How lucky we are

When I read such news, as this one showed below, from today's Guardian, by Ian Black, I think that we are really lucky on living in a western country, where all human rights are fully respected. Of course we will ask for more, in order to improve our democratic standard of life, but please, let us not forget unhappy brothers all over the world. Thanks to Amnesty International for highlighting such brutal reality in Iran.

Abuse and show trials – Amnesty reports on Iran
Human rights group criticises increase in political repression in six months since reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Ian Black
The Guardian, Thursday 10 December 2009
Article history

Convicted men publicly hanged in Mashhad, north-west Iran, in 2007. The situation today is no better than 20 years ago, says Amnesty. Photograph: Halabisaz/AP
Human rights abuses in Iran are now as bad as at any time in the past 20 years, Amnesty International reports tomorrow in a survey marking six months since June's disputed presidential election.
Amnesty documents "patterns of abuse" by the Basij militia and revolutionary guards involving beatings, rape, death threats, forced confessions, intimidation and official cover-ups. Many detainees have been subjected to show trials and five have been sentenced to death.
"The authorities have resorted to exceptionally high levels of violence and arbitrary measures to stifle protest and dissent," says the 80-page report. "The courts have not been an instrument of justice to hold police, security forces and other state officials to account … or to protect the rights to freedom of expression, assembly, association and religion."
According to official figures, 36 people died in violence after the election, but the opposition puts the figure at more than 70. At least 4,000 people were arrested after the poll on 12 June and some 200 remain in jail. This week, 200 people were arrested during protests around university campuses on national students day.
Protests began when the sitting president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, claimed victory over the leading opposition candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, amid claims that the result had been rigged.
Amnesty quotes an unnamed former detainee who was held with 75 others for more than eight weeks in a container at the notorious Kahrizak detention centre in Tehran. He was told his son would be raped if he did not "confess" and was beaten unconscious with a baton .
Last month, Ramin Pourandarjani, a young doctor who had treated inmates at Kahrizak and had reportedly been forced to certify the death of at least one torture victim as resulting from meningitis, died in suspicious circumstances.
Ebrahim Mehtari, a 26-year-old student, described being held in a tiny cell, interrogated while blindfolded and accused of "working with Facebook networks" and tortured into making a confession. He said: "They frequently beat me on the face; I was burned with cigarettes under my eyes, on the neck, head. I was beaten all over … They threatened to execute me and they humiliated me."
An independent medical examination substantiated his claims. But all the relevant documents disappeared, the authorities refused to investigate and his family were warned not to talk about the case.
Amnesty says Iran refused to co-operate with its investigation and has denied the organisation entry into the country since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
Many of the cases have been documented previously, but the cumulative effect of the data underlines what Amnesty calls "a clear pattern of systematic gross human rights violations by Iranian security forces condoned or even encouraged by powerful political and religious figures in Iran."
The report says government officials "have done their utmost to ensure that accounts of rape are discredited and not circulated further".
Amnesty has harsh words for the show trials of leading opposition figures. "The trials, broadcast to the nation, featured coerced 'confessions', 'apologies' and incrimination of others. Rather than bringing people to justice, the purpose was to validate the authorities' account of the post-election unrest and to make clear the severe consequences of opposing the authorities."

Where's the truth on Iraq's war affair?

I report from the Daily Mail on line the following news. I'm astonished and worried about knowing that such important politicians may lie on such involving matters.
Blair distorted the case for Iraq war, admits Sir John Scarlett
By Tim ShipmanLast updated at 12:30 AM on 09th December 2009

Former MI6 chief Sir John Scarlett
The spymaster behind the dodgy Iraq dossier yesterday made clear that Tony Blair 'sexed up' the strength of the intelligence with an 'overtly political' foreword making the case for war.
Sir John Scarlett said the then prime minister's claim that spies had 'established beyond doubt' that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was 'quite separate from the text of the dossier itself'.
Sir John, former chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, admitted that the claim that Saddam could fire chemical weapons in 45 minutes was also 'lost in translation'.
He conceded that it would have been 'much better' if the dossier had spelt out that the claim referred only to battlefield 'munitions' rather than 'weapons' - which was taken to mean missiles capable of hitting British bases in Cyprus.
Sir John, who recently retired as head of MI6, also revealed that Mr Blair never bothered to ask him about new intelligence received just ten days before the outbreak of war, which made clear that Iraqi chemical weapons and missiles had been 'disassembled'.
'The intelligence reports went through to the Prime Minister and to senior ministers,' he said.
Asked repeatedly whether Mr Blair or any other senior minister had asked about the intelligence or demanded a new assessment before giving the green light for war, Sir John replied: 'No. No. No.'Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1234179/Iraq-inquiry-Sir-John-Scarlett-says-pressure-Number-10-dodgy-dossier.html#ixzz0ZAaLJiIi

The Fall of the Wall

Come on! Laissez faire, laissez passer!
Today is not time
To arrest people anymore!
Don’t you know is November the 9th 1989?
Today there is not time
To stop goods anymore!
Come on!
Only one thousand dollars
Will cost you
A plenty full track!
At 9 past 21 p.m.
The wall is falling down!
Laissez faire, laissez passer!
There are bound to be changes
For our lives further on!

