KATHMANDU (AFP) – Nepal’s new government declared a public holiday after parliament passed a proclamation stripping King Gyanendra of his powers and thousands of people staged a celebration rally.

Shouting “Long live the Nepali People” and Down with the monarchy,” around 3,000 people marched through the streets of the capital Kathmandu and converged on a park, witnesses said.

“We will fight for the rights of people and not for power,” N.P. Saud, a lawmaker belonging to the Nepali Congress (Democratic) told the crowd.

Home Ministry spokesman Baman Prasad Neupane said the nationwide public holiday was announced “to celebrate yesterday’s historic proclamation that made the house of representatives sovereign and all-powerful.”

In the unanimously passed proclamation, the government stripped King Gyanendra of political power and removed his control of the army.

The proclamation also declared Nepal a secular state, ending its unique status as the world’s last Hindu kingdom.
news.yahoo.com

I have received the report of the Investigative Committee of the University of Colorado and consider it a travesty. This “investigation” has all along been a pretext to punish me for engaging constitutionally-protected speech and, more generally, to discredit the sorts of alternative historical perspective I represent.

There is blatant conflict of interest involved. Interim Chancellor DiStefano, who has consistently and publicly declared his bias against me, has served from the outset as both “complainant” and judge.

Despite my repeated requests for an investigation conducted by unbiased experts, the committee was composed primarily of CU insiders. Although both were available and willing to serve, the investigative panel included neither American Indian scholars nor persons competent in American Indian Studies.

To all appearances the committee was composed with an eye toward precluding the involvement of individuals knowledgeable in my discipline, as well as the context of indigenous history and belief that I have quite consistently brought to bear in my scholarship.

As a result, it was necessary to devote much of the 120-day investigative period, not to examining “the facts” at issue in my case, but to acquainting the committee with some of the most rudimentary procedures employed in American Indian Studies. Had qualified individuals been included on the panel, this preemption of my ability to respond to substantive matters would not have occurred.

Although the rules allow for extensions of the “deadline” for reporting, and despite the fact that I repeatedly requested an additional 30 days in which to formulate adequate responses to the highly complex and steadily-changing questions posed by the committee, the committee declined to allow any extension whatsoever.

The upshot is that the committee’s report is often self-contradictory. It frequently misrepresents or conflicts with the evidence presented. In many respects, it is patently false.

As things stand, the entire procedure appears to be little more than a carefully-orchestrated effort to cast an aura of legitimacy over an entirely illegitimate set of predetermined outcomes.

It follows that I reject and will vigorously contest each and every finding of misconduct.
counterpunch.com

Traders on the world’s financial markets left for home last night counting their losses after a week of extreme turbulence that witnessed the biggest one-day fall in share prices in London and New York for three years.

Fears that rising inflation might prompt central banks to keep raising the cost of borrowing triggered a sell-off which sloshed through all markets – putting the skids under the dollar, sending commodity prices on a rollercoaster ride and prompting cautious investors to seek out the traditional safe haven of gold.
guardian.co.uk

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Occidental Petroleum has filed an arbitration claim against Ecuador for cancelling its oil exploration rights, a move that has soured relations with Washington.

The claim, filed Wednesday with the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes in Washington, says the damages “will exceed one billion dollars,” according to the complaint.

The petition bases its claims on protections the company says are included in the US-Ecuador Bilateral Investment Treaty.

It follows Ecuador’s move on Monday to cancel the California-based company’s rights to an oil field in the Amazon basin region and take control of its production infrastructure.
news.yahoo.com

TRIPOLI, Libya – Two longtime members of the anti-American camp met Wednesday for talks about the oil market: Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, who’s coming from the cold after the U.S. restored relations, and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who’s going deeper into the freeze after being hit with a U.S. arms embargo.

Gadhafi, his face partly covered by a large brown scarf draped over his Arab tribal robe, welcomed Hugo Chavez at his house, scarred with bullet holes and showing damage to some of the crenelated concrete at the top of the building from a 1986 U.S. bombing raid.

The two leaders met for about an hour in a tent near the wrecked home, but officials from both sides refused to disclose details of the discussions.
msnbc.msn.com

Venezuela has signed a $1.3 billion agreement with China to purchase 18 oil tankers to facilitate the south American country’s expanding Asian market.

A spokesman for Venezuela’s state-run oil company says the agreement also calls for China to help build shipyards in Venezuela and train its workers.

