Zarqawi, al Qaeda are heading out, U.S. general says
Al Qaeda in Iraq and its presumed leader, Abu Musab Zarqawi, have conceded strategic defeat and are on their way out of the country, a top U.S. military official contended yesterday.
The group's failure to disrupt national elections and a constitutional referendum last year "was a tactical admission by Zarqawi that their strategy had failed," said Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who commands the XVIII Airborne Corps.
"They no longer view Iraq as fertile ground to establish a caliphate and as a place to conduct international terrorism," he said in an address at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Gen. Vines' statement came as news broke that coalition and Iraqi forces had killed an associate of Osama bin Laden's during an early morning raid near Abu Ghraib about two weeks ago.
Rafid Ibrahim Fattah aka Abu Umar al Kurdi served as a liaison between terrorist networks and was linked to Taliban members in Afghanistan, Pakistani-based extremists and other senior al Qaeda leaders, the military said yesterday.
In the past six months, al Kurdi had worked as a terrorist cell leader in Baqouba. Prior to that, he had traveled extensively Pakistan, Iran and Iraq and formed a relationship with al Qaeda senior leaders in 1999 while in Afghanistan.
He also had ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, formed while he was in Iran and Pakistan, and joined the jihad in Afghanistan in 1989, the military said. He was killed March 27.
Gen. Vines said the foreign terrorists had made a strategic mistake when they tried to intimidate and deny Iraqis a way to vote.
"I believe Zarqawi discredited himself with the Iraqi people because of his willingness to slaughter Iraqi people," he said.
Huthayafa Azzam, whose father was seen as a political mentor of bin Laden, told reporters in Jordan in early April that Zarqawi had been replaced as head of the terrorist fight in Iraq in an effort to put an Iraqi at the head of the organization.
Azzam said Zarqawi had "made many political mistakes," including excessive violence and the bombing last November of a Jordanian hotel, and as a result was being "confined to military action."
Gen. Vines, who from January 2005 to January 2006 led all coalition forces in Iraq, did not comment on those reports. But he did caution that although the foreign extremists were leaving Iraq "looking for more fertile ground," they could come back.
"The question now is what kind of government is going to be formed and is it going to be credible," he said, acknowledging that Iran had significant influence over Iraq's religious Shi'ite population.
"Iran wants us out, but not too soon -- after a Shi'ite government friendly to Iran is established," Gen. Vines said. "Iran's view is that the current government is not strong enough, and if we pulled out now, there would be a low-level civil war."
washingtontimes.comToo much. They're packing their suitcases with heads hung in shame. 'Strategic defeat'--yeah right. Now that we like Sunnis instead of Shia, this cartoon character, thrice-dead, one-eyed, one-legged all-purpose evil villain, has outlived its usefulness. Especially when even the likes of the Washinton Post is on to the scam and uttering the term 'psy-ops.' One good thing though: since he probably does not exist in the flesh, it's easy to disappear him.
Rootsie on 04.16.06 @ 08:46 AM CST [
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Saturday, April 15th
Guest-worker hopes spark rush to border
NOGALES, Mexico - At a shelter overflowing with migrants airing their blistered feet, Francisco Ramirez nursed muscles sore from trekking through the Arizona desert - a trip that failed when his wife did not have the strength to go on.
He said the couple would rest for a few days, then try again, a plan echoed by dozens reclining on rickety bunk beds and carpets tossed on the floor after risking violent bandits and the harsh desert in unsuccessful attempts to get into the United States.
The shelter's manager, Francisco Loureiro, said he has not seen such a rush of migrants since 1986, when the United States allowed 2.6 million illegal residents to get American citizenship.
This time, the draw is a bill before the U.S. Senate that could legalize some of the 11 million people now illegally in the United States while tightening border security. Migrants are hurrying to cross over in time to qualify for a possible guest-worker program - and before the journey becomes even harder.
azcentral.comCorporate Agriculture's Dirty Little Secret Our nation's continuing controversy surrounding its current immigration "policy" is more than just corporate agribusiness's dirty little secret, but it also shrouds an economic iceberg that unless recognized could well rip the U.S. apart.
Ignored by our national TV and media pundits in their alarm over the influx of foreign workers, principally from Mexico, the immigration issue has both its historical roots and an abject lesson regarding what is wrong about our whole so-called "free enterprise" system.
To begin with the question needs to be asked who really are "illegal" immigrants on mostly territory that now comprises one third of the U.S. land mass and which in fact belonged to Mexico prior to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 ?
Here was land literally stolen from the Mexican people by a handful of thievish land barons in what the famous land reformer Henry George once described as "a history of greed, of perjury, of corruption, of spoliation and high-handed robbery for which it would be difficult to find a parallel."
The long-term consequences of such action was that in the words of Ernesto Galarza, author of the classic Merchants of Labor, the Treaty left "the toilers on one side of the border, the capital and the best land on the other."
Therefore, it is no accident that throughout U.S. history the chronic areas of rural poverty have remained the South, where the plantation system has dominated the agricultural scene, and the Southwest, where the vast tracts of productive land have remained in the hands of a privileged few through the years.
During those years these large growers have developed the mistaken notion that the nation and our government should provide them with a cheap, unorganized work force.
Rootsie on 04.15.06 @ 10:29 AM CST [
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Venezuela tightens oil grip
CARACAS, VENEZUELA - Powering ahead with stringent nationalist reforms, Hugo Chávez's Venezuela is showing multinational oil firms little mercy.
Tense relations between private firms and Mr. Chávez's government escalated last week when the government seized fields operated by two European oil giants - France's Total and Italy's ENI - after the two companies snubbed government demands to convert their contracts to joint ventures with the state by April 1.
"This country does not allow itself to be blackmailed," says energy minister Rafael Ramirez. "These two multinational companies resist adjusting to our law. Our sovereignty isn't under negotiation."
Sixteen companies - including Chevron and Shell - did agree to new terms giving state oil company PDVSA at least a 60 percent state stake, a success which analysts say could embolden Venezuela to demand a majority stake in more valuable projects in the country's Orinoco heavy-oil belt. Heavy oil's viscosity makes it more expensive to drill and refine than regular oil. However, high oil prices have attracted top companies to Venezuela's heavy oil, which could boost the country's reserves count to the largest in the world - ahead of Saudi Arabia.
"Chávez is in the driver's seat because he has what everybody wants," says Roger Tissot, energy analyst at PFC Energy consulting firm, about Venezuela's heavy oil. "It's not any kind of oil. It's the oil of the future."
But more forced contract changes could further increase investor fear and make it more difficult for US oil companies to access one of the largest long-term sources of oil left on the planet.
csmonitor.com
Rootsie on 04.15.06 @ 10:23 AM CST [
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Cuba claims drug war victory, without US help
BOCA DEL TORO, Cuba (Reuters) - Flying over chains of sandy keys in a clattering old Soviet Mi-17 helicopter, Col. Jorge Samper declares a Cuban victory over South American drug traffickers -- with no thanks to the United States.
Communist Cuba wants to cooperate with its bitter political enemy in the war on narcotics, but is getting no response from Washington, says Samper, deputy commander of the Cuban Coast Guard.
Colombian smugglers have used the hundreds of tiny secluded islands off Cuba's long north coast as drop sites for bales of cocaine and marijuana to be picked up from the sea by speedboats for delivery to the United States.
Despite scarce resources to patrol its waters other than slow-moving Soviet-era torpedo boats, Cuba says it has the problem under control.
"The drug trafficking through Cuba, especially by sea, has been controlled. The traffickers have gone elsewhere," Samper told foreign reporters on a tour of coastal observation posts along the north coast of eastern Cuba.
au.news.yahoo.com
Rootsie on 04.15.06 @ 10:21 AM CST [
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Over the Moon: how football wins recruits for sect leader in Brazil
Unification Church's critics say sports projects are used to brainwash impoverished young people
t's training time on a drizzly morning in the impoverished Brazilian suburb of Los Angeles and 18 footballers huddle in circles, exchanging passes, headers and a sporadic barrage of expletives.
For residents of this impoverished area near Campo Grande, where boggy tracks wind between wooden shacks and cows amble from street to street, it's an ordinary Wednesday morning.
But this is no ordinary Brazilian football team. Nor is the team's owner - the eccentric 86-year-old leader of the Unification Church, Reverend Sun Myung Moon - your run-of-the-mill chairman.
Part of a miniature football empire commanded by evangelism's answer to Roman Abramovich, the New Hope Sports Centre (CENE) represents, say its directors, an attempt to transform Brazil's increasingly decadent national game as well as a step along the road to world peace.
"Our plans were always that within 10 years we'd be in the top flight," says Jose Rodrigues, the club's marketing director, at CENE's training centre in Los Angeles. "That means 2009 - so we have three years to really show what we can do."
For Moon's many critics, the team is nothing more than a bait used to draw locals into his controversial sect, offering access to education and sports to convert people from vulnerable, deprived communities.
CENE is one of two Moon-backed teams (the other is in Sao Paulo) that form the sports wing of a South American Moonie kingdom, now made up of around 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) of farmland in Brazil, bought for an estimated $25m (£14m), and at least 600,000 hectares (1.5m acres) in neighbouring Paraguay.
Followers say that through this transnational corridor Moon hopes to project his ideas across the continent. "In truth, football has the power to do something which nothing else can do - create one, single belief," says Paulo Telles, the club's executive president and a member of Moon's Family Association in Brazil.
Moon's Brazilian odyssey is said to have begun in 1994 during a fishing trip to the Pantanal, one of the world's largest wetlands, in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. Astonished by the area's wildlife, he returned to begin constructing the estate which now straddles Brazil's border with Paraguay.
The centrepiece of this ever-growing empire is the New Hope ranch, near the small town of Jardim. Here the Moonies receive followers from around the world, for visits of up to 40 days. Twelve neatly organised brick bungalows sit next to the Moonie church, a huge terracotta mansion, with the group's logo sprouting from its roof. Foreign visitors cruise around the community in white VW vans, and during the week the area's state school fills with children from nearby towns.
guardian.co.uk
Rootsie on 04.15.06 @ 10:18 AM CST [
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Official: U.S. Backing Somali Militants
NAIROBI, Kenya — The United States is backing a new coalition of Somali militants fighting Islamic extremists for control of the lawless nation's capital, a U.S. official said, as both sides prepared for a battle that could explode in widespread violence.
Clan leaders have put aside their traditional rivalries to take on the extremists, whom they describe as terrorists. The extremists, though, say they can offer unity and order after decades of chaos in Somalia.
Residents say both sides have recently received an infusion of cash and weapons as they face off for control of the country, which has had no central government since warlords divided it into clan-based fiefdoms in 1991.
The State Department said in March that the U.S. government was concerned about "al-Qaida fugitives responsible for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam (in Tanzania) and the November 2002 bombing of a tourist hotel and attack on a civilian airliner in Kenya, who are believed to be operating in and around Somalia."
While there have been numerous reports of al-Qaida bombers hiding in the Horn of Africa nation, only recently have they been reportedly involved in fighting alongside Somali extremists.
A U.S. official, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press, said prominent al-Qaida leaders with large cash bounties on their heads are under the protection of the extremist leaders in Mogadishu. He did not name them, but eight men wanted in the embassy bombings are on the FBI most wanted list.
The same official, who monitors the situation in Somalia, also repeated the long-standing U.S. policy of working with anyone who is ready to cooperate in the fight against al-Qaida, adding that U.S. officials had made contact with a wide range of Somalis. He declined to say what kind of support the U.S. was supplying.
chron.com
Rootsie on 04.15.06 @ 10:12 AM CST [
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42% of Your Taxes Pay for War
FCNL estimates the U.S. spent $783 billion in FY05 for past and present military activities. This includes funding for the Defense Department, Energy Department nuclear weapons programs, military-related activities of other agencies, foreign military financing and training, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, mandatory spending for military retirement and health care, veterans programs ($69 billion), and the estimated portion of interest paid on the national debt which can be attributed to past wars and military spending ($170 billion).
fcnl.org'I feel like I did in the Vietnam days - I hate to pay taxes just so they can go and bomb more people'Florida councilman won't swear support for US MIAMI (Reuters) - A newly elected councilman in a tiny Florida village has refused to take an oath of office pledging support for the U.S. government because he adamantly opposes the war in Iraq.
Councilman-elect Basil Dalack, 76, a Korean War veteran, won an uncontested election to fill a vacancy on the five-person council of the southeast Florida town of Tequesta.
But he is refusing to take the oath of office -- due to be administered on Thursday -- because the oath requires him to "support, protect and defend" the government. His decision comes at a time when polls show ebbing support for the war.
Dalack said he believes the U.S. war in Iraq is unjust and "an abomination." He said he could not sleep at night if he took a pledge implying blanket support for the U.S. government.
"Those dead kids in Iraq, American kids and Iraqi kids, would haunt me," Dalack said.
Rootsie on 04.15.06 @ 10:09 AM CST [
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On Cheney, Rumsfeld order, US outsourcing special ops, intelligence to Iraq terror group, intelligence officials say
The Pentagon is bypassing official US intelligence channels and turning to a dangerous and unruly cast of characters in order to create strife in Iran in preparation for any possible attack, former and current intelligence officials say.
One of the operational assets being used by the Defense Department is a right-wing terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), which is being “run” in two southern regional areas of Iran. They are Baluchistan, a Sunni stronghold, and Khuzestan, a Shia region where a series of recent attacks has left many dead and hundreds injured in the last three months.
One former counterintelligence official, who wished to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the information, describes the Pentagon as pushing MEK shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The drive to use the insurgent group was said to have been advanced by the Pentagon under the influence of the Vice President’s office and opposed by the State Department, National Security Council and then-National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice.
“The MEK is run by a brother and sister who were given bases in northern Baghdad by Saddam,” the intelligence official told RAW STORY. “The US army secured a key MEK facility 60 miles northwest of Baghdad shortly after the 2003 invasion, but they did not secure the MEK and let them basically be because [then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz was thinking ahead to Iran.”
rawstory.com
Rootsie on 04.15.06 @ 10:02 AM CST [
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Saudis plan to fence off border with chaos
SAUDI ARABIA has invited bids for the construction of a security fence along the entire length of its 900km (560mile) desert border with Iraq in a multimillion-pound project that will attract interest from British defence companies.
The barrier is part of a package to secure the Kingdom’s 6,500km of borders in an attempt to improve internal security and bolster its defences against external threats.
Saudi Arabia is concerned that the chaos in Iraq could cause an overspill of sectarian violence and terrorism. The kingdom claims to be winning the battle against al-Qaeda’s Saudi wing but wants to protect itself against Saudi insurgents returning from Iraq.
“There’s no suggestion that the border isn’t secure at the moment, so it could be a bit of an expensive white elephant,” a European diplomat in Riyadh said. Saudi militants joining the insurgency use other routes, such as Syria.
timesonline.co.uk
Rootsie on 04.15.06 @ 10:00 AM CST [
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Iran Can Now Make glowing Mickey Mouse Watches
Despite all the sloppy and inaccurate headlines about Iran "going nuclear," the fact is that all President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday was that it had enriched uranium to a measely 3.5 percent, using a bank of 180 centrifuges hooked up so that they "cascade."
The ability to slightly enrich uranium is not the same as the ability to build a bomb. For the latter, you need at least 80% enrichment, which in turn would require about 16,000 small centrifuges hooked up to cascade. Iran does not have 16,000 centrifuges. It seems to have 180. Iran is a good ten years away from having a bomb, and since its leaders, including Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei, say they do not want an atomic bomb because it is Islamically immoral, you have to wonder if they will ever have a bomb.
The crisis is not one of nuclear enrichment, a low-level attainment that does not necessarily lead to having a bomb. Even if Iran had a bomb, it is hard to see how they could be more dangerous than Communist China, which has lots of such bombs, and whose Walmart stores are a clever ruse to wipe out the middle class American family through funneling in cheaply made Chinese goods.
What is really going on here is a ratcheting war of rhetoric. The Iranian hard liners are down to a popularity rating in Iran of about 15%. They are using their challenge to the Bush administration over their perfectly legal civilian nuclear energy research program as a way of enhancing their nationalist credentials in Iran.
Likewise, Bush is trying to shore up his base, which is desperately unhappy with the Iraq situation, by rattling sabres at Iran. Bush's poll numbers are so low, often in the mid-30s, that he must have lost part of his base to produce this result. Iran is a great deus ex machina for Bush. Rally around the flag yet again.
If this international game of chicken goes wrong, then the whole Middle East and much of Western Europe could go up in flames. The real threat here is not unconventional war, which Iran cannot fight for the foreseeable future. It is the spread of Iraq-style instability to more countries in the region.
axisoflogic.comIsn't it interesting how Iran and the U.S. are enemies made in heaven? Are they simply mirror-images of the clash of two fundamentalisms or is it something more? Are we watching theater? Was the end of all this written long ago?
Rootsie on 04.15.06 @ 09:56 AM CST [
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Iran says nuclear drive unstoppable
A defiant Iran vowed that nothing could halt its controversial nuclear program, in a direct challenge to the UN Security Council that could risk international sanctions.
With the country basking in national pride after regime scientists successfully enriched uranium to make nuclear fuel -- a milestone in its atomic drive -- officials pledged to move rapidly to industrial-scale work.
"When a people master nuclear technology and nuclear fuel, nothing can be done against them," boasted armed forces joint chief of staff, General Hassan Firouzabadi.
Iran says its nuclear drive is purely peaceful, but uranium enrichment can be extended to make the fissile core of a bomb. The Security Council had set April 28 as a deadline for Tehran to halt the ultra-sensitive work.
"The West can do nothing and is obliged to extend to us the hand of friendship," the ISNA news agency quoted Firouzabadi as saying.
breitbart.comIran Could Produce Nuclear Bomb in 16 Days, U.S. Says April 12 (Bloomberg) -- Iran, defying United Nations Security Council demands to halt its nuclear program, may be capable of making a nuclear bomb within 16 days, a U.S. State Department official said.
Iran will move to ``industrial scale'' uranium enrichment involving 54,000 centrifuges at its Natanz plant, the Associated Press quoted deputy nuclear chief Mohammad Saeedi as telling state-run television today.
``Using those 50,000 centrifuges they could produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon in 16 days,'' Stephen Rademaker, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, told reporters today in Moscow.
Iran Leader: Israel Will Be Annihilated TEHRAN, Iran Apr 14, 2006 (AP)— The president of Iran again lashed out at Israel on Friday and said it was "heading toward annihilation," just days after Tehran raised fears about its nuclear activities by saying it successfully enriched uranium for the first time.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Israel a "permanent threat" to the Middle East that will "soon" be liberated. He also appeared to again question whether the Holocaust really happened.
"Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation," Ahmadinejad said at the opening of a conference in support of the Palestinians. "The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm."
Ahmadinejad provoked a world outcry in October when he said Israel should be "wiped off the map."
Israel pressuring U.S. over Iran attack WASHINGTON - The U.S. government is continuing to aspire for a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear problem, but doubts for chances of success are growing, a Washington Post article published on Sunday said.
According to the paper, Israeli officials who visited Washington recently gave the Americans an urgent message regarding Iran: The Islamic Republic was closer to developing a nuclear bomb than Washington realizes, and the moment of decision is approaching quickly.
On Saturday, a New Yorker article said that the U.S. government is planning to massively bomb Iran, and even use nuclear bunker-busting bombs in order to destroy Iranian facilities and development sites containing nuclear weapons.
The Washington Post wrote that despite estimations by American officials that Iran would need another decade before having the bomb, Israel believes that the critical breakthrough could take place within a number of months. Israeli representatives told the Americans that Iran has begun the most advanced centrifugal experiments in a speedier manner than experts predicted in the past.
The newspaper said that Israel recently leaked its own attack plans, if the United States does not act. The Israeli plan includes aerial attacks, commando raids, a possibility of a missile attack, and even bombs carried on the backs of dogs. The newspaper quotes Israeli newspapers which said that Israel constructed an exact replica of the Natanz nuclear development facility, but the United States does not believe that the operation can succeed without using nuclear weapons.
Outside View: US-Iran Clash Ahead MOSCOW, April 14 (UPI) -- The United States and Iran seem to have firmly set on a path that leads to the hell of war.
There are hopes for the best -- and I myself would be happy to be erring on the pessimistic side -- but the way things look here and now, hopes are increasingly overshadowed by grim reality.
Assertive statements on the American side and Gulf war games on the Iranian side equally scream of muscle-flexing. Either side, while portraying the other as a new evil empire, is in fact perfectly aware of the danger the opponent poses to its core ideological and political values. Though neither risks thumbing its nose on third-party peacemakers, neither actually listens to whatever they say.
There are objective propositions suggesting that the Middle East is in for yet another big fight. To fit in well with a changing world, both parties are equally desperate for a qualitative leap ahead. Regrettably, both seem to think that such success comes easier through a military, rather than an intellectual or moral, breakthrough.
Rootsie on 04.15.06 @ 09:47 AM CST [
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'Democracy' at work
International aid freezes threaten to strangle the democratically elected Hamas-led government.
Young engineer Nassar Odwa from the Ministry of Local Government waits patiently for hours to meet Abdul-Aziz Duwaik, the new Hamas parliament speaker. Odwa, in charge of urban planning projects that Norway abruptly cancelled after the Hamas-led government took power, wants to hear the alternatives for desperately needed infrastructure projects that would, for one, ameliorate the raw sewage problem reeking through Gaza. And he's not the only one in search of answers.
Indeed, tension is mounting in the Gaza Strip as Palestinians are preparing for an economic freeze after the Untied States and European Union slashed their assistance to the new Palestinian government, stocking up on food supplies and fuel in anticipation of stalled paychecks coupled with commercial borders closures by Israel. Meanwhile, sustained Israeli air raids and artillery bombardments took 15 Palestinian lives and injured dozens just over last weekend.
On Friday US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced: "Because the new Hamas-led Palestinian government has failed to accept the Quartet principles of non- violence, recognition of Israel and respect for previous agreements between the parties, the US is suspending assistance to the Palestinian government's cabinet and ministries." The EU followed suit on Monday suspending direct aid to the PA, including crucial budgetary funding used for infrastructure projects and to cover the salaries of over 150,000 PA employees, affecting nearly a third of the population. EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said Europe will continue to provide funds so that "basic human needs will be met". The EU aid will remain frozen for at least a month.
Several EU nations, including Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands have already frozen their aid to the new government and more may follow. Aid from the EU and its 25 member nations averages $615 million per year, about half of which has been suspended. The EU decision to freeze payments affects an immediate instalment of $36.5 million, compounding an already dire financial situation for the Palestinian government. Canada, Norway and other non-EU member nations have also cancelled funding.
Hamas has condemned the suspension of American and European assistance. "We are being punished. Is this democracy?" Duwaik told Al-Ahram Weekly. "The results of the 25 January elections showed the world that we are not convinced with this whole process. We would like to change the rules of the game so that our national rights are recognised, our well being is recognised and our basic human rights are recognised. If we give Israel recognition, they will give us a piece a paper, just put it in water and swallow it," he said.
Meanwhile the US will increase its basic humanitarian assistance to Palestinians by 57 per cent, bringing it to a total of $245 million. Some $65 million will be reserved for emergency food programmes, mostly distributed by the United Nations World Food Programme, $31 million for health programmes, $14 million for education programmes, and $135 million for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). More controversially, $42 million are being allocated to so-called democracy building expansion. Palestinians have largely interpreted this as an effort by the US to create an opposition to Hamas. Assistance will be administered through non-Palestinian Authority entities, including local and international non-governmental organisations. $45 million in direct assistance to the PA has been cancelled, along with the suspension of $359 million worth of other programmes.
US Consul-General in Jerusalem Jack Wallace told Palestinian journalists at his residence: "We will not have any contact with the PA or any of its ministries. However we will continue to work closely with President Mahmoud Abbas." Assistant Secretary of State David Welch said the decision of whether to channel fund to Abbas directly or not will be made in the future. Responding to queries as to why the US has made no effort to meet Hamas to find out their intentions, he replied: "You are right. We have had no contact with them, and that is part of the policy we established. It also reflects American law." Hamas, for its part, remains amenable to negations with the US.
weekly.ahram.org
Rootsie on 04.15.06 @ 09:32 AM CST [
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Israel to sever all links with Palestinians
ISRAEL'S acting Prime Minister has declared that the Jewish state will cut all ties with the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority, brand it a hostile power, and rule out negotiations with the President, Mahmoud Abbas, as long as Hamas refuses to renounce violence and recognise Israel.
Ehud Olmert said he would ask his cabinet to approve measures recommended by his top security advisers on Sunday, capping days of escalating tensions.
European Union foreign ministers, meeting in Luxembourg yesterday, were expected to endorse a decision to cut direct aid to the Palestinian government.
The quartet of Middle East peace brokers - the EU, the US, Russia and the United Nations - is trying to push Hamas to meet the same requirements on violence and Israel's right to exist, and to express clear support for the peace process.
On Friday the 25-member EU and the US announced a suspension of aid to the Palestinian Government.
smh.com.auIf Sharon can laugh, that's what he's doing.Hamas: Israeli move "a declaration of war" RAMALLAH (Reuters) - Hamas said it considered Israel's severing of contacts with the new Palestinian government "a declaration of war" and President Mahmoud Abbas accused the Jewish state of breaking international law.
In statements issued in quick succession on Monday, election rivals Hamas and Abbas denounced Israel for branding the Palestinian Authority a "hostile entity" and suspending security coordination.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said in a statement in Gaza that Israel's decision to sever contacts with the Palestinian Authority amounted to "a declaration of war and a failed attempt to cause internal divisions among Palestinians".
In the West Bank city of Ramallah, Abbas said Israel's position "completely violates the agreements we have signed with them and violates international law".
"We demand from this Israeli government to stop such measures", Abbas said.
With foreign ministers from the European Union poised to endorse a freeze in direct aid to the new government, thousands of Palestinians poured onto the streets of Gaza in protest.
In the West we 'stage demonstrations', while in Palestine people 'pour into the streets' like an insensible blob.U.S. blocks UN draft pressing Israel to end attacks UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United States on Thursday blocked a U.N. Security Council statement drafted by Arab nations and aimed at putting pressure on Israel to stop military strikes on Palestinian targets.
U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said the draft, even after three days of intense negotiations, "was disproportionately critical of Israel, and unfairly so, and needlessly so."
But Palestinian U.N. Observer Riyad Mansour accused Washington of "shielding and protecting Israeli activities and aggression against the Palestinian people."
"It was obvious that many of their concerns were accommodated but yet they kept coming back and coming back for additional things. It was obvious they did not want the Security Council to have a position," Mansour said.
Israel to boycott inquest into death of British peace activist shot in Gaza Israel will boycott an inquest opening today in London which will investigate the death of a British peace activist shot dead in broad daylight by an Israeli soldier.
Tom Hurndall, 22, died after being shot in Rafah, Gaza, while trying to lead Palestinian children to safety after the soldier opened fire from a nearby observation tower in April 2003.
His mother, Jocelyn, told the Guardian she is angry Israel is not cooperating as she still has many questions about how her son came to be shot: "We are hoping the coroner will address the culture of impunity in which the soldier was functioning and the enormous lack of cooperation we have experienced from the Israelis."
Mrs Hurndall said that only when the family went to Israel and for seven weeks pressured the authorities and raised the case in the media did any sort of investigation begin.
Her solicitor, Imran Khan, said Israel's boycott of the inquest is disrespectful: "It shows their disdain for the whole process."
Omar Barghouti: A Decisive Vote for Apartheid “Israel votes for disengagement and final borders” and “Israelis abandon the dream of Greater Israel” were the main themes in the spin that characterized mainstream, even some progressive media coverage of the Israeli parliamentary elections which took place on March 28. In reality, the election results revealed that a consensus has emerged among Israeli Jews, not only against the basic requirements of justice and genuine peace, as that was always the case, but also in support of a more aggressive form of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and cementing Zionist apartheid.
In the 2006 Knesset elections, Israelis have indeed overwhelmingly voted for “disengagement,” not from the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), but only from the Palestinians -- whether in Israel, in the OPT or in exile. Palestinian lands are clearly precluded from this disengagement. An objective examination of the election results and the political platforms of the parties represented in the new Israeli parliament will show that the celebration of the “shift to peace and realism” by Western and Israeli media pundits alike is not only unwarranted but quite deceptive as well. If anything, an avid adoption of the right’s agenda has taken place.
Rootsie on 04.15.06 @ 09:27 AM CST [
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War Without End
The war in Iraq arrives on America's shores by gurney. More than 16,000 U.S. soldiers have been wounded -- almost 400 have lost arms, legs, hands or feet. Each injury ripples through lives with its own pattern and force. And as two soldiers and their families are discovering, the war will be with them forever.
The ball was an Army tradition, celebrating a battalion's homecoming from war. The men of the 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry Regiment out of Fort Lewis — a few miles from Tacoma — had returned 10 days earlier from their yearlong tour of duty in Iraq.
Two soldiers had been looking forward to the gathering with heightened anticipation. Thirty-year-old Michael Buyas and 23-year-old Brent Bretz were sergeants in the 1-5's Charlie Company. In December 2004, within four days of each other, bombs blew off their legs. As the company fought together in Iraq for another 10 months, Michael and Brent — like so many of the more than 17,000 American soldiers wounded in Iraq — slipped off alone to their own private wars, inside hospital rooms and physical therapy clinics, inside the intricate circles of their families, inside their own heads.
sfgate.com
Rootsie on 04.15.06 @ 09:11 AM CST [
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When is Killing Arab Civilians Considered a Massacre?
Recent reports from Iraq indicate beyond doubt that the U.S. occupation army has embarked on a new “tactic” from its menu of atrocities, in an attempt to counter the burgeoning Iraqi resistance attacks against its soldiers. “Old-style” massacres of Iraqis have become so commonplace lately that even Iraqi “allies” of the U.S. were forced to unreservedly condemn them.
Among Western governments, alas, silence prevails. After all, the massacre victims are only Arabs. Not only is there an alarming apathy towards the horrifying spread of this phenomenon, but there is also a despicable aversion to calling it by its name. At the same time, many in the West go up in arms condemning the “massacre” of seals, whales, dolphins or a few white men anywhere around the world.
