Auffallend ist, dass OBL sich in dem Video vorwiegend an westliche Zielgruppen richtet. Offenbar versucht er auf diese Weise, den politischen Druck auf die amerikanische Regierung zu verstärken. Er folgt damit einer Strategie, die bereits von der FLN gegen Frankreich im Algerienkrieg und von Nordkorea und dem Vietkong gegen die USA verfolgt wurde. In beiden Fällen setzten sich die Akteure nicht militärisch durch, sondern erlangten durch erfolgreiche Einflussnahme auf die Wahrnehmung gegnerischer Bevölkerungen einen politischen Sieg. [...]

Bin Laden verwendet Themen der politischen Linken westlicher Staaten. Er verurteilt die Globalisierung, Armut in Afrika und den “globalen Kapitalismus”. Die Politik der USA werde durch internationale Konzerne geprägt. Die USA seien keine Demokratie, sondern würden durch das Kapital beherrscht. Der Kapitalismus sei die Ursache von Krieg. OBL knüpft hier unmittelbar an den Diskurs von Teilen der politischen Linken an, welche hinter den Interventionen im Irak und Afghanistan vorwiegend wirtschaftliche Motive …

Just as we begin to see the colossal price we are being asked to pay for measures to combat climate change, ever more of the evidence adduced to support the global warming scare crumbles away.

A key article of faith for the “warmists” is a supposed increase in the incidence of extreme weather events, such as droughts. As Al Gore claimed to a US Senate committee in March, “droughts are becoming longer and more intense”.

But US researchers, led by Gemma Narisma, have now shown that, far from becoming more frequent in recent decades, serious droughts have in fact become rarer than they were a century ago.

In a paper (reported on the website CO2Science.org) they identified the 30 most “severe and persistent” drought episodes of the 20th century.

Seven of these occurred before 1920, seven between 1921 and 1940 and eight …

Ein Leser fragt:

this is really what we wanted to see. osama as avantgarde of the western left.

will we see oskar lafontaine visiting not ahmedineschad but bin laden ?
will osama get a honour membership by the club of rome ?
will attac get the missing k from heaven ?
will greenpeace get a real green flag ?
what does osama think about smoking in public ???

we dont mind national socialists, as long as they are international socialists, who believe in some kind of paradise ...

this is so terrible ugly and funny at the same time, so pls dont stop covering this ...

The U.S. authorities have analyzed the new video from Prof Osama bin Laden. The video looks authentic and new - bin Laden refers to Gordon Brown as well as Nicolas Sarkozy as leaders. He looks younger - no gray hair anymore.

The Times of India explain that he doesn’t sound as an evil terrorist but rather as a generic peaceful left-wing professor who hates the corporations and capitalism. You might say, Prof Osama bin Laden is just another Prof Noam Chomsky. In fact, this is more than just an analogy. Prof Osama bin Laden explicitly endorses his counterpart from MIT:

“Among the most capable of those from your side who speak to you on this topic (the war in Iraq) and on the manufacturing of public opinion is Noam Chomsky, who spoke sober words of advice prior to the war. But the leader of Texas doesn’t …

China’s environmental problems are mounting. Water pollution and water scarcity are burdening the economy, rising levels of air pollution are endangering the health of millions of Chinese, and much of the country’s land is rapidly turning into desert. China has become a world leader in air and water pollution and land degradation and a top contributor to some of the world’s most vexing global environmental problems, such as the illegal timber trade, marine pollution, and climate change. As China’s pollution woes increase, so, too, do the risks to its economy, public health, social stability, and international reputation. As Pan Yue, a vice minister of China’s State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), warned in 2005, “The [economic] miracle will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace.” [...]

China’s Ministry of Public Health is also sounding the alarm with increasing urgency. In a survey of 30 cities and …

After decades of research and a plethora of seemingly infinite numbers of dead-end leads, scientists have finally discovered the cause of the biggest Public Health scourge of our time - Obesity. And what is that cause? Well, it is not lack of exercise, it is not what we are eating, and it is certainly not what is passed on through our genes. No, according to research recently published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, the cause of obesity is...fat people. You heard me correctly. The obesity epidemic is caused by - just what you might expect - fat people passing on their fatness to other people and making them fat.

In an amazing stretch of what can possibly be considered serious research, scientists from Harvard Medical School and the University of California dredged up and performed high-tech magic on some almost 40 year old data from …

Worldwide, in 1996 agriculture employed 42%, industry 21%, and services 37%. In 2006, the numbers are 36%, 22%, and 42%. So in the period, the service sector has overtaken farming on a global scale.

To me this stuck out as the news of the day. This is a huge milestone. In the west we’re accustomed to the farming sector being 4-6% or so, but that certainly has not been true in most of the word. You might think the industrial revolution was a long time ago, but the reality is that farming has remained the center of the overall human condition. Until sometime in these past few years, that is.

And thus passes a tremendous milestone in the history of our species. Farming, invented around 8000 BC, quickly dominated human activity and has continued to for some 10,000 years. And we even find that the agriculture->industry->services …

BBC Trust: From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel: Safeguarding Impartiality in the 21st Century, June 2007

Climate change is another subject where dissenters can be unpopular. There may be now a broad scientific consensus that climate change is definitely happening, and that it is at least predominantly man-made. But the second part of that consensus still has some intelligent and articulate opponents, even if a small minority.

Jana Bennett, Director of Television, argued at the seminar that ‘as journalists, we have the duty to understand where the weight of the evidence has got to. And that is an incredibly important thing in terms of public understanding - equipping citizens, informing the public as to what’s going to happen or not happen possibly over the next couple of hundred years.’

Roger Mosey, Director of Sport, said that in his former job as head of TV News, …