US forces in Iraq have launched a series of bloody attacks on Shia militia forces in and around Baghdad, killing or wounding 30 fighters and provoking widespread anger in the Shia community.

Iraqi government security forces, backed by the US troops and aircraft, moved into the vast Shia slum of al-Sadr City in eastern Baghdad at 3.15am yesterday in an attempt to arrest a commander of the Mehdi Army, the main Shia militia, called Abu Diraa. Iraqi police said nine people were killed including a woman. An Iraqi officer said the Americans had provided lists of people to be arrested in al-Sadr City.

The US army in Iraq is evidently starting a new confrontation with the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, which now controls much of Baghdad. Its militiamen have grown in number over the last year as Shia civilians look for protection against Sunni assassins and death squads. “Muqtada is taking over the city,” said one Shia yesterday.
independent.co,uk

42 killed in sectarian massacre in Baghdad Sunni neighborhood
BAGHDAD (AFP) – At least 42 people have been killed by roving bands of masked gunmen who appeared to be targeting Sunnis in the Baghdad neighborhood of Jihad.

A security source said the gunmen were wearing civilian clothes but were masked.

Witnesses said black-clad gunmen they described as Shiite militiamen set up at least two checkpoints Sunday and began stopping vehicles, forcing people out of their cars and shooting them.

“They also went into certain Sunni houses and killed everyone inside,” said one witness who declined to be named.

The killings ended when US and Iraqi forces surrounded the area and began a search for the gunmen.

On Saturday night, a car bomb in front of a Shiite mosque wounded at least four people, while on Friday a car bomb explosion near a Sunni mosque in the same neighborhood killed two and wounded three.

Police Abuses in Iraq Detailed
BAGHDAD „ Brutality and corruption are rampant in Iraq’s police force, with abuses including the rape of female prisoners, the release of terrorism suspects in exchange for bribes, assassinations of police officers and participation in insurgent bombings, according to confidential Iraqi government documents detailing more than 400 police corruption investigations.

A recent assessment by State Department police training contractors echoes the investigative documents, concluding that strong paramilitary and insurgent influences within the force and endemic corruption have undermined public confidence in the government.

Officers also have beaten prisoners to death, been involved in kidnapping rings, sold thousands of stolen and forged Iraqi passports and passed along vital information to insurgents, the Iraqi documents allege.

Days after Israeli aircraft carried out an aerial flight over the palace of President Bashar Assad, Syrian officials began hinting that the country may open a new front in the Golan Heights if it is attacked by Israel.

According to reports, the Israeli flyover deeply embarrassed the Syrians, and officials are now seriously contemplating military action against Israel.

“If Israel carries out further stupidities inside Syria, the Golan front will not remain as it is. Many Israelis will suffer as they suffered attacks from Southern Lebanon when they conducted acts of foolishness there,” Parliament Member Muhammad Habash said in a television interview this week.

“Syria’s devotion to peace as a strategic option since the Madrid Conference does not mean that this will remain the only option forever. The Syrians have other options as well,” he stated.
ynetnews.com

There is evidence that left-leaning voters have been scrubbed from key electoral lists in Latin America.

There’s something rotten in Mexico. And it smells like Florida. The ruling party, the Washington-friendly National Action Party (Pan), proclaimed yesterday their victory in the presidential race, albeit tortilla thin, was Mexico’s first “clean” election. But that requires we close our eyes to some very dodgy doings in the vote count that are far too reminiscent of the games played in Florida in 2000 by the Bush family. And indeed, evidence suggests that Team Bush had a hand in what may be another presidential election heist.

Just before the 2000 balloting in Florida, I reported in the Guardian that its governor, Jeb Bush, had ordered the removal of tens of thousands of black citizens from the state’s voter rolls. He called them “felons”, but our investigation discovered their only crime was Voting While Black. And that little scrub of the voter rolls gave the White House to his brother George.

Jeb’s winning scrub list was the creation of a private firm, ChoicePoint of Alpharetta, Georgia. Now, it seems, ChoicePoint is back in the voter list business – in Mexico – at the direction of the Bush government. Months ago, I got my hands on a copy of a memo from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, marked “secret”, regarding a contract for “intelligence collection of foreign counter-terrorism investigations”.

Given that the memo was dated September 17 2001, a week after the attack on the World Trade Centre, hunting for terrorists seemed like a heck of a good idea. But oddly, while all 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, the contract was for obtaining the voter files of Venezuela, Brazil … and Mexico.
guardian.co.uk

…Though it is Saturday morning, on my friendÍs block no children play and no one is cutting the grass. Most of her neighborsÍ homes are still abandoned. Three older women neighbors have died since Katrina.

We are still finding dead bodies. Ten days ago, workers cleaning a house in New Orleans found a body of a man who died in the flood. He is the 23rd person found dead from the storm since March.

Over 200,000 people have not yet made it back to New Orleans. Vacant houses stretch mile after mile, neighborhood after neighborhood. Thousands of buildings remain marked with brown ribbons where floodwaters settled. Of the thousands of homes and businesses in eastern New Orleans, 13 percent have been re-connected to electricity.

