American and Iraqi troops mounted two raids in Baghdad yesterday arresting more than 40 interior ministry guards at a secret prison and killing around 20 gunmen in an assault on a mosque loyal to the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
The sudden strikes seemed to put muscle behind a strong warning from the US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, on Saturday that militias must be brought under control. They had become a bigger threat to Iraq than the insurgency, he said.

“More Iraqis are dying from the militia violence than from the terrorists. The militias need to be under control,” he said during a visit to a Baghdad youth centre that had been renovated with US aid.

Yesterday’s raids saw US-backed Iraqi special forces exchange fire at a mosque in eastern Baghdad. Iraqi police said 22 died, while the American military said 16 “insurgents” were killed by Iraqi special forces, with US troops on the scene as back-up. “No mosques were entered or damaged during this operation,” the US military said in a statement.

“As elements of the 1st Iraqi Special Operations Forces Brigade entered their objective, they came under fire. In the ensuing exchange of fire … [Iraqi troops] killed 16 insurgents. As they secured their objective, they detained 15 more individuals,” the statement said.

An Iraqi police lieutenant, Hassan Hamoud, put the death toll at 22, with eight wounded. He said some casualties were at the Shia Dawa party office near the mosque. A senior Sadr aide accused US troops of killing more than 20 unarmed worshippers at the Mustapha mosque in cold blood. He denied that they were Mahdi army gunmen. “The American forces went into the mosque at prayers and killed more than 20 worshippers,” Hazin al-Araji said. “They tied them up and shot them.”
guardian.co.uk

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Iraqi forces found 30 bodies, most beheaded, near a village north of Baghdad on Sunday, in one of the bloodiest episodes in a cycle of apparent sectarian killings.

Police said the bodies were found after police and soldiers were dispatched to respond to a report of killings in Mullah Eid, a village near the town of Buhriz, a former stronghold of ex-President Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party about 35 miles north of Baghdad.
news.yahoo.com

Scientists in Ethiopia have discovered a hominid skull that could be a missing link between Homo erectus and modern man.

The hominid cranium was found in two pieces and is believed to be between 500,000 and 250,000 years old. Sileshi Semaw, the director of the Gona Paleoanthropological Research Project in Ethiopia, said it came “from a significant period and is close to the appearance of the anatomically modern human”.

Archaeologists found the cranium at Gawis, in Ethiopia’s north-eastern Afar region, five weeks ago, Dr Semaw said.

An Ethiopian palaeoanthropologist at Indiana University, Dr Semaw said that most fossil hominids were found in pieces. By contrast, the near-complete skull had provided a wealth of information.

…The face and cranium of the fossil are recognisably different from that of modern humans, but it offers unmistakable anatomical evidence that it belongs in our ancestry, Dr Semaw said.
independent.co.uk

Thousands of people have fled their homes to escape violence in the north of Central African Republic (CAR).
Aid agencies estimate that more than 7,000 refugees have crossed the border into Chad in the past few weeks.

A BBC reporter who visited the area says refugees claim government troops are systematically killing men and boys they suspect of backing rebel groups.

Central African Republic President Francois Bozize has blamed rebel groups for the unrest.
bbc.co.uk

…While racism was not a primary consideration at the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, it quickly became an endemic feature of plantation slavery. The sustained exploitation of Africans as slaves quickly acquired a racial character and over time required an ideology based on racism which made the terms ‘negro’ and ‘slave’ interchangeable. As Norman Girvan points out, the primary objective of this ideology was to depreciate the cultural and physical attributes of the enslaved race.

“African speech, religion, mannerisms and indeed all institutional forms were systematically denigrated as constituting marks of savagery and cultural inferiority … and extended to the physical, genetic and biological attributes of black people. The very colour of the African skin was held to be the first and lasting badge of his inferiority; as were the characteristics of his mouth, nose and hair texture. The desired consequence of extending the ideology of racism from cultural to physical attributes was to ensure that the African … was permanently imprisoned in his status as a slave in as much as he was permanently imprisoned in his black skin.”

The effect of this campaign on the self-confidence of Africans and people of African descent continue to this day. Three centuries later, we seize upon every opportunity to disguise the physical features which define us as African.

…Over 700,000 Africans were brought to Jamaica as slaves in the 153 years between the capture of the island by the British in 1655 and the end of the Atlantic Slave Trade in 1807. Such was the toll in human lives exacted by plantation slavery in Jamaica that there were only 323,827 slaves and 9,000 free blacks alive when the slave trade was abolished in 1807. The only word to describe this absolute reduction in the slave population is ‘genocide’. In contrast, after the first 150 years of freedom the African-Jamaican population increased some 700 per cent to over two million.
jamaica-gleaner.com

As dawn broke over Kenya’s Lake Naivasha, thousands of men and women trudged through a dusty township before filing into vast greenhouses. Here the hours are long and pesticides ever-present. Last week was tougher than most.

The flower farmers were putting in long shifts in the sweltering heat to ensure Britain had a happy Mother’s Day. They have also made flowers a cornerstone of the Kenyan economy. But serious concerns are being asked over working conditions and environmental impact.

