North Korea suggested Tuesday it had the ability to launch a pre-emptive attack on the United States, according to the North’s official news agency. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said the North had built atomic weapons to counter the U.S. nuclear threat.

“As we declared, our strong revolutionary might put in place all measures to counter possible U.S. pre-emptive strike,” the spokesman said, according to the Korean Central News Agency. “Pre-emptive strike is not the monopoly of the United States.”
forbes.com

IN AGES PAST, cities in wealthy nations greeted visitors with gold-plated lions at their gates.

But today, in America, the richest country on earth, the gates of many towns welcome visitors with abandoned factories. And the communities these factories flank tell you more about what’s really destroying America than any Wall Street analyst or Washington policy wonk ever could.

Since leaving the Philadelphia area, I’ve learned firsthand that these Anytown, USAs are everywhere – not just on the East Coast. One of them can be found by driving north through the shimmering cattle pastures on Montana Route 12, right near where I now live. There, you’ll be welcomed to East Helena by two defunct gray smokestacks rising from giant black mounds of what looks like spent coffee grounds, but is in reality industrial slag.

The towers, piercing an otherwise pristine Rocky Mountain vista, tell a story being told throughout America – a story not just of abandonment but of legalized theft afflicting both urban centers, and yes, small-town outposts.
philly.com

HOUSTON — Former first lady Barbara Bush gave relief money to a hurricane relief fund on the condition that it be spent to buy educational software from her son Neil’s company.

The chief of staff of former President George H.W. Bush would not disclose the amount earmarked for purchases from Ignite Learning.

Since Barbara Bush’s gift, the Ignite Learning program has been given to eight public schools with high numbers of Hurricane Katrina evacuees, the Houston Chronicle reported.

“Mrs. Bush wanted to do something specifically for education and specifically for the thousands of students flooding into the Houston schools,” the former President Bush’s chief of staff Jean Becker said Thursday.

The money was donated to the Bush-Clinton Houston Hurricane Relief Fund, said Steve Maislin, president of the Greater Houston Community Foundation, which administers the fund. That fund has no connection to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, he said.

Barbara Bush chose to promote Ignite because she supports her son and has genuine enthusiasm for his company’s program, Becker said.

Two years ago, the Houston school district board wrestled with conflict of interest concerns over the Ignite program. Neil Bush had helped raise $115,000 for the district’s philanthropic fund from donors who insisted the money be spent on his company’s software.

The district accepted the donations and used them to pay half the costs of new Ignite software, about $10,000 per school.

Currently, Houston public schools use 15 Ignite programs and the Houston area has 40 programs, said company president Ken Leonard.

Neil Bush founded the Austin-based company in 1999.
chron.com

Founded with funds from Bush buddies in Dubai.

Investment bank Bear Stearns has advised investors to start dumping airline and retail stocks in favour of blue-chip utilities as a hedge against bird flu, warning that a full human pandemic of the H5N1 virus could set off the worst global stock market crash since the 1930s.

In the first detailed study of its kind, the US bank suggests buying Scottish Power, biotech companies such as Amgen and Medimmune, and the US health group St Jude Medical Inc, citing them as the sort of companies that would hold up well or even rise in the first phase of a pandemic.

“We believe the imminent arrival of bird flu in the United States will bring this potentially devastating disease back into the limelight,” said the report. If bird flu turns out to be a ‘worst event in 100 years’ then extreme risk analysis suggests it could push the market down 46pc over a 12-month period. “We believe investors should consider a basket of stocks to inoculate their portfolio from this source of risk,” it said.
telegraph.co.uk

United Nations nuclear and health watchdogs have ignored evidence of deaths, cancers, mutations and other conditions after the Chernobyl accident, leading scientists and doctors have claimed in the run-up to the nuclear disaster’s 20th anniversary next month.

In a series of reports about to be published, they will suggest that at least 30,000 people are expected to die of cancers linked directly to severe radiation exposure in 1986 and up to 500,000 people may have already died as a result of the world’s worst environmental catastrophe.
guardian.co.uk

Report reveals how the world’s poorer countries are forced to pay for the CO2 emissions of the developed nations.

Over 70 million Africans and an even greater number of farmers in the Indian sub-continent will suffer catastrophic floods, disease and famine if the rich countries of the world fail to change their habits and radically cut their carbon emissions.

The stark warning, contained in a private Government document commissioned by Gordon Brown, comes days ahead of an announcement that will show Tony Blair backing away from his promise to “lead internationally” on climate change. The Government has decided to delay setting targets for industry to cut carbon emissions until other EU governments set theirs. Previously, Mr Blair has made a virtue out of leading the way in Europe.

The bleak facts on how climate change threatens the third world were laid out in a briefing paper drawn up this month by the Department for International Development. It pointed out that a quarter of Africa’s population lives within 100km of the sea coast. As sea levels rises, when global warming melts the ice pack, the number of Africans at risk from coastal flooding will increase from one million in 1990 to 70 million in 2080.

In India, rising temperatures could drive down farm incomes by as much as a quarter, while the cost to Bangladesh of changes in the climate could be more than half the £58bn that country has received in foreign aid.

“It’s the poorest people in the world who suffer from climate change, but they are the least responsible for it.”
independent.co.uk

‘Glacial earthquakes’ warn of global warming
Dramatic new evidence has emerged of the speed of climate change in the polar regions which scientists fear is causing huge volumes of ice to melt far faster than predicted.

Scientists have recorded a significant and unexpected increase in the number of “glacial earthquakes” caused by the sudden movement of Manhattan-sized blocks of ice in Greenland.

