A strike by local authority workers has closed thousands of schools, libraries and leisure centres, crippled council services across the UK and led to travel chaos for motorists.

Unions said the walkout, in a bitter row over pensions, had been solidly supported by more than a million workers in the biggest bout of industrial action since the 1926 General Strike.

All bus and rail services were at a standstill in Northern Ireland, while the Mersey Tunnels in Liverpool and the Metro on Tyneside were closed.

Picket lines were mounted outside council offices, police stations, universities, day centres, libraries, museums, schools and other local authority buildings.

Unison, the biggest of 11 unions involved in the row, said the turnout had been larger than expected, adding that strikers had received warm public support for their stance.

General secretary Dave Prentis said: “Our members have taken the decision to strike very seriously indeed. They are not selfish people, they are not using any excuse to call ‘strike’ and have a day off – they are asking simply for what they have paid for and what they deserve.

“These are real people who have paid 6% year in, year out to their pension scheme, and are now being treated like second-class citizens when it comes to paying out on their pensions.
thisislondon.com

· Organisers claim 3m people join marches
· Sarkozy floods Paris with 4,000 riot police

Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets of France yesterday, disrupting schools and transport in a nationwide strike to pressure the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, to withdraw his controversial new employment law.
Organisers of the marches claimed that three million people joined marches with major demonstrations in Marseille, Bordeaux and a dozen cities and towns across the country. In Paris, unions estimated that 700,000 people joined the biggest and most heavily policed demonstration that snaked its way to Place de la Republique over several hours led by students, schoolchildren and trade unionists, including striking Air France workers.
guardian.co.uk

NBC news reporter Pete Williams speculates that the feds have rigged a defiant Zacarias Moussaoui with a stun belt, an “electro-shock” device, apparently part of a growing “shock technology” arsenal used by torturers in South Africa, China, and Lebanon. “Amnesty International is extremely concerned about the introduction by the prison authorities in the United States of America of a remote controlled electro-shock stun belt for use on prisoners in chain gangs, judicial hearings and transportation,” the human rights organization declared in 1996. “Officers can use it to psychologically threaten a prisoner, and it appears designed to humiliate and degrade a prisoner… Data from other electro-shock weapons indicate that the high pulse 50,000 volt shocks lasting eight seconds at a time could result in longer term physical and mental injuries.”

Is it possible Moussaoui is now admitting he was involved in a plot to crash an airliner into the White House with the shoe bomber mental case Richard Reid in a Pavlovian response to 50,000 volts of electricity? If the feds are using electro-shock against the alleged wanna-be “al-Qaeda” operative, is it possible they are also drugging him? Aicha el-Wafi, Moussaoui’s mother, believes her son “must have been drugged” when she saw him in court, according to Yahoo News. “That is not Zachary,” she declared.

It should be remembered that Moussaoui previously denied any involvement in the nine eleven attacks and his sudden if not electrifying (pun intended) eleventh hour conversion during the penalty phase of his trial is highly suspicious. Moreover, according to nine eleven “mastermind” Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (supposedly in custody), Moussaoui was to take part in a second wave of attacks and was not part of the September 11, 2001, attack. Of course, this contradiction is not worth consideration, either by the jury or the corporate news media. It appears the patsy Zacarias Moussaoui is indeed a dead man walking—with a little help from a 50,000 volt shock belt.
kurtnimmo.com

The US supreme court was urged yesterday to rein in President George Bush’s use of his powers as a wartime president, challenging his order to dispatch al-Qaida suspects to trial before military tribunals.

In arguments that could redefine the balance between presidential power and the laws of war, lawyers for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, an inmate at Guantánamo, told the court that Mr Bush had violated basic military protections with his November 2001 executive order setting up the tribunals.

Mr Hamdan, a Yemeni accused of driving a pick-up truck for Osama bin Laden, was captured in Afghanistan in November 2001 and charged with war crimes. The Bush administration claims he conspired with the al-Qaida leader to carry out attacks in the US. He says he was merely working to support his family, and needed the $200-a-month salary.

