Humans have provoked the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65m years ago, according to a UN report that calls for unprecedented worldwide efforts to address the slide.
The report paints a grim picture of life on earth, with declining numbers of plants, animals, insects and birds across the globe, and warns that the current extinction rate is up to 1,000 times faster than in the past. Some 844 animals and plants are known to have disappeared in the last 500 years.

Released yesterday to mark the start of a UN environment programme meeting in Curitiba, Brazil, the report says: “In effect, we are currently responsible for the sixth major extinction event in the history of earth.” A rising human population of 6.5bn is wrecking the environment for thousands of other species, it adds, and undermining efforts agreed at a 2002 UN summit in Johannesburg to slow the rate of decline by 2010. The global demand for biological resources now exceeds the planet’s capacity to renew them by 20%.

The report, Global Biodiversity Outlook 2 from the secretariat of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, says: “The direct causes of biodiversity loss – habitat change, over-exploitation, the introduction of invasive alien species, nutrient loading and climate change – show no sign of abating.” It is bleaker than a first UN review of the diversity of life, issued in 2001, and says the 2010 goal can only be attained with “unprecedented additional efforts”.

About 6m hectares (15m acres) of primary forest are felled each year and about a third of mangrove swamps have been lost since the 1980s. In the Caribbean, average hard coral cover has declined from 50% to 10% in the last three decades. Up to 52% of higher bird species studied are threatened with extinction and the number of large fish in the North Atlantic has declined by two-thirds in the last 50 years.

The report concludes: “Biodiversity is in decline at all levels and geographical scales,” and international travel, trade and tourism are expected to introduce more alien species to fragile ecosystems.
guardian.co.uk

HIALEAH, Fla. — A new pay-for-performance program for Florida’s teachers will tie raises and bonuses directly to pupils’ standardized-test scores beginning next year, marking the first time a state has so closely linked the wages of individual school personnel to their students’ exam results.

The effort, now being adopted by local districts, is viewed as a landmark in the movement to restructure American schools by having them face the same kind of competitive pressures placed on private enterprise, and advocates say it could serve as a national model to replace traditional teacher pay plans that award raises based largely on academic degrees and years of experience.

Gov. Jeb Bush (R) has characterized the new policy, which bases a teacher’s pay on improvements in test scores, as a matter of common sense, asking, “What’s wrong about paying good teachers more for doing a better job?”

But teachers unions and some education experts say any effort to evaluate teachers exclusively on test-score improvements will not work, because schools are not factories and their output is not so easily measured. An exam, they say, cannot measure how much teachers have inspired students, or whether they have instilled in them a lifelong curiosity. Moreover, some critics say, the explicit profit motive could overshadow teacher-student relationships.
washingtonpost.com

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Twice in the past year, Muhammad Said has survived assassination attempts that left his car riddled with bullets. He works part time as a bodyguard for his father, a Baghdad city councilman, and helps a friend who has contracts with the American military. Both are very dangerous jobs.

So last month, Mr. Said, a slim, baby-faced 23-year-old, did what a small but growing number of Iraqis are doing: He walked into the offices of the Iraq Insurance Company and bought a terrorism insurance policy. It looked like an ordinary life insurance policy, but with a one-page rider adding coverage for “the following dangers: 1) explosions caused by weapons of war and car bombs; 2) assassinations; 3) terrorist attacks.”

It cost him 125,000 dinars, about $90. Mr. Said paid more than most people because of his risky occupation. The payout, if he dies, is five million dinars, around $3,500, or about what an Iraqi policeman earns in a year.

That guarantee appears to be the first off-the-shelf terrorism policy in the world, insurance experts say. In most countries, of course, there is no need for it: death by terrorism is rare enough that it is usually covered by ordinary accident insurance. In Iraq it is not, partly because the state used to compensate the families of war victims directly. So the Iraq Insurance Company began stepping into the gap about a year ago.

“Am I worth only five million dinars?” Mr. Said asked wearily, after signing his policy. “It is not a solution. But Iraqis can be attacked by anyone, just walking on the street: Americans, insurgents, the Iraqi Army.” The payout is not a lot of money, even by Iraqi standards. But in a country where terrorism kills hundreds of people a month and no one can rely on the government or employers to provide for their relatives afterward, it seems to be an idea with a future.

The Iraq Insurance Company, a state-owned group, has sold about 200 individual terrorism policies in the last year, and is now negotiating with several government ministries and private companies for group policies that would cover thousands of employees.

