By Zhang Shuangying

(Clearwisdom.net) My father Zhang Xingwu was taken away from us in July, 2008.

Zhang Xingwu

During the Beijing Olympic Games, many innocent people were arrested. At around midnight on July 16, 2008, my father was taken away from our residence by 610 office personnel. He was sent to a detention center, and in the next nearly twelve months, no family member has been allowed to visit him.

The last news we heard about my father was on March 31, 2009. On that day, my father was put on trial. My mother and family members engaged a lawyer and went to the court, and after much hassle, they were given a date for a public trial. After eight months of separation, we had hope for seeing him again. On that morning, my mother and other relatives, who were setting off to go to the courthouse, were put under house arrest. They were not allowed to attend the court session, and even the lawyer we engaged was not allowed to enter the courthouse. He was barred at the door of the courthouse. My aunt managed to reach the courthouse, but when they requested to enter the court room, they were immediately arrested. They were sentenced to 21 months of forced labor.

All of this happened without my father's knowledge. He was taken out of the detention center after being incarcerated for 260 days. When he arrived at the courthouse, he did not see a single familiar face. Even his defense lawyer, who had visited him the previous day, was not there.

A friend later passed on the news that my father was heavily escorted by many policemen when brought into the courtroom. During a trial where no defense lawyer or family member was allowed, my father was sentenced to seven years of imprisonment simply for being a Falun Gong practitioner. When family members and the lawyer expressed that they wanted to file an appeal, the court personnel forcefully blocked the lawyer from interacting with my father. They claimed that my father wanted them to pass on his wishes to fire the defense lawyer. The lawyer tried to go to the detention center to get my father's signature for the appeal, but he was turned away each time.

Since 1999, the local police and 610 Office personnel have not stopped their persecution of my parents. They detained them, ransacked our house, and for a period my parents were forced to go from place to place to avoid the persecution. They suffered three years of forced labor and now my father faces even longer imprisonment.

Background information

My father Zhang Xingwu, sixty-eight years old, was a physics professor in the Jinan Education College in Shandong Province. He started to practice Falun Gong in 1995, and his physical and mental health greatly improved. From then on he lived by the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance. After July 1999, he was demoted and his pay was cut. He was detained on many occasions and his house was ransacked many times. In 2000, he was forced to wander around homeless to avoid persecution. On January 1, 2001, he was subjected to three years of forced labor on the grounds of "spreading Falun Gong." During the period of imprisonment at the Liuchangshan Forced Labor Camp in Jinan City, because he refused to write a "guarantee letter" to renounce Falun Gong, he was not allowed to sleep for twelve consecutive days and subjected to brainwashing. They also used other torture methods on him. In late December 2003, when he was released from prison, he was still heavily monitored and not allowed to travel out of town nor to carry a passport. At 11 p.m. on July 16, 2008, over 20 policemen from the Jinan City Police Department and the Weijiazhuang Police Station barged into his residence. They ransacked his house and took away his cash and bank card. They also arrested his wife. The next day, Zhang was taken to the Jinan Detention Center and incarcerated, where he still is today, awaiting prison.

On March 31, 2009, a trial was held for his case. Outside the courthouse, about 70 riot policemen were stationed armed with guns. About 100 plainclothes policemen were scattered around the area. Mr. Zhang's wife and other relatives were put under house arrest and not allowed to attend the court session. Zhu Xiaodong, Miao Peihua and Liu Lijie were arrested at the courthouse and taken to the police station. Later, they were sentenced to one year and nine months of forced labor.

 

(wikipedia)

 

 

United States Capitol Building, Washington, D.C.

 

 

The fresco painted on the interior of the Capitol's dome titled The Apotheosis of Washington was painted by Constantino Brumidi.

 

Apotheosis of Washington is the very large fresco painted by Italian artist Constantino Brumidi in 1865 and visible through the oculus of the dome in the rotunda of the United States Capitol Building. The fresco is suspended 180 feet (55 m) above the rotunda floor and covers an area of 4,664 square feet (433.3 m²). The figures painted are up to 15 feet (4.6 m) tall and are visible from the floor below. The dome was completed in 1863, and Brumidi painted it over the course of 11 months at the end of the Civil War. He was paid $40,000 ($583,093 in 2008) for the fresco.

Brumidi had worked for three years in the Vatican under Pope Gregory XVI, and served several aristocrats as an artist for palaces and villas, including the prince Torlonia. He immigrated to the United States in 1852, and spent much of the last 25 years of his life working in the Capitol. In addition to The Apotheosis of Washington he designed the Brumidi Corridors.

 Symbolism

The Apotheosis of Washington depicts George Washington ascending to the heavens and becoming a god (apotheosis). Washington, the first U.S. president and commander-in-chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, is allegorically represented, surrounded by figures from classical mythology. Washington is draped in purple, a royal color, with a rainbow arch at his feet, flanked by the goddess Victory (draped in green, using a horn) to his left and the goddess Liberty to his right. Liberty wears a red cap, symbolizing emancipation, from a Roman tradition where sons leaving the home would be given a red cap. She holds a fasces in her right hand and an open book in the other.

Forming a circle between Liberty and Victory are 13 maidens, each with a star above their heads, representing the original 13 colonies. Several of the maidens have their backs turned to Washington, said to represent the colonies that had seceded from the Union at the time of painting.

Surrounding Washington, the two goddesses, and the 13 maidens are six scenes lining the perimeter, each representing a national concept allegorically: from directly below Washington in the center and moving clockwise, "War," "Science," "Marine," "Commerce," "Mechanics," and "Agriculture":

War
Freedom, also known as Columbia, is directly below Washington in the personification of War. The scene depicts a woman fighting for liberty with a raised sword, a cape, and a helmet and shield (in the colors of the American flag) trampling figures representing Tyranny and Kingly Power. To Freedom's left assisting her is a fierce bald eagle (the bald eagle is the national bird of the United States) carrying arrows and a thunderbolt (reminiscent of the arrows carried by the eagle in the Great Seal of the United States).

Science
Minerva, the Roman goddess of crafts and wisdom, is portrayed with helmet and spear pointing to an electrical generator creating power stored in batteries next to a printing press, representing great American inventions. American scientists and inventors Benjamin Franklin, Samuel F. B. Morse, and Robert Fulton watch. In the left part of the scene a teacher demonstrates the use of dividers.

Marine
This scene shows Neptune, the Roman sea-god, with trident and crown of seaweed riding in a shell chariot drawn by sea horses. Venus, goddess of love born from the sea, is depicted helping to lay the transatlantic telegraph cable. In the background is an ironclad warship with smokestacks.

Commerce
Mercury, god of commerce, with his winged petasos and sandals and a caduceus, is depicted giving a bag of gold to American Revolutionary War financier Robert Morris. To the left, men move a box on a dolly; on the right, the anchor and sailors lead into "Marine."

Mechanics
Vulcan, god of fire and the forge, is depicted standing at an anvil with his foot on a cannon next to a pile of cannonballs. A steam engine is in the background. The man at the forge is thought to represent Charles Thomas, the supervisor of ironwork during the construction of the Capitol dome.

Agriculture
Ceres, the goddess of agriculture, is shown with a wreath of wheat and a cornucopia, symbol of plenty, while sitting on a McCormick mechanical reaper. The personification of "Young America" in a liberty cap holds the reins of the horses, while the goddess Flora gathers flowers in the foreground.

 

The Capitol has a long history in art of the United States, beginning in 1856 with Italian/Greek-American artist Constantino Brumidi and his murals in the hallways of the first floor of the Senate side of the Capitol. The murals, known as the Brumidi Corridors,^]reflect great moments and people in United States history. Among the original works are those depicting Benjamin Franklin, John Fitch, Robert Fulton, and events such as the Cession of Louisiana. Also decorating the walls are animals, insects and natural flora indigenous to the United States. Brumidi's design left many spaces open so that future events in United States history could be added. Among those added are the Spirit of St. Louis, the Moon landing, and the Challenger shuttle crew.

Brumidi also worked within the Capitol Rotunda. He is responsible for the painting of The Apotheosis of Washington beneath the top of the dome, and also the famous Frieze of United States History. The Apotheosis of Washington was completed in 11 months and painted by Brumidi while suspended nearly 180 feet (55 m) in the air. It is said to be the first attempt by the United States to deify a founding father. Washington is depicted surrounded by 13 maidens in an inner ring with many Greek and Roman gods and goddesses below him in a second ring. The frieze is located around the inside of the base of the dome and is a chronological, pictorial history of the United States from the landing of Christopher Columbus to the Wright Brothers's flight in Kitty Hawk. The frieze was started in 1878 and was not completed until 1953. The frieze was therefore painted by four different artists: Brumidi, Filippo Costaggini, Charles Ayer Whipple, and Allyn Cox. The final scenes depicted in the fresco had not yet occurred when Brumidi began his Frieze of the United States History.

U.S. Capitol Rotunda

     Within the Rotunda is also located eight paintings of the development of the United States as a nation. On the east side are four paintings depicting major events in the discovery of America. On the west are four paintings depicting the founding of the United States. The east side paintings include The Baptism of Pocahontas by John Gadsby Chapman, The Embarkation of the Pilgrims by Robert W. Weir, The Discovery of the Mississippi by William H. Powell, and The Landing of Columbus by John Vanderlyn. On the west side is The Declaration of Independence, The Surrender of General Burgoyne, The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis, and General George Washington Resigning His Commission, all painted by John Trumbull, a contemporary of United State's founding fathers and a participant in the U.S. Revolutionary War. In fact, Trumbull painted himself into The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis.

National Statuary Hall Collection

The Capitol also houses the National Statuary Hall Collection, comprising two statues donated by each of the fifty states to honor persons notable in their histories. One of the most notable statues in the National Statuary Hall is a bronze statue of King Kamehameha donated by the state of Hawaii upon its accession to the union in 1959. The statue's extraordinary weight of 15,000 pounds raised concerns that it might come crashing through the floor, so it was moved to Emancipation Hall of the new Capitol Visitor Center. The 100th, and last statue for the collection, that of Po'pay from the state of New Mexico, was added on September 22, 2005. Po'pay was the first statue moved to and now resides in Emancipation Hall of the new Capital Visitor Center.

