PROVIDENCE, R.I. – The city of New Orleans could lose up to 80 percent of its black population if people displaced by Hurricane Katrina are not able to return to damaged neighborhoods, according to an ongoing university study.

“This means that policy choices affecting who can return, to which neighborhoods, and with what forms of public and private assistance, will greatly affect the future character of the city,” according to the Brown University study, which is being funded by the National Science Foundation.

The lead researcher, sociology professor John Logan, determined that if the city’s returning population was limited to neighborhoods undamaged by Katrina, half of the white population would not return and 80 percent of the black population would not return.
msn.com

Some 20 drop-in centers, shelters, homeless feeding programs and health clinics already dot the area around Hollywood Boulevard and Gower Street. And the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency has just purchased three lots steps from the intersection and announced plans to construct up to 60 residences and a companion social services program catering to the homeless.

Backers argue that the project will be good for Hollywood because it will take homeless people off the street and put them into long-term housing.

But a growing number of critics fear it will lure more street people into the area, potentially jeopardizing Hollywood’s fledgling revitalization that has nightclubs, high-end hotels and trendy restaurants popping up.

The proposed $20-million homeless project would rise just blocks from what civic leaders are hoping will be a cornerstone of Hollywood’s rebirth. There, at Hollywood and Vine, an ambitious retail and residential development includes conversion of the old Broadway department store into lofts and construction of a luxury 300-room W Hotel and an accompanying 150-unit residential complex. They will be around the corner from such hot spots as the ArcLight theater complex, Amoeba Records and the Sunset/Vine retail center.

“It’s ironic that while we’re on the verge of creating a vibrant new Hollywood, we’re at the same time creating a potential Hollywood skid row,” said Fran Reichenbach, founder of the Beachwood Canyon Neighborhood Assn.

The clash illustrates the looming problem officials face as they make a new push to deal with the homeless problem citywide. As part of the campaign, a delegation that includes several City Council members and business leaders was in New York this week to examine how that city has dealt with its homeless problem.
latimes.com

WASHINGTON — Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa accelerated his drive Thursday to take over the troubled Los Angeles Unified School District, announcing for the first time that he wants full control in two years and will unveil a detailed reform plan in three months.

In recent weeks, Villaraigosa has assembled a team of advisors who are beginning to draft a plan to take on the elected school board and the city’s powerful teachers union to win voter approval for a takeover.

This week, Villaraigosa and key aides launched a blitz of speeches to begin to lay the foundation for the coming campaign.

At a conference of mayors in Washington on Wednesday and Thursday, Villaraigosa argued that the district is failing its 727,000 students. He also consulted with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who have oversight of their school boards.
latimes.com

This is a country filled with failing schools.

A Minnesota senator said he was concerned that congressional trips to Israel could be cut under lobbying reform proposals.

Speaking at a hearing Wednesday of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Republican Norm Coleman said the American Israel Public Affairs Committee provides a service by sending lawmakers to Israel to meet its leaders.

“That would be prohibited if we take the approach that’s been articulated here,” Coleman said. “So I don’t think that helps us be better senators.” Several congressional leaders and outside groups have proposed lobbying reforms that would curtail all private travel by members of Congress.
jta.org

BERLIN – Germany may need to build its own nuclear weapons to counter the threat of nuclear bombs falling into the hands of a terrorist state, a former German defence minister said Thursday.

“We need a serious discussion over how we can react to a nuclear threat by a terrorist state in an appropriate manner – and in extreme cases with our own nuclear weapons,” said Rupert Scholz who served as defence minister from 1988 to 1989.

Germany does not have nuclear weapons and Scholz admitted in a Bild newspaper interview that his remarks were breaking what is widely seen as a national taboo.

Scholz – who is a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) – said Berlin should first try to get binding guarantees from the NATO alliance that it would protect Germany in case nuclear threats were directed at the country.

But he insisted if such guarantees were not spelled out in a formal NATO doctrine, then Germany needed to ponder building its own nuclear deterrence system.
expatica.com

WASHINGTON — Despite persistent disillusionment with the war in Iraq, a majority of Americans supports taking military action against Iran if that country continues to produce material that can be used to develop nuclear weapons, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found.

