As dawn broke over Kenya’s Lake Naivasha, thousands of men and women trudged through a dusty township before filing into vast greenhouses. Here the hours are long and pesticides ever-present. Last week was tougher than most.

The flower farmers were putting in long shifts in the sweltering heat to ensure Britain had a happy Mother’s Day. They have also made flowers a cornerstone of the Kenyan economy. But serious concerns are being asked over working conditions and environmental impact.

“It’s total exploitation. Most of the workers are women, mostly divorcees and single mothers, and they have to feed their families,” one leading human rights activist said. Some work 18-hour days for £25 a month with no protection from pesticides.
independent.co.uk

Novelist Walter Mosley recently lamented the void in black leadership in America, saying “millions dying in Africa while your leaders argued about the references and jokes in the movie Barbershop?”

It is much worse than that. Millions of the poor around the world that got jobs producing sneakers and apparel for America’s youth got nothing but scorn or betrayal from African-Americans, when they desperately sought assistance.

Anyone remember what Temple’s Coach John Chaney said to Philly Daily News about Michael?

[from Village Voice]: The great Jordan famously promised to investigate Nike’s factories when sweatshop conditions made headlines in 1996. He has not been heard from on the issue since, and Temple basketball coach John Chaney may have spoken for many in the sports world when he was asked about Jordan’s silence: “Why should he stick his neck out and risk his endorsement deals? You got a fucking problem with Michael making money? Michael should pick up every fucking dollar possible.”

What about Rev. Jesse Jackson? I was sitting in his church with a fired Indonesian Nike worker & the rev was IN INDONESIA, doing the “CNN photo-op prayer service” outside a locked (to keep him out) Nike factory; didn’t I think we were gonna drain the swamp! But JJ started collecting Nike contributions almost as soon as he touched down in the USA & talked about a boycott. A couple of years later, he gave the Rainbow Coalition’s “Leadership in Sports” award to Nike’s chief of public relations, Vada Manager.
counterpunch.org

Two days after the coup d’etat that brought a brutal military junta to power in Argentina, then U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger ordered his subordinates to “encourage” the new regime by providing financial support, according to a previously classified transcript released here by the independent National Security Archive (NSA).

The document, whose public release came on the 30th anniversary of the coup, depicts Kissinger as uninterested in warnings by his assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs, William Rogers, that the junta would likely intensify repression against suspected dissidents in ways that could make U.S. support for the regime embarrassing.

“The point I’m making is that although they have good press today, the basic line of all the interference was that they had to do it because she [ousted President Isabel Peron] couldn’t run the country,” Rogers told his boss. “So I think the point is that we ought not at this moment to rush out and embrace this new regime – that three-six months later will be considerably less popular with the press.”

“But we shouldn’t do the opposite either,” Kissinger insists, adding that “whatever chance they have, they will need a little encouragement from us.”

“I do want to encourage them,” he went on, asking to review the instructions to Washington’s ambassador in Buenos Aires, Robert Hill, on his first meeting with the junta’s yet-to-be-named foreign minister. “I don’t want to give the sense that they’re harassed by the United States.”

Washington approved 50 million dollars in military aid the following month.
antiwar.com

CURITIBA, Brazil, Mar 23 (IPS) – Affect, care, cooperation and responsibility are the four central principles of a new ethics that humanity urgently needs to adopt, in order to avoid becoming extinct as “a victim of itself,” Leonardo Boff, one of the founders of liberation theology, said Thursday.

Emotions and sensitivity are “the essence, the core dimension of the human being,” said the Brazilian theologian at a panel on “ethics, biodiversity and sustainability”. The panel formed part of the Global Civil Society Forum, held parallel to the Mar. 20-31 Eighth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP8).

It is not reason but feeling that is involved in our first contact with reality, and “today’s great crisis is not economic, political or religious, but a crisis of affect, of the capacity to feel a connection with others,” he said.

It is indispensable to “take care of all living things,” and science shows that cooperation is the “supreme law of the universe,” he added.

“The world is not made up of objects but of relationships. It was cooperation that made possible the leap from animal to humanity, and without it we are dehumanised, which is what occurs in the case of capitalism,” the theologian told around 300 activists, most of them small farmers.

…Boff, who left the priesthood after suffering sanctions at the hands of the Vatican for expressing “dangerous ideas” over the past two decades, has outlined his ecological concerns in several books.
ipsnews.net

Two releases of local law enforcement files in recent days have shed new light on just how far the Bush administration, federal, and local law enforcement are going to suppress political dissent in the aftermath of 9-11.