“Modern” massacres, that is the indiscriminate bombing -- which last year included the use of phosphorus -- of Iraqi civilian neighborhoods in “unruly” cities like Falluja and Qa’im, have always been a standard U.S. and British tactic. But those “clean,” remotely-executed and hi-tech acts of state terrorism were always easier for the world’s only empire and its lackeys to defend and present as “precision” targeting of “the enemy,” especially to a pathetically obedient media. The direct, messy murder of civilians, particularly by tying their hands and shooting them in the head, execution style, has not been as common, although it was practiced in several reported incidents in Iraq since the invasion [1]. Now it is being reported more often, but in language that in effect, if not always by intention, leads to sanitizing it, even to normalizing it as a nasty, yet unavoidable, part of “war.” If this evasion from using the term massacre is not deliberate, it can only reflect a deep-seated racism among western journalists who cannot use the same ethical or professional standards in reporting the killings of Arab civilians that they normally use when dealing with “white” victims in comparable situations.
Just this month, for instance, the U.S. army committed at least two massacres, killing in cold blood tens of Iraqi civilians, including four children and a six-month old baby, yet neither of them was reported as a massacre. On March 15, near Balad, the Iraqi police reported the following [2]:
“American forces used helicopters to drop troops on the house of Faiz Harat Khalaf situated in the Abu Sifa village of the Ishaqi district. The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 people, including five children, four women and two men, then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and killed their animals.”
A local police commander said hospital autopsies “revealed that all the victims had bullet shots in the head and all bodies were handcuffed.” It is crucial to note that the Iraqi police force is recruited, trained and assigned tasks under vigilant U.S. supervision.
A similar massacre was committed in Haditha, in November of last year, as an act of revenge after a bomb attack on a U.S. marine force. A nine-year-old survivor of that crime, who lived in a house near the site of the killings, told Time magazine that after the explosion her father began reading the Qur'an. “First, they went into my father's room, where he was reading the Qur'an, and we heard shots. I couldn't see their faces very well, only their guns sticking into the doorway. I watched them shoot my grandfather first in the chest and then in the head. Then they killed my granny.” All in all, 15 Iraqis were butchered in this incident.
Still, the Guardian reporter, or editor, chose not to call either “event” a massacre. He also avoided any terms of revulsion usually used to describe similar “incidents,” particularly those involving white victims.
zmag.org
Rootsie on 04.15.06 @ 09:07 AM CST [
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Sunni group demands action as body count surges in Iraq
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Sunni Arab political leaders said Thursday that nearly 90 Sunnis had been reported abducted or killed in the past two days by groups with possible ties to the nation's Shiite Muslim-led Interior Ministry forces.
In one incident, up to 25 men just released from detention were reportedly whisked away by gunmen in SUVs. The Sunnis also allege that 20 corpses turned up in Baghdad, all people reportedly abducted by security forces on the morning of April 4.
seattletimes.nwsource.comIraq unrest forces 65,000 to flee At least 65,000 Iraqis have fled their homes as a result of sectarian violence and intimidation, according to new figures from the Iraqi government.
And the rate at which Iraqis are being displaced is increasing.
Figures given to the BBC by the Ministry for Displacement and Migration show a doubling in the last two weeks of the number of Iraqis forced to move.
April 12: U.S. Death Toll in Iraq This Month Hits 35 BAGHDAD, Iraq - Four more American soldiers were killed in Iraq, the U.S. military said as the U.S. death toll for the month surpassed the total for all of March. More than 40 Iraqis also died, including at least 22 in a car bombing near a Shiite mosque northeast of Baghdad.
April 14: Nine US troops killed in Iraq over 4 days; Two-stars demands Rumsfeld resign WASHINGTON (Agencies): A recently retired two-star general who just a year ago commanded a US Army division in Iraq on Wednesday joined a small but growing list of former senior officers to call on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to resign. “I believe we need a fresh start in the Pentagon. We need a leader who understands teamwork, a leader who knows how to build teams, a leader that does it without intimidation,” Maj Gen John Batiste, who commanded the Germany-based 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, said in an interview on CNN.
In recent weeks, retired Marine Corps Lt Gen Gregory Newbold, Army Maj Gen Paul Eaton and Marine Corps Gen Anthony Zinni all spoke out against Rumsfeld. This comes as opinion polls show eroding public support for the 3-year-old war in which about 2,360 US troops have died. “You know, it speaks volumes that guys like me are speaking out from retirement about the leadership climate in the Department of Defense,” Batiste said. “But when decisions are made without taking into account sound military recommendations, sound military decision making, sound planning, then we’re bound to make mistakes.”
...Nine US soldiers have been killed across Iraq in the past four days, including three in roadside bombings Wednesday morning, the US military said. Two were killed when their vehicle was struck by a bomb south of Baghdad at around 9:20 am (0520 GMT) Wednesday, and another died in a similar bombing east of Baghdad.
Three soldiers died on Tuesday after their vehicle was struck by a roadside bomb north of Baghdad. One soldier died on Monday from wounds suffered in enemy action on Sunday while operating in the western Al-Anbar province. Near Balad, north of Baghdad, a soldier was killed Sunday when his patrol was hit by a roadside bomb, the military said, adding that another was wounded.
A soldier from the 101st Airborne Division died on Monday in a “non-battle injury” at the US base of Sykes, near Tall Afar in northern Iraq. An investigation is underway. The latest fatalities brought the US military personnel death toll in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion to 2,364 according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures. President Bush’s claim three years ago that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq was based on US intelligence that was later proved false. Spokesman Scott McClellan vigorously denied suggestions that Bush was making claims that already had been debunked when he said that two small trailers seized in Iraq were mobile biological laboratories.
Rootsie on 04.15.06 @ 09:01 AM CST [
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Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi
The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The documents state that the U.S. campaign aims to turn Iraqis against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners. U.S. authorities claim some success with that effort, noting that some tribal Iraqi insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists.
For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.
Some senior intelligence officers believe Zarqawi's role may have been overemphasized by the propaganda campaign, which has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, Internet postings and at least one leak to an American journalist. Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers," Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an Army meeting at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., last summer.
In a transcript of the meeting, Harvey said, "Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will -- made him more important than he really is, in some ways."
...One slide in the same briefing, for example, noted that a "selective leak" about Zarqawi was made to Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter based in Baghdad. Filkins's resulting article,
about a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi and boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq, ran on the Times front page on Feb. 9, 2004.
Leaks to reporters from U.S. officials in Iraq are common, but official evidence of a propaganda operation using an American reporter is rare.
Filkins, reached by e-mail, said that he was not told at the time that there was a psychological operations campaign aimed at Zarqawi, but said he assumed that the military was releasing the letter "because it had decided it was in its best interest to have it publicized." ...Another briefing slide states that after U.S. commanders ordered that the atrocities of Saddam Hussein's government be publicized, U.S. psychological operations soldiers produced a video disc that not only was widely disseminated inside Iraq, but also was "seen on Fox News."
U.S. military policy is not to aim psychological operations at Americans, said Army Col. James A. Treadwell, who commanded the U.S. military psyops unit in Iraq in 2003. "It is ingrained in U.S.: You don't psyop Americans. We just don't do it," said Treadwell.
...The Zarqawi campaign is discussed in several of the internal military documents. "Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response," one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed three methods: "Media operations," "Special Ops (626)" (a reference to Task Force 626, an elite U.S. military unit assigned primarily to hunt in Iraq for senior officials in Hussein's government) and "PSYOP," the U.S. military term for propaganda work.
One internal briefing, produced by the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, said that Kimmitt had concluded that, "The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date."
washingtonpost.comApril 10, 2006. Bush speaks on terrorism ...The terrorists know that the greatest threat to their aspirations is Iraqi self-government. And we know this from the terrorists' own words.
In 2004, we intercepted a letter from Zarqawi to Osama bin Laden. In it, Zarqawi expressed his concern about, "the gap that will emerge between us and the people of the land." He declared, "Democracy is coming." He went on to say, "This will mean suffocation" for the terrorists.
Zarqawi laid out his strategy to stop democracy from taking root in Iraq.
BUSH: He wrote, "If we succeed in dragging the Shia into the arena of sectarian war, it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger. The only solution for us is to strike the religious, military and other cadres among the Shia with blow after blow."
The advance of democracy is the terrorists' greatest fear. It's an interesting question, isn't it?
Why would they fear democracy? What is it about freedom that frightens these killers? What is it about liberty that causes these people to kill innocent women and children?
Rootsie on 04.15.06 @ 08:47 AM CST [
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NASCAR Furious With NBC Over 'Dateline' Segment
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (April 5) - American stock car racing's governing body called a network television news magazine "outrageous" on Wednesday, saying it tried to provoke anti-Muslim reactions from spectators at last week's race for a story about growing U.S. sentiment against Islam.
The National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing said the NBC network's "Dateline NBC" confirmed it was sending Muslim-looking men to a race, along with a camera crew to film fans' reactions. The NBC crew was "apparently on site in Martinsville, Virginia, walked around and no one bothered them," NASCAR spokesman Ramsey Poston said Wednesday.
"It is outrageous that a news organization of NBC's stature would stoop to the level of going out to create news instead of reporting news," Poston said.
news.aol.com
Rootsie on 04.15.06 @ 08:30 AM CST [
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AT&T forwards all Internet traffic into NSA
The NSA program came to light in December, when the New York Times reported that the president had authorized the agency to intercept telephone and Internet communications inside the United States without the authorization of any court. Over the ensuing weeks, it became clear that the NSA program has been intercepting and analyzing millions of Americans' communications, with the help of the country's largest phone and Internet companies.
Reporting has also indicated that those same companies—and AT&T specifically—have given the NSA direct access to their vast databases of communications records, including information about whom their customers have phoned or emailed with in the past.
In the lawsuit, EFF alleges that AT&T, in addition to allowing the NSA direct access to the phone and Internet communications passing over its network, has given the government unfettered access to its over 312 terabyte "Hawkeye" database, detailing nearly every telephone communication on AT&T's domestic network since 2001, according to the complaint. The suit also alleges that AT&T allowed the NSA to use the company's powerful Daytona database management software to quickly search this and other communication databases.
spamdailynews.com
Rootsie on 04.15.06 @ 08:29 AM CST [
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Friday, April 14th
UC Regents lose control of nuclear weapons program
This is part six of this very worthwhile 10-part articleResearch on population control, preventing future births, is now being carried out secretly by biotech companies. Dr. Ignacio Chapela, a University of California microbiologist, discovered that wild corn in remote parts of Mexico is contaminated with lab altered DNA. That discovery made him a threat to the biotech industry.
Chapela was denied tenure at UC Berkeley when he reported this to the scientific community, despite the embarrassing discovery that UC Chancellor Berdahl, who was denying him tenure, was getting large cash payments - $40,000 per year - from the LAM Research Corp. in Plano, Texas.
Berdahl served as president of Texas A&M University before coming to Berkeley. During a presentation about his case, Chapela revealed that a spermicidal corn developed by a U.S. company is now being tested in Mexico. Males who unknowingly eat the corn produce non-viable sperm and are unable to reproduce.
Depopulation, also known as eugenics, is quite another thing and was proposed under the Nazis during World War II. It is the deliberate killing off of large segments of living populations and was proposed for Third World countries under President Carter’s administration by the National Security Council’s Ad Hoc Group on Population Policy.
National Security Memo 200, dated April 24, 1974, and titled “Implications of world wide population growth for U.S. security & overseas interests,” says:
“Dr. Henry Kissinger proposed in his memorandum to the NSC that ‘depopulation should be the highest priority of U.S. foreign policy towards the Third World.’ He quoted reasons of national security, and because `(t)he U.S. economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less-developed countries ... Wherever a lessening of population can increase the prospects for such stability, population policy becomes relevant to resources, supplies and to the economic interests of U.S.”
sfbayview.compart 1part 2part 3part 4part 5part 7part 8part 9part 10
Rootsie on 04.14.06 @ 05:12 PM CST [
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Monday, April 10th
Kazakstan and Uzbekistan Make Up
...In the Nineties, Central Asia’s two big states developed along different routes. Kazakstan implemented economic reforms, allowed a degree of political freedom, and remained closely allied with Moscow while also inviting western engagement in its lucrative oil industry.
Uzbekistan attracted much less investment, not least because it chose to avoid political and economic reform. At the same time it grew apart from Russia, trying to position itself as the main regional player. When the United States-led coalition began the “war on terror” in Afghanistan, the Uzbeks seized the opportunity, offering the use of a military airbase and building closer relations with western powers.
But this strategic partnership came to an abrupt end last summer, when Tashkent responded to US demands for an investigation into Andijan by evicting the American military and turning away from the West.
According to an Uzbekistan-based analyst who asked not to be named, President Karimov took this radical step not because he could easily dispense with western economic assistance, but because “western democratic standards had become a danger to the continued existence of the extreme authoritarian regime in Uzbekistan”.
iwpr.net
rootsie on 04.10.06 @ 07:32 AM CST [
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Iraq discovers oil in Kurdistan
ARBIL (AFP) - Iraq has announced the discovery of oil reserves in the mountainous Kurdish region of Zakho, close to its border with Turkey.
"We have discovered oil at Zakho, 470 kilometers (292 miles) north of Baghdad," announced Iraq's deputy oil minister Motassam Akram.
He said Saturday the oil wells were drilled by a Norwegian company, DNO and added that the actual crude reserves would be known "soon".
In March, the Kurdish authorities had announced the signing of a contract with a Canadian company, Western Oil Sands, to survey the region of Garmain, 120 kilometres (75 miles) south of Sulaimaniyah.
Most of Iraq's crude reserves are in Shiite-dominated southern regions and are exported through the two southern terminals. Exports from Iraq's northern fields around Kirkuk, just south of Kurdistan, have effectively been shut down by insurgent attacks.
The self-rule Kurdish region, which groups the provinces of Sulaimaniyah, Arbil and Dohuk, has a small number of oil fields.
news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 04.10.06 @ 07:27 AM CST [
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Mubarak: US must not leave Iraq yet
The Egyptian president says civil war has broken out in Iraq and the conflict would spread and worsen if US forces left the country.
Hosni Mubarak also told Arabic channel Al Arabiya on Saturday that many in the large Shia Muslim populations of Arab states around Iraq were more loyal to Iran than to their own countries.
Asked what effect an immediate US troop withdrawal would have, he said: "Now? It would be a disaster... It would become an arena for a brutal civil war and then terrorist operations would flare up not just in Iraq, but in very many places.
"It's not on the threshold [of civil war]. It's pretty much started. There are Sunnis, Shia, Kurds and those types which come from Asia."
"I do not know when the situation in Iraq will stabilise. I personally do not see a solution to the problem in Iraq, which is practically destroyed now."
aljazeera.net
rootsie on 04.10.06 @ 07:16 AM CST [
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After blasts, hospital fills with sobs When bombs hit leading Shiite mosque in Baghdad, killing 79, relatives can only grieve and ask, 'Why?'
Baghdad -- You hear the moans first. They're low and soft, broken sometimes by staccato sobbing.
Then comes the crying and the keening. Sometimes it's just one person. Sometimes two. Sometimes a group of people, family members, hugging and crying and asking the question no one can answer: "Why?"
This was the scene outside the emergency room at the Baghdad Teaching Hospital on Friday. Suicide bombers had struck the Shiite Buratha Mosque, just across the Tigris River to the west, as Friday prayers ended. At least 79 people were killed, and at least 160 were injured. Many of the victims were brought to this hospital.
Family and friends, Iraqi police, commandos and soldiers, all jammed the narrow street leading to the entrance of the emergency room. A steady stream of people walked slowly down the tree-lined street. At the door, uniformed guards checked identifications and searched for weapons.
It was an ideal spot for another suicide bomber.
sfgate.com
rootsie on 04.10.06 @ 07:13 AM CST [
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'Forgers' of key Iraq war contract named
TWO employees of the Niger embassy in Rome were responsible for the forgery of a notorious set of documents used to help justify the Iraq war, an official investigation has allegedly found.
According to Nato sources, the investigation has evidence that Niger’s consul and its ambassador’s personal assistant faked a contract to show Saddam Hussein had bought uranium ore from the impoverished west African country.
The documents, which emerged in 2002, were used in a US State Department fact sheet on Iraq’s weapons programme to build the case for war. They were denounced as forgeries by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) shortly before the 2003 invasion.
The revelation spawned a series of conspiracy theories, most alleging that the British, Italians, or even Dick Cheney, the American vice-president, had had a hand in forging them to back the case for war.
timesonline.co.ukThey were bored one day and decided to fake a contract.
rootsie on 04.10.06 @ 07:13 AM CST [
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US leak of Zarqawi letter riles Israelis
ISRAELI military intelligence officials have accused President George W Bush’s administration of undermining their attempts to infiltrate Al-Qaeda’s operations in Iraq by revealing the contents of a secret letter written by Osama Bin Laden’s second-in-command, writes Uzi Mahnaimi.
Israel passed the letter — in which Ayman al-Zawahiri outlined his Middle East strategy to Abu Musab al- Zarqawi, the Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq — to Washington last October on condition of strict anonymity.
Israeli officials were dismayed, however, when John Negroponte, the US director of national intelligence, made it available in both English and its original Arabic on his office web site.
Bush then referred to it during his weekly address. “The Al-Qaeda letter points to Vietnam as a model,” the president declared. “Al-Qaeda believes that America can be made to run again. They are gravely mistaken. America will not run and we will not forget our responsibilities.”
Israeli intelligence sources said officials who had worked on “Operation Tiramisu” inside Iraq took emergency steps to protect their sources, but it was not clear how successful they had been in averting the damage to their intelligence network.
They said Bush’s indiscretion had undone months of painstaking effort.At first I thought it was a typo, or that they have promoted Zarqawi to Bin Ladin's 'second in command.'
rootsie on 04.10.06 @ 07:09 AM CST [
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Sunday, April 9th
Women and jobless armed by Chavez to resist 'US invasion'
The President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, is recruiting and training a people's militia to help lead a "war of resistance" against what he claims is the threat of a US invasion. Housewives, students, construction workers and the unemployed are being recruited for the country's Territorial Guard. The first training sessions with firearms have already taken place.
"I can assure you right away that also in this battle we will defeat the US empire," Mr Chavez said in a speech last week. A former army officer who turned to politics after his attempt at a coup in 1992 failed, he has raised the spectre of a US invasion so often that Washington's ambassador, William Brownfield, put it on record last year that "the United States has never invaded ... and will never invade Venezuela".
independent.co.uk
rootsie on 04.09.06 @ 10:10 AM CST [
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Bachelet: joining Mercosur would be “back stepping”
The recently inaugurated Chilean president Michelle Bachelet said that for Chile to become a full member of Mercosur would mean “back stepping”.
“That’s why we are so enthusiastic and push so hard for a Free Trade Association of the Americas, FTAA”, added Ms Bachelet in a long weekend interview with Buenos Aires daily La Nación.
“The difficulty has always been that Chile has economic reforms in place. Becoming a full member of Mercosur would mean back stepping on those reforms”, she underlined.
“What is needed is a basic FTAA, in which minimum conditions are equivalent for all countries, and from there on keep advancing. An FTAA of this kind would enable all countries to join. That’s why we are enthusiastic and push hard for TFAA”, added the Chilean president.
Mercosur, basically a customs union launched in 1991 fifteen years ago this Monday March 27, experienced an encouraging advance during the first few years and rapidly became a reference for the region.
However, problems began to emerge with the so called asymmetries, (different degrees of development of the members’ economies) and more serious, Mercosur lack of capacity to address and overcome those challenges.
Meantime Washington in the mid nineties launched the idea of a free trade association, on the lines of the North American Free Trade Association, Nafta, extending from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.
mercosurpress.comDespite her impressive credentials as a victim of Pinochet, she shows her true intentions.
rootsie on 04.09.06 @ 10:07 AM CST [
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Sandinistas eye return to power in Nicaragua
LEON, Nicaragua (Reuters) -- After years of setbacks, many Nicaraguans from Leon, the cradle of the 1979 Sandinista revolution, believe their aging former guerrilla leaders could soon return to power in elections that also could prove a diplomatic nightmare for Washington.
"We need a change. It's been bad, bad, bad," said 60-year-old war Sandinista war veteran Daniel Sauro, referring to 16 years of pro-Washington governments that took power after Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega's electoral defeat in 1990.
Sauro lives in a city where colonial churches and dilapidated houses are still splattered with aging bullet holes from 1970s street battles between leftist rebels and the army.
"We need to give Ortega another chance to show he can govern in times of peace," Sauro said.
Like many Nicaraguans, he complains about crime, corruption and low wages and looks back with nostalgia to the heady revolutionary days of 1979.
The graying Ortega -- a Cold War U.S. foe and loser of the last three elections -- is a favorite to win a vote that could cement an emerging shift to the left in Latin America.
Leon was one of the first cities that leftist rebels occupied in the 1979 uprising and loyalty has stayed strong -- the town has always elected a Sandinista mayor despite a swing against the movement in much of Nicaragua.
But now national support for the Sandinistas, who in the 1980s led a Soviet- and Cuban-backed government that battled U.S.-funded Contra rebels, is returning to Nicaragua before presidential elections in November, pollsters say.
Many voters are tired of pro-Washington governments that have failed to raise living standards in one of the Western Hemisphere's poorest nations.
cnn.com
rootsie on 04.09.06 @ 10:03 AM CST [
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Interview with Abel Mamani, Bolivia's Minister of Water
In this interview Abel Mamani outlines his hopes and the challenges his Ministry will face. He explains that the Bolivian Government's policies on water will be based on the understanding that Water is a human right and must be managed by the state and the community.
upsidedownworld.org
rootsie on 04.09.06 @ 10:01 AM CST [
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Zapatistas in Zirahuén: "They fight united and fight well, for their land, for their forests, and for their lake, too"
ZIRAHUÉN, MICHOACÁN, MÉXICO: To shouts of "Zapata lives, the struggle continues!" and "Cárdenas, understand, our land is not for sale!" about 500 indigenous peasant farmers from the "Caracol in Rebellion of Lake Zirahuén" received Zapatista Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos with a march. They later expressed to him their determination to continue the struggle to defend their communal lands in the face of an ambitious tourism mega-project.
axisoflogic.com
rootsie on 04.09.06 @ 09:58 AM CST [
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The Corporate Media Begins Their Attack on Ollanta Humala, Candidate for President in Peru
When we read the Christian Science Monitor's report on the Peruvian elections, "Ollanta Humala leads the polls ahead of Sunday's vote. He reflects views of leaders in Venezuela and Bolivia", we read disinformation and fear. At the same time, we have to smile at another lame attempt by the corporate media to marginalize yet another successful, indigenous, revolutionary leader in Latin America, Ollanta Humala of Peru. Their fear is born from their knowledge that Humala's allegiance is to the people, rejecting the homage paid to Washington by his predecessor, President Alejandro Toledos, a World Bank consultant and before him, Alberto Fujimori.
axisoflogic.comCoca crisis hangs over Peru elections Any unannounced 'gringo' visitor to this tiny village is a dead man. As endless coca fields spread into the forests of Peru's Apurimac jungle, mountains of coca leaves dry in the sun of Llaruri's dirt streets, at the heart of one of the world's largest cocaine-producing areas.
'Last time, I came here with a Canadian engineer and coca farmers thought we wanted to eradicate their crops, so they blocked the road, drove us away at gunpoint and threatened to shoot us,' said my driver as we approached the village. 'A local teacher saved us at the last minute by suggesting that they should check our identities first.'
For the United States, a key backer of Peru's anti-cocaine strategy, today's presidential elections pose an enormous challenge to its war against drugs. Nationalist front-runner and former military officer Ollanta Humala has promised a radical shift in anti-narcotics policy, echoing proposals from the recently elected Bolivian President, Evo Morales.
While Colombia remains the world's top cocaine producer, Peru - at number two - is rapidly gaining ground, driven by the area around the Apurimac river, where half of its cocaine is produced. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says that cocaine production in Apurimac increased by 70 per cent to 53 tonnes in 2004, with up to 90 per cent of all coca production being used for cocaine. And it warns that output could be about to increase further.
rootsie on 04.09.06 @ 09:52 AM CST [
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Increasingly Vicious Laws Push Out Homeless
Communities nationwide appear intent on testing the lengths they can go to suppress or expel their homeless populations -- anything to avoid having to see, let alone help, the least fortunate.
newstandardnews.net
rootsie on 04.09.06 @ 09:48 AM CST [
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New York Rethinks Its Remaking of the Schools
The New York City schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, is once again rethinking the nation's largest school system.
He has hired Chris Cerf, former president of Edison Schools, the commercial manager of public schools in 25 states. He has retained Alvarez & Marsal, a consulting firm that revamped the school system in St. Louis and is rebuilding the system in New Orleans. And he has enlisted Sir Michael Barber, a former adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain who is now at McKinsey & Company in London.
These consultants, often in pinstripe suits and ensconced in a conference room on the third-floor mezzanine of the headquarters of the Education Department in Lower Manhattan, are working with a small army of city education officials, all led by Mr. Klein's chief of staff, Kristen Kane. The effort is being paid for with $5 million in private donations.
Together, the consultants and officials are re-examining virtually every aspect of the system, not quite three years after Chancellor Klein and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg charted perhaps its most exhaustive overhaul and made it a laboratory for educational experimentation, closely watched across the country.
They are evaluating everything from how textbooks and paper are bought, to how teacher training programs are chosen, to how students, teachers, principals and schools are judged. They are running focus groups of dozens of principals, and they are studying districts in England, Canada and California.
A top goal is to find ways to relax much of the very centralization put in place by the Bloomberg administration and give principals a far freer hand, provided schools can meet goals for attendance, test scores, promotion rates and other criteria.
nytimes.comThis might sound ok, but it is a sinister development. In the name of 'smaller government' the forces of privatization move in. It's the same all over the globe.
rootsie on 04.09.06 @ 09:45 AM CST [
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Local Teacher's Run-In With Homeland Security Creates Insecurities
Los Angeles:
A local school employee said a rough run-in with a couple of Homeland Security officers has left him with a strong sense of insecurity.
Leander Pickett, a teacher's assistant at Englewood Elementary, said he was manhandled and handcuffed by two plain clothed Homeland Security officers in front of the school Tuesday for no reason at all.
"I would like to treat people the way I would want to be treated, and yesterday I wasn't treated that way," Pickett said.
Pickett has been working at Englewood for two years, and his principal and colleagues told Channel 4 they have never met a harder worker or nicer guy.
"He's well loved by everyone because he's willing to do anything to help children," said the Englewood Elementary Principal Gail Brinson.
However, Tuesday afternoon Pickett's niceness turned to anger, disappointment, and betrayal when, as Pickett was directing bus traffic, he said he was handcuffed and roughed up and humiliated by the very people that were supposed to protect him.
"I walked up to him and said, 'Sir, you need to move.' That's when he said 'I'm a police officer. I'm with Homeland Security ... I'll move it when I want to.' That's when he started grabbing me on my arm," Pickett said.
However, Homeland Security tells a different story.
The department said the only reason the officers were at the school was because they pulled over to look at a map.
The department also said it's looking into what happened, and that Pickett's version is wrong. It claims he was antagonizing the officers.
Several people were outside of the school, watching the incident take place, and those witnesses agree with Pickett's story.
"Mr. Pickett asked the guy blocking the bus loading zone to move, and the guy told him he would move his car when he got ready to move it," said Englewood coach Alton Jackson.
"At that point I intervened and I went up to the gentleman and said, 'Mr. Pickett is an employee here,' and they said that didn't matter," said Englewood media specialist, Terri Dreisonstok.
"'We're with Homeland Security,' and on and on they went, and pretty soon, before you know it, he's handcuffed and slammed against a car," Brinson said. "All the children are watching, they're all upset."
After about 30 minutes, the men released Pickett.
"The part that really upsets me is all these students were watching, and that and it isn't good," Jackson said.
Pickett said he plans to sue.
"You now you hear these stories everyday and say, 'This will never happen to me,' but yesterday it happened to me," Pickett said.
"If this is Homeland Security, I think we ought to be a little afraid," Brinson said.
The central office of Homeland Security contacted Channel 4 about the incident and stated that it considers all allegations seriously and the matter has been referred to a neutral investigative entity.
news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 04.09.06 @ 09:38 AM CST [
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Watchdog seeks lost Africa wealth
An anti-corruption campaign group has urged governments in the West to help Africa recover part of the wealth lost through corruption.
Transparency International made the appeal in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.
The group estimated the amount of illegally appropriated money invested outside Africa to be $140bn (£80.4bn).
It called on Western governments to change their banking laws to make it easier for illegally acquired wealth to be repatriated to Africa.
Transparency International (TI) which leads a campaign against corruption worldwide, says the phenomenon is seriously undermining Africa's fragile democracies and hindering efforts to achieve sustainable development.
bbc.co.ukWhat about the trillions the Europeans stole and are stealing? Who watches the watchers?
rootsie on 04.09.06 @ 09:35 AM CST [
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Seymour Hersch: THE IRAN PLANS
The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.
newyorker.comBush administration 'secretly plans air strikes' as it seeks regime change in Iran ent undercover forces into Iran, and has stepped up secret planning for a possible major air attack on the country, according to the renowned US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.
While publicly advocating diplomacy to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, Hersh reports in the next issue of The New Yorker magazine that "there is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush's ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change".
One former senior intelligence official is quoted as saying that Mr Bush and others in the White House have come to view Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as a potential "Adolf Hitler". According to a senior Pentagon adviser on the "war on terror", "this White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war". The danger, he adds, is that "it also reinforces the belief inside Iran that the only way to defend the country is to have a nuclear capability".
One option under consideration, Mr Hersh reports, involves the possible use of a B61 nuclear "bunker-buster" bomb against Iran's main centrifuge plant, at Natanz. Last week the Federation of American Scientists alleged that a weapons test to be carried out in the Nevada desert in June was designed to simulate the effects of just such a bomb. Conventional explosives would be used, it said, for "a low-yield nuclear weapon ground shock simulation against an underground target".
rootsie on 04.09.06 @ 09:30 AM CST [
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Does Israel Conduct Covert Action in America? You Bet it Does
...For years – even decades – U.S. citizens have been the subject of a political action campaign designed and executed by Israel. Currently, Israel's campaign is part steady-as-she-goes and part improvisation to neutralize an unexpected and – for Israel – worrying development. So far, Israel's covert political action is succeeding hands down. Americans are gradually being indoctrinated to believe Islamists are today's Nazis and that there is no "Israeli lobby" in America. Simply put, Israel is conducting a brilliant covert political action campaign in the United States, a campaign any intelligence service in the world would rightly be proud of.
