PARIS (AFP) – Those who say eclipses herald history-shaping events will find support for their superstition when, on Friday, the Sun will be briefly plunged into darkness on the day of Pope John Paul II’s funeral.

Astronomers, though, say the eclipse, while of a rare and intriguing type, was calculated long ago and is simply part of a ballet in celestial physics between the Sun, Earth and Moon.

It will be visible on Friday along an arc ranging from the southwestern Pacific to South America, at a time it will already be night in Rome.

The event will be a rare type called a “hybrid eclipse,” expert Fred Espenak says on his website
news.yahoo.com

Yeah yeah and the sky darkened the day Jesus died–we get it. It’s this kind of junk that gives a girl paranoid thoughts, such as “ok they timed his death announcement to coincide with an eclipse.”

Some legacy. Some hero. Some ‘saint.’

One of the biggest private security firms in Iraq has created outrage after a memo to staff claimed it is ‘fun’ to shoot people.

Emails seen by The Observer reveal that employees of Blackwater Security were recently sent a message stating that ‘actually it is “fun” to shoot some people.’

Dated 7 March and bearing the name of Blackwater’s president, Gary Jackson, the electronic newsletter adds that terrorists ‘need to get creamed, and it’s fun, meaning satisfying, to do the shooting of such folk.’
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) – Neighboring countries supportive of President Robert Mugabe’s increasingly isolated regime on Sunday endorsed his party’s sweeping election victory in Zimbabwe, despite widespread allegations the poll was rigged.

Mugabe said he hoped to stay in power until he was 100, as he celebrated Saturday the overwhelming win that secures his nearly 25-year rule and gives his Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front the power to change the constitution.

Observers from the 14-nation Southern African Development Community congratulated Zimbabwe on “peaceful, transparent, credible and well managed elections, which reflect the will of the people.”

They said problems with voters’ being unable to cast ballots affected all parties and did not influence the outcome.

The regional bloc – which also endorsed a 2002 presidential poll widely condemned for violence, intimidation and vote rigging – urged the government to improve voter education and increase access by all parties to state-run media. Similar approval came from a South African delegation.

The main opposition Movement for Democratic Change rejected Thursday’s election results as tainted by years of violence and intimidation – a view shared by the United States, Britain and independent rights groups. The party said discrepancies in the results pointed to ballot stuffing.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

Doesn’t sound ‘increasingly isolated to me. There is certainly no particular reason to believe the U.S. and Britain, architects of Iraq’s glorious election, about the fairness of this one.

by Alexander Cockburn
Jeff Weise, teen slayer of ten, including himself, at the Red Lake Indian reservation in northern Minnesota, was on Prozac, prescribed by some doc. How did the consultation go? “Here Jeff, take these, they may help you get over life’s little problems, like the fact that when you were 8 your dad committed suicide and when you were 10 your cousin was killed in a car wreck that left your mom with partial paralysis and an injured brain. And let’s face it, Jeff, most likely you’ll never get off the res. You’re here for the rest of your life.” Cut to a shot of the doc holding up a Prozac bottle, like the kindly fellow in the white coat and mirrored headband in 1950s Lucky Strike ads, telling us that Luckies were a fine way to soothe a raspy throat.

The minute the high command at Eli Lilly, manufacturer of Prozac, saw those news stories about Weise you can bet they went into crisis mode, and only began to relax when Weise’s websurfs of neo-Nazi sites took over the headlines. Hitler trumps Prozac every time, particularly if it’s an Injun teen ranting about racial purity. How many times, amid the carnage of such homicidal sprees, do investigators find a prescription for antidepressants at the murder scene? Luvox at Columbine, Prozac at Louisville, Kentucky, where Joseph Wesbecker killed nine, including himself. You’ll find many such stories in the past fifteen years.

By now the Lilly defense formula is pretty standardized:self-righteous handouts about the company’s costly research and rigorous screening, crowned by the imprimatur of that watchdog for the public interest, the FDA. And of course there’s the bogus comfort of numbers; if Lilly’s pill factory had a big sign like MacDonald’s, it could boast Prozac: Billions Served.
Full Article: counterpunch.org

The death of John Paul II on Saturday afternoon, at the age of 84, may bring a collective shrug of secular shoulders. Folks who were already sick of hearing the daily medical report on the old man in the silly hat won’t pay much heed to the glowing obituaries or lavish funeral rites. It’s a Catholic thing; the rest of us wouldn’t understand.

