The Netherlands branch of the German supermarket chain Aldi has started boycotting products from Israeli settlements in a bid to avoid controversy in its sales.
According to a statement released by a spokesman for the Aldi chain on July 22, the decision to boycott the settler goods is applied to Syria’s occupied Golan Heights, West Bank and East al-Quds (Jerusalem).
Earlier this week, a report published by the Amsterdam-basedTrouw daily revealed that two major supermarkets in the Netherlands, Hoogvliet and Jumbo, decided to boycott products manufactured in Israeli settlements.
In May, the Dutch Foreign Ministry said in a circular that it would be better for retailers to replace “Made in Israel” labels with a label reading as “Product from Israeli settlement."
PressTV
Sometime soon, a lab mouse could wake up thinking he had snuggled up to a girl mouse the night before. But he hadn’t. The memory would be fake.
Scientists have successfully implanted a false memory into a mouse’s brain — a seemingly far-fetched idea reminiscent of a science fiction film.
“If mice had Hollywood, this would be ‘Inception’ for them,” said one of the lead researchers, MIT neuroscientist Steve Ramirez, whose study was published onlineThursday in the journal Science.
Ramirez and his colleagues tagged brain cells associated with a specific memory and then tweaked that memory to make the mouse believe something had happened when it hadn’t.
Although implanting a memory won’t happen anytime soon in people, in principle, it should be possible to isolate a human memory and activate it at will, scientists said.
“We would have every reason to expect this would happen in humans exactly as it happened in mice,” said Michael J. Kahana, who was not involved in the study but is director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Computational Memory Lab.
Researchers said the ability to implant a false memory was a scientific milestone; Kahana called it a “technical tour de force.” The study’s authors said this type of research could one day help treat some emotional problems, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, which involves the intrusion of unwanted memories.
The first step in the mouse experiment took place last year when Ramirez and his colleaguesisolated an individual memory in a mouse’s brain by tagging the brain cells associated with it and inducing recall of the memory at will by forcing those neurons to fire with light. In this new study, they artificially stimulated neurons to make associations between events and environments that had no ties in reality and, in essence, implanted a new, false memory.
They used a technique called optogenetics, which uses light to turn on and off activity of individual brain cells in a living animal. An optical fiber feeds light into the mouse’s hippocampus, the area of the brain that plays a prominent role in forming new memories.
False memories in humans often happen when a person swaps out one detail for another. Sometimes these mistakes are trivial, such as swearing that you left your keys on the kitchen table only to find them hanging in the garage. In a courtroom setting, a false eyewitness account can destroy an innocent person’s life.
Ramirez recounts a true story about an Australian psychologist who was arrested for a rape he did not commit. Physically, he fit the bill of the victim’s description, but he had a foolproof alibi. He was speaking on a live television show at the time of the rape — the same show, it turned out, the victim had been watching right before her attack. As a result, she described him as her attacker, even though it wasn’t possible.
Red room equals danger
In their experiment, the scientists implanted memories associated with certain rooms or chambers where they placed the mouse. Similar to a person visiting a friend’s apartment and forming a memory about his ratty couch and cramped bathroom, a mouse explores and takes mental note of a given chamber’s nooks and crannies.
The Washington Post
The U.S. Army is now looking to stockpile nearly 3,000,000 live rounds of Soviet-era Russian ammo popular with civilian shooters.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
A U.S. Army solicitation posted July 18 on theFederal Business Opportunities web site asks for “non-standard” ammunition from vendors which includes:
- 2,550,000 rounds of 7.62x39mm ball ammo
- 575,000 blank rounds of 7.62x39mm ammo and
- 425,000 rounds of 9x18mm Makarov ball ammo
The army intends to store all these rounds in ammo storage facilities at both Camp Stanley in Boerne, Texas and the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky.
As the solicitation implies, the 7.62x39mm and the 9x18mm Makarov are not standard-issue in the U.S. military or NATO.
