President George Bush flew into a stormy reception last night on his first foreign trip since re-election, as tens of thousands of protesters sought to disrupt a summit of leaders from Asia and the Americas.

Police used tear gas and water cannon as dozens of masked youths broke off from a rally of up to 50,000 people to throw rocks, tear up park benches and hurl molotov cocktails in the Chilean capital, Santiago. Several officers and protesters were injured, with at least 130 arrests.

Hundreds of protesters have been arrested throughout Chile over the past week, and thousands of additional police are on duty in Santiago for the largest security operation since the papal visit in 1987.

Organisers estimated more than 50,000 people marched through the city centre, hours before leaders from the 21 economies of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group arrived for a weekend of meetings focusing on free trade and security.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve chairman, yesterday gave the dollar a further push lower as he said the huge US current account deficit threatened to scare off foreign investors.

His comments followed remarks from the US treasury secretary, John Snow, this week that poured cold water on the idea of intervention to support the greenback.

Mr Greenspan sent jitters through the currency markets as traders awaited the outcome of a meeting of the Group of 20 industrialised and developing countries this weekend in Berlin.

His remarks lent weight to a growing conviction that the American authorities are happy to see the dollar slide, making exports cheaper and imports dearer and thereby helping to correct the current account deficit.

In European markets the euro rose to $1.3068, just shy of the all-time high that it hit earlier in the week, while the dollar fell to a new four-year low against the Japanese yen of below ¥103.

“Given the size of the US current account deficit, a diminished appetite for adding to dollar balances must occur at some point,” Mr Greenspan told a banking conference in Frankfurt.

“International investors will eventually adjust their accumulation of dollar assets or, alternatively, seek higher dollar returns to offset concentration risk, elevating the cost of financing the US current account deficit and rendering it increasingly less tenable.”

The deficit has ballooned to more than 5% of gross domestic product, or $166bn (£90bn) in the second quarter of the year, driven by Americans’ appetite for imports and flows of money into US financial assets, particularly bonds.

The dollar has been sliding against other major currencies for a couple of years but its fall has accelerated since the re-election of President Bush this month as markets refocused on the current account and budget deficits. The large tax cuts of Mr Bush’s first term have driven the government’s budget deficit to record levels.

The US deficit is mainly being financed by a huge surplus in China, which artificially pegs its currency at a low rate against the dollar to boost its exports. The Chinese authorities use their export earnings to buy dollar assets, but there are reports that they are losing their appetite for US holdings, which may be what Mr Greenspan was referring to.
Full Article:guardian.co.uk

European Union justice and interior ministers agreed Friday that new immigrants to the 25-nation bloc should be required to learn local languages, and to adhere to general “European values” that will guide them toward better integration.

Dutch immigration minister Rita Verdonk, who chaired the meeting, said all countries agreed to make integrating newcomers a priority, considering the growing ethnic tensions as EU nations struggle to absorb a steady stream of poor, mostly Muslim immigrants.

Just this month in the Netherlands, the slaying of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a suspected Muslim radical unleashed a wave of attacks against mosques, churches and religious schools in a country once famed for its tolerance.

Tensions also rose in Belgium, where authorities arrested a suspect Friday accused of sending death threats to a senator of Moroccan heritage who criticized radical Muslims.

“It’s not like we are against immigration,” Verdonk said. “If you want to live in the Netherlands, you have to adhere to our rules … and learn our language.”

Highlighting a European-wide problem, Verdonk said that some 500,000 Turkish and Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands don’t speak Dutch.

For now, integration policies across the continent vary greatly. Public concerns over immigration have fueled electoral successes for far-right parties in several European countries, including Austria and Italy, where they have joined the national government.
Full Article: sfgate.com

Popular Dutch Lawmaker Urges Halt to Non-Western Immigrants
Full Article:sfgate.com

Immigration surge fuels racism in Spain
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

Did French ‘colonists’ learn Algerian values? Did Dutch Afrikaaners learn Xhosa and Zulu values? Did Belgians learn Congolese values? Did Spaniards learn indigenous American values?
And then there is the fascinating question of which ‘values’ non-Western immigrants should learn. Maybe not the ones so prominently on display for the past few centuries, anyway.

UN staff are expected to make an unprecedented vote of no confidence in Secretary-General Kofi Annan, union sources say, after a series of scandals tainted his term in charge of the world body.

The UN staff union, in what officials said was the first vote of its kind in the almost 60-year history of the United Nations, was set to approve a resolution withdrawing support for Annan and senior UN management.

Annan has been in the line of fire over a series of scandals including controversy about a UN aid program that investigators say allowed deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to embezzle billions of dollars.

Staffers said the trigger for the no-confidence measure was an announcement this week that Annan had pardoned the UN’s top oversight official, who was facing allegations of favouritism and sexual harassment.

