AFP/File – A woman teaches maths in Ouagadougou. A 16-year-old Iraqi immigrant living in Sweden has cracked a maths …

STOCKHOLM (AFP) – A 16-year-old Iraqi immigrant living in Sweden has cracked a maths puzzle that has stumped experts for more than 300 years, Swedish media reported on Thursday.

In just four months, Mohamed Altoumaimi has found a formula to explain and simplify the so-called Bernoulli numbers, a sequence of calculations named after the 17th century Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli, the Dagens Nyheter daily said.

Altoumaimi, who came to Sweden six years ago, said teachers at his high school in Falun, central Sweden were not convinced about his work at first.

"When I first showed it to my teachers, none of them thought the formula I had written down really worked," Altoumaimi told the Falu Kuriren newspaper.

He then got in touch with professors at Uppsala University, one of Sweden's top institutions, to ask them to check his work.

After going through his notebooks, the professors found his work was indeed correct and offered him a place in Uppsala.

But for now, Altoumaimi is focusing on his school studies and plans to take summer classes in advanced mathematics and physics this year.

"I wanted to be a researcher in physics or mathematics; I really like those subjects. But I have to improve in English and social sciences," he told the Falu Kuriren.

All i can say it OOOOOWWWWWWCHHHHH!



Wushu trainer Rahman Aqeel instructs students during Chinese wushu martial arts practice at St. Maaz high school, in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad July 8, 2008. Girls from ages 10 to 16 participate in weekly sessions during school term.



Muslim schoolgirls from St. Maaz high school practise Chinese wushu martial arts inside the school compound in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad July 8, 2008.

Marcy Newman, body on the line

zionist entity court order shutting down pal fest at al hakawati May 29, 2009 israeli terrorist forces invade al hakawati i went to the last night of the palestine festival of literature expecting that it would be shut down yet again. a friend of mine in the old city had bumped into one of the actors in al hakawati (the palestinian national theatre) and she told him that they were already planning to move it somewhere else. but when i went there to meet him everything was getting set up so it seemed that this was just a rumor. i arrived an hour early because my friends are in a book discussion group every thursday night so i went to join them as i sometimes do. but five minutes after they got started israeli terrorist soldiers invaded al hakawati. they came in and posted a court order in hebrew and arabic on the door and asked everyone to leave the theatre. my friends decided they would carry on their book discussion group in the courtyard so they sat down outside on theatre grounds. then they were told they also were not allowed to be there. none of the palfest people were there at the time. but the british counselor richard makepeace was there and he changed the location to the british council office down the street. once again literature is rendered illegal in palestine. below are my photographs from the invasion of al hakawati as well as video from palfest and audio of the beautiful and amazing poems read by nathalie handal and suheir hammad. here is the pal fest video of the theatre being shut down with the makepeace:   and here is another palfest video from the previous day when they went to khalil, which gives you a good sense of the zionist colonization and theft project in that palestinian city:   More..........................................

by Jack A. Smith / May 27th, 2009

When the U.S. and its principal ally Great Britain invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, in 2001 and 2003 respectively, both President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair believed they were fulfilling “God’s Will.”

This has been rumored for years after fundamentalist Bush was quoted six years ago as saying that he launched the invasions because he was “on a mission from God.” But new evidence establishes both former leaders were convinced that the Christian deity supported their attacks on the two Islamic countries.

Former French Premier Jacques Chirac, in a book published in March, revealed that Bush said he was fulfilling Biblical prophesy in starting each of his unjust, illegal wars. In late May, John Burton, one of Blair’s closest political associates for a quarter-century and often described as his mentor, told the press that the British leader’s support of the wars was “all part of the Christian battle; good should triumph over evil.”

An account of Bush’s religious motivations appeared May 24 in CounterPunch under the byline of Clive Hamilton, a visiting professor at Yale.

“In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France’s President Jacques Chirac,” Hamilton wrote. “Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated. In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped.

“The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy: ‘And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.’”

“Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac: ‘This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.’”                                                     More..............................

An Interview With Saadia Toor

by Ashley Smith / May 28th, 2009

More than 1 million people have fled the Swat region of Pakistan in one of the worst humanitarian crises since the slaughter in Rwanda during the mid-1990s.

The refugees from Swat — in the north of Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border — are victims of a Pakistani Army offensive, backed by the U.S., against forces of the Taliban, which operate in both countries. Under pressure from the U.S., the Pakistani military broke a ceasefire arrangement with the Taliban and is carrying out a scorched-earth assault — with the excuse that this is the only way to flush out Taliban fighters. But the civilian population is paying a terrible price.

