Chomsky concern over 'suspension'

 10 May 2011 Last updated at 11:22 ET  Dr Thornton said the university tried to discredit pupil Rizwaan Sabir and administrator Hicham Yezza Almost 70 academics, including renowned US scholar Noam Chomsky, have called for the "immediate reinstatement" of a Nottingham University lecturer.

Dr Rod Thornton claims he was suspended for writing an article criticising the university's treatment of a student arrested by anti-terror police in 2008.

The 67 professors and doctors, from universities around the world, said they were "deeply concerned".

Nottingham University has said Dr Thornton's paper is defamatory.

In May 2008, counter-terrorism officers arrested and questioned pupil Rizwaan Sabir along with Hicham Yezza, who worked as the principal school administrator at the university's School of Modern Languages.

Mr Sabir had downloaded the manual as part of research for a dissertation, and had sought Mr Yezza's help in drafting a PhD proposal because of his position as editor of a political magazine.

Six days later both men were released without charge.

'Tide of Islamophobia'

In a paper prepared for the British International Studies Association (BISA), anti-terror expert Dr Thornton claimed the university later "refused to apologise to the men" and also began to "resort to defensive measures that attempted to discredit their names".

He wrote: "Untruth piled on untruth until a point was reached where the Home Office itself farcically came to advertise the case as a 'major Islamist plot'."

He also said the document in question had been available from Nottingham University's own library.

Philosopher Mr Chomsky and the other academics have called for an independent inquiry

The university has refused to confirm or deny whether the academic has been suspended.

A spokesman said: "Academic freedom is a cornerstone of this university and is guaranteed in employment terms under the university's statutes.

"That freedom is the freedom to question, to criticise, to put forward unpopular ideas and views - it is not the freedom to defame your co-workers and attempt to destroy their reputations as honest, fair and reasonable individuals."

The university said staff had legitimately alerted police because the manual was discovered on the computer of Mr Yezza - an administrative worker with "no academic reason to possess such a document".

It also said it had acted in an "ethical, transparent and fair manner" throughout.

In a letter published in The Guardian, the group of scholars, including philosopher and cognitive scientist Mr Chomsky - based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - said the original arrests were "perceived as being indicative of a growing tide of Islamophobia".

They wrote: "The claims he makes are very serious and should be subjected to a full and proper inquiry: they cannot be ignored.

"We call for the immediate reinstatement of Dr Rod Thornton and call on the University of Nottingham to openly and thoroughly examine the claims made in his research. We also request that an independent inquiry be conducted into the university's actions on this matter."

Cables Show U.S. Concern on Japan’s Disaster Readiness

The cable, sent by Ambassador J. Thomas Schieffer, said Japan was preparing for earthquakes and even cyberattacks, but that it might prove less adept at responding to unforeseen disasters. “Compartmentalization and risk aversion within the bureaucracy, however, could increase Japan’s vulnerability to threats for which it is less prepared,” warned the cable, dated March 18.

Bureaucratic decision making has been cited as a factor in Japan’s lack of preparedness, almost exactly three years later, for the record-breaking tsunami that crippled the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station and set off the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. While the cable offers few specifics about the weaknesses in Japan’s disaster planning, it does go on to warn that a blow that disables the country could have catastrophic consequences for global trade and finance.

Scores of secret State Department cables obtained by WikiLeaks give an inside view of Washington’s sometimes rocky relationship with Japan. The most recent cables are from February 2010, long before the earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan on March 11 of this year. They also offer a detailed look at the United States’ response to the political upheaval that had just upended Japan’s long stagnant political landscape — the end of the Liberal Democratic Party’s almost continuous rule for more than 50 years.

After the Democratic Party of Japan won a landmark election in August 2009, American officials appeared uncertain in public how to react to the country’s new leaders and played down the damage to the relationship as teething problems in a nation that had seen opposition parties take power only once before since 1955. But in private, American diplomats were delivering a much more pointed message to the government of Japan’s new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama.

This is clearly seen in a classified cable dated October 2009 that describes a visit to Tokyo at that time by the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, Kurt M. Campbell.

A few days earlier, Mr. Hatoyama had visited Beijing, where he publicly said that Japan needed to end what he characterized as its historic overdependence on the United States. According to the cable sent to Washington by the United States Embassy in Tokyo, Mr. Campbell warned a Japanese deputy minister of defense at the time, Akihisa Nagashima, that the remarks “drew surprise from the highest levels of the U.S. government.”

