RED LAKE, Minn., March 25 – In their sleepless search for answers, the family of Jeff Weise, the teenager who killed nine people and then himself, says it is left wondering about the drugs he was prescribed for his waves of depression.

On Friday, as Tammy Lussier prepared to bury Mr. Weise, who was her nephew, and her father, who was among those he killed, she found herself looking back over the last year, she said, when Mr. Weise began taking the antidepressant Prozac after a suicide attempt that Ms. Lussier described as a “cry for help.”

“They kept upping the dose for him,” she said, “and by the end, he was taking three of the 20 milligram pills a day. I can’t help but think it was too much, that it must have set him off.”

Lee Cook, another relative of Mr. Weise, said his medication had increased a few weeks before the shootings on Monday.

“I do wonder,” Mr. Cook said, “whether on top of everything else he had going on in his life, on top of all the other problems, whether the drugs could have been the final straw.”

The effects of antidepressants on young people remain a topic of fierce debate among scientists and doctors.

Last year, a federal panel of drug experts said antidepressants could cause children and teenagers to become suicidal. The Food and Drug Administration has since required the makers of antidepressants to warn of that danger on their labels for the medications.

The suicide risk is particularly acute when therapy starts or a dosage changes, the drug agency has warned.
Full Article: nytimes.com

SÃO PAULO, Brazil, March 23 – Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ratcheted up the war of words between the Bush administration and Venezuela’s government on Wednesday, suggesting that the country’s plans to buy 100,000 assault rifles from Russia could further destabilize an already tumultuous region.

“I can’t imagine what’s going to happen to 100,000 AK-47’s,” he said at a news conference in Brasília, the Brazilian capital, where he met with Brazil’s vice president and defense minister, José Alencar. “I can’t imagine why Venezuela needs 100,000 AK-47’s.”

“I just hope that, personally hope, that it doesn’t happen,” Mr. Rumsfeld added. “I can’t imagine that if it did happen, that it would be good for the hemisphere.”

Mr. Rumsfeld’s remarks were the latest in a string of public warnings from senior American officials to Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, about what the Bush administration has cast as a worrisome arms buildup. Mr. Chávez’s government has been shopping around to modernize its poorly armed 100,000-member military, raising eyebrows both in Washington and in neighboring Colombia.

Besides the assault rifles, Venezuela has agreed to buy at least 10 military helicopters from Russia and is considering updating its air force with Russian MIG’s. Mr. Chávez has also talked of “military cooperation” with Brazil and has expressed interest in buying as many as 24 Super Tucano patrol planes from the Brazilian jet maker Empresa Brasileira de Aeronáutica, or Embraer.

The Bush administration, which has had increasingly tense relations with Venezuela since it tacitly backed a brief coup against Mr. Chávez in 2002, has suggested that the arms purchases could end up benefiting “irregular groups,” a reference to Marxist rebels in neighboring Colombia. Mr. Chávez, himself a former paratrooper who staged a failed coup in 1992, has been reluctant to condemn the Colombian guerrillas overtly, prompting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to call the Venezuelan leader a “negative force” in Latin America.

Mr. Chávez has responded angrily to the criticism from Washington, going so far as to warn of the possibility of an American invasion. In addition to upgrading the military, Mr. Chávez has announced plans to expand so-called popular defense units, a sort of citizen militia.

Mr. Rumsfeld was in Brazil to discuss the country’s growing leadership role in the region, including its peacekeeping mission in Haiti. But some analysts have speculated that the defense secretary may have also used the visit to ask for Brazil’s help in tempering Mr. Chávez.
nytimes.com

Divide and conquer. Big time.

MEXICO CITY, March 24 – Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld announced Thursday that the United States would lift its ban on military aid to Guatemala, whose government has embarked on a major effort to change a military accused of kidnappings and massacres during more than 30 years of civil war.

“I’ve been impressed by the reforms that have been undertaken in the armed forces,” Mr. Rumsfeld said at a joint news conference with President Óscar Berger of Guatemala. “I know it is a difficult thing to do but it’s been done with professionalism and transparency.”

Since taking office last year, President Berger has cut the military’s troop strength by close to half, to 15,000 soldiers from 27,000. And he closed several bases that had been used to stage attacks against an armed insurgency.

Human rights investigations into the violence uncovered significant military atrocities, conducted under so-called scorched-earth policies. Some 200,000 people were killed or went missing in Guatemala from 1960 to 1996, mostly Mayan Indian civilians. A United Nations-backed truth commission found that 90 percent of those deaths were caused by the military.

The United States withdrew aid from Guatemala’s military in 1990 after it was learned that soldiers were involved in the killing of an American named Michael Devine.

In the joint news conference in Guatemala City on Thursday, Mr. Berger assured Mr. Rumsfeld that such abuses had ended. “The shadow that was above our army has disappeared,” he said. “Today we have a transparent army with half the personnel.”