The poll, conducted Sunday through Wednesday, found that 57% of Americans favor military intervention if Iran’s Islamic government pursues a program that could enable it to build nuclear arms.

Support for military action against Tehran has increased over the last year, the poll found, even though public sentiment is running against the war in neighboring Iraq: 53% said they believe the situation there was not worth going to war.

The poll results suggest that the difficulties the United States has encountered in Iraq have not turned the public against the possibility of military actions elsewhere in the Middle East.

Support for a potential military confrontation with Iran was strongest among Republican respondents, among whom 76% endorsed the idea. But even among Democrats, who overwhelmingly oppose the war in Iraq, 49% supported such action.
latimes.com

Iran: We’ll Shut Down Straits of Hormuz
A senior Iranian official is threatening to close the Straits of Hormuz using military force, which would effectively shut down the Persian Gulf oil supply – if European supports economic sanctions against Iran in a bid to halt Tehran’s nuclear program.

“If Europe does not act wisely with the Iranian nuclear portfolio and it is referred to the U.N. Security Council and economic or air travel restrictions are imposed unjustly, we have the power to halt oil supply to the last drop from the shores of the Persian Gulf via the Straits of Hormuz,” said Mohammed-Nabi Rudaki, deputy chairman of the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission.

According to the Israeli News service Haaretz, which first reported the threat on Tuesday based on an Iranian news account – this is the first time an Iranian official has publicly issued a military threat.

Iran vows to put Israel into ‘eternal coma’ if attacked
Were Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran would respond so strongly that it would put the Jewish state into “an eternal coma” like Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s, the Iranian defense minister said yesterday.

Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz has said his country would not accept Iran’s acquiring nuclear weapons under any circumstances. He stopped short of threatening a military strike against Iran, but he said Israel was preparing for the possible failure of diplomatic negotiations with Iran.

A newscaster on Iranian state television read out a response from Iran’s minister of defense, Gen. Mostafa Mohammad Najjar, yesterday.

“Zionists should know that if they do anything evil against Iran, the response of Iran’s armed forces will be so firm that it will send them into eternal coma, like Sharon,” Najjar said.

Isn’t all this posturing just too convenient?

Iran accuses U.S., Britain and Israel of role in 2 plane crashes
TEHRAN – Iran said Thursday it had information that the United States, Britain and Israel had a role in two deadly military plane crashes in the last two months.

It was the latest accusation by Tehran against the West in their sharpening confrontation. A day earlier, Iran blamed the United States and Britain for two bombings this week that killed at least nine people in southwestern Iran.

“The information we have says that the U.S, Britain and Israel’s intelligence agents intended to create insecurity in Iran,” Interior Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi told reporters on the sidelines of a police seminar. “Even my evaluation says that the crash of our C-130 and Falcon planes was done by their design, or maybe electronic interference.”

Iran to Give Georgia Emergency Gas Supply
Georgia’s president said Friday that Iran had agreed to start providing emergency gas supplies to the Caucasus mountain nation as early as this weekend, signaling an end to an energy crisis made worse by an extreme cold snap.

Russia, meanwhile, was close to completing repairs on a gas pipeline that would allow it to resume gas deliveries later Friday, an official said.

The electric utility in the capital of Tbilisi was providing 110 megawatts of electricity, while Azerbaijan was sending in 50 megawatts, Turkey 60 megawatts and Russia 65 megawatts. Still, Georgia needed 600 megawatts more to ensure a normal supply, the Georgian State Electric System said.

President Mikhail Saakashvili cut short his trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday to try to calm fears that sent residents into long lines to fill kerosene canisters for portable heaters and some to chop down branches and trees to fuel stoves.

Saakashvili told his Cabinet that Iran had agreed to supply Georgia with gas via Azerbaijan beginning Sunday – or Monday, at the latest.

“The amount will be enough to restore electric and gas supplies,” he said.