The first case was in Pittsburgh, where a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union yielded the revelation that from 2002, when opposition to an invasion of Iraq began in earnest, right through at least until the final, heavily redacted document from 2005, law enforcement officials investigated, monitored, harassed, and infiltrated activists from Pittsburgh’s Thomas Merton Center. Merton was a renowned Catholic theologian and pacifist who fiercely opposed the Vietnam War and all wars, and his namesake descendants apply the same beliefs to Iraq.

As the released documents make clear, that, and only that, was why they became targets: because they opposed the war in Iraq. An FBI document from 2002 notes that the center is “a left-wing organization advocating, among many political causes, pacifism.” Pacifism! Egads! Aside from the fact that pacifism is a set of personal moral beliefs — not a “political cause” — is pacifism, in our militarized 21st Century America, the new Red Scare? Seems so. Just ask the Quakers.
workingforchange.com

LOS ANGELES (AP) – Immigration rights advocates more than 500,000 strong marched in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, demanding that Congress abandon attempts to make illegal immigration a felony and to build more walls along the border.

The massive demonstration, by far the biggest of several around the nation in recent days, came as President Bush prodded Republican congressional leaders to give some illegal immigrants a chance to work legally in the U.S. under certain conditions.

Wearing white shirts to symbolize peace, marchers chanted “Mexico!” “USA!” and “Si se puede,” an old Mexican-American civil rights shout that means “Yes, we can.” They waved the flags of the U.S., Mexico and other countries, and some wore them as capes.

Saturday’s march was among the largest for any cause in recent U.S. history. Police came up with the crowd estimate using aerial photographs and other techniques, police Cmdr. Louis Gray Jr. said.

Other demonstrations drew 50,000 people in Denver and several thousand in Sacramento and Charlotte, N.C.

Many protesters said lawmakers were unfairly targeting immigrants who provide a major labor pool for America’s economy.

“Enough is enough of the xenophobic movement,” said Norman Martinez, 63, who immigrated from Honduras as a child and marched in Los Angeles. “They are picking on the weakest link in society, which has built this country.”
guardian.co.uk

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi lectured a U.S. audience on democracy on Thursday and said Libya is the only real democracy in the world.

Via a video link, Gaddafi addressed an unprecedented gathering of U.S. and Libyan academics prompted by a thaw in relations since the former pariah state decided in 2003 to abandon nuclear weapons and took responsibility for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.

He touted Libya’s political system as superior to “farcical” and “fake” parliamentary and representative democracies in the West.”

“There is no state with a democracy except Libya on the whole planet,” Gaddafi said to the conference at Columbia University in New York.

Libya’s Jamahiriyah system, under which Libyans can air their views at “people’s congresses,” is genuine democracy, said Gaddafi, who spoke through a translator and was dressed in purple robes and seated at a desk in front of a map of Africa.
reuters.com

The three peace activists freed by an SAS-led coalition force after being held hostage in Iraq for four months refused to co-operate fully with an intelligence unit sent to debrief them, a security source claimed yesterday.

The claim has infuriated those searching for other hostages.

Neither the men nor the Canadian group that sent them to Iraq have thanked the people who saved them in any of their public statements.
telegraph.co.uk

Rescue in Iraq surprises Canadians
TORONTO – While Canadians rejoiced at the news that two of their citizens were rescued from captivity in Iraq, some were surprised to learn Canadian special forces were involved in the mission and curious as to how many troops are on the ground.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper told reporters Thursday that a handful of Canadian troops have been stationed in Iraq since the beginning of the U.S.-led invasion and occupation, which is still widely unpopular at home.

BAGHDAD – Iraq’s president issued a highly optimistic report Friday on progress among politicians trying to hammer out the shape of a new unity government. At least 51 more people, including two U.S. soldiers, were reported dead in rampant violence.

President Jalal Talabani said the government could be in place for parliamentary approval by the end of the month, though he acknowledged “I am usually a very optimistic person.” He spoke to reporters after a fifth round of multiparty talks among the country’s polarized political factions.

A less optimistic Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, whose nomination by the Shiite bloc for a second term produced the political stalemate, has said a Cabinet list could be ready by the end of April, a full month beyond the Talabani estimate.

Jaafari’s nomination has been strongly opposed by Sunni, Kurdish and secular legislators. But in remarks aired Friday on Al-Arabiya television, the prime minister suggested he had no plans to step aside.

The rising death toll among Iraqis on Friday included five worshipers killed in a bombing outside a Sunni mosque after prayers. At least 15 were wounded in the blast in Khalis, northeast of Baghdad, the Iraqi military reported.

Baghdad police said they discovered 25 more bodies, blindfolded, shot and dumped throughout the capital. Retaliatory killings among Shiites and Sunnis have become increasingly common in the capital since the Feb. 22 bombing of an important Shiite shrine that unleashed the rash of sectarian violence.