The oil company says it hopes to expand its total fleet of tankers to at least 42 ships

Venezuelan officials say the nation currently sells about 15 percent of its oil and other petroleum products to China and would like to increase that to about 45 percent by 2012. Venezuela is among the world’s largest oil exporters.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has said he wants to increase trade with China – and rely less on the United States as a customer for its oil.
voanews.com

President Bush’s nationally televised address on immigration on Monday night was intended as a grand gesture to revive his collapsing presidency, but instead he has plunged the Republicans into a political centrifuge, breaking the party down into its raw elements, whose collisions are triggering explosions of unexpected and ever greater magnitude.

The nativist Republican base is at the throat of the business community. The Republican House of Representatives, in the grip of the far right, is at war with the Republican Senate. The evangelical religious right is paralysed while the Catholic church is a mobilising force behind demonstrations by Hispanic immigrants. Every effort Bush makes to hold a nonexistent Republican centre generates an opposing effect within his party.
guardian.co.uk

My, my, my, isn’t this a surprise! It turns out that George W. Bush’s “Secure Border Initiative” to “control illegal immigration” is actually just a great big pork trough for his cronies and benefactors in the weapons biz to cash in big-time off the suffering and poverty of dusky foreigners. Now where have we seen that before?

The NYT reports that Bush is limbering up the federal checkbook to funnel even more millions to masters of war like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, still feasting sumptuously off the bloated corpse of conquered Iraq. These fine purveyors of contemporary “defense” (who says irony is dead?) will soon string the border with all manner of hugely expensive high-tech gizmonics designed to keep the hemisphere’s most desperate and vulnerable people from crossing over to take the slave-wage, no-benefit, no-protection jobs offered to them by, well, Bush’s cronies and benefactors in big business and among the wealthy elite (whom he has recently larded with more tax-cut largess). It’s a neat scam, really, a win-win situation: your corporate cronies get even more loot from the public treasury Ð and they still get the cheap Latino labor that keeps them in clover.
chris-floyd.com

Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough says Aboriginal leaders will not be invited to a national summit on the violence in Indigenous communities.

Premiers and chief ministers will be asked to attend the summit to be held before the end of June.

Mr Brough says premiers and the chief ministers can bring representatives from their regions who they think are relevant to the summit.

He says Indigenous leaders will not be invited

“Indigenous people have spoken, they have told us what they need. We now, as politicians and as people who run the judicial systems, are the ones who have to step up to the plate,” he said.
abc.net.au

Islamist gunmen overran a compound held by a United States-backed warlord alliance outside the lawless Somali capital on Wednesday, killing seven fighters and decapitating several, witnesses said.

Islamic militia targeted the base north of the city in the latest flare-up in fighting since the two sides began observing an informal truce on Sunday after eight days of pitched street battles in Mogadishu, they said.

In addition to those killed, at least nine fighters were wounded and a “battlewagon” — a pick-up mounted with a heavy machine gun — was seized from the compound about 20km north of the capital, they said.

“Seven people were killed and a battlewagon was taken by the Islamic court militia,” said one of the fighters loyal to warlord Mohamed Omar Habeb Dheere, who were forced to abandon the compound after the attack.

“A few were killed by gunfire and the others were beheaded after they were captured,” said a fighter from a non-allied militia, who was near the base when the attack took place.

Dheere — a member of the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism — was not at the compound at the time of the attack, they said.

The new fatalities bring the death toll from the most recent surge in violence between the alliance and the courts in and around Mogadishu to nearly 140 and came as thousands rallied for peace in the city.

More than 2 000 people attended the Islamist-sponsored demonstration in southern Mogadishu, denouncing the alliance and its foreign backers.
mg.co.za

What courage it took to attend such a demonstration.

Foreigners Reportedly Fighting in Somalia
NAIROBI, Kenya – A secular alliance that is battling fundamentalist Islamic militias in Somalia charged Wednesday that its rivals are bolstered by fighters from the Middle East, Pakistan and elsewhere, and said it has the bodies to prove it.

“Foreigners were fighting alongside the local terrorists and were killed,” said Hussein Gutale Ragheh, a spokesman for the secular alliance. No one was caught alive, he said, but among the dead were Arabs and others who looked like Pakistanis, Sudanese and Oromo fighters from neighboring Ethiopia.

The report could not be independently verified, but the possible presence of foreign extremists has heightened fears that al-Qaeda is making Somalia a staging ground, a State Department spokesman said Wednesday.

The U.S. is widely believed to be supporting the alliance of secular warlords, but American officials refused Wednesday to confirm or deny that.