Health authorities are secretly cutting millions of pounds in funding for psychiatric services, despite alarming new evidence of a crisis affecting an estimated one in five people in Britain. In a move branded “the real madness” by health experts, debt-ridden NHS trusts are slashing budgets and cutting care for the mentally ill.

An Independent on Sunday investigation has established that trusts are planning to cut more than £20m from budgets ear-marked for psychiatric care, using the cash to bail out other parts of the NHS instead.

In some parts of the country, primary care trusts have drawn up secret measures to slash spending on mental health care by up to a third.

With new figures today showing that children as young as seven are now being affected in an epidemic that costs Britain £100bn each year, the disclosures were seized on as evidence that mental health services were at breaking point.

…Reports by the Mental Health Foundation and the World Health Organisation reveal:

* 1 in 15 children self-harming;

* 19,000 suicide attempts by teenagers every year;

* 20 per cent of people suffering from genuine mental distress such as anxiety or depression and in need of urgent help;

* 25,000 people sectioned every year under the Mental Health Act
independent.co.uk

…For the first time in history these ‘elite women’ can succeed in any career they want. According to a remarkable thesis that has blown open the debate around feminism, sexism and the future role of women, a new generation of bright, rich professionals have broken through the glass ceiling and have nothing to fear from the men around them. They will be just as successful.

The thesis was expounded in a highly controversial article for Prospect magazine by Alison Wolf, a professor at Kings College London and author of Does Education Matter? She argues that the meteoric rise of this new generation of ‘go-getting women’ who want high-powered, well-paid jobs has dire consequences for society. Wolf says it has diverted the most talented away from the caring professions such as teaching, stopped them volunteering, is in danger of ending the notion of ‘female altruism’, has turned many women off having children – and has effectively killed off feminism.

‘[It is] the death of the sisterhood,’ Wolf writes. ‘An end to the millennia during which women of all classes shared the same major life experiences to a far greater degree than men.

‘In the past, women of all classes shared lives centred on explicitly female concerns. Now it makes little sense to discuss women in general. The statistics are clear: among young, educated, full-time professionals, being female is no longer a drag on earnings or progress.’

The article argues that the most educated women will now earn as much as men over a lifetime if they have no children. Even with children, the gap will be small. The desire to be successful acts as a major disincentive to women starting a family, Wolf argues.

‘Families remain central to the care of the old and sick, as well as raising the next generation, and yet our economy and society steer ever more educated women away from marriage or childbearing,’ she writes. ‘The repercussions for our future are enormous, and we should at least recognise the fact.’ The growth, Wolf argues, of the ‘because I’m worth it’ generation has led to the end of ‘female altruism’, where women would see the caring part of their life as normal.
observor.guardian.co.uk

Well the vast majority of females on the planet don’t have any of these opportunities. And it’s sort of ridiculous to fret about the END of workplace discrimination. ‘Female values’ are as unrepresented in the West as they are everywhere else, at least in any public discourse, and females often face the greatest physical danger from the terrorists they live with. If there were a true ‘sisterhood’ among Western women in the first place, our societies and our politics would look very different, and women would be fairly compensated for all the nurturing work that needs to be done in a healthy place. But the West is a pathological place, and worrying about the economic mobility of educated (and overwhelmingly white) females doesn’t strike me as the place to begin to address the pathology.

Hillary the Hawk
…From Leon Trotsky to Ralph Reed to Hillary Clinton is a long, torturous road to follow, yet the chameleon-like Wittmann—who styles himself a Bull Moose progressive in the tradition of his hero, Theodore Roosevelt—has navigated it expertly. Wittmann’s new role as Hillary’s unofficial Rasputin is perfectly suited to her current political needs. Eager to overcome her reputation as the leader of the party’s left wing, Hillary is “repositioning” herself, in modern parlance, as a “centrist,” i.e. a complete opportunist. She could have no better teacher than Wittmann, who from the pulpit of his “Moose-blog,” advises her to “seize the issue of Iranian nukes to draw a line in the sand.” While paying lip service to multilateralism, she should “make it clear that while force is the last resort, she would never take it off the table in dealing with the madmen mullahs and the psychotic leader of Iran.”