Part one of Israeli's political action consists simply of using that old standby debate-suppressor, the four-letter word "Nazi." Newspapers in Israel, of course, have long used the word to describe Israel's Muslim enemies. Recently, for example, the Jerusalem Post ran an article in which al-Qaeda is described as "yet another Nazi knockoff." This sort of language is the stuff of Israeli journalism, and not of much concern to Americans. If the Israeli press wants to teach their readers to underestimate the Islamist threat, so be it.
But now the word "Nazi" is being gradually fed to Americans as a scientific definition of our Islamist enemies. Headlines such as "Hamas Uber Alles," "Hitler's Heirs in Damascus," and "The Nazi Correction to Islamic Terror" are increasingly common in U.S. media publications found in the news files Googled daily by Americans. U.S. politicians, too, are eager to jump on the call-them-Nazis bandwagon, with Secretary Rumsfeld recently saying that leaving Iraq early would be like returning postwar Germany to the Nazis, and Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) comparing the attack on the Shia shrine in Samarra to the burning of the Reichstag by the Nazis.
The goal of using the Nazi analogy is to suppress any realistic debate about the pluses and minuses of the U.S.-Israel relationship, and to make sure any American raising questions about U.S. support for Israel is seen as siding with the "Islamofascists," the heirs of Nazism. Any person who knows the least bit about Islam – and the Israelis know a great deal – knows it is not Nazism, yet the Internet is rife with such titles as "A Manifesto Against Islamofascism" and "Islamofascism's Creeping Coup in Turkey." The best capsule description of the threat posed by Islamofascists is provided by Frank Gaffney in a recent issue of The Intelligencer, the journal of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Listen to Mr. Gaffney, and you will almost hear Muslim jackboots striking the pavement.
antiwar.com
rootsie on 04.09.06 @ 09:17 AM CST [
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Israel steps up shelling, kills one Palestinian
GAZA (Reuters) - Israel shelled two Palestinian security posts in northern Gaza on Sunday, killing one person and wounding 15 as the army kept up its heaviest strikes on the strip since Jewish settlers and troops withdrew last year.
Israeli air strikes and artillery barrages have killed 15 Palestinians, mainly militants, since Friday.
Interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who won elections last month on pledges to impose final borders with or without Palestinian agreement, said there were no curbs on the army to respond to a surge of militant rocket fire on Israel.
news.yahoo.comThe massacre in Rafah is a clear message to the world that the Israeli government will not cease attacks New Palestinian Legislative Council member, Ghazi Hamed, confirmed Saturday that the Israeli killing of six Palestinians in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah is, "a clear message to the world from the Israeli government that they will continue their work against members of the armed Palestinian resistance."
This is a horrible crime, says Hamed, that the Quaret and the European Union should take note of. "This is the Israeli beginning of yet another series of massacres against the Palestinian people as the Israeli government boycotts the Palestinian government and attacks its people."
The Palestinian government spoke directly to European and Arab states, and to the European Union, regarding the latest killing, giving details of what they referred to as the lastest massacre. The Palestinian government called on those instutions to pressure the Israeli government to put an immediate end to its agressions.
Responding to a question concerning the position of the European Union and the United States after a negative investigation of the new Palestinian government, Hamed said that is an unjust decision and the siege on the Palestinian people is not serving any just position. He asked, "Why are the consequences of the crimes and occupation being placed upon the Palestinian people and not upon Israel?"
Abbas: 'Convergence' will lead to war Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas said Friday in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian that Olmert's "convergence plan" will only bring more war to the region.
Abbas added that Olmert's plan will only endanger the chances of reaching a long term agreement, since it bypasses negotiations with the Palestinians.
Palestinian political rift grows Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya has criticised a decision by President Mahmoud Abbas to assume control of Gaza's border crossings.
He called the move an attempt to undermine the Hamas-led government's control over security matters.
The government would not accept the creation of parallel structures that would diminish its authority, he added.
Mr Abbas, whose Fatah party is a political rival of Hamas, also named an ally as head of internal security.
In his new role, Rashid Abu Shbak, who is currently head of the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Preventative Security Service, will have authority over the police and emergency services.
Correspondents say that although Mr Shbak will nominally report to Hamas Interior Minister Said al-Siyam, ultimate authority rests with the president.
rootsie on 04.09.06 @ 09:12 AM CST [
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Invisibility Looks Good on You": The Rebuking and Scorning of Cynthia McKinney
A Washington press corps that stood idly by while Bush and Cheney plundered the country, wrecked the environment, spied on Americans without a warrant, tortured civilians and lied the country into a war that will only get worse, woke up one morning and collectively decided: "Let's all play Get Cynthia!"
Let's get her for being too outspoken, bringing up the wrong issue at the wrong time, failing to get with the program, becoming a distraction, leaving House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi beside herself with rage.
Let's get her because, hell, she practically volunteered for it, and besides, she's an easy target, standing practically alone, fired upon at will by Republicans -- who seem to think her story cancels out DeLay, Abramoff, Katrina and Iraq -- and virtually undefended by Democrats, except by the rolling of eyes heavenward, as though to say, "Oh, please! We're not responsible for HER!"
Rep. Cynthia McKinney has now apologized for her part in the face-off at Checkpoint Cynthia. It was not enough to stop the cartooning of the coverage. Already the news wires are spinning her statement as a complete about-face, an abandonment of everything else she has said about the incident. Look, she said there was racial profiling in Washington! Look, now she's apologizing!
Journalists are reporting this story as though it were their job to "get" her, breathlessly revealing that the woman who receives more hate mail than Teddy Kennedy employs a part-time bodyguard, as though it proved something about her mental state.
But note, please, Rep. McKinney did not take back anything she has said about racial profiling in the nation's capitol. And the fact remains that, while each day's mail brings a new wave of personal threats, some of the people charged with protecting her affect not to recognize her. A Republican colleague offered the suggestion that she could announce "I am a Member of Congress" each time she passes a security checkpoint. But McKinney has served for eleven years, not eleven minutes.
Here's a test of media fairness: how many times, over those eleven years, have you seen Rep. McKinney on CNN, NBC, ABC, or CBS, asked to explain her views on Iraq and the Middle East? Not once, you say? Read on for the "why come" of it all.
The leaders of her own party turn their backs while she endures the most vicious racial stereotyping I've seen, since the last time I looked at that old KKK rag called the "Thunderbolt" when a fellow college student stuck a copy in my face back around 1963. "I know it's probably racist," he said, "but it's funny," as if that would have made it all right.
It wasn't funny, it was disgusting...
counterpunch.orgRacial Profiling from the Halls of Congress to the Studios of MSNBC: The Assault on Cynthia McKinney Joe Scarborough, political hack and host of Scarborough Country on MSNBC, went on yet another odious rant on April 3. This time his scurrilous remarks were aimed at six-term Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. The Congresswoman is accused of punching a Capitol Hill security officer in the chest (with cell phone in hand). After McKinney skirted a metal detector (members of Congress are not required to go through metal detectors) an officer, according to a witness, asked McKinney to stop several times. The officer claimed that he didn't recognize the six-term Congresswoman (although each officer is given pictures of members of Congress); it seems that the confusion was due to McKinney's new haircut. What would they have done to Dick Cheney in hunting gear? McKinney's lawyers allege that a skirmish ensued after the officer "harassed" the Congresswoman and forcefully grabbed her by the arm. The Washington Post quoted McKinney, "Let me be clear: This whole incident was instigated by the inappropriate touching and stopping of me, a female black congresswoman."
If you were watching Scarborough Country, you wouldn't have heard McKinney's claim, because Scarborough dove right into slanderous commentary and demonizing drivel: "How do you solve a problem like Cynthia McKinneyThe six-term Congresswoman from Georgia has long been considered an embarrassing fact of life for constituents, Congressman and Capitol Hill police." Scarborough went on to misquote McKinney, asserting that the Congresswoman claimed that George Bush knew about 9/11 and didn't do anything about it because it helped Bush's family's stock portfolio. Scarborough ended his diatribe with words of reassurance, "The good news, saying stupid things is not a crime." That's right, because Joe Scarborough, media guardian of Natalie Holloway and defender of creationism, would have jailed a long time ago.
rootsie on 04.09.06 @ 09:01 AM CST [
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Alexander Cockburn: If Only They'd Hissed Barack Obama
...The war's coming home indeed, in the form of people dreadfully wounded in body and spirit. Thousands of tragedies that will unwind, often violently, for years to come. But for now, for the most part, it's pictures on TV, not tears and terror on the hearthrug. So the Democrats in Congress aren't too worried about pressure from their antiwar constituents, even though the mere possibility of a primary challenge by Cindy Sheehan put the wind up Diane Feinstein. The awful six-termer, Jane Harman, faces a primary challenge from Marcy Winograd in southern California, after a couple of unions defied orders and endorsed Winograd. Meanwhile, at the other end of the country in Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman faced a decidedly cool audience at a big Democratic dinner at the end of March and got bailed out by his brother senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, who told the crowd to haul out their check books and make sure Lieberman gets returned for another term.
What kind of a signal is this? Here is Obama, endlessly hailed as the brightest rising star in the Democratic firmament, delivering (at a closely watched political dinner, with Lieberman's primary opponent, Ned Lamont, sitting in the crowd) a ringing endorsement to his "mentor", Lieberman, Bush's closest Democratic ally on the war in Iraq, and overall pretty much a symbol of everything that's been wrong with the Democratic Party for the past twenty years. What a slimy fellow Obama is, as befits a man symbolizing everything that will continue to be wrong with the Democratic Party for the next twenty years. Every time I look up he's doing something disgusting, like distancing himself from his fellow senator Dick Durbin for denouncing the torture center at Guantanamo, or cheerleading the nuke-Iran crowd.
counterpunch.org
rootsie on 04.09.06 @ 08:55 AM CST [
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Iraqi official: 'It's civil war'
A senior official in the Iraqi government has for the first time admitted the country is in a state of civil war.
Deputy interior minister Hussein Ali Kamal said Iraq had been in "undeclared" civil war for the past year.
He told reporters: "Actually Iraq has been in an undeclared civil war for the past 12 months.
"On a daily basis Shias, Sunnis, Kurds and Christians are being killed and the only undeclared thing is that a civil war has not been officially announced by the parties involved. Civil war is happening but not on a wide scale."
Mr Kamal's admission mirrors the words of former Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi who last month said Iraq was in civil war. Mr Allawi warned that the violence was reaching the point of no return and Europe and the USA would not be spared the consequences.
But British ministers have repeatedly denied civil war is either imminent or inevitable. Criticising anti-war protesters, Defence Secretary John Reid recently suggested those who argued that Iraq was on the brink of civil war were siding with the terrorists.
itv.comU.S. Study Paints Somber Portrait of Iraqi Discord WASHINGTON, April 8 — An internal staff report by the United States Embassy and the military command in Baghdad provides a sobering province-by-province snapshot of Iraq's political, economic and security situation, rating the overall stability of 6 of the 18 provinces "serious" and one "critical." The report is a counterpoint to some recent upbeat public statements by top American politicians and military officials.
The report, 10 pages of briefing points titled "Provincial Stability Assessment," underscores the shift in the nature of the Iraq war three years after the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Warnings of sectarian and ethnic frictions are raised in many regions, even in those provinces generally described as nonviolent by American officials.
There are alerts about the growing power of Iranian-backed religious Shiite parties, several of which the United States helped put into power, and rival militias in the south. The authors also point to the Arab-Kurdish fault line in the north as a major concern, with the two ethnicities vying for power in Mosul, where violence is rampant, and Kirkuk, whose oil fields are critical for jump-starting economic growth in Iraq.
The patterns of discord mapped by the report confirm that ethnic and religious schisms have become entrenched across much of the country, even as monthly American fatalities have fallen. Those indications, taken with recent reports of mass migrations from mixed Sunni-Shiite areas, show that Iraq is undergoing a de facto partitioning along ethnic and sectarian lines, with clashes — sometimes political, sometimes violent — taking place in those mixed areas where different groups meet.
The War Gets More Grim Every Day I have been covering the war in Iraq ever since it began three years ago and I have never seen the situation so grim. I was in the northern city of Mosul last week protected by 3,000 Kurdish soldiers, but even so it was considered too dangerous to send out heavily armed patrols in day time. It is safer at night because of a rigorously enforced curfew. In March alone the US military said 1,313 people were killed in sectarian attacks. Many bodies, buried in pits or thrown in the rivers, are never found. The real figure is probably twice as high. All over the country people are on the move as Sunni and Shi'ites flee each other's areas.
I was in Lebanon at the start of the civil war there in 1975. Baghdad today resembles Beirut then. People are being hauled from their cars and murdered solely because of their religious identity. A friend called to say that he had a problem because his two half brothers had been born in Fallujah, the Sunni Muslim stronghold, and this was on their identity cards. If they were picked up by Shiah militiamen or Interior Ministry troops a glance at their place of birth alone could get them killed.
Fleeing one danger in Baghdad it is easy to become victim of another. The same friend had taken his mother and two sisters to the passport office in central Baghdad so they could leave the country. While they were there a large bomb went off killing 25 policemen outside and breaking his sister's leg. Now the family cannot leave the country because his sister is in hospital and his mother is too frightened to return to the passport office to get a new passport.
President George W. Bush and Tony Blair have for the last three years continually understated the gravity of what is taking place in Iraq. It has been frustrating as a journalist to hear them claim that much of Iraq is peaceful when we could not prove them wrong without being killed or kidnapped. The capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the handover of sovereignty in 2004, the elections and new constitution in 2005 have all been spuriously oversold to the outside world as signs of progress.
The formation of national unity government in Iraq is now being presented as an antidote to the present surge in violence. "Terrorists love a vacuum", said the Defence Secretary John Reid yesterday citing his experience in Northern Ireland. But one Iraqi official remarked caustically that the three main communites the Sunni, Shia and Kurds -- do not "hate each other because they do not have a government, but rather they do not have a government because they already hate each other."
U.S. Marine reported shot by Iraqi BAGHDAD, Iraq - An Iraqi soldier allegedly shot and killed a U.S. Marine at a base near the Syrian border, the U.S. military said Friday.
Another U.S. Marine then wounded the Iraqi soldier.
The shootings occurred Thursday near Qaim, 200 miles west of Baghdad, the U.S. statement said.
''An Iraqi army soldier allegedly shot and killed the U.S. Marine on a coalition base'' near Qaim, the statement said. ''The Iraqi soldier was shot by another U.S. Marine.''
The incident is under investigation, the statement said. No further details were released, and Pentagon officials said they had no further information.
An earlier statement said the Iraqi was evacuated to a U.S. military in Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad. The soldier's condition was unknown.
''Just as we as American military men and women trust one another with our lives, we also trust our Iraqi counterparts, and that trust has not wavered,'' the statement added.
rootsie on 04.09.06 @ 08:41 AM CST [
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Saturday, April 8th
U.S. Envoy's Car Pelted in Venezuela
Supporters of President Hugo Chavez threw eggs, fruit and vegetables at the U.S. ambassador's car Friday, and a group of motorcyclists chased his convoy for miles, at times pounding on the vehicles, a U.S. Embassy official said. No one was hurt.
Embassy spokesman Brian Penn said Venezuelan police escorts did not intervene as the car carrying Ambassador William Brownfield was pounded and pelted.
"We're being attacked by groups of motorcyclists while we're traveling in an embassy car," Penn told The Associated Press by cell phone shortly before the motorcycles stopped chasing the four-car convoy.
"It's a very violent demonstration by a small group of people who appear to be organized by the mayor's office," Penn said.
The Caracas mayor's office, however, denied any involvement. "No official authorized by the mayor's office participated," said Luis Martinez, a spokesman for Mayor Juan Barreto.
Brownfield has faced protests at recent appearances. Chavez has repeatedly accused Washington of conspiring to overthrow him, an accusation U.S. officials have denied. The U.S. Embassy has asked the Venezuelan government to improve security for the ambassador, saying it's legally bound to do so, Penn said.
breitbart.comUS accuses Venezuela over attack ...The US under secretary of state told Venezuelan Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez that if such an incident happens again there would be severe diplomatic consequences, department spokesman Sean McCormack said.
Supporters of Hugo Chavez are said to be behind the protests
Mr Burns said the attack was a violation of the Vienna Convention and that the action was clearly condoned by the local government, the spokesman said.
US Embassy spokesman Brian Penn said the Venezuelan police escorting the convoy did not intervene to stop the incident.
Venezuela killings spark protests Protesters in Venezuela have taken to the streets in anger following the discovery of the bodies of three boys kidnapped on their way to school.
Police fired tear gas at demonstrators blocking a road as thousands of marchers brought Caracas traffic to a standstill, demanding justice.
After the protests, the capital's mayor said he was replacing the chief of police with an army brigadier general.
Correspondents say there is frustration over the perceived rise in crime.
Jason, Kevin and John Faddoul - aged 12, 13 and 17 respectively - were abducted while being driven to school in February. They held dual Canadian-Venezuelan nationality.
Their driver was also killed. The kidnappers remain unidentified.
Last week, a prominent Italian businessman was kidnapped and later murdered.
Photographer shot
In the Caracas neighbourhood where the brothers grew up, residents set up road blocks to express anger and sorrow over the killings.
The protesters carried banners and shouted slogans such as: "Justice for the Faddoul brothers."
Students also marched to the ministry of the interior.
(L-R) Kevin, John and Jason Faddoul were born in Venezuela
"Where is the justice, where is the answer for the people, how many people die here each week?" protester Cristina Alvarez told the Reuters news agency.
"At times, you don't trust your neighbour," university student Alejandro Linares told the Associated Press news agency.
A news photographer covering the demonstrations, Jorge Aguirre, was shot dead by an unknown gunman while covering one of the protests.
The Faddoul boys' kidnappers had demanded the parents pay a ransom of $4.5m. The family's lawyer said it had been too much to pay.
A farmer found the boys' bodies in scrubland outside the city, with gunshot wounds to the neck and head.
Police investigations are so far focusing on eyewitness accounts that the youngsters and their chauffeur were seized at a fake checkpoint manned by men in police uniforms.
However, Venezuela's attorney-general says so far he has no evidence of police involvement in any of the cases.
'the youngsters and their chauffeur...'Rice moves to block Chavez power play Condoleezza Rice, the American Secretary of State, is heading a concerted, but little-publicised, diplomatic effort by Washington to thwart the ambitions of Hugo Chavez, the firebrand Venezuelan President, to create and lead an anti-American axis in Latin America.
Faced by a resurgence of Left-wing populism in the Hispanic world, the Bush administration has decided to try "to do business" even with its harshest critics, if it can block the regional power play by Mr Chavez, backed by his friend Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator.
Ms Rice had a friendly, first meeting last month with Evo Morales, the new Bolivian President, even though he has threatened to nationalise foreign businesses and announced the end of the ban on cultivation of coca, the plant from which cocaine is produced.
The administration is also likely to adopt an initially conciliatory approach towards Ollanta Humala - if he wins the Peruvian vote next weekend. But the prospect is viewed with alarm in Washington.
Roger Noriega, the assistant secretary of state for Western hemisphere affairs until last year, said: "He seems to have a military populist instinct that will undermine the recent democratic restoration."
Mr Noriega, who remains close to the administration, said he believed that Mr Chavez's role in the Morales victory and the Humala campaign has "probably been decisive".
Moderate Left-wing presidents have also won recent elections in Chile, Uruguay and Brazil, but Washington maintains good relations with all three governments.
The next headache for America is looming in Mexico, where the anti-capitalist message of Andres Lopez Obrador has made him front-runner for July's presidential vote.
rootsie on 04.08.06 @ 09:57 AM CST [
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Evo Morales 'padlocked' in palace
Since Evo Morales took office, the joke is no longer on them. "Look," President Morales tells me, "60 years ago, our grandparents didn't even have the right to walk into the main square - not even in the gutter. And then we got into parliament - and now we're here."
He looks around apologetically at the long Rococco state room we are meeting in - at the ormolu chairs we are sitting on. He has installed a portrait of Che Guevara in the presidential suite but, apart from that, the palace remains as it was under his neo-liberal predecessors.
"It's been a great victory - now this is a stronghold for the indigenous people. And we're not going to stop," Mr Morales says.
"The most important thing is the indigenous people are not vindictive by nature. We are not here to oppress anybody - but to join together and build Bolivia, with justice and equality."
In truth, the Morales presidency is fast getting beyond the "peace, love and understanding" phase. The first indigenous leader to run Bolivia has been two months in office, but he does not feel like he is in power - yet.
"How does it work now? I'll tell you," he says.
"You want to issue a decree to help the poor, the indigenous people, the popular movements, the workers... but there's another law. Another padlock. It's full of padlocks that mean you can't transform things from the palace... I feel like a prisoner of the neo-liberal laws."
bbc.co.uk
rootsie on 04.08.06 @ 09:44 AM CST [
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We should not be fooled by new age mantras into believing that humanity is somehow inherently good, says Theo Hobson
You ought to be ashamed of yourself. This is the message of Lent, and it is a basic part of Christian belief. There is an absolute difference between God, who is absolutely good, and us, who are defined by our endless fallibility.
This is where Christianity differs from the myriad "spiritualities" on offer today. Every form of new age therapy will tell you the same flattering half-truth: you are special, you are deep, you can attain fuller inner peace and strength, and you can discover the divine by deepened self-awareness. There is an obvious overlap between holistic spirituality and a consumerist culture: buy this because you're worth it. Express yourself, with the help of this new product. Discover new depths to your personality by taking a holiday in Turkey.
All this celebration of the self is rooted in the Enlightenment belief in the natural goodness of humanity. It also draws on Romanticism, for it suggests that one's natural goodness is not "standard issue" but totally distinctive: it must be discovered through a unique inner journey. "Discover your unique inner goodness" is perhaps the central message of the age. And there is an increasing appetite to receive this message in spiritual form, in the language of belief. The growth of such spirituality has put the concept of secularisation in doubt: it still makes sense in terms of church decline but fails to account for the rise of the alternative religious market.
The cult of self-development is not entirely to be rubbished. There are worse myths to live by. It generally emphasises mental and physical health, quiet reflection, respect for others of all types and the freedom of the individual to find his or her own path in life. There is plenty of good here. There is much to be said for the rejection of authoritarian structures, moral rules, the dead hand of traditional dogma.
Yet the cult of self-celebration is based in a lie. And Lent is the nailing of that lie. The lie is that we can, with the right formulas and techniques, nurture our inner goodness. But in reality we are not naturally good. There is something wrong with us, deep down. There is a bias towards evil. This perhaps sounds melodramatic, but that is the fault of our unfamiliarity with our religious tradition. It used to be taken for granted in Christian cultures that we are constitutionally flawed. Our natural desire is not holy but dangerous.
...The lie that our natural desires are healthy has become the orthodoxy. To question it is to seem medieval, odd, reactionary, guilt-ridden. But we must question it if we are to have a substantial idea of goodness, or God. The whole point of the Christian God is that he is better than us, that we are lost without him. He does for humanity what it cannot do for itself. Christianity is capable of being utterly realistic about our natural depravity, without pessimism. It allows us, at Easter especially, to proclaim our frailty and shame as good news.
guardian.co.ukThis is one of the places Christianity goes off the track. It is amazing how a mistaken idea can unleash such evil consequences all down the history. The struggle to characterize 'human nature' is at the heart of all the struggles we face. For people with a 'bias towards evil' and 'natural depravity' need strong-arm leaders to control them, and 'supernatural' forces to 'save' them. Remember the sign outside Springfield Methodist Church on "The Simpsons"? 'Sunday Sermon...The Miracle of Shame.'Ancient pyramid found under crucifixion site Archaeologists claim to have discovered a massive sixth century pyramid beneath a crucifixion re-enactment site.
Built by the Teotihuacans, the pyramid was abandoned almost 1,000 years before Catholics began re-enacting the crucifixion at Iztapalapa in 1833 to give thanks for protection during a cholera epidemic.
During the Good Friday ritual, which now draws up to a million spectators, a wooden cross is raised and a man chosen to portray Christ is tied to the cross.
rootsie on 04.08.06 @ 09:34 AM CST [
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Student dies in Russia's latest racist attack
An African student was shot dead in St Petersburg with a hunting rifle emblazoned with a swastika early yesterday in an apparently planned racist attack that has horrified Russia.
The shooting, the fourth such assault on someone from an ethnic minority in the country in a week, has been blamed on a rise in skinhead groups and the extreme right in Russia's second largest city.
Witnesses said the gunman shot Lamzar Samba, 28, a communications student from Senegal, in the back of the neck when he and a group of foreign students were leaving the Apollo nightclub.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 04.08.06 @ 09:20 AM CST [
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Teachers criticise judge for 'trivialising' racial abuse
A judge who attacked the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for pursuing a case against a 10-year-old boy who was accused of shouting racist taunts in the playground has been criticised for trivialising the seriousness of racial abuse.
The boy appeared before Judge Jonathon Finestein at Salford youth court after allegedly calling an 11-year-old boy a "Paki" and "bin Laden" last year.
The boy, from Irlam, Manchester, is also said to have chanted: "He is on the run, pull the trigger and shoot the nigger, five, four, three, two, one."
However, Justice Finestein said the case should not have reached the courts and described the decision to prosecute as "political correctness gone mad".
He said they were just "boys in the playground" and he used to be called "fat" at school but said the headteacher would have just given the children "a good clouting" and sent them on their way.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 04.08.06 @ 09:17 AM CST [
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US college in turmoil over party rape of black stripper
Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, one of the most prestigious centres of academic and sporting achievement in America, was engulfed in scandal yesterday as police stepped up an investigation into allegations of a savage rape of a hired stripper at a party attended by members of its lacrosse team.
The elite campus has been in turmoil, with noisy protests erupting daily, ever since police divulged details of the case last week. Tensions deepened with the release on Wednesday of an e-mail from one of the team members sent just after the alleged rape, in which he fantasised about killing strippers and cutting off their skin.
Exposed by the crisis are deeply sensitive issues of race and class, which far exceed the familiar town-and-gown factors that divide many universities from surrounding communities. The accuser is black and is a student at nearby North Carolina Central University. The town of Durham is 43 per cent African-American, but only 11 per cent of Duke's students are black. All but one of the lacrosse team members is white.
...The refusal of the lacrosse players to co-operate with investigators has added to the anger in the town. At the outset, they switched first names in an effort to confuse police. However, DNA has now been sampled from 46 of the team's 47 members. The only member not subjected to a test is black.
The accuser claimed that she went to a small suburban home rented by the lacrosse players near campus on 13 March to dance at an alcohol-fuelled party. Late in the evening, she told police, she was cornered in a bathroom and raped by three white men.
independent.co.uk
rootsie on 04.08.06 @ 09:15 AM CST [
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A new sexual manifesto
...Is this really our world, where it is no longer strange to see pictures of breasts on the side of buses? Where it is considered hip for middle-class men and women to visit swanky lap-dancing clubs while remaining oblivious to the continuum of exploitation that links those polished performers with the crack-addicted working girls on the street corner. Where celebrity magazines detail at length the copulation techniques of minor celebrities, but their readers remain unable to choose on any given night whether they'd rather sleep alone - a third of young women say that they have been coerced into sex. Similar data for young men does not exist, but I wonder how often they too feel pinioned by expectation.
This is what sexual liberation, co-opted by commerce, has delivered for women and men. A few years ago Germaine Greer pointed out that while in the 70s she had fought for women's right to say yes to sex and not to be judged for their appetites, nowadays she felt appalled that women no longer had the right to say no, for fear of being branded inhibited and repressed.
The values of the market have turned sex into a competitive sport: better, faster, in ever more inventive contortions. The raunch culture identified by the American writer Ariel Levy puts forward pole-dancing lessons and no-strings liaisons as evidence of liberation, because women are, apparently, now able to consume sex on an equal footing with men. Female sexuality is celebrated as increasingly voracious, yet the images of women presented by advertisers are eager to please, easy to satisfy and as challenging as a blow-up doll.
But how does the white noise of public sex affect personal sexual development? There is some evidence that teenagers are becoming more confident about reporting rapes and sexual assaults. But if younger women know that they have the right not to be abused, they still don't think they have the right to satisfying, respectful sex, as the brilliant movie Kidulthood, about the lives of adolescents growing up in west London, documents starkly.
To desire and be desired can be many things: funny, awkward, transforming, sacred and profane. To be honest about what turns you on demands a particularly intimate bravery. But for all we are overinformed about how other people while away their bedroom hours, about what's hot and what's not, men and women are no closer to developing a common erotic language. Indeed, it seems that that private language is being gradually eradicated from the public domain by the megaphone imperialism of cultural sexism.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 04.08.06 @ 09:11 AM CST [
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White House Faces Barrage of Leak Queries
WASHINGTON - The White House faced a barrage of questions Friday over the timing of President Bush's decision to declassify intelligence that was then leaked to the press by Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff.
In a tense briefing, White House spokesman Scott McClellan was asked repeatedly to explain his statement from three years ago that portions of a prewar intelligence document on Iraq were declassified on July 18, 2003.
Ten days earlier, Cheney's top aide, I. Lewis Libby, had leaked snippets of intelligence from the document to New York Times reporter Judith Miller to rebut allegations by Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, Libby told prosecutors, according to documents revealed this week.
Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, said he had passed the information to Miller after being told to do so by Cheney, who advised Libby that Bush had authorized it, said a court filing by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.
McClellan told reporters July 18, 2003, that the material being released on Iraq "was officially declassified today." On Friday, McClellan interpreted his own words to mean that's when the material was "officially released."
