ALEXANDRIA, Va. – The FBI agent who arrested Zacarias Moussaoui in August 2001 testified Monday he spent almost four weeks trying to warn U.S. officials about the radical Islamic student pilot but “criminal negligence” by superiors in Washington thwarted a chance to stop the 9/11 attacks.

FBI agent Harry Samit of Minneapolis originally testified as a government witness, on March 9, but his daylong cross examination by defense attorney Edward MacMahon was the strongest moment so far for the court-appointed lawyers defending Moussaoui. The 37-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan descent is the only person charged in this country in connection with al-Qaida’s Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

MacMahon displayed a communication addressed to Samit and FBI headquarters agent Mike Maltbie from a bureau agent in Paris relaying word from French intelligence that Moussaoui was “very dangerous,” had been indoctrinated in radical Islamic Fundamentalism at London’s Finnsbury Park mosque, was “completely devoted” to a variety of radical fundamentalism that Osama bin Laden espoused, and had been to Afghanistan.

Based on what he already knew, Samit suspected that meant Moussaoui had been to training camps there, although the communication did not say that.

The communication arrived Aug. 30, 2001. The Sept. 11 Commission reported that British intelligence told U.S. officials on Sept 13, 2001, that Moussaoui had attended an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan. “Had this information been available in late August 2001, the Moussaoui case would almost certainly have received intense, high-level attention,” the commission concluded.

But Samit told MacMahon he couldn’t persuade FBI headquarters or the Justice Department to take his fears seriously. No one from Washington called Samit to say this intelligence altered the picture the agent had been painting since Aug. 18 in a running battle with Maltbie and Maltbie’s boss, David Frasca, chief of the radical fundamentalist unit at headquarters.

They fought over Samit’s desire for a warrant to search Moussaoui’s computer and belongings. Maltbie and Frasca said Samit had not established a link between Moussaoui and terrorists.
guardian.co.uk

A powerful new militia dubbed “the Pakistani Taliban” has effectively seized control of swaths of the country’s northern tribal areas in recent months, triggering alarm in Islamabad and marking a big setback in America’s “war on terror”.

The militants are strongest in North and South Waziristan, two of seven tribal agencies on the border with Afghanistan. Strict social edicts have been handed down: shopkeepers may not sell music or films; barbers are instructed not to shave beards. Yesterday a bomb blew up a radio transmitter in Wana, taking the state radio off the air.

Militants collect taxes from passing vehicles at new checkpoints, and last week an Islamic court was established in Wana to replace the traditional jirga, or council of elders. Rough justice has already been dispensed elsewhere. A gang of seven alleged bandits were executed in Miran Shah in December and their bodies were hung from a post in the town centre.
guardian.co.uk

LAGOS, Nigeria — Militants in the Niger Delta have blown up a pipeline belonging to Nigeria Agip Oil Co., cutting off 65,000 barrels per day of crude oil production.

The incident occurred Saturday near the town of Yenagoa, in southern Nigeria, the Vanguard newspaper reported Monday. Some 65,000 bpd were cut off in the attack that damaged the Tebidaba-Brass crude oil trunkline, raising to 621,000 bpd the total amount of Nigeria’s output currently shut in.

The pipeline, owned by Italy’s Agip, gathers crude from flowstations in the swamp region and delivers it to the Brass Terminal for export, Vanguard said.

The militant group Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, which is seeking a greater share of the oil resources, had threatened to increase attacks on Nigeria’s oil facilities.

Frequent attacks have cut Nigeria’s oil exports by 20 percent.
wpherald.com

Unknown even to many Mexicans, Africans helped build their country–toiling in silver mines, fighting alongside Zapata’s guerrillas during the 1910 revolution and shaping cultural traditions such as Carnaval, which sprang from African roots.

Africans in Mexico also have suffered some of the same brutality and bias as their kinsmen north of the border.

Now, as Mexicans migrate to Chicago, some find themselves competing with African-Americans for aldermanic seats, factory jobs, even gang turf.

That shared heritage and intertwined future are at the heart of a new exhibition at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, “The African Presence in Mexico,” the most ambitious and potentially controversial project ever for the Pilsen institution.
meridainsider.com

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuela agreed Monday to sell fuel under preferential terms to an El Salvador association created by a group of leftist mayors.

