NY Times
TOKYO (Reuters) – Secretary of State Colin Powell said Japan must consider revising its pacifist constitution if it wanted to become a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, Kyodo news agency reported on Friday.

Article Nine of Japan’s postwar, U.S.-drafted constitution, renounces the right to go to war and forbids a military, although it is interpreted as permitting forces for self-defense.

`If Japan is going to play a full role on the world stage and become a full active participating member of the Security Council, and have the kind of obligations that it would pick up as a member of the Security Council, Article Nine would have to be examined in that light,” Kyodo quoted Powell as saying. full article

Reuters
TEHRAN (Reuters) – Thousands of Iranians marched through the streets of Tehran on Friday to protest U.S. military actions in Iraq after a senior hardline cleric praised the resistance of Shi’ite Muslim rebels in Najaf.

Chanting “Death to America” and burning U.S. flags, the protesters flooded streets in central Tehran carrying banners proclaiming: “Death to the occupiers” and “American democracy – massacre of innocent people.” Similar state-sponsored rallies were planned across the country.

Shi’ite Muslim Iran has consistently called for U.S.-led forces to leave Iraq and expressed outrage at the presence of multinational forces in holy Shi’ite cities Najaf and Kerbala.

“They (Americans) want to fully eliminate Islamic groups from the Iraqi scene and give power to a laic group who are U.S. agents,” Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati told worshippers at Friday Prayers in Tehran before the protest march started.

“I must appreciate those who are resisting around the holy shrine (of Imam Ali in Najaf) against the bloodthirsty wolves,” he said. full article

NY Times
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 12 – If 16-year-old Eliezer Williams has his way, rats will no longer scurry through classrooms in California, and every student will have books, a place to sit and a clean bathroom to use.

Eliezer is the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed in 2000 by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of 1.5 million California students, most from poor neighborhoods.

The lawsuit accused the state of denying poor children adequate textbooks, trained teachers and safe classrooms.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, plans to announce Friday that California has settled the suit by agreeing to the demands that the students receive equal access to basic instructional materials in all core subjects and that they be taught by qualified teachers in sound and healthy schools.

The proposed settlement, which is subject to approval by a judge, would require the state to devote as much as $1 billion to repairs and upgrades to 2,400 deteriorating, low-performing schools.

It would also provide almost $139 million for textbooks this year alone.

“This means that every child counts,” said Mark D. Rosenbaum, legal director of the Southern California branch of the A.C.L.U.

The deal, Mr. Rosenbaum said, ends “decades of neglect and indifference.”

“We were in classrooms where kids had to share space with rats,” he said. “We saw essays posted on a board in an elementary school where kids had written about the prevalence of rats in their classrooms.”

While touring schools to research the lawsuit, Mr. Rosenbaum said, he found children who had defecated in class because restrooms were out of order.

In some classrooms, he said, rain poured through holes in ceilings.

Citing a Harris poll, Mr. Rosenbaum said that one million to two million students did not have books for use in school or to take home for study, and that schools with high concentrations of black and Latino students were 74 percent more likely than predominantly white schools to lack sufficient textbooks.

…The administration of Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat who was ousted last year in a recall election, spent about $18 million fighting the lawsuit.

Lawyers for the state argued that poor students were unlikely to do better in school even if they had the same educational benefits as children who were not poor. They also said the responsibility for ensuring educational equality belonged to local governments.

But the plaintiffs argued that the state had denied thousands of children their fundamental right to an education under the California Constitution. full article

commondreams.org
WASHINGTON – The Washington Post became the latest prestigious US newspaper to question its own coverage of Iraq leading up to the US-led war, saying it underplayed stories questioning White House claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. full article

Guardian UK
…”On June 28, my feeling was nothing was going to change because of the handover,” says Steven Cook, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “There were still going to be car bombings and US soldiers being killed, and that’s exactly what’s happened. Nothing has changed.”

But one thing did change: US press coverage of Iraq. The handover marked a turning point in the level and intensity of media interest, which sharply decreased, particularly on the 24-hour cable news channels.

