New York Times/AP
CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — Mark Thatcher, the son of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was arrested and charged Wednesday with helping to finance a foiled coup attempt in oil rich Equatorial Guinea.

Thatcher, a 51-year-old businessman who has lived in South Africa since 2002, was arrested at his Cape Town home and brought before the Wynberg Magistrate’s Court to be charged with violating South Africa’s Foreign Military Assistance Act.

“We have evidence, credible evidence, and information that he was involved in the attempted coup,” said police spokesman Sipho Ngwema. “We refuse that South Africa be a springboard for coups in Africa and elsewhere.”

Thatcher was placed under house arrest and has until Sept. 8 to post $297,460 bail.

Police with search warrants raided Thatcher’s home in the upscale suburb of Constantia shortly after 7 a.m. local time Wednesday. He was held there while investigators searched his records and computers for evidence linking him to the alleged plot to overthrow Equatorial Guinea’s President Teodoro Obiang, which authorities claim was foiled in March. full article

Q&A: the Equatorial Guinea ‘coup’ Guardian UK
What happened in Equatorial Guinea?
In the event, not much – the alleged participants of the attempted coup against the country’s president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema M’basogo, were detained at Harare airport in Zimbabwe in March.

Sixty-four men were arrested on board a plane apparently en route to Equatorial Guinea, although they were unarmed. Two days later a further 15 men were arrested, allegedly an advanced party and believed to be led by a South African man called Nick du Toit. Two separate trials of the men are taking place, one in Zimbabwe and one in Equatorial Guinea. One of the suspects, a German man, died in prison in Equatorial Guinea after what Amnesty International described as suspected torture.

Why would there be a coup?
The underlying motive is most likely connected to the discovery of oil in the formerly impoverished state. Production has increased tenfold since the mid-1990s, making Equatorial Guinea the third largest oil power in sub-Saharan Africa.

New York Times
WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 – The head of the Environmental Protection Agency said on Tuesday that fish in virtually all of the nation’s lakes and rivers were contaminated with mercury, a highly toxic metal that poses health risks for pregnant women and young children.

Michael O. Leavitt, the E.P.A. administrator, drew his conclusion from the agency’s latest annual survey of fish advisories, which showed that 48 states – all but Wyoming and Alaska – issued warnings about mercury last year. That compared with 44 states in 1993, when the surveys were first conducted.

The latest survey also shows that 19 states, including New York, have now put all their lakes and rivers under a statewide advisory for fish consumption. full article

New York Times
There is no doubt the nature of America’s work force has changed a great deal since the enactment of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, but the Bush administration has cynically relied on this fact to overhaul the law’s overtime provisions in a manner most likely to hurt millions of Americans. At a time of stagnant wages and a weak labor market – when workers need more security, not less – fewer people are likely to receive overtime pay when they put in more than 40 hours a week on the job.

That is because new rules that went into effect this week take an expansive view of the nation’s managerial class, which is ineligible for overtime pay. If you are a factory employee or a retail store supervisor who leads a small team of fellow workers, for instance, the new rules deny you overtime if you can merely recommend – not carry out – the hiring and firing of employees.

Business groups want the new rules because they say they need to cut down on the litigation-inducing uncertainty of who is eligible for overtime. But the Bush administration could have provided more clarity without necessarily stacking the deck against working Americans. The administration goes so far as to say that its changes will expand the pool of people eligible for overtime, but research by liberal and labor advocates persuasively argue that the changes would cut the number, by as many as 6 million. New York Times

by William Loren Katz counterpunch.org
To the sputtering fury of a Bush administration who has repeatedly conspired with Venezuela’s elite to drive Hugo Chavez from power, the Black Indian President of this oil-rich nation has scored a decisive 59% victory over a recall effort. Chavez now sits more comfortably than ever atop a fourth of the world oil supplies — equal to that of Iraq — and he supplies a fifth of US oil needs. In addition, he is current leader of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC. George W. Bush would prefer his friends in Saudi Arabia rather than Chavez set global oil prices. US attacks on Chavez caricature him as a tyrant in the class of Saddam Hussein, or a Marxist, or a ferociously anti-American clone of Castro. Actually, his populist uprising springs from multicultural grass roots that pre-date the foreign invasion of the Americas that began in 1492.

Like four-fifths of Venezuelans, Chavez was born of poor Black and Indian parents. Since the days of Columbus descendants of the Spanish conquistadores have supplied the governing classes of the Americas, and have denied indiginous people a say in their future. Chavez represents a strong challenge.

Chavez is not only proud of his biracial legacy, but has begun to use oil revenues to help the poor of all colors improve their education and economic standing. He also flatly rejects Bush administration efforts to isolate Cuba, counts Castro a friend, and has repeatedly accused the US of meddling in his country and around the world.