The nightmarish scene in Swat and other areas in the north marks the latest stage of Pakistan’s crisis, brought to a boil by the U.S. escalation of its war in Afghanistan, which is spilling across the border. But it also a sign of the deepening contradictions of Pakistani politics following the downfall of the U.S.-backed strongman, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, last year amid growing unrest.

Musharraf was replaced by Asif Ali Zardari, the husband of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party. But Zardari, who has a long record of corruption, has quickly lost credibility. He only reinstated Pakistan’s Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry — whose ouster by Musharraf spurred a mass movement spearheaded by lawyers — after huge protests in March forced his hand. Now, with the attacks in Swat, the Pakistani military is regaining the initiative.

Saadia Toor, an assistant professor of Anthropology and Social Work at Staten Island College and part of the group Action for a Progressive Pakistan, talked to Ashley Smith about the situation in Pakistan today.

Ashley Smith: For last few weeks, the media have been filled with reports of the “imminent threat of the Taliban,” and then coverage of Pakistani military assault on the Taliban in Swat. Why has the Pakistani military abandoned the former peace and launched this attack?

Saadia Toor: Finally, we’re beginning to see a lot of good analysis coming out of the left media. Earlier, the U.S. government’s rhetoric was being picked up uncritically. We’ve seen scaremongering in the media over the imminent takeover of Pakistani nukes by the Taliban.

The U.S. has created this bizarre new moniker “Af/Pak” as a way to cover over their expansion of the war from Afghanistan into Pakistan. Building consent for this expansion has been what all the State Department, Pentagon and media propaganda has been about in the last few weeks.                                 More.........................

by Mike Whitney / May 28th, 2009

Collapsing home prices and credit markets continue to put downward pressure on consumer spending, forcing the Federal Reserve to take even more radical action to revive the economy. Last week, Fed chief Ben Bernanke raised the prospect of further monetizing the debt by purchasing more than the $1.75 trillion of Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities (MBS) already committed. The announcement sent shockwaves through the currency markets where skittish traders have joined doomsayers in predicting tough times ahead for the dollar. Foreign central banks have been gobbling up US debt at an impressive pace, adding another $60 billion in the last three weeks alone. That’s more than enough to cover the current account deficit and put the greenback on solid ground for the time-being. But with fiscal deficits ballooning to $3 trillion in the next year alone, dwindling foreign investment won’t be enough to keep the dollar afloat. Bernanke will be forced to either raise interest rates or let the dollar fall hard.

Export-led nations are looking for an edge to revive flagging sales by keeping their currencies undervalued. But the strong dollar is making it harder for Bernanke to engineer a recovery. He’d like nothing more than to see the dollar tumble and reset at a lower rate. That would reduce the debt-load for homeowners and businesses and send consumers racing back to the shopping malls and auto showrooms. Perception management is a big part of stimulating the economy. That’s why the financial media has been air-brushing articles that focus on deflation and shifting the attention to inflation. It’s an effort to kick start consumer spending by convincing people that their money will be worth less in the future. But deflation is still enemy number one. Rising unemployment, crashing home prices, vanishing equity and tighter credit; these are all signs of entrenched deflation.                          More.....................

Tony Blair viewed his decision to go to war in Iraq and Kosovo as part of a "Christian battle", according to one of his closest political allies.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair poses with soldiers of the Parachute Regiment in Basra, Iraq, 2005 Photo: AP

The former Prime Minister's faith is claimed to have influenced all his key policy decisions and to have given him an unshakeable conviction that he was right.

John Burton, Mr Blair's political agent in his Sedgefield constituency for 24 years, says that Labour's most successful ever leader – in terms of elections won – was driven by the belief that "good should triumph over evil".

"It's very simple to explain the idea of Blair the Warrior," he says. "It was part of Tony living out his faith."

Mr Blair has previously admitted that he was influenced by his Christian faith, but Mr Burton reveals for the first time the strength of his religious zeal.

Mr Burton makes the comments in a book he has written, and which is published this week, called "We Don't Do God".

In it he portrays a prime minister determined to follow a Christian agenda despite attempts to silence him from talking about his faith.

"While he was at Number 10, Tony was virtually gagged on the whole question of religion," says Mr Burton.

"Alastair [Campbell] was convinced it would get him into trouble with the voters.

"But Tony's Christian faith is part of him, down to his cotton socks. He believed strongly at the time, that intervention in Kosovo, Sierra Leone – Iraq too – was all part of the Christian battle; good should triumph over evil, making lives better."                                        More........................................

By Clive Anderson, CounterPunch. Posted May 25, 2009.

The answer may lie in an alarming story about George Bush's Christian millenarian beliefs that has yet to come to light.

In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France's President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.

In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:

"And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them."

Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:

"This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins".