…Hillary hails the 1998 bombing of Iraq, ordered by her husband, which killed thousands of Iraqi civilians, and recounts the official mythology promulgated by the Bush administration: “[T]he so-called presidential palaces … in reality were huge compounds well suited to hold weapons labs, stocks, and records which Saddam Hussein was required by UN resolution to turn over. When Saddam blocked the inspection process, the inspectors left.” As we now know, there was nothing even approaching WMD in those palaces, and Iraq had been effectively disarmed at that point. In late February or early March, Scott Ritter, then a UN arms inspector, met with then-U.S. ambassador to the UN Bill Richardson. Ritter was told to provoke an incident so the U.S. could finish bombing by the start of the Islamic New Year holiday.

Hillary, however, didn’t let any inconvenient facts get in her way. She boasted that it was under a Democratic administration that the U.S. “changed its underlying policy toward Iraq from containment to regime change” and took credit for the bright idea of putting Ahmad Chalabi, convicted embezzler and known liar, on the U.S. payroll. Her speech reads like a Weekly Standard editorial, reiterating each of the War Party’s talking points—the bio-weapons fantasy, the links to al-Qaeda gambit, the phantom nuclear arsenal: “This much,” she maintained, “is undisputed.”

La Paz, Mar 22 (Prensa Latina) The terrorist bombings in Bolivia have sparked widespread condemnation, as false explosive alarms proliferate.

Two people were killed in the bombings of two small hotels in La Paz late Tuesday and early Wednesday. A US citizen was one of two people arrested in connection with the terrorist actions, according to reports.

President Evo Morales described the attacks as destabilizing actions by oligarchic sectors affected by the ongoing process of change in the country, and recalled that history shows that terrorism always precedes military coups.

He called on the people to organize in committees of defense of democracy, and urged the US to prevent US people from coming to Bolivia to disrupt democracy, the government and the Constituent Assembly to be elected in July.
plenglish.com

Blum:The Cuban Punching Bag
The Committee to Protect Journalists, located in New York, calls itself “An Independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending press freedom worldwide”. In December it issued a report that said that “China, Cuba, Eritrea, and Ethiopia are the world’s leading jailers of journalists in 2005”.

On January 7 I sent them the following email:

“Dear People,

“I have a question concerning your report on imprisoned journalists. You write that you consider journalists imprisoned when governments deprive them of their liberty because of their work. This implies that they’ve been imprisoned because of WHAT THEY’VE WRITTEN PER SE. You show Cuba with 24. And I would question whether your criterion applies to the Cuban cases. The arrests of these persons in Cuba had nothing to do with them being journalists, or even being dissidents, per se, but had everything to do with their very close, indeed intimate, political and financial connections to American government officials.

“The United States is to the Cuban government like al Qaeda is to Washington, only much more powerful and much closer. During the period of the Cuban revolution, the United States and anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the US have inflicted upon Cuba damage greater than what happened in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against the United States for $181.1 billion in compensation for victims of (at that time) forty years of aggression. The suit accused Washington policies of being responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and wounding or disabling 2,099 others.

“Would the US ignore a group of Americans receiving funds from al Qaeda and engaging in repeated meetings with known leaders of that organization inside the United States? Would it matter if these American dissidents claimed to be journalists? In the past few years, the American government has arrested a great many people in the US and abroad on the basis of alleged ties to al Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba had with its dissidents’ ties to the United States.

“Moreover, most of the arrested Cubans can hardly be called journalists. Their only published works have appeared on websites maintained by agencies of the United States.”

El Salvador 2006: Elections in a Broken Nation
…Dreams of a life in the United States are the norm here among working people. Since the country converted its currency to the dollar in 2003, the low wages and high unemployment mean working people live in poverty, if they are lucky enough to find a job. The maquilas pay starvation wages, and there are no unions. Each day, over 700 Salvadorans flee on the dangerous trek through Guatemala and Mexico to the United States. Young Salvadoran women look for a mate that is “going north”. I heard a tale of a high school class of 18 young men, all of whom got on a bus out of the country the day after their graduation. The effect of this economic migration is that 2 million Salvadorans working in the United States sent back $3 billion to their families in 2005. These remittances, or “remesas” support the economy, and are the source of the cash for the malls and fast food restaurants that proliferate in this poor nation. They are not a source for investment that develops the infrastructure. The cash simply recycles back to the corporations and banks of the United States and El Salvador.

