By Katherine Smith

Do animals have cognitive mapping abilities?

A cognitive map is a powerful memory of landmarks which allows novel short-cutting to occur. [1]

Bart (pictured on the right) and Katherine visit UCLA on October 6 and demonstrate novel short-cutting is possible in dogs.

UCLA is a daunting place to get around if you aren’t familiar with the geography.

The campus consists of 174 buildings on 419 acres with a College of Letters/Science and 11 professional schools.

Bart and I arrived about 11:30 to attend a lecture at the Law School that started at noon.

We purchased a parking permit and entered the parking structure P2 at level 5 (click here to open a map of the campus in a new window).

One good thing about UCLA is that when they designed the campus they didn’t use their opposing “dumb” and a bulldozer to level the 419 acres.

Therefore the entrance and exit to the P2 structure is at level 5, not level 1.

I had trouble finding a parking place and because it was raining and we were late, I exited the garage, drove up Charles E. Young Drive East (CEYE) and parked in the loading zone (LZ-2) in front of Dodd Hall. Bart and I went in and listened to about 20 minutes of the lecture.

We returned to the car, drove back to the P2 parking structure and finally found a parking place on level 7.

We took the elevator to level 3 and exited onto CEYE.

As we walked by the faculty center, I decided to impersonate a faculty member and stopped in for lunch.

Five professors teaching classes in Molecular Science were discussing environmental science and the latest geo-engineering solution to the environmental problems we face today.

I walked over to their table, apologized for interrupting, and asked them if they taught/discussed/thought about or were aware of the GEO4.

Everyone looked up in amazement, wondering if I was talking about a car.

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Mahboob A. Khawaja, Ph.D.

Wars are planned, financed and fought by governments, not by groups or ordinary people. Wars are based on political agendas bent on complete control over resources, people and territory. Most wars have multiple reasons, domestic, foreign and global outreach. The U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are fought to maintain US domination worldwide, to occupy the untapped natural resources of the Middle East, in particular oil and gas, and to protect the value of U.S. dollar as a stable international reserve currency. In September 2000, the proactive policy paper written by the neoconservative intellectuals to envision the "Project for the New American Century" (PNAC), sets the milestone, seeking U.S. domination over the rest of the world powers. Its objectives: meeting U.S. energy demands through occupation by force of all the oil and gas resources in the Arab Middle East. The blueprint supports military occupation of the oil-exporting Arab countries and regime change wherever necessary - to fulfill the PNAC policy aims of global domination. Centuries ago, German historian Carl Von Clausewitz wrote On War: “War is not merely a political act but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means.”

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Franklin Lamb, Shatila Camp

“The only solution to the Palestinian issue is for the invaders (Israelis) of the occupied Palestinian land to leave, and give the Palestinians their rights and return all the Palestinian refugees to their original land. Iran supports Lebanon’s bitter struggle in confronting Israeli assaults. We demand with all seriousness and insistence the liberation of all occupied land in Lebanon and Syria”. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bint Jbeil 10/15/10

In the days since Iran’s president Ahmadinejad completed his visit to Lebanon, and given the continuing lively discussion across the local and international political spectrum evaluating the impact of his historic appearance, one thing appears fairly clear. US State Department official Jeffrey Feltman who came to Beirut quick from Saudi Arabia on orders from the White House to “do something!” to offset the Iranians unprecedented reception, may have been a bit wide of the mark in his evaluation. Feltman repeated this past weekend the March 14 pro-US and Saudi prediction that: “ I don’t think Ahmadinejad’s” visit will have a lasting effect. It’s not something extraordinary. Its impact will remain for a couple days and that’s it.”

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by Stephen Lendman

Defence for Children International (DCI) Palestine Section (DCI/Palestine) "is a national section of the international non-government child rights organisation and movement (dedicated) to promoting and protecting the rights of Palestinian children," according to international law principles.

Two earlier articles addressed their work, accessed though the following links:

sjlendman.blogspot.com-imprisoning-palestinian-children.html

sjlendman.blogspot.com-israeli-soldiers-sexually-abuse.html

Both covered Israel's systematic, institutionalized use of torture of Palestinian children as brutally as against adults. DCI/Palestine's latest September Bulletin adds more, saying:

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