-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Russian Follies Russia's Secret Deal to Re-arm Saddam Revenge for Operation Desert Fox RUSSIA has signed arms deals worth more than £100 million with Saddam Hussein to reinforce Iraq's air defences. The move will pose a serious threat to British and American planes enforcing Iraq's no-fly zone. In a blatant breach of the UN arms embargo, the Russians have agreed to upgrade and overhaul Iraq's ageing squadrons of MiG jet-fighters and restore Iraq's air defences to combat readiness, diplomatic sources in Moscow have told The Telegraph. The arms deals constitute a serious challenge to British and American attempts to force Baghdad to honour its commitment to dismantle Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. It will also strain Moscow's relations with Britain and the US at a time when President Boris Yeltsin is desperately seeking international assistance for Russia's beleaguered economy. British and American jets have been involved in almost daily military confrontations with Iraq since Operation Desert Fox, the air strikes unleashed against Saddam's military infrastructure by Britain and the US at the end of last year. The Iraqi armed forces have so far failed to shoot down any Allied warplanes because they have to rely on out-dated and unreliable equipment. However, the Russian deal to upgrade Iraq's air force and anti-aircraft missile batteries will bring Iraq's air defences up to pre-Gulf war levels. Apart from earning much-needed foreign currency, Russia's decision to provide Iraq with military assistance was approved by Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov in retaliation for Operation Desert Fox. Russia bitterly opposed launching air strikes against Iraq to punish Saddam for not co-operating with UN weapons inspectors. The Foreign Office said yesterday that it had received reports of the arms deals, which were being investigated. Officials privately confirmed that the deals had been approved by Moscow. A senior Foreign Office official said: "It is almost beyond belief that a permanent member of the security council could authorise such a flagrant breach of the UN arms embargo. It indicates that Russian relations with Iraq have become a great deal closer since Mr Primakov became prime minister." Officials expect Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, to raise the issue of Russia's arms sale to Baghdad when he embarks on his much-delayed trip to Moscow. Mr Cook was to fly to Russia in early March, but the trip was yesterday postponed because of his commitments to the current round of peace talks over Kosovo. Details of the arms deals between Moscow and Baghdad have also been passed to the State Department in Washington, where officials have already been alerted to be on the look-out for evidence of arms trading between Russia and Iraq. A spokesman said: "Any attempt by Russia to violate UN sanctions will be a matter of the deepest concern." In Moscow, the Foreign Ministry refused to comment, while officials at Mapo-MiG, one of the beneficiaries of the arms trade, denied any knowledge of the deals. Ahmed Murtada Ahmed Khalil, the Iraqi Transport and Communications Minister, signed the arms deals in Moscow on January 13 and 14 after a visit to Russia by Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi deputy prime minister, in December, days before Operation Desert Fox was launched. The London Telegraph, Feb. 14, 1999 Sexpionage China Lures Dissidents into "Honey Traps" Wanna play with my politics? PROSTITUTES have moved to the front line in the Chinese government's battle against political dissent. The latest tactic adopted by Beijing to deal with its opponents is a crude version of the Cold War honey trap in which hostile targets were first propositioned and then blackmailed for information by Soviet agents. The Chinese public security apparatus has discovered that the spread of prostitution is a useful pretext through which it can detain opposition activists and penalise others who refuse to observe Beijing's harsh strictures. Government officials under investigation for corruption are often accused of having a penchant for vice, while the Vatican alleged recently that Roman Catholic priests were frequently seduced by prostitutes while undergoing interrogation. Diplomats with experience of the totalitarian regimes of the former Warsaw Pact say Beijing has adopted a familiar ploy to discredit and punish its internal critics for crimes that are seemingly unrelated to politics. "This has got a foul smell about it," said one Western diplomat. "I've seen it played out in Eastern Europe where it was a frequently used tactic to compromise and incriminate domestic opponents and foreign businessmen." Charges related to prostitution in China allow the authorities to impose stiff penalties outside the criminal code. Chinese citizens found guilty of consorting with prostitutes can be sentenced to up three years in a labour camp for re-education without a formal trial. But imprisonment is rare for men accused of patronising prostitutes unless they have been targeted for political reasons, according to the pressure group Human Rights in China. Overwhelmingly, the clients of prostitutes pay a fine and go free. "This is a very convenient way of dealing with opponents which diminishes their credibility by making people think they are deviants," an official of Human Rights in China said. Five dissidents have been jailed in China in recent months on charges of consorting with prostitutes; two of them have been sent to labour camps. The latest to be detained on soliciting charges is Peng Ming, 44, founder of the think-tank China Development Union and one of the country's most prominent advocates of greater freedoms for ordinary citizens. Police, who had been watching Mr Peng for four months, moved on the former businessman at the Da Yun nightclub, a gaudy neon-lit establishment in Beijing's eastern suburbs that is frequented by scores of "entertainment ladies" each night. He was surrounded and arrested while his friend was in the lavatory. Mr Peng's wife, Nie Ying, says the charge that her husband sought to procure sex in the Da Yun is ridiculous. As he was under close surveillance at the time of his detention and had told her days before that he feared his arrest was imminent, Ms Nie thinks it unlikely that he would have willingly compromised himself in a public place. "He recently told me that if he couldn't be contacted at any time, then he must have lost his freedom." More than two weeks after his arrest, Mr Peng's fate is still unknown. Ms Nie was originally told that Mr Peng would serve 14 days' administrative detention for his crimes but his