…Certainly, the slave economy underpinned the riches of 18th century society. It also had a dominating influence across the British politico-financial establishment. Institutional investors in slavery included the Hanoverian royal family, numerous Oxbridge colleges and even the Church of England.

This needs to be the starting point for any commemoration. As Professor James Walvin has commented: “My worry about 2007 is that there will be such a euphoria of nationalistic pride that people will forget what happened before, which was that the British had shipped extraordinary numbers of Africans across the Atlantic.”

…Despite its barbarity, ending this lucrative trade was an uphill struggle. Few today would go so far as to hail it, as one contemporary did, as “the most altruistic act since Christ’s crucifixion”, but halting trafficking had serious economic costs. Yet the moral certitude of Wilberforce and his evangelical allies convinced MPs, many of whom had slaving interests, of the ethical case for abolishing “the foul iniquity”.

However, this had as much to do with purifying England from the taint of slavery as any great humanitarian concern for slaves. There was little sense of racial equality, and a new image of the ever-grateful black subject subsequently developed – seen to greatest effect in Josiah Wedgwood’s cameo of a slave kneeling in chains. The inscription read: “Am I not a man and a brother?” But few among Wilberforce’s Clapham Sect honestly thought so.
guardian.co.uk

Islamophobia at Downing Street: Tony Blair’s Bipolarity
This week, Tony Blair launched a scathing ideological attack on Islamism. Describing the conflict between Islamism and the world as a, “battle for modernity,” he quoted the conservative American historian, Samuel Huntington, in order to refute him. Contrasting his interpretation of a “conflict about civilisation” in a historical chiaroscuro with Huntington’s “conflict of civilisations,” Blair blasted Islamism as the fountainhead of the world’s escalating level of ultra-violence.

Promising to make further keynote speeches to address the Israel-Palestine conflict in the Middle East, Blair sought to defend the pointed attacks on Islamic fundamentalism by George Bush and Christopher Hitchens as the raison d’etre for the war in Iraq. In his latest lamentation on the exclusively Islamic sources of ulta-violence, terrorism and war, Blair echoed the mantras of the coterie of deeply Islamophobic neoconservative intellectuals who emerged from the right-wing witches’ cauldron of Leo Stein at the University of Chicago.

Blair’s diatribe was the performance of a committed idealist, a demagogue mesmerized by his own ideology and not that of an intellectual, an academic, a mainstream politician or a statesman. Blair inhabits that shadowy region of Christianity that sees itself as totally separate and apart from the other faiths stemming from the house of Abraham: Judaism and Islam. In Blair’s vision of Christianity, there are no Muslims who accept the messianic status of Jesus; no Christians who launch terrorist atrocities and no Jewish terrorists, either.

In the mind of Tony Blair, the trouble with world terror stems exclusively from the ideology and culture of Islamic fundamentalism. In Blair’s deeply bipolar world, Christianity and Judaism are blameless for the rising tide of terror.

On March 10, 2006, the United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination found that the United States was denying the Western Shoshone people “their rights to own, develop, control and use their land and resources”. They warned the U.S. to respect their obligations according to the Convention”. The U. S. was urged to “freeze”, “desist” and “stop” their actions against the Western Shoshone and abide by the Committee’s “Early Warning and Urgent Action Procedure”.

The Western Shoshone land base covers approximately 60 million acres, stretching across the states of Nevada, Idaho, Utah and California. Their land rights were entrenched in the 1868 Treaty of Ruby Valley. The U.S. used a procedure similar to that of the Canadian and Ontario governments when they turned land belonging to the Stoney Point people at Ipperwash into a park. The U.S. declared the Western Shoshone lands had become “public” or federal lands in violation of the treaty.