Details of the amount of fuel that will be sold to the Intermunicipal Energy Association for El Salvador were not immediately available but shipments were to begin “as soon as possible,” said Violeta Menjivar, mayor-elect of San Salvador.

It was not immediately clear what kind of fuel was covered by the agreement, but local Salvadoran officials said they hoped for diesel and gasoline.

The Venezuelan state oil firm subsidiary PDV Caribe reached the agreement with the El Salvador association, formed by mayors belonging to the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front party.

Under the agreement, cities headed by the FMLN will pay 60 percent of their oil bill within 90 days while paying for the rest in-kind through agricultural products and locally made goods, said Soyapango Mayor Carlos Ruiz.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, whose country is a major world oil producer, has broadened his influence with generous oil deals to countries across Latin America and the Caribbean. The program has also extended to the United States where the leftist leader has shipped cheaper heating oil to low-income people in New York and Massachusetts via its company Citgo Petroleum Corp.

Chavez, a frequent critic of U.S. policy, used Monday’s signing occasion to criticize U.S.-backed free trade agreements such as the one El Salvador joined March 1.

“They’re making deals with the devil, the devil himself,” Chavez said.
nydailynews.com

A state of emergency has been declared in five of Ecuador’s provinces as indigenous groups continue protests against free trade talks with the US.
Peasants have been blocking roads in highland areas since last week in an action which has cost millions of dollars in lost trade.

Protesters fear the trade deal to be negotiated in Washington this week will damage their way of life.

The state of emergency bans public meetings and imposes a curfew.

It was declared by President Alfredo Palacio in the highland provinces of Cotopaxi, Canar, Chimborazo and Imbabura, as well as parts of Pichincha, where the capital Quito is located.

“The president took this decision after exhausting all other options for dialogue,” said Interior Minister Felipe Vega.

A final round of talks about the free trade deal is scheduled to begin in Washington on 23 March, with a deal expected to be concluded in early April.

Ecuador’s neighbours Colombia and Peru have already signed deals with the US.
bbc.co.uk

U.S. Meddling in Peruvian Presidential Race?
Something smells funny about the recent denunciation of maverick Peruvian presidential candidate Ollanta Humala for alleged human rights violations. Before the accusations, Humala was riding high as the leading candidate in Peru’s presidential elections. Investigations illustrate that Humala’s accusers are subsidized by the US Government funded Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Washington may be interfering in this election to protect its own interests.

The former army officer heads a nationalist and anti- neoliberal coalition between his new Peruvian Nationalist Party and the ten-year-old center-left Union for Peru party. Humala, a mestizo, was never part of Lima’s white ruling elite which has traditionally run the major institutions of the country. He is often derided for being an upstart “cholo” (indigenous), which sheds light on the colonial racism still inherent within Peruvian society. So much of Humala’s support comes from the impoverished non-white majority who has suffered from the “neoliberal reforms” of the unpopular sitting president Alejandro Toledo.

Erasing Indigenous Peru
Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the most famous intellectuals in Latin America. His name ranks with those of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende, and Miguel Angel Asturias as one of the top writers of the legendary Latin American “boom” of the sixties and seventies. His novels are probing, philosophical, and often hilarious page-turners. In the first decade of his career, Vargas Llosa retooled the structure of the novel with the confidence and mastery of a seasoned expert, or, in his case, a genius. Many times he has left my jaw on the floor and my mind reeling.

Mario Vargas Llosa is also a Peruvian. He was born and raised in Peru, and his first novels took place in Peru and explored Peruvian history and life. His masterpiece, Conversation in the Cathedral, is widely considered to be The Great Peruvian Novel, and a contender for The Great Latin American Novel. I am a particular fan, having read the novel twice in the original Spanish. Even while I was punch drunk with the power of the story, however, I knew that something was terribly wrong.

There are no indigenous people in Conversation in the Cathedral. The novel, which mostly takes place in Lima, probes many class and race issues between European descendants, mestizos and African descendants. The millions of indigenous people living in the Andes, the Amazon basin, and cities throughout the country, however, are missing.