By Ru Yi, a Falun Dafa practitioner in China

(Clearwisdom.net) One morning in July 2007 I was arrested by police officers from the local National Security team and taken to a site used to persecute Dafa practitioners. There, I was savagely tortured and interrogated. I was later taken to a detention center for a month, and was subsequently imprisoned in Heizuizi Forced Labor Camp, Changchun City, Jilin Province.

The interrogation site was in a quiet suburb of Changchun. I was tortured for three days. The police handcuffed me to a metal chair and then beat my head. They handcuffed my hands behind my back with one hand over my shoulder (see torture illustration figure 3 at http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/articles/2005/4/27/60082.html) and put six beer bottles between my back and hands. My arms quickly became numb due to lack of circulation. The police opened the handcuffs for a few minutes and then closed them again.

They also used an electric baton to hit my head and shock my knees. One officer, who weighed at least 220 pounds, stepped on my foot that was cuffed to the chair, then pushed me to the ground, stepped on my back, and pulled up my hands that were cuffed behind my back.

They put pens with hard edges between my fingers and then squeezed my hands.

They also threatened to put me in a water dungeon, where they claimed they had beaten a practitioner to death. When I clarified the truth to them, they laughed at me, "We have heard this many times. There are many practitioners who are more capable than you."

They tortured me from morning until noon. Team lead Wang was tired and sat on a chair and said, "It seems that you didn't feel any pain. How do you feel?" I replied, "You are very evil." He replied, "That's right..."

In the afternoon, the police went to my home and ransacked the place. They took my Dafa books and equipment for producing truth-clarification materials.

When they returned they started another round of interrogation. I said that I needed to use the bathroom. A male officer said, "There aren't any female guards here so I need to watch you, otherwise you can't use the bathroom." During those three days, they worked nonstop to brainwash, torture, interrogate, and threaten me. At night, they restrained me to a chair or bed. They even asked me why my feet were swollen. I said that it was caused by their beatings. They replied, "Who beat you?"

When I was taken to the detention center on the third day, my whole body was covered in black and purple bruises and welts. After a month of this illegal detention, I was taken to Jilin Province Women's Forced Labor Camp (Heizuizi Forced Labor Camp in Changchun City, where almost all Dafa disciples from this area are imprisoned and tortured).

On the second day at the forced labor camp the guards took turns "chatting" with me so they could brainwash me. They ordered me to write a statement denouncing Falun Gong, to criticize myself, and to memorize the forced labor camp's rules. I refused to cooperate with any of it. But they kept telling me that if I was "good" I could go home earlier. After realizing my attitude towards Dafa was firm, they again started cursing and threatening me.

I often saw other practitioners being confined in a solitary compartment, tied to the "dead person's bed," (click here for illustration: http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/articles/2004/12/15/55600.html), beaten, and shocked with several electric batons at once.

The guards even grabbed the hair of a senior practitioner in her sixties and bashed her head against the wall. One female practitioner was tied to a dead person's bed during menstruation. When she was finally untied, her pants and the bed were all bloody. Her periods have since become irregular.

During the Olympic Games, to prevent practitioners from clarifying the truth to the visitors, the staff extended the detention periods of those practitioners whose terms at the forced labor camp were almost up, some by as much as 100 days.

Sometimes practitioners were released and then arrested right away when they were barely outside the door of the camp.

Between beatings, practitioners were forced to do hard labor from 5:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. every day. There was only 30 minutes for a lunch break. We were frequently strip-searched. The guards searched us from head to toe, including our socks, shoes, and underwear. Sometimes they even made the practitioners remove all of their clothing.

These are the events I saw and experienced when I was persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). I am letting everyone know how evil the CCP can be.

 

 

 

 

(Clearwisdom.net) Mr. Xu Dawei, a 34-year-old Falun Gong practitioner, was from Qingyuan County, Fushun City, Liaoning Province. Mr. Xu was persecuted for eight years by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials in Dabei Prison in Shenyang, First Prison in Lingyuan County, Second Prison in Fushun City, and Dongling Prison in Shenyang City. Mr. Xu was tortured in a number of ways: violent brainwashing, being forced to wear handcuffs and shackles for extensive periods of time, brutal beatings, being hung up, force-feeding, being beaten with a rubber hose, being pierced with a steel needle more than 10 cm long, electric baton shocks, etc. February 3, 2009, was the last day of Mr. Xu's illegal imprisonment. When his family came to Dongling Prison to take him home they found that he was emaciated, his hair had turned gray, and his face was heavily bruised and stiff. Worst of all, Mr. Xu did not even recognize his family members. Just 13 days after returning home, on February 16, 2009, Mr. Xu died. Upon his death, his body still exhibited numerous injuries and scars caused by the tortures while in custody.

Photo: Mr. Xu Dawei, taken just a few months before being persecuted.

The following are some facts about Mr. Xu's persecution in Dabei Prison in Shenyang City and First Prison in Lingyuan County.

Mr. Xu Dawei was transferred to the Lujian Team in Dabei Prison and kept there for about 40 days. At first, the inmates forced Mr. Xu and three other practitioners to stand facing a wall, during which time other inmates were instigated to monitor and torment the four practitioners. When the practitioners were asked if they would continue to practice Falun Gong, they asserted that they would. Then policemen instructed inmates to remove Mr. Xu's pants and beat him. However, Mr. Xu continued to practice the exercises. Later, Mr. Xu and other practitioners went on a hunger strike to protest the persecution. The inmates then intensified their tactics with brutal force-feeding and hanging them under a ladder for about 20 days.

Mr. Xu Dawei and Mr. Yang Xinyu were taken away for torture and brainwashing. Both practitioners were resistant ,and the police allowed other inmates to strictly monitor them and beat them. They were then taken to the "strict management team" for much more severe abuse. The then-deputy head of the 12^th team incited armed policemen in plainclothes to handcuff Mr. Xu and other practitioners with their arms behind their backs and then sent them to the "strict management team." They were locked in a small cell, where Mr. Xu and the others were beaten by inmates regularly. They were subjected to long-term starvation and were only allowed a small portion (about 100 g) of bread or just a cup of porridge.

The two-person cell to which Mr. Xu Dawei was confined was two square meters. Mr. Xu had to sit from 4:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. After an extended period of time passed, the muscles in his buttocks degenerated, resulting in extreme pain.

On January 31, 2002, Mr. Xu and five other practitioners were taken to First Prison in Lingyuan County. Because Mr. Xu, Liang Hongbo, and other practitioners continued to study the Fa and practice the exercises, they were sent to the"strict management team" and were confined in a solitary cell by Wang Hongbo, the head of the Prison Administration Section. The police designed handcuffs made of reinforcing bar that was 8 mm in diameter and caused severe pain when put on. The policemen used these handcuffs on Mr. Xu for one month; his hands were handcuffed behind his back 24 hours a day and his feet were shackled. He could not move his hands even a little, for even the slightest movement would induce excruciating pain. His skin was broken and infected, which resulted in further festering and pain. The suffering Mr. Xu Dawei endured was unfathomable.

The prison in Lingyuan also forced practitioners to do hard labor, such as making carpets, etc. Mr. Xu resisted by going on a hunger strike, which resulted in brutal force-feeding. He was sent to the "strict management team" many times and tortured further. One of those tortures was the "extreme stretching method:" his limbs were stretched in four different directions for 24 hours a day. Usually a person could not bear it for more than three days, but Mr. Xu 's limbs were stretched like that for seven days the first time and then many more times thereafter.

More than 98% of supposedly natural and environmentally friendly products on US supermarket shelves are making potentially false or misleading claims, Congress has been told. And 22% of products making green claims bear an environmental badge that has no inherent meaning, said Scot Case, of the environmental consulting firm TerraChoice.

The study of nearly 4,000 consumer products found "greenwashing" in nearly every product category – from a lack of verifiable information to outright lies.

Even the experts are confused. Case, whose firm runs its own Ecologo certification programme, admitted he had bought a refrigerator only to find it failed to meet its claims of energy efficiency.

"My refrigerator used twice as much energy as advertised," he told members of the House of Representatives committee on commerce, trade and consumer protection. The hearing amounted to a crash course into the perils of the new green marketplace for the committee. Congress is looking at how to guide consumers through a thicket of competing claims on so-called greenness.

One problem is proliferation – both of products claiming to be green and of certification programmes purporting to back up those claims.

The interest in products that do not poison water or air, create unnecessary waste or unduly add to the effects of climate change has defied class divisions and the economic recession. In its company surveys, Wal-Mart, the chain of low-cost megastores, found that 57% of its customers professed to be concerned about the environment.

There is a constantly expanding pool of products to choose from. About 33% of all new food products launched in 2008 claimed to be "natural", Dara O'Rourke, a professor in environmental policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and founder of the GoodGuide, told the recent hearing. But with around 300 competing environmental certification programmes, shoppers are bombarded by irrelevant or deceptive labels touting the green, natural, eco-friendly, recyclable and non-toxic properties of goods.

It is virtually impossible to sort through the claims, said Urvashi Rangan, of the Consumers Union. "We've got to get rid of the green noise," she said. "Vague and misleading terms should not be allowed."

Labels do not generally say whether products contain recycled content, or how far they travelled from factory to shelf.

Rangan singled out "non-toxic", "natural", and "fragrance free" as misleading claims, because the federal government has never set a precise standard for manufacturers to meet. "Personal care products are the Wild West," she said.

Reading the fine print on labels will not necessarily help either. Companies are not required to disclose the use of some substances believed to be dangerous – such as phthalates, which can cause birth defects and hormone abnormalities and are widely used, from baby bottles to cleaners and cosmetics.

The makers of household cleaners are also not required by law to list every chemical in the bottle so long as it is below a certain level. "Almost none of these companies disclose the ingredients in these products," O'Rourke told Congress. "We don't know what is in them. We don't what the plastic is made of."And as Case eventually discovered, even the most seemingly reliable certifications cannot be trusted.

Case told the Congress hearing he bought his LG Electronics refrigerator in 2007, reassured by its Energy Star rating. The seal, from the department of energy, is supposed to be awarded to appliances that consume at least 20% less electricity than a standard appliance.

This spring, he got a letter saying that his fridge did not, after all, qualify for Energy Star status because LG, in its process of "self-certification", had strayed from the efficiency guidelines set by the department of energy.

