On a recent night in downtown Nairobi, beneath a nightclub’s orange neon lights and spinning disco ball, dozens of descendants of Africa’s ancient Nubian tribe gathered in full regalia to perform traditional music.

But the crowd, who turned out in force for Nubian Night, was not there just for a glimpse into the past. About an hour into the concert, the vibe switched from plaintive drumming and chanting to loud, explosive hip-hop.

The concert was designed for Nubians in Kenya „ there are believed to be 200,000 of them here „ to keep their traditions alive and relevant by fusing them with modern sensibilities.

“In every community, the culture is getting lost,” said Yousouph Noah, a 26-year-old rapper who helped organize the concert. “I grew up in this community so I have the knowledge of traditional music. But I just combined it with the music of the younger people, hip-hop.”

Nubians came to Kenya from Egypt and Sudan after serving with the British Army in the King’s African Rifles regiment during World War I. The British then settled them in what is now a sprawling Nairobi slum, Kibera, a maze of dwellings topped by rusting iron roofs. Noah lives in Kibera.
music.yahoo.com

Dennis Bernstein/ Flashpoints: Many in the U.S. see the AFL-CIO as a huge effective union [federation] representing tens of thousands of workers in this country, which may be true and is but it is not widely understood that the union joined hands with the U.S. State Department and spy and propaganda agencies to undermine foreign governments in the guise of supporting democracy in the good old USA fashion.

In recent days this is no where more obvious than in Haiti and Venezuela: the United States has been heavily engaged in both countries and has availed themselves of various subsets of the AFL-CIO to subvert the will of the people and to undermine self determination in both these countries.
upsidedownworld.org

LOS ANGELES (AFP) – A video game which features mercenaries invading Venezuela to guarantee oil supplies for the United States has become the latest source of tension between the two nations.

The game, “Mercenaries 2: World in Flames” only comes out next year but Venezuela’s Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel has already expressed anger — at the US government.

“This shows the perversion of North American society, its government,” said Rangel on Wednesday, calling President George W. Bush’s administration “a government of gangsters, drug traffickers and criminals”.
news.yahoo.com

…”Today is a particularly symbolic day. Cuba is a founding member of the Human Rights Council, and the United States is not,” Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said. “The absence of the United States is the defeat of lies; it is the moral punishment for the haughtiness of an empire.

“The election entailed a demanding assessment. Each one got what they deserved,” Perez Roque added.
cnn.com

In Israeli discourse, Israel is always the side exercising restraint in its conflict with the Palestinians. This was true again for the events of the past week: As the Qassam rockets were falling on the Southern Israeli town of Sderot, it was ‘leaked’ that the Israeli Minister of Defense had directed the army to show restraint.1

During the week of Israeli restraint, the army killed a Palestinian family who went on a picnic on the Beit Lahya beach in the Gaza Strip; after that, the army killed nine people in order to liquidate a Katyusha rocket.

But in the discourse of restraint, the first killing does not count, because the army denied its involvement, and the second was deemed a necessary act of self-defense. After all, Israel is caught in the midst of Qassam attacks, and must defend its citizens. In this narrative, the fact that Israel is content merely to bombard the Gaza Strip from air, sea and land is a model of restraint and humanity that not many states could match.
counterpunch.org

The US and British leaders may be getting domestic flak for their perceived mistakes in Iraq, but some observers in the Arab world see them as being quite successful – in carrying out a well-calculated plan to divide the country.

The debate dates back to July 13, 2003, when the Iraqi Governing Council was formed under Paul Bremer, the US administrator.

Sectarianism and ethnic extremism were strengthened in that council and various laws have since encouraged an aggressive sectarianism leading to a fierce militia war.

Anis Mansour, an Egyptian editor and author, believes the US is following the historical British policy of divide and rule.
aljazeera.net

Curfew escalates chaos as Baghdad battle rages
BAGHDAD, Iraq Iraq’s prime minister Friday tightened an already draconian security clampdown in the capital in an attempt to restore order on downtown streets during an hourslong gunbattle that at times involved Iraqi and American troops fighting Shiite and Sunni Arab gunmen.

Maliki’s Master Plan
June 24, 2006 – A timetable for withdrawal of occupation troops from Iraq. Amnesty for all insurgents who attacked U.S. and Iraqi military targets. Release of all security detainees from U.S. and Iraqi prisons. Compensation for victims of coalition military operations.

…Numerous rights organisations have reported the presence, “for security reasons,” of female detainees in many prisons throughout Iraq. Evidence indicates widespread maltreatment, degradation and physical and psychological torture, in addition to unhealthy and unhygienic conditions of detention. There remains considerable uncertainty about the number of female detainees.

…there is the personal testimony of detainees following their release. One such case is Hoda Al-Azawi, who was interviewed following her release from Abu Ghraib. Another is Abdul- Jabbar Al-Kubaysi, secretary-general of the Iraqi Patriotic Alliance, who spent over a year in detention in Camp Cropper and who recalls hearing, night after night, day after day, the cries and screams of women being tortured under interrogation.
weekly.ahram.org.eg

(AP) NEW YORK As a member of the National Guard, Nadine Beckford patrolled New York train stations after Sept. 11 with a 9mm pistol, then served a treacherous year in Iraq.

Now, six months after returning, Beckford lives in a homeless shelter.

“I’m just an ordinary person who served. I’m not embarrassed about my homelessness, because the circumstances that created it were not my fault,” said Beckford, 30, who was a military-supply specialist at a base in Iraq that was a sitting duck for around-the-clock attacks, “where hell was your home.”

Thousands of veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan are facing a new nightmare — the risk of homelessness. The government estimates that several hundred vets who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan are homeless on any given night around the country, although the exact number is unknown.
wcbstv.com

What a brutal and heartless place this is.

Illegal Federal Reserve At Heart Of Problem As Minnesota Judge Allegedly Poisened In 1969 After Ruling Against Corrupt Banksters

The New Underworld Order’s bank accounts are used for bribery, murder and corruption world wide as private Illuminati-controlled bankers make money out of thin air. European investigators trying to trace the illegal funds, say the Illuminati’s Global Security Fund needs to be stopped and is the difference between freedom and slavery in America.

The Illuminati’s cash cow, grazing freely on the world wide pasture of greenbacks, isn’t called “Elsie” but instead is called the Global Security Fund, a name actually meaning in the secret cult’s language Global Terrorist Fund.
axisoflogic.com

Stephen Hawking charmed a group of Chinese students on Wednesday, telling them he liked Chinese culture and women while warning that global warming might turn the Earth into a fiery planet.
chinadaily.com.cn