The mass displacement of people has left New Orleans older, whiter and more affluent. African Americans, children and the poor have not made it back ? primarily because of severe shortages of affordable housing.

Thousands of homes remain just as they were when the floodwaters receded ? ghost-like houses with open doors, upturned furniture, and walls covered with growing mold.

Not a single dollar of federal housing repair or home reconstruction money has made it to New Orleans yet. Tens of thousands are waiting. Many wait because a full third of homeowners in the New Orleans area had no flood insurance. Others wait because the levees surrounding New Orleans are not yet as strong as they were before Katrina and fear re-building until flood protection is more likely. Fights over the federal housing money still loom because Louisiana refuses to clearly state a commitment to direct 50 percent of the billions to low and moderate income families.

Meanwhile, 70,000 families in Louisiana live in 240-square-foot FEMA trailers ? three on my friendÍs street. As homeowners, their trailer is in front of their own battered home. Renters are not so fortunate and are placed in gravel strewn FEMA-villes across the state. With rents skyrocketing, thousands have moved into houses without electricity.

Meanwhile, privatization of public services continues to accelerate.

Public education in New Orleans is mostly demolished and what remains is being privatized. The city is now the nationÍs laboratory for charter schools ? publicly funded schools run by private bodies. Before Katrina the local elected school board had control over 115 schools ? they now control 4. The majority of the remaining schools are now charters.
axisoflogic.com

Investors Lead Home Sale Boom in New Orleans
NEW ORLEANS, July 8 „ In a market spurred by speculators and bargain hunters, an extraordinarily large number of houses in the flood-ravaged metropolitan area here are being sold, according to real estate analysts, who say volume and sales prices exceed levels before Hurricane Katrina.

The higher prices are largely due to an increase in value in suburban areas, many of which were not heavily flooded, or in dry areas of New Orleans. But flooded houses in the city are being bought as well, often at deep discounts of as much as $50 a square foot less than they would have sold for before the hurricane.

“We have a stronger housing market than before,” said Wade R. Ragas, professor emeritus of finance at the University of New Orleans and the president of a local consulting firm, Real Property Associates.

“There is renovation activity in every ZIP code of Orleans Parish,” Dr. Ragas added, “but the strongest buying activity is, in general, closest to where it did not flood or where there was under two feet of water.”

Across the nine-parish region that includes New Orleans, 7,506 single-family homes were sold between January and the end of last month, compared with 6,449 in the same period last year, according to statistics from the New Orleans Metropolitan Association of Realtors and the Gulf South Real Estate Information Network. The average price so far this year is $221,244, compared with $193,097 in the same period last year.

The interest in buying, selling and renovating has been a bright spot since the last months of 2005, and has confounded some people who thought the flooding would cripple the housing market for years. But it is just one of many counterintuitive contrasts that are defining the area and making easy predictions unreliable.

Sick sick sick…the Iraq privatization fantasy is not proceeding according to plan, so hell, NO is the next best thing…

PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) – At least 16 people were killed and three injured in a night of fighting between armed groups in the south of Haiti’s capital, a United Nations official said.

The UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) sent a battalion to the southern Port-au-Prince quarter of Martissant to help calm the situation, and the Haitian national police force also reported sending in its teams.

“While we are not excluding the possibility of other casualties, the military forces found the bodies of 16 victims, and three people wounded, on the spot,” MINUSTAH said in a statement.

It was not immediately clear whether the casualties included civilians or members of the rival gangs.
news.yahoo.com

Fighting in Sudan’s Darfur region has increased since a peace deal was signed two months ago, the head of the United Nations mission in Sudan has said.

Jan Pronk said people had been given distorted information about the deal, meaning it had not won popular support.

Only one of the rebel groups signed it and all deadlines for implementing the agreement have so far been missed.

The insecurity has meant the estimated 2m people displaced in the three-year conflict are unwilling to go home.
bbc.co.uk

The 1949 Geneva Conventions state, in article 54 of their additional protocol: “Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited.” It is also ‘prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population.’ That means that the Israeli army’s latest offensive in the occupied territories amounts to war crimes; it includes the blockade of the civilian population and their collective punishment, the bombing of Gazaês $150m power station, depriving 750,000 Palestinians of electricity in the intense summer heat, and the kidnapping on the West Bank of 64 members of the political wing of Hamas, including eight cabinet ministers and 22 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council. On 5 July the Israeli government said it would expand its military operation in Gaza.
mondediplo.com

Three people suffer from shock as second rocket hits house
A Sderot resident was moderately wounded when a Qassam rocket slammed into the western Negev city on Sunday morning. The man suffered shrapnel wounds to his chest and was rushed to Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon.

A second rocket hit a Sderot house, causing damage.

Magen David Adom paramedics were treating three people for shock.

On Saturday evening, a six-year-old Palestinian girl, her elder brother and her mother were killed in an explosion in a house east of Gaza City, medical sources said.

The explosion occurred in the neighborhood of Sajaiyeh, near the Karni border crossing on Gaza’s eastern border with Israel.

The Israel Defense Forces denied responsibility for the fatalities, but confirmed that it launched an air strike in the area, claiming it was aiming for a group of armed gunmen.

