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A “trophy” video appearing to show security guards in Baghdad randomly shooting Iraqi civilians has sparked two investigations after it was posted on the internet … The video has sparked concern that private security companies, which are not subject to any form of regulation either in Britain or in Iraq, could be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent Iraqis. The video, which first appeared on a website that has been linked unofficially to Aegis Defence Services, contained four separate clips, in which security guards open fire with automatic rifles at civilian cars. All of the shooting incidents apparently took place on “route Irish”, a road that links the airport to Baghdad.

The Video, and here.

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Human rights abuses in Iraq are now as bad as they were under Saddam Hussein and are even in danger of eclipsing his record, according to the country’s first Prime Minister after the fall of Saddam’s regime. ‘People are doing the same as [in] Saddam’s time and worse,’ Ayad Allawi told The Observer. ‘It is an appropriate comparison. People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same things’ … Allawi accused fellow Shias in the government of being responsible for death squads and secret torture centres. The brutality of elements in the new security forces rivals that of Saddam’s secret police.

Iraq’s president dismissed Mr Allawi’s allegations, saying his government did not accept the torture of prisoners. The BBC’s Jim Muir in Baghdad says Mr Allawi’s remarks come as Iraq prepares for parliamentary elections next month, which he hopes could see him return as prime minister.

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U.N. teams also raided the other sites Curveball had named. They interrogated managers, seized documents and used ground-penetrating radar, according to U.N. reports. The U.N. inspectors “could find nothing to corroborate Curveball’s reporting,” the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group reported last year. On March 7, 2003, Hans Blix, the chief U.N. inspector, told the Security Council that a series of searches had found “no evidence” of mobile biological production facilities in Iraq. It drew little notice at the time. The invasion of Iraq began two weeks later.

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“In some ways, lunar dust resembles the silica dust on Earth that causes silicosis, a serious disease … it is extremely fine and abrasive, almost like powdered glass … Martian dust could be even worse. It’s not only a mechanical irritant but also perhaps a chemical poison. Mars is red because its surface is largely composed of iron oxide (rust) and oxides of other minerals. Some scientists suspect that the dusty soil on Mars may be such a strong oxidizer that it burns any organic compound such as plastics, rubber or human skin as viciously as undiluted lye or laundry bleach. “If you get Martian soil on your skin, it will leave burn marks”.

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A 360-degree war, some call it, an asymmetrical battle space that threatens to injure troops’ minds as well as their bodies. But just how deep those mental wounds are, and how many will be disabled by them, are matters of controversy. Some experts suspect that the legacy of Iraq could echo that of Vietnam, when almost a third of returning military personnel reported significant, often chronic, psychological problems.

Although the shattering psychological impact of war is well known, experts have become increasingly interested in those who emerge from combat feeling enhanced. Some psychiatrists and psychologists believe that those soldiers have experienced a phenomenon known as “post-traumatic growth,” or “adversarial” growth … “If you think about all of the heroes and heroines in cultures across the world . . . all of them, in one sense or another, faced some sort of a dragon,” said Matthew J. Friedman, director of the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and a professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth Medical School. “The transformation from that encounter has been celebrated from antiquity.”

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PRESIDENT Bush planned to bomb Arab TV station al-Jazeera in friendly Qatar, a “Top Secret” No 10 memo reveals. But he was talked out of it at a White House summit by Tony Blair. … The No 10 memo now raises fresh doubts over US claims that previous attacks against al-Jazeera staff were military errors. In 2001 the station’s Kabul office was knocked out by two “smart” bombs. In 2003, al-Jazeera reporter Tareq Ayyoub was killed in a US missile strike on the station’s Baghdad centre.

Al-Jazeera TV says one of its journalists was killed Tuesday when a U.S. airstrike hit a building housing Arab media … An Al-Jazeera reporter on-air said he felt, as did his colleagues, the U.S. strike was a deliberate attack against the network, since two missiles hit the building, not one, and that the raid happened at about the same time Abu Dhabi TV offices were hit.

