Mexican riot police fired tear gas and used clubs to break up a protest by supporters of left-wing presidential challenger Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

Leftist lawmakers were among at least 30 people injured in the scuffles outside Congress in Mexico City.

Mr Lopez Obrador’s supporters have been camped out in protest at the 2 July election they say was stolen by conservative rival Felipe Calderon.

This is the first time the authorities have used force on the protesters.

Mr Lopez Obrador later told his supporters that the events showed the authorities are “taking off their masks and putting aside their talk of supposed legality and respect”.

bbc.co.uk

Left-Wing Protests Spread to Highways, Banks

“…We have to toughen up the campaign. It is going to be spread across the country because this is a national problem,” said Gerardo Fernandez, a spokesman for the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution.

Activists swung open toll barriers for hours on several main highways serving Mexico’s three biggest cities: Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey. Also hit were highways to the Pacific coast beach resort of Acapulco and Nuevo Laredo on the US border.

So, Osama Walks into This Bar, See? and Bush says, “Whad’l’ya have, pardner?” and Osama says…

But wait a minute. I’d better shut my mouth. The sign here in the airport says, “Security is no joking matter.” But if security’s no joking matter, why does this guy dressed in a high-school marching band outfit tell me to dump my Frappuccino and take off my shoes? All I can say is, Thank the Lord the “shoe bomber” didn’t carry Semtex in his underpants.

Today’s a RED and ORANGE ALERT day. How odd. They just caught the British guys with the chemistry sets. But when these guys were about to blow up airliners, the USA was on YELLOW alert. That’s a “lowered” threat notice.

According to the press office from the Department of Homeland Security, lowered-threat Yellow means that there were no special inspections of passengers or cargo. Isn’t it nice of Mr. Bush to alert Osama when half our security forces are given the day off? Hmm. I asked an Israeli security expert why his nation doesn’t use these pretty color codes.

He asked me if, when I woke up, I checked the day’s terror color.

“I can’t say I ever have. I mean, who would?”

He smiled. “The terrorists.”

America is the only nation on the planet that kindly informs bombers, hijackers and berserkers the days on which they won’t be monitored. You’ve got to get up pretty early in the morning to get a jump on George Bush’s team.
infoclearinghouse.info

08/12/06 “NBC News”– -LONDON – NBC News has learned that U.S. and British authorities had a significant disagreement over when to move in on the suspects in the alleged plot to bring down trans-Atlantic airliners bound for the United States.

A senior British official knowledgeable about the case said British police were planning to continue to run surveillance for at least another week to try to obtain more evidence, while American officials pressured them to arrest the suspects sooner. The official spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case.

In contrast to previous reports, the official suggested an attack was not imminent, saying the suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. In fact, some did not even have passports.

informationclearinghouse.info

In this week’s issue of the New Yorker, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reports Israeli officials visited the White House earlier this summer to get a “green light” for an attack on Lebanon. The Bush administration approved, Hersh says, in part to remove Hezbollah as a deterrent to a potential US bombing of Iran. A government consultant said the Bush administration also saw the attack on Lebanon as a “demo” for what it could expect to face in Iran.

Interview w/Amy Goodman

New Yorker article

Over a mess-tent dinner of turkey cutlets, the bony-faced 21-year-old private from West Texas looked right at me as he talked about killing Iraqis with casual indifference. It was February, and we were at his small patrol base about 20 miles south of Baghdad. “The truth is, it wasn’t all I thought it was cracked up to be. I mean, I thought killing somebody would be this life-changing experience. And then I did it, and I was like, ‘All right, whatever.’ ”

He shrugged.

“I shot a guy who wouldn’t stop when we were out at a traffic checkpoint and it was like nothing,” he went on. “Over here, killing people is like squashing an ant. I mean, you kill somebody and it’s like ‘All right, let’s go get some pizza.’ ”

At the time, the soldier’s matter-of-fact manner struck me chiefly as a rare example of honesty. I was on a nine-month assignment as an embedded reporter in Iraq, spending much of my time with grunts like him — mostly young (and immature) small-town kids who sign up for a job as killers, lured by some gut-level desire for excitement and adventure. This was not the first group I had run into that was full of young men who shared a dark sense of humor and were clearly desensitized to death. I thought this soldier was just one of the exceptions who wasn’t afraid to say what he really thought, a frank and reflective kid, a sort of Holden Caulfield in a war zone.

But the private was Steven D. Green.

The next time I saw him, in a front-page newspaper photograph five months later, he was standing outside a federal courthouse in North Carolina, where he had pled not guilty to charges of premeditated rape and murder. The brutal killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and her family in Mahmudiyah that he was accused of had taken place just three weeks after we talked
axisoflogic.com

Rusty buses lined the wide road, their roofs packed with men, sitting, crouching and lying down.

Families sat and stood in the back of old pick up trucks. The people arrived in droves, by truck, bus or on foot, carrying banners and flags. The Wipala, a flag composed of multicoloured squares, was held aloft, draped around shoulders and hung from the small trees in the grassy central divide of the road. It represents the indigenous people of Bolivia who make up nearly two thirds of the population, those descended from the people who inhabited the land before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors. Not only the majority, they are also overwhelmingly the poorest. As one of their leaders said, they are often condemned to work as “peons” or serfs for wealthy landowners, “latifundistas“. This is a situation generations have faced for five hundred years.