The U.S. uses Western Shoshone land for military testing, open pit cyanide heap leach gold mining and nuclear waste disposal planning. They have used military style seizures of Shoshone livestock, trespass fines in the millions of dollars and ongoing armed surveillance of Western Shoshone who assert their original and treaty rights. When the Western Shoshone questioned their actions, they were denied “fair access” to the U.S. courts. The U.S. courts represent the United States, one of the adversaries in the conflict. So the Western Shoshone took their case to the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. This became the neutral tribunal required under international law.

In 2001 the Committee had already expressed alarm that U.S. laws and treatment of indigenous peoples continue to be based on the outdated, colonial era “doctrine of discovery.” The Committee’s decision is a direct negation of the colonial process.
montrealmuslimnews.net

Thousands of people across the country protested Friday against legislation cracking down on illegal immigrants, with demonstrators in Los Angeles, Phoenix and Atlanta staging school walkouts, marches and work stoppages.

The House of Representatives passed legislation in December that would make it a felony to be illegally in the United States, impose new penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants and erect fences along one-third of the U.S.-Mexican border. The Senate is set to take up its own version of immigration reform on Monday.

The proposals have angered many immigrant rights groups which have promised to fight back.

The Los Angeles demonstration led to fights between black and Hispanic students at one high school, but the protests were largely peaceful, authorities said.

“It was horrible, horrible,” Mason said. “It’s ridiculous that a bunch of black students would jump on Latinos like that, knowing they’re trying to get their freedom.”

Chantal Mason, a sophomore at George Washington Preparatory High, said black students jumped Hispanic students as they left classes to protest the House bill that would make it a felony to be in the U.S. illegally.

Rep. Peter King of New York, one of the bill’s sponsors, told CBS News correspondent Sandra Hughes, “The issue of illegal immigration, is not just a social issue, not just an economic issue, it’s an issue of homeland security.”

In Phoenix, police said 10,000 demonstrators marched to the office of Republican Sen. Jon Kyl, co-sponsor of a bill that would give illegal immigrants up to five years to leave the country. The turnout clogged a major thoroughfare.

“They’re here for the American Dream,” said Malissa Greer, 29, who joined a crowd estimated by police to be at least 10,000 strong. “God created all of us. He’s not a God of the United States, he’s a God of the world.”
cbs2.com

The Racist War on Immigrants: Jim Crow Goes Fishing
Speaking in Cleveland, President Bush called on Congress to end “catch and release” practices on the border with Mexico. He wasn’t referring to recreational fishing enthusiasts who catch large mouth bass, snap a picture and then release them back into the water. He was talking about INS (now Homeland Security) agents who round up undocumented workers trying to cross the border, harass and threaten them, and then issue them summons to appear in American court. President Bush and Congress are preparing legislation that makes it clear that they have as much (or little) respect for immigrant workers as they have for freshwater fish.

In typical fashion, the House Republicans have passed bill HR 4437 (the Sensenbrenner bill) that only a Klansman could love. It makes simply being an undocumented worker in the United States a felony, and it makes it illegal for anyone (teachers, social workers, firefighters, anyone) to help that person in any way. HR 4437 dismantles forty years of civil rights legislation and officially reintroduces Jim Crow into American law.

Datelined Washington — an odd city in which to learn about Iraq, you might think — its opening paragraph reads: “Despite the recent arrest of one of his would-be suicide bombers in Jordan and some top aides in Iraq, insurgency mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi has eluded capture, US authorities say, because his network has a much better intelligence-gathering operation than they do.”

Now quite apart from the fact that many Iraqis — along, I have to admit, with myself — have grave doubts about whether Zarqawi exists, and that al-Qaida’s Zarqawi, if he does exist, does not merit the title of “insurgency mastermind,” the words that caught my eye were “US authorities say.” And as I read through the report, I note how the Los Angeles Times sources this extraordinary tale. I thought US reporters no longer trusted the US administration, not after the mythical weapons of mass destruction and the equally mythical connections between Saddam and the international crimes against humanity of Sept. 11, 2001. Of course, I was wrong.