“Clearly the volume in press coverage has gone way down,” says Cook. “‘Sleepy’ is a good word to describe it. The coverage doesn’t compare with anything we’d seen during the previous 12 months from Iraq. The drop-off has been noticeable. full article

The Withdrawal of Foreign Troops is the Only Solution:
The Media-hyped Fiction of a Handover of Power in Iraq is designed for US Voters by Tariq Ali commondreams.org
Most legends contain a small grain of truth, but none is to be found in the fraudulent images being presented each day by the BBC (and the US networks). The print media is not much better. Official propaganda is constantly repeated in sentences such as: “On June 28 the United States and its coalition partners transferred sovereign control of Iraq to an interim government headed by prime minister Ayad Allawi. The transfer of sovereignty ended more than a year of American-led occupation”. Meanwhile, US intelligence agencies admit that the size of the resistance increases every day. If Moqtada al-Sadr were to be captured or killed in the fighting taking place in Najaf, the steady trickle of recruits could become a flood. In such a situation and with no official opposition to the occupation in the Commons it should be the responsibility of the media to ensure that some truth, at least, is regularly reported. full article

by Greg Palast africaspeaks.com

Hugo Chavez drives George Bush crazy. Maybe it’s jealousy: Unlike Mr. Bush, Chavez, in Venezuela, won his Presidency by a majority of the vote.

Or maybe it’s the oil: Venezuela sits atop a reserve rivaling Iraq’s. And Hugo thinks the US and British oil companies that pump the crude ought to pay more than a 16% royalty to his nation for the stuff. Hey, sixteen percent isn’t even acceptable as a tip at a New York diner.

Whatever it is, OUR President has decided that THEIR president has to go. This is none too easy given that Chavez is backed by Venezuela’s poor. And the US oil industry, joined with local oligarchs, has made sure a vast majority of Venezuelans remain poor.

Therefore, Chavez is expected to win this coming Sunday’s recall vote. That is, if the elections are free and fair.

They won’t be. Some months ago, a little birdie faxed to me what appeared to be confidential pages from a contract between John Ashcroft’s Justice Department and a company called ChoicePoint, Inc., of Atlanta. The deal is part of the War on Terror.

Justice offered up to $67 million, of our taxpayer money, to ChoicePoint in a no-bid deal, for computer profiles with private information on every citizen of half a dozen nations. The choice of which nation’s citizens to spy on caught my eye. While the September 11th highjackers came from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and the Arab Emirates, ChoicePoint’s menu offered records on Venezuelans, Brazilians, Nicaraguans, Mexicans and Argentines. How odd. Had the CIA uncovered a Latin plot to sneak suicide tango dancers across the border with exploding enchiladas? full article

US Support for Anti-Democratic Forces in Venezuela Recall

africaspeaks.com

magine the scandal if a foreign government had for years funneled millions of dollars to political groups in the United States in an attempt to affect the outcome of a U.S. election. Even worse, what if some of the groups that received money had been involved in a failed coup attempt against a democratically elected U.S. president? Would the U.S. public not have a right to be outraged at the attempt to manipulate our political process?

Of course we would — which is why the people of Venezuela have a right to be outraged at the U.S. government’s ongoing attempts to meddle in the electoral process in Venezuela. full article

Guardian UK
If you’re a delegate attending the Republican national convention at Madison Square Garden later this month, Jamie Moran knows where you’re staying. He knows where you’re eating and what Broadway musical you plan on seeing. For the past nine months, Moran has been living off savings earned as an office manager at a nonprofit and working full-time to disrupt the RNC.

His small anarchist collective, RNCNotWelcome.org, runs a snitch line and an email account where disgruntled employees of New York hotels, the Garden and the Republican party itself can pass on information about conventioneers. So far, the collective has received dozens of phone calls and hundreds of emails with inside dirt on GOP activities.

Recently, a woman with a polished, middle-aged sounding voice left a message saying, “For some God-unknown reason I’m on the Republican mailing list, and they sent me what they call a list of their inner-circle events.” The events hadn’t been publicised elsewhere, she said, and she wanted to fax the list to Moran.

Moran feeds information like this to a cadre of activists desperate to unleash four years’ worth of anger at the Bush administration. By dogging the delegates wherever they go, RNC Not Welcome hopes to make the Republicans’ lives hell for as long as they’re in New York.

