sept. 30 ‘00 -
Please note that all injuries figures are from PRCS field posts & EMS
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| Total Sept . 1-30 ‘06 | 33 | 27 | 4 | 2 | 31 | 63 |
| Total Oct . 1-31 ‘06 | 54 | 41 | 7 | 4 | 16 | 56 |
| Total Nov. 1-30 ‘06 | 100 | 122 | 9 | 1 | 159 | 292 |
| Total Dec. 1-31 ‘06 | 15 | 19 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 22 |
| Total Jan. 1-31 ‘07 | 8 | 24 | 21 | 0 | 0 | 45 |
| Total Feb. 1-28 ‘07 | 9 | 11 | 43 | 9 | 5 | 68 |
| Total March. 1-31 ‘07 | 6 | 10 | 13 | 2 | 1 | 26 |
| Total April. 1-30 ‘07 | 14 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 5 |
| Total May. 1-31 ‘07 | 53 | 7 | 0 | 8 | 81 | 96 |
| Total June. 1-30 ‘07 | 27 | 27 | 21 | 5 | 6 | 59 |
| Total July. 1-31 ‘07 | 28 | 6 | 9 | 2 | 24 | 41 |
| Total Aug . 1-31 ‘07 | 50 | 70 | 58 | 0 | 0 | 128 |
| Total Sept . 1-30 ‘07 | 30 | 7 | 5 | 1 | 24 | 37 |
| Total Oct . 1-31 ‘07 | 37 | 2 | 4 | 0 | 16 | 22 |
| Total Nov. 1-30 ‘07 | 28 | 15 | 0 | 0 | 41 | 56 |
| Total Dec. 1-31 ‘07 | ||||||
|
TOTAL |
4,675 |
8,429 |
7,013 |
6,656 |
9,672 |
31,815 |
Palestine Red Crescent Society
Some examples of Palestinian civilians killed by illegal settlers:
Salman Yusef Salman a-Safdi
17 year-old resident of ‘Urif, Nablus district, killed on 26.10.2004 next to Yizhar, Nablus district, by gunfire. Additional information: Killed by a settler after he penetrated his house. He was not armed.
Sa’il Mustafa Ahmad Jabarah
46 year-old resident of Salem, Nablus district, killed on 27.09.2004 next to Salem, Nablus district, by gunfire. Additional information: Killed while driving his taxi, by a settler who wanted him to stop.
Hani Bani Maniya
22 year-old resident of ‘Aqraba, Nablus district, killed on 06.10.2002 in ‘Aqraba, Nablus district, by gunfire. Additional information: Shot and killed by settlers while harvesting his olives
Farid Mussa ‘Issa Nesasreh
28 year-old resident of Beit Furik, Nablus district, killed on 17.10.2000 in Beit Furik, Nablus district, by gunfire. Additional information: Killed by a settler from Itamar while harvesting olives near the settlement.
Some examples of Palestinians killed while waiting to cross checkpoints for medical reasons:
Amir Shaher ‘Abdallah al-Yazji
8 year-old resident of Gaza city, died on 19.11.2007 in Gaza city, following a delay in receiving medical care. Additional information: suffered from meningitis, and died after being refused, for more than a week, entry into Israel.
Mahmoud Kamal Kamel Abu Taha
23 year-old resident of Rafah, died on 28.10.2007 in Erez (Industrial Zone), North Gaza district, following a delay in receiving medical care. Additional information: Cancer patient dies after being delayed entry into Israel for 10 days even though he had a permit to pass.
Nimer Muhammad Salim Shuheibar
75 year-old resident of Gaza city, died on 23.10.2007 , North Gaza district, following a delay in receiving medical care. Additional information: He arrrived at the Erez checkpoint after having received a permit to enter Israel, but soldiers fired at the ambulance and ordered it to return to the hospital in Gaza. The following day, he returned to the checkpoint and was allowed to pass after waiting for more than two hours, but died when he got to the Israeli side.
Na’el ‘Abd a-Rahman Khamis al-Kurdi
21 year-old resident of Gaza city, died on 16.10.2007 in Gaza city, following a delay in receiving medical care. Additional information: a cancer patient, Israel refused to let him leave the Gaza Strip to obtain medical treatment
‘Aiseh ‘Ali Hassan ‘Absi
21 year-old resident of Qibya, Ramallah and al-Bira district, died on 22.05.2002 , Ramallah and al-Bira district, following a delay in receiving medical care. Additional information: A kidney patient, she was on her way to dialysis treatment. Soldiers at the checkpoint twice refused to let her cross; the second time, they fired a tear-gas canister at the car she was in. She died in the car.
|
Committed Suicide |
30 |
|
Illness |
14 |
|
Accidents |
26 |
|
Terror Incidents |
6 |
http://philistine.wordpress.com/2008/01/19/a-genocide-in-numbers/
The warmongers who got us into Iraq are blaming everyone but themselves for the humanitarian disaster they created.