Here are the sources — on pages one and 10 for the yarn spun by reporters Josh Meyer and Mark Mazzetti: “US officials said,” “said one US Justice Department counter-terrorism official,” “Officials… said,” “those officials said,” “the officials confirmed,” “American officials complained,” “the US officials stressed,” “US authorities believe,” “said one senior US intelligence official,” “US officials said,” “Jordanian officials… said” — here, at least is some light relief — “several US officials said,” “the US officials said,” “American officials said,” “officials say,” “say US officials,” “US officials said,” “one US counter-terrorism official said.”

I do truly treasure this story. It proves my point that the Los Angeles Times — along with the big east coast dailies — should all be called US OFFICIALS SAY. But it’s not just this fawning on political power that makes me despair.
agrnews.org

The regime of restriction on movement imposed by Israel on the Palestinians has crumbled the West Bank into dozens of closed or partially closed enclaves isolated from each other despite their geographical proximity. Permanent and mobile checkpoints, along with physical barriers of various kinds, fenced-off main roads, limitations on Palestinian traffic on east-west and north-south arteries, have cut off direct transportational links between areas of the West Bank.

Thus, a new geographic, social and economic reality has emerged in the West Bank.
haaretz.com

Water both a lifesaver and weapon in ME war
“Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, checkpoints, the confiscation of land, arrests, the demolition of homes and the wall: all this presents a major obstacle to development projects especially in the water sector,” he said.

The Palestinian Authority is having to buy water for its growing population, he said. But at the same time, Israel is pumping increasing amounts of water from the underground sources that supply the Palestinian towns of Jenin, Jericho and Qalqiya.

In the West Bank, 40 percent of the population has barely 40 liters (10.5 US gallons) of water per day each, said Kawash. In Gaza, much of the population survives on 80 litres a day.

US Media Bias: Covering Israel/Palestine
On July 18, 2005 14 year old Ragheb al-Masri sat in the back of a taxi with his parents at the Abo Holi checkpoint. An Israeli bullet penetrated his back and cracked open his chest. His mother screamed as his body lay lifeless. Have you heard his name? I wouldn’t expect that you have because CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post didn’t report the killing online. If they had quoted his parents, their readers would have been able to feel their tears and envision the heartbreak. Ultimately, no Israeli soldier was arrested or even reprimanded.

Every time a suicide bombing strikes Israel, mass coverage of the tragedy begins instantly. Whether landing on the front page of The New York Times or taking up the headline block on CNN.com, the pain Israeli people endure is shown endlessly. Israelis do suffer. Suicide bombings are horrific. Nevertheless, Palestinian pain occurs far more frequently, and yet often overlooked by the mainstream American media.

Since the uprising in September of 2000, more than 3800 Palestinians have been killed in the Occupied Territories as a result of the conflict. Most Americans are unaware of the toll because it is not properly reported. In 2004, If Americans Knew—an American organization that exposes and examines the facts of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict—reported that 808 Palestinian conflict deaths occurred while 107 Israelis conflict deaths occurred. The study, however, found that The New York Times covered Israeli deaths in the headline or the first paragraph in 159 articles—meaning in some cases they covered the same death numerous times. In contrast, The New York Times only covered about 40 percent of Palestinian deaths—334 of 808—in the headline or in the first paragraph of the articles. Nearly eight Palestinians died for every one Israeli. Disturbingly The New York Times is considered the quintessential “liberal” newspaper of the US.

“Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.” – Henry Kissinger, quoted in “Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own POW’s in Vietnam”

Vietnam was a chemical war for oil, permanently contaminating large regions and countries downriver with Agent Orange, and environmentally the most devastating war in world history. But since 1991, the U.S. has staged four nuclear wars using depleted uranium weaponry, which, like Agent Orange, meets the U.S. government definition of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Vast regions in the Middle East and Central Asia have been permanently contaminated with radiation.

And what about our soldiers? Terry Jemison of the Department of Veterans Affairs reported this week to the American Free Press that “Gulf-era veterans” now on medical disability since 1991 number 518,739, with only 7,035 reported wounded in Iraq in that same 14-year period.