Human rights organizations denounced the move. Displaced soldiers, they said, had joined powerful criminal organizations that smuggle drugs and weapons through Guatemala.

Adriana Beltrán, an expert on Guatemala with the Washington Office on Latin America, a research institution, said Mr. Berger’s government had done very little to stop private groups of gunmen from intimidating and killing people who were working to uncover past and present human rights abuses in Guatemala. Rewarding the government with arms sends the wrong message, she said.
nytimes.com

The Bush administration agreed today to sell Pakistan F-16 fighter planes in a major policy shift that was meant to reward Pakistan for its help in combating terrorism but was also certain to deeply antagonize Pakistan’s longtime adversary India.

President Bush telephoned Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh from his ranch in Crawford, Tex., and “explained his decision to move forward” on the sale, a White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, told reporters in Texas. Mr. Singh expressed “great disappointment,” a spokesman in New Delhi told Reuters.

Pakistan’s information minister, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, called President Bush’s decision “a good gesture,” one that shows that “our relations are growing stronger,” Reuters reported.

There were conflicting reports on how many F-16’s might be involved in the sale, which would require Congressional approval. One Bush administration official said the number was 24, but another said it was still indefinite, Reuters reported. A State Department spokesman, J. Adam Ereli, said that both the number of planes and the terms of the sale had not been determined. Teal Group, an aerospace consulting firm in Fairfax, Va., said the planes could cost $35 million each, Bloomberg News reported.
Full Article: nytimes.com

Why does Chavez need the AK’s? Maybe because the U.S. sells hardware to Guatemala and Pakistan. Such hypocrisy.

WASHINGTON, March 24 – Gov. Jeb Bush’s last-minute intervention in the case of Terri Schiavo, even after the president had ended his own effort to keep her alive, may have so far failed in a legal sense, but it has cemented the religious and social conservative credentials of a man whose political pedigree is huge and whose political future remains a subject of intense speculation.

On one level, the Florida governor’s emergence as the most prominent politician still fighting, despite a string of court and legislative defeats, to have a feeding tube reinserted in Ms. Schiavo was very much in keeping with someone who has repeatedly declared a deep religious faith.

Several associates noted that he had been devoutly religious longer than President Bush, and even critics said his efforts – prodding the Florida Legislature and the courts and defying much of the electorate – were rooted in a deep-seated opposition to abortion and euthanasia rather than in political positioning.

Yet inevitably, the events of recent days have fed the mystique of Mr. Bush as a reluctant inheritor of perhaps America’s most famous dynasty since the Adams family two centuries ago.
Full Article: nytimes.com

“deep”, “devout”, “intense”, “mystique”…my my my. The Times says the Shiavo case is “cementing” Jeb’s “political stature.” I would say that this propaganda piece masquerading as journalism has just that intent. I like the picture with the studious looking glasses: nice touch.

PHOENIX (AP) – All options should be considered to prevent rampages like the Minnesota school shooting that took 10 lives – including making guns available to teachers, a top National Rifle Association leader said Friday.

“I’m not saying that that means every teacher should have a gun or not, but what I am saying is we need to look at all the options at what will truly protect the students,” the NRA’s first vice president, Sandra S. Froman, told The Associated Press.

Gun-control restrictions would not have prevented Jeff Weise, 16, from killing nine people and himself Monday at Red Lake High School near Bemidji, Minn., said Froman, an attorney expected next month to be elected president of the NRA, which claims 4 million members.

The presence of an unarmed guard at the school failed to stop the siege, she noted.

“No gun law, no policy that you could implement now or that was already implemented, I think, could possibly prevent someone so intent on destruction,” she said. “I think everything’s on the table as far as looking at what we need to do to make our schools safe for our students.”

Froman said if it is the responsibility of teachers to protect students in a school, “then we as a society, we as a community have to provide a way for the teachers to do that.”
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

Yeah and it is so so obvious that teachers packing heat is the way.

The explosion on a Texan crude oil refinery that claimed at least 14 lives and left more than 100 people injured remains a mystery, BP said today.

Terrorism, says the British oil giant, was not the cause of yesterday’s incident at the 470,000 barrel-a-day facility, the third largest in the US. The explosion occurred in a unit that makes components that boost octane in petrol.

“We have no reason to believe this was anything caused by an outside agent,” said Hugh Depland, a company spokesman.

BP’s chief executive, John Browne, travelled to Texas today to meet employees and families affected by the explosion. Company officials and area health officials said that of the 100 hurt, some were in critical condition. There are still some people unaccounted for.

“We have a process to account for everyone working in the plant at the time of the incident, and we are proceeding with that process. This is a major focus at this time,” Don Parus, BP’s refinery manager, said on the company’s website.

