Fortnightly Mailing

Across Hardangervidda in Norway

Harteigen, 1690 m, from Hadlaskard, 18 March 2008

This Easter, after three days alone a bit further north, skiing from lake Tyin to Bygdin, I went hut-to-hut with two friends across Hardangervidda in Norway, Europe's biggest mountain plateau, from Haugastøl on the Bergen to Oslo railway, south-west to Haukelisæter east of Stavanger. The weather was best described as "variable", hence a paucity of good pictures, particularly at the end of the journey when it was cold, snowy, and misty, with very strong head-winds. In the continuation post below there is a rather fragmented set of pictures.

Sleep apnoea: joined up government needed to prevent road deaths

19 April 2008. Here is a link to the recently published United States Department of Transportation's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration 28 January 2008  [216 kB PDF], which contains a comprehensive review of the evidence that sleep apnoea suffering drivers are at substantially greater risk of crashing than non sufferers, along with a comprehensive set to (joined up) recommendations on how to lessen the risks.

2 April 2008 update. Here is a document I've had a hand in writing: Preventing death and injury caused by LGV and PSV drivers falling asleep at the wheel – the case for a joined-up approach by Government [10 page 55 k B PDF]. Please feel free to pass the URL of the document on to interested parties.

26 March 2008 update. Today the National Institute for Clinical Excellence published its decision that sufferers from sleep apnoea should be eligible for NHS treatment [34 kB PDF]. Meanwhile the British Government yesterday launched a campaign to increase awareness of the danger of tiredness in drivers, saying that about 1 in 5 road accidents are caused by tiredness - perhaps equating to 600 deaths a year. So far these two developments have not been properly integrated by Government, with the campaign materials bizarrely silent on the problem of sleep apnoea. But with luck, it will now only be a matter of time before further measures are introduced to ensure that employers conform to their obligations under Section 3 of the Health and Safety at Work Act, by identifying sleep apnoea sufferers in their workforce and preventing them from driving until they have been successfully treated.

Yonatan Mendel on the lack of objectivity of Israeli journalists

Grim and informative piece reflecting on the deeply rooted lack of objectivity of Israeli journalists concerning Palestine, in the 6 March 2008 London Review of Books, by Yonatan Mendel, who until recently was the Middle East correspondent of Walla, which he describes as "Israel's most popular web site". This short extract does not do the article justice:

"When it comes to ‘security’ there is no such freedom. It’s ‘us’ and ‘them’, the IDF and the ‘enemy’; military discourse, which is the only discourse allowed, trumps any other possible narrative. It’s not that Israeli journalists are following orders, or a written code: just that they’d rather think well of their security forces.

In most of the articles on the conflict two sides battle it out: the Israel Defence Forces, on the one hand, and the Palestinians, on the other. When a violent incident is reported, the IDF confirms or the army says but the Palestinians claim: ‘The Palestinians claimed that a baby was severely injured in IDF shootings.’ Is this a fib? ‘The Palestinians claim that Israeli settlers threatened them’: but who are the Palestinians? Did the entire Palestinian people, citizens of Israel, inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, people living in refugee camps in neighbouring Arab states and those living in the diaspora make the claim? Why is it that a serious article is reporting a claim made by the Palestinians? Why is there so rarely a name, a desk, an organisation or a source of this information? Could it be because that would make it seem more reliable?"

Henry Siegman writes about Gaza’s future in the London Review of Books

Henry Siegman is the director of the US/Middle East Project, served as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1994 to 2006, ans was head of the American Jewish Congress from 1978 to 1994. I do not know how long the whole of Siegman's scathing and depressing attack on current US and Israeli policy in relation to the siege of Gaza in the 7/2/2008 London Review of Books will be visible to non-subscribers, but I hope LRB will include it amongst the articles that it does not password protect. Here is the start:

"The breaching of the barrier between Gaza and Egypt by Gaza’s imprisoned population dramatised two fundamental realities about which Israeli and US policymakers have been in complete denial. First, that sooner or later Gazans would seek to break out of their open-air jail. That they have done so should be applauded not condemned. It would have been a sad comment on the human spirit had Gaza’s citizens surrendered to their fate.

Israel’s claim that the strangulation of Gaza was intended to provoke its population into overthrowing Hamas is absurd – and offensive. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the draconian restrictions imposed by Israel on Gaza’s civilian residents redirected against their Israeli tormentors what anger existed among them towards Hamas for its ideological rigidity and its refusal to halt rocket assaults on Israel. As recent opinion polls have found, the suffering caused by the Gaza closures produced greater solidarity not greater divisiveness. It even moved Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad to public displays of anger (however disingenuous) against Ehud Olmert’s government.

Olmert’s statement, made shortly before the breakout, that Gaza’s residents could not expect to lead normal lives while missiles from Gaza were hitting Israel would have been perfectly reasonable if Gazan residents had indeed been allowed to live ‘normal’ lives before the most recent tightening of the noose and if it were the case that Gaza’s civilian residents had any control at all over the firing of the missiles.

As Olmert knows, neither is the case. The siege of Gaza was imposed by Israel because Israel’s government and the US administration intended to undo the results of Hamas’s victory in the elections of 2006. Initially, they thought they could achieve this by arming Fatah’s security forces and encouraging them to promote anarchy in Gaza in a way that would discredit Hamas. When Hamas ousted Fatah security forces, Israel blockaded Gaza in the hope that its population would overthrow Hamas. The Qassam rockets were the consequence, not the cause of these misguided Israeli and US manoeuvres."

Continue reading Siegman's article.