Now I know what Hillary Clinton meant, first hand, by that “vast right-wing conspiracy.” When the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Sunday Times in London are going after you — along with about 100 right-wing bloggers — rest assured you’ve hit a nerve.
Or is it just Soros Derangement Syndrome at work?
More than two years ago, I commissioned a household survey of Iraq to learn how many people had died in the war. This topic had been virtually ignored by the news media and the U.S. government. It was important to know for at least three reasons. The first was to try to understand the nature of the violence there, which was steadily growing and creating a humanitarian crisis, possibly a regional conflagration. Second, it might tell us something about how and when to exit. Third, we needed to know for the sake of our national soul. What had we wrought?
So I contacted the people who had done a previous, largely ignored survey-top public health professionals at Johns Hopkins University. They had published a survey in October 2004 that showed 98,000 had died in the first 18 months of the war, which was greeted with disbelief and charges of politicizing science, and quickly dismissed.
I said: ‘do a bigger survey to improve the accuracy, and I will make sure it gets the proper attention in the news media.’ They did do a bigger survey, and I managed a public education campaign that permitted the results to be considered more broadly, results that estimated total deaths at 600,000 by violence after 40 months of war. The survey was published in The Lancet, the British medical journal. And get attention it did, roundly disbelieved and scorned by war supporters, but spurring a brief but intense debate about the human cost of the war.
Dozens of statisticians and other professionals scoured the study and its data to see if the methods and implementation were proper; a special committee at the World Health Organization was convened to review it, and the Lancet had also subjected it to rigorous peer review. The survey held up to this scrutiny, with quibbles and some lingering “should have done this” and “might have done that.” But virtually every competent person agreed that the study provided the best estimate we have.
Then, earlier this month, the National Journal, a Capitol Hill “insider” weekly, ran a cover story titled “Data Bomb” by Neil Munro and Carl Cannon. In a note by Munro published by the National Review blog, he asserts:
George Soros funded the survey. The U.S. authors played no role in data-collection, and did not apply standard anti-fraud measures. The chief Iraqi data-collector had earlier produced medical articles to help Saddam’s anti-sanctions campaign in the 1990s, and said Allah guided the prior 2004 Lancet/Johns Hopkins death-survey. Some of the field surveyors were employed by Moqtada Sadr’s Ministry of Health. The Iraqis’ numbers contain evidence of fakery, and the Lancet did not check for fakery.
It’s a neat summary of their allegations, which include dozens of unfounded charges, promiscuous innuendo, misquoting of the principals, and misunderstanding statistics, and relies on two disgruntled critics. It was a hatchet job, pure and simple. Not a sentence of Munro’s summary is truthful, and that goes for much of the NJ article, too, which I have demolished elsewhere (PDF). The principal author, Gilbert Burnham, M.D., Ph.D., and his colleagues have taken time from their clinics in Afghanistan and Jordan and Africa to answer the charges on the John Hopkins website, too ( with a letter here, and a FAQ here).
But lies have a way of proliferating on the Internet, and so it was with this set of schoolyard bully brickbats. What seemed most to get under the skin of the right-wing media was a small grant for public education funded by the Open Society Institute, a foundation created by George Soros.
The charges of fraud that NJ clumsily made but never came close to proving were of course a tonic to the war supporters who were shamed by the estimate of 600,000 fatalities. There is nothing as devastating to the increasingly discredited case for war as the specter of the U.S. invasion having caused, directly and indirectly, more deaths than were attributed to the bloody reign of Saddam Hussein.
But it was news that “Soros” was a donor, and the wingnuts went berserk. The line that Munro and Cannon took was that “Soros” was somehow behind the survey from the start, which was timed to affect the 2006 elections. It was not only fraud, they contend, but the perversion of science for political ends backed by the disgruntled, Bush-hating billionaire.
It’s classic right-wing defamation, and of course none of it is true. Munro and Cannon were painstakingly walked through the chronology and donors, but deliberately ignored it to fashion their paranoid fairy tale, and the Wall Street Journal et al lapped it up.