“Imagine the Japanese response if the U.S. government were to say publicly that it wished to devote more attention to China than Japan,” the cable quotes Mr. Campbell as saying. He warned that such remarks “would create a crisis in U.S.-Japan relations.”

Though the cables give a distinctly American view of events at a volatile time, they also provide glimpses of how the end of the Liberal Democrats’ long run in power had opened the floodgates in Japan for reconsidering the cold war-era security alliance with the United States. The cables show alarm and concern, in both the United States and Japan, about the Hatoyama government’s often clumsy and erratic efforts to lessen Japan’s postwar dependency on the United States and to flirt with closer ties to China.

The cables reveal that, in private conversations, American officials repeatedly warned the Japanese to take China’s military rise more seriously, though they avoided raising the issue in public for fear of angering China. They also played the China card to get Japan to be more cooperative.

An Oct. 15, 2009, cable described a delegation of a dozen high-ranking United States officials — including diplomats, Pentagon officials and a Marine Corps major general — who tried to persuade Japan to honor an agreement to keep an American air base on the Japanese island of Okinawa. They described the history of the agreement, and promised to address the concerns of the Democratic Party, which had vowed during the election campaign to move the base, Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, off Okinawa.

Then one of the Japanese officials asked whether the base could be moved to the United States territory of Guam. An American official bluntly replied that the United States needed to keep the base on Okinawa as one of three runways there that its forces would need to defend Japan from “the dramatic increase in China’s military capabilities,” the cable recounted.

The cables also reveal the active efforts that American diplomats were making to reach out to the new government, as well as some setbacks, including an attempt to build personal ties between Mr. Hatoyama and President Obama.

In a cable dated Dec. 10, 2009, John V. Roos, the current American ambassador to Japan, told the Japanese land minister in blunt terms that the United States had “a problem with Hatoyama telling POTUS” — the president of the United States — “to trust him, but not following through.”

 

Cables Show U.S. Concern on Japan’s Disaster Readiness

The cable, sent by Ambassador J. Thomas Schieffer, said Japan was preparing for earthquakes and even cyberattacks, but that it might prove less adept at responding to unforeseen disasters. “Compartmentalization and risk aversion within the bureaucracy, however, could increase Japan’s vulnerability to threats for which it is less prepared,” warned the cable, dated March 18.

Bureaucratic decision making has been cited as a factor in Japan’s lack of preparedness, almost exactly three years later, for the record-breaking tsunami that crippled the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station and set off the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. While the cable offers few specifics about the weaknesses in Japan’s disaster planning, it does go on to warn that a blow that disables the country could have catastrophic consequences for global trade and finance.

Scores of secret State Department cables obtained by WikiLeaks give an inside view of Washington’s sometimes rocky relationship with Japan. The most recent cables are from February 2010, long before the earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan on March 11 of this year. They also offer a detailed look at the United States’ response to the political upheaval that had just upended Japan’s long stagnant political landscape — the end of the Liberal Democratic Party’s almost continuous rule for more than 50 years.

After the Democratic Party of Japan won a landmark election in August 2009, American officials appeared uncertain in public how to react to the country’s new leaders and played down the damage to the relationship as teething problems in a nation that had seen opposition parties take power only once before since 1955. But in private, American diplomats were delivering a much more pointed message to the government of Japan’s new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama.

This is clearly seen in a classified cable dated October 2009 that describes a visit to Tokyo at that time by the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, Kurt M. Campbell.

A few days earlier, Mr. Hatoyama had visited Beijing, where he publicly said that Japan needed to end what he characterized as its historic overdependence on the United States. According to the cable sent to Washington by the United States Embassy in Tokyo, Mr. Campbell warned a Japanese deputy minister of defense at the time, Akihisa Nagashima, that the remarks “drew surprise from the highest levels of the U.S. government.”

“Imagine the Japanese response if the U.S. government were to say publicly that it wished to devote more attention to China than Japan,” the cable quotes Mr. Campbell as saying. He warned that such remarks “would create a crisis in U.S.-Japan relations.”

Though the cables give a distinctly American view of events at a volatile time, they also provide glimpses of how the end of the Liberal Democrats’ long run in power had opened the floodgates in Japan for reconsidering the cold war-era security alliance with the United States. The cables show alarm and concern, in both the United States and Japan, about the Hatoyama government’s often clumsy and erratic efforts to lessen Japan’s postwar dependency on the United States and to flirt with closer ties to China.

The cables reveal that, in private conversations, American officials repeatedly warned the Japanese to take China’s military rise more seriously, though they avoided raising the issue in public for fear of angering China. They also played the China card to get Japan to be more cooperative.