This week the American Free Press dropped a “dirty bomb” on the Pentagon by reporting that eight out of 20 men who served in one unit in the 2003 U.S. military offensive in Iraq now have malignancies. That means that 40 percent of the soldiers in that unit have developed malignancies in just 16 months.

Since these soldiers were exposed to vaccines and depleted uranium (DU) only, this is strong evidence for researchers and scientists working on this issue, that DU is the definitive cause of Gulf War Syndrome. Vaccines are not known to cause cancer. One of the first published researchers on Gulf War Syndrome, who also served in 1991 in Iraq, Dr. Andras Korényi-Both, is in agreement with Barbara Goodno from the Department of Defense’s Deployment Health Support Directorate, that in this war soldiers were not exposed to chemicals, pesticides, bioagents or other suspect causes this time to confuse the issue.

This powerful new evidence is blowing holes in the cover-up perpetrated by the Pentagon and three presidential administrations ever since DU was first used in 1991 in the Persian Gulf War. Fourteen years after the introduction of DU on the battlefield in 1991, the long-term effects have revealed that DU is a death sentence and very nasty stuff.

Scientists studying the biological effects of uranium in the 1960s reported that it targets the DNA. Marion Fulk, a nuclear physical chemist retired from the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab and formerly involved with the Manhattan Project, interprets the new and rapid malignancies in soldiers from the 2003 war as “spectacular … and a matter of concern.”

This evidence shows that of the three effects which DU has on biological systems – radiation, chemical and particulate – the particulate effect from nano-size particles is the most dominant one immediately after exposure and targets the Master Code in the DNA. This is bad news, but it explains why DU causes a myriad of diseases which are difficult to define.

In simple words, DU “trashes the body.” When asked if the main purpose for using it was for destroying things and killing people, Fulk was more specific: “I would say that it is the perfect weapon for killing lots of people.”
sfbayview.com

…The US strategy in Iraq has been to destroy its Arab- Muslim identity and partition it into a minimum of three weak and conflicting protectorates, along sectarian lines, in order to ensure American political, economic and military domination. The invasion of Iraq was and remains an illegal war, a crime of aggression. Iraq and Iraqis are protected by international law — by the founding Charter of the United Nations as well as the Geneva Conventions and the Hague IV Convention. By recognising UN Security Council Resolution 1533, in which the US is described as an occupying power, the US bound itself to inalienable obligations, stated under international humanitarian law. These treaties stipulate that an occupying power cannot change the social, economic or political make-up of the occupied country and cannot link this country to any agreements or treaties that exceed the occupation. This includes the constitution, elections and all contracts that have been created.

…The present uprising of Iraqis is not merely a part of the wider struggle against savage globalisation and “free” capital; it is its forefront battle. It is because the Iraqis refuse to surrender their sovereignty to multinational corporations that Iraq is being destroyed so blatantly. We should all be humbled by the loses this people has been prepared to endure for our sake and demand the complete, unconditional and immediate withdrawal of occupation forces from Iraqi soil, along with the cancellation of any law, treaty, agreement or contract passed under occupation and the fair payment of reparations and compensations for the human and material loses the Iraqis have suffered.

The US plan has already failed — politically, morally, economically and even militarily. There are two types of strategy in warfare: either you have the ability to destroy your enemy or you have to destroy his will to fight. The US has failed in the first attempt, and can only completely eradicate the Iraqi population to succeed in the second. The Iraqi people’s right to resist is the basis of, and is protected by, the Charter of the United Nations. This people’s struggle will be our future pride if it is not already. Supporting the Iraqis in their legitimate and heroic fight does not mean supporting the return of any previous order. Iraqis have proven their determination in defining their fate and future. They have taken it into their hands and will not and cannot accept any kind of future tyranny.

The Iraqi youth will refuse any occupation, foreign interference, one party state, despotism, or authoritarian rule. It holds the heritage, technical skills and modernism to defend the separation of religion and state, equality between men and women and sovereignty over Iraq’s natural resources. This youth will not accept selling short the rights of the country and nation. While humanity has neared the edge of moral suicide, the success of their struggle is our salvation. My heart is Iraqi.
ahram.org.eg