This latest incident took place just a year after another blast at the same refinery. On March 30 2004, a large explosion and fire occurred, but there were no casualties.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

WASHINGTON – The Army probably will fall short of its monthly enlistment goals again in March and April but expects a new emphasis on patriotic pitches to make up the difference later, Secretary of the Army Francis Harvey said Wednesday.

In February, for the first time in five years, the Army’s active, Reserve and National Guard components missed their monthly recruiting goals. Now, the Army has forecast that it will fall short this month and in April, Harvey said at a Pentagon news conference.

“So are we concerned? Absolutely,” Harvey said.

Despite the possible three-month shortfall, Harvey added that there’s time to reach annual goals and that he’s “cautiously optimistic.”

“I’m clearly not going to give up,” he said. “At this stage we still have six months to go. And I’ve challenged our human resource people to get as innovative as they can.”

The Army has been struggling to fill its ranks as the war in Iraq, which has claimed the lives of more than 1,500 service members, enters its third year. It’s increased enlistment bonuses, the number of recruiters and the maximum enlistment age for the Reserve and Guard.

The Army’s usual peacetime pitches – money for college, vocational training – aren’t so appealing when weighed against the perils of one or more tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So it’s crafting pitches appealing to parents’ patriotism, since recruiters have encountered resistance from people reluctant to send their sons and daughters into harm’s way.
Full Article: news.yahoo.com

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Army is ordering more people to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan involuntarily from a seldom-used personnel pool as part of a mobilization that began last summer.

They are part of the Army’s Individual Ready Reserve, made up of soldiers who have completed their volunteer active-duty service commitment but remain eligible to be called back into uniform for years after returning to civilian life.

The Army, straining to maintain troop levels in Iraq, last June said it would summon more than 5,600 people on the IRR in an effort to have about 4,400 soldiers fit for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan after granting exemption requests for medical reasons and other hardships.
Full Article: news.yahoo.com

by Cynthia McKinney
Remarks at Chicago Anti-War Rally, March 19, 2005

Two years ago we gathered all across America to say no to war.

We were joined by people all over the planet who know that there is an alternative to war.

But war is about the only option available when the real motive is to steal natural resources that belong to someone else.

Or to restack the deck in the Middle East with today’s generation of coups and assassinations, following the likes of the US 1949 ouster of Syria’s elected government, the US 1953 ouster of Iran’s elected government; US 1958 landing of Marines in Lebanon; and its 1963 support for a coup in Iraq after an assassination attempt against its leader failed.

The militarism we see today is nothing new.

Even though some 14 countries have withdrawn their troops since March 2003, Bush tells the American people that he has no idea when US troops can expect to come home.

Sadly, many of them are being forced to take matters into their own hands. With filings for conscientious objector status, forced pregnancies, disappearances, seeking asylum in Canada, and leading rallies like this today all over America.

The American people, and our children over there fighting, still haven’t been told the real reason the US is at war with the Iraqi people.

And against the people the US war machine has turned.

Thousands of Iraqis, especially children, have been killed by our sanctions and our bombs.

This is an immoral and illegal war and we need to bring our troops home now.

Instead, they lay the groundwork to expand the war and destabilize Iran, Lebanon, and Syria.

Destroying Iraq isn’t enough for them.

Nor are the million men and women in our Armed Services enough for them.

The George Bush war machine wants you, too. And your children.

Everywhere you turn the Pentagon is denying it wants a draft while at the same time lamenting that recruitment is way down.

Mercenaries will increasingly be used to fight their wars with your tax dollars.

While reinstating the draft only feeds the war machine.

In fact, we need to get the military recruiters out of our high schools; they need to stop harassing our children, and the 1 billion dollars they spend on slick radio and tv spots and friendly neighborhood offices, ought to be put in the education budget so our kids can go to college without having to go to war first.

They tell us we’re at war for democracy.

But that’s a joke; George Bush came to power by stopping democracy at home–denying the opportunity to vote to blacks and Latinos in Florida.

They built on that fine record last year with hackable voting machines that don’t accurately tally our votes.

And in countries like Haiti where democracy was thriving, they arrested President Aristide at gunpoint and forced him out of his own country.

While they purport to cherish democracy, they really have a disdain for it.

Democracy in Venezuela, India, Spain, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay has produced proud people willing to stand up to US imperialism, coup attempts, and destabilization of their countries. And the good news is that this resistance will spread.

The worse they are, the stronger we become.

And worse they will become because they’ve aimed their sights on Russia and China after they’ve balkanized the Middle East.

But one thing I guarantee to you and to them: we won’t be fooled!

We know the truth. And we won’t stop.

Stay strong, my brothers and sisters, we have a lot of work to do.
Full Article: counterpunch.org