Chavez rules a country where three percent of the population, mostly of white European descent, own 77% of the land. In recent decades millions of hungry peasants have drifted into Caracas and other cities, and live in barrios of cardboard shacks and open sewers. Chavez has begun to transfer fields from giant unused or abandoned haciendas to peasant hands, and as landlords have responded with howls of alarm, he has promised further distributions. full article

Long after slavery, inequities remain Miami Herald
LIMA – The cover of the 2004 Lima phone book features a white doctor, a white nurse, a white chef, a white man on the phone, two white men doing home repairs — and a black bellhop carrying luggage.

Jorge Ramírez winced as he examined the cover.

”This only perpetuates racism in Peru,” said Ramírez, a self-described Afro-Peruvian who heads a civil rights group in Lima. “It puts blacks below everyone else.”

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Peru, and a few determined Afro-Peruvians are using the occasion to tell their countrymen that racism is alive and well here, in ways both similar to and different from racism in the United States.

Their counterparts throughout Latin America tell a similar story as blacks throughout the region are increasingly expressing black pride and creating political movements — 50 years after the civil rights movement mushroomed in the United States.

Blacks in Latin America report regular acts of racism: that whites sometimes cross the street to avoid them, that waiters at exclusive restaurants ignore them and that security guards often follow them through store aisles while they shop.

Few countries — Brazil being a major exception — even keep separate socioeconomic statistics on blacks, which effectively hides their lagging status, said Josefina Stubbs, a World Bank official.

All Latin American presidents are white or brown-skinned, as are the overwhelming majority of their Cabinet ministers and the leading businessmen throughout the region.

But unlike the United States, where anyone with a drop of black blood was once legally considered black, racial distinctions in Latin America are harder to pin down. Also unlike the United States, Latin American governments have not systematically practiced racial segregation or deliberately repressed their black citizens.

”Racism here is more subtle,” said Rafael Santa Cruz, a black actor who in 1991 portrayed the first successful black professional in a Peruvian soap opera when he played a doctor. “In Peru, you’re black if you look black. The darker you are, the lower you are socially and economically.”
full article

Independent UK
The standoff in Najaf has cast the spotlight on the rebel Shia cleric Muqtada Sadr. While the Western media cannot resist calling him “radical”, it is in fact very difficult to find any basis for this description.

He has been consistent in his staunch opposition to the occupation of Iraq. “There can be no politics under occupation, no freedom under occupation, no democracy under occupation,” he said this month. What is so radical about that? If his Mehdi Army were patrolling and bombing London or New York, I would be astonished to find media descriptions of US and British resistance as “radical”.

His opposition to foreign occupation cannot be explained away as support for Saddam Hussein, who persecuted the Shias so ruthlessly. Sadr and his family were vehemently opposed to the dictator and his regime, and for this they paid a heavy price – Sadr’s uncle was executed in 1980, and his father and two brothers were shot dead in February 1999.

Although Sadr’s opposition to occupation has been consistent, he only turned to armed resistance more than a year after the invasion. His sermons previously called for non-violent resistance.

While death and insecurity reigned after Baghdad fell, Sadr supporters took control of many aspects of life in the Shia sectors, appointing clerics to mosques, guarding hospitals, collecting garbage, operating orphanages, and supplying food to Iraqis hit by the hardships of war. I cannot imagine anything less “radical” than collecting garbage especially since the occupation authorities failed in their responsibility under international law to provide such basic and vital services. full article

There’s more to Sadr than meets the eye
Guardian UK

New York Times
I’m launching a major investigation into whether the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth organization is being secretly financed by the Kerry campaign. For today that organization begins airing ads drawing attention to John Kerry’s 1971 testimony against the Vietnam War.

If voters see that testimony, they will see a young man arguing passionately for a cause. They will see a young man willing to take risks and boldly state his beliefs. Whether they agree or not, they will see in John Kerry a man of conviction.

Many young people, who don’t have an emotional investment in endlessly refighting the conflicts of the late 1960’s, might take a look at that man and decide they like him. They might not realize that man no longer exists.

That conviction politician was still visible as late as the 1980’s. When Senator Kerry opposed aid to the contras, or took on Oliver North, he did it with the same forthright fire.

But then in the early 1990’s, things began to evolve. First, Kerry relied on his post-Vietnam convictions and ended up casting the vote against the first Iraq war that threatened his political future.

Then the political climate changed. Bill Clinton came to power and suddenly the old Vietnam-era liberalism was no longer in vogue. The future belonged to triangulating New Democrats. Then Newt Gingrich came in and the frame of debate shifted further to the right. John Kerry was now in a position to run for national office – and thus needed to be acceptable to a national constituency. full article

Guardian UK
Women in Iraq endured untold hardships and difficulties during the past three decades of the Ba’ath regime. Although some basic rights for women, such as the right to education, employment, divorce in civil courts and custody over kids, were endorsed in the Personal Status Code, some of these legal rights were routinely violated.

