News for the Waking Generation
The European Union’s three presidents are in Oslo to receive this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, on behalf of the group. It’s being given to commend the EU for fostering peace. But not everyone agrees – hundreds marched through the Norwegian capital in protest. RT’s Peter Oliver looks at why many believe the EU doesn’t deserve the prize, and why the whole Nobel institution may need a rethink.
“In the lead up to the one-year anniversary of the biggest protest in Israel’s history, we get tear-gassed by the IDF in the West Bank, and then we have drinks with a spokesperson for the Israeli protest movement…”
JERUSALEM — In a fiery speech Saturday before a mammoth rally in Gaza City marking the 25th anniversary of the founding of Hamas, Khaled Meshal, the political leader of the militant Islamist group, pledged that it would never recognize Israel and called for an Islamic Palestinian state on the territory of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Meshal spoke during his first visit to Gaza, a triumphant tour after a recent eight-day warbetween Hamas and Israel, and 15 years after he survived an Israeli assassination attempt in Jordan.
A sea of green flags filled Katiba Square in Gaza City as Meshal and the Hamas prime minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, walked out of a giant replica of a long-range Hamas M-75 rocket set up on a stage with a mock-up of the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City.
Tens of thousands gathered for what was billed as both an anniversary and a victory celebration after last month’s conflict, during which Hamas fired rockets toward Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Meshal, who has led Hamas from exile, used the occasion to reiterate the group’s long-held principles, calling for “armed resistance” to eliminate Israel.
“Palestine, from the river to the sea, from north to south, is our land,” Meshal said, “Not an inch of it can be conceded.”
“We cannot recognize the legitimacy of Israel’s occupation of Palestine,” he said. “There is no legitimacy to occupation, and therefore no legitimacy for Israel, no matter how long it will take.”
“Liberating Palestine, all of Palestine, is a duty, a right and a goal,” he added.
As for Jerusalem, “we will liberate it inch by inch, stone by stone, Islamic and Christian holy places,” he said. “Israel has no right in Jerusalem.”
The recent recognition of Palestine as a non-member observer state at the United Nations was a “small step but a good one,” Meshal said, but he asserted that armed action took precedence over diplomacy.
“Liberation first, then the state,” he said. “The real state is the product of liberation, not the product of negotiations.”
“Holy war and armed resistance are the real and right path to liberation and recovery of rights,” he declared, adding that that while diplomatic efforts could also serve the cause, they had “no value without resistance.”
Meshal’s message stood in stark contrast to the strategy of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who heads the rival Fatah faction that is dominant in the West Bank. Abbas led the successful U.N. bid, has negotiated with Israel and rejects violence.
Still, Meshal urged Abbas to follow through with a reconciliation agreement signed last year between Hamas and Fatah, calling the U.N. vote a boost to faltering unity efforts.
After the reconciliation accord, Meshal endorsed a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and unarmed “popular struggle” advocated by Abbas, but he did not renounce violence or commit to ending the conflict with Israel once that state was achieved. Washington Post
Darryl Fears
In a government lab where scientists slice open dead animals to study the exotic diseases that killed them, Carol Meteyer peered through a microscope at hundreds of little bats and started to notice something very weird.
The bats had managed to survive the white-nose fungus that had killed millions of other bats hibernating in caves, mostly in the Northeast. But they had succumbed to something else that had left their tiny corpses in tatters, their wings scorched and pocked with holes.
Meteyer, a scientist for the U.S. Geological Survey, had stumbled upon a phenomenon never before seen in mammals in the wild. A similar finding had been observed only once before — in people with AIDS.
Now scientists hope studying the immunology of bats might help in the development of treatments for AIDS.
The devastating immune-system attack, called IRIS for immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome, plays out differently in humans and bats, according to an article by Meteyer and two colleagues that recently appeared in the journal Virulence.
When bats hibernate in winter, their heart rates slow and their immune systems all but shut down, making them vulnerable to the cave-dwelling fungus Geomyces destructansthat causes white-nose and eats away skin, connective tissue and muscle.
When bats wake up in late March, their immune systems react like startled homeowners who realize prowlers are inside the house. They launch a wild search-and-destroy mission that annihilates the disease, but also healthy cells and tissue.
“It’s not natural. It’s cellular suicide. It comes out in a huge wave, going out to those areas of infection and kills everything,” said Meteyer, who was a veterinary pathologist for the USGS in Madison, Wis., at the time of her discovery but now is the deputy coordinator for contaminant biology for the agency in Reston.
For AIDS patients, the immune-system syndrome plays out differently. After antiretroviral treatment improves patients’ health, their restored immune systems can launch an exaggerated attack against any previously acquired opportunistic infection the treatment didn’t catch, causing extensive damage.
Scientists now hope to study the immunology of bats to try to uncover findings that can assist the development of treatments for AIDS.
Meteyer said she envisions a day when “we can look closely at the mechanism driving this intense response in bats and potentially get insight into this phenomenon in humans.”
Her co-author, Judith Mandl, a research fellow for the National Institutes of Health involved in AIDS research, was also intrigued by the similarities between bat and human reactions. “When you release immune suppression, you get a response that’s a lot more damaging than helpful,” she said. The third co-author is Daniel Barber, who also works at NIH.
Eleftherios Mylonakis, Virulence’s editor-in-chief, said he included the research in the Nov. 15 edition because it represents the “out of the box” thinking the journal seeks to capture. “We want to support scientists thinking in novel ways,” he said. “Very often what we see in our patients is already seen in some form or another in nature and we want to understand these connections in order to facilitate new discoveries.”
The chemical scare around Syria is receiving a skeptical response not only from Assad’s government, but now the very people seeking to bring him down.
A senior rebel official has dismissed Washington’s reports that Assad was arming chemical warheads, saying it was all part of a media game. 