Rather they are calibers developed by the former Soviet Union which are now commonly used by civilian shooters in the United States.
The 7.62x39mm in particular is extremely popular with private gun owners due to the wide availability and affordability of both military surplus ammo and firearms chambered for this round, such as the AK-47 and the SKS.
Handguns chambered for the 9x18mm Makarov, such as the FEG PA-63, are common, inexpensive imports.
The desired list of calibers attached to aprevious, related acquisition request also included oddball rounds such as the .303 British and the 7.62×25mm Tokarev.
In addition to this solicitation for nearly 3,000,000 live rounds of Russian calibers popular with the public, the army made a similar request last year for a long-term weapon supplier who can ship both foreign non-standard and obsolete U.S. military weapons anywhere in the world.
According to this 2012 request, the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC) wanted to find a vendor who could “reach around the world at any given moment to gather and provide multiple types of weapons and weapon parts.”
The extensive list of desired weapons included firearms popular with civilians such as the aforementioned AK-47, 1911s, M1903 Springfields, Walther PP/PPKs (another common import), and other “commercial and para-military weapons.”
This solicitation also asked for “books, manuals, tools, and gauges” pertaining to the firearms.
Headquartered in New Jersey, ARDEC is primarily known for its research in advanced weapons such as lasers and nanotechnology.
These unusual requests prompt the question as to why the U.S. Army, and especially the army’s advanced weapons research and development division, needs a vast quantity of non-NATO rounds and decades-old – sometimes even 100-year-old – firearms popular with civilians for worldwide deployment “at any given notice.”
The ARDEC request in particular seems too broad.
Are World War I era M1903 Springfields really that common in today’s battlefields, or even the popular CZ-52 imports which have been retired from Czechoslovakian service since 1982?
Are these obsolete weapons used that frequently in current world conflicts to warrant specific mention in an army acquisition request?
Do century-old firearms really need to be shipped all around the world for “research and development?”
What about the huge purchase of 425,000 9x18mm Makarov rounds?
Are they going to somehow end up in the sidearms of Obama-backed Syrian rebels, especially after two congressional panels cleared the way for shipping small arms to Syria?
Handguns chambered in 9x18mm Makarov are still commonplace among Syrian militants because Syria received military aid from the Soviet Union for over 20 years.
These solicitations, with planned acquisitions ranging between $500,000 to $22,000,000, definitely forge fears of back door gun control by creating artificial scarcity that denies Americans access to a wide-range of firearms and ammo, especially in the wake of the U.N. arms trade treaty which was signed by Obama but rejected by the Senate.
Regardless of the army’s intentions, these large-scale purchases will only further intensify firearm and ammo shortages for gun owners across the country.
Infowars
WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama has decided to halt the planned delivery of four F-16 fighter jets to Egypt, thePentagon said on Wednesday, amid the unrest that erupted after the military ousted Egypt's first democratically elected president.
The move came two weeks after Reuters reported US plans to go ahead with the delivery of the F-16s, and shows how the United States is struggling to respond to the removal of President Mohamed Morsi and an ensuing surge in violence.
Pentagon spokesman George Little declined to specify precisely what triggered the reversal but acknowledged what he referred to as the "fluid situation" on the ground.
"Given the current situation in Egypt, we do not believe it is appropriate to move forward at this time with the delivery of F-16s," Little said, adding that Obama's decision was made with the unanimous consent of his entire national security team.
Still, the Pentagon said it did not believe it was in the best interests of the United States to suspend overall military assistance to Egypt, which totals about $1.3 billion a year.
Little said this year's Bright Star military exercise with Egyptwould go ahead as planned, for example.
Washington has been treading a careful line since Morsi's ouster, neither welcoming it nor denouncing it as a "coup," saying it needs time to weigh the situation.
A US government decision to call it a coup would, by law, cut off US assistance to Egypt.
The Pentagon said the White House and the State Department were still conducting a review into how to define Morsi's removal.
