Kenyan ecologist Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, today reiterated her claim that the AIDS virus was a deliberately created biological agent.

“Some say that AIDS came from the monkeys, and I doubt that because we have been living with monkeys (since) time immemorial, others say it was a curse from God, but I say it cannot be that.

“Us black people are dying more than any other people in this planet,” Ms Maathai told a press conference in Nairobi a day after winning the prize for her work in human rights and reversing deforestation across Africa.

“It’s true that there are some people who create agents to wipe out other people. If there were no such people, we could have not have invaded Iraq,” she said.

“We invaded Iraq because we believed that Saddam Hussein had made, or was in the process of creating agents of biological warfare,” said Ms Maathai.

“In fact it (the HIV virus) is created by a scientist for biological warfare,” she added.

“Why has there been so much secrecy about AIDS? When you ask where did the virus come from, it raises a lot of flags. That makes me suspicious,” Ms Maathai said.

Full Article:abc.net

by James Roylance
…Advances in genetics are undermining some of our oldest notions about the nature and biology of race. And the scientists whose intellectual forebears helped establish those notions say it’s time to set the record straight.
 
“Race as an explanation for human biological variation is dead,” says Alan H. Goodman, president-elect of the American Anthropological Association.
 
The truth emerging from modern genetics, scientists say, is that we’re 99.9 percent identical. Thanks to our common origins, and our natural eagerness to exchange DNA, our genes are thoroughly scrambled. And what patterns do emerge bear little resemblance to our traditional, geographically rooted notions of “race.”
 
Researchers say this new, deeper understanding should silence those who argue that some innate inferiority — or superiority — lies behind persistent racial disparities in such things as school achievement, poverty or incarceration rates, or infant mortality.
 
“That just doesn’t wash,” says Goodman, a professor of biological anthropology at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. “It takes … a gun out of the hand of racists.”
 
‘Race has real effects’  
 
But it doesn’t end the discussion. Race still exists as what scientists call a “social construct,” an invention of society which we begin to learn by the age of 3 or 4.
 
“Race has real effects. It has material effects,” Goodman says. “If you talk of differences in voting patterns in the U.S., differences in health care, education, housing, differences in school behavior — that structure between racial groups is real. But it’s not biological.”
 
These realizations sparked anthropologists, who gathered recently in Alexandria, Va., to begin what they see as a badly needed public conversation about the biological and social realities of race in America.

They also want to put to rest some ghosts in their own history. It was one of their own — German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, often called the father of physical anthropology — who proposed in 1795 that mankind was divided into five races based on geography, physical attributes and traits. He called them Caucasian, Negro (or Ethiopian), American, Mongolian and Malayan.
 
The notion stuck, and it influenced the thinking of many 19th- and 20th-century scientists whose theories often confused science with cultural biases and value judgments.
 
“This led to errors and misapplications and, much more seriously, to the abuse of biology as a means of achieving power over others,” says University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Frank Johnston. Nazi atrocities, apartheid in South Africa and “one drop of blood” rules, once used to assign race and expand slavery and oppression during America’s antebellum and Jim Crow years, were all rationalized by misplaced theories of racial biology.

…For social anthropologists, race is entrenched in American society. “And the racism that comes from that is something that we deal with every day,” says Moses.
 
She worries that the death of biological race might become an excuse to ignore the impact of racism. “The concern is that by saying race doesn’t exist biologically, it will fall off the radar screens of policy-makers and leaders who really need to understand the impact that social race continues to have,” she says.
 
“Unless we acknowledge that, and understand how we’ve institutionalized racism and attributed behavior to people based on their skin color, for example, then we can’t get to a colorblind society, where color doesn’t matter.
 
“Because color does matter in this society.”

Full Article: africaspeaks.com

AMERICA’S MILITARY and political interventions in Haiti have never been backed by sufficiently sustained or vigorous efforts to ease the country’s crippling poverty. In Congress’s pre-adjournment hours, Republican leaders in the House of Representatives have a chance to modestly redress that balance for the hemisphere’s most destitute nation.