Asked when it was declassified, McClellan refused to answer, saying the matter was part of Fitzgerald's ongoing CIA leak probe that has resulted in Libby's indictment.
news.yahoo.comThe Plame game The latest revelation about George W Bush's involvement in the Valerie Plame scandal is unlikely to be the smoking gun that finishes off his administration, writes David Fickling.
rootsie on 04.08.06 @ 09:06 AM CST [
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More debate over report on Israel's influence in US
Coverage of the debate over the recent paper by professors Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago that examines the influence of Israel and its supporters in Washington over US foreign policy has been, mostly, absent from US media. But the paper generated vigorous debate in the British and international media and on the Internet. Since the working paper's release, there have been several more attacks on it, but also more support for the professors' position on the need to look hard at the US-Israel relationship.
...Editor Mary-Kay Wilmers, who is Jewish, said that while the support of people like David Duke was "unsettling," it did not detract from the debate the authors were attempting to start.
'I don't want David Duke to endorse the article,' [she] told The Observer from France on Friday. 'It makes me feel uncomfortable. But when I re-read the piece, I did not see anything that I felt should not have been said. Maybe it is because I am Jewish, but I think I am very alert to anti-Semitism. And I do not think that criticising US foreign policy, or Israel's way of going about influencing it, is anti-Semitic. I just don't see it.'
csmonitor.com
rootsie on 04.08.06 @ 09:00 AM CST [
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Israel launches triple air strike on Gaza Strip
JERUSALEM (AFP) - The Israeli military launched three air raids overnight against targets in the Gaza Strip, a spokesman said.
"Our helicopters launched three attacks. Two targeted two offices at Beit Lahya (north) where activists of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades were meeting to plan rocket strikes against Israel, and another attack was against a helicopter pad inside Gaza City," the military spokesman said.
news.yahoo.comAt Least Six Killed in Israeli Strike On Alleged Training Camp in Gaza JERUSALEM, April 7 -- Israeli military aircraft fired on a car carrying suspected gunmen Friday night in the southern Gaza Strip as it left what military officials said was a training camp for members of an armed Palestinian group at war with Israel. At least six people were killed, including two children.
The death toll was one of the largest from an Israeli airstrike in recent years. Hours later, the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas called the airstrike part of an "unjustified Israeli escalation."
rootsie on 04.08.06 @ 08:57 AM CST [
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Head of UN watchdog to visit Iran
The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, Mohamed ElBaradei, will go Tehran next week to discuss Iran's nuclear programme.
Mr ElBaradei will report back to the UN Security Council at the end of April on whether Iran has complied with its demand to suspend uranium enrichment.
The demand, issued last week, has been publicly rejected by Tehran.
UN nuclear inspectors arrived in Iran on Friday to visit sites including the Natanz uranium enrichment plant.
Iran insists it has the right to civilian nuclear technology and denies Western claims that it is seeking atomic weapons.
A senior official at the watchdog, the IAEA, said Mr ElBaradei would meet senior Iranian officials for talks on confidence-building measures.
The official said the visit would provide Iran with an opportunity to come forward with information required by the IAEA "to fill in the gaps in the history of Iran's nuclear activities".
bbc.co.uk
rootsie on 04.08.06 @ 08:51 AM CST [
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Bought With Western Cash: Independent voices can be heard in Pakistan but NGOs are stifling genuine social movements
by Tariq Ali
...The NGOs are no substitute for genuine social and political movements. In Africa, Palestine and elsewhere, NGOs have swallowed the neoliberal status quo. They operate like charities, trying to alleviate the worst excesses, but rarely question the systemic basis of the fact that 5 billion citizens of our globe live in poverty. They may be NGOs in Pakistan, but on the global scale they are western governmental organisations (WGOs), their cash flow conditioned by enforced agendas: Colin Powell once referred to them as "our fifth column".
A few of them are doing good work, but the overall effect of NGO-isation has been to atomise the tiny layer of progressives and liberals in the country. Most of these men and women struggle for their individual NGOs to keep the money coming. Petty rivalries assume exaggerated proportions; politics in the sense of grassroots organisation becomes virtually nonexistent. The salaries, in most cases, elevate WGO executives to the status of the local elites, creating the material basis for accepting the boundaries of the existing system.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 04.08.06 @ 08:48 AM CST [
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2 suicide bombs in southern Afghan province, 3 Americans wounded
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) - Two suicide attackers exploded car bombs in separate assaults on U.S. and Afghan forces Friday, slightly wounding two U.S. military members and one U.S. civilian contractor, officials said.
Both bombings, the latest in a wave of suicide strikes, occurred around 11:30 a.m. in the southern province of Helmand, a hub of Afghanistan's drug trade and Taliban rebellion. Both attackers died.
newspress.com
rootsie on 04.08.06 @ 08:44 AM CST [
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THE ARCHITECTS OF WAR: WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
President Bush has not fired any of the architects of the Iraq war. In fact, a review of the key planners of the conflict reveals that they have been rewarded – not blamed – for their incompetence.
thinkprogress.org
rootsie on 04.08.06 @ 08:38 AM CST [
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U-S ambassador warns of threat of sectarian war to entire Middle East
BAGHDAD, Iraq The U-S ambassador to Iraq says a conflict that could affect the entire Middle East might emerge if efforts to build an Iraqi government don't succeed.
Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad tells the BBC that the political contacts between Iraq's groups are improving, but the country faces the possibility of sectarian civil war if the government formation doesn't work.
He says that the role of armed militias is in part to blame for the intensifying "polarization along sectarian lines."
Khalilzad says the best way to prevent a conflict is to form a government that includes representatives of all groups -- an effort that has stalled because of opposition to Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
Khalilzad says the international community must do everything possible "to make this country work."
kristv.comApparently Mr. Khalilzad is not in the loop. The country he represents doesn't want the country to work.Summit may be Iraq's last chance for peace WASHINGTON -- As Iraq teeters on the brink of civil war and remains unable to form a government of national unity more than four months after the elections, Jordan said it would host a conference aimed at defusing the volatile situation across its eastern border.
The Iraqi Islamic Reconciliation Summit will be held in the Jordanian capital, Amman, on April 22. The intent of the 'summit' is to gather a large number of Iraq's top religious and tribal leaders representing Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Kurds, in an effort to seek an agreement based on common religious principles. The first hurdles the conference will tackle will be to find a way to end the violence that is claiming dozens of lives every day and to achieve a political solution that will put an end to Iraq's current strife.
The Iraqi Islamic Reconciliation Summit will be held under the patronage of King Abdullah II, and is expected to draw a large number of senior Iraqi religious and tribal leaders from all sects and walks of life. The conference organizers, Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought and the Arab League, say they hope the meeting "will provide a forum for Iraqi leaders to take a crucial step towards stemming the violence in Iraq."
rootsie on 04.08.06 @ 08:33 AM CST [
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Threat of Shiite Militias Now Seen As Iraq's Most Critical Challenge
BAGHDAD, April 7 -- Shiite Muslim militias pose the greatest threat to security in many parts of Iraq, having killed more people in recent months than the Sunni Arab-led insurgency, and will likely present the most daunting and critical challenge for Iraq's new government, U.S. military and diplomatic officials say.
washingtonpost.comThat's how we want it to seem, anyway.Mosque Explosion Kills 79 in Iraq BAGHDAD, Iraq - Suicide attackers wearing women's robes blew themselves up Friday in a Shiite mosque, killing 79 people and wounding more than 160, police said. It was the deadliest single attack in Iraq this year and the second major bombing of a Shiite target in as many days.
Police Lt. Col. Falah al-Mohammedawi said the blasts were caused by two suicide attackers wearing black abayas at the Buratha mosque, which is affiliated with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the main Shiite party.
Jalal Eddin al-Sagheer, the preacher at the mosque and one of the country's leading politicians, said there were three assailants. One came through the women's security checkpoint and blew up first, he said. Another raced into the mosque's courtyard while a third came to his office before detonating his bomb, said al-Sagheer, who was not injured.
He accused Sunni politicians and clerics of waging "a campaign of distortions and lies against the Buratha mosque, claiming that it includes Sunni prisoners and mass graves of Sunnis."
"Shiites are the ones who are targeted as part of this dirty sectarian war waged against them as the world watches silently," he told Al-Arabiya television.
Three US troops killed in Iraq BAGHDAD - The US military announced Friday the death of three of its troops across Iraq over the past 24 hours.
U.S. Marines say can keep Iraq levels indefinitely WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Marine Corps can sustain indefinitely its current troop level in Iraq, the No. 2 Marine general said on Thursday, despite concerns about the 3-year-old war breaking the all-volunteer military.
Gen. Robert Magnus, assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, also said the Marines do not plan to prohibit troops from having commercial body armor while deployed, as the Army did last week. Some troops and their families have bought body armor because of concern that what the military was providing was insufficient.
There are about 24,500 Marines serving in the U.S. force of about 132,000 in Iraq, defense officials said.
rootsie on 04.08.06 @ 08:16 AM CST [
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Those ungrateful Iraqis!
AT LAST, there's consensus on who's to blame for the mess in Iraq: the Iraqis!
From the beginning, there were ominous signs that the Iraqis weren't going to play the game right. More than a few neocon hearts were broken by the Iraqi refusal to greet us with flowers and champagne as we marched into Baghdad, and the snub still hurts. Just this week, Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum and an unrepentant hawk, complained about "the ingratitude of the Iraqis for the extraordinary favor we gave them: to release them from the bondage of Saddam Hussein's tyranny."
What really rankles most politicos these days is the Iraqis' refusal to get cracking on the formation of a multiethnic government. Four months after the elections, Iraqi factions still haven't come up with a power-sharing arrangement that satisfies all constituencies.
In Baghdad on Monday for a joint appearance with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Condoleezza Rice suggested that we've now given the Iraqis all the help a liberated people can reasonably expect: We "have forces on the ground and have sacrificed here," she told reporters, so we have "a right to expect that this process [of government formation] will keep moving forward."
Chiming in, Straw called on the Iraqis to shape up and select a prime minister, pronto: "The Americans have lost over 2,000 people [in Iraq]. We've lost over 100…. And billions — billions — of United States dollars, hundreds of millions of British pound sterlings have come into this country. We do have, I think, a right to say that we've got to be able to deal with Mr. A or Mr. B or Mr. C. We can't deal with Mr. Nobody."
The "after all we've done for you!" theme is more than a little jarring, coming as it does from the architects of the war. The Iraqis didn't beg us to invade their country. We invaded Iraq for reasons quite unrelated to the welfare of the Iraqi people (and, it turned out, for reasons unrelated to the welfare of the American people as well).
informationclearinghouse.info
rootsie on 04.08.06 @ 08:12 AM CST [
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First-graders get sad news about 'adopted' soldier
There's no good time in the school day to give bad news about a friend's death.
So administrators at Franklin Elementary School waited until just before the school day's end yesterday to let a first-grade class know that the Fort Campbell soldier they "adopted" died after a recent mission in Iraq.
"We want to give them a little time to absorb it," Assistant Principal Marcella Crenshaw said. "It's a lot to absorb for 5- and 6-year-old children. Children are very resilient, but it depends on their personal lives and what they've dealt with like this before."
tennessean.comI would be ripped if I were the parent of one of these children. Adopt a soldier?? Tell them he's dead and then send them home for their parents to deal (or not) with the confusion and grief they have set the children up for?
rootsie on 04.08.06 @ 08:09 AM CST [
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Friday, April 7th
Discovered: the missing link that solves a mystery of evolution
Scientists have made one of the most important fossil finds in history: a missing link between fish and land animals, showing how creatures first walked out of the water and on to dry land more than 375m years ago.
Palaeontologists have said that the find, a crocodile-like animal called the Tiktaalik roseae and described today in the journal Nature, could become an icon of evolution in action - like Archaeopteryx, the famous fossil that bridged the gap between reptiles and birds.
As such, it will be a blow to proponents of intelligent design, who claim that the many gaps in the fossil record show evidence of some higher power.
Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, said: "Our emergence on to the land is one of the more significant rites of passage in our evolutionary history, and Tiktaalik is an important link in the story."
Tiktaalik - the name means "a large, shallow-water fish" in the Inuit language Inuktikuk - shows that the evolution of animals from living in water to living on land happened gradually, with fish first living in shallow water.
The animal lived in the Devonian era lasting from 417m to 354m years ago, and had a skull, neck, and ribs similar to early limbed animals (known as tetrapods), as well as a more primitive jaw, fins, and scales akin to fish.
The scientists who discovered it say the animal was a predator with sharp teeth, a crocodile-like head, and a body that grew up to 2.75 metres (9ft) long.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 04.07.06 @ 08:12 AM CST [
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McKinney apologizes for run-in: Congresswoman allegedly assaulted police officer
Washington -- Under increasing pressure from House Democratic leaders, Rep. Cynthia McKinney took to the House floor Thursday to apologize for an incident in which she allegedly assaulted a Capitol police officer at a security checkpoint.
Since the incident last week, not one of McKinney's fellow 200 House Democratic colleagues had publicly defended her conduct in the incident, in which the African American representative from Georgia claims she was the victim of racial profiling at an entrance to the Longworth House Office Building.
The House's top Democrat, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, distanced herself from McKinney and publicly expressed increasing exasperation Thursday just before McKinney issued her apology. McKinney's case had become a distraction for Democrats, who want to keep the focus on what they see as a corrupt and ineffective Republican-led Congress symbolized by former Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who announced his resignation earlier this week.
The incident with McKinney began when she tried to go around a security checkpoint, as members of Congress are entitled to do. She wasn't wearing her members' lapel pin, and it appears an officer did not recognize her.
She was challenged, but didn't stop. When an officer tried to stop her, and apparently touched her, McKinney allegedly struck the officer in front of witnesses.
As the furor over the incident mounted in recent days, a federal grand jury was convened to consider possible charges against McKinney involving assaulting an officer. Witnesses to the incident, including an aide to Rep. Sam Farr, D-Carmel, testified Thursday before the grand jury.
McKinney, who has been embroiled in other controversies in her six House terms, tried to defuse the latest incident with Thursday's remarks.
"There should not have been any physical contact in this incident," McKinney said in a one-minute statement on the House floor. "I am sorry that this misunderstanding happened at all, and I regret its escalation and I apologize," she added, surrounded by a small group of Democrats, including Rep. Barbara Lee of Oakland.
Just an hour earlier, Pelosi made it clear that McKinney -- who since the incident has appeared daily on TV talk shows to publicize her claims of racial prejudice by the Capitol police -- wasn't getting sympathy from the Democratic leadership.
"I don't see any conceivable reason why anyone would strike a Capitol police officer. I have the greatest respect for the Capitol police," Pelosi told reporters.
Pelosi said the 535 members of the House and Senate have to help the police on Capitol Hill, where security has increased so much since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that officers toting long-barrel assault weapons patrol the grounds. "Members have a responsibility to help protect the Capitol, Congress and our constituents who visit us here," she added.
It also didn't help McKinney that House members from both parties and all races said they have also been challenged by police when they weren't wearing their lapel pins.
Baby-faced 31-year-old Rep. Adam Putnam, R-Fla., said some officers just can't believe he's a congressman. McKinney's fellow Georgian and Democrat, civil rights pioneer Rep. John Lewis, has also been stopped, and reportedly told her to stop making an issue out of the incident.
Rules Committee chairman Rep. David Dreier, R-San Dimas (Los Angeles County), said he often doesn't wear his pin and gets stopped, especially when he enters on the Capitol's Senate side.
After the vote, another of the members who stood with McKinney when she apologized said he hoped the storm had passed. "It's what a lot of members hoped she would do. It takes us toward putting this to rest," said Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio.
Pelosi's deputy, House Minority Whip Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., agreed. "Hopefully this will put it to rest. This was a small item. We have huge crises facing our country," Hoyer said.
There was no reaction from federal prosecutors on whether McKinney's apology will have any effect on the grand jury proceedings.
sfgate.com400 years of history, telescoped into a single event.
rootsie on 04.07.06 @ 08:10 AM CST [
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Libby Says Bush Authorized Leaks
Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff has testified that President Bush authorized him to disclose the contents of a highly classified intelligence assessment to the media to defend the Bush administration's decision to go to war with Iraq, according to papers filed in federal court [PDF] on Wednesday by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case.
Lewis "Scooter" Libby testified to a federal grand jury that he had received "approval from the President through the Vice President" to divulge portions of a National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam Hussein's purported efforts to develop nuclear weapons, according to the court papers. Libby was said to have testified that such presidential authorization to disclose classified information was "unique in his recollection," the court papers further said.
Libby also testified that an administration lawyer told him that Bush, by authorizing the disclosure of classified information, had in effect declassified the information. Legal experts disagree on whether the president has the authority to declassify information on his own.
The White House had no immediate reaction to the court filing.
nationaljournal.com
rootsie on 04.07.06 @ 08:05 AM CST [
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Martin Luther King shooting tapes released online
Thirty-eight years after he was assassinated on a motel balcony, photographs, recordings and police files that describe the death of Martin Luther King Jr. have been placed on the internet.
On yesterday's anniversary of Dr King's death, the Shelby County Register’s office in Memphis, Tennessee, made available hours of tapes, including hurried police calls from the scene of the crime, hundreds of photographs and thousands of pages of files and transcripts of the trial of James Earl Ray, the man found guilty of the shooting.
Dr King was shot in the jaw while he spoke to supporters from his balcony outside Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in downtown Memphis in the early evening of April 4, 1968. He was in the city, and under police surveillance, trying to lead a peaceful protest of sanitation workers. He died an hour later.
timesonline.co.uk
rootsie on 04.07.06 @ 08:01 AM CST [
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More self-rule sought for the oil-rich `Texas of Venezuela' (opposing Hugo Chavez)
A small group in the Venezuelan state of Zulia -- a state critical to the nation's oil industry -- has caused a stir by pushing for more autonomy.
MARACAIBO, Venezuela - The state of Zulia has always thought of itself as the Texas of Venezuela -- a land dominated by oil, cattle and largely conservative politicians. So it's no surprise that some of its people would want more autonomy.
''We want our own government,'' said Néstor Suárez, an economics professor and president of the pro-autonomy group Own Way. ``We are against big central governments.''
That central government, of course, is run by President Hugo Chávez, whose politics and economics are moving toward socialism in the mold of Cuba -- expanding social-service programs and seizing some ''idle'' lands and factories.
Suárez -- whose movement favors traditional capitalist policies -- said the group is still in its early stages but is not seeking independence from Venezuela. He likens its goal to Spain's Catalonia province and China's Hong Kong, areas with semi-autonomous economic and political systems.
But Own Way's ideas nevertheless are causing a national stir, with Chávez charging that the Bush administration, which he has repeatedly accused of trying to topple him, is backing the proposal in an attempt to grab Zulia's vast oil reserves.
The United States has called all of the accusations ridiculous.
Still, Zulia is important. With about four million people in an area the size of West Virginia, it has the second-highest population and is one of the richest of Venezuela's states. Its Lake Maracaibo is one of the country's main oil-producing areas.
freerepublic.comThe same thing is happening in Bolivia. Of course it is also 'ridiculous' to assume that the US has a hand in this.
rootsie on 04.07.06 @ 07:59 AM CST [
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The 7,000km journey that links Amazon destruction to fast food
A handful of the world's largest food companies and commodity traders, including McDonald's in the UK, are driving illegal and rapid destruction of the Amazon rainforest, according to a six-year investigation of the Brazilian soya bean industry.
The report, published today, follows a 7,000km chain that starts with the clearing of virgin forest by farmers and leads directly to Chicken McNuggets being sold in British and European fast food restaurants. It also alleges that much of the soya animal feed arriving in the UK from Brazil is a product of "forest crime" and that McDonald's and British supermarkets have turned a blind eye to the destruction of the forest.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 04.07.06 @ 07:54 AM CST [
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Colombia suffers highest level of armed violence
Colombia suffers one of the highest levels of armed violence in the world, although there has been a significant improvement since 2002, according to a joint report by the Conflict Analysis Resource Center and the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey.
Between 1979 and 2005 more than 475,000 people were killed by the use of firearms through crime, organised and petty, and the ongoing conflict between the government and guerrilla groups. Most victims have been young men.
The report concentrates on measuring the impact of armed violence on human security. It also describes the production, trade, use, and trafficking of arms in Colombia and the regulatory framework in the country.
news.ft.comColombia Tops List of Land Mine Victims ...According to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Colombia had the third-highest number of land mine victims in 2004 after Cambodia and Afghanistan. The count was incomplete for 2005.
The Colombian government's Land Mines Observatory recorded 1,070 land mine victims in Colombia in 2005 and said the number was more than in any other country. One quarter of these incidents resulted in deaths.
Land mines are perhaps the perfect embodiment of Colombia's civil war, a mechanism designed to kill and maim that draws no distinction between armed combatant and innocent civilian.
The majority of the victims are soldiers, many of whom are slowly trudging their way through heavily mined leftist strongholds in southern Colombia in the country's biggest offensive against the rebels. But a full quarter of those injured or killed, according to government figures, are civilians caught in the middle of the violence.
Colombia: Drug Wars Force Forest Nomads To Flee 150 Indians belonging to one of the last nomadic tribes in the Amazon have been forced to flee their land after becoming caught up in Colombia's drugs war.
Large numbers of left-wing guerrillas have taken over the Indians' territory, and are engaged in fighting with the Colombian army and right-wing paramilitaries. All sides are seeking to control the lucrative drugs trade which thrives in this remote region.
The Indians belong to the Nukak-Makú tribe, who live in the eastern Colombian Amazon. The tribe first made contact with white people in 1988. Around half the tribe have died since then from diseases such as flu and measles, leaving a population of about 500. In 1997 a Survival campaign succeeded in gaining legal protection of the Indians' territory on paper.
Until recently most of the Nukak were trying to continue their nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life in the face of waves of violence against them and the colonisation of their lands by poor Colombians growing coca. However, the scale of the fighting now taking place has made their life in the forest impossible, and the very survival of the tribe is now at risk.
rootsie on 04.07.06 @ 07:50 AM CST [
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U.S. Rolls Out Nuclear Plan
The administration's proposal would modernize the nation's complex of laboratories and factories as well as produce new bombs.
The Bush administration Wednesday unveiled a blueprint for rebuilding the nation's decrepit nuclear weapons complex, including restoration of a large-scale bomb manufacturing capacity.
The plan calls for the most sweeping realignment and modernization of the nation's massive system of laboratories and factories for nuclear bombs since the end of the Cold War.
Until now, the nation has depended on carefully maintaining aging bombs produced during the Cold War arms race, some several decades old. The administration, however, wants the capability to turn out 125 new nuclear bombs per year by 2022, as the Pentagon retires older bombs that it says will no longer be reliable or safe.
Under the plan, all of the nation's plutonium would be consolidated into a single facility that could be more effectively and cheaply defended against possible terrorist attacks. The plan would remove the plutonium kept at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory by 2014, though transfers of the material could start sooner. In recent years, concern has grown that Livermore, surrounded by residential neighborhoods in the Bay Area, could not repel a terrorist attack.
latimes.com
rootsie on 04.07.06 @ 07:42 AM CST [
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A replay of Iraq beckons in Darfur if we send in troop
If there is a world journalism record for being arrested by Sudan's dictatorial government, I probably hold it: I was detained on the first morning of my first visit. Despite many less eventful subsequent visits to Sudan, I remain very wary of the regime.
Nevertheless, Khartoum does have a point about the dangers of western military intervention in Darfur. In February President Bush, during an unscripted question-and-answer session in Florida, suggested an expanded international role in Darfur, with "Nato stewardship" of a UN force there. This statement caught many policy makers off guard.
Nato is already assisting with logistics for the 7,800 African Union peacekeepers in Darfur. Bush is pushing for a large UN force - perhaps 20,000 troops - to replace the AU, arguing that this would end the fighting there. This sounds good but won't work. Putting white, western, Christian troops in Darfur would unite all those fighting each other - in a holy war against outsiders. Defence officials in London and Brussels cautioned Washington by invoking the 1993 debacle in Somalia. But the genie of western-directed forces is out of the bottle.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 04.07.06 @ 07:38 AM CST [
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Net closes in on Gaza fisherman
Isreali gunboats stop Palestinians from fishing as a communal punishment or to prevent attacks.
His nets empty and his fibreglass hull perforated by machinegun bullets, Omar sits glumly on the shoreline contemplating the looming demise of the Gaza fishing industry.
Unable to afford the rising prices of lamb, beef and flour in their sealed-off coastal strip, Palestinians crowd their markets in search of fish. Now that poultry supplies are depleted by the threat of bird flu, the clamour for fish is even greater.
But, confronted by Israeli gunboats in fishing grounds they consider their own, the impoverished fishermen are unable to meet the demand.
The heart of the issue is the continued Israeli control of Gaza’s borders, airspace and waters, more than six months after it claimed to have ended its military rule of Gaza by evacuating 8,000 Jewish settlers and all its military bases.
A study by the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP), released this week, identifies Israeli restrictions on fishing boats as a key factor in the decline of an industry that, it says, could be finished by October 2007.
timesonline.co.uk
rootsie on 04.07.06 @ 07:34 AM CST [
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Problem children locked up in pig pens, Spanish police say
Swiss teenagers sent to a centre for problem children based at a remote Spanish farmhouse were allegedly locked up in pig pens and kept on a diet of milk and muesli if they misbehaved, according to police.
The case came to light after some of the children ran away and one was found at a nearby railway station.
Police in the north-eastern town of Sant Llorenç de la Muga arrested three people who had been running the centre and accused them of illegally detaining children and using physical and psychological violence against them. "Those in charge of the centre allegedly mistreated the children daily, shutting them up for days on end in pig pens if they did not want to work or worked poorly," a Spanish police statement said. "Some children were shut up eight hours a day in the pig pens for three months," it added. Police said other children were allegedly confined in a space measuring one square metre.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 04.07.06 @ 07:31 AM CST [
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A million at risk as Georgian floods loom
More than a million Georgians could be evacuated after being told they are at risk from catastrophic flooding, landslides and mud flows, says the country's chief environmental adviser.
Geologists and other experts are examining mountainsides and river valleys so people in disaster-prone areas can be evacuated in time. The homes of 400,000 families in 3,000 settlements are at risk, says Emi Tsereteli, of the State University of Georgia, head of the environment ministry emergency taskforce. He blamed Georgia's worsening problems on climate change and man-made factors such as illegal logging on steep mountainsides.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 04.07.06 @ 07:28 AM CST [
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Cheap, pure heroin set to flood Britain, say police
A bumper crop of opium poppies in Afghanistan has raised fears that an influx of cheap and dangerously pure heroin could flood the UK within the next few months.
Drug experts have warned that, with the price of a heroin wrap already £20 or less, they are concerned supply will outstrip demand, forcing dealers to try to attract new customers with low prices and create the biggest drug epidemic in the country for 20 years.
Some campaigners are worried there will be a rash of drug-related deaths because the heroin heading for the UK is likely to be stronger and more pure than many users are accustomed to.
"The heroin is heading our way and we have to be prepared for it," warned Tom Wood, former deputy chief constable at Lothian and Borders Police and now chairman of the Edinburgh Drugs and Alcohol Action Team.
"It will be getting cheaper. If enough comes in, then supply will outstrip demand.
"The bigger concern is that it will become more powerful. We're talking about extra strong, pure heroin. If it is pure it will be more dangerous.''
independent.co.uk
rootsie on 04.07.06 @ 07:23 AM CST [
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Gold Rises in London, Nears $600, as Oil Gains Spur Fund Buying
April 6 (Bloomberg) -- Gold rose in London, approaching $600 for the first time since 1980, as investors bought bullion to hedge against rising oil prices amid concern over disruption to energy supplies.
Crude oil gained for a second day in New York as declining gasoline stockpiles before the peak U.S. summer-driving season added to concern about reduced supplies from Nigeria and Iran. Money in index-linked commodity funds will rise 38 percent this year to $140 billion, according to Barclays Capital.
``Rising oil prices and the political concerns are flowing into gold prices,'' Gerard Burg, a commodity economist at National Australia Bank Ltd., said in Melbourne. ``Investors are the real factor driving the gold prices.''
Gold for immediate delivery in London rose as much as $8.45, or 1.4 percent, to $596.95 an ounce, the highest since January, 1981. It traded at $594.80 at 12:49 p.m. local time. The metal rose to $602.50 on Dec. 23, 1980.
Funds have been the biggest buyers in 2006, outpacing purchases by jewelers, who accounted for 73 percent of demand last year, the London-based World Gold Council said in a March 29 newsletter.
Some investors buy gold to preserve purchasing power as inflation increases. The precious metal surged to $873 an ounce in New York in 1980, when consumer prices jumped more than 12 percent.
bloomberg.com
rootsie on 04.07.06 @ 07:15 AM CST [
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'The war is illegal. I can't pay for a government killing machine'
A man has vowed to go to prison rather than pay taxes which he believes would fund a "blatantly illegal war" in Iraq.
Robin Brookes, 52, appeared at Swindon County Court for refusing to pay a £580 income tax bill. Describing an imminent seizure of his goods as "blood money", the doll's house designer, from Market Lavington in Wiltshire, said: "I don't want to break the law, and I want to contribute to education and health, the law and the police force, but I cannot pay for a government's killing machine.
"The Iraq war is illegal and it is against the will of the people, which was amply demonstrated by people marching in London. I have been withholding taxes since the March 2003 invasion."
Mr Brookes, who believes that 10 per cent of all tax is used by the Government to fund the military, was told by magistrates on Monday that bailiffs would seize his goods on 5 May unless he paid up.
independent.co.uk
rootsie on 04.07.06 @ 07:13 AM CST [
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The tethered goat strategy
Since the Iraqi elections in January, US foreign service officers at the Baghdad embassy have been writing a steady stream of disturbing cables describing drastically worsening conditions. Violence from incipient communal civil war is rapidly rising. Last month there were eight times as many assassinations committed by Shia militias as terrorist murders by Sunni insurgents. The insurgency, according to the reports, also continues to mutate. Meanwhile, President Bush's strategy of training Iraqi police and army to take over from coalition forces - "when they stand up, we'll stand down" - is perversely and portentously accelerating the strife. State department officials in the field are reporting that Shia militias use training as cover to infiltrate key positions. Thus the strategy to create institutions of order and security is fuelling civil war.