The idea of insuring ordinary people in what may be the most violent place on earth came from Abbas Shaheed al-Taiee, an executive at the Iraq Insurance Company.

“It is a kind of gift to the Iraqi people,” said Mr. Shaheed, 53, a big, heavyset man with terribly serious eyes and a reputation as a master salesman. “We have expanded the principles of life insurance to cover everything that happens in Iraq.”
nytimes.com

Yeah. Real humanitarians.

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Sunday lobbed a litany of insults at U.S. President George W. Bush ranging from “donkey” to “drunkard” in response to a White House report branding the left-wing leader a demagogue.

Chavez is one of Bush’s fiercest critics and has repeatedly accused the U.S. government of seeking to oust him from the presidency of Venezuela, the world’s No. 5 oil exporter and a supplier of around 15 percent of U.S. crude imports.

“You are a donkey, Mr. Bush,” said Chavez, speaking in English on his weekly Sunday broadcast.

“You’re an alcoholic Mr. Danger, or rather, you’re a drunkard,” Chavez said, referring to Bush by a nickname he frequently uses to describe the U.S. president.
reuters.com

by Naeim Giladi
…Alexis de Tocqueville once observed that it is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth. Certainly it has been easier for the world to accept the Zionist lie that Jews were evicted from Muslim lands because of anti-Semitism, and that Israelis, never the Arabs, were the pursuers of peace. The truth is far more discerning: bigger players on the world stage were pulling the strings.
inminds.co.uk

A very important article…

March 17 (Bloomberg) — U.S. military spending in Iraq and Afghanistan will average 44 percent more in the current fiscal year than in fiscal 2005, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said.

Spending will rise to $9.8 billion a month from the $6.8 billion a month the Pentagon said it spent last year, the research service said. The group’s March 10 report cites “substantial” expenses to replace or repair damaged weapons, aircraft, vehicles, radios and spare parts.

It also figures in costs for health care, fuel, national intelligence and the training of Iraqi and Afghan security forces — “now a substantial expense,” it said.

The research service said it considers “all war and occupation costs,” while the Pentagon counts just the cost of personnel, maintenance and operations.
bloomberg.com

LONDON (Reuters) – British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Tuesday will call for a global, interventionist approach to confront terrorism head on and win a battle over values and ideas.

“This is not a clash between civilizations, it is a clash about civilization,” Blair will say in a speech this afternoon, according to extracts released by his official spokesman.

“‘We’ is not the West. ‘We’ are as much Muslim as Christian or Jew or Hindu. ‘We’ are those who believe in religious tolerance, openness to others, to democracy, liberty and human rights administered by secular courts,” he will say.

The speech, due to be given at a Reuters Newsmaker event, is the first of three that Blair plans to deliver on terrorism and the significance of Iraq and Afghanistan. The second will be given in Australia and the third in the United States.

“The only way to win is to recognize this phenomenon is a global ideology; to see all areas in which it operates as linked and to defeat it by values and ideas set in opposition to those of the terrorists,” the speech will say.

Blair will say a belief in an “activist approach” to foreign policy, based on values and interests, is the theme underlying the government’s approach to issues from Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iraq, Afghanistan, to climate change and poverty in Africa.
netscape.cnn.com

How droll. ‘We’ are not the same imperialist West perpretrating the same crap over the past 500 years. Looks the same, sounds the same, smells the same…

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger offered words of sympathetic support to President George W. Bush, as the administration encounters eroding public support for US military involvement in Iraq.

Kissinger, who served under Republican US President Richard Nixon during the tumultuous Vietnam War years, told CNN television’s “Late Edition” program that his experience facing growing public opposition to that unpopular conflict gives him a unique window into the travails by the Bush White House in Iraq now.

“My heart goes out to the president because I’ve served in an administration that faced a very divided country in a very difficult set of circumstances,” Kissinger told CNN, without invoking America’s military intervention in Vietnam by name.

The former top US diplomat said that the Bush administration deserves the benefit of the doubt as it struggles to find a way to quell mounting sectarian violence in Iraq.

“The president is trying to head out in a direction that avoids civil war in Iraq, and that prevents the insurgents from dominating and establishing some sort of fundamentalist regime,” Kissinger said.

“I think we should attempt to work together on this. I would support the objectives,” he said, adding that for the time being “nobody has yet put forward a better program.”
news.yahoo.com

Poor babies. It is such a hard job day in and day out being the Great Satan.