This largely explains why Vargas Llosa lost the presidential race against Alberto Fujimori in 1990. A commentator at the time noted that Vargas Llosa ran his campaign throughout the Peruvian countryside as if he were running for office in Switzerland. Fujimori, an unknown professor at a Lima-based agricultural university, slaughtered him. Fujimori then ripped off Vargas Llosa’s neoliberal economic program, became an iron-fisted dictator, and, eventually, a self-exiled criminal protected from extradition by the Japanese government. Vargas Llosa moved to Europe and returned to novels, most of which stepped out of Peruvian reality.

Now Vargas Llosa is back, kind of. In an article published in the national Mexican newspaper, La Reforma, on 12 March 2006, Vargas Llosa lamented the poll results showing that the retired army commander, Ollanta Humala, is number two in the race, with a third of the decided voters. Vargas Llosa’s attack against Humala and his defense of the Christian Democrat candidate, Lourdes Flores, are of little interest compared to his description of who Humala’s supporters are, and why they support him. This, in turn, puts forth Vargas Llosa’s views on who is poor and why in Peru. His answer is stunning and worth quoting in full:

“At least a third of the population lives trapped in conditions that shut them out of all the benefits derived from Peru’s good macroeconomic statistics.

“Rural peasants, marginalized urban sectors, migrants who cannot fit themselves into the cities, unemployed, and retired people who cannot plug the gap with their thin pensions, etcetera.”

Who is missing? One of the largest and most diverse indigenous populations on the planet. Unless they are supposed to be captured in Vargas Llosa’s “etcetera,” they simply do not exist for him. They are not there. The word “indigenous” does not appear anywhere in his article.

MEXICO CITY, March 19 — For more than a decade, the idea that private companies would be able to bring water to the world’s poor has been a mantra of development policies promoted by international lending agencies and many governments.

It has not happened. In the past decade, according to a private water suppliers trade group, private companies have managed to extend water service to just 10 million people, less than 1 percent of those who need it. Some 1.1 billion people still lack access to clean water, the United Nations says.

The reality behind those numbers is sinking in. At the fourth World Water Forum, a six-day conference here of industry, governments and nongovernmental organizations, there is little talk of privatization.

Instead, many people here want to return to relying on the local public utilities that still supply 90 percent of the water to those households that have it.
nytimes.com

Big water companies quit poor countries
Millions of people could have to wait years for clean water as some of the world’s largest companies pull out of developing countries because of growing doubts about privatisation projects, a major UN report reveals today.

Political and consumer unease about multimillion-pound schemes that were intended to end the cycle of drought and death that has afflicted many countries is forcing major multinationals to think again. “Due to the political and high-risk operations, many multinational water companies are decreasing their activities in developing countries,” says the UN’s second world water development report, published today in Mexico City.

Multinationals sent in to profit off what other multinationals have despoiled. Sweet deal.

Temperatures in East African highlands have risen by half a degree Celsius in the last 50 years, scientists found.

Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they say this small rise may have doubled the number of malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
bbc.co.uk

The law lords today overturned a court ruling that teenager Shabina Begum’s human rights were violated when she was banned from wearing full Islamic dress at school.
Shabina, 17, won a landmark victory last March that Denbigh high school in Luton, Bedfordshire, had infringed her human rights after teachers would not let her wear a traditional jilbab covering her body completely.

Today’s judgment was warmly welcomed by headteachers, who feared the earlier ruling would make it impossible to enforce any school uniform policy.

Shabina said she was disappointed, but happy the case was over. She said she would be discussing with her lawyers whether they would apply to take the case to the European court of human rights.

The school, which had agreed a uniform policy with parents and community leaders allowing girls to wear the shalwar kameez (trousers and tunic), went to the highest court in the land last month to ask a panel of five judges at the House of Lords to overturn the ruling at the court of appeal.
guardian.co.uk

Nearly seven months after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and forced out hundreds of thousands of residents, most evacuees say they have not found a permanent place to live, have depleted their savings and consider their life worse than before the hurricane, according to interviews with more than 300 evacuees conducted by The New York Times.

The interviews suggested that while blacks and whites suffered similar rates of emotional trauma, blacks bore a heavier economic and social burden. And even as both groups flounder, most said they believed that the rest of the nation, and politicians in Washington, have moved on.

“I don’t think anybody cares, really,” said Robert Rodrigue, a semiretired computer programmer who has returned to his home in the suburb of Metairie. “New Orleans is kind of like at the bottom of the country, and they just forget about us.”
nytimes.com