[An Nahar] Supporters of Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier convicted of espionage for leaking secret files to WikiLeaks, presented a petition to the Nobel Institute on Monday backing his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The petition, launched by the online activist organization RootsAction, garnered more than 103,000 signatures.
Awarding Manning the prize would, the organization said, clear "the cloud (that) hovers over the Norwegian Nobel Committee" for awarding the prestigious honor to U.S. President Barack Obama My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you'll join with me as we try to change it... in 2009. Two months after the announcement and one week before Obama accepted the award, he decided to intensify the war effort in Afghanistan.
"No individual has done more to push back against what Martin Luther King Jr. called 'the madness of militarism' than Bradley Manning," the petition read.
"And right now, remaining in prison and facing relentless prosecution by the U.S. government, no one is more in need of the Nobel Peace Prize," it said.
A U.S. military court found Manning, 25, guilty of 20 of the 22 charges of spying and disobeying orders lodged against him for having handed a large quantity of secret military reports and U.S. diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy website founded by Julian Assange.
Manning faces up to 90 years in prison.
According to U.S. journalist Norman Solomon, one of the organizers of the petition, awarding the soldier the Nobel would underline the important role played by whistleblowers in promoting peace and democracy.
"Unless we can speak the truth, then peace-making becomes a hollow exercise of rhetoric rather than reality," Solomon told news hounds before handing over the 5,000-page document to the Nobel Institute.
The chairman of the Institute, Geir Lundestad, has in the past said that such campaigns do not influence the Nobel Committee in its choice.
The 2013 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on October 11 in Oslo.
Denouncing what he called "a normalization of perpetual war", Solomon, a former Obama supporter, said giving Manning the Nobel would restore some of the prize's cachet after it was awarded to the U.S. leader.
"The Nobel Peace Prize at this point needs Bradley Manning more than Bradley Manning needs the Nobel Peace Prize because there is no question of the firm commitment of Bradley Manning to human rights ...which are usually entirely different from personal liberty... and peace," he said.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/13/2013 00:00 ||
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#1
I wonder how many signatures are legitimate? Five? Ten?
#3
Given the drone kill orders signed by the Nobel Peace Prize holder in the White House, E0 Manning has a better record in the peace category. It's the consequences of his actions over the long run that make it questionable, sort of like the Rosenbergs. The judge at their trial pointed out that had the cabal not provided the Soviets the knowledge and means to achieve their bomb, the 'victims' of the Korean war may not have occurred because the incentive (versus the disincentive of being without a bomb) to engage in the war of opportunity provided by that possession would not have been there.
[Al Ahram] International arrest warrants have been issued for former energy minister Chekib Khelil and eight others in connection with a corruption case at energy firm Sonatrach, Algeria's prosecutor general said Monday.
Khelil's wife, their two children and right-hand man Farid Bedjaoui also face arrest, Belkacem Zeghmati told a news conference in Algiers.
He said the warrants were issued two weeks ago.
Khelil is also wanted by Italy in connection with bribes paid to high-ranking Algerian officials, including in the Sonatrach hierarchy, to ensure markets in the North African country for the Italian oil service group Saipem.
The Italian justice authorities are trying to retrieve $123 million (92.6 million euros) which had been deposited in bank accounts belonging to Bedjaoui, who is said to be based in Dubai.
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08/13/2013 00:00 ||
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[Al Ahram] Striking security guards reimposed a two-week-old shutdown at Libya's two biggest crude export terminals on Monday, hours after they had reopened, and more oilfields closed in a wave of protest that is propping up world oil prices.
The outages at ports and fields, caused by striking employees and jobless people demanding work, have brought the worst disruption to the North African OPEC member's oil industry since the civil war in 2011.
A source at Arabian Gulf Oil Company (AGOCO) said output at the state oil company subsidiary had dropped below 60,000 barrels per day (bpd) due to strikes, down from levels of 375,000 bpd before the disruption.