Get off it. All the carping, belly-aching and complaining about George Bush’s incompetence in Iraq, from both the Left and now the Right, is just dead wrong.

On the third anniversary of the tanks rolling over Iraq’s border, most of the 59 million Homer Simpsons who voted for Bush are beginning to doubt if his mission was accomplished.

But don’t kid yourself — Bush and his co-conspirator, Dick Cheney, accomplished exactly what they set out to do. In case you’ve forgotten what their real mission was, let me remind you of White House spokesman Ari Fleisher’s original announcement, three years ago, launching of what he called,

“Operation
Iraqi
Liberation.”

O.I.L. How droll of them, how cute. Then, Karl Rove made the giggling boys in the White House change it to “OIF” — Operation Iraqi Freedom. But the 101st Airborne wasn’t sent to Basra to get its hands on Iraq’s OIF.
gregpalast.com

Well the oil companies are seeing massive profits due to the crippling of Iraq’s oil output.

Iraq is a country paralysed by fear. It is at its worst in Baghdad. Sectarian killings are commonplace. In the three days after the bombing of the Shia shrine in Samarra on 22 February, some 1,300 people, mostly Sunni, were picked up on the street or dragged from their cars and murdered. The dead bodies of four suspected suicide bombers were left dangling from a pylon in the Sadr City slum.

The scale of the violence is such that most of it is unreported. Iyad Allawi, the former prime minister, said yesterday that scores were dying every day. “It is unfortunate that we are in civil war. We are losing each day, as an average, 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more,” he said. “If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is.”

Unseen by the outside world, silent populations are on the move, frightened people fleeing neighbourhoods where their community is in a minority for safer districts.

There is also a growing reliance on militias because of fears that police patrols or checkpoints are in reality death squads hunting for victims.

Districts where Sunni and Shia lived together for decades if not centuries are being torn apart in a few days. In the al-Amel neighbourhood in west Baghdad, for instance, the two communities lived side by side until a few days ago, though Shias were in the majority. Then the Sunni started receiving envelopes pushed under their doors with a Kalashnikov bullet inside and a letter telling them to leave immediately or be killed. It added that they must take all of their goods which they could carry immediately and only return later to sell their houses.
independent.co.uk

10 bodies found in Baghdad, including 13-year-old girl
Iraqi authorities today reported finding 10 more bullet-riddled bodies dumped in the capital Baghdad, one of them that of a 13-year-old girl.

The 10 bodies were the latest gruesome discoveries tied to the underground sectarian war being conducted by Shiite and Sunni Muslims as they settle scores in the chaos that grips the Iraqi capital.

Iraqi Insurgents Storm Police Station, Killing 15 Officers
BAGDHAD, Iraq, March 21 — In a bold raid at daybreak, a band of at least 100 insurgents stormed a police station in the town of Muqdadiya northeast of Baghdad today, killing at least 18 police officers, wounding four others and freeing all of the 33 prisoners being held in the station, officials in the Interior Ministry said.

Iraqi president rejects civil war talk
The Iraqi president has discounted the risk of a civil war in response to remarks by Iyad Allawi, the former premier, that the country was in the midst of such a conflict.

“One can completely rule out the threat of a civil war,” Jalal Talabani, the president, told reporters after a meeting of political parties discussing the formation of a unity government.

“The Iraqi people cannot accept a civil war. We are passing through a difficult period right now, but the attachment of Iraqis to their country will prevent such a war,” he said.

“We are a long way from a civil war and we are working towards a formula for a national accord.”

Chalabi blames Bremer for Iraq’s unraveling
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi blamed former US civilian administrator Paul “Jerry” Bremer for failing to anticipate the violence in Iraq.

Asked by CNN television’s “Late Edition” program who was responsible for “blunders” in Iraq, Chalabi said: “I will give you a name. I would not have given the name if he had not published a book — Ambassador Jerry Bremer.”

Chalabi slammed Bremer “for not appreciating the situation, appreciating the size of the threat from anti-US insurgents.

“He kept, for months and months on end, to say, those are die-hards who have no coordination and no plan to move forward,” he said.

“He refused to accept the obvious. He refused to believe what was right in front of him,” Chalabi said.

“In general, this is largely responsible for what we are seeing now,” he said, speaking of the sectarian violence between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.

Chalabi also dismissed as “great fiction” a recent book by Bremer which pinned some of the blame for the violence on poor military planning by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

A CIA flunkie to the end…