But despite all the God talk that will ensue over the next few days, John Paul’s relevance extended well beyond the walls of the Vatican or the sacristy of St. Whatshisname down the block. Whether or not you accept the idea that John Paul was a spiritual leader with an infallible ability to interpret the teachings of Jesus Christ, there is no denying that he was as much a political figure as a religious one.

And an influential one, too. His voice on matters like the Iraq war, which he condemned, or communist rule in Eastern Europe carried a lot of weight: If an Italian newspaper account on recently opened files of the East German Stasi is to be believed, John Paul’s opposition to Soviet rule was so powerful that the KGB plotted to kill him in 1981.

At .2 square miles, it’s the world’s smallest country, but the Vatican certainly punched above its weight during John Paul’s papacy. At U.N. meetings in the 1990s on population policy, the Vatican opposed language that acknowledged a universal right to abortion or that suggested condoms might be used to stop the spread of AIDS. The rest of the world listened to those complaints. On a lot of them, the Vatican won.

And John Paul never shied from making direct calls to Roman Catholic politicians, as he did in July 2003, when he asked them to block or repeal laws permitting gay marriage. The Vatican’s views on stem cell research are part of that debate as well.

Some of this clout might die with John Paul. But his particular interpretation of Catholic doctrine is unlikely to perish, because he has stacked the college of cardinals with his ideological allies. According to the BBC, he was still making appointments of bishops as late as Thursday.

All the obits of JP II are going to mention that he was the beloved leader of the world’s 1 billion Catholics. Keep in mind that Americans make up only 6 percent of that total. The heart of the church is elsewhere, and its growth is in Asia and Africa. We can shrug our shoulders all we want at the next pope and the late one. But someone is listening.
Full Article: villagevoice.com

A cardinal considered a candidate to succeed Pope John Paul II delivered a strong message in favor of Jewish settlement in the Holy Land on Wednesday night, rejecting the claim that European Christians’ support for the State of Israel is based on Holocaust guilt and saying that all Christians should affirm Zionism as a biblical imperative for the Jewish people.

Archbishop of Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, part of a visiting Austrian delegation, made the remarks in an address at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on the topic of “God’s chosen land.”

After asking, “What does Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel] mean to us,” Schoenborn answered by stressing the doctrinal importance to Christians of not only recognizing Jews’ connection to the land, but also ensuring that Christian identification with the Jewish Bible not lead to a “usurpation” of Jewish uniqueness.

“Only once in human history did God take a country as an inheritance and give it to His chosen people,” Schoenborn said, adding that Pope John Paul II had himself declared the biblical commandment for Jews to live in Israel an everlasting covenant that remained valid today. Christians, Schoenborn said, should rejoice in the return of Jews to the Holy Land as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

A Palestinian priest challenged the cardinal on that point, asking how he could preach to his Palestinian congregation that the establishment of the modern Jewish state was not a “catastrophe,” as they called it, or the result of European powers’ guilty conscience following World War II.

Schoenborn responded by saying that “I am myself a refugee” – at the end of World War II, when he was an infant, Schoenborn’s parents fled to Austria from Czechoslovakia – and that he felt pained at the unrecognized injustice that thousands of Czechs had suffered. However, he said, both that case and the Arab-Israeli conflict were matters of international law, whereas the chosenness of the Jewish people and their inheritance in the Holy Land were matters of faith that date back to the Bible itself.

Schoenborn also said he hoped the conflict here would be resolved in accordance with international law, and with respect to justice for the Palestinian people. “We are all longing for that solution,” he said. “Yet I am not naive. Conflicts are part of [both sides’] love of the land, and always have been… There is no simple solution.”
jpost.com

Sounds like Pope material to me. Some of us think that events of the past weeks a la Popes and Shiavos and feeding tubes are being used to maniopulate the emotions of ‘true believers’in the direction of ‘holy war.’

…There is a breathtaking hypocrisy to the indictment of Kofi Annan over the oil for food programme for Iraq. It was the US and the UK who devised the programme, piloted the UN resolutions that gave it authority, sat on the committee to administer it and ran the blockade to enforce it. I know because I spent a high proportion of my time at the Foreign Office trying to make a success of it. If there were problems with it then Washington and London should be in the dock alongside the luckless Kofi Annan, who happened to be general secretary at the time.

But there is a deeper level of perversity to the denigration of Annan by the American right wing. They have long clamoured for reform of the UN. Kofi Annan has just proposed the most comprehensive overhaul of the UN in its history and is the general secretary most likely to deliver support for it. If they persist in undermining him they are likely to derail his reform package. The suspicion must be that they would rather have a creaking, ineffective UN to treat as a coconut shy than a modern, representative forum that would oblige them to respect collective decisions.