The story of the conversation emerged only because the Elyse Palace, baffled by Bush's words, sought advice from Thomas Romer, a professor of theology at the University of Lausanne. Four years later, Romer gave an account in the September 2007 issue of the university's review, Allez savoir. The article apparently went unnoticed, although it was referred to in a French newspaper.

Last week, four men from Newburgh, New York were arrested in what the FBI says was a plot to bomb two synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down military planes with Stinger missiles. The Muslim men had planted the bombs outside the Riverdale Temple and the Riverdale Jewish Center, but didn’t know that they were fake explosives given to them by an FBI informant.

Some are claiming that this “foiled plot” is another example of why we need surveillance and warrantless wiretaps to "protect" us from terrorist attacks and a supposed reminder of the constant “threat” that terrorism continues to pose. Here’s Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, doing his best to scare every New Yorker he can:

‘This latest attempt to attack our freedoms shows that the homeland security threats against New York City are sadly all too real and underscores why we must remain vigilant in our efforts to prevent terrorism,’ Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said in a statement.

Bloomberg also awarded honorary certificates to more than 100 officers from the FBI, NYPD, and state police just two days after.

What is most interesting about this is not that we were protected from a supposed terrorist attack, but that the whole “plot” was invented by an FBI informant:

The defendants, in their efforts to acquire weapons, dealt with an informant acting under law enforcement supervision, authorities said. The FBI and other agencies monitored the men and provided an inactive missile and inert C-4 to the informant for the defendants, a federal complaint said.

In June 2008, the informant met Cromitie in Newburgh and Cromitie complained that his parents had lived in Afghanistan and he was upset about the war there and that many Muslim people were being killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan by U.S. military forces, officials said.

Did you catch the last sentence? He was upset that his fellow Muslims was being mercilessly bombed, and when tricked into retaliating, he and his three accomplices were arrested. They did not “hate our liberties,” as nearly every media mouthpiece recites ad nauseum, they hated the fact the U.S. is brutally occupying and pummeling two-and-a-half Muslim countries. This is just another example of how our global empire*, with over 800 bases in over 120 countries with soldiers ready to be deployed, creates a lot of backlash, and in the Middle Eastern world, this means terrorism.

 Switzerland, New Zealand, Costa Rica and many others are all countries that are far freer than us and do not feel the sting of terrorism because they mind their own business, engage in free trade (we should end the impoverishment embargo of Cuba, but that’s a subject for another day), and don’t meddle militarily in other countries.          

 More....................................

Unlike her cosmopolitan brothers and sisters who spread Zionism and tribal racism using a liberal and progressive disguise, Melanie Philips is open about it all.  The other day she defined what Zionism is in a very clear manner:

“Zionism,” writes Philips, “is simply the movement for the self-determination of the Jewish people. And its significance is greater than any other movement of national liberation because Judaism itself rests upon three legs — the people, the religion and the land. If one is lopped off by having its legitimacy denied, the whole thing collapses. That is why anti-Zionism is far more than an unpleasant political position. It is a direct attack on Judaism itself.”

Philips doesn’t leave much room for speculation. For her, not only is Zionism a legitimate national movement, ‘its significance is greater than any other movement’ because it rests upon ‘three legs’. Thinking about it for a second, it is indeed significant for something to rest upon three legs, I myself rest upon just two legs and a bit.  Occasionally when I stand naked in front of the mirror I wish I were Zionism.

As Philips maintains, Zionism is indeed an amalgam of three Jewish ingredients: the people, the land and the religion. It is this very composition that makes Zionism into an epic victorious narrative. It is this very mixture that made Zionism into the 20th century collective symbolic identifier of the Jewish people. It is Zionism that has managed to reinvent the Jewish people as a nation with a lucid ideological, spiritual and geographical aspiration.  Yet, as much as Zionism makes a lot of sense to very many Jews around the world, it makes less and less sense for those who fail to be chosen i.e., the rest of humanity. The reason is simple, Jews may be welcomed to celebrate their symptoms collectively but they are not exactly entitled to do so at the expense of anyone else.

Zionism has managed to interpret Judaism as a brutal license to plunder and kill. It transformed a spiritual text into a land registry.  It primarily invented the Jews as nation.  It then set for the newly born nation a task of immoral geographical aspiration with some devastating racist colonial implications.

One may wonder, how did Zionism managed to be so successful, how did it manage to get away with murder, and how has it done so for so long? At the end of the day, the lethal mixture of ‘land’-‘religion’-‘people’ stands in complete opposition to the post-war Western cultural and political narrative (cosmopolitan / multi-cultural / multi-faith / open borders).

I tend to believe that Philips’ equation Zionism = Judaism is the most effective Zionist tactic of them all. It leads towards a severe paralysis of most humanist opposition of Zionism. The reason is obvious, ordinary ethical beings do not know how to comb the knots out of this shattering formula that leads them to criticism of a religious belief system.