The Age of Irony
It is tragic to witness the transformation of a victim into the worst perpetrator of that which he suffered from in the past. But this is what is unfolding before our eyes.

This statement is evidently clear in its meaning and intent. The entire world knows that what I have in my mind is the Israelis and their loss of all sense of morality and reason. They have descended, without any inhibitions, into unprecedented savagery directed against the defenseless Palestinians.

Rarely have a people suffered under such brutality that they are denied the very essence of their humanity.

Seen through the prism of the Israelis and the Western press and the elite, the Palestinians never die or are maimed. Their homes are never destroyed nor their infrastructure is decimated. Their leaders are never assassinated or abducted. No, the Palestinians canêt suffer or feel pain or bear the weight of oppression; they simply fade away and are never heard of again.

It is truly ironic that the words of Shylock are far more apt today to describe the Arab than the Jew and it is even more ironic that the hand which kills, destroys and tortures is that of a Jew and that its victim is the Arab who has been the Jewês cousin, friend, neighbor and colleague not for decades but centuries. Arabs are the one people who never committed pogroms at any time in history against Jews or built gas chambers to cast the Jews into or ghettos to imprison them in.

WASHINGTON, July 8 „ The Bush administration said Saturday that it would open formal negotiations with Russia on a long-discussed civilian nuclear agreement that would pave the way for Russia to become one of the world’s largest repositories of spent nuclear fuel.

President Vladimir V. Putin has been looking to expand the country’s role in the multibillion nuclear power business. The United States has traditionally opposed any such arrangement, in part because of concerns about the safety of Russian nuclear facilities, and because the country has helped Iran build its first major nuclear reactor.

But administration officials said that once Mr. Bush endorsed Mr. Putin’s proposal last year for Iran to conduct uranium enrichment inside Russia „ rather than in Iran, where the administration fears it would be diverted to weapons „ it made little sense to bar ordinary civilian nuclear exchanges with Russia.

In announcing the change of course, the White House made it clear that in return, it expected Mr. Putin’s cooperation in what promises to be a tense confrontation with Iran on forcing it to give up the enrichment of uranium. Mr. Bush has charged that the enrichment is intended to feed a secret nuclear weapons program. “We have made clear to Russia that for an agreement on peaceful nuke cooperation to go forward, we will need active cooperation in blocking Iran’s attempts to obtain nuclear weapons,” said Peter Watkins, a White House spokesman.
nytimes.com

The events in Iraq during the past week make it clear, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that neither the Bush administration nor its puppet Shiite theocrats in Iraq want peace.

Ten days ago, the U.S.-installed government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki made a grand show of offering “national reconciliation” with the Iraqi insurgency. In what seemed at first to be an olive branch to the insurgents, Maliki began dropping hints that the regime in Baghdad might offer a package deal to the resistance, including a broad amnesty for armed, anti-occupation fighters and an outreach to the deposed Iraqi Baath party. It was, according to Maliki and to Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, a sincere effort to strike a deal that could end the fighting in Iraq and which conceivably could lead to the withdrawal of U.S. forces.

Last week, in this space, I wrote skeptically about the thin possibility that Maliki might strike a deal with the resistance. By now, it is obvious that the Maliki-Khalilzad supposed reconciliation plan was no such thing. Khalilzad, President Jalal Talabani and Maliki have been conducting on-again, off-again talks with parts of the Iraqi resistance for at least a year, but appear to have no intention of offering the insurgent groups a deal they can accept. Instead, Khalilzad and the leaders of the Iraq government are engaged in a cynical, divide-and-conquer maneuver that can only guarantee the war in Iraq will grind on for years.
axisoflogic.com

The picture in the paper of the young soldier being led away in handcuffs bore an eerie resemblance to the pictures of Lynndie England at her trial. Both young, scared and perhaps not truly sure of what they had done wrong. Like England, who suffered from learning disabilities and Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome before entering the military, Private Steven Green, charged with the rape and murder of a young Iraqi girl and the murder of 3 members of her family, suffers from “anti-social personality disorder” which the military cited as the reason for his discharge earlier this year.

We will no doubt once again be assured that this was an isolated incident, a few low-ranking soldiers run amok. But it will be no more true now than it was at Abu Ghraib. The rape and murder of civilians has been a systemic tool of war since the dawn of time. It is simply not believable that we have been in Iraq this long without other incidents of rape and cold-blooded murder of civilians taking place. And in fact that has been documented by human rights organizations, NGOs and independent media.

But despite the enormous press coverage and airplay that this story is getting, the context in which the atrocity took place will only nominally be examined, if at all. That aspect of the story is not what is newsworthy. Or to be a tad more crass and honest, it is not what sells. And the dissemination of news is most definitely a business, one that is now owned and controlled primarily by large corporations who are far more concerned with the bottom line than with truth and integrity.

Many of the companies that make the news accessible are also heavily invested in the pornography industry, a form of media that makes much, much more money than does hawking the news. Knowing this, it should not be at all surprising that when a news story that contains the same elements as a good porn plot occurs, the media doesn’t hesitate to frame the story from that angle. Sex sells. Violent sex sells even better.
counterpunch.org