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9. januar 2007
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Organic food has more to do with choosing an eco-lifestyle than safer or more healthy products, writes Rob Lyons.
A new book just published in the US, The Truth About Organic Foods provides a thorough examination of the evidence. The author, Alex Avery, shares Miliband’s conclusion that organic food is no healthier than ‘conventional’ food produced by industrial methods – and also argues that the claim of organic food to be better for the environment is suspect. As Avery, a trained plant physiologist and biologist now working for the Hudson Institute told me, nobody has been putting the other side of the story on organic: ‘The “organic utopian” myth has become a serious roadblock to agricultural progress and I knew that some of the organic food industry’s main claims were simply smoke and mirrors and religious dogma.’
Read the whole article.
Link via Bjørn Stærk's sidebar.
8:15:05 PM 
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ETA admits responsibility for the Madrid airport bombing:
The Basque separatist group Eta has formally acknowledged it carried out a bomb attack that killed two people at Madrid airport last week.
However the statement by the group also said that the "permanent ceasefire" announced in March remained in effect.
Obviously, they have learned the definition of "ceasefire" from Hamas.
8:08:23 PM
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A US Air Force gunship has attacked fleeing al-Qaeda operatives in Somalia, CBS reports.
A U.S. Air Force gunship has conducted a strike against suspected members of al Qaeda in Somalia, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports exclusively.
The targets included the senior al Qaeda leader in East Africa and an al Qaeda operative wanted for his involvement in the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in Africa, Martin reports. Those terror attacks killed more than 200 people.
The AC-130 gunship is capable of firing thousands of rounds per second, and sources say a lot of bodies were seen on the ground after the strike, but there is as yet, no confirmation of the identities.
The al-Qaeda terrorists were forced to flee Mogadishu after Ethiopian forces took the city, allowing US drones to track them. An AC-130 was dispatched from its base in Djibouti.
Update: There are reports of more attacks by US aircraft, this time by two helicopters near Afmadow.
Helicopter gunships attacked suspected al-Qaida fighters in the south Tuesday after U.S. forces staged airstrikes in the first offensive in the African country since 18 American soldiers were killed there in 1993, witnesses said.
Witnesses say 31 civilians were killed. It is not fully confirmed that the helicopter attack was from the US as opposed to Ethiopian forces.
3:47:19 AM
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Just this month, one of the greatest finds from the viking age is just being unearthed in western Norway.
In one of the graves, belonging to a woman, archaeologists found jewellery, many pearls, glass beads, scissors, a knife and other household utensils.
"The size, quality and design of the jewellery is highly unusual," said archaeologist Olle Hemdorff. "She took with her many things."
The archaeologists from the Archaeological Museum in Stavanger found traces from Viking times just a half-meter below the surface at their excavation site at Frøyland. They've found a woman's grave, a man's grave and a child's grave, which they haven't yet examined.
It's believed that two more graves are lying in the vicinity.
More than 50 items from the grave, found just after New Year, have been transported to the museum, including a large bronze buckle engraved with bear heads and ducks.
 The site at Frøyland in Rogaland, western Norway (map) is obviously a family burial site for one of the leading and richest families in the region. Both the man's and the woman's graves contained boats, about 23 feet long, of which it appears only the nails were properly preserved. The well-preserved Oseberg (picture) and Gokstad ships have long been exhibited in the viking museums in Oslo.
The archaeological finds from this exciting era have been rich, and are getting even better with this find. However, it is an unfortunate fact that the viking societies did not have writing. The famous rune script was at that time exclusively used for religious symbolism, not for recording any ideas or history.
A big thanks goes to our relatives on Iceland, without whom the entire history of Norway and Denmark for this era would only be known through artifacts and our enemies' rather nervous recollections. On Iceland, having one of the richest literary traditions in the world, especially for its size, saga writers like Snorri Sturluson carefully wrote down and preserved, with great literary talent, centuries-long traditions, epic poetry, stories and religious beliefs that would otherwise have been lost. The Icelanders went against the European tradition of utterly destroying all traces of pre-Christian history, and made it possible for us to make sense of this rather unlikely era, when the sparsely populated communities in Norway, Sweden and Denmark dominated developments in almost the entire Europe for several centuries.
Thanks to these traditions, finds like the one in Frøyland can be put into a good historical context.
1:22:50 AM
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After a lot of back and forth, German prosecutors have secured a conviction of Hamburg cell member Mounir el Motassadeq.
A court in Hamburg on Monday sentenced Mounir el Motassadeq, a Moroccan friend of the Sept. 11, 2001 hijackers who is convicted for being an accessory to mass murder, to 15 years in prison.
A Hamburg court on Monday handed Mounir el Motassadeq the maximum 15-year sentence for his role in aiding the hijackers who killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.
Prosecutor Walter Hemberger said Monday that Motassadeq, who was friendly with three of the suicide attackers when they were students in the northern German city of Hamburg, deserved the toughest sentence possible under German law because he had committed "an immense wrong."
It is unlikely that Motassadeq personally knew precisely what terrorist attack the 19 were planning. However, if it is proven he was involved in financing an organisation that has a long reputation for mass murder and terrorist activities, that is sufficient for a tough sentence.
Only Motassadeq and Zacarias Moussaoui have been sentenced related to the 9-11 attacks.
12:37:04 AM
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© Copyright 2007 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.02.2007; 06:22:06.
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