By a Falun Dafa Practitioner from China

(Clearwisdom.net) Falun Gong practitioner Mr. Zhang Hongwei from Tonghua, Jilin province has been recently tortured brutally by the Jilin Province Jail. He was hospitalized for a week, beginning on April 9, 2009. Doctors said that he had gastric erosion and duodenal ulcers. Currently, Mr. Zhang cannot eat or drink anything, as he vomits anything that he ingests. Mr. Zhang is now extremely skinny and when his family came to see him, he could not stand by himself and had to be supported by two people. The jail refused to release Mr. Zhang on bail for medical treatment. Mr. Zhang is now in critical condition.

Mr. Zhang was arrested by the Fangshan District Police Station in Beijing for making truth-clarifying materials. He was sentenced to 13 years in jail by the Beijing City Court and Procuratorate. On November 9, 2001, Mr. Zhang was transferred from the Fangchan Detention Center to Tiebei Jail in Changchun City, Jilin province. He resisted the persecution with a hunger strike for 53 days. In March of 2002, Mr. Zhang was sent to the Jilin Province Jail and repeatedly tortured. He was put into solitary detention in a small cell for over two years. He has also been tortured on the death bed and the "stretching bed," hung up in the air, and brutally beaten. For a long time, the jail refused to let Mr. Zhang's family visit him. His family went to the Procuratorate to appeal. Mr. Zhang was finally let out of solitary detention in August of 2004.

In the beginning of 2005, Mr. Zhang shouted at guards beating practitioners. He also shouted "Falun Dafa is good!" Mr. Zhang was then forced into solitary detention in a small cell for another three months as punishment. Mr. Zhang's health was devastated with all kinds of inhumane torture.

In the beginning of 2006, Mr. Zhang was coughing every day. A medical check-up showed that he had pulmonary tuberculosis and abdominal dropsy. In March, his situation was getting worse and he was also getting pleurisy, high blood pressure, and heart disease. He was becoming extremely weak and was hospitalized in the jail hospital. A check-up showed that he had pulmonary tuberculosis in both lungs (type III). However, the jail's administration refused to release Mr. Zhang on bail for medical treatment and only allowed his family a period of 3 months to be able to visit him.

His family had nowhere to appeal. In February of 2009, Mr. Zhang was vomiting everything he ate. In the beginning of March, he was beaten by criminal prisoners from the 10^th Prison Division. On March 25, 2009, Mr. Zhang resisted the persecution with a hunger strike and the jail is torturing him and again putting him into solitary detention.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com

Opposition to Plant Highlights Hurdles Facing Renewable Energy

By using the molten-salt method, the plant could store 16 hours of power supply, easing concerns about the ability of solar plants to provide power when it is dark or cloudy. It would have a capacity of 100 megawatts, enough to power about 50,000 homes.

"We're trying to build a facility that runs 24 hours a day," said Kevin B. Smith, SolarReserve's chief executive.

But Belote said the solar plant would compromise classified aspects of the Air Force's training range and would interfere with radar. He said the Air Force would tell

the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management, which owns most of the land in the state, to reject the proposal. (The bureau controls more than 20 million acres of land with wind energy potential and more than 30 million acres with solar potential.)

SolarReserve officials "did a lot of [research] with publicly available tools," Belote said. "But when they came back for an official look the answer was, 'Man, that's still too close.' And because of the sensitivity [of information], I can't tell them why. . . . Unfortunately for them and us, there's stuff on the Nevada testing range we don't tell anyone about." Belote suggested they try another site, either 100 miles to the southeast or about 80 miles to the northeast, near the town of Mesquite.

Top executives at SolarReserve said they were upset and disappointed. They feel that the Air Force pointed them toward the second site before rejecting it. Moreover, the Nellis base boasts of its own photovoltaic panels -- the nation' largest solar photovoltaic power plant; on May 27, Belote hosted President Obama and  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who toured the solar facility.

Obama "got a nice tour of the facility, but I expect he had not been informed that Nellis was resisting renewable-energy facilities in the surrounding area," Smith said. "The fact that Nellis AFB allowed someone to build a PV [photovoltaic] facility on the base and sell them the power is great, but they are hiding behind it while they try and stop other development in the region."

The Air Force has a history of balking at buildings near the 2.9-million-acre flight-training range in Nevada, which makes up 41 percent of the Air Force's total training acres worldwide. In the past, the service has objected to tall hotel projects in nearby Las Vegas and to wind turbines.

But SolarReserve's chief executive Smith said "we tried to make sure we had a site the Air Force wouldn't object to." The company's plan would place a lone solar-power tower below a 2,000-foot-tall mountain range that separates their location from the base. The base sits well above the height of the tower.

In addition, the project would create many construction jobs, Smith noted.

SolarReserve is still hoping it can prevail upon the Air Force to approve the site near Nellis and has appealed to members of Congress for help. Belote has arranged for classified briefings to explain his objections to select Senate staffers, and he has promoted the project to the mayor of Mesquite, a small town just on the Nevada side of the Arizona border, 87 miles northeast of Las Vegas.

"Our community is very, very interested in alternative energy and the thought of being green," said Mesquite Mayor Susan M. Holecheck. "Historically, our economic base has been gaming and tourism." Another solar company has already proposed a project using similar technology. Holecheck said the town would have to study whether a SolarReserve site would interfere with plans for moving the town's airport. And the Bureau of Land Management would also need to agree to provide land.

Smith hasn't had time to pursue the Mesquite idea. He said the Air Force just mentioned the alternative a month ago. "The difficulty with moving to a new site is you start over again," he said. "It is certainly something we can do if we fail at the current site but it will delay the project 12 to 18 months."

(Clearwisdom.net)

Five years ago, Clearwisdom reported that Dafa practitioner Wang Jinzhong from Shenyang was tortured to death (http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/articles/2004/7/1/49735p.html) and CCP police sent his body to the hospital "to save him," but did so only after his death in an attempt to cover up their guilt. The following is testimony from an eyewitness named Zhen. Zhen witnessed the miserable shape of Wang Jinzhong's body and has verified that Wang Jinzhong was sent to the hospital only after he had been tortured to death by the policemen.

Wang Jinzhong

Testimony:

On June 13, 2004, I witnessed the shocking condition of the body of a Falun Gong practitioner named Wang Jinzhong after he had been tortured to death at Wangjia Detention Center, Tiexi Police Department, Shenyang City. Wang Jinzhong's body was naked except for underwear. His eyes were open after he died, and his eye socket was black and blue and sunken with the eye being putrid. His mouth was open, his cheekbones were protruding, and his cheeks were black and decayed. His skin slumped on his neck. Both of his shoulders were narrowed, his arms looked like matchsticks, as did his ribs, pelvis, thighs, legs and feet - they were all as thin as matchsticks. His whole body was skin and bone with no muscle or flesh. His body was bent and shrunken. It probably only weighed about 45 to 70 pounds. The skin above the bones was black, and his body looked like it has been baked and dried. His body was hurriedly carried away by four armed policemen.

A Brief Summary of How Dafa Practitioner Wang Jinzhong Was Tortured To Death:

http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/articles/2004/7/1/49735p.html

Based on Clearwisdom's report on June 23^rd 2004, Dafa practitioner Wang Jinzhong, age 48, from Shenyang, was seized from his workplace by the policemen from Xingshun Police Station, Tiexi on May 20, 2004. The police cruelly tortured Wang Jinzhong and detained him in Tiexi Detention Center. On June 13, 2004, Wang Jinzhong died as a result of his persecution. The evil police then sent Wang Jinzhong's body to a hospital. The hospital stated that Wang Jinzhong had died before he was sent there.

Wang Jinzhong had been in very good health. His height was about 178 cm and his weight was somewhat over 178 pounds. On June 13, evil people from the company that Wang Jinzhong worked for declared in a meeting that Wang Jinzhong had committed suicide. They also warned the other workers not to go to his home and claimed that people who had heard from Wang Jinzhong that Dafa is good all have their names on a blacklist. His colleagues were very mad. They said that this healthy person died only 20 days after he was seized for no reason. Everyone knew that he was tortured to death. In the eyes of his colleagues and friends, Wang Jinzhong was an upright, simple, practical and kind person

 

(wikipedia)

Dutch Golden Age painting is a period of painting in Dutch history. It occurred during the Dutch Golden Age, a period in Dutch history generally spanning the 17th century, in which Dutch trade, science, and art were among the most acclaimed in the world. The painters of this era have left a profound legacy.

At the time, there was a "hierarchy of genres" in painting, whereby some types were regarded as more prestigious than others. In descending order of status:

 

• Baroque painting, characteristic of the age
• history painting, including religious subjects
• Portrait painting
• genre painting or scenes of everyday life
• landscape and cityscape
• still life

Johannes Vermeer Milkmaid 1658-1660

Combinations of these categories occurred. Allegories, in which painted objects conveyed symbolic meaning about the subject, were often applied. For instance, a still life might include a skull, an hourglass and a snuffed out candle, symbols which all emphasized mortality. Seasons were often indicated by human activities that were typical for that time of the year (skating, sowing, harvesting, etc). Paintings often had a moralistic message hidden under the surface.

 History painting

This category comprises not only paintings that depicted real historical events, but also paintings that showed biblical, mythological, literary and allegorical scenes. Large dramatic historical or Biblical scenes were produced less frequently than in other countries, where religious and noble patrons of art often sought to overawe the viewer. Dutch painters, especially in the northern provinces, tried instead to invoke emotion on the part of the viewer by letting him/her be a bystander on a scene of profound intimacy. As such Rembrandt and Rubens are striking examples of large differences in style between Dutch painters from the northern Low Countries, the Dutch Republic, and Flanders in the south.

Many great Dutch painters were inspired and influenced by Italian painters during their formative years. Copies of Italian masterpieces circulated and suggested certain compositional schemes. Dutch painters became absolute masters of the treatment of light, which could partly be traced back to Italian predecessors, notably Caravaggio. Some Dutch painters also travelled to Italy to make firsthand observations.

(Group) portraits

Portrait painting thrived in the Netherlands in the 17th century. Many portraits were commissioned by wealthy individuals. Group portraits similarly were often ordered by prominent members of a city's civilian guard, by boards of trustees and regents, and the like.

Especially in the first half of the century, portraits were very formal and stiff in composition. Groups were often seated around a table, each person looking at the viewer. Much attention was paid to fine details in clothing, and where applicable, to furniture and other signs of a person's position in society. Later in the century groups became livelier and colours brighter.