The eccentric selection of John Bolton as Bush’s ambassador to the UN is consistent with such a strategy of sabotage rather than reform. His hostility to any constraint on US unilateralism is so deep, (and his life so sad), that he described his “happiest moment” signing the letter to Kofi Annan telling him that the US would have nothing to do with the international criminal court. His relish in the gesture is all the more revealing as the issue was not within the remit of his job, and he pleaded to be allowed to sign as a special favour.

Ironically the first confrontation the US has faced since his appointment was the vote last night on the proposal to refer the war crimes in Darfur to the international criminal court. The problem for Washington unilateralists in trying to stop it was that the brutality and genocide in Darfur is a classic case for enforcement of international law through multilateral process.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

ALMATY, Kazakhstan, March 31 – Kazakhstan’s national oil company said Thursday it joined a group developing an oil field in the Caspian Sea by indirectly buying half of the BG Group’s stake in the project.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Jonathan Miller, head of communications for the BG Group, with headquarters in Reading, England, said it would sell its 16.67 percent stake in the Kashagan field for $1.8 billion to the other alliance members, which include Total of France, the Royal Dutch/Shell Group, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips of the United States and the Agip unit of Eni of Italy, the operator. The group agreed to sell half the stake to the national oil company, KazMunaiGaz.

BG is fundamentally a gas company, and Kashagan is “a huge oil field” that does not fit the company’s long-term strategy, Mr. Miller said.

The North Caspian P.S.A., as the project is called, is predicted to become one of the world’s top fields by 2015, the biggest outside the Middle East, and to produce more than a million barrels a day.

Along with lesser fields, it is expected to propel Kazakhstan into the ranks of the world’s top oil five exporters, with an expected production of more than three million barrels a day, nearly all of it to be exported.

The Kashagan project faces difficulties because the oil is laced with poisonous hydrogen sulfide that needs to be reinjected into the well at pressures never tried before. There are also management challenges.

In addition, the alliance’s relations with the government of President Nursultan Nazarbayev have been so strained that the government’s approval of the plan was delayed for more than a year in a fight over a fine. That pushed the target for production back two years to 2008.

The government, and much of the public, seems to think that the contract for the development of Kashagan gave an unfair advantage to the companies. BG agreed last year to sell its stake to its partners, but the Kazakh government said it had a pre-emptive right to the stake. The government’s insistence on exercising that right raises questions as to whether the move will delay the development of the field, analysts said.

A spokesman for KazMunaiGaz could not be reached. The energy minister, Vladimir Shkolnik, has said that Kazakhstan, whose oil trade is dominated by Western companies, may pre-empt projects under a policy to regain control of the industry.
Full Article: nytimes.com

Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine,Georgia: this is what it’s all about. Check the map. Check China.

Suspected insurgents yesterday blew up the top of a 9th-century Islamic minaret which is one of Iraq’s most important heritage sites.

The blast punched a two-metre hole in the Malwiya, a spiralling yellow sandstone architectural wonder towering 50 metres (170ft) over Samarra, a flashpoint town north of Baghdad.

For centuries pilgrims and tourists have climbed the stairway winding up to the pinnacle. Built by Abbasid Caliph al-Motawakel in AD852, the structure appears on Iraq’s 250-dinar bill.

Witnesses said the explosion had happened shortly after two men descended from the top. A US military spokesman blamed insurgents and said there had been no coalition troops at the site yesterday.

Residents said American snipers and Iraqi troops sometimes occupied the minaret. US-led troops took Samarra from insurgents in October. Last year a mortar blew a small hole in the tower.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

WASHINGTON (AP) – E-mails by several government scientists on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump project suggest workers were planning to fabricate records and manipulate results to ensure outcomes that would help the project move forward.

“I don’t have a clue when these programs were installed. So I’ve made up the dates and names,” wrote a U.S. Geological Survey employee in one e-mail released Friday by a congressional committee investigating suspected document falsification on the project.

“This is as good as it’s going to get. If they need more proof, I will be happy to make up more stuff.”

In another message the same employee wrote to a colleague: “In the end I keep track of 2 sets of files, the ones that will keep QA happy and the ones that were actually used.” QA apparently refers to “quality assurance.”
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

This story is a parable for the state of most ‘science’ being conducted in the U.S.