RUTHFULLY YOURS

In his State of the Union speech in 2002 President Bush, citing Iran, Iraq and North Korea, for building chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and building terrorist training camps:

“States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world”. I guess Carter was not fully convinced….rsk
K-School Professor Confronts Iran Pres. Carter says Ahmadinejad only interested in “the sound of his own voice”
By YELENA S. MIRONOVA, CONTRIBUTING WRITER September 27, 2006

President Bush avoided a face-to-face confrontation with Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the United Nations last week, but elsewhere on Manhattan, Kennedy School of Government professor Ashton B. Carter confronted the controversial Tehran chief head-on.

The encounter left some observers hopeful that the U.S. could strike up a dialogue with leader of a regime that admits it is pursuing a nuclear program. But for others, Ahmadinejad’s obstinance reinforced their impression that Iran isn’t willing to budge an inch on issues such as weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and human rights.

Ahmadinejad addressed two dozen members of the Council on Foreign Relations at a Manhattan hotel, according to the New York Times. Only four journalists—all of whom were members of the council—were let in.

Carter, a former assistant defense secretary under the Clinton administration and a member of the council, told The Crimson that the meeting addressed several issues, including “Ahmadinejad’s skepticism of the reality of the Holocaust, Iran’s nuclear programs, Lebanon and Iran’s support for Hezbollah, Iraq, and human rights.”

“It was my impression that Ahmadinejad was not very interested in hearing anything but the sound of his own voice,” Carter said. “He gave responses that to me seemed practiced and non-convincing, and in the case of the Holocaust, particularly disturbing.”

While Ahmadinejad spoke to the council for the bulk of the meeting, at one point Carter broke in.

Marcus Weldon, the current president of one of the most celebrated technology centers in the world, has high hopes for his local team
BY DAVID SHAMAH

Over the years, Bell Labs has won eight Nobel Prizes – more than any other tech lab – and Marcus Weldon, the current president of Bell Labs, fully expects the organization to win a ninth, based on the work that will be done by its new Israel location.

Bell Labs on Monday night inaugurated its Israeli branch – the group’s first out-of-the-US location – at the Kfar Saba offices of Alcatel-Lucent, the multinational communications firm that now owns the organization. The Israel lab actually began work several months ago, but got its official kick-off when Weldon, along with other top Bell Labs officials and alumni, gave the Israel site their official stamp of approval.

Often called “America’s Idea Factory,” Bell Labs has a long and storied history of innovation and invention. Originally the engineering department of “the phone company” — American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) — Bell Labs researchers developed many of the building blocks of modern electronics and computers. In 1927, a Bell team transmitted the first television images; in 1937, it transmitted the first stereo signals via radio; a Bell scientist invented the photovoltaic cell in the early 1940; and in 1947, Bell scientists created the transistor, an invention that made modern computing possible. Later inventions included TDMA and CDMA digital cellular telephone technology, the compiled C programming language, the UNIX operating system, the first single-chip 32-bit microprocessor, and much more.

Bell Labs remained a part of AT&T until 1996, when the company spun it off into a new company named Lucent Technologies, which in 2006 merged with communications company Alcatel, and created Alcatel-Lucent. Worldwide, the company has over 70,000 employees, about 50,000 of them in research and development, and the company operates Bell Labs facilities in about a dozen countries.

Between its invention of the transistor, the microprocessor, and UNIX, it’s fair to say that Bell Labs was responsible for the computer revolution, said Weldon – and the company was gearing up for the next revolution, the one in communications, he added. “We won those past Nobels by working to meet ‘grand challenges,’ developing technology to solve problems in important projects, and using that technology to change the world.”

38The House on Tuesday passed legislation to terminate Social Security benefits for suspected Nazi war criminals.

Passed 420-0, the bill was approved after an October Associated Press report found that dozens of suspected Nazi war criminals forced to leave the U.S. collected millions of dollars in federal benefits.

Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas), the measure’s sponsor, said it would close a loophole that allowed Nazis who skipped the lengthy deportation process to still receive Social Security benefits.
“Social Security is an earned benefit hardworking Americans pay as a portion of their wages for promises of future benefits,” Johnson said. “It’s a benefit that was never intended for those who participated in horrific acts of the Holocaust.”

The Justice Department pressured Nazi war crime suspects to leave the U.S. voluntarily to speed up their departures, according to the AP. However, avoiding the deportation process resulted in the individuals still being eligible for federal payments.

It may not seem as if Ferguson, Missouri has much to do with Israel, but some of the activists protesting the events in that Missouri city seem to also have Israel on their mind. What happened in Ferguson and why does Israel factor into the picture?

Ferguson was a case of a white policeman shooting and killing a black civilian. There are between 300 and 400 cases of police killings in the United States each year (there are a smaller number of police killed in the line of duty). A majority of the victims of police shootings are not African-American. Some of the African-American victims (10-20 percent each year) are killed by African-American police. There are maybe 100 or so cases a year of white policemen killing blacks, and the great majority of these cases are non-controversial. The half dozen or so that are controversial are now becoming the biggest news stories of the day and the year.

In an average year, about 16,000 Americans are murdered, so police killings are maybe two percent of that number. Over half of all murder victims are African-Americans, and almost all of them are killed by other African-Americans. Overall, African-Americans commit murder in the United States at a rate seven times their share of the population. While 16,000 is a big number, the U.S. murder rate has sharply declined the last 20 years, by about 40 percent. In New York City, the scene of the latest race-related controversy over a police killing (in this case from a chokehold,) the murder rate has dropped 85 percent.

One might think that the far larger murder toll that does not involve police would be a much bigger story than the few controversial cases of white cops killing black civilians. That this is not the case reflects the role of today’s media, which feeds off of the white cops killing black civilian stories almost as much as they love hurricanes and tornadoes and airplane disasters. Stories that enable the 24- hour cable news networks to fill their time reporting updates for days and weeks is the news that is fit to broadcast. America is an extremely polarized nation at this point on issues involving race, but also on broader political questions, like immigration, and Obamacare chief among them, and conflict is good for news departments. And this, unfortunately is where Israel has begun to filter into the frame.

In a major defeat for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, the leading association for British architects has rescinded its call for their Israeli counterparts to be suspended from an international association representing the profession.

“We got it wrong,” said Stephen Hodder, the president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA,) after he confirmed that a RIBA motion passed in March urging that Israelis be barred from the International Union of Architects (UIA,) in protest at the building of “illegal settlements” in the West Bank, was no longer RIBA policy.

According to the London-based Jewish Chronicle, RIBA’s change of heart was triggered by warnings from its lawyers that the endorsement of a boycott of Israel could compromise the institute’s charitable status.

Financial concerns were another factor, as the boycott is said to have cost the institute around $150,000 in lost revenue; many Jewish supporters of RIBA have cancelled bookings to use the institute’s impressive central London building for Bar Mitzvahs and similar events.

Hodder emphasized that the policy change signaled a new, positive approach to international affairs on RIBA’s part. “For the Institute to have engaged in this issue in a confrontational way – by seeking suspension of the Israeli Association of United Architects from the UIA (the International Architects Union) – was wrong,” he said.