Scientists often posed with instruments and objects of their study around them. Physicians sometimes posed together around a cadaver, a so called 'Anatomical Lesson', the most famous one being Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632, Mauritshuis, The Hague). Boards of trustees preferred an image of austerity and humility, posing in dark clothing (which by its refinement testified to their prominent standing in society), often seated around a table, with solemn expressions on their faces. Families often had themselves portrayed inside their luxurious homes.

Most group portraits of civilian guards (Dutch: schutterstuk) were commissioned in Haarlem and Amsterdam. Here the portrayed favoured an image of might, status or even a joyous spirit. The arrangement around a table would give way in later years to a more dynamic composition, the most prominent example being Rembrandt's famous The Militia Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq better known as the Night Watch (1642, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). In Amsterdam most of these paintings would ultimately end up in the possession of the city council. Many of these are now on display in the Amsterdams Historisch Museum.

Often group portraits were paid for by each portrayed person individually. The amount paid determined each person's place in the picture, either head to toe in full regalia in the foreground or face only in the back of the group. Sometimes all group members paid an equal sum, which was likely to lead to quarrels when some members gained a more prominent place in the picture than others.

Scenes of every day life

Many genre paintings, which seemingly only depicted everyday life, actually illustrated Dutch proverbs and sayings, or conveyed a moralistic message, the meaning of which is not always easy to decipher in modern times. All walks of life were shown. Today these genre paintings provide many insights into the daily life of 17th century citizens of all classes.

Landscapes and cityscapes

Landscape painting was a major genre in the 17th century. Flemish landscapes (particularly from Antwerp) of the 16th century first served as an example. These had been not particularly realistic, having been painted mostly in the studio, partly from imagination. Soon this trend changed, and real Dutch landscapes became prevalent. Drawings were made on site. Horizons were lowered, which made it possible to emphasize the often impressive cloud formations that were (and are) so typical in the climate of the region, and which cast a particular light. Favourite topics were the dunes along the western sea coast, rivers with their broad adjoining meadows where cattle grazed, often with the silhouette of a city in the distance. Winter landscapes with frozen canals and creeks also abounded. The sea was a favourite topic as well since the Low Countries depended on it for trade, battled with it for new land, and battled on it with competing nations. Pictures of sea battles told the stories of a Dutch navy at the peak of its glory.

Architecture also fascinated the Dutch, churches in particular. The exteriors and interiors of buildings were reproduced faithfully. During the century insights into the proper rendering of perspective grew and were enthusiastically applied.

Still lifes

Still lifes were a great opportunity to show one's aptitude in painting textures and surfaces in great detail and with realistic light effects. Food of all kinds laid out on a table, silver cutlery, intricate patterns and subtle folds in table cloths and flowers all challenged painters. Painters from Leiden, The Hague, and Amsterdam particularly excelled in the genre.

The most famous Dutch painters of the 17th century were: Ferdinand Bol, Albert Cuyp, Gerard Dou, Willem Drost, Carel Fabritius, Govert Flinck, Jan van Goyen, Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch, Pieter Pieterszoon Lastman, Judith Leyster, Jan Lievens, Nicolaes Maes, Maria van Oosterwyck, Adriaen van Ostade, Paulus Potter, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Rachel Ruysch, Pieter Saenredam, Jan Steen, Johannes Vermeer.

By a Falun Dafa practitioner in New York

(Clearwisdom.net) On June 18, 2009, initiated by New York State Assemblyman Phil Boyle, more than 50 members of the Assembly co-signed a letter within 24-hours of signature collection at the New York State Capitol in Albany. The letter calls upon President Obama to urge the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to stop the persecution of Falun Gong. On the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the brutal persecution of Falun Gong launched by the CCP, the joint letter calls upon President Obama to condemn the CCP's suppressive policy, demand the CCP end this lengthy, horrible persecution, and let Falun Gong practitioners restore their peaceful and calm cultivation practice and lives. The signature collection will continue until Monday.

New York State Assemblyman Phil Boyle

Phil Boyle, a member of the New York State Assembly representing the 8^th Assembly district, believes that "July 20" is an important date, for it marks the beginning of the persecution imposed upon Falun Gong practitioners by the CCP. On the tenth anniversary of "July 20," he initiated a letter to President Obama. The assistant in Assemblyman Phil Boyle's office said that within 24 hours, more than 50 members of the Assembly had signed the letter to show their support. In the past, similar letters had only received about a dozen signatures. Assemblyman Boyle said, "We have over 40 Assemblymen writing a letter to President Obama to make sure that he marks July 20^th , the ten-year anniversary of the persecution of Falun Gong by the Chinese Communist Party, and we hope that President Obama takes seriously this issue and makes sure that when he is dealing with the administration in Beijing that they focus on human rights in general and the persecution of Falun Gong specifically." [quote from listening to NTDTV program.http://www.ntdtv.com/xtr/b5/2009/06/21/a307490.html#video]

Last year, after accomplices of the CCP assaulted Falun Gong practitioners in Flushing, New York, it became apparent that the CCP had extended its persecution of Falun Gong to US soil. As an elected Assemblyman, Phil Boyle said, "Many people are unaware that it [persecution]is not just going on in China with Falun Gong, but the persecution has also taken place in New York City. There were assaults and violence against Falun Gong practitioners by anti-Falun Gong mobs. We need to make sure that the president is aware of that, and he knows that in New York City, the law enforcement authorities, are acting on that and we need to crack down on any anti-Falun Gong activities." [quote from listening to NTDTV program.http://www.ntdtv.com/xtr/b5/2009/06/21/a307490.html#video]

The Following is the letter to President Obama co-signed by members of New York State Assembly [the letter is the original version]

June 18, 2009

President Barack Obama

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Obama,

As you are aware, July 20, 2009 marks a sad anniversary - the beginning of ten years of continuous persecution of Falun Dafa (Falun Gong) by the government of the People's Republic of China. Before this decade of persecution began, it is estimated that between 70 and one hundred million people practiced the tranquil Falun Gong exercises daily in parks, work places, and houses across China, while peacefully adhering to Falun Dafa's guiding principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.

To date, there have been over 3,000 confirmed deaths as a result of this violent crackdown by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It is feared that the actual number of Falun Gong deaths by torture, malnutrition, exhaustion, neglect in detention, and even organ harvesting in hospitals, may actually have reached into the tens of thousands.

The persecution of Falun Dafa followers by the Chinese Communist regime is not limited to the People's Republic of China. Pro-communist mobs have berated, threatened, and physically attacked Falun Gong adherents in New York City. New York City police officers have had to arrest several members of an anti-Falun Gong mob for attacks against practitioners, with charges ranging from assault to resisting arrest.

Mr. President, we commend you for your leadership in protecting human rights throughout the world. In furtherance of your efforts to foster human rights, we urge you to mark the July 20th anniversary by denouncing the policy of repression by the CCP against Falun Dafa and demanding that Communist Chinese leaders end this long campaign of terror, allowing Falun Dafa adherents to once again practice in peace and tranquility.

Sincerely,

Assemblyman Phil Boyle

Members of New York State Assembly signed the appeal letter to President Obama

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

Sixty years after the publication of Orwell's masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, that crystal first line sounds as natural and compelling as ever. But when you see the original manuscript, you find something else: not so much the ringing clarity, more the obsessive rewriting, in different inks, that betrays the extraordinary turmoil behind its composition.

Probably the definitive novel of the 20th century, a story that remains eternally fresh and contemporary, and whose terms such as "Big Brother", "doublethink" and "newspeak" have become part of everyday currency, Nineteen Eighty-Four has been translated into more than 65 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide, giving George Orwell a unique place in world literature.

"Orwellian" is now a universal shorthand for anything repressive or totalitarian, and the story of Winston Smith, an everyman for his times, continues to resonate for readers whose fears for the future are very different from those of an English writer in the mid-1940s.

The circumstances surrounding the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four make a haunting narrative that helps to explain the bleakness of Orwell's dystopia. Here was an English writer, desperately sick, grappling alone with the demons of his imagination in a bleak Scottish outpost in the desolate aftermath of the second world war. The idea for Nineteen Eighty-Four, alternatively, "The Last Man in Europe", had been incubating in Orwell's mind since the Spanish civil war. His novel, which owes something to Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian fiction We, probably began to acquire a definitive shape during 1943-44, around the time he and his wife, Eileen adopted their only son, Richard. Orwell himself claimed that he was partly inspired by the meeting of the Allied leaders at the Tehran Conference of 1944. Isaac Deutscher, an Observer colleague, reported that Orwell was "convinced that Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt consciously plotted to divide the world" at Tehran.

Orwell had worked for David Astor's Observer since 1942, first as a book reviewer and later as a correspondent. The editor professed great admiration for Orwell's "absolute straightforwardness, his honesty and his decency", and would be his patron throughout the 1940s. The closeness of their friendship is crucial to the story of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell's creative life had already benefited from his association with the Observer in the writing of Animal Farm. As the war drew to a close, the fruitful interaction of fiction and Sunday journalism would contribute to the much darker and more complex novel he had in mind after that celebrated "fairy tale". It's clear from his Observer book reviews, for example, that he was fascinated by the relationship between morality and language.

There were other influences at work. Soon after Richard was adopted, Orwell's flat was wrecked by a doodlebug. The atmosphere of random terror in the everyday life of wartime London became integral to the mood of the novel-in-progress. Worse was to follow. In March 1945, while on assignment for the Observer in Europe, Orwell received the news that his wife, Eileen, had died under anaesthesia during a routine operation.

Suddenly he was a widower and a single parent, eking out a threadbare life in his Islington lodgings, and working incessantly to dam the flood of remorse and grief at his wife's premature death. In 1945, for instanc e, he wrote almost 110,000 words for various publications, including 15 book reviews for the Observer.

Now Astor stepped in. His family owned an estate on the remote Scottish island of Jura, next to Islay. There was a house, Barnhill, seven miles outside Ardlussa at the remote northern tip of this rocky finger of heather in the Inner Hebrides. Initially, Astor offered it to Orwell for a holiday. Speaking to the Observer last week, Richard Blair says he believes, from family legend, that Astor was taken aback by the enthusiasm of Orwell's response.

In May 1946 Orwell, still picking up the shattered pieces of his life, took the train for the long and arduous journey to Jura. He told his friend Arthur Koestler that it was "almost like stocking up ship for an arctic voyage".