Rather than being received as invaluable intelligence, the messages are discarded or, worse, considered signs of disloyalty. Rejecting the facts on the ground apparently requires blaming the messengers. So far, two top attaches at the embassy have been reassigned elsewhere for producing factual reports that are too upsetting.
The Bush administration's preferred response to increasing disintegration is to act as if it has a strategy that is succeeding. "More delusion as a solution in the absence of a solution," said a senior state department official. Under the pretence that Iraq is being pacified, the military is partially withdrawing from hostile towns in the countryside and parts of Baghdad. By reducing the number of soldiers, the administration can claim its policy is working going into the midterm elections. But the jobs the military doesn't want to perform are being sloughed off on state department "provisional reconstruction teams" (PRTs) led by foreign service officers. The rationale is that they will win Iraqi hearts-and-minds by organising civil functions.
The Pentagon has informed the state department it will not provide security for these officials and that mercenaries should be hired for protection instead. Internal state department documents listing the PRT jobs, dated March 30, reveal that the vast majority of them remain unfilled by volunteers. So the professionals are being forced to take the assignments in which "they can't do what they are being asked to do", as a senior department official told me.
Foreign service officers, as a rule, are self-abnegating in serving any administration. The state department's Intelligence and Research Bureau was correct in its scepticism before the war about Saddam Hussein's possession of WMDs, but was ignored. The department was correct in its assessment in its 17-volume Future of Iraq project about the immense effort required for reconstruction after the war, but it was disregarded. Now its reports from Iraq are correct, but their authors are being punished. Foreign service officers are to be sent out like tethered goats to the killing fields. When these misbegotten projects inevitably fail, the department will be blamed. Passive resistance to these assignments reflects anticipation of impending disaster, including the likely murder of diplomats.
Amid this internal crisis of credibility, the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, has washed her hands of her department. Her management skills are minimal. Now she has left coercing people to fill the PRTs to her counsellor, Philip Zelikow, who, by doing the dirty work, is trying to keep her reputation clean.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 04.07.06 @ 07:12 AM CST [
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International laws hinder UK troops - Reid
John Reid demanded sweeping changes to international law yesterday to free British soldiers from the restraints of the Geneva conventions and make it easier for the west to mount military actions against other states.
In his speech, the defence secretary addressed three key issues: the treatment of prisoners, when to mount a pre-emptive strikes, and when to intervene to stop a humanitarian crisis. In all these areas, he indicated that the UK and west was being hamstrung by existing inadequate law.
Mr Reid indicated he believed existing rules, including some of the conventions - a bedrock of international law - were out of date and inadequate to deal with the threat of international terrorists.
"We are finding an enemy which obeys no rules whatsoever", he said, referring to what he called "barbaric terrorism".
The conventions, he said, were created more than half century ago "when the world was almost unrecognisable". They dealt with how the sick and injured and how prisoners of war were treated, "and the obligations on states during their military occupation of another state", he said.
Given the big changes undertaken by the military over the past 50 years, he added, "serious questions" must be asked about whether "further changes in international law in this area are necessary".
Mr Reid declined to say whether he had come round to the US view that detainees at Guantánamo bay should not be allowed the protection of the conventions or the courts. Similarly, he would not say if he thought Britain should support the US practice of extraordinary rendition, the transferring of prisoners to secret camps where they risk being tortured. However, he said, it was not "sufficient just to say [Guantánamo] is wrong".
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 04.07.06 @ 07:06 AM CST [
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Evangelicals Rally Their Flocks Behind Israel
Charismatic televangelist John Hagee thinks that the Rev. Pat Robertson's suggestion that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's stroke was payback from God for withdrawing from Gaza was "insensitive and unnecessary." But he nevertheless appears to share Robertson's concern that Israel may be giving up too much land to the Palestinians.
To prevent the George W. Bush administration from pressuring the Israelis into turning over even more land, Hagee, the pastor of San Antonio's Cornerstone Church and the head of a multimillion-dollar evangelical enterprise, recently brought together 400 Christian evangelical leaders – representing as many as 30 million Christians – for an invitation-only "Summit on Israel."
The result was the launch of a new pro-Israel lobbying group called Christians United for Israel (CUFI).
By 2002, a number of veteran Christian conservative evangelical leaders and Republican Party power brokers had joined forces with conservative Jewish leaders to launch several pro-Israel organizations. But the history of Jewish-evangelical involvement goes back several decades.
According to Rabbi James Rudin, writing in his recently published book, The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right's Plans for the Rest of U.S., "the first [modern] evangelical-Jewish meeting" took place in New York in 1975.
A bevy of issues including "the meaning of Messiah in both traditions, Jesus the Jew, biblical theology, and the meaning of modern Israel and Jerusalem for Christian conservatives and Jews" were discussed.
Rudin points out that "the evangelical commitment to Israel creates some … ambivalence" in the Jewish community, since that "commitment" is built on the biblical belief that "without an Israel, an ingathering of Jewish exiles, [the] major event in Christian eschatology [the Second coming of Jesus to Jerusalem] cannot take place."
"That is why some evangelicals are dismayed at any Israeli withdrawal or disengagement from any area of the biblical 'Holy Land.' That is also why the strong Christian conservative support of Israel is not linked to Middle East realpolitik or America's growing thirst for Arab oil," Rudin says.
Although not as well known on the national political scene as some of his evangelical brethren, Hagee has built an impressive evangelical empire and developed strong political ties to the Republican Party.
Since his 1978 "conversion" to Zionism, he has emphasized establishing and maintaining good relations with Israeli leaders and conservative sectors of the U.S. Jewish community. Over the years, he has met with Israeli heads of state and carved out a special relationship with former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose Likud Party performed dismally in the recent elections in Israel.
"Think of CUFI as a Christian version of American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC]," the powerful pro-Israel lobby, Hagee told The Jerusalem Post in an interview a few days before his February summit. "We need to be able to respond instantly to Washington with our concerns about Israel. We must join forces to speak as one group and move as one body to [respond to] the crisis Israel will be facing in the near future."
antiwar.com
rootsie on 04.07.06 @ 07:02 AM CST [
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AIPAC website: Decades of Deception-Iran's Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons
Iran’s persistent refusal to end its illicit nuclear programs is a direct threat to countries around the world. Iranian ballistic missiles are currently capable of delivering a nuclear warhead more than 1,200 miles. The video and maps below are intended to help you better understand the escalating threat that is Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.
aipac.org
rootsie on 04.07.06 @ 06:51 AM CST [
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Iranian democrats tell US where to stick its $85m
While gauging public opinion can be a tall order in Iran, many of those who have spoken out so far say they are keen to maintain their independence, and this includes American money to continue their efforts to promote democracy in Iran.
The Bush administration has US$75 million in emergency funding to promote democracy in Iran, in addition to $10 million already budgeted.
Mohammad Ali Dadkhah is a co-founder of the Center for Human Rights Defenders. Dadkhah tells RFE/RL that democratic changes should come from inside the country - without outside interference. "Democracy is not a product that we can import from another country," Dadkhah said. "We have to prepare the ground for it so that it can grow and bear fruit - especially because independent and national forces, and also self-reliant forces, in Iran will never accept a foreign country telling them what to do and which way to take."
The proposed US aid would include $25 million to support "political dissidents, labor union leaders, and human-rights activists" in additional to non-governmental groups outside Iran. The declared aim is to allow them to build support inside the country.
The US administration also wants $50 million to set up round-the-clock television broadcasting in Persian to beam into Iran. Another $5 million is aimed at allowing Iranian students and scholars to study in the US. And $15 million is earmarked for other measures, such as expanding Internet access, which is tightly controlled in Iran.
asiatimes.com
rootsie on 04.07.06 @ 06:44 AM CST [
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Mortar blast near main US base in Afghanistan kills one
KABUL (AFP) - A mortar blast near the main US military base in Afghanistan left a civilian dead while coalition forces killed an insurgent and dropped 2,000-pound bombs on a band of Taliban, officials said.
Police were investigating whether the explosion a few hundred metres from Bagram Airfield north of Kabul was the work of insurgents from the ousted Taliban government, local police commander Abdul Rahman Sayedkhili said.
news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 04.07.06 @ 06:29 AM CST [
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Pakistan says killed 40 militants near Afghan border
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistani forces killed at least 40 pro-Taliban militants in a troubled tribal region near Afghan border, the military said on Thursday, sharply raising the tally from the previous day's fierce fighting.
"Latest information shows that at least 40 miscreants were killed," military spokesman Major-General Shaukat Sultan told Reuters, raising the tally from 16.
reuters.com
rootsie on 04.07.06 @ 06:26 AM CST [
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Thursday, April 6th
Capitol Police Chief Denies Racism Charge
U. S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer said Wednesday that Rep. Cynthia McKinney turned an officer's failure to recognize her into a criminal matter when she failed to stop at his request, and then struck him.
"He reached out and grabbed her and she turned around and hit him," Gainer said on CNN. "Even the high and the haughty should be able to stop and say, 'I'm a congressman' and then everybody moves on."
For her part, McKinney wasn't backing down from the argument. She charged anew that racism is behind what she said is a pattern of difficulty in clearing Hill security checkpoints.
Gainer said that racism, however, was not a factor.
"I've seen our officers stop white members and black members, Latinos, male and females," he told CNN. "It's not an issue about what your race or gender is. It's an issue about making sure people who come into our building are recognized if they're not going through the magnetometer, and this officer at that moment didn't recognize her."
"It would have been real easy, as most members of Congress do, to say here's who I am or do you know who I am?" Gainer added.
Police also have said that McKinney was failing to wear a pin that lawmakers are asked to display when entering Capitol facilities.
But she said Wednesday: "Face recognition is the issue .... The pin doesn't have my name on it and it doesn't have my picture on it, and so security should not be based on a pin ... People are focused on my hairdo."
The Georgia Democrat, appearing on CBS's "The Early Show" Wednesday, recently dropped her trademark cornrows in favor of a curly brown afro.
"Something that perhaps the average American just doesn't understand is that there is a heightened sense of a lack of appropriateness being there for members who are elected who happen to be of color," McKinney said, "and until this issue is addressed by the American public in a very substantive way, it won't be the last time."
Last Wednesday's incident in a House office building has caused a commotion on Capitol Hill, where security in the era of terrorist threat is tighter than ever and where authorities had to order an evacuation just Monday because of a power outage.
McKinney has garnered little support among fellow Democrats in her feud with the Capitol police. No one in her party chose to join her at a news conference last Friday to discuss the situation, and the event was canceled.
As a federal prosecutor considers whether to press assault or other charges against her, Republicans presented a resolution commending Capitol police for professionalism toward members of Congress and visitors _ even though they "endure physical and verbal assaults in some extreme cases."
"I don't think it's fair to attack the Capitol Police and I think it's time that we show our support for them," said Rep. Patrick McHenry, R- N.C., a sponsor of the measure. Ignoring a police officer's order to stop, or hitting one, "is never OK," McHenry said.
Some GOP members have said the McKinney incident serves to underscore Democratic insensitivity to security concerns.
breitbart.comMcKinney Acting Like 'Arrogant Racist'Tom Delay, who should be off somewhere skulking in shame, also called McKinney a racist yesterday. And on talk radio? "a welfare drag queen"..."a ghetto slut."Boortz claimed McKinney "looked like a welfare drag queen" Referring to Rep. Cynthia McKinney's (D-GA) March 29 altercation with a Capitol Police officer, Neal Boortz attacked McKinney's physical appearance on the March 31 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio program, stating, "I don't blame that cop for stopping her" because "it looked like a welfare drag queen was trying to sneak into the Longworth House Office Building." He added: "That haircut is ghetto trash." Boortz said he was "absolutely privileged and entitled" to make his comments, based not on his "white privilege," but on his "bald privilege," saying, "I've been enduring jokes about my lack of hair for years," so "I am privileged and entitled to say anything I want about anybody else's hairdo." Boortz then predicted, "Media Matters [for America] will pick up that one," and declared: "[T]hat's why I do things like that, just to give them something to write about." As Media Matters noted, earlier on his program, Boortz had said that McKinney "looks like a ghetto slut."
rootsie on 04.06.06 @ 07:52 AM CST [
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Police Uncover New Duke Lacrosse E-Mail
Hours after an exotic dancer was allegedly raped by members of the Duke University lacrosse team, a player apparently sent an e-mail saying he wanted to invite more strippers to his dorm room, kill them and skin them. It was not clear whether the message was serious or a joke.
Investigators did not return calls seeking comment about the nature of the e-mail. But a lawyer for the player who purportedly wrote it said the content suggests his client is innocent.
"While the language of the e-mail is vile, the e-mail itself is perfectly consistent with the boys' unequivocal assertion that no sexual assault took place that evening," said attorney Robert Ekstrand. The e-mail "demonstrates that its writer is completely unaware that any act or event remotely similar to what has been alleged ever occurred."
breitbart.com
rootsie on 04.06.06 @ 07:30 AM CST [
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'Playing The Clash made me a terror suspect'
A mobile phone salesman was hauled off a plane and questioned for three hours as a terror suspect - because he listened to songs by The Clash and Led Zeppelin.
Harraj Mann, 24, played the punk anthem London Calling and classic rock track Immigrant Song in a taxi before a flight to London.
The lyrics to both tracks made the driver fear his passenger was a terrorist.
The words of the Clash track begin: "London calling to the faraway towns, now war is declared and battle come down." And Led Zep's Immigrant Song goes: "The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands, to fight the horde, singing and crying: Valhalla, I am coming!"
Mr Mann, of Hartlepool, Teesside, had boarded the plane at Durham Tees Valley Airport when the flight to Heathrow was stopped and he was arrested by police.
He said he was told he was being questioned under the Terrorism Act and his choice of music had aroused suspicions.
Mr Mann said yesterday: 'The taxi had one of those tape deck things that plugs into your digital music player.
"I played Procol Harum's Whiter Shade Of Pale first, which the taxi man liked. I figured he liked the classics so put on a bit of Led Zeppelin - Immigrant Song - which he didn't like. Then, since I was going to London, I played the song by The Clash and finished up with Nowhere Man by The Beatles."
Mr Mann said he was 'frog-marched off the plane in front of everyone, had my bags searched and was asked 'every question you can think of'.
dailymail.co.uk
rootsie on 04.06.06 @ 07:27 AM CST [
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DHS Spokesman Is Accused of Soliciting Teen Online
The deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security was arrested last night on charges that he used the Internet to seduce an undercover Florida sheriff's detective who he thought was a 14-year-old girl, the Polk County Sheriff's Office said.
Brian J. Doyle, 55, was arrested at his Silver Spring home at 7:45 p.m. and charged with seven counts of using a computer to seduce a child and 16 counts of transmitting harmful materials to a minor, according to a sheriff's office statement.
Agents with the department's Inspector General's Office, the U.S. Secret Service, the Montgomery County police and the Polk County Sheriff's Office served a search warrant and seized his home computer and other materials, the statement said.
Doyle was online at the time awaiting what he thought was a nude image of a girl who had lymphoma, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said in an interview with Fox News' "On the Record With Greta Van Susteren." "We wanted to make sure he was using that computer and talking to detectives at the time of the arrest," Judd said.
washingtonpost.com
rootsie on 04.06.06 @ 07:24 AM CST [
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Workers in the Aftermath of Katrina: Survival of the Fittest
Six months after Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf Coast struggles with a new challenge-who will do the rebuilding? The region is awash in clean-up and reconstruction projects, but with more than 1.5 million people displaced by the hurricane, ready hands are in short supply.
In many areas, the tight post-Katrina labor market has already had stunning effects-construction jobs regularly advertise starting pay of $15 an hour or more, and a gig at Burger King might land you a $6,000 bonus.
But even with tight labor markets, workers in the region are finding conditions-and organizing against those conditions-challenging.
The hurricane has created enormous problems for the Gulf Coast's union workers. Waste Management Inc.-one of the largest waste services companies in the United States-is one such example. The company handled trash pick-ups for the city of New Orleans before Katrina.
But after the storm, FEMA took over garbage collection for the city and Waste Management secured several lucrative subcontracts for debris removal. In the process, the company dumped its unionized workers and replaced them with temps. Waste Management even set up a camp just north of the Huey Long Bridge for its temp laborers.
counterpunch.org
rootsie on 04.06.06 @ 07:22 AM CST [
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Somalia may be proxy US-Islam battleground
NAIROBI, April 4 (Reuters) - Somalia's worst fighting in years suggests the failed Horn of Africa state may become a new proxy battleground for Islamist militants and the United States.
Washington sees Somalia as a terrorist haven and backs the warlords in Mogadishu, which may have galvanised the Islamists against them both, analysts say.
A battle in March pitted warlords calling themselves the Anti-Terrorism Coalition against Islamic fighters backed by the influential Islamic courts. As many as 90 people were killed in the fighting.
A widely held perception that the United States backs the warlords with weapons, money and surveillance prompted Islamist hardliners to start a fight that killed 37 people in February, hours after the coalition announced its presence.
What has many worried is that these two battles were seen as a fight between the United States and Islam.
The U.S. backing for the warlords has, in fact, strengthened the position of the Islamists and "helped extreme elements to get the Somali public behind them," an official involved with Somalia told Reuters.
While the Islamic courts are not viewed as extremists, they and their supporters are seen as sympathetic to al Qaeda and foreign fighters who operate in Somalia, the official said.
Others say the Islamic courts, whose leaders have blamed the United States for supporting warlords, want to fight any attempt to create a government that would undermine their authority.
alertnet.org
rootsie on 04.06.06 @ 07:19 AM CST [
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Israel Fires Missiles Into Abbas' Compound
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Israeli warplanes fired three missiles into the presidential compound of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday, wounding two people and leaving deep craters in the ground. Abbas was not there at the time.
The Israeli airstrike came in response to homemade Palestinian rocket attacks on southern Israel, though it was not immediately clear why Abbas' compound was targeted. Abbas has been a strong critic of the rocket fire and has urged the new Hamas Cabinet to accept peacemaking with Israel.
The missiles landed at Ansar 2, a largely abandoned base of the presidential guard and about 100 yards from Abbas' office. The Palestinian leader was at his main office in the West Bank.
news.yahoo.comThat's right, kill the only Palestinian you say you're willing to talk to.U.S. looking to increase Palestinian humanitarian aid The United States wants to increase humanitarian assistance to Palestinians and help them control an outbreak of bird flu even though it will not give aid to a Hamas-led government, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Tuesday.
Rice is close to concluding a review of U.S. aid to Palestinians as she seeks to balance efforts to prevent suffering among Palestinians while avoiding any U.S. dealings with Hamas, which Washington considers a terrorist group despite having won a parliamentary election in January.
"One thing we are reviewing is how we can even increase our humanitarian assistance because we don't want to send a negative message to the Palestinian people about their humanitarian needs," Rice told a congressional budget hearing.
Oh I don't think the Palestinians are getting the wrong idea, not at all.
rootsie on 04.06.06 @ 07:14 AM CST [
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Turkish Kurds see Iraq as an inspiration
DIYARBAKIR, Turkey - For Ramazan, an elderly Kurdish businessman, the recent battles between masked Kurdish youths and Turkish police have rekindled a dream - the creation of an autonomous zone for his people in Turkey, much like the one carved out of Iraq. But that dream is Turkey's worst nightmare.
While Kurds look to northern Iraq for inspiration, Turks see it as an example of what the future could bring: a collapsed central state and a brewing ethnic civil war.
Iran and Syria also are concerned that Kurds in Iraq's oil-rich north could set up an independent state if the Iraqi central government collapses - serving as a rallying call for their own restless Kurdish minorities and destabilize the entire region.
Iran's ambassador to Turkey, Firouz Dowlatabadi, warned in an interview published Tuesday that Turkey, Iran and Syria need a joint policy on the Kurdish issue or "the U.S. will carve pieces from us for a Kurdish state."
thestate.com
rootsie on 04.06.06 @ 07:08 AM CST [
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Democracy In Iraq Not A Priority in U.S. Budget
While President Bush vows to transform Iraq into a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, his administration has been scaling back funding for the main organizations trying to carry out his vision by building democratic institutions such as political parties and civil society groups.
The administration has included limited new money for traditional democracy promotion in budget requests to Congress. Some organizations face funding cutoffs this month, while others struggle to stretch resources through the summer. The shortfall threatens projects that teach Iraqis how to create and sustain political parties, think tanks, human rights groups, independent media outlets, trade unions and other elements of democratic society.
The shift in funding priorities comes as security costs are eating up an enormous share of U.S. funds for Iraq and the administration has already ratcheted back ambitions for reconstructing the country's battered infrastructure. While acknowledging that they are investing less in party-building and other such activities, administration officials argue that bringing more order and helping Iraqis run effective ministries contribute to democracy as well.
Jennifer Windsor, executive director of Freedom House, an advocacy group that hosted a Bush speech last week, called the situation "a travesty" and said she is "appalled" that more is not being done. "This is the time to show that democracy promotion is more than holding an election. If the U.S. can't see fit to fund follow-up democracy promotion at this time," then it is making a mistake, she said.
"The commitment to what the president of the United States will say every single day of the week is his number one priority in Iraq, when it's translated into action, looks very tiny," said Les Campbell, who runs programs in the Middle East for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, known as NDI.
NDI and its sister, the International Republican Institute (IRI), will see their grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development dry up at the end of this month, according to a government document, leaving them only special funds earmarked by Congress last year. Similarly, the U.S. Institute of Peace has had its funding for Iraq democracy promotion cut by 60 percent. And the National Endowment for Democracy expects to run out of money for Iraqi programs by September.
"Money keeps getting transferred away to security training. Democracy's one of the things that's been transferred," said Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's project on democracy and the rule of law. "Without that, all the other stuff looks like just background work."
washingtonpost.comGee should we cheer or boo?
rootsie on 04.06.06 @ 07:05 AM CST [
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In Iraq, US still carries big stick
WASHINGTON – Much of the money for rebuilding Iraq has already been spent, and Iraqi soldiers are gradually taking over for their American counterparts. So what can the United States still use as leverage? It may be that the strongest influence is the simple fear of what would happen if the US up and left.
"Most of Iraq's leaders recognize that if the US were to pull out precipitously, things could get much worse," says Phebe Marr, an Iraq expert at the US Institute of Peace who has spent considerable time with Iraq's principal political factions. "All the talk about the US getting out, an exit strategy and so forth, has them worried. It's having an impact."
Yet even as the US shows signs of growing increasingly impatient with Iraqi leaders over their inability to name a new government, that doesn't mean the US wants to look as if it is determining Iraq's future. The result is a delicate balancing act: It's applying pressure for political action even while encouraging a sovereign Iraq that appears to stand on its own two feet.
csmonitor.comIraq shelves political talks despite US pressure BAGHDAD (AFP) - Iraqi leaders shelved talks on forming a government despite a warning from the United States and Britain against any further delay, as at least 23 were killed in violence across the country.
In another key development, Saddam Hussein was charged for genocide for the first time over his Anfal military campaign against Kurds from 1987-1988 that left around 180,000 people dead.
Talks on forming a national unity government were shelved despite stern warnings from US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her British counterpart Jack Straw who left Iraq Monday after an unprecedented two-day visit.
The formation of the first permanent post-Saddam government has been delayed due to bitter wrangling over key ministerial posts and the premiership, with non-Shiite factions opposing the candidacy of incumbent prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari.
The political vacuum saw Rice and Straw earlier this week voice their frustration at the lack of political progress, although the two refrained from any direct reference as to who should lead the cabinet.
Splits have appeared in the dominant conservative Shiite grouping, the United Iraqi Alliance, over the key sticking point of whether Jaafari should lead the new government.
And who caused this 'split'?Rice Dismisses Talk of U.S. Bases in Iraq WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday brushed aside suggestions that the United States wants an indefinite troop presence and permanent military bases in Iraq.
"The presence in Iraq is for a very clear purpose, and that's to enable Iraqis to be able to govern themselves and to create security forces that can help them do that," Rice told the House Appropriations Committee's foreign operations panel.
"I don't think that anybody believes that we really want to be there longer than we have to," the chief U.S. diplomat added.
However, Rice did not say when all U.S. forces would return home and did not directly answer Rep. Steven Rothman (news, bio, voting record), D-N.J., when he asked, "Will the bases be permanent or not?"
"I would think that people would tell you, we're not seeking permanent bases really pretty much anywhere in the world these days. We are, in fact, in the process of removing base structure from a lot of places," Rice replied.
A lie, like so many others.
rootsie on 04.06.06 @ 07:01 AM CST [
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The rules of war: too '20th Century'?
"We need to make people feel the consequences of their actions." Yikes.The British Defence Secretary John Reid has called for changes in the rules of war in the face of "a deliberate regression towards barbaric terrorism by our opponents."
He has put forward three areas for re-examination:
-The treatment of international terrorists
-The definition of an "imminent threat" to make it easier to take pre-emptive action
-When to intervene to stop a humanitarian crisis.
Perhaps the most controversial element was the first.
Although he framed his speech in the form of raising questions rather than proposing answers, he came close to suggesting that the way to end the "anomaly" of the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay was to change international law.
"Anomaly" is the word chosen by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair to describe Guantanamo and it has never really been defined. Mr Reid went some way towards doing that.
There are two ways of ending an anomaly - remove the anomaly or change the situation that makes it one. He appeared to favour the latter.
"On the one hand it is against our values," he said during questions after a speech to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London.
"But we need to understand how we got to this unsatisfactory anomaly. It is not enough to say that it is wrong. We ought to discuss how it happened."
How it happened, he suggested in his speech, was 11 September 2001 "proved beyond doubt that, while no one can be sure that the era of war between great powers is entirely over, we certainly now face a new enemy."
Guantanamo Bay: how to end the 'anomaly'?
"We now face non-state actors capable of operating on a global scale, crossing international borders, exploiting the teachings of a great, peaceful religion as justification for their murderous intent."
...Mr Reid said the question was "to what extent we could impose on non-state actors the same constraints we apply to ourselves. We need to make people feel the consequences of their actions."
bbc.co.uk
rootsie on 04.06.06 @ 06:52 AM CST [
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Wednesday, April 5th
Astronomer Unearths Evidence of Scientific Tradition in Africa
Part of apartheid involved destroying people's aspirations," says Thebe Medupe, a South African astronomer. "Imagine being a black child and all the time reading about other peoples' histories and other peoples' way of doing things. You start having doubts about whether you played any role in human history."
Medupe grew up in a rural village in northwest South Africa. When he was 13, he built a telescope. "I remember the first night I pointed the telescope toward the Moon," he says. "It was amazing to see the craters, the valleys, and the mountains. Since that time I knew that my career was going to be in astronomy."
Today, Medupe, 32, who earned a PhD in physics at the University of Cape Town, is a researcher at the South African Astronomical Observatory. On top of his research on variable stars, Medupe explores cultural astronomy and historical scientific activity in Africa. In the 2003 documentary film Cosmic Africa, Medupe visits indigenous peoples across the continent to learn about the form and significance that astronomy takes in their cultures. His latest project involves scouring ancient manuscripts from Timbuktu, Mali, for references to science and math.
physicstoday.org
rootsie on 04.05.06 @ 09:33 AM CST [
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Chávez, Seeking Foreign Allies, Spends Billions
CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chávez is spending billions of dollars of his country's oil windfall on pet projects abroad, aimed at setting up his leftist government as a political counterpoint to the conservative Bush administration in the region.
Mr. Chávez has been subsidizing samba parades in Brazil, eye surgery for poor Mexicans and even heating fuel for poor families from Maine to the Bronx to Philadelphia. By some estimates, the spending now surpasses the nearly $2 billion Washington allocates annually to pay for development programs and the drug war in western South America.
The new spending has given more power to a leader who has been provocatively building a bulwark against what he has called American imperialistic aims in Latin America. Mr. Chávez frequently derides Mr. Bush and his top aides. In March, he called Mr. Bush a "donkey," a "drunkard" and a "coward," daring him to invade the country.
But with the biggest oil reserves outside the Middle East, Mr. Chávez is more than an irritant. He is fast rising as the next Fidel Castro, a hero to the masses who is intent on opposing every move the United States makes, but with an important advantage.
"He's managed to do what Fidel Castro never could," said Stephen Johnson, a scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "Castro never had an independent source of income the way Chávez does. Chávez is filling a void that Castro left for him, leading nonaligned nations."
It remains unclear exactly how much the government has spent, because the state oil giant, Petróleos de Venezuela, has not made detailed financial records public, and its balance sheets have been shielded from independent audits. Mega-projects, like Mr. Chávez's utopian plan of building a gas pipeline through the Amazon from Venezuela to Argentina, are not likely to materialize.
nytimes.comYeah pet projects like delivering home fuel to poor people, teaching people to read, medical care...Just because in the US mind, 'pet project' amounts to self-indulgent pork barrel doesn't mean every outlay of cash for projects is suspicious. But this is the usual Times' take on Chavez, and reveals their role as government shill.
rootsie on 04.05.06 @ 09:30 AM CST [
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Venezuela Seizes Control of Two Oil Fields
LIMA, Peru, April 3 — In another move against foreign oil companies, Venezuela's populist government said Monday that it had taken control of fields operated by two European energy giants after they challenged new rules that give the state extensive control over 32 mostly marginal fields that, until now, had been managed by foreign multinationals.
The action, which happened Saturday, takes over fields from Total of France and Eni of Italy and it came just days after Venezuela's energy minister, Rafael Ramírez, publicly said that Exxon Mobil was not welcome in Venezuela after a dispute over the company's stake in the minor Quiamare-La Ceiba field.
To avoid new terms that gave the state a majority stake in the field, Exxon Mobil sold its stake to Repsol of Spain, though Exxon Mobil, the world's largest publicly traded oil company, still holds a 42 percent stake in a much larger heavy-oil project at Cerro Negro.
Last week, the National Assembly, which is completely controlled by President Hugo Chávez, approved a system governing how the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, will control projects that account for about one-fifth of Venezuela's oil production. The system, which gives the state at least a 60 percent stake in projects where foreign oil companies were once paid production fees, was signed on Monday by 16 companies that include Petrobras of Brazil, Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell.