Meanwhile, ...back at the hoedown, the fiddler suddenly struck a sour note. The dancing stopped abruptly. Everyone looked at Bob... loadings halted again at the Es Sider and Ras Lanuf terminals, with a combined export capacity of 600,000 bpd, due to actions by the armed guards whose job is to protect them, trading and shipping sources said.
"The security guards have stopped the exports (from Es Sider)," said Mohammed El-Hattab, chairman of the federation of oil workers and an employee at the port's operator Waha Oil Company.
"We are having discussions now and hope to restart today or tomorrow," he added.
In total, around 15 crude and oil product tankers were waiting outside the two ports, according to Windward, a maritime analytics services company.
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08/13/2013 00:00 ||
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[CSMONITOR] Bob Muggsy Mugabe Octogenarian President-for-Life of Zim-bob-we who turned the former Breadbasket of Africa into the African Basket Case... today told those challenging his July 31 re-election to get lost or worse, and not to waste his time with courts and the law.
"Those who can't stomach the defeat, you can commit suicide. Even dogs will not sniff their carcass," Mr. Mugabe piquantly told a Zim-bob-we veterans group, according to CNN.
Mugabe, a former liberation leader turned dictator, has held tight control of Zim-bob-we for 33 years and on the last day of July in a long delayed national vote, appeared to win a resounding 61 percent.
Today he swept aside court challenges that his election was fraudulent -- even as many in Zim-bob-we are bracing for a return of one-party rule in Zim-bob-we that could see banks, land, mines, churches, and other properties expropriated as in earlier periods of Mugabe rule.
Today is "Heroes Day," a kind of Fourth of July for Zimbabwe, and Mugabe told veterans of the 1970s independence struggle that his political rivals can "go hang."
"Those who were hurt by defeat can go hang if they so wish," he said, according to the BBC.
Last week Morgan Tsvangirai, Mugabe's chief political opponent, filed a case of voter fraud that centered partly on the fact that no voter rolls were given to the opposition until the day of the election, and that the rolls that were given were in paper, not digitized in a way that made checking their veracity possible.
Mr. Tsvangirai and his party cite the Zimbabwe Election Commission, the official agency that declared Mugabe the winner, which reports that some 300,000 people were turned away from voting, mostly in urban areas, and that more than 200,000 were "assisted" in voting.
The Zimbabwe Election Support Network, a watchdog group, says more than 850,000 votes were not recorded.
It was unclear whether Tsvangirai will have enough traction in the courts in Harare for his election fraud claims.
Indeed, Mugabe can point to the African Union assessment that the vote was "free and peaceful," even though this was a revision of their earlier assessment of "free and fair."
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EIA's August 2013 Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) forecasts that China's net oil imports will exceed those of the United States by October 2013 on a monthly basis and by 2014 on an annual basis, making China the largest importer of oil in the world.
The imminent emergence of China as the world's largest net oil importer has been driven by steady growth in Chinese demand, increased oil production in the United States, and a flat level of demand for oil in the U.S. market.
U.S. total annual oil production is expected to rise by 28% between 2011 and 2014 to nearly 13 million barrels per day, primarily from shale oil, tight oil, and Gulf of Mexico deepwater plays. In the meantime, Chinese production increases at a much lower rate (6% over this period) and is forecast to be just a third of U.S. production in 2014.
Who will pay to protect the sea lanes & oil fields?
I think China gets it. They're building, slowly, a fleet carrier arm. They're building lots of frigate sized ships (per Feng at Information Dissemination). They're quietly getting fueling and visitation rights in the region.
[Ynet] Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's office denied on Monday reports he had been hospitalised for a stomach condition in the past week, dismissing what it called "baseless allegations".
Speculation about Erdogan's health has been rife since he had surgery to remove polyps from his intestines in late 2011. Polyps are abnormal growths of tissue which can be cancerous. However, a lie repeated often enough remains a lie... following the surgery, Turkish media cited Erdogan's doctor as saying the polyps had been harmless.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[CSMONITOR] 
