class war: Europe’s homeless dying in arctic conditions

Officials in Ukraine say 38 more people have died in severe winter weather over the last 24 hours, bringing the total number of dead in the past week to 101.

Ukraine is experiencing its coldest winter for six years. Overnight temperatures dropped to 33 degrees below freezing.

The country’s Emergencies Ministry has set up around 3,000 heated tents to provide shelter for the homeless.

Some 64 of the dead were found on the streets.

Several hundred people have been treated in hospital for frostbite and hypothermia.

The severe conditions are widespread across much of Europe.

Police in Poland said 37 people have died over the past week as a result of the arctic conditions, the majority of them homeless.

Worst hit was the south-east of the country where temperatures hit – 35 degrees Celsius.

In Serbia, emergency services had to rescue residents from remote villages that had been cut off.

There has been no escape even in western and southern Europe.

The cold blast swept across Italy, disrupting transport and bringing the rare sight of snow in Rome.

In France, the electricity generator has asked households to go easy with heaters at peak evening times as demand approaches a record high.

There has been snow too on the Mediterranean coast and in Spain.

via Europe’s homeless dying in arctic conditions | euronews, world news.

Syrians say Lebanon blocking escape

Only a handful of Syrians have made it to hospitals in neighbouring Lebanon, after being wounded in the ongoing military campaign in Homs.

Doctors in the northern city of Tripoli expected many more injured Syrians to escape across the border, but Syrian activists say the Lebanese army is arresting anyone trying to cross, regardless of whether they are injured.

Sue Turton reports from a clinic in Tripoli that has been set up to treat the wounded.

via Syrians say Lebanon blocking escape – Middle East – Al Jazeera English.

Thousands of Maldivians condemn ‘coup’ in indian ocean nation

Thousands of supporters of Mohamed Nasheed, who says he was forced to resign as the president of Maldives, have taken to the streets to protest over what they are calling a coup.

Al Jazeera’s Steve Chao, reporting from the capital island of Male on Wednesday, said up to 3,000 people took part in the protests in support of Nasheed and calling for his return to power.

He said police fired tear gas and clashed with protesters as they attempted to push the crowds backwards. In the hours following the protests, there were reports of Nasheed being manhandled by security forces.

Nasheed was only “lightly” injured, according to his supporters, our correspondent reported via Twitter.

Nasheed, the Indian Ocean island nation’s first democratically elected leader, stepped down on Tuesday in the wake of a police mutiny and clashes on the streets after weeks of anti-government protests.

In an interview to Al Jazeera’s Chao at his family home earlier on Wednesday, Nasheed said he was compelled to resign to prevent bloodshed.

“This is definitely a coup,” he said. “By any definition anywhere, this was a coup. This was a bloodless coup because I did not take part in it. I did not want to defend [my position]; that is why there was no blood.”

‘Threatening me’

Asked why he had resigned, Nasheed said: ”Because I didn’t want them to go shooting our people. They were threatening me and they were threatening the people. I didn’t want that.“

But Nasheed said he believed he still had the backing of the people and hinted he would seek office in new elections, currently scheduled for next year.

“We are certain that the people of this country are with us,” he said.

Mohamed Nasheed speaks exclusively to Al Jazeera

Nasheed’s home was being guarded by soldiers on Wednesday, although Mohamed Waheed, the former vice-president sworn in as Nasheed’s successor, said that was for his family’s protection.

Waheed also said he had revoked a travel ban preventing Nasheed and other officials from leaving the country.

Members of Nasheed’s Maldives Democratic Party (MDP) have already denounced Tuesday’s events, with a former presidential aide, speaking anonymously, telling Al Jazeera that he has been “profoundly shocked” by what he has witnessed.

via Thousands of Maldivians condemn ‘coup’ – Central & South Asia – Al Jazeera English.

over 50,000 american military women have been sexually assaulted by u.s. soldiers

This article is part 4 in the five-part series, “The Battlefield and the Barracks: Two War Fronts for Women Soldiers. “

Nearly 90 percent of soldiers wounded in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – some 35,000 – survived battle injuries, thanks to breakthroughs in US state-of-the art military medicine, among them, surgical techniques, regenerative medicine and prosthetics. Neither the Department of Defense (DoD) nor the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), though, was prepared with the same cutting-edge treatment for the one in three women soldiers in those same wars – an estimated 70,000 – who were sexually assaulted by fellow soldiers.