But Total and Eni, the third- and fourth-largest European oil companies, were unable to reach deals with the government before Friday's deadline, prompting Venezuela to announce it had taken control of their fields.
nytimes.com
rootsie on 04.05.06 @ 09:24 AM CST [
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The Papuans Say, This Land and Its Ores Are Ours
JAKARTA, Indonesia, April 2 — Titus Natkime, 31, the son of a tribal leader who encountered the first Americans to walk into the wilderness of Papua nearly 50 years ago, was clearly upset with his employer the American mining company, Freeport-McMoRan.
For generations, Mr. Natkime's clan has laid claim to much of the land in Papua, the Indonesian province where Freeport mines some of the world's largest copper and gold reserves. Now it was time for a payback, he said.
nytimes.com
rootsie on 04.05.06 @ 08:18 AM CST [
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Marx's reserve army of labour is about to go global
The eruption of the Indian and Chinese economies could shift the balance of power sharply in favour of capital in the rich world.
A piece of conventional wisdom about the world dear to economists is that the share of national income going to workers stays pretty stable. Karl Marx disagreed; he argued that labour-saving capital investment would limit demand for labour, while also bankrupting small-scale producers, in agriculture for example. They would swell the labour supply, creating a permanent "reserve army of labour" that would prevent real wages growing as fast as labour productivity. Workers would thus spend an increasing proportion of working time producing profits for capitalists - a falling share for labour or a rising rate of exploitation, in Marx's terminology.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 04.05.06 @ 08:15 AM CST [
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McKinney is distraction, say the Dems
The bizarre scuffle Wednesday between Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) and an unnamed U.S. Capitol Police officer is winning the spirited congresswoman few new friends in her caucus. In fact, some Democrats are trying to distance themselves from her.
McKinney has been aggressively publicizing the incident, calling press conferences on each of the past two business days and even attracting a mention on the front page of The New York Times, something that the dozens of House and Senate Democrats combined couldn’t match when they unveiled their homeland-security plan last week.
Now, with McKinney facing a possible arrest warrant, the media frenzy is set only to escalate. The U.S. Capitol Police referred the issue to the U.S. District Attorney’s office for prosecution yesterday.
All of the attention has some Democrats concerned that McKinney is drawing the limelight away from their policy goals and Republicans’ ethical missteps to focus on a momentary, disputed encounter in a Capitol Hill hallway.
“There’s been a lot of eye-rolling,” said an aide to a moderate Democrat who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The national attention it’s been getting has been unfortunate. It’s becoming a distraction.”
A Democratic strategist concurred.
“This isn’t the view of Democrats that we want to project in the tough races, one of victims and race-baiting,” the strategist said.
McKinney often elicits strong opinions, even within her own caucus. She has a history of making controversial statements that delight progressives while irking moderates, yet even some of the caucus’s more progressive members have had disagreements with her.
She and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) no longer speak, not even to exchange greetings when encountering each other in the Capitol hallways, said two House Democratic sources. Pelosi twice turned down McKinney’s request to regain her seniority after she was defeated and then reelected in 2002 and 2004. McKinney first came to Congress in 1992.
thehill.comShe questioned the official story of 9-11, was a lone voice against this war, lost her seat, and won it back again. All without the help of the Democratic Party. She sure doesn't need them now. The view they want to project...please.
rootsie on 04.05.06 @ 08:12 AM CST [
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Bush Admin. Wants to Bury More Nuke Waste
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration wants to bury tens of thousands more tons of nuclear waste at the Yucca Mountain dump in Nevada than is now allowed - part of a package of new proposals meant to spur development of the long-delayed dump.
Legislation unveiled by Energy Department officials Tuesday proposes lifting the 77,000-ton storage cap on the dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas and allowing as much waste as the mountain can safely hold. That figure has been estimated by federal environmental impact studies at 132,000 tons; but in a letter to the Senate to introduce the bill, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said it could rise even higher.
Some 55,000 tons of nuclear waste are already waiting at utility sites around the country. Lifting the waste cap would postpone indefinitely the need for the Energy Department to find a site for a second nuclear waste dump, the department said.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 04.05.06 @ 08:07 AM CST [
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Warlord Taylor's son held in US
WASHINGTON: Charles McArthur Emmanuel, son of former Liberian president Charles Taylor, has been arrested in Miami, days after his father was handed over to a war crimes tribunal in West Africa.
Mr Emmanuel, a US citizen, led Liberian forces responsible for Taylor's security until he went into exile in 2003, according to an affidavit filed in the Federal Court in Miami.
Mr Emmanuel, 29, also known as Charles "Chuckie" Taylor Jr, was on a UN list of Liberians whose travel was restricted. He served his father in Liberia for the duration of Taylor's rule, from 1977 until August 2003, the affidavit said, citing an interview with Mr Emmanuel's mother.
theaustralian.news.com.auWow. He must have been an amazing baby.Taylor finally takes the stand in Sierra Leone to deny war crimes Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, has appeared in the dock at a UN-backed war crimes court in Sierra Leone in a historic precedent for Africa.
It is the first time a former African president has been brought to trial to face charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes on a continent notoriously reluctant to judge its own leaders.
Oh brother. Well rest assured, the Europeans will step in to judge them.
rootsie on 04.05.06 @ 08:04 AM CST [
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Pakistani Taliban gaining strength
Peshawar, Pakistan -- A pickup packed with fundamentalist fighters rolls through Wana, a troubled town in Pakistan's northern tribal belt. Some fearful residents call the vehicle "Azrael" -- the Angel of Death.
"It moves freely through the bazaar; nobody dares stop it. They use it to kill people accused of being American spies or anti-Islamic elements," said Lateef Afridi, a tribal lawyer and opposition politician in Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier province.
The dramatic rise of the self-described Pakistani Taliban in recent months has triggered alarm among Pakistan's leaders and marked a significant setback in the American-driven war on Islamic militancy.
sfgate.comNine die in Waziristan incidents Nine people have been killed in three separate incidents in Pakistan's restive Waziristan tribal area, near the Afghan border, officials say.
Four people, including two women, were killed when their vehicle struck a landmine in Dattakhel near North Waziristan's Miranshah town.
Two militants were killed in a clash with security forces in Mirali town.
And a woman and two children were killed in a blast at their South Waziristan home. The cause was unclear.
rootsie on 04.05.06 @ 07:57 AM CST [
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UN aid workers: Gaza on verge of disaster
United Nations aid organizations are warning that the Gaza Strip is on the verge of a humanitarian disaster due to a lack of money and food.
David Shearer, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told Foreign Ministry officials that if there is no significant change in the situation, Gaza will face a humanitarian crisis as bad as the one in Kosovo.
A report by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) warns of a lack of basic food supplies due to the frequent closures of the Karni crossing that are preventing goods from reaching Gaza from Egypt. The report also said there has been a significant increase in the number of hungry people since financial aid has been halted.
World Bank statistics show that if there is no dramatic change, 75 percent of Palestinians will be below the poverty line within two years. The current rate is 56 percent, compared to 22 percent in 2000.
haaretzdaily.com
rootsie on 04.05.06 @ 07:42 AM CST [
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Jews and Arabs unite to protest Israel's unilateral frontier
BILIN, West Bank (AFP) - "I came to Bilin because when Jews are with Palestinians there is less violence," says Jonathan Sivin as he joins a weekly demonstration against Israel's security fence in this West Bank village.
But this day Sivin's words have an ominous echo, coming days after acting premier Ehud Olmert's Kadima party won the Israeli general election on a platform of turning the "barrier" into the Jewish state's eastern border.
Palestinian leaders, who call the barrier "an apartheid fence", have said such a move will only lead to further conflict, and this ragtag band of 300 left-wing Israelis, Palestinian villagers and foreign peace activists agree.
"Olmert means there will be no peace in this land," says demonstrator Yussef Karaja. "I don't know what we can do but we refuse his way. They are killing us without shooting, by lack of food, lack of work, lack of services."
Once completed, the 670-kilometre (415-mile) mix of concrete, steel and razor wire will effectively confiscate eight to 10 percent of Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem.
Some 49,400 Palestinians living in 48 villages will find themselves on the Israeli side of the barrier.
news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 04.05.06 @ 07:39 AM CST [
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US says Iran weapons tests a 'concern'
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Iran's test-firing of what it called a highly destructive torpedo, atop tensions over Iran's nuclear ambitions, is a "concern", a State Department spokesman said.
"The fact that in three days you've had the test of a missile, as well as the reported test of a torpedo of new capability, demonstrates a weaponization program by Iran that does nothing to reassure Iran's neighbors or the international community," deputy spokesman Adam Ereli told reporters.
"It certainly is of concern."
But Ereli said the US is committed to resolving through diplomacy the issue of Iran's uranium enrichment operation -- which the US believes masks a nuclear weapon program.
"The United States has made it clear ... that we are committed to a diplomatic solution because we believe a diplomatic solution can work," he said.
news.yahoo.comAn exercise in bravado ...The US has repeatedly declined to rule out military action if coercive diplomacy fails to resolve the dispute over Iran's nuclear activities. And if the issue at hand is relative US-Iranian military might, it is really no contest. Total US defence-related spending will rise this year to around $550bn (£315bn); Iran allocated $4.4bn to defence in 2005. It cannot begin to match US weapons, technology and expertise.
Iran's great strength is its manpower: an army numbering 350,000 soldiers, plus 125,000 Revolutionary Guards, says the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Yet such an imposing host will be of little use if any future attack on Iran's suspect nuclear facilities is directed, as is thought likely, from the air.
Because of western sanctions, ostracism and a lack of spare parts, Iran has few modern fighter aircraft, although Russia recently proposed a $1bn sale of 29 Tor-M1 missile systems for anti-aircraft defence. The air force still relies in part on Iraqi MiGs flown to Iran for safety by Saddam Hussein at the start of the Gulf war in 1991 and never returned. Michael Knights, writing in Jane's Intelligence Review, said Iran was likely to try to repel any attack though a mobile defence of "highly integrated local networks of interceptor aircraft and ground-based Sams [surface-to-air missiles]". This would provide "layered protection" for strategic locations such as the Isfahan and Bushehr facilities and Bandar Abbas at the mouth of the Gulf.
While Great Prophet may have failed to predict Iranian military success, it has made a number of discomfiting points to the US and its allies. By focusing on the Strait of Hormuz, Iran reminded the west that up to one third of the entire world's exported oil supply must pass through a channel that American strategists call a "global chokepoint". The exercises alone have driven up crude oil prices.
American planners, trying to anticipate Iran's likely response to an attack, say it could block the strait using mines. Un-named intelligence officials told the Washington Post this week that there was a "growing consensus" that, if attacked, Iran would also resort to terrorism against civilian targets in the US and Europe, and would use Hizbullah and Islamic Jihad to foment trouble in Israel-Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq. No evidence was cited for these claims.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 04.05.06 @ 07:35 AM CST [
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West accused of fiddling figures on Iraq aid
Britain and other Western nations are using huge debt write-offs to Iraq to boost development aid statistics and give a misleading impression of their generosity to the Third World, campaigners say.
The UK, France, Germany and Italy have all bracketed debt cancellations to Iraq as part of their assistance to the world's poorest nations.
Figures released today by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development are expected to show that most, if not all, of the 15 nations in the EU before its 2004 expansion increased aid contributions.
But the statistics will include massive write-offs to Iraq in 2005 when the UK cancelled €499m (£350m) of debt to Baghdad, France €1.6bn, Germany €1.28bn and Italy €925m.
A report released yesterday by non-governmental organisations said that, while the countries were not breaking international rules, they were misleading the public.
independent.co.uk
rootsie on 04.05.06 @ 07:31 AM CST [
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Condi's Surreal Visit to Iraq
Condoleezza Rice went to Baghdad to tell the Iraqis to ‘get governing.’ What she did was highlight the disconnect between the Green Zone and the rest of the country. April 3, 2006 - There’s nothing like roaring into Baghdad aboard a Rhino. A Rhino is a giant, heavily-armored bus that can withstand IEDs (small ones), and it is now the favored means of keeping Western visitors from getting blown to bits by these homemade bombs on the dangerous road between Baghdad International Airport and the secure Green Zone at the city’s center. “Rhino” is an appropriately Disney-ish name for these wheeled monstrosities, adding to the surreal feeling one gets in moving from the howling chaos outside the Green Zone into the theme park-like confines within. You drive through several checkpoints, leaving behind tracts of litter and rubble and the desperate, dark faces of ordinary Iraqis trying to earn a few dinars. There, behind high concrete blast walls and razor wire, you find quiet streets and the heart of the American occupation: a double-sized Olympic pool with a palm-fretted patio restaurant, food courts and a giant coffee lounge where lessons in belly dancing and martial arts are offered. All these are huge improvements from the last time I was in Baghdad, two years ago. And all are intended for the Westerners who dwell in increasing comfort here.
rootsie on 04.05.06 @ 07:29 AM CST [
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Claim Raises Speculation About al-Zarqawi
CAIRO, Egypt - Terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has sharply lowered his profile in recent months, halting his group's Internet claims as the number of big suicide bombings in Iraq — his infamous signature form of attack — has fallen.
Now, a man with close ties to Iraqi insurgent groups claims al-Zarqawi was shunted aside as political leader of a recently formed coalition of militants because they were angry at his propaganda efforts and embarrassed by his group's deadly attack on hotels in Jordan.
news.yahoo.comWell no. It's that we don't need a Sunni 'insurgent' anymore. Since we fabricated him it's easy to disappear him.
rootsie on 04.05.06 @ 07:26 AM CST [
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Hussein Charged With Genocide in 50,000 Kurdish Deaths
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 4 — The Iraqi court trying Saddam Hussein announced Tuesday that it had charged him with genocide, saying he sought to annihilate the Kurdish people in 1988, when the military killed at least 50,000 Kurdish civilians and destroyed 2,000 villages.
nytimes.comNot that this bothered us back then, when we were friends.Tehran faces growing Kurdish opposition MOUNT QANDIL, Iraq -- A little-known organization based in the mountains of Iraq's Kurdish north is emerging as a serious threat to the Iranian government, staging cross-border attacks and claiming tens of thousands of supporters among Iran's 4 million Kurds.
Kurdish protests toll rises to 15 after bus blaze ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Hundreds of Kurds clashed with police in southeast Turkey on Monday and in Istanbul three people were killed as they fled a bus set ablaze by protesters, bringing the death toll in violence over the past week to 15.
The latest violence added to a week of unrest triggered by the funerals of 14 rebels from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) who were killed in clashes with security forces.
It marked some of Turkey's worst civil unrest since the PKK took up arms against the state in 1984 in an insurgency which has killed more than 30,000 people, and fueled fears of an escalation of the conflict.
the Kurds are being groomed as a US secret weapon.
rootsie on 04.05.06 @ 07:21 AM CST [
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France's political crisis grows as 3 million take to streets
Police fought running battles with rioters in central Paris last night as youths attacked officers with bangers, bottles and concrete at the end of a mass demonstration against a youth employment law that has caused a political crisis for Jacques Chirac's ruling party.
Trade unionists and student leaders said up to three million people took to the streets across France yesterday - the second time in eight days that the country has seen its biggest street demonstrations in almost 40 years. The protests, including one by hundreds of thousands of students and scholars who marched through central Paris, were mainly peaceful.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 04.05.06 @ 07:13 AM CST [
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Filmgoers get 9/11 shock
It's an intense and traumatic glimpse inside the 9/11 hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93 - and it's too much, too soon for some New York moviegoers.
At least one theater on the upper West Side has yanked the harrowing trailer for Universal Pictures' upcoming "United 93," saying it reduced one patron to tears.
"I personally received a couple of complaints. Some people were pretty upset," said a manager at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square 12 theater on Broadway. "We pulled the trailer last weekend."
The new $15 million feature-length film dramatizes events onthe doomed United flight from takeoff through the courageous revolt by passengers to the eventual crash outside Shanksville, Pa.
nydailynews.com
rootsie on 04.05.06 @ 07:10 AM CST [
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Big Gain for Rich Seen in Tax Cuts for Investments
The first data to document the effect of President Bush's tax cuts for investment income show that they have significantly lowered the tax burden on the richest Americans, reducing taxes on incomes of more than $10 million by an average of about $500,000.
An analysis of Internal Revenue Service data by The New York Times found that the benefit of the lower taxes on investments was far more concentrated on the very wealthiest Americans than the benefits of Mr. Bush's two previous tax cuts: on wages and other noninvestment income.
nytimes.com
rootsie on 04.05.06 @ 07:07 AM CST [
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Tuesday, April 4th
U.S. troops in Dominican Republic
The United States hoped sending a heavily armed brigade of several thousand troops to Barahona, a small city on the southern coast of the Dominican Republic 50 miles from the Haitian border, would go unnoticed.
But the progressive movement in the Dominican Republic held a series of demonstrations in late February exposing this potential threat to Cuba, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico, to the elections scheduled for Haiti and to progressives in the Dominican Republic itself.
The U.S. and the Dominican army put out the cover story that the U.S. troops were there to provide medical assistance. Oscar Moreta, a member of the Patriotic Anti-Imperialist Committee of Barahona, told the Cuban News Agency Prensa Latina, “Those of us who live in Barahona have been able to confirm that they have tanks, armored vehicles, attack helicopters, radar and many weapons, and we understand that those are not things used to build clinics.”
There are rumors circulating in Bara hona that the troops are the advanced guard of an eventual 14,000, designed to pose a major threat to any U.S. opponents in the region.
Although René Préval is Haiti’s president-elect, after a massive popular struggle, he can’t take office until the Haitian parliament is seated. The second round of parliamentary elections is currently scheduled for April 21-23, which means that the votes won’t be counted and the victors seated until some time in May.
workers.org
rootsie on 04.04.06 @ 08:15 AM CST [
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In a disease-ridden and stinking swamp, thousands hide from war
...The dozen or more islands, some the size of football pitches, now provide sanctuary for thousands of victims of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s latest fighting.
They have taken refuge in this remote, mosquito-infested area of shallow lakes and marshes — the source of the great Congo river which snakes across the heart of Africa — to escape clashes between roaming militias, known as Mai-Mai, and the Congolese Army.
“The Mai-Mai came at night. They killed people. We fled in our canoes and came here, but we have lost everything,” said Kalenga wa Kalenga, 32, as she waded knee-deep to get an emergency package from Médecins sans Frontières, one of the few charities in the area.
timesonline.co.uk
rootsie on 04.04.06 @ 08:12 AM CST [
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The price of being a woman: Slavery in modern Iindia
The desire for sons has created a severe shortage of marriageable young women. As their value rises, unscrupulous men are trading them around the subcontinent and beyond as if they were a mere commodity.
independent.co.uk
rootsie on 04.04.06 @ 08:09 AM CST [
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Israeli bulldozers bury a Palestinian alive in Hebron
All week long Hasham Mohammad Mousa Asamahain waits for Friday to come.
His reasoning, in short, is that on that day the 41 year old has a chance to go and earn a living. That is why Asamahain readied himself to travel to Beit Shemish, in the extreme north, west of Hebron. He was not in the southern West Bank to look for treasure or expensive ruins, but to find whatever he can to raise enough money to buy bread or pay the school fees for his six children. Asamahain’s punishment for this was to be buried alive in a garbage dump.
...A huge Israeli bulldozer buried Asamahain under the garbage, dumping tons of metal on his body. He was taken to an Israeli hospital, but without any hope of survival, and is now referred to as, “the martyr searching for bread.”
After several attempts PNN was able to speak with one of Asamahain’s relatives, Omar Shaqik Al Maghdour. He confirmed that the Israeli authorities continued until 9:00 pm Saturday evening to keep Asamahain’s body, continuing to detain him even after death. “It was not sufficient for the bulldozer to bury him alive under the garbage, for the Israelis are now denying his wife and children the simplest of human rights, which is to kiss their husband and father goodbye and bury him according to the Sharia.”
pnn.ps
rootsie on 04.04.06 @ 08:03 AM CST [
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Editor hits back over Israel row
London Review of Books stands its ground after being accused of anti-Semitism in an article attacking pro-Israeli influence on US policy
...But while Wilmers feels confident that the article examines legitimate concerns - in particular about the lobby group American Israel Public Affairs Committee - it is not a view shared by critics of the LRB. Among them is Professor Alan Dershowitz, a colleague of Walt at Harvard, who is criticised in the article for being an 'apologist' for Israel. Dershowitz denounced the authors last week as 'liars' and 'bigots' and compared their argument to neo-Nazi literature. It is a view shared by US academics Jeffrey Herf and Andrei Markovits, who wrote to the LRB: 'Accusations of powerful Jews behind the scenes are part of the most dangerous traditions of modern anti-Semitism.'
But while some have focused on the issue of anti-Semitism, others, following Dennis Ross's lead, have condemned the article as a shoddy piece of pseudo-academia. It is a view endorsed by journalist Christopher Hitchens, who has accused the authors of an exercise in Jewish 'name listing', and perhaps - most surprisingly - by Noam Chomsky, the Nobel-prize winning academic who has written on the pro-Israeli bias of the US media.
'Recognising that Mearsheimer-Walt took a courageous stand which merits praise,' he wrote for online magazine ZNet last week, 'we still have to ask how convincing their thesis is. Not very, in my opinion.'
Wilmers rejects the accusation by Hitchens, Ross and others that the Mearsheimer-Walt article has done little more than attempt to join up a disconnected list of people and organisations lobbying on different aspects of Israeli concern into a central 'Israel Lobby' - capitalised by the LRB. She admits now, however, that it would have been better to use a lower case 'l' for the word 'lobby' - to have avoided the risk of being misunderstood.
'It is not true that the authors simply lumped together a long list of people and organisations in the same piece to make their case for an "Israeli Lobby". To say that because someone is mentioned in context in a long piece is tainted by association with any other is wrong.'
Wilmers believes, too, that the most angry denunciations of anti-Semitism - while designed to serve the purpose of censorship by those attempting to forestall criticism of Israel - may actually encourage anti-Semitism in the long run.
guardian.co.ukHaaretz:New Christian pro-Israel lobby aims to be stronger than AIPAC
rootsie on 04.04.06 @ 07:57 AM CST [
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Wolfowitz looks at opening World Bank Iraq office
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz is considering expanding bank operations in Iraq, which would put his agency at the center of rebuilding from a war he helped plan as the Pentagon's former No. 2 official.
Senior bank officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because no final decision had been made, said key donor countries including Britain, Japan, Germany and Denmark are pressuring Wolfowitz to establish a Baghdad office.
The development agency has not had a Iraq office since an August 19, 2003, bombing at U.N. headquarters in Iraq killed a bank employee. A consultant, with a staff of seven Iraqis, is paid by the World Bank looks after its affairs in Iraq.
No World Bank staff would be forced to accept an Iraq assignment, the officials said.
In recent weeks, Wolfowitz sent a fact-finding mission to Iraq, and he was now examining security matters and several reconstruction-related issues, officials said.
The possibility of a new World Bank office revives attention to Wolfowitz's role as an architect of the Iraq war. Many critics have accused the Bush administration and the Pentagon in particular of failing to plan for a post-invasion Iraq, as violence rages three years after Saddam Hussein's ouster.
Michael O'Hanlon, a reconstruction expert at Washington's Brookings Institute, said Wolfowitz's history with Iraq "complicates everything."
"He is a very smart man," O'Hanlon said, "but he is also obviously very controversial in his basic support of the Iraq invasion."
Wolfowitz's predecessor as World Bank president, Jim Wolfensohn, resisted pressure from U.S. lawmakers to return bank reconstruction experts to Iraq after the 2003 bombing.
news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 04.04.06 @ 07:52 AM CST [
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The Ghost in the Baghdad Museum
BAGHDAD, Iraq — For the director of a shuttered museum in a country at war, the imaginary can be a welcome refuge. Condemned to contemplate his own and his country's fate in great halls emptied of visitors, Donny George paces past showcases of ancient vessels and jars and clay tablets, and he dreams.
In his mind's eye, the museum director sees the grand opening: the courtyard filled with 1,000 guests, succulent lamb and sumptuous dates on tables beneath the palms, a Baghdad chamber quartet playing, the spirited talk of civilized people in the land where, several thousand years ago, the emergence of writing first permitted the considered transfer of ideas from one epoch to the next.
Mr. George smiles. It is a relief to dream when explosions greet the dawn. His genial brown eyes express both hope and the burden of living in Iraq. Under Saddam Hussein, he learned to live a double life: praising the dictator in public, worrying in private. He was a member of Mr. Hussein's now-disbanded Baath Party. Not to be, he says, would have meant dismissal and the abandonment of archaeological excavations, his great love. Compromise is woven into the texture of his life.
Now, as the director general of Iraqi museums, his new title, he inhabits a labyrinth. The Interior Ministry has been urging him to reopen the National Museum, saying it will provide him with 1,000 guards if necessary. "But then it's no longer a museum," Mr. George said. "It's a barracks."
nytimes.com
rootsie on 04.04.06 @ 07:49 AM CST [
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Eight Marines, One Sailor Killed in Iraq Incidents
WASHINGTON, April 3, 2006 – Eight Marines and a sailor died in two separate incidents in Iraq yesterday. Three servicemembers also are missing after a vehicle accident in floodwaters, military officials reported today.
A U.S. Marine Corps 7-ton truck rolled over in a flash flood near Asad, resulting in five Marines dead, one injured, and two Marines and one sailor missing. The vehicle was on a combat logistics convoy in Anbar province with eight Marines and one Navy corpsman on board.
defenselink.mil
rootsie on 04.04.06 @ 07:47 AM CST [
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Indonesia Prepares for Possible Attack
JAKARTA, Indonesia - Indonesian police increased security throughout the country Sunday in response to a warning of a possible terrorist attack issued last week by Australia and the United States, police officials said.
Australia and the United States had warned their citizens living in Indonesia that Sunday was a potential date for a terrorist attack in the country, possibly directed at Western targets. Indonesian authorities said they had no specific information of a possible attack and the security measures were precautionary.
news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 04.04.06 @ 07:44 AM CST [
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Taliban set ablaze U.S. military base-bound oil tankers in S. Afghanistan
Suspected Taliban-linked militants set on fire 10 oil tankers carrying fuel to U.S. military base in south Afghanistan Saturday, a local official said Sunday.
"Taliban militants attacked a logistic convoy in Grishk district of Helmand province yesterday at noon and set ablaze 10 petrol tankers in Haiderabad area," acting district police chief Amanullah Khan told Xinhua.
Contingents of troops, he said had been sent to the area but the militants fled away to the nearby mountains.
However, he confirmed that the drivers of the ill-fated oil tankers are safe.
Meantime, Taliban's purported spokesman Qari Yusuf Ahmadi accepted responsibility for the incident and added the Taliban set free the drivers after they committed not to cooperate with the U. S.-led coalition forces in Afghanistan.
Helmand, a hotbed of Taliban in south Afghanistan, has been the scene of increasing insurgency over the past two weeks during which around 50 people including one American and one Canadian soldiers and more than 30 militants have lost their lives in conflicts.
Taliban-led insurgency has claimed the lives of over 200 people since the beginning of 2006.
peopledaily.com.cn
rootsie on 04.04.06 @ 07:41 AM CST [
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No more pussyfooting around Iran
...What, then, should we do? There is, after all, a danger that military strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities might boost support for Ahmadinejad - indeed, some Iranian dissidents believe that his wild rhetoric is designed to provoke precisely such an attack. Unlike Iraq, whose nuclear programme was wiped out with a single raid in 1981, Iran is attempting the more complex procedure of centrifuge separation of uranium hexafluoride gas in installations spread throughout the country.
A direct strike might be a necessary last resort. But our earlier objective should be to support the opposition groups. The enemies of the ayatollahs are divided: some are monarchists, some communists, some representatives of Iran's national minorities. Some are in exile, some in Iranian campuses. Around 40,000 are trained soldiers based in Iraq, where they have been disarmed by the Americans. But, together, these groups speak for perhaps 85 per cent of the population. They hold the key to replacing this wicked regime.
telegraph.co.ukUS will Find Another Excuse to Target Iran The United States is firm in its plans to launch a military operation against Iran, said Kazim Jalali, a spokesman for the Iranian Parliament’s Commission of Foreign Affairs, adding the United States would find another reason for its military operation even if the nuclear plants were immediately shut down.
rootsie on 04.04.06 @ 07:38 AM CST [
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Jill Carroll rounds on critics
...In her first hours of freedom, Carroll and the Monitor were forced to counter allegations by conservative bloggers that she had betrayed a sympathy for her kidnappers.
The charge was given currency by the New York Times, which suggested Carroll had come to identify with her abductors' aims.
In a statement posted on the Monitor website on Saturday, Carroll dismissed any suggestion she shared the aims of her kidnappers: "Let me be clear: I abhor all who kidnap and murder civilians, and my captors are clearly guilty of both crimes."
...On Saturday, Carroll also disavowed an interview granted to Iraqi television immediately after she was freed in which she said she was never threatened by the kidnappers. "In fact, I was threatened many times," she said. "Things that I was forced to say while captive are now being taken by some as an accurate reflection of my personal views. They are not."
guardian.co.ukAll she said was that the insurgency will win: you don't need a gun to your head to say that, just some common sense.
rootsie on 04.04.06 @ 07:24 AM CST [
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Atrocious Entertainment
"See those kids by the river/Drop some napalm/Watch them quiver/Napalm sticks to kids" ~ U.S. Army cadence
It's a popularly accepted truth that art is an expression of culture. American culture, then, is obsessed with sadism. The movie theater has become our Colosseum, the actor our gladiator. Blood is our artistic medium of choice, the human body our canvas. God's command to meditate on what is right, pure, and lovely has been perverted by society to an implicit command to meditate on whatever is evil, whatever is polluted, and whatever is hideous.
Sadism commands top dollar at the box office these days, according to an article in the latest issue of Newsweek. Confirming what I've long suspected, the article quotes horror magazine editor Tony Timpone, "In 1990, I had to pull my hair out just to find a movie to put on the cover. There were only three or four major horror releases a year. Now there's three or four a month. We're like pigs in slop."
...While stateside audiences munch popcorn and revel in the sight of an eyeball being cut from a woman's skull, as portrayed in Hostel, is it any wonder that each day reveals a new story about American troops abusing Iraqis in one way or another? True, the Abu Ghraib MPs confined themselves to techniques for producing humiliation and mental distress, bypassing outright "torture," but their motivation was to abuse for time-killing giggles. Mistreatment became a recreational sport, a form of diversion like you might find in your friendly neighborhood theater.
