Despite sanctions and trade embargoes, over the past decade the United States government has granted special licenses allowing American companies to do billions of dollars in business with Iran and other countries blacklisted as state sponsors of terrorism, an examination by The New York Times has found.

At the behest of a host of companies — from Kraft Food and Pepsi to some of the nation’s largest banks — a little-known office of the Treasury Department has made nearly 10,000 exceptions to American sanctions rules, approving deals involving countries that have been cast into economic purgatory, beyond the reach of American business.

Most of the licenses were approved under a decade-old law mandating that agricultural and medical humanitarian aid be exempted from sanctions. But the law, pushed by the farm lobby and other industry groups, was written so broadly that allowable humanitarian aid has included cigarettes, Wrigley’s gum, Louisiana hot sauce, weight-loss remedies, body-building supplements and sports rehabilitation equipment sold to the institute that trains Iran’s Olympic athletes.

Hundreds of other licenses were approved because they passed a litmus test: They were deemed to serve American foreign policy goals. And many clearly do, among them deals to provide famine relief in North Korea or to improve Internet connections — and nurture democracy — in Iran. But the examination also found cases in which the foreign-policy benefits were considerably less clear.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/24/world/24sanctions.html?_r=1&hp

Gus: one knows it's the way to yamerikanise "hostile" countries into the empire... give then the taste of coke and kfc — and they will come to papa... see toon at top...

The files contain a wide range of UFO-related documents, drawings, letters and parliamentary questions covering the years 2000-2005.

Find out more about the House of Lords’ debate on UFOs, a flying saucer hoax that was treated as a potentially real alien invasion of the UK and how 1978 nearly became 'the year of the UFO'.

Start by reading our highlights guide (PDF, 397kb) to help you navigate your way through the files.

Due to the large size of some of these files, we recommend you save them to your PC before opening them. Please right click on the links and select the ‘save’ option.

http://ufos.nationalarchives.gov.uk/

see toon at top.............................. Doctor Who would be proud...

There is new reason to curb greenhouse gases that not even climate change sceptics can dismiss. Apparently the growing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could alert aliens to our existence, and they may decide to destroy earth as a result.

That is one of the more alarming scenarios outlined in a report from Nasa scientists and researchers at Pennsylvania State University.

Their argument goes that alien cultures will notice the presence of humans on earth by the sudden increase in CO2. "A preemptive strike would be particularly likely in the early phases of our expansion because a civilisation may become increasingly difficult to destroy as it continues to expand," says the report.

Aliens may also be enraged by the damage we are doing to our planet and decide to wipe us out to save earth.

The paper divides the types of encounter we could experience with extraterrestrials into three camps: beneficial, neutral and harmful. At the harmful end of the spectrum there is the prospect that the aliens could "eat us", "enslave us" or "attack us". There is also the worrying prospect that we could be wiped out by an inter-galactic "act of incompetence" or a physics experiment that destroys our solar system.

Primary school sport must be boosted to prevent a generation of children growing up less fit than their parents, according to Sebastian Coe, the man behind London’s extraordinarily successful Olympic Games.

Lord Coe, the chairman of the London organising committee and a former double Olympic gold medallist, was speaking in the wake of a row about the Government cutting fundign for school sport and scrapping a target of two hours of school sport a week for children. David Cameron was criticised earlier in the day for claiming that many schools were focused on “Indian dance” rather than competitive sport.

Lord Coe said: “It is very, very important that we do everything we can to maintain high quality physical education in schools, and in primary schools it is particularly important because it is my instinct that if you haven’t got that pattern and love of sport and pattern of exercise by year 10 or 11, it is going to be quite hard to introduce that to 14- and 15-year-olds with the cluttered landscape that you are then competing against.

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/olympics/news/coe-we-risk-having-children-who-are-less-fit-than-their-parents-8031687.html

see toon above...