The case challenges the Bush administration’s justification for holding people without recourse to US courts or the Geneva convention.

Terror suspects brought before the tribunals do not have the right to an attorney of their choice or to see the evidence against them. Even if they are acquitted and freed, the verdict can be reversed by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

Mr Hamdan’s lawyers contended yesterday that that makes the tribunals unconstitutional because they allow the president to define the crime, and select the prosecutor and judges who act as jury.

“This is a military commission that is literally unburdened by the laws, constitution and treaties of the United States,” one lawyer, Neal Katyal, told the court.
guardian.co.uk

In Bushzarro world, the invasion and occupation of Iraq was first about Saddam’s illusory weapons of mass destruction, and then in lieu of actually finding any weapons the excuse shifted to altruism, a mawkish desire to bestow democracy on benighted Iraqis (who pretty much pioneered civilization 12,000 years ago as Mesopotamians and didn’t need any help from the neocons). In fact, the invasion had nothing to do with either of these things, as some of us said in late 2002, about the time the Straussian neocons began making serious noise about invading Iraq and killing thousands of people.

Instead, the invasion of Iraq was all about destroying Iraqi society and nationalism. It was a coup de grâce delivered after twelve years of brutal, immoral, sadistic, and medieval sanctions designed to break the Iraqis down. It has everything to do with defeating secular Arab nationalism and in this respect the occupation (and destruction) of Iraq is an Israeli project. Both Syria and Lebanon loom large on the Straussian neocon hit list precisely because they represent Arab nationalism. Syrian thinkers such as Constantin Zureiq, Zaki al-Arsuzi and Michel Aflaq formulated pan-Arab ideology and Aflaq and al-Arsuzi were key figures in the establishment of the Arab Ba’ath (Resurrection) Party. Since the 1980s, the Israelis and their neocon allies in the United States have work diligently to replace pan-Arab nationalism with Islamic fanaticism.

According to retired Delta Force Command Sergeant Major Eric Haney, the United States has “fomented civil war in Iraq” and has “probably fomented internecine war in the Muslim world between the Shias and the Sunnis…. I think Bush may well have started the third world war, all for their own personal policies,” Haney will tell the Los Angeles Daily News tomorrow, Raw Story reports.

Back in November, 2003, Leslie Gelb, “an influential man who, until recently, presided over the very important Council of Foreign Affairs, a think tank that brings together the CIA, the secretary of state and big shots from U.S. multinational corporations,” writes Michel Collon, proposed breaking Iraq into three ethnically distinct balkanized mini-states as an effective way to “weaken resistance,” a continuation and amplification on the old British “divide and rule” technique used to great effect in Ireland, India, Pakistan, and elsewhere (see Gelb’s The Three-State Solution, New York Times, 25 November 2003). It is an idea pushed long and hard by the Israelis, as proposed in Oded Yinon’s A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties. “Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon,” Yinon wrote. It is precisely “inter-Arab confrontation” initiated through false flag provocative operations occurring currently in Iraq.
kurtnimmo.com

But recognizing that M-W took a courageous stand, which merits praise, we still have to ask how convincing their thesis is. Not very, in my opinion. I’ve reviewed elsewhere what the record (historical and documentary) seems to me to show about the main sources of US ME policy, in books and articles for the past 40 years, and can’t try to repeat here. M-W make as good a case as one can, I suppose, for the power of the Lobby, but I don’t think it provides any reason to modify what has always seemed to me a more plausible interpretation. Notice incidentally that what is at stake is a rather subtle matter: weighing the impact of several factors which (all agree) interact in determining state policy: in particular, (A) strategic-economic interests of concentrations of domestic power in the tight state-corporate linkage, and (B) the Lobby.