A second study has found that higher temperatures caused by global warming could melt the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets much sooner than previously thought, with a corresponding rise in sea levels.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – Residents gave new details Monday about the shootings of civilians in a western Iraqi town, where the U.S. military is investigating allegations of potential misconduct by American troops last November.
The residents said troops entered homes and shot and killed 15 members of two families, including a 3-year-old girl, after a roadside bomb killed a U.S. Marine.

The military, which announced Friday that a dozen Marines are under investigation for possible war crimes in the Nov. 19 incident, said in a statement Monday that a videotape of the aftermath of the shootings in Haditha, 140 miles northwest of Baghdad, was presented in support of the allegations.

The charges against the Marines were first brought forward by Time magazine, which reported this week that it obtained a videotape two months ago taken by a Haditha journalism student that shows the dead still in their nightclothes.
startribune.com

TIME:Collateral Damage or Civilian Massacre in Haditha?

The bodies began to show up early last week. On Monday, 34 corpses were found. In the darkness of Tuesday morning, 15 more men, between the ages of 22 and 40 were found in the back of a pickup truck in the al-Khadra district of western Baghdad. They had been hanged. By daybreak, 40 more bodies were found around the city, most bearing signs of torture before the men were killed execution-style. The most gruesome discovery was an 18-by-24-foot mass grave in the Shi’ite slum of Kamaliyah in east Baghdad containing the bodies of 29 men, clad only in their underwear with their hands bound and their mouths covered with tape. Local residents only found it because the ground was oozing blood. In all, 87 bodies were found over two days in Baghdad.

The grisly discovery was horrible enough, the latest and perhaps most chilling sign that Iraq is descending further into butchery — and quite possibly civil war. But almost as disturbing is the growing evidence that the massacres and others like it are being tolerated and even abetted by Iraq’s Shi’ite-dominated police forces, overseen by Iraq’s Interior Minister, Bayan Jabr. On his watch, sectarian militias have swelled the ranks of the police units and, Sunnis charge, used their positions to carry out revenge killings against Sunnis. While allowing an Iranian-trained militia to take over the ministry, critics say, Jabr has authorized the targeted assassination of Sunni men and stymied investigations into Interior-run death squads.

Jabr’s and his forces’ growing reputation for brutality comes at a particularly inopportune moment for the Bush Administration, which would like to hand over security responsibilities to those same police units as quickly as possible. That has raised the distinct and disturbing possibility that the U.S. is in fact training and arming one side in a conflict seeming to grow worse by the day. “Militias are the infrastructure of civil war,” U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told TIME recently. Khalilzad has been publicly critical of Jabr and warned that the new security ministries under the next, permanent Iraqi government should be run by competent people who have no ties to militias and who are “non-sectarian.” Further U.S. support for training the police and army, he said, depends on it.
time.com

US blasted for creating terrorism “quagmire” on anniversary of Iraq war

…”Three years into the Iraq war, and with no end in sight, it looks as if the United States, in creating a quagmire for itself in the Middle East, has also created the ideal environment in which the terrorism bacillus can fester, and then infect the whole world,” said the Sydney Morning Herald.

The weekly news magazine, Time, wrote two parties ruling the autonomous Kurdistan region in northern Iraq restrict freedoms and the democratic process.

The magazine focusing on the region reported corruption and repression prevail in the region ruled by the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). The two parties’ despotic tendencies repress their opponents, it was underlined, and that the KDP and PUK rule the region by “force and fear.”

The parties led by Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani function almost as a police state and views that, “Instead of one big Saddam, we have a hundred small Saddams in Kurdistan,” Time reported.

Access to education, jobs and career advancement is often determined by party affiliation and there is no independent media in the region, Time wrote.
The weekly news magazine handled the problems in northern Iraq in the story titled “Trouble in Kurdistan.” The frustration at this “dual monopoly” appear to have been behind a violent outburst last week at Halabja, the town on which Saddam Hussein inflicted a barbaric chemical attack in 1988, killing 5,000 people.
zaman.com

Widespread bread rationing has been introduced in the Gaza Strip because Israel has cut off deliveries of flour and other foodstuffs to the Palestinian territory for most of the past two months.

The military reopened the main cargo crossing into Gaza yesterday under US pressure to allow in humanitarian supplies, but the UN said the terminal was working at only a fraction of capacity. The Israelis say that the closure has been forced by security warnings but the Palestinians accuse them of using the crossing as a political tool after the Hamas election victory, and in breach of pledges to the US.

“The bakeries are rationing bread,” said John Ging, director of UN operations in Gaza. “People queue and they’re given a coupon and a rationed amount … The shelves are quite empty. There’s no sugar, oil, milk, the basics. The shops are really depleted on those essential items.”

The Palestinian deputy economy minister, Nasser Sarraj, said about two-thirds of Gaza bakeries had closed due to lack of flour, and many restaurants have shut. Fuel shortages have also contributed to sharply rising commodity prices.

On Monday, Israel allowed Karni crossing to open for less than an hour to permit deliveries of wheat, Coca-Cola and crisps. Before that it was operating only intermittently for almost two months.

Mr Ging said yesterday’s deliveries of wheat were limited because the terminal was working at only 10% of capacity.

“This is the first time that bread has been rationed,” he said. “Palestinians are very resilient people and they would always have their reserves. However, as the crossing has been closed for 60% of the time since January 1 this year, this is unprecedented. Last year the crossing was closed for 18% of the time.”

Amos Gilad, a senior Israeli defence ministry official responsible for liaising with the Palestinians on Karni, said the closures were entirely a matter of security.

“The shortage of basic foodstuffs was weighed against the terror threat, and the logical decision to open it for a limited amount of time was made with the hope the Palestinians will uphold their commitments,” he told Israel radio.
guardian.co.uk

The Israeli’s ability to evoke the Warsaw Ghetto is astonishing.