"I would caution against premature conclusions with respect to that (review) process of determining whether or not there was a coup," Little said.
"This was a decision made about the F-16s and doesn't necessarily reflect what the outcome will be in that process."
Egypt's military chief, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, called for mass rallies on Friday to give him a mandate to tackle the unrest.
US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel spoke with Sisi on Wednesday to inform him of the decision to delay the delivery of the jets, which are part of America's $1.3 billion in annual military aid to Egypt and are built by Lockheed Martin Corp .
They also discussed Sisi's call for rallies, Little said.
Jerusalem Post
The White House has been touting the success of its economic agenda recently, claiming to have created 7.2 million jobs. But a look at the growing rolls of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) shows that for every job the administration says it created, two Americans have been added to the food stamp rolls.
In January of 2009, 32,204,859 Americans received SNAP aid, but as of April 2013, there were 47,548,694 Americans taking food stamps.
"That means that more than two Americans have been added to the food stamp rolls for every one job the administration says it has created," CNSNews reports.
Fifteen million more Americans have gone on food stamps since Obama took office in 2008.
Under Obama, 1.6 million more Americans are now collecting disability insurance, while 9.5 million workers have dropped out of the labor force altogether.
Breitbart
Turkey is not interested in a diplomatic reconciliation with Israel, but rather in humiliating it and bringing it to its knees, Israeli officials said on Thursday.
The comments came after Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc told the Turkish media that the reason for the deadlock in compensation talks with Israel over the 2010 Mavi Marmara incident was that Jerusalem was not willing to admit that the compensation payment was the result of a wrongful act.
Up until now the assumption was that the two sides were not yet normalizing ties because they could not agree on the size of the compensation package, with the Turks demanding much more than Israel was willing to pay.
But Arinc, leading the Turkish team in the three rounds of talks that have already been held, said earlier this week that money was not the issue.
“In our first meeting [the Israelis] showed no opposition to this. But in the second meeting, they intended to give an ex gratia payment [one made without the giver recognizing any liability or legal obligation] as a form of reparation because they fear compensation [as a result of their wrongful act] will set an example for other cases, which is not a concern to us,” the Turkish daily Hurriyet reported him as saying.
On March 22, just as US President Barack Obama was leaving Israel after his visit and at his urging, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu called Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and offered an apology for any operational errors that might have led to the death of nine Turkish activists on the Mavi Marmara ship trying to break the blockade of Gaza in 2010.
“The amount of money is not the problem,” Arınc said.
“There are two problematic areas. The first one is that Israel should accept that it’s paying this money as a result of its wrongful act. Nothing less than this will be accepted. And second, we are waiting for them to realize our third condition of cooperating with Turkey is making life conditions easier for Palestinians. We are not talking about the amount of money as our first two conditions have not been met,” he added.
One Israeli official said that Arinc’s comments reveal that Ankara is not genuinely interested in settling the dispute over the Mavi Marmara with Israel, but rather the aim is to humiliate Jerusalem.
“All of a sudden he says the money is not the issue. Indeed, they want to bring us to our knees and read the text that they dictate to us.”
The official said that the formula for the apology was very carefully crafted, so as not to admit any Israeli legal culpability. Now, he said, this is no longer enough for the Turks. Regarding lifting the blockade on Gaza, Israel has made clear that it has no intention of doing so, and that it will ease restrictions there to the degree that the rocket and missile fire from the area into Israel stops.
One senior Israeli official, when asked several weeks ago about the Turks apparent adding on conditions before returning their ambassador to Israel, replied that “enough is enough,” implying that Israel did what it felt it had to do to try and improve the ties with Turkey, but would go no further.
One Israeli official said on Thursday that while there was US pressure in the past on Israel to make gestures to reconcile with Turkey, there are currently no such demands. Netanyahu did what the Americans expected him to do, the official said, and from their standpoint this whole episode should now be over.
Jerusalem Post