“We want to make their stay here as miserable as possible,” says Moran, who has sandy hair, a snub nose and a goatee. The son of a retired Queens cop, he’s 30 but looks younger. “I’d like to see all the Republican events – teas, backslapping lunches – disrupted. I’d like to see people from other states following their delegates, letting them know what they think about Republican policies. I’d like to see impromptu street parties and marches. I’d like to see corporations involved in the Iraq reconstruction get targeted – anything from occupation to property destruction.”

There’s a showdown coming to Manhattan. Backed by the most intense security the city has ever seen, the Republicans are about to turn the blue-state bastion of New York City into the backdrop for George Bush’s coronation. The RNC chose New York because it was the site of the September 11 terror attacks, which to Bush’s opponents and even some ordinary New Yorkers seems a brazen provocation.

On one side are 36,000 cops – a force that city councilman Peter Vallone Jr calls “perhaps the world’s 10-largest standing army”. On the other side are at least 250,000 protesters expected to converge on the city from all across the United States and Canada – a demonstration six times larger than the legendary antiglobalisation protests that rocked Seattle in 1999. They’re facing off at a time when police are increasingly adopting military tactics in response to protest, and protesters are responding likewise, conducting their own reconnaissance on Republican plans and plotting actions designed to hit where the cops are weakest. full article

New York Times
TEHRAN (Reuters) – Iran said on Wednesday it carried out a successful field test of the latest version of its Shahab-3 medium-range ballistic missile, which defense experts say can reach Israel or U.S. bases in the Gulf.

Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani said last week Iran was working to improve the range and accuracy of the Shahab-3 in response to Israel’s moves to boost its anti-missile capability.

The Defense Ministry, in a brief statement carried on the official news agency IRNA, said the test of the new Shahab-3 “was carried out successfully … The pre-determined targets were hit in the testing,” it said.

Iran says its missile program is purely for deterrent purposes. Tehran also denies U.S. and Israeli accusations that it is seeking to develop nuclear warheads which could be delivered by the Shahab-3.

In Washington, the State Department said Iran’s attempts to improve its missile capability were a threat to the region and U.S. interests.

“We will continue to take steps to address Iran’s missile efforts, and to work closely with other like-minded countries in doing so,” State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said.

Based on the North Korean Nodong-1 and modified with Russian technology, the Shahab-3 is thought to have a range of 810 miles, which would allow it to strike anywhere in Israel.

Shahab means meteor in Persian.

Amid media speculation that Israel may try to halt Iran’s nuclear program by carrying out air strikes on some atomic facilities in Iran, Iranian officials have said Tehran would retaliate promptly and strongly to any such attack.

TOUGH TALK

“If Israel behaves like a lunatic and attacks the Iranian nation’s interests, we will come down on their heads like a mallet and break their bones,” the ISNA students news agency quoted Revolutionary Guards Commander Yahya Rahim Safavi as saying on Wednesday. full article

Well this is not a starving country with a military bombed into submission every day for 10 years. It is certainly not irrational for the Iranians to believe that the fix is in. Even the Congressional declaration of war on Iraq contains ominous statements about Iran.

Reuters
KIGALI (Reuters) – The United Nations must forcibly disarm Rwandan Hutu militias at the heart of years of conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the country’s four vice-presidents said on Wednesday.

Vice-president Azarias Ruberwa said Congo wanted the U.N. Security Council to beef up the mandate of its 11,000-strong peacekeeping mission in Congo (MONUC) to help hunt down and forcibly disarm the Interahamwe. full article

New York Times
TRAIGUÉN, Chile – Before the conquistadors arrived, and even for centuries afterward, the lush, verdant forests of southern Chile belonged to the Mapuche people. Today, though, tree farms stretch in all directions here, property of timber companies that supply lumber to the United States, Japan and Europe.

But now the Mapuches, complaining of false land titles and damage to the environment and their traditional way of life, are struggling to take back the land they say is still theirs. As their confrontation with corporate interests has grown more violent, Chile’s nominally Socialist government has sought to blunt the indigenous movement by invoking a modified version of an antiterrorist law that dates from the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, 1973 to 1990.

Despite international protests, 18 Mapuche leaders are scheduled to go on trial soon, accused under a statute that prohibits “generating fear among sectors of the population.” The charges stem from a series of incidents during the past seven years in which groups of Mapuches have burned forests or farmhouses or destroyed forestry equipment and trucks. full article