We commissioned the survey on October 25, 2005, hoping to get it done as quickly as it could be done professionally, and perhaps have the results out in the spring. Why wait? But Iraq quickly became too violent to permit teams of questioners go out to 1,000 randomly chosen households. So it was not until late spring that they did begin the door-to-door work-still very perilous-and completed the survey in early July. It took another two months to enter the data, have biostatisticians at Johns Hopkins analyze it, and write up the article. The Lancet then took weeks to peer review. It was released when ready. There was no political agenda; there didn’t need to be. The results spoke for themselves.
The Open Society Institute came late to the process, announcing to me that a grant had been made for public education on May 4, 2006. That is six and a half months after the survey process began. We had already paid for the survey out of internal funds. Less than half of the cash needs of the survey, the analysis, and the public education effort was paid for by OSI. (If the real cost of the effort were totaled-to include salaries of Burnham, myself, and many others who were not compensated directly-then the OSI contribution would have offset about 10 percent of the cost.) I doubt very much whether George Soros himself was ever aware of the grant. OSI is a very large, humanitarian foundation, and their $46,000 grant to MIT is small by their standards.
And, needless to say, OSI and “Soros” had no influence over the initiation, conduct, or findings of the survey. Neither Burnham and his colleagues nor the Lancet editors knew OSI was one of the donors. The contract was with MIT.
I carefully told this to Munro on the telephone, and Burnham’s colleague Les Roberts emailed the same information to Cannon last autumn. Munro had asked, among other hostile questions, whether any Muslims or Arabs were supporting the survey, a racism reflected in his remark about Allah above and a charge in the NJ piece that the survey teams lacked American oversight and were thereby suspect. But he was emotionally fixated on Soros, and asked about his role repeatedly. When I tried to offer corroborating evidence for the survey, he screamed at me that none of that mattered. I could see where this was going.
Of course, Munro himself has been a rabid supporter of the war from the start. In the tradition of former NJ editor Michael Kelly, who called opponents of the war traitors, Munro agitated for the “destruction of Iraq” as early as November 2001. He had elsewhere insisted that the peace in Northern Ireland was the result of the British Army’s iron fist. His sentiments were on display through the hatchet job on us, not least in alleging that The Lancet article was a spur to jihadists.
So the headlines-”Soros Underwrites Osama’s Talking Points,” and “$oros Iraq Death Claim was a Sham” are typical. The Soros Derangement Syndrome derives, I suspect, from his special status as a traitor to his class, as the right used to refer to FDR. Someone so intelligent, articulate, actively compassionate, and rich cannot be tolerated.
In an odd twist, a new mortality survey-approvingly mentioned by the NJ piece-appeared earlier this month in the New England Journal of Medicine. Conducted by the Iraqi Ministry of Health, it found 151,000 deaths by violence as of June 2006, about the same period as the Lancet article. Newspaper coverage duly noted that their estimate was only one-quarter that of the Lancet. But a little digging would have revealed much more: the total deaths attributable to the war, non-violent as well as violent, was about 400,000 for that period, now 19 months ago. If the same trends continued, that total today would be more than 600,000.
The deaths-by-violence in that latter survey remained the same from year-to-year, however, which is not plausible-all observers agree that violent deaths were rising sharply in 2005 and 2006. The discrepancy is found in how the survey was conducted: interviewers identified themselves as employees of the Ministry of Health, then under the control of Shiite cleric Moktada al Sadr. Those interviewed, therefore, would be wary of saying a brother or son or husband had been killed by violence, fearing retribution. And, indeed, there are non-violent categories in the survey that suggest just such equivocation: “Unintentional injuries” would equal about 40 percent of the death-by-violence toll, for example. Road accidents were ten times their pre-war totals-if someone is run off a highway by a U.S. convoy, is that a “non-violent” death?
The researchers, to their credit, acknowledge that their estimate is likely too low due to several factors. They did not go into dangerous neighborhoods, which made up 11 percent of the sample, and could not accurately estimate the death toll in those, which would of course have been high. Still, the survey is revealing on the non-violent mortality, too: deaths by kidney failure, cancer, diabetes, and others rose by several times, signaling the near-collapse of the health care system.
The MoH survey is the fifth trying to measure mortality during the war, and there is significant congruence among all. (The Lancet estimate is not actually the highest; that belongs to the private British polling firm, Opinion Research Business, which found that as of August 2007, 1.2 million Iraqis were dead due to the war.) But all the surveys point to one thing: a colossal amount of killing and dying has been going on, far more than numbers used in most discussions of the issue in the fleeting instances when concern for Iraqis appears.