The M-W thesis is that (B) overwhelmingly predominates. To evaluate the thesis, we have to distinguish between two quite different matters, which they tend to conflate: (1) the alleged failures of US ME policy; (2) the role of The Lobby in bringing about these consequences. Insofar as the stands of the Lobby conform to (A), the two factors are very difficult to disentagle. And there is plenty of conformity.
zmag.org

Is Chomsky a shill for Isreael?

The ruling Kadima party won yesterday’s general election in Israel, according to exit polls, but with fewer seats than the acting prime minister, Ehud Olmert, wanted in order for him to claim a mandate for his plan to impose Israel’s final borders.
The election proved disastrous for the once dominant Likud party, driven into fourth place by Labour and the rise of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu which advocates removing Arabs from Israel.

According to exit polls last night, Kadima won up to 32 seats in the 120-seat parliament. Labour has about 21, Yisrael Beiteinu 14 and Likud 12. The balance of seats is mostly held by religious and nationalist parties. The turnout, at 63%, was the lowest in Israel’s history.

Mr Olmert’s likely coalition partners are Labour and two smaller parties. He may also turn to the Pensioners party, which has never before held seats in parliament but is estimated to have won eight in an apparent protest vote.

The election was widely regarded as a referendum on Mr Olmert’s commitment, backed by Labour and the left, to unilaterally withdraw from large parts of the West Bank, to remove tens of thousands of Jewish settlers while retaining the main settlement blocks, and to carve out a border using the West Bank barrier. Likud, led by Binyamin Netanyahu, and other parties on the right argued that pulling out of Palestinian territory would be a victory for terrorism.

In his victory speech, Mr Olmert said he would press ahead with his plan to separate from the Palestinians.

“In the near future we will bring about the shaping of the final borders of the state, guaranteeing a Jewish democratic state,” he said.

The acting prime minister said he wanted to negotiate frontiers with the Palestinians only on condition they recognise Israel and end violence.
guardian.co.uk

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – U.S. commanders in Iraq on Monday accused powerful Shi’ite groups of moving the corpses of gunmen killed in battle to encourage accusations that U.S.-led troops massacred unarmed worshippers in a mosque.

“After the fact, someone went in and made the scene look different from what it was. There’s been huge misinformation,” Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq, said.

He rejected the accusations of a massacre that prompted the Shi’ite-led government to demand U.S. forces cede control of security but declined to spell out which group he believed moved the bodies.
news.yahoo.com

In a crescendo of violence in Iraq, a suicide bomber killed 40 army recruits in Mosul as Shia leaders reacted furiously to a US-Iraqi raid on a mosque which they claim killed 37 people. A further 21 bodies were found in and around Baghdad, some with nooses around their necks.

The suicide bomber blew himself up yesterday in a recruitment centre near a joint Iraqi-American military base, with the usual devastating results for the unemployed young men waiting for a job in the armed forces.

The killing of what the Americans say were 16 “insurgents”, and what Shias claim were 37 unarmed worshippers in the Mustafa mosque, may turn out to be a turning point in the three-year-old Iraq crisis. Iraq’s Shias, 60 per cent of the population, have hitherto largely co-operated with American occupation while Sunni Arabs have resisted. But the Shias increasingly see the US as trying to deny them power despite the electoral success of its Alliance.
independent.co.uk

Iraq: As Many as 90 Killed
A suicide bomber struck an army recruiting station near Tal Afar in northern Iraq, killing 40 and wounding 20. President Bush recently lauded the situation in Tal Afar and environs as a US success story.

About 29 corpses corpses showed up in the streets of Baghdad, most of them strangled and tortured.

A rocket attack on a building resulted in several casualties. The building housed political offices for the Fadhila (Virtue) and Dawa Parties. Both are Shiite religious parties.

A young physician in Kirkuk confessed on Kurdistan television Monday to having been an serial killer on behalf of the guerrillas, giving lethal injections to more than 40 Iraqi soldiers and police or denying them oxygen. At the same time, he was secretly treating wounded members of the guerrilla movement.

Guerrillas abducted 16 employees of an Iraqi trading company on Monday, according to the Iraqi Interior Ministry.