scheduled release date passed last week and she has not heard from him. Police have refused to release any information about the case and have told Ms Nie that investigations into Mr Peng's background are continuing. Last October, Han Lifa and Cai Guihua were jailed for nine months on soliciting charges after young women entered their hotel rooms in Shanghai, stripped naked and waited for the police to arrive. The following month, two New York-based dissidents, Zhang Lin and Wei Quanbao, were arrested in Guangzhou and sentenced to three years in a labour camp for soliciting. It appears that the Chinese security forces have not restricted their employment of prostitutes to the pursuit of political dissidents. Last month the Vatican news agency, Fides, alleged that the Chinese government had used prostitutes as agents to seduce priests loyal to the Roman Catholic Church, which is officially blacklisted in China. In a report that drew a furious denial from the Chinese foreign ministry, Fides said that priests had been forced to break their vows while in detention. Female service personnel (actually prostitutes) had been sent into the cells, apparently to do the daily chores but, in fact, to tempt the priests into sexual relations, the report said. The agency said that police had taken video footage in order to blackmail priests loyal to the underground Church into joining the official Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association and betraying other members of the clergy loyal to Rome. The London Telegraph, Feb. 14, 1999 Robin Williams Comes to Your Neighborhood Theater Polio Vaccines May Be Killing Hundreds Through Cancer Get your hand out of the popcorn and do it THE mass vaccination campaigns of the Fifties and Sixties may be causing hundreds of deaths a year because of a cancer-causing virus which contaminated the first polio vaccine, according to scientists. Known as SV40, the virus came from dead monkeys whose kidney cells were used to culture the first Salk vaccines. Doctors estimate that the virus was injected into tens of millions during mass vaccination campaigns before being detected and screened out in 1963. Those born between 1941 and 1961 are thought to be most at risk of having been infected. Now a new study of the effects of SV40 points to disturbing evidence that the monkey virus causes a number of human cancers. It concludes that there is "compelling" evidence linking SV40 to mesothelioma, a once-rare type of lung cancer whose prevalence is rapidly increasing. Dr Janet Butel of the Baylor College of Medicine, Texas, and the lead author of the study, told The Telegraph: "I feel strongly that research is warranted to determine how common human infections by SV40 may be, and what factors might predispose individuals to SV40-related tumours." Her study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, also suggested that the monkey virus may be passing from those given the contaminated vaccine to their children, spreading the cancer risk still further. Blood samples analysed by Dr Butel and her colleagues point to the steady spread of the cancer-causing virus in the human population, with 10 per cent of those never exposed directly to the contaminated vaccine testing positive for SV40. Dr Butel said: "I believe SV40 is present in the human population today and is being spread among individuals by an unknown route." vaccine linked The Telegraph has learnt that scientists in Britain have joined an international effort to confirm the findings. According to Prof Gordon McVie, the director general of the Cancer Research Campaign, researchers have so far uncovered evidence linking SV40 to a number of cancers, including brain tumours and bone cancer. He said: "I've a feeling that the virus might be implicated in more, such as non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and prostate cancer." The study is also likely to prompt a radical rethink by doctors of what happened 40 years ago, during the early days of polio vaccination. Until now, SV40 was regarded as harmless, with no evidence of long-term health effects emerging in follow-up studies of those vaccinated. Now it appears that these studies may not have been conducted over a long enough period. New highly sensitive laboratory tests have disclosed the presence of SV40 in many different types of human tumour. The most startling results centre on mesothelioma, until recently linked primarily to exposure to asbestos. Studies have found that around 70 per cent of mesothelioma cases test positive for the SV40 virus. Over the past 30 years, the number of mesothelioma cases has risen 10-fold, to about 1,000 a year, and is predicted to reach 4,000 early next century. Until now, the increase was blamed on the asbestos industry. But the new findings are leading scientists to suspect that SV40 may account for a substantial number of mesotheliomas. Dr Butel said: "The consistent association of SV40 with that tumour is compelling." Some scientists remain sceptical of the link, however. Robin Weiss, a professor of viral oncology at University College, London, said that SV40 is widely used in laboratories and could easily contaminate tumour samples, fooling the ultra-sensitive tests used to detect the virus. Prof Weiss said: "Many of the positive results are probably false positives. We've looked at mesothelioma and did find it in some cases, but then we got bogged down in whether they were due to contamination or not." However, Dr Bharat Jasani, a leading expert on SV40 and mesotheliomas at the University of Wales College of Medicine, Cardiff, said that new reliability tests rule out contamination as a possible explanation. He said: "There is absolutely no question of laboratory contamination being to blame. That part of the story is now over. The time has come where we have to take things more seriously." Dr Jasani said he had little doubt that the mass polio vaccination campaigns were to blame for SV40 entering the human population. He said, however, that this could bring new hope to hundreds of cancer patients, as it suggested that many might be treated by a vaccine that attacked SV40. He said: "We could think about saving more than 2,000 lives a year from mesothelioma - and that is good news." A spokesman for the Department of Health said last night that it was aware that SV40 had contaminated early polio vaccines but insisted that there is no evidence that the virus caused tumours. She said: "It is also important to stress that the vaccine currently used is rigorously checked for safety and efficacy and is free of SV40." The London Telegraph, Feb. 14, 1999 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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