The question is whether Washington should help Haiti to cultivate one of its few economic bright spots — the assembly and export of cheap apparel such as T-shirts to the United States — after a quota system expires at the end of this year. A bill passed by the Senate would do so, providing duty-free access for Haitian apparel manufacturers to as much as 1.5 percent of the U.S. market, an amount that would double over three years and, Haitian officials say, support some 100,000 jobs. But a House version of the Haitian Economic Recovery Opportunity Act, known as H.E.R.O., is far less heroic. Bowing to pressure from U.S. textile manufacturers (for most Haitian apparel is made from cheap material imported from Asia), the House bill would all but eliminate duty-free access to U.S. markets; it would do almost nothing to provide employment to a country where 80 percent of the population lives in extreme poverty and a single job can support a half-dozen people or more. By closing off duty-free access for Haitian apparel, the stingy House bill all but guarantees that investors would write off Haiti and take their business elsewhere.

Full Article: Washington Post

Oh I see: the problem with Haiti is that there have not been ENOUGH interventions. And now it’s all come down to cheap t-shirts. ‘The question’ is buried far beneath the assumptions that allow completely distorted views to be put forward without question. That first paragraph is a classic example. Haiti needs ‘interventions.’ It needs charity and trade breaks due to its essential inferiority. Those ‘stingy’ Republicans have hearts of stone.

Haiti has never been allowed the breathing space to develop itself since the slave rebellion which gave birth to it shocked and horrified Britain, France, and the US 200 years ago. And they have been sure that Haiti has been punished hard, and often, ever since.

by John Vidal
Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan who created a women’s movement which has planted more than 30m trees in 20 countries, became the first African woman to win the Nobel peace prize yesterday.

The award to recognises an effort which began in 1977 when she walked into the ministry of forests in Nairobi and asked for 15m tree seedlings to stop soil erosion, provide fuel and improve the lot of the poorest communities.

The director laughed in her face, but told her she could have as many as she wanted.

Less than a year later he had to withdraw his offer because the demand was so great.

…Prof Maathai, 64, says she turned to trees to give Kenyan women self-confidence.

In 1989 she told the Guardian: “[We] are overwhelmed by experts who sap confidence. People [have been made to] believe they are ignorant, inexperienced, incapable and backward. The idea of setting up the Green Belt Movement is to create local expertise to create confidence.”

…”The growth of an impersonal concrete jungle directly leads to the psychosis, neuroses, maniacal and freakish behaviour evident in the major cities of the so-called developed world,” she said.

Full Article: Guardian UK

KABUL (Reuters) – Afghanistan’s historic presidential election closed on Saturday without any of the feared large-scale violence but the vote was thrown into turmoil instead by a boycott called by most of the candidates.

All 15 of President Hamid Karzai’s rivals said they were withdrawing from the election because systems to prevent illegal multiple voting had gone awry. The move effectively left Karzai as the only candidate in the fray.

Election officials nevertheless refused to halt the process, which appeared to have gone smoothly across the rugged Islamic nation despite fears that many Afghans would be too afraid to participate.

“Halting the vote at this time is unjustified and would deny these individuals the right to vote,” said election official Ray Kennedy.

The impoverished nation was voting to choose its first elected president and perhaps end over a quarter-century of war.

It was not immediately clear how much credibility the poll would have after the boycott or whether it would lead to further divisiveness in the country, a patchwork of ethnic groups and often warring tribes held together for the past three years by the U.S.-backed interim government.

Fears of sabotage by Taliban militants who had vowed to disrupt the polls were overtaken halfway through the voting day when it became clear some workers were using the wrong pen to mark people’s fingers after they voted.

This meant the ink could just be washed off and the voter could potentially cast a ballot again.

During the campaign, some candidates expressed surprise that as many as 10.5 million out of the country’s 28 million people had registered to vote, and said they believed many people had received multiple voter cards. The indelible ink was aimed at preventing them from voting more than once.

Full Article: Reuters

I just heard a radio report that said people are voting two and three times. Oh well, Rumsfeld said it wouldn’t be ‘perfect.’

by Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON – Sidelined by their failed predictions for Iraq and U.S. President George W Bush’s efforts to reassure voters he is not a warmonger, prominent neo-conservatives and their Christian Right allies are nonetheless trying hard to prepare the ground for future U.S. adventures in the Middle East.

Echoing increasingly threatening noises from the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon about preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, neo-cons are calling for Washington to undertake covert action, at the very least, to oust what some of them call the ”terror masters” in Tehran as part of a more general ”World War IV” against alleged Arab and Islamic extremism.

A growing number of observers, particularly in the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), are coming to the conclusion that the neo-cons may actually enjoy greater influence if Bush wins re-election.

