Several letter writers to the Star pointed out that his figures were as far off as King George's.
It's becoming increasingly frustrating to witness the gloating that too many Canadians are enjoying as a result of our non-official participation in the war and ongoing crisis in Iraq. In a less than complimentary association with Winston Churchill — at least for Churchill — our recently departed prime minister Jean Chrétien has even referred to his belated decision not to participate in the war as his, "finest hour."Support for the war's objectives has emerged in the current election campaign as a misguided weapon to unfairly defame such disparate candidates as Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff.
Since the allied invasion in March of 2003 almost three years ago, 30,000 Iraqis have perished as a result of the war.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: How many Iraqi citizens have died in this war? I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis. We have lost about 2,140 of our own troops in Iraq.
Impeach Blair on Iraq, says generalTags
· PM misled public, says UN Bosnia commander
· Invasion 'a blunder of enormous significance'
A former general has called for impeachment proceedings against Tony Blair, accusing the prime minister of misleading parliament and the public over the invasion of Iraq.General Sir Michael Rose, commander of UN forces in Bosnia in 1994, writes in today's Guardian: "The impeachment of Mr Blair is now something I believe must happen if we are to rekindle interest in the democratic process in this country once again". Britain was led into war on false pretences, he says. "It was a war that was to unleash untold suffering on the Iraqi people and cause grave damage to the west's prospects in the wider war against global terror."
General Sir Michael Walker, chief of defence staff, has said in public only that British military presence in Iraq was a "politically-charged issue" which has affected recruitment since people saw the armed forces as "guilty by association" with Mr Blair's decision to invade the country.
General Sir Mike Jackson, head of the army, has criticised US tactics in Iraq. British commanders were told by Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, chief of defence staff at the time of the invasion, to deal with Iraqi officers and Ba'athists to help maintain law and order. That order was rescinded in May 2003 on the instructions of US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Enough of his excuses: Blair must be impeached over Iraq
The only way parliament can regain the trust of disaffected voters is to admit that it was wrong to support the war
Michael Rose
Tuesday January 10, 2006
The Guardian
Wars are won when the people, government and army work together for a common cause in which they genuinely believe. Whereas the people may be initially uncertain about military intervention, politicians will often be the strongest advocates - blinded by the imperatives of their political views. It will invariably be military commanders who are most cautious about using force - for they understand better than most the consequences of engaging in war.Although in a true democracy they must remain subordinate to their political masters, they have a clear responsibility to point out when political strategies are flawed or inadequately resourced. Since they might also have to ask their soldiers to sacrifice their lives, they must be assured that a war is just, legal and the last resort available. Yet three years ago this country was somehow led by the prime minister into war in Iraq where few, if any, of these requirements were met.
Most importantly a clear justification for the war in Iraq was never sufficiently made by Tony Blair - for the intelligence he presented was always embarrassingly patchy and inconsistent. What is more, his unequivocal statement to the House of Commons that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that could be used within 45 minutes was made without being properly validated - for it was decided in Washington and London to launch the invasion of Iraq early, on the basis of the flimsy evidence available. This was done without asking the UN weapons inspectors, who were actually on the ground in Iraq, to investigate this allegation. Ultimately, as the inspectors suspected and as we now all know, it turned out that there were no such weapons. Britain had been led into war on false pretences. It was a war that was to unleash untold suffering on the Iraqi people and cause grave damage to the west's prospects in the wider war against global terror.
A study on female foeticide in India that has been published by renowned British medical journal, Lancet, states that since 1994, over 1 crore - 10 million - female foetuses have been aborted in the country.India's 'girl deficit' deepest among educatedIn 1994, India banned the use of technology to determine the sex of unborn children and the termination of pregnancies on the basis of gender.
However, research for the year 2001 showed that for every 1,000 male babies born in India, there were just 933 girls.
Leading campaigners say many of India's fertility clinics continue to offer a seemingly legitimate facade for a multi-billion pound racket and that gender determination is still big business in India.
The researchers said the "girl deficit" was more common among educated women but did not vary according to religion.
Experts in India say female foeticide is mostly linked to socio-economic factors.
It is an idea that many say carries over from the time India was a predominantly agrarian society where boys were considered an extra pair of hands on the farm.