It was a risky move; Orwell was not in good health. The winter of 1946-47 was one of the coldest of the century. Postwar Britain was bleaker even than wartime, and he had always suffered from a bad chest. At least, cut off from the irritations of literary London, he was free to grapple unencumbered with the new novel. "Smothered under journalism," as he put it, he told one friend, "I have become more and more like a sucked orange."

Ironically, part of Orwell's difficulties derived from the success of Animal Farm. After years of neglect and indifference the world was waking up to his genius. "Everyone keeps coming at me," he complained to Koestler, "wanting me to lecture, to write commissioned booklets, to join this and that, etc - you don't know how I pine to be free of it all and have time to think again."

On Jura he would be liberated from these distractions but the promise of creative freedom on an island in the Hebrides came with its own price. Years before, in the essay "Why I Write", he had described the struggle to complete a book: "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist or [sic] understand. For all one knows that demon is the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's personality." Then that famous Orwellian coda. "Good prose is like a window pane."

From the spring of 1947 to his death in 1950 Orwell would re-enact every aspect of this struggle in the most painful way imaginable. Privately, perhaps, he relished the overlap between theory and practice. He had always thrived on self-inflicted adversity.

At first, after "a quite unendurable winter", he revelled in the isolation and wild beauty of Jura. "I am struggling with this book," he wrote to his agent, "which I may finish by the end of the year - at any rate I shall have broken the back by then so long as I keep well and keep off journalistic work until the autumn."

Barnhill, overlooking the sea at the top of a potholed track, was not large, with four small bedrooms above a spacious kitchen. Life was simple, even primitive. There was no electricity. Orwell used Calor gas to cook and to heat water. Storm lanterns burned paraffin. In the evenings he also burned peat. He was still chain-smoking black shag tobacco in roll-up cigarettes: the fug in the house was cosy but not healthy. A battery radio was the only connection with the outside world.

Orwell, a gentle, unworldly sort of man, arrived with just a camp bed, a table, a couple of chairs and a few pots and pans. It was a spartan existence but supplied the conditions under which he liked to work. He is remembered here as a spectre in the mist, a gaunt figure in oilskins.

The locals knew him by his real name of Eric Blair, a tall, cadaverous, sad-looking man worrying about how he would cope on his own. The solution, when he was joined by baby Richard and his nanny, was to recruit his highly competent sister, Avril. Richard Blair remembers that his father "could not have done it without Avril. She was an excellent cook, and very practical. None of the accounts of my father's time on Jura recognise how essential she was."

Once his new regime was settled, Orwell could finally make a start on the book. At the end of May 1947 he told his publisher, Fred Warburg: "I think I must have written nearly a third of the rough draft. I have not got as far as I had hoped to do by this time because I really have been in most wretched health this year ever since about January (my chest as usual) and can't quite shake it off."

Mindful of his publisher's impatience for the new novel, Orwell added: "Of course the rough draft is always a ghastly mess bearing little relation to the finished result, but all the same it is the main part of the job." Still, he pressed on, and at the end of July was predicting a completed "rough draft" by October. After that, he said, he would need another six months to polish up the text for publication. But then, disaster.

Part of the pleasure of life on Jura was that he and his young son could enjoy the outdoor life together, go fishing, explore the island, and potter about in boats. In August, during a spell of lovely summer weather, Orwell, Avril, Richard and some friends, returning from a hike up the coast in a small motor boat, were nearly drowned in the infamous Corryvreckan whirlpool.

Richard Blair remembers being "bloody cold" in the freezing water, and Orwell, whose constant coughing worried his friends, did his lungs no favours. Within two months he was seriously ill. Typically, his account to David Astor of this narrow escape was laconic, even nonchalant.

The long struggle with "The Last Man in Europe" continued. In late October 1947, oppressed with "wretched health", Orwell recognised that his novel was still "a most dreadful mess and about two-thirds of it will have to be retyped entirely".

He was working at a feverish pace. Visitors to Barnhill recall the sound of his typewriter pounding away upstairs in his bedroom. Then, in November, tended by the faithful Avril, he collapsed with "inflammation of the lungs" and told Koestler that he was "very ill in bed". Just before Christmas, in a letter to an Observer colleague, he broke the news he had always dreaded. Finally he had been diagnosed with TB.

A few days later, writing to Astor from Hairmyres hospital, East Kilbride, Lanarkshire, he admitted: "I still feel deadly sick," and conceded that, when illness struck after the Corryvreckan whirlpool incident, "like a fool I decided not to go to a doctor - I wanted to get on with the book I was writing." In 1947 there was no cure for TB - doctors prescribed fresh air and a regular diet - but there was a new, experimental drug on the market, streptomycin. Astor arranged for a shipment to Hairmyres from the US.

Richard Blair believes that his father was given excessive doses of the new wonder drug. The side effects were horrific (throat ulcers, blisters in the mouth, hair loss, peeling skin and the disintegration of toe and fingernails) but in March 1948, after a three-month course, the TB symptoms had disappeared. "It's all over now, and evidently the drug has done its stuff," Orwell told his publisher. "It's rather like sinking the ship to get rid of the rats, but worth it if it works."

As he prepared to leave hospital Orwell received the letter from his publisher which, in hindsight, would be another nail in his coffin. "It really is rather important," wrote Warburg to his star author, "from the point of view of your literary career to get it [the new novel] by the end of the year and indeed earlier if possible."

Just when he should have been convalescing Orwell was back at Barnhill, deep into the revision of his manuscript, promising Warburg to deliver it in "early December", and coping with "filthy weather" on autumnal Jura. Early in October he confided to Astor: "I have got so used to writing in bed that I think I prefer it, though of course it's awkward to type there. I am just struggling with the last stages of this bloody book [which is] about the possible state of affairs if the atomic war isn't conclusive."

This is one of Orwell's exceedingly rare references to the theme of his book. He believed, as many writers do, that it was bad luck to discuss work-in-progress. Later, to Anthony Powell, he described it as "a Utopia written in the form of a novel". The typing of the fair copy of "The Last Man in Europe" became another dimension of Orwell's battle with his book. The more he revised his "unbelievably bad" manuscript the more it became a document only he could read and interpret. It was, he told his agent, "extremely long, even 125,000 words". With characteristic candour, he noted: "I am not pleased with the book but I am not absolutely dissatisfied... I think it is a good idea but the execution would have been better if I had not written it under the influence of TB."

And he was still undecided about the title: "I am inclined to call it NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR or THE LAST MAN IN EUROPE," he wrote, "but I might just possibly think of something else in the next week or two." By the end of October Orwell believed he was done. Now he just needed a stenographer to help make sense of it all.

It was a desperate race against time. Orwell's health was deteriorating, the "unbelievably bad" manuscript needed retyping, and the December deadline was looming. Warburg promised to help, and so did Orwell's agent. At cross-purposes over possible typists, they somehow contrived to make a bad situation infinitely worse. Orwell, feeling beyond help, followed his ex-public schoolboy's instincts: he would go it alone.

By mid-November, too weak to walk, he retired to bed to tackle "the grisly job" of typing the book on his "decrepit typewriter" by himself. Sustained by endless roll-ups, pots of coffee, strong tea and the warmth of his paraffin heater, with gales buffeting Barnhill, night and day, he struggled on. By 30 November 1948 it was virtually done.

Now Orwell, the old campaigner, protested to his agent that "it really wasn't worth all this fuss. It's merely that, as it tires me to sit upright for any length of time, I can't type very neatly and can't do many pages a day." Besides, he added, it was "wonderful" what mistakes a professional typist could make, and "in this book there is the difficulty that it contains a lot of neologisms".

The typescript of George Orwell's latest novel reached London in mid December, as promised. Warburg recognised its qualities at once ("amongst the most terrifying books I have ever read") and so did his colleagues. An in-house memo noted "if we can't sell 15 to 20 thousand copies we ought to be shot".

By now Orwell had left Jura and checked into a TB sanitorium high in the Cotswolds. "I ought to have done this two months ago," he told Astor, "but I wanted to get that bloody book finished." Once again Astor stepped in to monitor his friend's treatment but Orwell's specialist was privately pessimistic.

As word of Nineteen Eighty-Four began to circulate, Astor's journalistic instincts kicked in and he began to plan an Observer Profile, a significant accolade but an idea that Orwell contemplated "with a certain alarm". As spring came he was "having haemoptyses" (spitting blood) and "feeling ghastly most of the time" but was able to involve himself in the pre-publication rituals of the novel, registering "quite good notices" with satisfaction. He joked to Astor that it wouldn't surprise him "if you had to change that profile into an obituary".

Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949 (five days later in the US) and was almost universally recognised as a masterpiece, even by Winston Churchill, who told his doctor that he had read it twice. Orwell's health continued to decline. In October 1949, in his room at University College hospital, he married Sonia Brownell, with David Astor as best man. It was a fleeting moment of happiness; he lingered into the new year of 1950. In the small hours of 21 January he suffered a massive haemorrhage in hospital and died alone.

The news was broadcast on the BBC the next morning. Avril Blair and her nephew, still up on Jura, heard the report on the little battery radio in Barnhill. Richard Blair does not recall whether the day was bright or cold but remembers the shock of the news: his father was dead, aged 46.

David Astor arranged for Orwell's burial in the churchyard at Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire. He lies there now, as Eric Blair, between HH Asquith and a local family of Gypsies.

Why '1984'?

Orwell's title remains a mystery. Some say he was alluding to the centenary of the Fabian Society, founded in 1884. Others suggest a nod to Jack London's novel The Iron Heel (in which a political movement comes to power in 1984), or perhaps to one of his favourite writer GK Chesterton's story, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill", which is set in 1984.

In his edition of the Collected Works (20 volumes), Peter Davison notes that Orwell's American publisher claimed that the title derived from reversing the date, 1948, though there's no documentary evidence for this. Davison also argues that the date 1984 is linked to the year of Richard Blair's birth, 1944, and notes that in the manuscript of the novel, the narrative occurs, successively, in 1980, 1982 and finally, 1984. There's no mystery about the decision to abandon "The Last Man in Europe". Orwell himself was always unsure of it. It was his publisher, Fred Warburg who suggested that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a more commercial title.

Freedom of speech: How '1984' has entrusted our culture

The effect of Nineteen Eighty-Four on our cultural and linguistic landscape has not been limited to either the film adaptation starring John Hurt and Richard Burton, with its Nazi-esque rallies and chilling soundtrack, nor the earlier one with Michael Redgrave and Edmond O'Brien.