Of course, the American occupation in Iraq has produced more than perverted shenanigans. Aidan Delgado, who was profiled in a New York Times article after being discharged from the Army for conscientious objection, says, "Guys in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvee and shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians passing by. They'd keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people's heads." Delgado also says he "witnessed incidents in which an Army sergeant lashed a group of children with a steel Humvee antenna, and a Marine corporal planted a vicious kick in the chest of a kid about 6 years old." Hysterical, right? Why should American troops behave any differently when the movies tell us our culture approves of torture as entertainment?
pieterfriedrich.com
rootsie on 04.04.06 @ 07:18 AM CST [
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Essays: Increasing inequality imperils nation
... ''While the United States remains a spectacularly rich country by any standard, we are drifting toward a Third-World-like distribution of our riches. For tens of millions of Americans, the alternative to unemployment has become a dead-end job that doesn't necessarily pay enough to cover basic living expenses,'' writes co-editor James Lardner, a senior fellow at Demos, a New York-based think tank.
strib.com
rootsie on 04.04.06 @ 07:14 AM CST [
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US 'intoxicated' by power: Gorbachev
WASHINGTON - Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who triggered the demise of the Soviet Union's Communist empire, said in an interview published Sunday that the United States was "intoxicated" by its power and should not impose its will on others.
"This talk of pre-emptive strikes, of ignoring the UN Security Council and international legal obligations -- all this is leading toward a dark night," Gorbachev told Time magazine.
turkishpress.com
rootsie on 04.04.06 @ 07:10 AM CST [
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Texas professor advocates die-off of 90% of humanity?
AUSTIN - A University of Texas professor says the Earth would be better off with 90 percent of the human population dead.
"Every one of you who gets to survive has to bury nine," Eric Pianka cautioned students and guests at St. Edward's University on Friday. Pianka's words are part of what he calls his "doomsday talk" - a 45-minute presentation outlining humanity's ecological misdeeds and Pianka's predictions about how nature, or perhaps humans themselves, will exterminate all but a fraction of civilization.
..."This is really an exciting time," he said Friday amid warnings of apocalypse, destruction and disease. Only minutes earlier he declared, "Death. This is what awaits us all. Death." Reflecting on the so-called Ancient Chinese Curse, "May you live in interesting times," he wore, surprisingly, a smile.
So what's at the heart of Pianka's claim?
6.5 billion humans is too many.
In his estimation, "We've grown fat, apathetic and miserable," all the while leaving the planet parched.
The solution?
A 90 percent reduction.
That's 5.8 billion lives - lives he says are turning the planet into "fat, human biomass." He points to an 85 percent swell in the population during the last 25 years and insists civilization is on the brink of its downfall - likely at the hand of widespread disease.
"[Disease] will control the scourge of humanity," Pianka said. "We're looking forward to a huge collapse."
But don't tell local "citizen scientist" Forrest Mims to quietly swallow Pianka's call to awareness. Mims says it's an "abhorrent death wish" and contends he has "no choice but to take a stand."
Mims attended the educator's doomsday presentation at the Texas Academy of Science's annual meeting March 2-4. There, the organization honored Pianka as its 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist - another issue Mims vocally opposes.
"This guy is a loose cannon to believe that worldwide genocide is the only answer," said Mims, who filed two formal petitions with the academy following the meeting.
seguingazette.comMeeting Doctor Doom ...there was a gravely disturbing side to that otherwise scientifically significant meeting, for I watched in amazement as a few hundred members of the Texas Academy of Science rose to their feet and gave a standing ovation to a speech that enthusiastically advocated the elimination of 90 percent of Earth's population by airborne Ebola. The speech was given by Dr. Eric R. Pianka, the University of Texas evolutionary ecologist and lizard expert who the Academy named the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist.
Something curious occurred a minute before Pianka began speaking. An official of the Academy approached a video camera operator at the front of the auditorium and engaged him in animated conversation. The camera operator did not look pleased as he pointed the lens of the big camera to the ceiling and slowly walked away.
This curious incident came to mind a few minutes later when Professor Pianka began his speech by explaining that the general public is not yet ready to hear what he was about to tell us. Because of many years of experience as a writer and editor, Pianka's strange introduction and the TV camera incident raised a red flag in my mind. Suddenly I forgot that I was a member of the Texas Academy of Science and chairman of its Environmental Science Section. Instead, I grabbed a notepad so I could take on the role of science reporter.
sas.org
rootsie on 04.04.06 @ 07:06 AM CST [
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Monday, April 3rd
Ideological conformity — an impediment to truth
Many of us have learned – with good reason – to distrust the corporate media and have turned increasingly to a host of internet web sites and other non-corporate-controlled sources for news and analysis. Of course it’s in our interest to make all our grassroots information sources as trustworthy as possible. So it’s troubling when incorrect or otherwise misleading information is distributed by our own sources. Initially my focus was on the misunderstanding of the Morales’ speech in the Science for the People group. But then I realized it was probably fairly widespread among those of us who, because of our left-oriented ideology, tend to accept what we learn from our preferred sources without being sufficiently critical.
... I find it remarkable, though perhaps not too surprising, that much of the liberal and even radical left media share with the corporate media an emphasis on personalities and the instruments of power in their choice of “news” and commentary. Of course the nature of the commentary, especially that of the radical left, is entirely opposed to that of corporate media. But my point is that even when arguing from a radical left perspective, the framework of the discussion, the choice of what is important to argue about, has almost always been established by “the enemy”. When we do this, we are fighting on their turf, a great mistake.
umb.edu
rootsie on 04.03.06 @ 08:20 AM CST [
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Rape case highlights South's abiding divide
It had all the ugliness of the Old South in an institution that prides itself on being a pillar of the New South: a brutal collision of race, sex and class at one of America's most prestigious universities.
In an episode that has deeply divided opinion at North Carolina's Duke University and beyond, this much is clear. On March 14, an African American working her way through college at North Carolina Central University, Durham, reported to police that she had been gang-raped by three white men at a party organised by the lacrosse team of Duke University, which is on the other side of town.
...Duke, one of America's most sought after private institutions, is an island of affluence in a working-class African American town where the median income is less than the $41,000 (£24,000) annual tuition. The other college is a traditionally black institution. Lacrosse, unlike sports that are viewed as an escape from urban poverty, is seen as an elite pursuit.
The lacrosse team at Duke, the Blue Devils, is by reputation hard-drinking. Last week, the News & Observer reported that 15 members had received cautions for under-age drinking and other minor offences. Meanwhile, neighbours have accused team members of painting racist graffiti on cars, and yelling racist insults at the woman as she left the party.
Those tensions have deepened in the days since the party, with neighbours banging pots and pans outside the players' house in nightly vigils. Meanwhile, the university has struggled to counter criticism that it has been too tolerant of rowdiness among sports teams, and was slow to discipline the lacrosse team for the excessive drinking at the party.
University officials waited two weeks after the alleged incident to cancel the rest of the lacrosse season.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 04.03.06 @ 08:15 AM CST [
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Chávez seeks to peg oil at $50 a barrel
Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez is poised to launch a bid to transform the global politics of oil by seeking a deal with consumer countries which would lock in a price of $50 a barrel.
A long-term agreement at that price could allow Venezuela to count its huge deposits of heavy crude as part of its official reserves, which Caracas says would give it more oil than Saudi Arabia.
"We have the largest oil reserves in the world, we have oil for 200 years." Mr Chávez told the BBC's Newsnight programme in an interview to be broadcast tonight. "$50 a barrel - that's a fair price, not a high price."
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 04.03.06 @ 08:11 AM CST [
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Shells, rockets and leaflets are ammunition in Gaza battle
Israeli artillery fired about 150 shells into the Gaza strip over the weekend, some from gunboats for the first time, in the largest barrage against the territory since the withdrawal of Jewish settlers and the army in September. The military said the assault, aimed principally at open land, was in response to the continued firing of rudimentary rockets from Gaza by Palestinian factions.
The air force also hit a number of buildings in northern Gaza which it said sheltered rocket launchers. They included a casino complex under construction and partly owned by Israelis.
The assault did not stop Palestinian factions from launching at least six rockets into Israel but neither they nor the army's barrage caused casualties.
The air force also dropped leaflets over Gaza city that read: "Where are the terror organisations leading you? How much longer are you going to allow terrorists to control your lives and your future? The military response will worsen as long as the firing continues."
guardian.co.ukHaaretz: Army, navy pound Gaza launch sites in massive assault
rootsie on 04.03.06 @ 08:09 AM CST [
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One dead, 10 injured in Kurdish clashes in Turkey
KIZILTEPE, Turkey (Reuters) - One thousand Kurdish protesters set fire to two banks on Saturday and youths set up barricades in a town in southeastern Turkey where violent clashes with security forces this week have killed eight people.
Security sources said one protester died in the latest clashes in Kiziltepe and 10 people were injured.
...The latest death brought the toll in this week's violence -- Turkey's worst civil unrest in decades -- to eight dead.
Riots erupted on Tuesday after funeral ceremonies for 14 members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) killed last weekend by security forces.
news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 04.03.06 @ 08:04 AM CST [
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Taleban Insurgent Kills 9 Afghan Policemen
Hospital sources in southern Afghanistan says suspected Taleban insurgents on motorcycles have attacked a police checkpoint, killing five officers and wounding three.
A doctor at the hospital where the victims were taken says the ambush occurred Sunday on the outskirts of Kandahar city.
Meanwhile, in neighboring Helmand province, a Taleban militant, posing as a traveler looking for a place to spend the night, killed four policemen after eating dinner with them.
Local authorities say the assailant shot the officers after they had gone to sleep late Friday.
In the same province Saturday, Taleban insurgents torched four fuel trucks delivering supplies to coalition forces. Local authorities say the drivers were not harmed.
voanews.comMP assassinated in Afghan capital
rootsie on 04.03.06 @ 08:01 AM CST [
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Civilians in Iraq Flee Mixed Areas as Attacks Shift
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 1 — The war in Iraq has entered a bloodier phase, with the killings of Iraqi civilians rising tremendously in daily sectarian violence while American casualties have steadily declined, spurring tens of thousands of Iraqis to flee from mixed Shiite-Sunni areas.
The new pattern, detailed in casualty and migration statistics from the past six months and in interviews with American commanders and Iraqi officials, has led to further separation of Shiite and Sunni Arabs, moving the country toward a de facto partitioning along sectarian and ethnic lines — an outcome that the Bush administration has doggedly worked to avoid over the past three years.
The nature of the Iraq war has been changing since at least the late autumn, when political friction between Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs rose even as American troops began implementing a long-term plan to decrease their street presence. But the killing accelerated after the bombing on Feb. 22 of a revered Shiite shrine, which unleashed a wave of sectarian bloodletting.
About 900 Iraqi civilians died violently in March, up from about 700 the month before, according to military statistics and the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, an independent organization that tracks deaths. Meanwhile, at least 29 American troops were killed in March, the second-lowest monthly total since the war began.
nytimes.comExplosions, grisly finds in Baghdad Insurgents blew up a small Shi'ite mosque north-east of Baghdad today, while police reported the discovery of nearly 40 bodies in several neighbourhoods of the Iraqi capital.
The US military reported the death of three American soldiers.
US and UK forces establish 'enduring bases' in Iraq The Pentagon has revealed that coalition forces are spending millions of dollars establishing at least six "enduring" bases in Iraq - raising the prospect that US and UK forces could be involved in a long-term deployment in the country. It said it assumed British troops would operate one of the bases.
Love and hate in Baghdad This is the extraordinary blog of ‘Riverbend’, a young Iraqi woman who lays bare her life in occupied Iraq. It has been long-listed for the Samuel Johnson literary prize.
rootsie on 04.03.06 @ 07:56 AM CST [
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Government in secret talks about strike against Iran
The Government is to hold secret talks with defence chiefs tomorrow to discuss possible military strikes against Iran.
A high-level meeting will take place in the Ministry of Defence at which senior defence chiefs and government officials will consider the consequences of an attack on Iran.
It is believed that an American-led attack, designed to destroy Iran's ability to develop a nuclear bomb, is "inevitable" if Teheran's leaders fail to comply with United Nations demands to freeze their uranium enrichment programme.
telegraph.co.ukBaradei Urges Calm in Iran DebateSleuths look for the tiniest smoking gun that could lead to war on IranHugo Chávez Warns of Impending Invasion of Iran
rootsie on 04.03.06 @ 07:44 AM CST [
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Sunday, April 2nd
Britain Backs Request to Move Liberian's Trial to The Hague
UNITED NATIONS, March 31 — Britain circulated a draft resolution to Security Council members on Friday that would transfer the war crimes trial of Charles G. Taylor, the former Liberian president, to the Netherlands because of what it said was a threat to regional peace posed by his continued presence in West Africa.
Under its terms, Mr. Taylor would be tried in the International Criminal Court complex in The Hague under the auspices of the United Nations-backed court that was established in Sierra Leone to try people suspected of responsibility for atrocities during the country's civil war, from 1991 to 2002.
Mr. Taylor was indicted by that court in March 2003, while still president of Liberia, on 17 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He had been living in exile in Nigeria from August 2003 until Wednesday, when he was arrested while trying to flee to Cameroon and flown to Sierra Leone.
Mr. Taylor is accused of backing rebels who, in a civil war that killed 50,000 people, gained grisly notoriety for raping victims and maiming and killing people by chopping off their arms, legs, hands, ears and lips.
The draft resolution said Mr. Taylor's presence in West Africa constituted "an impediment to stability and a threat to the peace of Liberia and of Sierra Leone, and to international peace and security in the region."
nytimes.comIf Not Peace, Then Justice I. A Day in Court for the Criminals of Darfur?
A thick afternoon fog enveloped the trees and streetlights of The Hague, a placid city built along canals, a city of art galleries, clothing boutiques, Vermeers and Eschers. It is not for these old European boulevards, however, that The Hague figures in the minds of men and women in places as far apart as Uganda, Sarajevo and now Sudan. Rather, it symbolizes the possibility of some justice in the world, when the state has collapsed or turned into an instrument of terror. The Hague has long been home to the International Court of Justice (or World Court), a legal arm of the United Nations, which adjudicates disputes between states. During the Balkan wars, a tribunal was set up here for Yugoslavia; it has since brought cases against 161 individuals. It was trying Slobodan Milosevic — the first genocide case brought against a former head of state — until his unexpected death last month. And now the International Criminal Court has begun its investigations into the mass murders and crimes against humanity that have been committed, and are still taking place, in the Darfur region of Sudan.
How ugly, the perpetrators of horrific crimes in Africa with total impunity now taking up the mantle of Great White bringers of 'peace and justice.'
rootsie on 04.02.06 @ 10:06 AM CST [
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Nader: The Corporate Superpower of Superpowers
An Open Letter to New Exxon/Mobil CEO, Rex Tillerson
You have to be feeling pretty good about your new position heading the world's largest oil and gas company. You stand astride the globe where, with few exceptions, the Congress is like putty in your hands, the White House is your House and the consuming public is powerless. Governments in the Third World may huff and puff, but Exxon/Mobil pretty much gets its way in dozens of arrangements completed and about to be concluded.
Seven years ago, your predecessor, Lee Raymond, took over Exxon's main competitor, Mobil Oil Company, through a merger approved by the misnamed Antitrust Division of the Justice Department. Really, what is left of antitrust standards when the number one and number two companies in an industry are permitted to marry?
Profits of your company are beyond your dreams of avarice. Over $36 billion last year, after modest taxes, yet you blithely ignored urgent pleas by members of Congress, especially that of the powerful Chairman, Senator Chuck Grassley (Rep. Iowa) to contribute some significant deductible money to charities which help impoverished American families pay the exorbitant prices for heating oil this past winter. Rarely has there been such a demonstration of corporate greed and insensitivity by a company that has received huge government welfare subsidies, de-regulation and tax expenditures over the years at the expense of the smaller taxpayers of America.
...Unchanged is Exxon/Mobil's stubborn refusal to pay the modest $5 billion punitive damage award following the Exxon Valdez oil spill that damaged or put so many small businesses out of business. They are still waiting, according to a recent network television expose. Last year your company made that much post-tax profits in about seven weeks. After the devastating spill in Alaskan waters, your gasoline prices rose sharply in California and you made money there. And your delay for 12 years resisting the court ordered payout by legal maneuvers has returned in interest on that award about that amount. Not that many years ago, a company in your mega-profitable position would have considered the public relations if not the simple justice benefits before dragging on the proceedings. Not so, with the impregnable Exxon/Mobil.
counterpunch.orgA Tangle in Caracas for Exxon ... Few moves can rattle the executive suites of companies here in Houston. But one that did came late this week: a comment from Venezuela's energy minister, Rafael Ramírez, who essentially told Exxon that it was no longer welcome in Venezuela.
"We don't want them to be here, then," Mr. Ramírez said Thursday in a television interview in relation to Exxon's earlier decision to sell its stake in an oil field to Repsol of Spain rather than submit to a venture controlled by Petróleos de Venezuela. Venezuela's Congress approved measures this week that give the government control of 32 privately run oil fields.
If Venezuela needs Exxon, Mr. Ramirez said, "we'll call them."
Still, nothing is simple in the relationship between Venezuela and Exxon, which played a contentious role in the building of the country's oil industry. For all the rising tensions, the relationship between Exxon and Venezuela is more nuanced and intertwined than the harsh statements from Mr. Ramírez might suggest.
Exxon's chief executive, Rex W. Tillerson, said this month that he, at least for the moment, would avoid making any major investments in the country. Western oil companies fear a creeping nationalization of petroleum assets in Venezuela under Mr. Chávez's government, which is using its growing wealth from high oil prices to spread its influence around the rest of Latin America.
Those rising revenues from oil exports have also emboldened Mr. Chávez's government in its dealings with foreign energy companies.
Yet for all its difficulties in Venezuela, the placement of Exxon in the government's cross hairs may have more to do with symbolism than substance because of the way the company is perceived as a symbol of American influence in a country where anti-American sentiment is flourishing.
Exxon also stands out because of its signature method of dealing with governments in countries where it operates. Exxon, for example, has publicly criticized Venezuela's moves to increase royalties on projects in the country's Orinoco region, threatening last year to take the issue to international courts.
Venezuela has repeatedly been a challenging operating arena for Exxon, with the company taken off a $3 billion petrochemical project in February and a $5 billion project to export natural gas in 2002.
While Exxon and Venezuela continue to dance around each other, most other foreign oil companies operating there, including some of the largest energy concerns from the United States, Britain and France, have acquiesced to government requests for higher taxes, royalties and even fines.
rootsie on 04.02.06 @ 09:58 AM CST [
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Nationalism and Populism Propel Front-Runner in Peru
MOQUEGUA, Peru, March 28 — In a presidential campaign filled with symbolism, the front-runner here found a perfect image for his hard-charging crusade: on Tuesday, he jumped on a chestnut mare and, with his followers sprinting behind him, galloped to the central plaza to promise to revolutionize this Andean country.
The candidate is Ollanta Humala, 43, who was seeking to evoke the image of the authoritarian man on horseback known as the caudillo. He says that if elected on April 9, he will waste no time before cracking down on the multinationals he says cheat citizens and arresting the crooked politicians he says have plundered Peru. As the leader of the newly formed Nationalist Party, he also says he will ally himself with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, who wants to form a bulwark against the Bush administration.
Mr. Humala, whose first name means "warrior who sees all," is as populist as they come on a continent that has been swept by leftist leaders mining popular discontent with free-market policies and suspicions of the United States. His antiglobalization stance and talk of transforming the economy provoke fear in the entrepreneurial class; the stock market suffered its biggest tumble in five years when he rose in the polls.
nytimes.com
rootsie on 04.02.06 @ 09:54 AM CST [
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Corporate profits surge to 40-year high
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- U.S. corporate profits have increased 21.3% in the past year and now account for the largest share of national income in 40 years, the Commerce Department said Thursday.
Strong productivity gains and subdued wage growth boosted before-tax profits to 11.6% of national income in the fourth quarter of 2005, the biggest share since the summer of 1966.
For all of 2005, before-tax profits totaled $1.35 trillion, up from $1.16 trillion in 2004 and just $767 billion in 2001.
Meanwhile, the share of national income going to wage and salary workers has fallen to 56.9%. Except for a brief period in 1997, that's the lowest share for labor income since 1966.
"It's a big puzzle," said Josh Bivens, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute. "If this is a knowledge economy, how come the brains aren't being compensated? Instead, the owners of physical capital are getting the rewards."
Despite the flood of cash coming in the door, corporations are investing comparatively little in expanding their operations. Capital spending has been below average, especially considering the strength of the economy, the level of profits and the special tax breaks given to boost investment.
In the fourth quarter, business fixed investment increased just 4.5%. In the past year, investment has risen 6.8%. The growth rate has been falling for the past four quarters.
Some economists are counting on the corporate sector to pick up their investments in the coming year, to replace the economic stimulus that will be lost as the housing market cools.
Profits have been so high because almost all of the benefits from productivity improvements are flowing to the owners of capital rather than to the workers.
marketwatch.com
rootsie on 04.02.06 @ 09:50 AM CST [
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The Second Revolution
April is Confederate History month. Before the pall of political correctness descended on the country and drained politicians of what little courage they had, Southern governors routinely proclaimed the month. These days, I suspect few will.
Nevertheless, there are only two really important events in American history. One is the American Revolution, and the other is the War Between the States and Reconstruction. The latter has been called America's second revolution and, by some, America's French Revolution.
Sad to say, the America we live in today comes from that second revolution, not the first. Contrary to the politically correct version of history, Confederates saw themselves as defenders of the first revolution, not as defenders of slavery – though, to be sure, slavery played a part in the conflict. It came to symbolize all the other differences.
It was not a civil war because the South never aspired to overthrow the government of the United States. The Southern states simply withdrew peacefully from what they believed, and in earlier years all Americans believed, was a voluntary union. The U.S. remained, and the government in Washington remained. No Confederate official or military officer was ever tried for treason because no treason had been committed.
The war, which the North started (we Southerners refer to it as the War of Northern Aggression), was a conflict between nationalism and federalism. Regardless of which side you agree with, the events are so important to understanding America today that you owe it to yourself to get up to speed on what really happened, as opposed to the Hollywood version.
lewrockwell.com
rootsie on 04.02.06 @ 09:47 AM CST [
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Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to offer abortions
If South Dakota's abortion ban stands, it won't ban them from all parts of the state. The Oglala Sioux tribe president wants to open a women's clinic on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation that will offer abortions only if House Bill 1215 becomes law.
Cecilia Fire Thunder, President, Oglala Sioux Tribe
"The best solution to abortion is to make sure that women have access to contraceptives, have access to family planning options, and that information needs to be out there at all times where all women of childbearing age have that information and use it."
For those reasons, Fire Thunder wants to open a women's clinic on Pine Ridge, providing women with birth control options and proper health care, and if 1215 passes the clinic would also provide abortions.
"We just want to make sure that something is done for women who make that decision. All we can do is provide that to them, no questions asked. It's their choice. It's between her and God and that unborn baby. And I honor that."
South Dakota Attorney General Larry Long says providing an abortion on the Pine Ridge Reservation is not unlawful because state law doesn't apply to sovereign land.
msnbc.msn.comWhat an astonishing historical irony. If they had been able, the US government would have aborted every Lakota baby.
rootsie on 04.02.06 @ 09:44 AM CST [
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You're Damn Right Race Matters: The Press Mob, Their Rope and Barry Bonds
Is Barry Bonds the object of a racist witch-hunt? Over the last week I have had to publicly argue this issue against some of the finest minds of my generation (all right, John Rocker and Jose Canseco). In addition, I have duked it out on talk radio, sports radio, email chats, and various blogs. The dominant argument I hear repeatedly, whether from Mr. Rocker or Mr. Liberal Blogger, is that I am an idiot if I think that the Bonds steroid-mania is all about bigotry run amok. Unfortunately that is not my argument.
To be clear:
I don't think that everyone against Bonds is a racist. I don't think every sportswriter who wants Bonds punished is a racist. And I certainly don't think anyone who believes in harsh penalties for steroid use is a racist. One can hate Barry Bonds and also spend Sundays singing "We Shall Overcome" with the Harlem Boys Choir before reading select passages from Go Tell it On The Mountain. But to argue that race has nothing to do with the saga of Barry Bonds is to practice ignorance frightening in its Rocker-ian grandiosity.
Of course you can always simply agree with San Francisco Giants owner Peter Magowan, CEO of Safeway Supermarkets and anti-union zealot, who believes that it is a remarkable sign of racial progress that Barry Bonds is flayed before the public. Magowan said, "I don't believe this is a case of racism. In fact, I think this shows how far we've come. If the media brought this up 20 years ago, they would have been considered racists."
Now that's progress. The media can be as racist as they want without being called on it.
The fact is that racism smears this entire story like rancid cream cheese on a stale bialy.
First and foremost, there are the death threats. USA Ttoday reported yesterday that Bonds is being deluged with letters that threaten his life, many with overtones about as subtle as a burning cross. Today I was on a tremendous radio show out of Cincinnati called The Buzz, and we were deluged with calls by older African-Americans who recalled with chilling clarity the trials of Henry Aaron. When Aaron approached Babe Ruth's home run record, the death threats came rolling in. Now that Bonds is just six behind Ruth's 714, the slurs are returning 32 years later like a white power Halley's Comet.
counterpunch.org
rootsie on 04.02.06 @ 09:40 AM CST [
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26 Saudis to be released from Guantanamo, news reports
RIYADH - Twenty-six Saudi detainees are to be released from Guantanamo Bay and transferred to Saudi Arabia in the coming weeks, the Saudi daily Al Watan reported on Saturday.
Saudi authorities have been notified that the US has started procedures to release the Saudi nationals and hand them over to the kingdom, the report quoted an anonymous source as saying.
The detainees awaiting release are the third group of Saudis to leave Guantanamo. Saudi Arabia admitted five detainees in 2004 and three in July 2005.
US authorities are currently holding 124 Saudi nationals captured during US strikes on formerly Taleban-governed Afghanistan and the period following US occupation.
Lawyers for the detainees in Guantanamo said their clients had been working in humanitarian and charitable organizations before they were detained by the US in Pakistan and moved to the Cuba detention camp.
khaleejtimes.comIt's all in who you know--and who you kiss on the mouth in a romantic garden in Texas.
rootsie on 04.02.06 @ 09:36 AM CST [
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War Against Iran, April 2006
History repeats itself, but always with new twists. We are back to the good old days when a Declaration of War preceded the start of a war. Such declaration occurred on March 16th, 2006. Reversing the old order, we are now in the "Sitzkrieg", to be followed shortly by an aerial "Blitzkrieg" in the coming days.
In the old days, Congress declared war, and directed the Executive to take action. In the new millenium, the Executive declared war last March 16th, then Congress will pass H.R. 282, "To hold the current regime in Iran accountable for its threatening behavior and to support a transition to democracy in Iran." This bill and previous ones like it are in direct violation of the legally binding Algiers Accords[pdf] signed by the United States and Iran on January 19, 1981, that states "The United States pledges that it is and from now on will be the policy of the United States not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran's internal affairs"; however, this is clearly of no interest to the 353 policymakers sponsoring the bill.
The US promised Russia and China that the UN Security Council statement just approved will not be a trigger for military action after 30 days; true to its promise, the US will attack before the 30-day deadline imposed by the UNSC for Iran to stop its nuclear enrichment activity, i.e. before the end of April. The "justification" is likely to be an alleged threat of imminent biological attack with Iran's involvement.
antiwar.comIranian militiamen were brought in by Britain MILITIAMEN from an Iranian-backed force were deliberately recruited by Britain to join the new Iraqi security services after Saddam Hussein was overthrown, the Government has admitted.
The sectarian Badr organisation, trained in exile by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, is suspected of violently pursuing its own agenda after being allowed to enlist in national units. John Reid, the Defence Secretary, disclosed in a Commons written answer to the Plaid Cymru MP Adam Price that it had been official policy to welcome the Shia gunmen. “Following the end of the conflict in Iraq, the Coalition Provision Authority sought to reintegrate militia members into civil society,” Mr Reid said. “This process included members of the Badr organisation, formerly known as the Badr Corps, among others.”
Sunnis have accused the Badr organisation of torturing prisoners, a claim rejected by the Shia-dominated Government. Bayar Jabor, the Interior Minister, was a member of the militia. The organisation’s stronghold is southern Iraq, where British troops have been based since the war.
rootsie on 04.02.06 @ 09:31 AM CST [
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Truth and Fiction in Elie Wiesel's Night: Is Frey or Wiesel the Bigger Moral Poseur?
Did Oprah Pick Another Fibber?When in trouble, head for Auschwitz, preferably in the company of Elie Wiesel.
...hardly had Frey been cast down from the eminence of Amazon.com's top bestseller before he was replaced at number one by the new pick of Oprah's Book Club, Elie Wiesel's Night, which had the good fortune to see republication at this fraught moment in Oprah's literary affairs. Simultaneous with the Night selection came news that Oprah Winfrey and Elie Wiesel would shortly be visiting Auschwitz together, from which vantage point Oprah, with the lugubrious Wiesel at her side, could emphasize for her ABC-TV audience that there is truth and there is fiction, that Auschwitz is historical truth at its bleakest and most terrifying, that Night is a truthful account and that Wiesel is the human embodiment of truthful witness.
The trouble here is that in its central, most crucial scene, Night isn't historically true, and at least two other important episodes are almost certainly fiction. Below, I cite views, vigorously expressed to me in recent weeks by a concentration camp survivor, Eli Pfefferkorn, who worked with Wiesel for many years; also by Raul Hilberg. Hilberg is the world's leading authority on the Nazi Holocaust. An expanded version of his classic three-volume study, The Destruction of the European Jews, was recently reissued by Yale University Press. Wiesel personally enlisted Hilberg to be the historical expert on the United States Holocaust Commission.