Some neo-cons are even complaining that if Bush had been serious about the ”war on terrorism”, he should have taken on Iran after Afghanistan, rather than Iraq.

”Had we seen the war for what it was, we would not have started with Iraq, but with Iran, the mother of modern Islamic terrorism, the creator of Hezbollah, the ally of al-Qaeda, the sponsor of Zarqawi, the longtime sponsor of Fatah and the backbone of Hamas”, wrote part-time Pentagon consultant Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) this week.

His article also reprised an argument he first made three years ago — that the Iranian people were already rising up against the mullahs and needed only a little nudge from Washington to succeed.

Neo-conservatives are also busy stoking tensions with Syria, even amid indications that Washington and Damascus are feeling their way toward some kind of ”modus vivendi” that may even include joint military patrols along the latter’s porous border with Iraq.

Full Article: commondreams.org

Full Article:myway.com

Tony Blair yesterday proposed a 15,000-strong European Union battle force, including British troops, dedicated to intervening in African conflicts and deployable within 10 days of a political instruction. He said the force should be ready next year.

Mr Blair made the bold proposal just 24 hours after the Iraq Survey Group reported that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. The talk of battle plans underlined the fact that despite the controversy over Iraq, Mr Blair has not lost his fervour for human rights-driven military interventions.

The proposal formed part of a wider package to tackle the crisis across Africa, including generous debt and aid proposals designed to take the continent out of its cycle of poverty, disease and instability.

Full Article: Guardian UK

See, Africa is to the Europeans a place you DO things to. The British have had more than anyone else to do with CREATING a ‘cycle of poverty, disease, and instability.’ Now they propose to TAKE Africa OUT of these conditions. The collossal arrogance, the deliberate ignorance of history, the ‘white man’s burden’ tone of nobility and charity…we must ‘TACKLE’ the ‘crisis’—please it’s sick.

Geldof flies the flag for the poor Full Article: Guardian UK

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel’s plan to withdraw from some occupied territory aims to rule out a Palestinian state indefinitely, with full U.S. approval, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s chief of staff said on Wednesday.

Dov Weisglass’s remarks on the move to give up the Gaza Strip next year while keeping large chunks of the West Bank surprised U.S. diplomats, who said Washington remained dedicated to a “road map” peace plan for a Palestinian state.

Sharon, wary of alienating Israel’s key ally, said later he still backed the “road map” effectively dismissed by Weisglass.

Palestinians, whose calls for road map talks have been spurned by Israel’s ruling right, condemned Weisglass’s message.

“I believe he has revealed the true intentions of Sharon. We told the quartet (of U.S.-led peace mediators) eight months ago that the Gaza plan was designed to undermine their road map,” said Negotiations Minister Saeb Erekat said.

Weisglass’s message, coinciding with a big Israeli offensive in Gaza, could help Sharon win over far-right foes opposed to abandoning the territory and challenging his grip on power.

“The significance of our (unilateral) disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. It supplies the formaldehyde necessary so there is no political process with Palestinians,” Weisglass said in an interview published in the Haaretz daily.

“When you freeze the process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state … Effectively, this whole package called a Palestinian state, with all it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda,” Weisglass said.

Full Article: Reuters

From: RH
To: mike@michaelmoore.com
Sent: Monday, July 12, 2003 4:57 PM
Subject: Iraqi freedom veteran supports you
Dear Mr Moore,
I went to Iraq with thoughts of killing people who I thought were horrible. I was like, “Fuck Iraq, fuck these people, I hope we kill thousands.” I believed my president. He was taking care of business and wasn’t going to let al Qaeda push us around. I was with the 3rd Squadron, 7th Cavalry, 3rd Infantry division out of Fort Stewart, Georgia. My unit was one of the first to Baghdad. I was so scared. Didn’t know what to think. Seeing dead bodies for the first time. People blown in half. Little kids with no legs. It was overwhelming, the sights, sounds, fear. I was over there from Jan’03 to Aug’03. I hated every minute. It was a daily battle to keep my spirits up. I hate the army and my job. I am supposed to get out next February but will now be unable to because the asshole in the White House decided that now would be a great time to put a stop-loss in effect for the army. So I get to do a second tour in Iraq and be away from those I love again because some guy has the audacity to put others’ lives on the line for his personal war. I thought we were the good guys.

Full Article: Guardian UK