The union had requested a formal probe into the official, Dileep Nair, after employees accused him of harassing staff and violating UN rules on the hiring and promotion of workers.
Full Article:news.yahoo.com

Annan got Watergated. I didn’t figure his comments about Iraq would be tolerated for long.

npr.org
Continued from yesterday.

by Hugh Urban
“Is [Jesus] gonna kill a bunch of people here, like He is over there?”
“I’m afraid He is. If they’re working for the Antichrist, they’re in serious trouble.”
— Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Glorious Appearing: End of Days

I see things this way: The people who did this act on America are evil people. As a nation of good folk, we’re going to hunt them down and we will bring them to justice.
— George W. Bush, September 25, 2001

As a professor of comparative religion and cultural studies, I have long been fascinated by the strange intersections between religion, politics and popular culture. One of the most striking such intersections occurred to me this summer as I sat down to read the twelfth and last volume of the wildly popular Left Behind series by evangelical preacher Tim LaHaye and novelist Jerry Jenkins. For those who haven’t yet had a chance to read any of LaHaye and Jenkin’s series, the story is basically an evangelical interpretation of the Book of Revelation set in the context of contemporary global politics: the Rapture has taken place, the Antichrist has taken control of the U.N. and created a single global economy, while a small group of American-led believers battles the forces of evil in a showdown in Jerusalem.

At the same time that I was immersed in this entertaining mixture of Stephen King-esque thrills and fundamentalist rhetoric, I had also been reading much of the recent literature on the Neoconservative movement and its powerful role in the Bush administration. As Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke have persuasively argued in their recent study, America Alone, the election of George W. Bush and the confusion following 9/11 allowed a small but radical group of intellectuals to seize the reins of U.S. foreign policy. Led by figures like Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the members of the Project for a New American Century, the Neocons have been able to put into effect a long-held plan for asserting a U.S. global hegemony, in large part by dominating the Middle East and its oil resources.

The two narratives that I was reading here — the Neocon’s aggressive foreign policy, centered around the Middle East, and the Christian evangelical story of the immanent return of Christ in the Holy Land– struck me as weirdly similar and disturbingly parallel. The former openly advocates a “New American Century” and a “benevolent hegemony” of the globe by U.S. power, inaugurated by the invasion of Iraq, while the latter predicts a New Millennium of divine rule ushered in by apocalyptic war, first in Babylon and then in Jerusalem.

I was tempted to dismiss the similarity as an amusing but insignificant coincidence. Yet the more I began to examine the Neocon’s strategies and the ties between George W. Bush and the Christian Right, the less this link seemed to be either coincidental or unimportant. I am not, of course, suggesting that there is some kind of conspiratorial plot at work between Neocon strategists and evangelical writers like LaHaye, or that the two are somehow working secretly together behind the scenes.
Full Article:counterpunch.org

Why not?

The Palestinian leadership is to send a delegation to Paris in an attempt to establish the cause of Yasser Arafat’s death last week amid a growing belief among Palestinians that he was poisoned by Israel.

The dispatch follows France’s refusal to permit Palestinian officials to see Arafat’s medical records on the grounds of confidentiality. The hospital says it will only give them to Arafat’s widow, Suha, who has refused to reveal their contents.

French authorities have said Arafat, 75, was not poisoned but they have not explained his death. “The conditions surrounding the death of President Yasser Arafat raise questions,” said the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qureia.

Rumours that Arafat was poisoned took hold during the two weeks he was in France, with conflicting accounts emerging about the state of his health.

They gained ground again after Arafat’s personal physician, Ashraf Kurdi, told the Arab press he believed tests on the Palestinian leader’s blood raised the possibility he was poisoned.

Yesterday Le Monde quoted doctors as saying Arafat had suffered from an unusual blood disease and a liver problem.
guardian.co.uk

Well convenient that he died Thursday and they buried him Friday.

Vladimir Putin announced yesterday that Russia was developing a nuclear missile system that he claimed was unrivalled in the world.

The president said Russia was “testing the most up-to-date nuclear missile systems” which would be put into service “in the next few years”.

“What is more, they will be developments of the kind that other nuclear powers do not and will not have,” Mr Putin added in televised remarks to high-ranking military officers.

His brief statement was seen as both an attempt to boost military morale and a hint that Russia’s nuclear deterrent would not be rendered obsolete by the US launch of a missile defence shield.

Washington reacted cautiously to Russia’s nuclear designs last night, viewing them as consistent with bilateral treaties. “We do not perceive Russia’s nuclear sustainment and modernisation activities as threatening,” said the state department spokesman Adam Ereli.

Mr Putin, who meets George Bush this weekend in Chile, appeared to refer to a new nuclear warhead delivery system that a senior Russian military official said in February had been successfully tested.