And that, of course, should be the real issue here, not whether George Soros is interested in the issue. The NJ calumny and the many gleeful references to it are a sign that the pro-war legions are really at wit’s end. The catastrophe they created and supported must be blamed on others-the conveyors of bad news, the quisling liberals, and the Iraqis themselves.
But the dead in Iraq cannot be silenced as long as we have courageous researchers who will go into the warzone to gather data and tell us the truth. That’s what five surveys-against perilous of odds-have done, and the findings should haunt us every day.
A new study suggests that drinking two cups of coffee each day may significantly increase the risk of miscarriage in pregnant women.
American researchers who studied more than 1,000 pregnant women found those who drank two cups of regular coffee, or five 12-ounce cans of caffeinated soda daily had a two-fold higher risk of miscarriage compared with their counterparts who avoided caffeine altogether.
According to the study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, women who had a daily caffeine intake of less than 200 milligrams were at a 42 percent increased risk of losing their child.
The scientists said caffeine is an active substance which can go straight to the fetus and result in blood flow reduction.
Doctors suggest pregnant women or those who plan to become pregnant should stop drinking caffeine, at least in the first trimester when most miscarriages occur.
Israel has successfully launched a spy satellite which will be used to gather intelligence on Iran’s activities, a new report says.
The TECSAR satellite is particularly important for Israel since it can be used to ‘keep tabs on Iran’s nuclear program’, the report said citing unnamed Israeli officials.
The officials revealed that the TECSAR satellite operates with an enhanced footage technology, allowing it to transmit images regardless of daytime and weather conditions.
TESCAR is considered the Zionist regime’s most advanced satellite in orbit to date.
Israel has been backing the US efforts to isolate Iran and persuade the international community to intensify sanctions against the Islamic Republic over its nuclear standoff with the West.
Despite a report by US spy agencies last fall which conceded that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons, Washington and Tel Aviv accuse Tehran of pursuing a nuclear arms program.
Iran says its nuclear activities are within the framework of the regulations of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The CIA has revealed that cyber terrorists have left several cities outside the USA without power by hacking into power grids, demanding money in return for switching the lights back on. It would appear that the nightmare scenario envisaged in films like Die Hard 4 has now become a reality.
In a statement given to a major US security conference, CIA official Tom Donahue revealed that America’s security agency knew of a number of successful attacks on power grids outside the US that had resulted in blackouts and demands for money.
Donahue revealed how in at least one case the attacks had “caused a power outage affecting multiple cities”. The CIA has refused to name the cities or countries affected by the attacks, but confirmed that all the attacks had taken place through the internet.
According to the CIA statement, the hackers’ success in compromising infrastructure security systems may have been aided by insider knowledge, although they have no way of proving this. Although blackmail was certainly one factor no other motives were presented: “We do not know who executed these attacks or why, but all involved intrusions through the internet,” the statement read.
The statement has led to renewed calls for more attention to be focused on the security of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems that are used to manage many civic utilities and infrastructure. The vulnerability of SCADA systems has concerned IT security specialists for many years.
Although numerous checks and balances aimed at preventing wholesale meltdown are incorporated into most SCADA systems, the CIA’s evidence suggests that there are still ways to circumnavigate even the tightest security.
The Sunday Times has obtained a document that confirms that a file, which the FBI denied existed, could contain information about American officials stealing nuclear secrets for Turkish and Israeli spies, who would then sell the secrets to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
Earlier, FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, 37, approached the Times about “explosive” communications she discovered between high-up American officials and Turkish and Israeli spies. A FOIA request to the FBI, for case number 203A-WF-210023, was answered with a claim that the case number did not exist.
“I can tell you that that file and the operations it refers to did exist from 1996 to February 2002,” says Edmonds.
One high-ranking official, identified by RAW STORY’s Larisa Alexandrovna as Marc Grossman, Ambassador to Turkey from 1994 to 1997. Grossman is said to have warned his cohorts not to do business with Brewster Jennings, a front company set up by the CIA. Brewster Jennings was also the “employer” of CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose cover, with Grossman’s help, was blown in what is widely believed to be a political hit job by the Bush Administration on her husband, Ambassador and Iraq war critic Joseph C. Wilson.
The entire Sunday Times article can be read HERE. More information is also available at The BRAD BLOG.
The record of lost data of the past few years should be a warning to us all: our personal details are safe in nobody’s hands
Jackie Ashley
The Guardian
Here’s an easy question. What do the following have in common - people on housing benefit, people getting child benefit, people wanting to be RAF pilots or Royal Marines, people in hospital and people learning to drive? The answer is that they have all had their personal details lost through government incompetence. And here’s another question. With the national database for ID cards looming, just how much do you trust the government to keep your identity details safe?