In fact one way around it is to dispute Philips’ equation. Zionism doesn’t equal Judaism. Zionism is a mere radical narrow interpretation of Judaism. It takes the biblical plunderous narrative and turns it into a daily practice. It takes the Judaic moral notion of chosenness and turns it into crude supremacist agenda.  Rather than Judaism, Zionism is in fact the true genuine face of Jewish ideology.  It is racist, it is chauvinist, it is seeking power; but it is different from Judaism, for Judaism is centred around the fear of God and Zionism is totally fearless.  Accordingly, It will be right to argue that to oppose Zionism is to oppose Jewish ideology or what I myself define as ‘Jewishness’.                             More.............................

Ma'an News

Washington's Blog

by Jaisal Noor / May 19th, 2009

Einstein on Zionism and Israel: His Provocative Ideas About the Middle East
By Fred Jerome
Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press (May 2009)
ISBN-10: 0-312-36228-5
ISBN-13: 9780312362287

Countless books and articles have been written about the life of the great physicist and thinker Albert Einstein, and since his death in 1955, a near consensus has existed that Einstein was a staunch supporter of the state of Israel.

Veteran journalist Fred Jerome uses hundreds of pages of Einstein’s own letters, articles and interviews — many published for the first time — to refute this thesis.

It is well known that Einstein, a German Jew, witnessed European anti-Semitism firsthand and spoke out against both prejudice and Nazism. These experiences convinced Einstein to support Zionism and a Jewish homeland. After gaining immense fame for his scientific breakthroughs, he was offered the presidency of Israel in 1952 after the death of the country’s first president, Chaim Weizmann.

In reality, while Einstein was sympathetic to the Zionist cause, he repeatedly warned that a “narrow nationalism” may arise if a Jewish-only state was founded and peaceful co-existence with the Palestinians was not achieved. Instead, Einstein advocated Cultural Zionism — the creation of Jewish cultural and educational centers within a bi-national state with equal rights for both Arabs and Jews.                                             More.................................

UN Torture Watchdog Demands Access

by Jonathan Cook / May 19th, 2009

Nazareth — The United Nation’s watchdog on torture has criticized Israel for refusing to allow inspections at a secret prison, dubbed by critics as “Israel’s Guantanamo Bay,” and demanded to know if more such clandestine detention camps are operating.

In a report published on Friday, the Committee Against Torture requested that Israel identify the location of the camp, officially referred to as “Facility 1391,” and allow access to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Findings from Israeli human rights groups show that the prison has in the past been used to hold Arab and Muslim prisoners, including Palestinians, and that routine torture and physical abuse were carried out by interrogators.

The UN committee’s panel of 10 independent experts also found credible the submissions from Israeli groups that Palestinian detainees are systematically tortured despite the banning of such practices by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1999.

The existence of Facility 1391 came to light in 2002, when Palestinians were detained there for the first time during Israel’s reinvasion of the West Bank.

In a submission to the UN committee, Israel denied that any prisoners are currently being held at the site, although it admits that several Lebanese were detained there during the attack on Lebanon in 2006.

The committee expressed concern about an Israeli Supreme Court ruling in 2005 that found it “reasonable” for the state not to investigate suspicions of torture at the prison. The panel is believed to be concerned that without inspections the prison might still be in use or could be revived at short notice.                  More.........................

Things go missing. It's to be expected. Even at the Pentagon. Last October, the Pentagon's inspector general reported that the military's accountants had misplaced a destroyer, several tanks and armored personnel carriers, hundreds of machine guns, rounds of ammo, grenade launchers and some surface-to-air missiles. In all, nearly $8 billion in weapons were AWOL.

Those anomalies are bad enough. But what's truly chilling is the fact that the Pentagon has lost track of the mother of all weapons, a hydrogen bomb. The thermonuclear weapon, designed to incinerate Moscow, has been sitting somewhere off the coast of Savannah, Georgia for the past 40 years. The Air Force has gone to greater lengths to conceal the mishap than to locate the bomb and secure it.

On the night of February 5, 1958 a B-47 Stratojet bomber carrying a hydrogen bomb on a night training flight off the Georgia coast collided with an F-86 Saberjet fighter at 36,000 feet. The collision destroyed the fighter and severely damaged a wing of the bomber, leaving one of its engines partially dislodged. The bomber's pilot, Maj. Howard Richardson, was instructed to jettison the H-bomb before attempting a landing. Richardson dropped the bomb into the shallow waters of Warsaw Sound, near the mouth of the Savannah River, a few miles from the city of Tybee Island, where he believed the bomb would be swiftly recovered.                                               More.............................