The two U.S. soldiers were killed in combat in insurgent-ridden Anbar province, the American military reported Friday. The statement said the soldiers, assigned to the 2/28th Brigade Combat Team, were killed Thursday.
sptimes.com

No civil war risk in Iraq, says US chief
RAQ does not face the danger of civil war as Iraqis move towards a national unity government and prepare to take on more responsibility for their country, the chairman of the US joints of staff, Peter Pace, said today.

“I do not think a civil war will erupt in Iraq. What is important here are the decisions of the Iraqi people,” Mr Pace, who was in Turkey to attend a conference on global terrorism, told the NTV news channel with voice-over translation into Turkish.

The general pointed out that Iraqi leaders had called for calm and moderation since the bombing last month of a Shiite shrine north of Baghdad, which triggered reprisals against Sunnis and unleashed the worst sectarian violence in years.

“I think the Iraqi people have understood that they are at a historic turning point. The elected leaders are working to form a unity government that will include Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Iraqis,” Mr Pace said.

“This will be to the benefit of Iraqis. I foresee a very healthy 2006. They (Iraqis) will take on more responsibility” for their country, he added.

Bound, Blindfolded and Dead: The Face of Revenge in Baghdad
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 25 — Mohannad al-Azawi had just finished sprinkling food in his bird cages at his pet shop in south Baghdad, when three carloads of gunmen pulled up.

In front of a crowd, he was grabbed by his shirt and driven off.

Mr. Azawi was among the few Sunni Arabs on the block, and, according to witnesses, when a Shiite friend tried to intervene, a gunman stuck a pistol to his head and said, “You want us to blow your brains out, too?”

Mr. Azawi’s body was found the next morning at a sewage treatment plant. A slight man who raised nightingales, he had been hogtied, drilled with power tools and shot.

In the last month, hundreds of men have been kidnapped, tortured and executed in Baghdad. As Iraqi and American leaders struggle to avert a civil war, the bodies keep piling up. The city’s homicide rate has tripled from 11 to 33 a day, military officials said. The period from March 7 to March 21 was typically brutal: at least 191 corpses, many mutilated, surfaced in garbage bins, drainage ditches, minibuses and pickup trucks.

In Falluja, Iraqi forces riven by sectarianism
FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters) – If all goes to plan, U.S.-trained Iraqi troops and police will work together, gain the trust of volatile cities like Falluja and battle insurgents on their own as the Americans gradually withdraw troops.

But, judging by the mood of this former rebel stronghold west of Baghdad, that is wishful thinking.

Iraqi soldiers and police, charged with making sure al Qaeda-linked militants and Saddam Hussein loyalists who once took over the city never return, are deeply divided, raising questions about the prospects of stability.

This week, the mostly Arab Sunni police staged a strike to protest what they said were abuses committed by Shi’ite Muslim soldiers. The police have returned to their posts, but the mistrust remains.

“The soldiers attacked a 17-year-old grocer and took him away to an area where he was found dead two hours later,” said a police major, who asked not to be named. He said the youth had been shot in the eye and his stomach ripped open.

Ancient Rift Brings Fear on Streets of Baghdad
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 25 — The difference between Shiites and Sunnis is sometimes explained simply as a disagreement over who should have become the leader of the Muslim community after the Prophet Muhammad died nearly 1,400 years ago.

But in Iraq, the divide goes beyond that, partly because of geography and partly because of history. With sectarian tensions rising, Iraqis are paying more attention to the little things that signal whether someone is Shiite or Sunni. None of the indicators are foolproof. But a name, an accent and even the color of a head scarf can provide clues.

Complicating all of this is the reality that many Iraqis have intermarried and that for much of Iraq’s history, the two communities have coexisted peacefully. Very rarely has sectarian identity been a life or death matter, the way it is now on some of Baghdad’s streets.

Oh I see. This has to do with an ‘ancient rift.’ This is the sort of subtle bias the Times excels at.

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of the Shas party, was quoted Friday by an ultra-Orthodox weekly paper saying that “whoever votes for Kadima in the upcoming elections will be going backwards, and into hell.”

The influential rabbi later told Shas Chairman Eli Yishai that he never made the controversial statement, adding, “Had I wanted to say such things, I wouldn’t be ashamed of doing so.”

Rabbi Yosef recently said that whomever votes for Shas in next week’s general elections is ensured a spot in heaven. In his interview with with the paper, “Hakehila” he stood by this statement. “That is the absolute truth. I’m happy people made a stink about this. I only speak the truth,” he said.

A Kadima election campaign spokesman responded saying, “Whoever votes for Kadima is voting for hope and for Sharon’s policy, and is ensuring that Israel will be a better place. That is the real Paradise.”
haaretz.com