News flies past our eyes so fast, in a blur of exclamation marks and excitement, it is often hard to keep track, to join the stories together. So it’s useful to go back and remember. In this case, we only need to go back to last year when the child benefit records for a mere 25 million people, including dates of birth, national insurance numbers and bank and building society details, were lost by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC). It happened in October, when a junior official sent the information on two CDs by the private courier TNT to the National Audit Office. They failed to arrive and have still not been found.You might think: well, a one-off, any organisation makes the odd mistake. As it happens, the HMRC had lost details of 15,000 people when they were sent to Standard Life the previous month. Also in September an HMRC laptop was lost with the details of 400 Isa holders on it. Remember that this is not just any government organisation, but the one meant to be trusted, holding the crown jewels of our financial lives. And there were other similar incidents, going back at least to 2005. Indeed, according to parliamentary answers HMRC had in the previous year been responsible for a modest 2,111 data-protection breaches.
Then in December it was revealed that more computer discs had gone missing, this time in transit between local authorities and the Department for Work and Pensions, involving the same courier. This time the number of personal details involved was unclear, but it was large. One council, Kirklees, lost CDs with 45,000 names of people claiming housing benefit. At about the same time, nine English NHS trusts admitted losing the records of hundreds of thousands of patients.
Next up, learner drivers. Ruth Kelly, the transport secretary, had to admit that the records of 3 million people who had sat driving tests from September 2004 to April 2007 had been lost from a hard disc in Iowa. Like the child benefit discs, the details had not been properly encrypted and, again, a “total error in procedure” was blamed.
This year has begun in the same vein. On Friday, hundreds of documents containing details of benefit claims, photocopies of passports and mortgage payments were found dumped at a roundabout near Exeter airport. And on the same day we learned about the loss of a Ministry of Defence laptop containing passport, national insurance and banking details of 600,000 people who had expressed some interest in joining the Royal Navy, Marines or RAF. There is talk of a court martial and Des Browne will be making a statement in the Commons today. But surely, after one ear-splitting, headline-grabbing warning after another, from different departments, month after month, there might be a bigger lesson here, one that goes beyond tightening this procedure or that, one rather larger in scope than internal inquiries or even prosecutions, can deal with?
Remember that this year the full national identity register, the essential core of a compulsory ID card scheme, will get properly started: from now, anyone aged over 16 applying for a passport has all their details, fingerprints, face or eye scans included, added to the register. Foreigners coming to work here get the first ID cards this year too, and although for the next two years people can opt out of having the cards, from 2010 anyone renewing or getting a passport will be included. The cards, and thus your involvement in the national identity register (which will be stored on three government databases) don’t become compulsory until after the next election - if Labour wins it. And nobody has told us if carrying the things will be compulsory too - though plenty of the arguments in favour of them fall if you don’t have to carry them.
Legally, this is all done and dusted. After five defeats in the Lords the parliamentary process is over, the scheme is taking shape, big IT contracts have been signed and the computer industry have been snarling at the Tories and Lib-Dems for threatening to ditch it. Ministers still think they are on to a winner.
Well, it seems to me that after the events of the past few months, they are wrong and that any voter who notices the news already knows what will happen. We know that millions of sensitive details will be lost. We know that material of huge use to criminals will be sent in the post, stolen, mislaid, dropped in car parks, will fall off the back of lorries and will be sent by accident to radio talkshow hosts. We know this because whatever the system, whatever the rules, from Tyne and Wear to Iowa City, they are operated by humans. And people get bored, tired, drunk, have bad days, think they’re about to be fired, are greedy and, in general, make mistakes.
The government is going to introduce a single system for all our identities. And I promise, you can’t trust it. First, it will leak like a battered old bucket. Oh yes, there will be ministerial statements. Apologies. Inquiries. Expensive new IT consultants will be brought in. Tough and unbreakable procedures will arrive. And still it will leak like a battered old bucket - except that it will be the most expensive battered old bucket in the history of the world, and we will keep pouring in money to the IT industry in the years to come.
Second, it will be riddled with errors. Great-grannies will be jumped on by armed police at Newcastle airport because of an administrative or human error. Identities will be confused. And third, whatever promises there are about keeping some things, health things, or criminal record things, off one database, these walls will be breached. There is always an emergency, a special case, on the way.
This is a fantasy of control. Whatever Des Browne says today, whatever promises he makes, however rare and unusual he says the loss of this laptop was, the truth is in the record. The national identity register will make us less safe, not more so. However late the hour, it should be scrapped.