It’s crashing down
Together with our illusions
Their false promises
The wrong secular hopeness!
Come on!
The wall is not hiding anymore
The totems of progress!
Let’s go worshipping
The glittering gods
Bounding ahead!!!

The really Italian people love peace not war.

Today is the 87th anniversary for the taking of power by Benito Mussolini and the Fascists in Italy.

As matter of fact the 28th october 1922 the Fascism took the power after a March to Rome led by Benito Mussolini after which the King gave him the charge of forming a new governement.

I'm not at all a nostalgic (while my dead father was it) 'cause I was not even born at that time.

But I think the worst mistake done by Mussolini was to declare the war against France and Great Britain in 1940.

The Italians are proud to descend from the ancient Romans but they love peace not war!

The Twin Lovers

I used to greet you
At ten to nine
We left each other
Rightly half way
Between the twin towers

We both work
At the 87.th floor
You in the northern
Me in the southern
Ten minutes
For the lift
To get me up
And see you again
Through the windows
Of the twin towers.

But on that 9/11
I had to wait
Twenty minutes,
Twenty long horrible
Bloody minutes
Watching the smoke,
The flames,
The hell!

And now we are rejoined
For ever
as powder and ashes
in God’s heaven.

The Essence of life - Third Part

......continues from the 9th e the 6th July... Two young people, searching for a job, meet in London a very strange man who offers to employee them, but on return, he asks to be allowed before of counting his own story.......

While pronouncing his last words Mr Winningoes, who had gradually been increasing his excitement during the narration, lifted up the right hand, tensing his forefinger as an accuser, and his eyes rotated a couple of times halting eventually in an insane expression of craziness depicted on his face.

He remained for indefinite time with the lift forefinger, staring into space, with his muscles tended as if they had wanted to get out of standing. He seemed a statue of marble, immortalized in a grotesque pose. This sudden explosion of apparent madness came unexpected.

Before we had the time to interact, however, the man seemed to recover himself. He looked around, lost and embarrassed and, grabbed a glass of water, voided all of it in a hit.

The water seemed to calm the man. His eyes showed now a serene light and he looked like being almost absent, lost in his thoughts or perhaps looking for recomposing the interrupted line of his story. He pulled the refreshments trolley and picked up a crystal’s cruet filled of a golden coloured liquid.

- “Have a drink, please. It is cognac from Charente, one of the few things that I appreciate of French people.”

This way saying he poured some of that liquid in a short, carved wine glass, explaining us that a cognac, to be really good, has to leave, if slightly rotated, a thin layer of colour inside the glass. As soon as I had drunk, I immediately felt a comforting warmth. On the warm’s alcohol wave I thought that that man surely knew so much indeed about life. His theories, nevertheless, yet quiet abstruse to me, showed however a sort of suggestive charm.

I imagined my brain imploding together with George’s, melting with it and flying, as a winged rocket, in the endless universe. Mr Winningoes’ voice, starting over with his narration brought me, with equal quickness, again to earth.

- “You certainly know how has the second world war concluded” - said the man, who went on talking about the last phases of the war, mixing them with some personal circumstances and original points of view, totally different from official historical interpretation .

- “Excuse me , my friends, for detouring from the main path” - he returned to say taking back the main stream of his narration. -“After all, such problems, didn't interest to me so much at the time, neither they interest to me today. I had to follow my life, and rather, the use of the atomic bombs in Japan made me understand, even more, the urgency of stopping mankind’s foolishness, under the risk of destroying the world and all its living forms. When I was dismissed, appointed as a real hero, I decided to go to pay a visit to my father. I still felt some grudge towards him and perhaps, I thought, I would have thrown him all the medals which “his” king had given to me. But the memoirs of my happy infancy wound me in a veil of emotion and when I saw my father, old and tired, convicted on a wheels chair, I understood that was time to pass over and look at future. He cried, my old father, seeing the medals that I had conquered in the hot skies of Europe. With pride he told me that he knew of my heroic deeds, and now that his name, the glorious lineage of Winningoeses had been fully rehabilitated, he could happily die. I wished to him a very long life, leaving his medals to consolation of my not dilatory departure. My books, my studies attended me again, in the United States, for a new thrilling issue on the walk of truth. Taking back to my searches I considered that I had to continue in a forced direction, if it were true, as it is true, that the brain of every living being contains, even though modified by the evolution, the original matrix of our existence.....to be continued

The Depht of my Wondering

Sometimes I think:
“God, help me,
I feel alone and I fear the world,
the life, the death.”

Then I look in to my brothers’ eyes
to discover they have my same fears
and I can share with them
the impervious human pathways!

So I wonder:
“Who are you God?
Are you our fears?
Are you our weakness?”

Blasphemer I think:
“We have created You!
We certainly did
In our image and likeness!
Mirror of our uncertain minds
Comfort shelter
Cave in the storm
Nourishing Cow
Heather Sun!

But if I think about Christ
Limbs nailed on the Cross
Two thousand years of bleeding sores
Best among Manhood
Example and Verb:
something that I can’t explain
touches me in the depth
of my wondering!