The girl child has traditionally been considered inferior and a liability - a bride's dowry can cripple a poor family financially
India 'lost birth' study disputedBBC News
DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(06)67930-0
Low male-to-female sex ratio of children born in India: national survey of 1·1 million households
Summary
BackgroundFewer girls than boys are born in India. Various hypotheses have been proposed to explain this low sex ratio. Our aim was to ascertain the contribution of prenatal sex determination and selective abortion as measured by previous birth sex.
MethodsWe analysed data obtained for the Special Fertility and Mortality Survey undertaken in 1998. Ever-married women living in 1·1 million households in 6671 nationally-representative units were asked questions about their fertility history and children born in 1997.
FindingsFor the 133 738 births studied for 1997, the adjusted sex ratio for the second birth when the preceding child was a girl was 759 per 1000 males (99% CI 731–787). The adjusted sex ratio for the third child was 719 (675–762) if the previous two children were girls. By contrast, adjusted sex ratios for second or third births if the previous children were boys were about equal (1102 and 1176, respectively). Mothers with grade 10 or higher education had a significantly lower adjusted sex ratio (683, 610–756) than did illiterate mothers (869, 820–917). Stillbirths and neonatal deaths were more commonly male, and the numbers of stillbirths were fewer than the numbers of missing births, suggesting that female infanticide does not account for the difference.
InterpretationPrenatal sex determination followed by selective abortion of female fetuses is the most plausible explanation for the low sex ratio at birth in India. Women most clearly at risk are those who already have one or two female children. Based on conservative assumptions, the practice accounts for about 0·5 million missing female births yearly, translating over the past 2 decades into the abortion of some 10 million female fetuses.
Affiliations
a Centre for Global Health Research, St Michael's Hospital, and Department of Public Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
b School of Public Health, Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, India
Correspondence to: Dr Prabhat Jha, Centre for Global Health Research, St Michael's Hospital, University of Toronto, 70 Richmond Street East, 2nd Floor, Toronto, Ontario M5C 1N8, Canada
'Gender' - a new dangerous ideology
Sunday - Catholic Weekly, Poland -14 Dec 2005
... Shulamith Firestone in her book 'The Dialectic of Sex', published in 1970, modifying the idea of the class struggles, calls to sex-class revolution: 'In order ...
They claim that while other researchers have bred partly fluorescent pigs, theirs are the only pigs in the world which are green through and through.
The pigs are transgenic, created by adding genetic material from jellyfish into a normal pig embryo.
Stampede kills Mecca pilgrims by the hundreds
Interior Ministry spokesman Major-General Mansour al-Turki said the deaths occurred after some pilgrims began to trip over luggage that had spilled from a moving bus.
Backgrounder: Major lethal stampedes last yearCash and coupons lure 42 to death in Chennai
Funny that. Perhaps they should hire the Engineering Firm Bin Laden to solve the problem. Nope on second thought that may not be such a good idea. Mecca hostel collapse prompts rare media criticismHajj crowd-pressure must be eased to avoid tragedy
New Scientist But experts say the sheer scale of the stoning ritual makes it inherently dangerous. "There's a huge risk and potential for accidents whenever you have so many people in a tightly confined space," says Keith Still, an expert on crowd behaviour at UK company Crowd Dynamics. "There's a limit to what can be done."
In 1990, 1462 pilgrims were killed in a crush within a tunnel leading to the site and in 2004 another crush caused the death of 251 people. Similar accidents also occurred in 1997 and 1998.
Or is it just that the statist Saudi's with their army and police can't do the responsible thing and protect public safety, looking the other way at the exploitation of the pilgrims by their own profiteers. Ah say it ain't so.MECCA, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) - The death of 76 people in a Muslim pilgrims' hostel in Mecca before the annual haj prompted a rare flurry of media criticism of Saudi authorities on Saturday.
"Yet another building has collapsed, and with each one the bad management, bad supervision, and nonchalance of the concerned authorities are revealed," columnist Abdul-Rahman Al-Rashed wrote in the main Saudi daily Ashraq al-Awsat.
An Interior Ministry official, who said it was still not clear what caused the collapse, told journalists the hostel had been licensed by the Industry and Trade Ministry.
Still, a report in the daily al-Riyadh newspaper said: "The state is pumping millions into the haj and honest businessmen are sticking to rules, but some who look for quick gain embarrass the country before the international community."I think given the choice between the luggage is to blame and the Saudi's abidcate responsibilty while cashing in on pilgrams I will chose the latter.