On Saturday June 3, 2006 thousands of indigenous campesinos, peasants and agricultural labourers, congregated around a small stage in the eastern Bolivian city of Santa Cruz. Representatives of three communities were presented with the legal titles to their land by President Evo Morales, a former union leader of coca growers and now the first indigenous president of the most indigenous country in Latin America. In total sixty sets of papers were received by communities from different parts of Bolivia, from the Departments of Beni, Cochabamba, La Paz, Oruro, Pando, Santa Cruz and Tarija. The land titles represented over 7.5 million acres of land, for farmer communities as small as 103 acres, and designated native lands as large as 1.1 million acres.

upsidedownworld.org 

The Washington Post is upset with Andres Manuel López Obrador. Because Obrador is demanding a recount in an election with several irregularities (if not cases of fraud), the Post suggests he is Stalinist, anti-democratic and threatens to move the country back to authoritarianism.

The Post Editorial stated that Obrador has made “wild charges” in his dispute with the preliminary election results and states “international and independent Mexican observers detected no such abuse,” as if there were absolutely no experts that disagreed with those the Post talked to.

But as UpsideDownWorld reported in early July, there are quite a few reasons why a recount would be warranted. They include:

08/07/06 “The Independent” — — So the great and the good on the East River laboured at the United Nations Security Council – and brought forth a lemon. You could almost hear the Lebanese groan at this draft resolution, a document of such bias and mendacity that a close Lebanese friend read carefully through it yesterday, cursed and uttered the immortal question: “Don’t these bastards learn anything from history?”

And there it all was again, the warmed-up peace proposals of Israel’s 1982 invasion, full of buffer zones and disarmament and “strict respect by all parties” – a rousing chortle here, no doubt, from Hizbollah members – and the need for Lebanese sovereignty. It didn’t even demand the withdrawal of Israeli forces, a point that Walid Moallem, Syria’s Foreign Minister – and the man the Americans will eventually have to negotiate with – seized upon with more than alacrity. It was a dead UN resolution without a total Israeli retreat, he said on a strategic trip to Beirut.

A close analysis of the American-French draft – the fingerprints of John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN, were almost smudging the paragraphs – showed just who is running Washington’s Middle East policy: Israel. And one wondered how even Tony Blair would want to associate himself with this nonsense. It made no reference to the obscenely disproportionate violence employed by Israel – just a sleek reference to “hundreds of deaths and injuries on both sides” – and it made only passing reference to Hizbollah’s demand that it would only release the two Israeli soldiers it captured on 12 July in return for Lebanese and other Arab prisoners in Israeli jails.

The Security Council said it was “mindful of the sensitivity of the issue of prisoners and encouraging the efforts aimed at settling the issue [sic] of the Lebanese prisoners detained in Israel”. I bet Hizbollah were impressed by the “mindful” bit, not to mention the “sensitivity” and the soft, slippery word “settle” – an issue which can be “settled” in maybe 20 years’ time. Then came the real coup de grâce. A demand for the “total cessation by Hizbollah of all attacks” and the “immediate cessation” by Israel of “all offensive military operations”. Bit of a problem there, as Hizbollah spotted at once. They have to lay down their arms.

informationclearinghouse.info

Israel running US or vice-versa? Israel is used as the vicious bulldog everybody loves to hate.

The draft UN resolution

Pakistan appears to have embarked on a dramatic expansion of its nuclear arsenal with the construction of a new heavy water reactor capable of producing enough plutonium for up to 50 warheads a year, according to a report released yesterday by a US thinktank.
The report by the Institute for Science and International Security (Isis), is largely based on commercially available satellite images showing a large building site at a nuclear production complex at Khushab, in Pakistani Punjab. Isis, a non-governmental nuclear watchdog, estimates that the huge rectangular building under construction and the circular structure inside it almost certainly represent the early stages of a 1,000MW reactor capable of generating more than 200kg (440lbs) of weapons-grade plutonium per year. When completed it would be 20 times the size of the existing reactor at Khushab.

The Khushab complex uses deuterium oxide, known as heavy water because of its chemical similarity to water, to produce plutonium and tritium, which is used as a booster in nuclear fission weapons.

The Isis report suggests the Indian government must know of the new reactor and may be seeking to increase its own plutonium production. In an agreement with the Bush administration, under review by Congress this week, India insisted several of its own nuclear reactors remain exempt from international safeguards.

“South Asia may be heading for a nuclear arms race that could lead to arsenals growing into the hundreds of nuclear weapons, or at a minimum vastly expanded stockpiles of military fissile material,” the Isis report said.
guardian.co.uk

IRAN is seeking to import large consignments of bomb-making uranium from the African mining area that produced the Hiroshima bomb, an investigation has revealed.

A United Nations report, dated July 18, said there was “no doubt” that a huge shipment of smuggled uranium 238, uncovered by customs officials in Tanzania, was transported from the Lubumbashi mines in the Congo.

Tanzanian customs officials told The Sunday Times it was destined for the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, and was stopped on October 22 last year during a routine check.

The disclosure will heighten western fears about the extent of Iran’s presumed nuclear weapons programme and the strategic implications of Iran’s continuing support for Hezbollah during the war with Israel.

It has also emerged that terror cells backed by Iran may be prepared to mount attacks against nuclear power plants in Britain. Intelligence circulating in Whitehall suggests that sleeper cells linked to Tehran have been conducting reconnaissance at some nuclear sites in preparation for a possible attack.

The parliamentary intelligence and security committee has reported that Iran represented one of the three biggest security threats to Britain. The UN security council has given Iran until the end of this month to halt its uranium enrichment activities. The UN has threatened sanctions if Tehran fails to do so.

timesonline.co.uk

Half of US still believes Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction

just follow the yellow-cake road