The VHA is the agency within the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) responsible for picking up the pieces of lives injured and shattered

by combat, war trauma and military sexual assault. It will be faced, over the next months and years, with a tsunami of severe injury and illness from the DoD’s largely feckless sexual assault prevention programs.

Health Services

Following the first Persian Gulf War, a series of Congressional hearings on women veterans’ issues in 1992 led to authorizing the VA to provide outreach and counseling for women veterans who had suffered military sexual assault, services that were extended to male veterans soon after. By 1999, the VA put in place a universal screening program for military sexual trauma (MST) for all veterans using their services. Since 2004, those who have screened positive for MST are eligible for free medical treatment for any MST-related illness, injury or mental health condition. Each VA facility has assigned a MST coordinator to supervise the screening and treatment referral process and provide education and training for clinicians.[1]

All of these initiatives are crucial, essential and rightful for the tens of thousands of veteran survivors. Yet, they are only as effective as the outreach to sexual trauma survivors, the percent of women veterans using the VA medical system, the MST screening protocol, the understanding and recognition of complex health sequelae from sexual trauma, the clinical talent and compassion of the health providers and each VA facility’s capacity of treatment.

via Picking Up the Pieces From Military Sexual Assault | Truthout.

Heated hard drives could be super-quick

Physicists have discovered a new way to record data that could make future hard drives hundreds of times faster than existing technology – all you need is a little heat.

Hard drives store data using magnetic recording, with tiny sections of the disc magnetised in a particular direction to represent the 0 or 1 of a bit. Recording data involves flipping the direction, which is

currently done using an external magnetic field. Now, a team of researchers led by Thomas Ostler at the University of York, UK have discovered that a short burst of heat can do the job much faster.

It was previously thought that heat could only assist in remagnetisation when used in conjunction with a magnetic field. It turns out that zapping a magnet with a laser for less than one trillionth of a second, momentarily raising the temperature by over 800 degrees Celsius, can have the same effect. The results were published today in the journal Nature Communications.

The researchers say this new method could be used to make hard drives capable of recording terabytes of information a second, which is hundreds of times faster than existing drives. The process also uses less energy than magnetic recording, meaning the new drives would be more energy efficient.

via One Per Cent: Heated hard drives could be super-quick.

kropotkin, time-tripping founder of crimethinc!

quit the mundane world by living passionately! 

“Order, as it is understood today, means nine-tenths of humanity working to procure luxury, pleasure, and the satisfaction of the most execrable of passions for a handful of idlers. Order is the deprivation for this nine-tenths of humanity of all that is necessary for a healthy life. Order is poverty; it is famine become the normal order of society. Order is…the worker reduced to the state of a machine. Order is a tiny minority, elevated into the seats of government, which imposes itself in that way on the majority and prepares its children to continue the same functions in order to maintain the same privileges by fraud, corruption, force, and massacre. Order is the continual war of man against man, of trade against trade, of class against class, of nation against nation. Order is servitude, it is the shackling of thought, the brutalizing of the human race, maintained by the sword and the whip. It is the sudden death by fire-damp [flammable gas], or the slow death by suffocation, of hundreds of miners blown up or buried each year by the greed of the employers, and shot down and bayonetted as soon as they dare complain. That is order.

“And disorder? What is this you call disorder? It is the uprising of the people against this ignoble order, breaking its fetters, destroying the barriers, and marching towards a better future. It is humanity at the most glorious point in its history. Disorder is the abolition of ancient slaveries, it is the uprising of the communes; it is the destruction of feudal serfdom, the effort to make an end to economic servitude. Disorder—what they call disorder—is all the ages during which whole generations sustained an incessant struggle and sacrificed themselves to prepare a better existence for humanity by freeing it from the servitude of the past. Disorder is the blossoming of the most beautiful passions and the greatest of devotions, it is the epic of supreme human love.”

— Peter Kropotkin, Words of a Rebel, 1885