It is claimed the warhead can detach from the main missile during the final stages of its descent, and then continue to fly like a cruise missile, evading any missile defence shield.
Full Article:guardian.co.uk

by Arnaud de Borchgrave
The mullah nullah continues to grow wider with each act of terrorism in the Middle East. No sooner had the Sinai bombings in Taba killed 35 Israeli tourists and injured 124 than Arab voices began accusing Israel of murdering its own.
    The Middle East Media Research Institute reminds us the price of America’s benign neglect of the peace process is a grotesque caricature of the U.S. and its Israeli protege. Israel bombed Sinai, said Egypt’s Al Ahram Research Center expert Dhia Rashwan, “to convince the world Egypt is not a stable country, thus opening the door for external involvement, specifically Israel and America, for the so-called preservation of security and eradication of terrorism in the region [which gives] Sharon a green light to strike Palestinians in the occupied territories under the pretext of fighting terrorism.”
    It takes roughly one news cycle for preposterous theories to become received ideas before they become incontrovertible facts in the Middle East corridors of power. Palestinian Security Chief Jibril Rajoub said matter-of-factly, “Bush is facing elections and I believe he needs operations like this to justify his aggression in Iraq and to justify his defense of the Israeli aggression in Palestine.” Next, an Egyptian spokesman took up the refrain on national TV.
    The only reference to the Middle East by either John Kerry or President Bush in the presidential debates was to mention Israel — and the imperative need to protect and enhance its security.
    John Edwards piled on with a new justification for the Iraq war. Stretching credulity, he said removing Saddam Hussein from power had reduced terror attacks against Israel. This played right into the hands of those who argue the U.S. is incapable of being an honest broker between Palestinians and Israelis.
    Growing anger in Arab American and Muslim American ranks — several million votes — appears not to bother the candidates. The possible loss of Jewish votes haunts both political parties.
    Those mullahs and imams who had not yet caught up with the new conventional wisdom that Israel killed its own said it was payback time. “What happened in Taba was 0.0001 of what Israel deserves,” said a Lebanese imam in his Friday sermon. “What happened there is a result of American and Israeli actions and a partial and very small result of what Israel and the U.S. are doing in the region.”
    In the West Bank, Ma’ariv reported, Israeli settlers are not worried about the Arab demographic threat as they nurture the vision of a “mega-occupation,” or expanding the Kingdom of Israel to the borders promised in the covenant with Arbaham.
    The Committee of Rabbis in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, writes, “Everyone who has faith in his heart … will not countenance betrayal of the divine promise of the Jewish people.”
    Professor Hillel Weiss, said Ma’ariv, spelled out what this meant: “The purpose of the armed struggle is to establish a Jewish state in all the territory that will be captured, from the River Euphrates [in Iraq] to the Egyptian River [Nile].”
    For good measure, Rabbi Haim Steinitz, writing on behalf of the rabbis of the Beit El settlement, explained, “In general, the Euphrates and the Nile are the main points of reference, as well as the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.” That takes care of the western border. There is some dispute about the eastern border. Most West Bank rabbis say the Kingdom of Israel “should rest on the upper Syrian stretch of the Euphrates. Others, wrote Ma’ariv, “take a broader view with a border that runs down to the mouth of the Persian Gulf.”
    One rabbi calls for the military conquest of all Arab countries. Even this was not enough for Rabbi Zelman Melamed, who wrote: “It is not impossible that the Jewish people will have the ability to threaten and put pressure on the entire world to accept our way. But even if we acquire the power to seize control of the world, that is not the way to realize the vision of complete redemption.”
    Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg says he knows in the near future the Land of Israel is about to expand. “It is our duty to force all mankind to accept the seven Noahide laws, and if not — they will be killed.”
    Imams do not have exclusive rights on loony tunes. Palestinian state anyone?
washingtontimes.com

Every once in a while, the Moonies’ Washintgton Times communicates real news, albeit cloaked in their dismissive tone.
‘Greater Israel’ is on many minds these days, and the alternative theory of the Sinai bombing unfortunately does not sound ‘preposterous’ at all.

Since Congress revamped the nation’s immigration laws in the 1990s, the government has rounded up tens of thousands of immigrants each year who’ve committed a crime — from murder to offenses such as overstaying their visas — even if the offenders had already been punished.

These immigrants have been jailed for months or years while Homeland Security officials obtained a court order to deport them. Some have allegedly experienced brutal and violent conditions while in detention.

… In the spring of 2002, Mohabir returned to Guyana to visit his mother, who was ill. On his way back to New York that April, an immigration agent at Kennedy International Airport noticed Mohabir had a criminal record: Six years earlier, he’d been convicted of possessing about $5 worth of drugs. The judge fined him $250 for a misdemeanor and let him go.

Because of that past conviction, Mohabir was deported to Guyana and banned from ever coming back to the United States. But before returning to his native country, Mohabir was detained for almost two years at New Jersey’s Passaic County Jail, where he alleges that guards taunted and beat detainees and terrorized them with dogs. One detainee was attacked by a dog earlier this year and sent to the hospital. Evidence obtained by NPR during the course of a five-month-long investigation suggests Mohabir’s tale of abuse, corroborated by other detainees, is true.
Full Report:npr.org