The latest energy crisis began last weekend, when an explosion on a major gas pipeline that runs through the Russian border region of North Ossetia cut supplies to many Georgian regions. Russian authorities blamed the blasts on saboteurs.

The misery worsened early Thursday when a fierce windstorm in western Georgia ruptured power lines leading from the Inguri hydroelectric station to eastern regions, leaving about 3 million people in the dark, Deputy Energy Minister Alexander Khetaguri said.

Then, a gas-powered unit of a Tbilisi power station shut down because of malfunctions, leaving most of Tbilisi’s 1.5 millions residents – a third of the country’s population – to scrounge for other heating options as a heavy snow fell and daytime temperatures fell to 17 degrees.

http://www.musicsolutions.ca/mp3/LARS-Marley.mp3

by Michael Neumann
What matters for an understanding of the Israel/Palestine conflict is what the expression ‘a Jewish state’ would mean to any reasonable person. What, in particular, could the Palestinians reasonably expect when they heard that such a state was to be established in Palestine?

The state itself–the human community–is, everywhere in the world, an absolute dictator bound neither by morality nor by law. Even in the most impeccable democracy, there are ways to institute anything humans can do to one another. Frequently, as in the case of the democratic Weimar Republic of Germany, just invoking emergency legislation is quite enough to open the gates of hell.
counterpunch.org

Hamas’s triumph in Wednesday’s Palestinian elections is the best news from the Middle East for a long time. The poll was a more impressive display of democracy than any other in the region, outstripping last year’s votes in Lebanon and Iraq both in turnout and the range of views that candidates represented.
Whereas in Iraq parties that opposed the occupation had to downplay or even obscure their views, Palestinian supporters of armed resistance to Israel’s expansionist strategies were able to run openly. It is true that Hamas candidates did not make relations with Israel the centrepiece of their campaign. They focused on reform in the Palestinian Authority. But few voters were unaware of Hamas’s uncompromising hostility to occupation and its record in fighting it.

Wednesday’s election was remarkable also in owing nothing to Washington’s (selective) efforts to promote democracy in the Arab world. Instead, it was further proof that civil society in Palestine is more vibrant than anywhere else in the region and that Palestinian politics has its own dynamics, dictated not by outside pressure but the social and economic demands of ordinary people in appalling conditions. Providing a forum to freely express hopes and fears, debate policy and seek agreed solutions is, after all, what democracy is about.

In Israel and Washington reaction to Hamas’s victory has been predictably negative. European governments should take a more sensitive view. The first watchword is caution. Applaud the process but don’t take issue with the result. While the dust settles and Hamas works out its own priorities for government, Europeans should calmly analyse why Hamas got so much support.
guardian.co.uk

Bush Defends His Goal of Spreading Democracy to the Mideast
WASHINGTON, Jan. 26 — The sweeping victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections threw President Bush and his aides on the defensive on Thursday, complicating the administration’s policy of trying to promote democracy as an antidote to the spread of terrorism.

Reacting uneasily to the Hamas triumph, Mr. Bush said the results spoke to the failures of President Mahmoud Abbas and the “old guard” of his Fatah faction to root out corruption and mismanagement, not to any flaws in the administration’s policy of advocating democracy.

ha. They set up a bogus US/Isreali puppet government and then made the fatal error of allowing the Palestinian people to vote, and now they have to backpedal on this democratic fiction they’ve been trying to foist on the region.

After Hamas Victory, Israel’s Likely Course
JERUSALEM, Jan. 26 — The Hamas landslide in Palestinian elections has stunned Israelis, but it may also have brought them a rare moment of clarity: with peace talks off the table, Israel will most likely pursue unilateral actions, drawing its own borders and separating itself from the Palestinians.

Ehud Olmert, the acting prime minister, made it clear after an emergency cabinet meeting that talks with Hamas, a Palestinian party sworn to Israel’s destruction, were out of the question, while experts said Israel was now freer to establish its future on its own.

This is not one bit different from what Israel has always been doing, except that it doesn’t have its bogus ‘Palestinian Authority’ to be ‘negotiating’ with.

DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan. 26 — A magazine article calling on nations to boycott Israel because of its treatment of Palestinians has provoked a tempest at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting here, prompting the organizers to pull the magazines from the forum’s shelves here and issue an apology.

The article, which appeared in Global Agenda, a magazine published by the forum and distributed to participants, carried the headline “Boycott Israel.” The author, Mazin Qumsiyeh, equated Israel’s policies toward Palestinians with apartheid and said that countries should withdraw their investments and boycott Israel.

After a member raised questions about the article, the organizers removed the magazines from shelves at the conference center in this Alpine resort. The forum’s executive director, Klaus Schwab, said the article should not have been published and had slipped through the editing process.
nytimes.com

aw too bad. How dare they try to harsh the mellow of this politico-Euro-trash feelgood fest? Shame. It’s ok though, they have their police-state tactics to fall back on.

Merkel Makes Waves at Davos
In astonishingly short time, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has emerged as the most dynamic leader in Europe. That at least seemed to be the verdict of the applause meter at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Jan. 25. “You have given us hope for the first time in a long time,” Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, chairman and chief executive of Swiss food giant Nestle (nsrgy.pk.PK), told Merkel after she delivered the keynote address to a packed auditorium.

Merkel called for a massive reduction in bureaucracy in both Europe and Germany, and an increase in the retirement age, among other measures. “We have to be more flexible. We’re holding back enormous potential,” she said.

SHOW OF STATESMANSHIP. Merkel’s Davos performance was only the latest in a series of coups for the Chancellor. Since she was chosen in November to lead a coalition government of her Christian Democrats and the center-left Social Democrats, Merkel has repaired relations with the U.S., strained by the Iraq war. She also has displayed a new toughness toward Russia by visiting human-rights groups during a trip in January to see Russian President Vladimir Putin.

These and other shows of statesmanship have made her Germany’s most popular leader in years, banishing memories of last year’s national election campaign, when she squandered a commanding lead to barely achieve a plurality against the Social Democrats. Immediately after her speech, Merkel showed she’s comfortable in the world of business as well as politics, bantering on stage with members of a panel that included Michael Dell, chairman of computer retailer Dell (NasdaqNM:DELL – News), and Henry McKinnell, chairman and CEO of drugmaker Pfizer (NYSE:PFE – News). Dell advised Merkel to cut jobless benefits to remove the incentive not to work. “Good advice,” replied Merkel in English.

Merkel delivered the rest of her remarks in German, even though she speaks English well — a sign she was aiming at a domestic audience and setting the tone for policy moves to come. In a Continent dominated by the likes of such battle-scarred political warhorses as France’s Jacques Chirac and Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, Merkel is a badly needed fresh face. It’s not just image. As the chancellor reminded her listeners, she grew up in Communist East Germany and has no emotional stake in the social-welfare state that holds down economic growth.

She’s gonna fit right in…

From Chennai with Love: Chennai Hosts 3rd Asia Pacific Regional Cuba Solidarity Conference
…Chennai’s link with Cuba is not new. On June 12, 1960, C. M. Annadurai, a legendary leader of the Dravidian movement, wrote to his cadres of America’s atom bomb and its ability to “destroy the whole world.” Meanwhile, Cuba has none of these arms, and yet because of the wide support to the Revolution, “if America attacks not even a nail will remain in the US after the attack.” It is this tradition that provoked the Dravidian movement’s M. Karunanidhi to write an ode to Castro, which he read out at the Solidarity Conference’s last day. Cuba is a honeycomb, Tamil Nadu’s senior mass leader exclaimed, for “whenever America touches it in an unguarded moment, the people of Cuba, like honey bees, will sting.” This was all good rhetoric, even as it typically came without a program of action toward solidarity. (Contrast this political situation with that of the US, where even within the Left there is an allergic reaction against Cuba, and a hasty attempt to appear “reasonable” by making all sorts of anti-Cuban gestures. The record on this is nicely laid out by the Harvard scientist Richard Levins in “Progressive Cuba Bashing,” Socialism and Democracy, vol. 19, no. 1, March 2005).