Scientists say sewer water sampling tracks community’s meth, cocaine use

WASHINGTON

Researchers have figured out how to give an entire community a drug test using just a teaspoon of wastewater from a city’s sewer plant.

The test wouldn’t be used to finger any single person as a drug user. But it would help federal law enforcement and other agencies track the spread of dangerous drugs, like methamphetamines, across the country.

Oregon State University scientists tested 10 unnamed American cities for remnants of drugs, both legal and illegal, from wastewater streams. They were able to show that they could get a good snapshot of what people are taking.

Agence France-Presse

WASHINGTON

Experts say that US President George W. Bush may be misrepresenting history when he drew a parallel between the bloody wars Americans fought in East Asia to the current US "war on terror" to back his case for maintaining US troops in Iraq.

The US leader on Wednesday likened the "terrorists" who wage war in Iraq to the communist forces in Korea and Vietnam and imperial Japanese army, and warned that a hasty Iraq withdrawal would trigger a bloodbath like the one in Southeast Asia after the US defeat and retreat from Vietnam.

There seems to be no rational basis for the arrest of a group of German sociologists, and the case highlights the fragility of our civil liberties.

Richard Sennett and Saskia Sassen

"Terrorism" has two faces. There are real threats and real terrorists, and then again there is a realm of nameless fears, vague forebodings, and irrational responses. The German federal police seem to have succumbed to the latter; on the July 31 2007 they raided the flats and workplaces of Dr Andrej Holm and Dr Matthias B, as well as of two other persons, all engaged in that most suspicious pursuit: committing sociology.

Alvin Anders

Recently, several Canadian judges have ruled that simple possession of marijuana is no longer a crime.  What has caused this turn of events?  Why it’s medical marijuana.  It seems that Canadian judges find it unconstitutional for marijuana to be legal as medicine and then force the sick to resort to the black market for their medicine.  In the US, nine states have passed laws allowing the medical use of marijuana but only California allows patient access to their medicine without resorting to the black market.  Sure in all nine states, patients can grow their own medicine (and wait four months for harvest), except buying and selling the seeds are illegal in eight of them.  And if the patient or their caregiver buys seeds from Canada or other countries selling them, they violate another law if they ask the US Postal Service to deliver them.

So what is the US government’s response to the legalization of personal possession in Canada?  Well if Canada legalizes personal possession, then goods coming across the Canadian border will have to really, really be inspected.  We can’t have Canadian marijuana being smuggled into the US.

AARON KLEIN
 
RAMALLAH

American-run programs that train Fatah militias were instrumental in the "success" of the Palestinian intifada that began in 2000, a senior Fatah militant told The New York Sun.

"I do not think that the operations of the Palestinian resistance would have been so successful and would have killed more than one thousand Israelis since 2000 and defeated the Israelis in Gaza without these [American] trainings," a senior officer of President Abbas's Force 17 Presidential Guard unit, Abu Yousuf, said.

America has longstanding training programs at a base in the West Bank city of Jericho for members of Force 17, which serves as de facto police units in the West Bank, and for another major Fatah security force, the Preventative Security Services.

Maurice Shohet

Preface

The deliverance of Iraqi Jewry, that rose almost as one man and migrated to the newly founded State of Israel, in the years 1948 - 1952, could be considered not only as a glorious chapter in the annals of Zionism, but also as a demonstration of the potency of the Zionist idea.

The exciting tidings of the establishment of the State on the one hand, the persecution and feeling of insecurity that often beset members of the community in Iraq on the other, combined and joined together with the love and yearning for the Land of Zion and Jerusalem, giving birth to a wonderful phenomenon. Almost an entire Jewish community, of about 120,000 souls, the most ancient of the Diaspora – if not the oldest of all – picked itself up, young and old alike, and immigrated to Israel; first by way of illegal and convoluted routes, and later as an officially sanctioned airborne migration. If the concept of Zionism has any meaning, then this combination is its fullest realization.