“It’s total exploitation. Most of the workers are women, mostly divorcees and single mothers, and they have to feed their families,” one leading human rights activist said. Some work 18-hour days for £25 a month with no protection from pesticides.
independent.co.uk

Novelist Walter Mosley recently lamented the void in black leadership in America, saying “millions dying in Africa while your leaders argued about the references and jokes in the movie Barbershop?”

It is much worse than that. Millions of the poor around the world that got jobs producing sneakers and apparel for America’s youth got nothing but scorn or betrayal from African-Americans, when they desperately sought assistance.

Anyone remember what Temple’s Coach John Chaney said to Philly Daily News about Michael?

[from Village Voice]: The great Jordan famously promised to investigate Nike’s factories when sweatshop conditions made headlines in 1996. He has not been heard from on the issue since, and Temple basketball coach John Chaney may have spoken for many in the sports world when he was asked about Jordan’s silence: “Why should he stick his neck out and risk his endorsement deals? You got a fucking problem with Michael making money? Michael should pick up every fucking dollar possible.”

What about Rev. Jesse Jackson? I was sitting in his church with a fired Indonesian Nike worker & the rev was IN INDONESIA, doing the “CNN photo-op prayer service” outside a locked (to keep him out) Nike factory; didn’t I think we were gonna drain the swamp! But JJ started collecting Nike contributions almost as soon as he touched down in the USA & talked about a boycott. A couple of years later, he gave the Rainbow Coalition’s “Leadership in Sports” award to Nike’s chief of public relations, Vada Manager.
counterpunch.org

Two days after the coup d’etat that brought a brutal military junta to power in Argentina, then U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger ordered his subordinates to “encourage” the new regime by providing financial support, according to a previously classified transcript released here by the independent National Security Archive (NSA).

The document, whose public release came on the 30th anniversary of the coup, depicts Kissinger as uninterested in warnings by his assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs, William Rogers, that the junta would likely intensify repression against suspected dissidents in ways that could make U.S. support for the regime embarrassing.

“The point I’m making is that although they have good press today, the basic line of all the interference was that they had to do it because she [ousted President Isabel Peron] couldn’t run the country,” Rogers told his boss. “So I think the point is that we ought not at this moment to rush out and embrace this new regime – that three-six months later will be considerably less popular with the press.”

“But we shouldn’t do the opposite either,” Kissinger insists, adding that “whatever chance they have, they will need a little encouragement from us.”

“I do want to encourage them,” he went on, asking to review the instructions to Washington’s ambassador in Buenos Aires, Robert Hill, on his first meeting with the junta’s yet-to-be-named foreign minister. “I don’t want to give the sense that they’re harassed by the United States.”

Washington approved 50 million dollars in military aid the following month.
antiwar.com

CURITIBA, Brazil, Mar 23 (IPS) – Affect, care, cooperation and responsibility are the four central principles of a new ethics that humanity urgently needs to adopt, in order to avoid becoming extinct as “a victim of itself,” Leonardo Boff, one of the founders of liberation theology, said Thursday.

Emotions and sensitivity are “the essence, the core dimension of the human being,” said the Brazilian theologian at a panel on “ethics, biodiversity and sustainability”. The panel formed part of the Global Civil Society Forum, held parallel to the Mar. 20-31 Eighth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP8).

It is not reason but feeling that is involved in our first contact with reality, and “today’s great crisis is not economic, political or religious, but a crisis of affect, of the capacity to feel a connection with others,” he said.

It is indispensable to “take care of all living things,” and science shows that cooperation is the “supreme law of the universe,” he added.

“The world is not made up of objects but of relationships. It was cooperation that made possible the leap from animal to humanity, and without it we are dehumanised, which is what occurs in the case of capitalism,” the theologian told around 300 activists, most of them small farmers.

…Boff, who left the priesthood after suffering sanctions at the hands of the Vatican for expressing “dangerous ideas” over the past two decades, has outlined his ecological concerns in several books.
ipsnews.net

Two releases of local law enforcement files in recent days have shed new light on just how far the Bush administration, federal, and local law enforcement are going to suppress political dissent in the aftermath of 9-11.

The first case was in Pittsburgh, where a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union yielded the revelation that from 2002, when opposition to an invasion of Iraq began in earnest, right through at least until the final, heavily redacted document from 2005, law enforcement officials investigated, monitored, harassed, and infiltrated activists from Pittsburgh’s Thomas Merton Center. Merton was a renowned Catholic theologian and pacifist who fiercely opposed the Vietnam War and all wars, and his namesake descendants apply the same beliefs to Iraq.

As the released documents make clear, that, and only that, was why they became targets: because they opposed the war in Iraq. An FBI document from 2002 notes that the center is “a left-wing organization advocating, among many political causes, pacifism.” Pacifism! Egads! Aside from the fact that pacifism is a set of personal moral beliefs — not a “political cause” — is pacifism, in our militarized 21st Century America, the new Red Scare? Seems so. Just ask the Quakers.
workingforchange.com