The Ba’ath regime’s “faithfulness campaign”, an act of terrorism against women that included the summary beheading of scores of those accused of prostitution, is just one example of its brutality against women.

However, it is now almost a year after the war, which was supposed to bring “liberation” to Iraqis. Rather than an improvement in the quality of women’s lives, what we have seen is widespread violence, and an escalation of violence against women.

From the start of the occupation, rape, abduction, “honour” killings and domestic violence have became daily occurrences. The Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (Owfi) has informally surveyed Baghdad, and now knows of 400 women who were raped in the city between April and August last year.

A lack of security and proper policing have led to chaos and to growing rates of crime against women. Women can no longer go out alone to work, or attend schools or universities. An armed male relative has to guard a woman if she wants to leave the house.

Girls and women have become a cheap commodity to be traded in post-Saddam Iraq. Owfi knows of cases where virgin girls have been sold to neighbouring countries for $200, and non-virgins for $100. full article

Independent UK
The true threat from global warming may have been masked by air pollution, a leading scientist warned today.

Aerosols – particles of pollution in the air – help to cool the earth but, as they diminish in coming decades, global warming may be found to accelerate, says Meinrat Andreae, of the Max Planck Institute in Mainz, Germany.

Professor Andreae will tell a conference in London today that warming will be especially fast if aerosol “cooling” has hidden a higher climate sensitivity than is generally assumed.

“These arguments suggest that there is a considerable chance that climate change in the 21st century will follow the upper extremes of current… estimates, and may even exceed them.

“This would have truly grave consequences for the Earth environment and human society, and argues for immediate and radical reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.” full article

Independent UK
It is a warm Monday evening in spring and in the Chapel of Divine Providence in El Salvador’s capital city, San Salvador, a small, bespectacled priest is performing Mass. Having completed his sermon, the priest is standing close to the altar, blessing the wafer discs that represent the body of Christ.

From the rear of the church there is the sound of a single shot. The priest crumples to the floor of the chapel fatally wounded, blood seeping from a small hole in his chest and soaking his vestments. Outside the small chapel, a bearded man armed with a .223 high-velocity weapon, is seen in the back seat of a red, four-door Volkswagen which then drives away.

The priest was Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the Archbishop of El Salvador and an outspoken champion of the poor, and he was assassinated by right-wing paramilitaries, on 24 March 1980. Though the identity of the assassin remains unknown, many of the alleged conspirators have long been identified and live on untouched, a sore that has continued to fester within Salvadoran society.

Now, more than 24 years later, a court in California will today hear evidence against one of those accused of orchestrating the murder of Archbishop Romero. That man, Alvaro Rafael Saravia, the right-hand man to the leader of El Salvador’s death squads of the 1980s, has lived in the US for the past 19 years but has not been seen in public since papers were filed against him last September. The hearing will be held in his absence.

The civil action is designed to establish Mr Saravia’s alleged complicity in the killings and seek damages against him. Archbishop Romero often spoke critically of the US, which supported the right-wing government of El Salvador and those of other Latin American countries in their so-called “dirty wars”, training and funding paramilitary forces.

Among those trained by the US was Mr Saravia’s boss, the late Major Roberto D’Aubuisson who is said to have ordered the archbishop’s assassination. He studied at the notorious School of the Americas, a US military college in Fort Benning, Georgia, which for decades taught counter-insurgency to more than 60,000 cadets from Latin American regimes, It was renamed in 2001 after a series of scandals, including the discovery there of stacks of torture manuals. full article

Reuters
JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Hoping to avoid sanctions, Israel’s attorney general wants Israel to consider applying to Palestinians the Fourth Geneva Convention safeguarding the treatment of occupied people, a spokesman said on Tuesday.

It was another sign of emerging Israeli disquiet about the risk of international sanctions following a World Court decision in July that declared illegal its West Bank barrier built across Palestinian farmland.

Israel has said previously the Geneva Convention’s clauses on occupation do not apply to it because Jordanian and Egyptian control over the West Bank and Gaza before 1967 was not internationally recognized.

Some 3.6 million Palestinians live in the two territories which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

Israel says it does its best to heed humanitarian standards in Palestinian areas but Palestinians dispute this, pointing to Jewish settlements, roadblocks and other Israeli controls.

Attorney General Menachem Mazuz last week urged the right-wing government to reroute its barrier swiftly to minimize the risk of sanctions, and the High Court gave it 30 days to issue a statement on the ramifications of the World Court decision.

A Justice Ministry spokesman said Mazuz now wanted the government to “deeply consider” the possibility of adopting the 1949 Convention, which forbids abuses of civilians in conflict zones and transferring citizens of an occupying power onto captured territory. full article