It is likely, however, that many people watching the Big Brother series on television (in the UK, let alone in Angola, Oman or Sweden, or any of the other countries whose TV networks broadcast programmes in the same format) have no idea where the title comes from or that Big Brother himself, whose role in the reality show is mostly to keep the peace between scrapping, swearing contestants like a wise uncle, is not so benign in his original incarnation.

Apart from pop-culture renditions of some of the novel's themes, aspects of its language have been leapt upon by libertarians to describe the curtailment of freedom in the real world by politicians and officials - alarmingly, nowhere and never more often than in contemporary Britain.

Orwellian

George owes his own adjective to this book alone and his idea that wellbeing is crushed by restrictive, authoritarian and untruthful government.

Big Brother (is watching you)

A term in common usage for a scarily omniscient ruler long before the worldwide smash-hit reality-TV show was even a twinkle in its producers' eyes. The irony of societal hounding of Big Brother contestants would not have been lost on George Orwell.

Room 101

Some hotels have refused to call a guest bedroom number 101 - rather like those tower blocks that don't have a 13th floor - thanks to the ingenious Orwellian concept of a room that contains whatever its occupant finds most impossible to endure. Like Big Brother, this has spawned a modern TV show: in this case, celebrities are invited to name the people or objects they hate most in the world.

Thought Police

An accusation often levelled at the current government by those who like it least is that they are trying to tell us what we can and cannot think is right and wrong. People who believe that there are correct ways to think find themselves named after Orwell's enforcement brigade.

Thoughtcrime

See "Thought Police" above. The act or fact of transgressing enforced wisdom.

Newspeak

For Orwell, freedom of expression was not just about freedom of thought but also linguistic freedom. This term, denoting the narrow and diminishing official vocabulary, has been used ever since to denote jargon currently in vogue with those in power.

Doublethink

Hypocrisy, but with a twist. Rather than choosing to disregard a contradiction in your opinion, if you are doublethinking, you are deliberately forgetting that the contradiction is there. This subtlety is mostly overlooked by people using the accusation of "doublethink" when trying to accuse an adversary of being hypocritical - but it is a very popular word with people who like a good debate along with their pints in the pub. Oliver Marre

June 18, 2009

The unrest unfolding in Iran is the quintessential 21st-century conflict. On one side are government thugs firing bullets. On the other side are young protesters firing "tweets."

The protesters' arsenal, such as those tweets on Twitter.com, depends on the Internet or other communications channels. So the Iranian government is blocking certain Web sites and evicting foreign reporters or keeping them away from the action.

The push to remove witnesses may be the prelude to a Tehran Tiananmen. Yet a secret Internet lifeline remains, and it's a tribute to the crazy, globalized world we live in. The lifeline was designed by Chinese computer engineers in America to evade Communist Party censorship of a repressed Chinese spiritual group, the Falun Gong.

Today, it is these Chinese supporters of Falun Gong who are the best hope for Iranians trying to reach blocked sites.
"We don't have the heart to cut off the Iranians," said Shiyu Zhou, a computer scientist and leader in the Chinese effort, called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium. "But if our servers overload too much, we may have to cut down the traffic."

Mr. Zhou said that usage of the consortium's software has tripled in the last week. It set a record on Wednesday of more than 200 million hits from Iran, representing more than 400,000 people.

If President Obama wants to support democratic movements on a shoestring, he should support an "Internet freedom initiative" pending in Congress. This would include $50 million in the appropriations bill for these censorship-evasion technologies. The 21st-century equivalent of the Berlin wall is a cyberbarrier, and we can help puncture it.

Mr. Zhou, the son of a Chinese army general, said that he and his colleagues began to develop such software after the 1999 Chinese government crackdown on Falun Gong. One result was a free software called Freegate, small enough to carry on a flash drive. It takes a surfer to an overseas server that changes I.P. addresses every second or so, too quickly for a government to block it, and then from there to a banned site.

Freegate amounts to a dissident's cyberkit. E-mails sent with it can be encrypted. And after a session is complete, a press of a button eliminates any sign that it was used on that computer.

The consortium also makes available variants of the software, such as Ultrasurf, and other software to evade censors is available from Tor Project and the University of Toronto.

Originally, Freegate was available only in Chinese and English, but a growing number of people have been using it in other countries, such as Myanmar. Responding to the growing use of Freegate in Iran, the consortium introduced a Farsi-language version last July -- and usage there skyrocketed.

Soon almost as many Iranians were using it as Chinese, straining server capacity [...]. The engineers in the consortium, worrying that the Iran traffic would crash their servers, dropped access in Iran in January but restored it before the Iran election.

"We know the pain of people in closed societies, and we do want to accommodate them," Mr. Zhou said.
China is fighting back against the "hacktivists." The government has announced that new computers sold beginning next month will have to have Internet filtering software, called Green Dam (the consortium has already developed software called Green Tsunami to neutralize it). More alarming, in 2006 a consortium engineer living outside Atlanta was attacked in his home, beaten up and his computers stolen. The engineers behind Freegate are now careful not to disclose their physical locations.

Granted, these technologies are not a panacea. One Chinese journalist estimated that only 5 percent of the country's Netizens use proxy software, and the Iranians themselves managed a grass-roots revolution in 1979 without high-tech help.

And at the end of the day, bullets usually trump tweets.

Still, it does make a difference when people inside closed regimes get access to information -- which is why dictatorships make such efforts to block comprehensive Internet access.

"Freegate was a kind of bridge to the outside world for me," said a Chinese journalist with dissident leanings, who asked not to be named. "Before accessing the Internet through Freegate, I was really a pro-government guy."

Human-rights activists from Cuba, North Korea, Syria and elsewhere have appealed to Congress to approve the $50 million Internet freedom initiative, and Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch says he supports it as well.

The Obama administration has been quiet on the proposal. For Mr. Obama, this would be a cheap and effective way of standing with Iranians while chipping away at the 21st-century walls of dictatorship.

NEW YORK - The Internet is by far the most popular source of information and the preferred choice for news ahead of television, newspapers and radio, according to a new poll in the United States.

But just a small fraction of U.S. adults considered social Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace as a good source of news and even fewer would opt for Twitter.

More than half of the people questioned in the Zogby Interactive survey said they would select the Internet if they had to choose only one source of news, followed by 21 percent for television and 10 percent for both newspapers and radio.

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Only 10 percent described social Web sites as an important for news, and despite the media buzz about Twitter, only 4 percent would go to it for information.

The Internet was also selected as the most reliable source of news by nearly 40 percent of adults, compared to 17 percent who opted for television and 16 percent who selected newspapers and 13 percent for listened to the radio.

"The poll reinforces the idea that efforts by established newspapers, television and radio news outlets to push their consumers to their respective Web sites is working," Zogby said in a statement.

Almost half of 3,030 adults questioned in the online survey said national newspaper Web sites were important to them, followed by 43 percent who preferred television Web sites.

Blogs were less of a necessity than Web sites, with only 28 percent of those polled saying blogs that shared their political viewpoint were important.

"That the Web sites of traditional news outlets are seen by a wide margin as more important than blog sites — most of which are repositories of opinion devoid of actual reportage — could be seen as an encouraging development for the media at large," Zogby added.

When asked to peer into the future, an overwhelming 82 percent said the Internet would be the main source of information in five years time, compared to 13 for television and 0.5 percent chose newspapers.

About 84 percent of American have access to the Internet, according to industry studies.

(Clearwisdom.net)

Mr. Wang Hongrong, a Falun Gong practitioner from Hefei City, Anhui Province, was illegally sentenced to jail for eight years in 2005 by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He was tortured by prison guards in Suzhou Prison and became paralyzed. The police released him when he was in critical condition. Two months later, on June 22, 2007, he passed away at home.

Mr. Wang was born on April 4, 1949. He worked for the Forklift Plant Administration Division in Hefei City, Anhui Province. He was known to be a good person by everyone in his company.

Before Mr. Wang was subjected to the persecution

This photo was taken after Mr. Wang was released from jail.

Bedsore suffered while in police custody

Mr. Wang's badly burnt feet

Mr. Wang's badly burnt feet

On April 30, 2003, the 610 Office police went to Mr. Wang's home, and they threatened and harassed him because they saw a practitioner enter his home. They ransacked Mr. Wang's home and confiscated his computer equipment and household appliances, which had a total value of over 10,000 Yuan. He was forced to leave home and went from place to place. Mr. Wang's wife, Ms. Zhang Jiyu, was also victimized by the persecution. She was forcibly sent to a detention center for one month and then held in an administrative detention camp for another 15 days. Then she was taken to a brainwashing center for more persecution.

On September 24, 2004, Mr. Wang went to help produce truth-clarification materials in Fuyang City. He and more than 10 other practitioners were arrested by the CCP personnel there. They were held in different places. They were severely beaten and had confessions extracted from them by torture.

On June 15, 2005, the CCP court in the Yingzhou District, Fuyang City secretly held a hearing for Mr. Wang and other practitioners. The court did not inform practitioners' families or announce the names of the judge and adjudicator. There were no spectators allowed. Because practitioners had no lawyers who could defend them, they had to represent themselves. During the hearing, they shouted "Falun Dafa is good!" and "Falun Dafa is an upright teaching!"

In September 2005, the court secretly held another trial against Mr. Wang. He was sentenced to eight years in prison and sent to the Suzhou Prison in Anhui Province. During his imprisonment, the wardens ordered two inmates who had infectious diseases to supervise him. One of them had tuberculosis and the other had hepatitis. They forced Mr. Wang to do hard labor everyday.

Mr. Wang was very steadfast in his belief in Falun Gong even when he was in prison. In February 2007, the police searched Mr. Wang's body. They found some copies of writings by Falun Gong's Teacher. As a result, they threw him into the confinement cell, where he was severely beaten. They also instigated prison personnel and inmates against him. As a result of the persecution, Mr. Wang became incontinent and his lower body was numb. Because he could not look after himself and nobody else did, he was often covered in feces.

In early April 2007, the general manager from Mr. Wang's company visited him in the prison. Mr. Wang told he that he couldn't move his legs anymore. Shocked by the scene, the manager demanded that one of the prison guards take him to the hospital for treatment. Before going to the hospital, Mr. Wang said, "I am very dirty and smell so badly. I'd like to take a shower before I go to the hospital." Enraged for some reason, the prison guard ordered inmates to force his feet into a bucket of boiling water. Half a day later, his feet swelled up and festered, with blisters all over. The prison guard then forced Mr. Wang to say on videotape, "The inmates were just trying to help clean my legs. They didn't do it intentionally."