If absolute truth to history is the standard, Pfefferkorn says, then Night doesn't make the grade. Wiesel made things up, in a way that his many subsequent detractors could identify as not untypical of his modus operandi: grasping with deft assurance what people important to his future would want to hear and, by the same token, would not want to hear.
counterpunch.org
rootsie on 04.02.06 @ 09:26 AM CST [
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Nadia Hasan - You can't go home again, (they won't let you)
...I went to the passport control and a big group of tourists were there, everyone got their visa in less that 5 minutes. When was my turn, I saw a familiar face, the woman in the control office was the same that last year, the same that after gave me one month visa told me "if you don't like it go back to Chile, we don't want more Palestinians here!!!!"
Everything was normal, she asked me for my passport, and checked my name at the computer.... she was looking at it for more that 2 minutes, at that moment I knew that my name was there, but which information they have, I don't know..., she called a guy, after another woman, after another guy... all of them were talking in Hebrew, looking at me sometimes, reading again, i don't know for how long, I was so nervous.
A new guy came to me and starts to speak in Arabic with me, I told him that i don't understand, he continues speaking in Arabic.... after that he told me "Good luck" and asked me to go to the check room again. Well, he didn't asked me, he order me, he told me "Move now."
I entered in the check room and I had all the Israeli security with me, more than 15 persons, all of them not more than 22, playing an important game in their life, with power in their hands and with a terrorist in front of them, I saw excited eyes, waiting for the orders of the oldest man, the guy with the biggest M16 in his hand.
They open all my bags, they put everything on a table and start to check it, everything... After a young woman told me that she need to check my body, and with a smile on my face I answered, "OK, no problem", when she was checking me she told me whispering "I am sorry, but is my work, can you take of all your clothes?", I answer yes, but I want to keep my t shirt (I didn't want to show my tattoo), well, she checked me all, open your legs, close your legs, sit here, up and open your legs again, etc... like last year.
After the woman from last year came and asked me if I was in Israel before, I answer yes. Why you are coming again. I have friends here. Arabic friends, she asked? No, Israeli friends, Israelis????? (her face changed). Yes, Israeli friends. She asked me their names and I gave to her.
After asked me for my other passport, passport that I don't have of course, asked me about Gaza, about Nablus, about other Arab countries, about my name again...
Well, she left me alone, I check the time, was 10:30 am, I was thinking that my future in Palestine will depend on what she decided, and I wanted to smoke, of course I was not allowed to do it, sit there and wait!!!!
The time running, I was nervous but quiet at the same time, I wait for this moment since I was refused from my homeland last year, 6 long months, and I was there again, ready for that.
I checked the time again, was 12:15, I asked if I can use the bathroom, they told me no, sit and wait!!! After 10 minutes the women came to me, I wanted to cry, I knew that she has my dreams in her hands and she gave me back my passport, I take my bags (after put everything inside) and I start to walk.
I walk, with tears in my eyes, full of emotions inside me, all my memories from Palestine were in my head, in my heart, I remember in this 5 or 10 minutes every person that I met in Nablus, how much I wanted come back, how near I was.
One man stopped me and told me something that I didn't want to hear, something that was only in my nightmares, something that I listened before: "Welcome to Jordan."
I am in Aqaba again, with Palestine in front of me but more far than ever.
axisoflogic.com
rootsie on 04.02.06 @ 09:20 AM CST [
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Schools Shut Down Over Immigration Uproar - Corporate Censorship - this News Article Was Blocked by Norton Securities' Parental Control Function.
LOS ANGELES (March 30) - Teachers and students are turning the walkouts that have emptied high schools across Southern California into a real-life civics lesson about national immigration policy and even the nuances of civic duty itself.
In Christian Quintero's social studies classroom, the conversation flowed easily from English to Spanish - but the topics his students discussed didn't have easy answers.
"So do you think yesterday was a good thing or a bad thing?" Quintero asked of Monday's walkout, which involved an estimated 36,000 students in Los Angeles County, including many from Belmont High School where he teaches.
"A good thing!" a boy in the back shouted.
"Why?"
"Because we let them know what's up," the boy said.
Indeed, the protests landed the Los Angeles Unified School District - the nation's second largest, and 73 percent of its students Hispanic - in the debate on congressional proposals to crackdown on immigration.
Wednesday was relatively quiet after two days of protests that began with blocked freeways and pleas from the mayor to go back to class, and escalated Tuesday to school lockdowns and truancy citations. On the popular Web site MySpace.com, where many students have said they went for protest instructions, the word was wait until Friday for the next mass protest.
Meanwhile, in classrooms and hallways some students have turned to reflection - were the protests effective? were they the right thing to do?
Some teachers seized the opportunity to make the connection between the textbook and real life. Some offered lessons on how a bill becomes law. In one school, lunchtime morphed into an organized forum on immigration policy.
axisoflogic.com
rootsie on 04.02.06 @ 09:15 AM CST [
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Rice Finds British Muslims Want to Give Her an Earful
...Whenever asked, Mr. Straw said the protesters were a small minority, and he even belittled them, saying at one point that he "could have done better" during his youthful days as a peace advocate. He added, "I can't say I am embarrassed in the least" by the reception his hometown gave to Ms. Rice. "If you did an opinion poll, you'd find that the vast majority of people in Blackburn agree with this trip."
On Friday, Ms. Rice had to content herself with a visit to the Liverpool school where Paul McCartney studied instead of meeting him — and had to face a short line of students wearing T-shirts that said: "No torture. No compromise." During a visit to a school in Blackburn, she was greeted with chants of "Condi Rice go home!"
Mr. Straw had advised Ms. Rice that she would probably be greeted by protesters on the trip, officials said, and she told him that such confrontations would not bother her. She gave several interviews to the British press, and almost every one was dominated by questions about her rough reception.
"People can say whatever they wish," she told The Lancashire Evening Telegraph. "I know where I stand. We made the right decision" in Iraq. "I was fully supportive of the decision."
During the news conference in Blackburn on Saturday, the boos and jeers rose to greet the secretaries as they spoke. Referring to the protesters at one point, Ms. Rice said, "They make my point. A democracy is the only system of government that allows people to be heard peacefully."
nytimes.comHeard peacefully and ignored studiously. Ra! democracy.
rootsie on 04.02.06 @ 09:12 AM CST [
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Quake victims forced home
There has been much resistance among inhabitants to the closure of the 148 camps six months after the 8 October quake, which killed 75,000 people and made millions more homeless. The sites were managed by the army and some of the soldiers cried as they broke the news of the closure. The government argues it is necessary to prevent people becoming so dependent on handouts that the camps will never shut. Many of the aid agencies in the relief effort agree.
observer.guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 04.02.06 @ 09:08 AM CST [
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Saturday, April 1st
Toni Solo: The Anti-Americans
Jean Kirkpatrick's recent intervention in Nicaragua's internal politics is a helpful reminder that US government foreign policy is marked not just by hypocrisy and sadism but also by delusional stupidity. Take this quote from an interview Kirkpatrick gave to the publication "Religion and Liberty" (1) :
"I don't think that Fidel Castro knows how to run a government that must provide the necessities in a society. He is quintessentially a revolutionary, committed to world revolution. Since that's his profession, I don't think he can last."
Despite decades of US economic blockade promoted hard by Kirkpatrick, Cuba's people enjoy better education, better healthcare and better disaster prevention and relief services than most people in the United States. This truth was dramatically highlighted last year by the contrast between the US government's response to Hurricane Katrina and the Havana government's response to a series of equally devastating hurricanes in Cuba. Jean Kirkpatrick's views on Cuba are absurdly counterfactual. Her policy advocacy on Cuba has been a complete failure.
Try this anti-historical gem from the same interview:
"... no authoritarian state has ever evolved out of a democratic welfare state, nor has a democratic welfare state ever evolved into an authoritarian state."
Even given the limited relevant historical period she corners in this foolish remark one has to assume that Kirkpatrick's European history studies wound up just before the Weimar Republic, to name only the most obvious example. Yet this person is a leading guru of the United States foreign policy elite. No wonder the Bush regime's criminal aggression against Iraq has involved the people of the United States in their country's worst foreign policy debacle since Vietnam.
Nicaragua at the UN. Kirkpatrick's career nadir?
Perhaps the most embarrassing diplomatic debacle of Kirkpatrick's career was the bungled attempt by US diplomacy to prevent the election of Nicaragua to the UN Security Council in 1982. Kirkpatrick and her colleagues desperately struggled to promote the candidacy of the Dominican Republic in order to prevent Nicaragua's election. She and her team failed dismally. Nicaragua's Chancellor at the time, Padre Miguel D'Escoto remembers,
"I spoke with all the foreign ministers of the world gathered there in the context of bilateral exchanges of about half an hour with each. But I was not alone. I could count on a marvellous support team from our foreign ministry and on Nora Astorga. But it was our heroic people under arms and Daniel (Ortega) who most accompanied us and made possible our victory thanks to the admiration and respect the world feels towards people of consequence."(2)
The vote was a personal triumph for D'Escoto and an almost unprecedented blow to US prestige. By rejecting the Reagan administration supported candidate, the vote indicated the contempt most of the world felt for the Reagan government's advocacy of vicious terror regimes and groups around the world at that time. For that flop, blame Kirkpatrick first.
Continuities : from El Salvador to Palestine and Iraq
Just as the career of Kirkpatrick's fellow death squad promoter John Negroponte spans from the Reagan government's crimes in Central America to the Bush regime's crimes in Iraq so too do the echoes of Kirkpatrick's pro-terror rhetoric from the early 1980s. When the US-trained Salvadoran army murdered three US nuns and a US woman lay missionary in 1982, Kirkpatrick notoriously tried to justify the killings by accusing the women of being political activists working for the Salvadoran guerrillas. What a contrast with the US government's reaction to the killing of four US mercenaries in Fallujah which led to the destruction of the city by thousands of troops backed up by artillery, armour and air-power.
zmag.org
rootsie on 04.01.06 @ 10:30 AM CST [
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From Guatemala to Colombia: The Regional Integration of Gold and Bullets
This article analyzes the role of militarization as a part of the control of territory, natural resources and people, and raises doubts about the so-called war on drug trafficking in mining districts. A comparison is drawn between Plan Colombia and the current situation in the gold mining region of San Marcos, Guatemala.
In San Marcos, the same region where the People of Sipakapa maintain their resistance to Canadian-US company Glamis Gold’s Marlin gold mine, the participation of United States military forces in searches for weapons and opium poppy crop fumigations has recently been announced as part of the Plan Maya Jaguar.
Just as terrorism apparently abounds around oil fields, it seems as though the worst hotbeds of drug trafficking are located where powerful mining interests are to be found. Whatever the pretext, the recent news from the highlands of San Marcos in Guatemala should be cause enough for reflection about what really lies behind militarization and the so-called regional integration initiatives, which amount to nothing more than the continuation of the historic process of exploitation and control in Mesoamerica: control of territory, control of resources and control of Peoples.
upsidedownworld.org
rootsie on 04.01.06 @ 10:26 AM CST [
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Mugabe eyes Equatorial Guinea oil
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe hopes to sign an agreement to import oil from Equatorial Guinea, Africa's third-largest producer.
Equatorial Guinea President Teodoro Obiang Nguema is visiting Zimbabwe two years after the authorities there helped foil a plot to oust him.
Zimbabwe is suffering chronic fuel shortages, the result of a foreign exchange crisis.
Mr Obiang said his country was ready to forge stronger links with Zimbabwe.
"I can assure you that you can always count on the support of the government and people of Equatorial Guinea to do their best," he said at a dinner hosted by Mr Mugabe.
Mr Mugabe himself accused western governments and media of vilifying Zimbabwe.
"The born-again democrats in London and Washington would like to hoodwink the world on the situation in Zimbabwe in the very same manner they have done on Iraq," he said.
Simon Mann, the British leader of the alleged coup plot against Mr Obiang, is still serving a jail sentence in Harare after the plane on which he was travelling landed there in 2004, on its way to Equatorial Guinea.
bbc.co.uk
rootsie on 04.01.06 @ 10:22 AM CST [
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Istanbul blast amid Kurd tension
A bomb blast has killed one person and injured 13 others near a bus stop in Turkey's biggest city of Istanbul.
A Kurdish separatist group, the TAK, said it carried out the attack in response to recent violence in the mainly Kurdish south-east of Turkey.
Seven people died during several days of clashes between Kurds and Turkish riot police in the region - the worst for many years.
bbc.co.uk
rootsie on 04.01.06 @ 10:19 AM CST [
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Mosul slips out of control as the bombers move in
When the 3,000 men of the mainly Kurdish 3rd Brigade of the 2nd Division of the Iraqi Army go on patrol it is at night, after the rigorously enforced curfew starts at 8pm. Their vehicles, bristling with heavy machine guns, race through the empty streets of the city, splashing through pools of sewage, always trying to take different routes to avoid roadside bombs. "The government cannot control the city," said Hamid Effendi, an experienced ex-soldier who is Minister for Peshmerga Affairs in the Kurdistan Regional Government.
He is influential in the military affairs of Mosul province with its large Kurdish minority, although it is outside the Kurdish region. He believes: "The Iraqi Army is only a small force in Mosul, the Americans do not leave their bases much and some of the police are connected to the terrorists." In the days since a suicide bomber killed 43 young men waiting to join the Iraqi army at a recruitment centre near Mosul last week soldiers in the city have been expecting a second attack.
"We are not leaving the base in daytime because we know other bombers are waiting for us," said a soldier at a base near Mosul's city centre.
Saadi Pire, until recently the leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in Mosul, says bluntly that the 12,000 police "are police by day and terrorists by night. They should all be dismissed and other police brought in from outside."
He thinks that Mosul, the northern capital of Iraq with a population of 1.7 million, could erupt at any moment. He points out that it is difficult to pacify because so much of Saddam Hussein's army - some 250,000 soldiers and 30,000 officers - was recruited from there.
independent.co.uk
rootsie on 04.01.06 @ 10:18 AM CST [
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Shiite Ayatollah Ignores Letter From Bush
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A letter from President Bush to Iraq's supreme Shiite spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, was hand-delivered earlier this week but sits unread and untranslated in the top religious figure's office, a key al-Sistani aide told The Associated Press on Thursday.
The aide - who has never allowed use of his name in news reports, citing al-Sistani's refusal to make any public statements himself - said the ayatollah had laid the letter aside and did not ask for a translation because of increasing ``unhappiness'' over what senior Shiite leaders see as American meddling in Iraqi attempts to form their first, permanent post-invasion government.
The aide said the person who delivered the Bush letter - he would not identify the messenger by name or nationality - said it carried Bush's thanks to al-Sistani for calling for calm among his followers in preventing the outbreak of civil war after a Shiite shrine was bombed late last month.
The messenger also was said to have explained that the letter reinforced the American position that Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari should not be given a second term. Al-Sistani has not publicly taken sides in the dispute, but rather has called for Shiite unity.
The United States was known to object to al-Jaafari's second term but has never said so outright and in public.
But on Saturday, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad carried a similar letter from Bush to a meeting with Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the largest Shiite political organization, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
The al-Sistani aide said Shiite displeasure with U.S. involvement was so deep that dignitaries in the holy city of Najaf refused to meet Khalilzad on Wednesday during ceremonies commemorating the death of the Prophet Muhammad. The Afghan-born Khalilzad is a Sunni Muslim.
guardian.co.ukIraq Shi'ite ayatollah demands U.S. fire envoy BAGHDAD, March 31 (Reuters) - A leading Iraqi Shi'ite cleric demanded on Friday that the United States sack its ambassador, accusing Zalmay Khalilzad of siding with his fellow Sunni Muslims in the sectarian conflict gripping the country.
In a sermon read out at mosques for Friday prayers, Ayatollah Mohammed al-Yacoubi said Washington had underestimated the bloody conflict between Shi'ites and the once dominant Sunni Arab minority, which many fear threatens to trigger a civil war.
"By this, they are either misled by reports, which lack objectivity and credibility, submitted to the United States by their sectarian ambassador to Iraq ... or they are denying this fact," Yacoubi said in the message, later issued as a statement.
"It (the United States) should not yield to terrorist blackmail and should not be deluded or misled by spiteful sectarians. It should replace its ambassador to Iraq if it wants to protect itself from further failures."
After the imam of Baghdad's Rahman mosque read that line, worshippers chanted "Allahu Akbar" -- God is Greatest.
Afghan-born Khalilzad, former envoy to Kabul and the most senior Muslim in the U.S. administration, has been in Iraq for 10 months and is spearheading Washington's increasingly urgent efforts to pressure Iraq's leaders into a unity government.
rootsie on 04.01.06 @ 10:15 AM CST [
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The Mustafa Mosque Massacre was No Accident or Error
Events in Iraq are giving the lie to administration claims that all it wants to do is create a stable, democratic Iraq, and then leave.
The U.S. assault on the Mustafa Mosque, and the deaths of, variously, 16 insurgents or 37 unarmed worshippers (depending upon whether you believe the Pentagon or Iraqi police), has prompted calls from the Iraqi government for the U.S. to hand over control of security in Iraq to the local government.
Now, if this is what the U.S. government is trying to do anyway, the Bush administration and the Pentagon should be very happy. They've just been told, pretty clearly, that they're no longer wanted and they can pack up and go home, right?
But they're not doing it.
Why?
Because the Bush administration has no intention of leaving Iraq, particularly in the hands of its elected Shi'ia-led leadership.
Note also that the Iraqi "government," supposedly sovereign (remember all that talk of handing over sovereignty two years ago?), is asking the US to turn over control of security in the country to it, not telling it to. Note also that Bush and the U.S. ambassador to Iraq have told the country's Shi'ia leaders that they don't want the elected prime minister-designate, Ibrahim al-Jafari, to be prime minister.
Some sovereignty!
The truth is that the U.S. is running Iraq from the giant U.S. Embassy compound in the Green Zone, and the Iraqi "government" remains a puppet regime. The truth is also that the U.S. has been spending billions of dollars not on Iraq reconstruction, which in any case is not being phased out if it ever was being attempted, but on building several large, permanent military bases inside Iraq, from which the U.S. has no intention of budging in the foreseeable future. (Want to guess where some of that "missing" $9 billion in U.S. reconstruction money has really gone?).
The Mosque attack also shows the terrible morass that American troops have been dumped into. They're getting shot at from all over the place--probably from mosques as much as anywhere--but if they shoot back, they end up killing innocents. And even when they kill people who were actually shooting at them, those people have families and friends who consider their deaths to be heroic and patriotic. So a blood feud against the American occupiers is made all the more bitter.
...Let's be clear: the attack on the Mustafa mosque was no accident, nor was it some stupid move by a low-ranking officer who didn't know the implications of what he was doing. The attack was a deliberate act of intimidation and provocation directed against the Shi'ia majority by U.S. occupation authorities. It will not be the last.
The U.S. has no interest in a successful Iraq government, since it is now clear that such a government will be Shi'ia led, and close to Iran politically. Therefore, my guess is that the fallback strategy is to rev up the Shi'ia militants, stir up civil strife, and perhaps even to get the Sunni minority, long the heart of opposition to the U.S., to turn to the U.S. for help, as the Kurds did years back.
counterpunch.org
rootsie on 04.01.06 @ 10:09 AM CST [
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Garbage Dump Second Home for Iraqi Children
SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq, March 31, 2006 (ENS) - Every day before school, seven year old Mohammed Fariq Rostam goes with his father on their donkeys to scrounge through Sulaimaniyah's garbage dump.
Mohammed's eyes often burn from the smoke that rises from the rubbish, and his forehead bears a scar from when he slipped on trash and sliced it on a piece of glass.
But he is proud when he helps his father find a source of income for their five member family. That could be aluminium cans that they can resell in the market, or a piece of electrical equipment that has been thrown away but can be repaired. Shoes and clothes, though torn or stained, are also prized.
"This isn't a place for him," said Mohammed’s father Fariq, 31, who is illiterate and unemployed. "I want him to have a better future."
The dump lies in an industrial area 11 kilometers southwest of Sulaimaniyah city, near seven villages that are home to more than 100 families. It has become a source of income for many like the Rostams who are out of work and looking for anything that can be resold or reused.
Zereen Abdullah, 12, sloshes through garbage with a pair of muddy boots - one of her many finds. She has rashes all over her body from the trash that itches her skin, but triumphantly announces, "I have found three dolls, and whenever I go home I play with them."
ens-newswire.com
rootsie on 04.01.06 @ 10:02 AM CST [
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Bombing civilians is not only immoral, it's ineffective
No one knows how many civilians have died violently in Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003. The most careful assessment, by the website Iraq Body Count, estimates at least 36,000. The true figure could be three times higher. The uncertainty is explained by General Tommy Franks' now-notorious remark, "We don't do body counts."
Three interesting facts nevertheless help shape a sense of the possibilities. One is that the US forces insist that they use precision techniques to minimise "collateral damage". The second is that the coalition recently and controversially admitted using phosphorus weapons in its attack on Falluja. The third is that one of the US marine air wings operating in Iraq announced in a press release in November 2005 that since the invasion began it had dropped more than half a million tons of explosives on Iraq.
The felt inconsistency between the first fact and the other two reminds one that ever since the deliberate mass bombing of civilians in the second world war, and as a direct response to it, the international community has outlawed the practice. It first tried to do so in the fourth Geneva convention of 1949, but the UK and the US would not agree, since to do so would have been an admission of guilt for their systematic "area bombing" of German and Japanese civilians.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 04.01.06 @ 10:00 AM CST [
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Insurgents will win, says hostage
US AUTHORITIES in Iraq guarded freed hostage Jill Carroll overnight after insurgents released her from nearly three months of captivity and published a video showing her praising them.
Insurgents, meanwhile, carried out a series of attacks killing eight people, five of them from one Shiite family.
US officials declined to say when the 28-year-old freelance journalist would go home to the United States.
Video footage posted on the Internet late Thursday showed Ms Carroll in an interview with her kidnappers before her release in which she praised Iraq's insurgents and even predicted their victory.
The circumstances under which she spoke were unclear.
"I think the mujahedeen are very smart and even with all the technology and all the people that the American army has here, they still are better at knowing how to live and work here, more clever," Ms Carroll said in response to a question.
Asked what she meant, Ms Carroll, who was snatched from a Baghdad street on January 7, answered: "It makes very clear that the mujahedeen are the ones that will win in the end."
heraldsun.news.comOff with her head.
rootsie on 04.01.06 @ 09:57 AM CST [
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Iran is being set up for “an unprovoked nuclear attack”
Professing to be the greater civilization, the intellect is deliberately disassociated, sanity is interned so that greed may proceed and allow the savagery of the greater to prey upon the less. While mankind strives for nobility, there are some among us who contemplate such base decisions that would threaten the existence of another nation. Those same powers who would refute that man is born under one law, and so they bound him by another, targeting him with nuclear weapons.
Alarmed at such baseness, Philip Giarldi, A former CIA officer, in an August 1, 2005 issue of The American Conservative warns that Dick Cheney has issued a request for using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. More troubling is that the use of nuclear weapons is not conditional on Iran being involved in the act of terrorism against the United States. Otherwise stated, Iran is being set up for “an unprovoked nuclear attack”.
Ms. Rice who is rather smug about having earned herself a major victory by getting everyone on board in referring Iran to the United Nations Security Council, can also invite these same nations to share this crime against humanity. Dr. Jorge Hirsch, professor of physics at UC, San Diego, in his remarkable video emphasizes the consequences of a US nuclear attack on Iran. Each bomb would deliver an incalculable number of corpses, the radiation fallout, both immediate and residual, unparallel in magnitude to the tragedy witnessed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 60 years ago.
zmag.org
rootsie on 04.01.06 @ 09:53 AM CST [
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Bolton Really Is Bonkers
"This is a real test for the Security Council. There's just no doubt that for close to 20 years, the Iranians have been pursuing nuclear weapons through a clandestine program that we've uncovered.
"If the U.N. Security Council can't deal with the proliferation of nuclear weapons, can't deal with the greatest threat we have with a country like Iran – that's one of the leading state sponsors of terrorism – if the Security Council can't deal with that, you have a real question of what it can deal with."
Thus spake Bonkers Bolton, Bush’s Ambassador to the United Nations, on the eve of UN Security Council debate on what to do with the "Iranian Dossier" the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency had forwarded them at the request of the IAEA Board of Governors.
As required by the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Iran concluded in 1974 a Safeguards Agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency wherein Iran agreed to allow IAEA inspectors to satisfy themselves that no "source or special nuclear materials" are being used or have been used in furtherance of a nuclear weapons program.
Director-General ElBaradei reported to the IAEA Board just last month [.pdf] that no declared source or special nuclear materials had been used in furtherance of a nuclear weapons program, but that "the Agency is not at this point in time in a position to conclude that there are no undeclared nuclear materials or activities in Iran."
Contrary to Bonkers Bolton, the Iranian dossier makes it clear that the IAEA has never uncovered any evidence whatsoever that Iran is now pursuing or has ever pursued a nuclear weapons program.
And, of course, whether Iran is – or is not – a leading state sponsor of terrorism is none of the IAEA’s beeswax.
So, how did the Security Council deal with a report whose principal conclusion was that the IAEA would need more time before finally concluding that there is no evidence to uncover?
Well, they noted with "serious concern" that after more than two years of intrusive inspections the Agency was still not in a position to conclude that Iran had declared all its activities that should have been declared.
Now, that’s obviously not what Bolton wanted or expected.
No Security Council resolution.
Not even a Presidential Statement declaring Iran "in violation of its NPT obligations."
No suggestion that Iranian behavior "constituted a threat to international peace and security."
In fact, the only concrete action the Council took was to "call on" Iran to resume cooperating with ElBaradei, as before.
antiwar.com
rootsie on 04.01.06 @ 09:50 AM CST [
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US professors accused of being liars and bigots over essay on pro-Israeli lobby
An article by two prominent American professors arguing that the pro-Israel lobby exerts a dominant and damaging influence on US foreign policy has triggered a furious row, pitting allegations of anti-semitism against claims of intellectual intimidation.
Stephen Walt, the academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and John Mearsheimer, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, published two versions of the essay, the Israel Lobby, in the London Review of Books and on a Harvard website.
The pro-Israel lobby and its sway over American policy has always been a controversial issue, but the professors' bluntly worded polemic created a firestorm, drawing condemnation from left and right of the political spectrum.
Professor Walt's fellow Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz - criticised in the article as an "apologist" for Israel - denounced the authors as "liars" and "bigots" in the university newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, and compared their arguments to neo-Nazi literature.
"Accusations of powerful Jews behind the scenes are part of the most dangerous traditions of modern anti-semitism," wrote two fellow academics, Jeffrey Herf and Andrei Markovits, in a letter to the London Review of Books. Critics also pointed out that the article had been praised by David Duke, a notorious American white supremacist.
Prof Mearsheimer said the storm of protest proved one of its arguments - that the strength of the pro-Israel lobby stifled debate on US foreign policy.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 04.01.06 @ 09:47 AM CST [
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Bush Pledges More Mayhem in the Middle East
Asked recently about his position on Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions, President Bush said, “I made it clear, and I’ll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel.”
This statement brought precisely zero reaction from the public and the media. Do the American people fully appreciate that this president is committed to sending their sons and daughters to kill and die — yet again — in a foreign country? Leaving aside the reigning political mythology, by what moral principle does he pledge other people’s lives without their consent? It is bad enough to die for “one’s own” country, which, let’s face it, in practice always means for the exploiting elite who head the government. Being sent to die for another country’s elite is obscene. Would some of those at risk like to speak up before it’s too late?
fff.org
rootsie on 04.01.06 @ 09:44 AM CST [
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Lawyer Says McKinney a Victim in Scuffle
A lawyer for Rep. Cynthia McKinney, the Georgia congresswoman who had an altercation with a Capitol Police officer, says she was "just a victim of being in Congress while black."
McKinney awaited word Friday on whether she would be charged for apparently striking the officer after she entered a House office building this week unrecognized and did not stop when asked.
Two law enforcement officials said it was unlikely a warrant would be issued this week. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Her lawyer, James W. Myart Jr., said, "Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, like thousands of average Americans across this country, is, too, a victim of the excessive use of force by law enforcement officials because of how she looks and the color of her skin."
breitbart.com
rootsie on 04.01.06 @ 09:42 AM CST [
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Rice shrugs off UK visit protests
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said she is not troubled by noisy protests against her current UK visit.
"I find them an exercise in democracy, I find them not in any way off-putting or disconcerting," she said, on a visit to the north-west town of Blackburn.
Angry demonstrators could be heard as Ms Rice held a joint press conference with her UK counterpart Jack Straw.
The secretary of state spoke after having held what she said were positive talks with local Muslim leaders.
About 200 noisy demonstrators - some of whom carried a coffin draped with a US flag - were gathered outside the town hall where Ms Rice and Mr Straw spoke to reporters.
Asked if she had been embarrassed by the protests which have followed her around on her two-day visit, Ms Rice said she respected the demonstrators' right to protest.
"Democracy is the only system that allows people to be heard and be heard peacefully," she said.
"When there are more places where people's voices can be heard peacefully, especially in the Middle East, we are all going to be better off."
bbc.co.uktranslation: Scream your heads off all you want. We are the masters of the universe.
rootsie on 04.01.06 @ 09:39 AM CST [
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The appeal of Apple
It has flirted with disaster but the firm that changed the way we work is 30 today.
It is not quite the birthday present that Apple Computer would have wished for. A courtroom battle between the maker of the iPod and the Beatles' Apple Corps record label is threatening to take the shine off the US technology firm's 30th anniversary celebrations today.
The high court heard yesterday that Apple Computer denied any breach of an agreement made 15 years ago that the Californian computer company would not use its apple trademark "in connection with musical content".
Anthony Grabiner, defending Apple Computer, said the iTunes Music Store did not breach the 1991 agreement as it was merely sending digital files. "Data transmission is within our field of use," he said, adding that it was not allowed to sell Beatles tracks through iTunes.
It is unlikely that a legal battle with the world's most famous musicians was on the minds of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak when they started Apple on April Fool's Day 1976. With their friend Ronald Wayne, they set up the firm from a Californian garage as wide-eyed, technology-obsessed twenty-somethings. And while Apple's fortunes have endured a rollercoaster ride over the years, their vision of affordable, user-friendly home computers has revolutionised how we live and work.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 04.01.06 @ 09:34 AM CST [
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