WARRI, Nigeria (AP) — Militants demanding control of revenues from Nigeria’s oil-rich southern delta released their last remaining foreign hostages on Monday — two Americans and a Briton — but the group threatened to continue attacks on oil installations.

Abel Oshevire, spokesman for the southern Delta state government, said Americans Cody Oswalt, Russell Spell and Briton John Hudspith were released just before dawn after more than five weeks in captivity.

”They are here with us now and are all in good health,” Oshevire told reporters.

The militants, responsible for a wave of recent attacks in southern Nigeria, took nine foreign oil workers hostage Feb. 18 from a barge owned by Willbros Group Inc., the Houston-based oil services company that was laying pipeline in the delta for Royal Dutch Shell. The group released six of the captives after 12 days.
nytimes.com

MOGADISHU, Somalia, March 26 — Radical Islamic militiamen and rivals buried their dead Sunday and brought in more fighters during a lull after four days of combat on the outskirts of Mogadishu, witnesses said. So far, at least 93 people have died and nearly 200 have been wounded in the violence.

A prominent moderate Islamic scholar appealed to the warring sides not to restart the fighting, which ranks among the deadliest in recent years in the nominal capital of this Horn of Africa country.

“I offer the warring sides a venue for them to talk to resolve their differences,” Sharif Sheik Muhidin said.

Somalia has been without a working government for 15 years. The recent battles involve a militia supporting hard-line Islamic clerics who are trying to expand their influence and fighters loyal to businessmen and Somali warlords who have formed an alliance to oppose the religious movement.
washingtonpost.com

LOMAS DE ZAMORA, Argentina — Carina Grossi turned on the tap in her kitchen sink and raised a glass of water to the light, her eyes narrowing in disgust.

“Look at that,” said Grossi, 32. “Look how cloudy the water is, how dirty.”

“It’s a disaster,” said her father, Eduardo, a 65-year-old grocer. “That’s what is making your mother so sick.”

Like many of their neighbors in this working-class suburb of Buenos Aires, the Grossis are convinced that their water is contaminated — and they now use bottled water to make soup and tea. They blame the problem on the French company that has provided water and sewer service since the federal government privatized the utility in 1993.

Across Latin America, a growing number of people say the privatization of public services, a movement that swept the region in the 1980s and 1990s, has failed. Protests have erupted over the issue in several countries, and some governments are beginning to reverse these policies. Last week Argentina announced it was rescinding its 30-year contract with the French company Suez and reinstating government control of the water supply.

The Grossis, among many others, have welcomed the about-face.

“The trains, the water, the electricity — I say it all needs to come back to national control,” Carina Grossi said. In her suburb, authorities estimate about 30 percent of homes lack water and the majority are without sewage service. “We pay money out to these foreign companies and get nothing in return,” she said. “This is our country. We should stop selling it out to others.”
washingtonpost.com

A US Supreme Court justice has been quoted as saying that Guantanamo detainees do not have the right to be tried in civil courts.
Newsweek magazine said it had heard a tape of a recent talk given by Antonin Scalia in which he made these comments.

The report comes as the court prepares to hear a challenge by a Guantanamo detainee against US military tribunals.

The case is considered an important test of the Bush administration’s handling of its war on terror.

Lawyers for Salim Ahmed Hamdan – Osama Bin Laden’s former driver – will argue that President George W Bush does not have the constitutional right to order these military trials.

The US government has urged the Supreme Court to dismiss the case.

“War is war, and it has never been the case that when you captured a combatant you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts,” he is quoted as saying.

“Give me a break.”

Asked whether Guantanamo detainees have any rights under international conventions, Justice Scalia reportedly answered:

“If he was captured by my army on a battlefield, that is where he belongs.

“I had a son (Matthew Scalia) on that battlefield and they were shooting at my son and I’m not about to give this man who was captured in a war a full jury trial. I mean it’s crazy.”

Mr Scalia is also quoted as saying he was “astounded” at the “hypocritical” reaction in Europe to Guantanamo.
bbc.co.uk

BAGHDAD, Iraq — A suicide bomber attacked a joint U.S.-Iraqi military base in northern Iraq on Monday, killing at least 15 people and wounding as many as 30, the Iraqi military said. At least 21 more bodies were found _ many with nooses around their neck _ and mortar and bomb attacks killed at least four people.

The nationalities of the victims in the suicide bombing about 20 miles east of the ancient city of Tal Afar were not immediately known. The bomber struck shortly after noon at an Iraqi army recruiting center in front of the base.

President Bush singled out Tal Afar in a recent speech as a success story for American and Iraqi forces in the drive to quell the insurgency.