Mr. Wang was diagnosed by the hospital as having bone cancer, paralysis, numbness, and incontinence. He was in good health before the persecution. His critical health problems are directly attributable to his long-term imprisonment and mistreatment.

In order to shirk responsibility, Suzhou Prison released Mr. Wang in late April 2007 after he was tortured to the verge of death. On April 26, 2007, Mr. Wang's wife went to pick him up . As she tried to apply for medical treatment for Mr. Wang, the prison chief, who had the last name Tang, told her that they had no money. He also stated that Mr. Wang had to write guarantee statements to give up Falun Gong to be eligible for medical care.

When Mr. Wang returned home, a huge bedsore was found near his buttocks. Because he had not relieved his bowels for more than 10 days, his stomach was extremely swollen. He became incontinent and his face was grossly distorted. He was diagnosed with bedsore sepsis two months after he was taken home. At 5 o'clock on June 22, 2007, he passed away at the young age of 59.

Departments that were directly involved in the persecution of Mr. Wang included the Forklift Plant of Hefei City, the Public Security Bureau of Hefei City, the Public Security Bureau of Fuyang City, and the Suzhou Prison in Anhui Province. People who were directly responsible for Mr. Wang's death were Security Section Chief of Hefei City Wu Jiabin, the Deputy Section Chief Li Jin, Team Captain in the West District of Hefei City Zhan, and prison warden Wang Jun.

 

http://www.scrippsnews.com

By ISAAC WOLF, Scripps Howard News Service

 

(Clearwisdom.net) Falun Gong practitioners Ms. Song Xia and her mother Ms. Lu Fenglan were arrested on March 23, 2006, by the police from the Heping Police Station of Fushun City, Liaoning Province. They were held in the Second Detention Center of Fushun City, and later sentenced to imprisonment. The trial was secret, as the court did not inform any of their family members, or lawyers. The whole process lasted less than 2 minutes when the judgment was handed down.

Later, Ms. Lu and Ms. Song were sent to the Women's Prison of Liaoning Province. Because of the mistreatment, Ms. Lu suffered from heart failure and her blood pressure rose to 220, after which the prison refused to accept her. Ms. Song was detained in the 10^th prison section. Later, she was transferred to a dark storehouse, where she was closely monitored by two prisoners 24 hours a day. In the prison she was tortured and subjected to brainwashing for over 6 months, which led to poor eyesight, acute pain in her ribs, difficulty breathing and finally, unconsciousness.

The prison guards of the Women's Prison of Liaoning Province mistreated Falun Gong practitioners cruelly. Among them, the 8^th prison section mistreated practitioners the most severely. The name of the chief of the section is Zuo, and the group head and the deputy group head are extremely cruel. In April 2008, before the Beijing Olympic Games, a Falun Gong practitioner was killed in the 8^th section. His body was seen covered with blood and dragged out by a prison guard.

Falun Gong practitioners are also persecuted in the 9^th, 3^rd, 1^st, 2^nd, 10^th, and 6^th sections. The most widely implemented mistreatments are sleep deprivation for a long period and starvation. The practitioners are provided with only very small amount of food-- one spoon of boiled rice every day, and they are not allowed to drink water. In winter they are forced to go barefoot with only a shirt on them. They are constantly shocked with electric batons and their arms are bound behind their back with strips torn from bed sheet. They are subjected to all kinds of torture by prison guards, including pricking finger nails with toothpicks, stepping on the feet and palms forcefully, punching the chest and ribs, dragging them by the hair and hitting their heads against the wall, not allowing them to go to the toilet (which led to intestinal diseases), hanging and suspending them in the air, and deep squatting with the head in the lap. Many practitioners were injured and crippled as they were forced to give up Falun Gong. Besides the physical torture, the prison guards also carried out mental torture audaciously. They locked the practitioners in a dark room to watch homicide and suicide videos and forced them to write their understandings about it. All the methods they used were extremely cruel.

Following are tortures the practitioners suffered when they were subjected to the coercive "transformation" process, in which they were forced to give up Falun Gong.

Ms. Li Guiqing was forced by monitoring prisoners and prison guards to have dinner every day, but was not allowed to go to toilet. As a result, she suffered from intestinal obstructions and her life was in danger.

Ms. Li Meifeng resisted the mistreatment on her. In the four years of imprisonment she had been locked in a solitary confinement cell two times and tortured cruelly. For several months, the prison guards continuously beat her, exposed her to the freezing cold, prevented her from drinking water, bound her with ropes and subjected her to starvation. She was badly disfigured, emaciated, and one of her arms was broken when she was beaten. Later, Ms. Li broke out of prison.

Ms. Du Jingqin was cruelly beaten, deprived of sleep and subjected to starvation. The prison guards forbid her from putting on cotton-padded shoes in the cold winter, dragged her by her hair and hit her head against the wall.

Ms. Liu Cuiping was hung up and beaten for several days. The prison guards shocked her mouth and lower half of her body with electric batons. As a result, she became unable to walk for many days and was badly disfigured.

Ms. Zhang Xiujuan was crippled for many days because of being tortured.

Ms. Teng Hongtao was forbidden to go to the toilet for 18 days, even during her menses. In the cold winter she was not allowed to put on cotton-padded clothes, and had cold water poured over her body. She was deprived of sleep for 18 days. She was hung up with her hands cuffed behind her back for many days. Because of this torture her legs were badly injured.

 

(Clearwisdom.net) Mr. Zhou Xiangyang is a Falun Dafa practitioner and former engineer at the No. 3 Design Institute of the Ministry of Railroad in Tianjin City. Mr. Zhou has been on a hunger strike for over 300 days, since June 2008, to resist the persecution. Mr. Zhou was previously a strong and positive man, but due to being persecuted he is emaciated and his life is in danger. The Gangbei Prison claims that to be released on bail for medical treatment, he must sign papers renouncing his practice of Falun Gong.

Mr. Zhou Xiangyang, practitioner and former engineer at the No. 3 Design Institute, Ministry of Railroad in Tianjin City

Mr. Zhou Xiangyang, 32, has been jailed at the Gangbei Prison since August 9, 2004. He has been verbally and physically abused and detained in isolation countless times. He has also been on the verge of death numerous times. Because his family members all practice Falun Dafa, the prison has kept an especially close watch on him. The few times when his family was allowed to visit, the prison kept audio and video recordings for analysis. Once they felt that there was "obstruction to the transformation" or "influence on the overall situation," they immediately ended the visit.

In February 2009, the guard captain at Gangbei Prison disclosed that Mr. Zhou was force-fed five times per day and that he could die at any moment. During the previous visits by Mr. Zhou's parents, the captain, surnamed Song, thought that Mr. Zhou and his parents used "code words over the phone," so his parents were denied further visits. Two months later, when other family members went to visit, Mr. Zhou was carried out by four prisoners indicted on criminal charges. He was very weak, small and thin, and his face was deathly white. His voice was stilted when he spoke. Even under these conditions, the other prisoners monitored his speech. If they thought he was starting to disclose the persecution experienced in prison, they kicked his legs or feet to warn him to change the topic.

During the most recent visit by family members, Mr. Zhou suddenly dropped the phone while talking. He picked up the phone again after a long period and told his family members that he had just taken a shower so his hand was a little numb. This is a tactic used by the Gangbei Prison to prevent any persecution marks being left on the body. Every time before visits, the guards arranged to have Mr. Zhou bathed. They also threatened him about what was allowed to be said and what couldn't be said.

In early April 2009, Mr. Zhou was taken to the Police Hospital for emergency intravenous injections for fifteen days. In mid-May, 2009, he was again taken to the Police Hospital. These emergency measures had to be taken each time he was on the verge of death.

The Gangbei Prison recently tried to shift responsibility for the persecution. They notified Mr. Zhou's family that they could apply for his "release on bail for medical treatment," but stipulated that all conditions had to be met. The conditions included his renouncing the practice and transferring Mr. Zhou's permanent registered address from Tianjin City to a village with no ties to his hometown. The prison threatened the family, ordering them not to expose this secret. The prison claimed that this was "special treatment" for Mr. Zhou. When Mr. Zhou's family began organizing this matter, they were suddenly notified that, "Mr. Zhou Xiangyang does not meet the conditions for release on bail. His situation is known across numerous provinces, and it is more complicated. Return home and wait for the announcement."

This result was very surprising and disappointing to Mr. Zhou's family, but it completely followed Gangbei Prison's persecution policy of refusing to release Falun Gong practitioners if they don't write a guarantee statement. This common tactic and persecution method has been used by the Gangbei Prison over the past ten years. The premise for release is a signed "guarantee statement." Not only does the practitioner have to sign, the family members also have to sign, even those who do not practice.