An Oct. 15, 2009, cable described a delegation of a dozen high-ranking United States officials — including diplomats, Pentagon officials and a Marine Corps major general — who tried to persuade Japan to honor an agreement to keep an American air base on the Japanese island of Okinawa. They described the history of the agreement, and promised to address the concerns of the Democratic Party, which had vowed during the election campaign to move the base, Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, off Okinawa.

Then one of the Japanese officials asked whether the base could be moved to the United States territory of Guam. An American official bluntly replied that the United States needed to keep the base on Okinawa as one of three runways there that its forces would need to defend Japan from “the dramatic increase in China’s military capabilities,” the cable recounted.

The cables also reveal the active efforts that American diplomats were making to reach out to the new government, as well as some setbacks, including an attempt to build personal ties between Mr. Hatoyama and President Obama.

In a cable dated Dec. 10, 2009, John V. Roos, the current American ambassador to Japan, told the Japanese land minister in blunt terms that the United States had “a problem with Hatoyama telling POTUS” — the president of the United States — “to trust him, but not following through.”

 

Concern Grows Over Window Blind Safety

But before they left, she decided to put her 2-year-old foster son, Angel, down for a nap. A short time later, her daughter came out of the bedroom and announced that Angel was “sleeping in the window with something around his neck.”

Ms. Leeson, who lives in Montgomery Village, Md., found him lifeless and hanging an inch off the floor, with a window-blind cord wrapped around his neck. “I was screaming his name and shaking him, and the realization hit me, ‘Oh my God. This can’t be happening.’?”

For the last 25 years or so, manufacturers of window blinds have installed safety features and offered tips to parents to try to minimize the dangers from their products. Even so, children like Angel continue to strangle on the cords with grim regularity, an average of one a month.

Now, prodded by a Missouri mother whose daughter was strangled in a window blind, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has asked manufacturers to devise a way to eliminate the risks from window cords or perhaps face mandatory regulations. Critics of the industry complain that manufacturers have dragged their feet on addressing safety hazards for decades, making minor tweaks or putting the onus on parents to shorten cords or buy tie-down devices. Until recently, regulators have done little to crack down, they say.

In response to the commission’s latest push, the industry, working with a task force of regulators and consumer advocates, says it will come up with a fix by the fall.

But the negotiations have gotten off to a rocky start. Like some other regulatory battles that involve consumer safety, this one comes down to a sobering question: how much should manufacturers, and ultimately consumers, be required to pay to prevent the maiming or death of a child?

Manufacturers of window blinds have offered several fixes that they say would reduce the hazards, but consumer advocates on the task force say they are inadequate and have threatened to quit.

“It was my understanding that we were eliminating the hazard,” said Carol Pollack-Nelson, a safety consultant and member of the task force. “Now they are talking about reducing the hazard. We don’t want reduced strangulation. We want no chance of it.”

Regulators at the Consumer Product Safety Commission also rejected the industry’s proposals, and they urged manufacturers to try again. Inez Tenenbaum, the commission’s chairwoman, emphasized that the commission staff plans to continue negotiating with manufacturers to find a solution.

“We are going to stay at the table,” Ms. Tenenbaum said, adding, “I hope everyone will stay at the table.”

What makes the debate over window blinds so vexing is that a solution has been available for several decades: cordless blinds. But cordless blinds are more difficult to manufacture than corded blinds, and can cost considerably more in stores, by some estimates, twice as much.

In an interview, Ms. Tenenbaum said cordless blinds were part of the solution. But the additional cost, she said, had prompted her to push manufacturers to find cheaper alternatives, too, like retractable cords or cords that are covered and therefore inaccessible to children.

Ralph J. Vasami, executive director of the Window Covering Manufacturers Association, said it was unrealistic to expect the industry to eliminate every possible hazard. Window blinds are not children’s products, he said, nor are they defective. His trade group urges parents of young children to install cordless shades.

“The objective is to minimize the hazard as much as possible,” said Mr. Vasami. “I don’t know if you have it in your power to eliminate every hazard for every product.”

Mr. Vasami argued that the industry’s efforts have had a positive effect, citing the fairly stable rate of strangulation deaths even as the industry has grown. He predicted that the number of deaths would inevitably decline as older products were replaced by those with more safety features. “Just looking at it from a statistical standpoint, there will be a lessening over time,” he said.

There are more than one billion blinds in the United States. Americans buy new shades, on average, every seven years, Mr. Vasami said.