The Guardian is running a piece by Matthew Taylor today titled Web of hate.  The hate in question is of Marxists, and belongs to the “far right” hard men of Redwatch.

Taylor explains:-

The site, which has links with the neo-Nazi organisation Combat 18 and a host of European fascist organisations, is hosted in the US but registered and run from the UK. It lists the personal details and shows the photographs of anti-racists - many taken during protests against the British National Party - alongside the slogan: “Remember places, traitors’ faces, they’ll all pay for their crimes.”

... Redwatch was launched in 2001 and takes its name from a Combat 18 newsletter produced in London in the 1990s. For the first few years it was just another online talking shop for hardline racists and fascists, offensive and unpleasant but apparently not dangerous. However, in April 2003, those behind the site signalled that Redwatch meant business. Leeds school teachers Sally Kincaid and Steve Johnson had been involved in local campaigns against the BNP and other far-right groups for years. Then their personal details appeared on Redwatch following a demonstration they had attended in the Pudsey area of the city. A couple of weeks later they suffered a fire-bomb attack at their home, which left their car burned out.

The incident was a turning point. Those featured on Redwatch were no longer being subjected to threats and harassment but to physical attacks.

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I don’t care to nurse my politics all day long.  Nope, once or twice in my day some opportunity comes along that lifts the spirit a little.  Here’s a prime example, courtesy of NASA and Nature.com.  Not that NASA isn’t political, you understand.  Sending minority equal-people into space is nothing if not political.

But none of that Shuttle stuff comes into play with the pure research goals of the Mars Rover programme ...

What’s the Opportunity rover up to now?

Opportunity has just finished an epic voyage to the edge of Victoria crater and is taking a good look over the side.

It has taken 21 months to make the 9-kilometre journey – breakneck speed, according to project scientist Bruce Banerdt at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

What’s the Opportunity rover up to now?

Opportunity has just finished an epic voyage to the edge of Victoria crater and is taking a good look over the side.

It has taken 21 months to make the 9-kilometre journey – breakneck speed, according to project scientist Bruce Banerdt at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“It was a gamble to go to Victoria,” he says. It was so far away that Opportunity was quite likely to run out of steam before it got there. “We decided to drive as fast as we could.”

Why is this crater worth such a dash?

It’s big. It’s deep (70 metres). It’s wide (800 metres). Other craters investigated by Opportunity have been small fry in comparison. The depth of the cliffs means that more layers of rock are exposed and so a longer geological history can be probed than before. The bottom is at least a billion years old, say researchers.

The rover has ventured out on to a rocky point on the crater’s rim and now has a panoramic view of the nearest cliff face.

What is Opportunity looking for, specifically?

The rover has a number of instruments on board: a thermal emission spectrometer will probe the rock layers to discover their composition, an alpha-particle spectrometer will give information about the elements, and a Mössbauer spectrometer will work out the abundance and composition of any iron-bearing minerals. Opportunity doesn’t have a way to age the rock, although the deeper it gets the older it will be.

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My thanks to Bo Sears for unearthing this piece by James Petras, published last week at AxisOfLogic.  It lists eighteen ways, no less, to counter the Jewish Lobby, and in its conclusion is pretty upbeat - a novel discovery for some of us - about the prospects for success.

I recommend you to read the article in its entirety.  But here are those 18 points of action:-

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I am posting Martin Hutchinson’s latest Bear’s Lair piece, which addresses what, currently, is the hottest European potato: the conflict between the grand ambition of EU enlargement and the practical difficulties it poses.  It is dated today, 2nd October, and is published on the Prudent Bear website.

GW

The EU Tuesday finally agreed to admit Bulgaria and Romania on January 1, 2007, but expressed deep concern about the level of corruption in both countries. Is this a problem that affects only the countries concerned, or might it affect the EU economy as a whole, bringing it new diseconomies from EU enlargement?

The political arguments for and against EU expansion are clear.  On the one hand, the EU wants to take in its poorer neighbors, to include them in a greater European federation that can pull its weight in world affairs and produce prosperity for its people.  On the other hand, as the EU goes further East and South, it comes to countries which are either exceedingly poor (hence possibly a burden on EU social funds and other programs) or culturally sufficiently different from the European majority (for example, primarily Moslem) that their assimilation might prove difficult.  There is no hard dividing line – Bosnia is a Moslem country that is historically well within the European heartland, while Armenia is a Christian country whose history has little connection with Western Europe. Nevertheless it’s clear that politically, while the absorption of culturally close entities such as East Germany and Hungary was supported by the great majority of EU citizens, expansion beyond the European heartland poses progressively more difficult problems.

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The following letter was addressed to the head of MediaNews, the corporation that owns the San Jose Mercury News, the monopoly paper for the 10th largest city in the USA.

Bo

Dear Mr. Singleton,

We emailed preliminary objections to you on 9/27/06 about the use of an undocumented and unsubstantiated “bloody bits” anecdote passed off as true in a Richard Cohen column that veered sharply from being opinion into being an assertion of fact, and printed in the San Jose Mercury News on 9/26/06. We have now had an opportunity to read all the reviews, related literature, and the entire 512-page book that contains the single-sourced bloody bits anecdote, The Lost, published in AD 2006.

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It’s worth repeating here the metanews of Newsweek’s most recent cover as it appears around the world:

This one should get the BNP website guys scribbling.

Driving test fraud has surged to ‘terrifying’ levels, putting millions of innocent lives at risk, a Daily Mail investigation reveals

Fraudsters are ‘systematically targeting’ test centres in their thousands to obtain the driving licences, which allow them on the country’s roads unskilled and highly dangerous.

The highly-prized documents also unlock the door to thousands of pounds of Government benefits, credit cards and bank accounts.

Illegal immigrants and other criminals use easily-forged ID to book a test, then pay a lookalike up to £1,500 to pass for them. Experts say the driving licence they receive allows them to ‘wreak havoc’.

Home Office Minister Baroness Scotland [Editor’s tip: she’s not Scottish] said it was clear the public was being put at ‘substantial risk’.

The terrifying scam, which puts other motorists at enormous risk of injury or death, had been thought to be limited to a handful of cases.

But the Daily Mail has discovered that the shock case of a Somali bus driver this week convicted of helping 200 of his countryment to illegal driving licences is disturbingly common.

In the last year alone - an astonishing 4,830 practical tests had to be halted over doubts about the driver’s identity. A similar number of theory tests are also understood to have been halted - pushing the total towards 10,000.

Experts say even this is just the ‘tip of the iceberg’, with many more bogus drivers likely to have slipped through the net.

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David Cameron, the kinder, more caring, more middle-of-the-road and yet, crucially, more chic Blair, a Blair for all seasons and all men, and everything you can possibly think of if you are not actually a Tory ... yes, that David Cameron, the unknowable one, has just gone even higher in the red-hot political-hip stakes.  That’s hipper than he was on his green, green bicyle.  Or when he signed up St Bob.  Superhip Dave has started two exciting video blogs.  If you can call watching him do the washing-up exciting.

But it is cool, isn’t it?  And, you know, warm at the same time.

So it is that the lead blog is an all about cool political me page.  Then there’s an other dudes I think are cool page for guesties.

John McCain is first up as a guestie - a shrewd move Washington-wise, as one expects from the manipulative, mysterious and vaguely unEnglish Steve Hilton.

Now, never let it be said that Big Dave and Little Steve aren’t willing to go where the bullets are flying.  Oh gosh, no.  They take comments - though you will have to register, and there’s a strong probability that certain questions will be adjudged much, much too uncool to get published.