Release on bail for medical treatment is a basic human right - it is a safeguard of the right to live. In China however, forced labor camps under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are vehicles for persecution. Not only do they illegally imprison Falun Gong practitioners, release on bail for medical treatment is not based on the detainee's physical condition, but on renouncing the practice, renouncing the belief in Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance. Therefore, release on bail for medical treatment is only a method used by the CCP to further persecute Falun Gong practitioners.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk

By James Alexander BBC News   At least one suicide in the UK has been linked with the hum For decades, hundreds of people worldwide have been plagued by an elusive buzzing noise known as "the Hum". Some have blamed gas pipes or power lines, others think their ears are faulty. A few even think sinister forces could be at work. "It's a kind of torture, sometimes you just want to scream," exclaims retired head teacher Katie Jacques. Sitting in the living room of her home in the suburbs of Leeds, the 69-year-old grandmother describes the dull drone she says is making her life a misery. Most visitors hear nothing, but to Katie the noise is painful, vivid and constant. "It has a rhythm to it - it goes up and down. It sounds almost like a diesel car idling in the distance and you want to go and ask somebody to switch the engine off - and you can't."   "It's worst at night. It's hard to get off to sleep because I hear this throbbing sound in the background and you know what it's like when you can't get to sleep and you're tossing and turning and you get more and more agitated about it." Katie first became aware of the maddening rumble two years ago. She turned everything electrical off at the mains, but that made no difference. Neither did her efforts to block out the sound with ear plugs, or smother it with music.   Neighbours are unaffected and tests by environmental health officials have drawn a blank. Checks on Katie's ears ruled out tinnitus, a ringing noise that generally follows the sufferer wherever they go. Katie, like most victims of the hum, only hears the noise at a specific location - in her case, at home. Elsewhere, her hearing is fine. Moving out is an option she's considered, but she's reluctant to leave the house she's lived in for nearly 50 years. "My children grew up here, they still live nearby, so do my grandchildren. I have lots of friends here. I don't want to move, but I have thought I may have to if I can't find out what's causing it." Bad vibrations The hum is a phenomenon that has been reported in towns and cities across the world from Vancouver in Canada to Auckland in New Zealand. In Britain, the most famous example was the so-called "Bristol hum" that made headlines in the late 1970s. One newspaper asked readers in the city: "Have you heard the Hum?" Almost 800 people said they had. The problem persisted for years. Residents complained of sleep loss, headaches, sickness and nosebleeds. Experts eventually found traffic and factories were to blame. There have been other cases in Cheshire, Cornwall, Gloucestershire, London, Shropshire, Suffolk and Wiltshire. A low-pitched drone known as the "Largs hum" has troubled the coastal town of Largs in Strathclyde for more than two decades. People assume you must be hearing things, but I'm not crackers Katie Jacques, hum sufferer At least one suicide in the UK has been linked with the hum. And the problem is on the increase, according to the Low Frequency Noise Sufferers' Association. Two thousand people have so far contacted its helpline, and it says it receives two or three new cases every week. They are generally over 50 and are mostly female. 'Cover-up' So what is the cause? Various features of modern life have been blamed - gas pipes, power lines, mobile phone masts, wind farms, nuclear waste, even low-frequency submarine communications. The internet is abuzz with rumour and speculation. There are dark mutterings about secret military activity, alien contact and government cover-ups. The hum even featured in an episode of the sci-fi drama "The X-Files". Such conspiracy theories are understandable, but unhelpful, according to Dr David Baguley, who's head of audiology at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge. He estimates that in about a third of cases there is some environmental source that can be tracked down and dealt with. "It may be a fridge or an industrial fan or a piece of heavy machinery at a nearby factory that is causing the disturbance and can be switched off," he says. Most of the time, however, there is no external noise that can be recorded or identified. "People do come up with some strongly constructed, sometimes strange theories," says Dr Baguley. The more people focus on the noise, the more anxious and fearful they get Dr David Baguley, audiologist His own theory - based on years of research - is that many sufferers' hearing has become over-sensitive. Surrounded in his office by plastic models of human ears, he explains how we each have an internal volume control that helps us amplify quiet sounds in times of threat, danger or intense concentration. "If you're sitting by a table waiting for exam results and the phone rings you jump out of your skin. Waiting for a teenager to come home from a party - the key in the door sounds really loud. Your internal gain is sensitised." This is a mechanism we all rely on at moments of pressure or stress when we want our senses on full alert. According to Dr Baguley, the problem comes when an individual fixes on a possibly innocuous background sound, and this act of concentration then triggers the body's "internal gain", boosting the volume. The initial "signal" may vary from person to person, but the outcome is the same. "It becomes a vicious cycle," he explains. "The more people focus on the noise, the more anxious and fearful they get, the more the body responds by amplifying the sound, and that causes even more upset and distress." Sound of silence In an attempt to break this cycle, Dr Baguley is currently working on a pilot project with the acoustics laboratory at the University of Salford. The trial - funded by the Department for Environment and the Department of Health - uses psychology and relaxation techniques to help sufferers become less agitated and distressed by the hum. Dr David Baguley has examined numerous people with the problem The experiment is not finished, but Dr Baguley says the initial results look promising, allowing the noise to quieten and in some cases fall silent. "It's really exciting," he says. "For years I've been seeing people with this problem in my clinic and it's been hard to find answers. But now there is hope and there is potentially help." Back in Leeds, Katie Jacques is pleased the hum is being taken seriously, but remains adamant that her suffering is caused by a real, external noise nuisance. She suspects it may be something to do with the nearby airport, although the authorities there say no engines are left running overnight. "People assume you must be hearing things, but I'm not crackers," she laughs. "I don't know how I can get this over to people, but this is not in my head. It's just as though there's something in your house and you want to switch if off and you can't. It's there all the time."

(Clearwisdom.net) At 6:30 a.m. on February 25, 2008, four policemen from the Taihe Police Station barged into the residence of Falun Gong practitioner Ms. Zhang Xiulan, a former employee of the Nuerhe Sewing Factory of Jinzhou City, Liaoning Province. After confirming her identity, they immediately bound her hands behind her back. Two policemen wrapped a cotton blanket around her head and did not even give her a chance to put on her shoes. Then they lifted her and took her downstairs and threw her into the car that was waiting there.

After a while, seven to eight policemen came and ransacked her house. They confiscated 4,800 yuan in cash, a VCD player, an MP3 player, a tape recorder, a mobile phone, her house keys, Falun Gong books and Master's portrait.

They took Ms. Zhang Xiulan to the Taihe Police Station and tied her hands behind her back to a chair. They also tied her feet with a wire and wrapped a cloth around her head. Then they used electric batons to shock her many times. While torturing her, they verbally abused her. They also viciously tugged her hair and slapped her. They tortured her this way for 17 hours. After being shocked with electric batons, Ms. Zhang's toes turned brownish black. At 11 p.m., they forced her sign a document, which they had falsified as being her testimony. They then took her to Jinzhou City No.1 Detention Center.

In April 2008, Ms. Zhang Xiulan suddenly had a stomachache. A policeman took her to the Jinzhou City Police Hospital for an examination, where they found a tumor in her stomach. Later, she was taken to the Jinzhou City Women and Children's Hospital for another examination and her tumor had grown to the size of a small melon.

In August 2008, officials of relevant CCP departments, the Taihe Police Station in Jinzhou City, the court and the 610 Office disregarded Ms. Zhang's health condition and sentenced her to 6 years of imprisonment. Guard Dai Wei and other personnel from the No. 1 Detention Center took Ms. Zhang to the Dabei Prison in Shenyang City. Doctors in the Dabei Prison performed an examination on her and discovered that there were already two tumors growing in her abdomen. There was also another one growing in her neck. Thus the prison refused to admit her. Under such circumstances, Liang Huaifu, the Jinzhou No. 1 Detention Center head, still did not release her.

In early January 2009, guard Dai Wei of the detention center once again took Ms. Zhang to the Dabei Prison Hospital. Her health condition was very serious, and the hospital refused to admit her. Under the persistent request of detention center head Liang Huaifu, the hospital admitted her for one week. After this, Liang Huaifu ordered guard Dai Wei and other personnel to fetch Ms. Zhang Xiulan back and continued to torture her. During this period, her family members came many times and wanted to visit her, but Liang Huaifu instigated his subordinates to refuse the family visitation. It was not until mid April 2009, when Ms. Zhang's health condition worsened further and she could no longer walk, had a blurry vision, and difficulty eating, that she was released on bail for medical treatment after much effort from her family and practitioners. Ms. Zhang Xiulan was tortured at Jinzhou City No. 1 Detention Center for 14 months.

 

 

 

Doug Pelmear, owner of Horse Power Sales.net Inc. and Hp2G LLC, will hold an open house Monday morning in the idle 100,000-square-foot factory he has leased in Wauseon to begin manufacturing his revolutionary engine.

The factory, on the Fulton Industries Inc. campus in Wauseon, will be tooled to initially turn out 20 of Mr. Pelmear's custom engines per day with one shift of 25 workers.

A Decatur, Ind., specialty car company, Revenge Designs Inc., has contracted with Mr. Pelmear to purchase 2,000 engines for use in a new vehicle it plans to unveil at the end of this year at the Los Angeles International Auto Show. The vehicle is to be called the Revenge Verde Super Car, which will use Mr. Pelmear's 400-horsepower engine and its 500 foot-pounds of torque to travel up to 200 mph and get 110 mpg - though admittedly not at the same time.

"The engine is going to be a really great partnership with the car," explained Emily Levault, a spokesman for Revenge Design. "The idea behind this was to give people what they want while putting people back in their jobs."

Ms. Levault said the Verde will be introduced as both a left and right-hand drive, so that it can be marketed around the world. She said details of its pricing have not been released.

Mr. Pelmear's company employs eight people, and he said he'll "take resumes" on Monday, but won't accept applications, for what would be his first shift of production workers. Depending on how the plant start-up goes, Mr. Pelmear said, "we'll probably add another 25 over the next three months after that." Mr. Pelmear did not say what workers will be paid.

Contact Larry P. Vellequette at:
lvellequette@theblade.com
or 419-724-6091.

 

(Clearwisdom.net) Mr. Qian Shiguang endured a great amount of brutal mistreatment during the persecution for his steadfast belief in Falun Gong. Below is an account of his last days before he died.

After Mr. Qian was illegally arrested and taken to the Gongjiawan Brainwashing Center in May 2005, he was illegally sentenced to forced labor. Party Secretary Qi Ruijun, nurse Ma Xin, and guards Liu Xin, Sun Qiang, Qiao Houquan, Guo Yuancheng, and Yang Jigang often hung him up by his arms and beat him. This caused severe injuries, including damage to his back and spine, to the point where he walked bent over at a 90-degree angle all the time.

Qi Ruijun deprived Mr. Qian of his visitation rights and detained him past the end of his term in April 2008. Mr. Qian's over 3,000 yuan retirement pension was used up by the brainwashing center. Nurse Ma Xin beat him with his walking stick. Sun Qiang once kicked him down to the ground. Qiao Houquan also cruelly beat Mr. Qian in the bathroom with other guards.

By the end of August 2008, Mr. Qian's condition had worsened significantly under the long-term mistreatment. His personal "watcher" Jia Honglin reported that he had not eaten anything in ten days, but the guards ignored it. Mr. Qian was very pale and thin as a skeleton, and he was clearly dying.

On the night of September 8, 2008, Jia Honglin reported four times to the guard on duty, Yang Wentai, that Mr. Qian's life was in danger. The guards came, took a look, and said, "He's fine."

At about 5:50 a.m. in the early morning of September 9, 2008, the guards wrapped Mr. Qian in his blanket and carried him out of the ward. The prisoners heard that he had died and saw that his sheet was stained green. Qi Ruijun tried to blame "watcher" Jia Honglin, withholding his salary and trying to extort money from him.