The [UK] attorney general last night threatened newspapers with the Official Secrets Act if they revealed the contents of a document allegedly relating to a dispute between Tony Blair and George Bush over the conduct of military operations in Iraq. It is believed to be the first time the Blair government has threatened newspapers in this way. Though it has obtained court injunctions against newspapers, the government has never prosecuted editors for publishing the contents of leaked documents.

[UK] Cabinet Office civil servant David Keogh is accused of passing [the memo] to Leo O’Connor, who formerly worked for former British lawmaker Tony Clarke. Both Keogh and O’Connor are scheduled to appear at London’s Bow Street Magistrates Court next week … Keogh was charged with an offense under Section 3 of the Official Secrets Act relating to “a damaging disclosure” by a servant of the Crown of information relating to international relations or information obtained from a state other than the United Kingdom. O’Connor was charged under Section 5, which relates to receiving and disclosing illegally disclosed information.

When top CNN news executive Eason Jordan made comments at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the US military had targeted journalists in Iraq, he set off a firestorm of controversy that eventually led to his resignation. (Mr. Jordan eventually “backpedalled” from his remarks, and said he did not mean to imply that “US forces acted with ill intent when US forces accidentally killed journalists.”)

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Gary Glitter could face a firing squad or decades in a squalid jail if he is found guilty of raping a 12-year-old girl in Vietnam. The girl is said to have admitted having sex with the 61-year-old former glam rock star, allegedly for 5.50.

The faded glam rocker, best known for the ubiquitous sports anthem “Rock and Roll Part II,” was arrested Saturday morning by Vietnamese immigration authorities on charges of child molestation as he tried to board a flight from Ho Chi Minh City to Bangkok.

Neighbors on Monday said they were surprised to read the allegations against Glitter in the newspaper. They said the only problem they ever had with him was that he sometimes brought home friends to his oceanside villa and sang songs too loudly. “Before this, I never suspected him” of doing anything he’s accused of, said Tran Cong Khanh, 48. “I thought he just liked children.”

The age of consent in the southeast Asian nation is 16. Punishment for having sex with a minor can reportedly range anywhere from 12 years in prison to the death penalty in extreme cases.

The singer had always denied four counts of indecently assaulting a girl in the early 1980s when she was under 16. He also denied four charges of serious sexual assault against the same girl, who is now 34 and married with children. After the verdict the Press Complaints Commission said it would investigate revelations that a newspaper paid the woman who made the allegations … Gary Glitter, charged under his real name, Paul Gadd, smiled as the not guilty verdict was greeted by cheers in the public gallery. He turned to the jury, put his hands together and said “thank you”.

Gary Glitter Fan Club.

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People don’t spend as much time with Google as they do using other sites. Yahoo had 43 billion page views last month, Time Warner had 30 billion, and MSN had 21 billion. Google just wasn’t as busy. Its users generated 6.6 billion views. That’s just over half the number generated by News Corp’s social-networking sensation MySpace, which had 11.6 billion.

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Just for laughs I often flip through my (free subscription!) Stereophile magazine. You know, the one with the ads for the $12000 speaker wire and $5000 CD players. Imagine my surprise when I saw a preview of a new music service, MusicGiants, that is offering lossless music downloads for $1.29 each. Targeted to “audiophiles”, MusicGiants is also selling its “SoundVault“, which seems like some kind of Windows Media Center PC, albeit with a $10,000 price tag, and an ability to download the lossless tracks to some portable media players, with the notable exception of the iPod. Oh, and there’s a $50 annual fee (!). Ho hum so far, but then I noticed that the service has significant buy in from most of the major labels, indicating that they seem to have developed some faith in the ability of Microsoft’s DRM to shield their “top quality” downloads from pirates. My thinking on this is that if successful, it should prompt Apple to offer lossless downloads from the iTMS Service, if only because Apple likes to present a “high end” image, and having a competitor actively dissing iTMS by lumping it in, quality-wise, with “pirated music from p2p networks” has got to hurt.

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[Iraqi] Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, who has had ties to a Shiite militia, argued that prisoners found in a bunker-like Baghdad facility that U.S. troops entered Sunday night had been legally arrested based on proper evidence and documents … “OK, there were signs of torture,” Jabr said. “And for that we will punish those responsible. But there were no killings and no beheadings

“.

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