The governor of Baghdad province, Hussein al-Tahan, announced Monday “Today we decided to stop all political and service cooperation with the US forces until a legal committee is formed to investigate this incident.” [i.e. the US/Iraqi attack on the Mustafa Husayniyah in the Ur district on Sunday, which left some 20 persons dead).

Officials of the United Iraqi Alliance of Shiite fundamentalists, the largest single bloc in parliament, demanded Monday that security matters be turned over to Iraqis and taken out of US hands. Reuters says, ‘ “The Alliance calls for a rapid restoration of (control of) security matters to the Iraqi government,” Jawad Al Maliki, a senior Alliance spokesman and ally of Prime Minister Ibrahim Al Jaafari, told a news conference. ‘

I have to say that if the US military doesn’t even know, as its spokesmen admitted, to which branch of Islam the persons its joint operation killed on Sunday belonged, it really is acting as a bull in a china shop.

The Intrepid Ann Garrels and Joost Hilterman report that some Shiites are speaking now of a second great betrayal by the Americans of the Shiites, as they fear that the US it tilting now toward the Sunni Arabs. In spring of 1991, the US stood by while Saddam’s forces massacred rebelling Shiites after the Gulf War.

Some Shiites, according to al-Hayat, are saying that the US is deliberately attempting to provoke a civil war in Iraq. Among their concerns was the US military’s announcement that the attack on the Mustafa Husayniyah in Ur was the work of an Iraqi military unit. Which unit? Where? To whom does it report? Is it little more than a death squad? Is it commanded by the Americans? Why didn’t the Prime Minister know about this attack, which spilled over on Dawa Party offices? PM Jaafari is a member of the Dawa Party.

The Badr Organization, a political party that represents the paramilitary Badr Corps, the Shiite militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, demanded Monday that Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to Iraq, be expelled from that country.

This moment is therefore a particularly inauspicious one for Khalilzad to press for the sidelining of Ibrahim Jaafari as candidate for prime minister of the United Iraqi Alliance. Jaafari narrowly won an internal party vote, but was backed by Muqtada al-Sadr and opposes loose federalism and unrestrained capitalism. For all these reasons he is unacceptable to the Kurds and to the US.

Izzat Ibrahim Duri, one of Saddam’s key officials, is said to have issued a tape on Monday. It was played on Aljazeera but has not been authenticated. The tape calls on the Arab League to recognize the Iraqi insurgency as the true government of Iraq, and condemns the blowing up of the Askariyah shrine in Samarra, an anti-Shiite strike. Al-Duri led the charge to repress and massacre the Shiites in sping of 1991 when they rose against Saddam, so he is unlikely to get any points for his defense of the Askariyah.

Is it soup yet?

It is the fastest growing city on earth, a landscape of building sites full of workers feverishly constructing the highest, the largest and the deepest in the world. It’s a neverland, rising out of the barren desert and fringed by beaches and a ski resort. There are no taxes. And it is the favoured destination of Britons wishing to work and play abroad.

Fifty per cent of the world’s supply of cranes are now at work in Dubai on projects worth $100bn – twice the World Bank’s estimated cost of reconstructing Iraq and double the total foreign investment in China, the word’s third-largest economy.

But there is also a downside to the glistening towers that soar above the shopping malls, the six-lane highways and the world’s only seven-star hotel with suites that can cost $50,000 (£28,000) a night. More than 2,500 workers at the site of the world’s tallest building, the $800m Burj Dubai, went on strike last week in a country where striking – and unions – are illegal. It is the latest manifestation of the deep discontent felt by the semi-indentured labourers from the Indian subcontinent who are building this glitzy oasis. Complaining of unpaid wages, and demanding better conditions, the labourers marched out of the cramped, stifling dormitories where they are corralled 25 to a room in violent protests which caused $1m worth of damage. They overturned cars and smashed up offices in a very graphic reminder of a problem which normally receives little publicity.
independent.co.uk