Iraqi army Lt. Akram Eid told The Associated Press that many of the wounded were taken to the Sykes U.S. Army base on the outskirts of Tal Afar. The U.S. military in Baghdad said it was checking the report.
washingtonpost.com

American and Iraqi troops mounted two raids in Baghdad yesterday arresting more than 40 interior ministry guards at a secret prison and killing around 20 gunmen in an assault on a mosque loyal to the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
The sudden strikes seemed to put muscle behind a strong warning from the US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, on Saturday that militias must be brought under control. They had become a bigger threat to Iraq than the insurgency, he said.

“More Iraqis are dying from the militia violence than from the terrorists. The militias need to be under control,” he said during a visit to a Baghdad youth centre that had been renovated with US aid.

Yesterday’s raids saw US-backed Iraqi special forces exchange fire at a mosque in eastern Baghdad. Iraqi police said 22 died, while the American military said 16 “insurgents” were killed by Iraqi special forces, with US troops on the scene as back-up. “No mosques were entered or damaged during this operation,” the US military said in a statement.

“As elements of the 1st Iraqi Special Operations Forces Brigade entered their objective, they came under fire. In the ensuing exchange of fire … [Iraqi troops] killed 16 insurgents. As they secured their objective, they detained 15 more individuals,” the statement said.

An Iraqi police lieutenant, Hassan Hamoud, put the death toll at 22, with eight wounded. He said some casualties were at the Shia Dawa party office near the mosque. A senior Sadr aide accused US troops of killing more than 20 unarmed worshippers at the Mustapha mosque in cold blood. He denied that they were Mahdi army gunmen. “The American forces went into the mosque at prayers and killed more than 20 worshippers,” Hazin al-Araji said. “They tied them up and shot them.”
guardian.co.uk

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Iraqi forces found 30 bodies, most beheaded, near a village north of Baghdad on Sunday, in one of the bloodiest episodes in a cycle of apparent sectarian killings.

Police said the bodies were found after police and soldiers were dispatched to respond to a report of killings in Mullah Eid, a village near the town of Buhriz, a former stronghold of ex-President Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party about 35 miles north of Baghdad.
news.yahoo.com

Scientists in Ethiopia have discovered a hominid skull that could be a missing link between Homo erectus and modern man.

The hominid cranium was found in two pieces and is believed to be between 500,000 and 250,000 years old. Sileshi Semaw, the director of the Gona Paleoanthropological Research Project in Ethiopia, said it came “from a significant period and is close to the appearance of the anatomically modern human”.

Archaeologists found the cranium at Gawis, in Ethiopia’s north-eastern Afar region, five weeks ago, Dr Semaw said.

An Ethiopian palaeoanthropologist at Indiana University, Dr Semaw said that most fossil hominids were found in pieces. By contrast, the near-complete skull had provided a wealth of information.

…The face and cranium of the fossil are recognisably different from that of modern humans, but it offers unmistakable anatomical evidence that it belongs in our ancestry, Dr Semaw said.
independent.co.uk

Thousands of people have fled their homes to escape violence in the north of Central African Republic (CAR).
Aid agencies estimate that more than 7,000 refugees have crossed the border into Chad in the past few weeks.

A BBC reporter who visited the area says refugees claim government troops are systematically killing men and boys they suspect of backing rebel groups.

Central African Republic President Francois Bozize has blamed rebel groups for the unrest.
bbc.co.uk

…While racism was not a primary consideration at the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, it quickly became an endemic feature of plantation slavery. The sustained exploitation of Africans as slaves quickly acquired a racial character and over time required an ideology based on racism which made the terms ‘negro’ and ‘slave’ interchangeable. As Norman Girvan points out, the primary objective of this ideology was to depreciate the cultural and physical attributes of the enslaved race.

“African speech, religion, mannerisms and indeed all institutional forms were systematically denigrated as constituting marks of savagery and cultural inferiority … and extended to the physical, genetic and biological attributes of black people. The very colour of the African skin was held to be the first and lasting badge of his inferiority; as were the characteristics of his mouth, nose and hair texture. The desired consequence of extending the ideology of racism from cultural to physical attributes was to ensure that the African … was permanently imprisoned in his status as a slave in as much as he was permanently imprisoned in his black skin.”

The effect of this campaign on the self-confidence of Africans and people of African descent continue to this day. Three centuries later, we seize upon every opportunity to disguise the physical features which define us as African.

…Over 700,000 Africans were brought to Jamaica as slaves in the 153 years between the capture of the island by the British in 1655 and the end of the Atlantic Slave Trade in 1807. Such was the toll in human lives exacted by plantation slavery in Jamaica that there were only 323,827 slaves and 9,000 free blacks alive when the slave trade was abolished in 1807. The only word to describe this absolute reduction in the slave population is ‘genocide’. In contrast, after the first 150 years of freedom the African-Jamaican population increased some 700 per cent to over two million.
jamaica-gleaner.com