NEW DELHI — Indian intelligence agencies have identified terror outfit Lashkar-e-Toiba as the prime suspect behind the Varanasi blasts.

The Indian Express newspaper said Friday the intelligence agencies told the cabinet committee on security, a key security committee of the federal government, that the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba militant outfit was the prime suspect in the Varanasi blasts and had most probably used operatives from Bangladesh and local elements to carry out the bombings.

“The status report presented to the CCS pointed out that the evidence collected so far indicated that LeT was the mastermind behind the bomb blasts though LeT men were not on the ground to personally set off the bombs. For that, the LeT is believed to have used Bangladeshis living illegally in Uttar Pradesh,” said a news report quoting an unidentified Indian intelligence official.

The official said in both cases, pressure cookers with timer devices were used to store improvised explosive devices which were triggered in the evening, when people crowd market places and religious shrines.
wpherald.com

NEW DELHI (AFP) – Officials from India, Pakistan and Iran will meet in Tehran next week to discuss a pipeline project for the export of Iranian natural gas to South Asia, an Indian oil ministry official said.

The 2,600-kilometre (1,600-mile) pipeline, valued at over seven billion dollars, was first proposed in 1994 but progress has been slowed by tensions between India and Pakistan, neighbours and nuclear-armed rivals.

“Petroleum Secretary M.S. Srinivasan will lead the Indian delegation, which will arrive in Iran on Monday for three days of official talks,” the official said on Friday.

India, which imports 70 percent of the oil it consumes, is keen to import natural gas to meet growing energy needs.
news.yahoo.com

THE United States is pushing the United Nations Security Council to give Iran a two-week deadline to halt nuclear work that could be related to the making of weapons.

The ultimatum to Iran to step down from its nuclear defiance or face sanctions could come as soon as Friday when the 15 members of the Security Council meet in New York.

A draft text prepared for the council by European nations yesterday said Iran should “without delay re-establish full, sustained and verifiable suspension of all enrichment-related and reprocessing [for plutonium] activities” with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Prime Minister John Howard has said Iran’s program should be referred to the UN and it would be a test of the UN’s effectiveness. But he believes it is too early to talk of sanctions.

With Russia and China opposing direct action, the Security Council is unlikely to rush into sanctions. It is likely first to urge Iran to accept IAEA demands that it halt all uranium enrichment work.

But the US is increasing the pressure to force Iran to step back from its refusal to co-operate with the IAEA.
smh.com.au

The new Zogby poll gauging the opinions of American troops in Iraq has drawn attention mostly because it finds that 72 percent believe the United States should withdraw in a year or less and only 23 percent favor George W. Bush’s plan to “stay the course.”

But the poll also illustrates the power of propaganda.

Shockingly, 85 percent of the troops questioned believe they are fighting in Iraq “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks” – one of the key Iraq War myths built by Bush’s frequent juxtaposition of references to Osama bin-Laden and Saddam Hussein.

This subliminal message has stuck with the vast majority of U.S. troops even though Bush eventually acknowledged publicly that there is no evidence linking Saddam to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

In other words, more than eight in 10 of the U.S. soldiers and Marines in Iraq think they are there avenging the 3,000 people killed on Sept. 11, even though the U.S. government lacks evidence of the connection.

The poll also found that 77 percent think that a major reason for the war was “to stop Saddam from protecting al-Qaeda in Iraq” – another myth nurtured by the Bush administration even though Hussein’s secular government was a bitter enemy of al-Qaeda’s Islamic fundamentalists.

Traitorous Troops?

Despite this confusion over the reasons for the war, the poll exploded another myth promoted by the administration and its media allies – that Americans are unpatriotic if they criticize Bush’s policies, because to do so would damage troop morale.

It turns out the troops want the war brought to a quick end because they have concluded it’s unwinnable based on their own experiences, not from the carping of home-side naysayers, often denounced as “traitors” by Bush’s supporters.

It seems somehow that 72 percent of the U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq have become “traitors,” too.
consortiumnews.com

FALLUJA – Three civilians, one Iraqi soldier and a U.S. soldier were killed when a suicide car bomb detonated near the western city of Falluja on Friday, the U.S. military said.
BAGHDAD – The body of American hostage Tom Fox was found with gun shot wounds and his hands tied behind his back near a railway line in western Baghdad on Thursday, police said on Saturday.
BAGHDAD – A director of Al-Iraqiya state owned television Amjad Hameed was killed and his driver wounded when gunmen ambushed his car in western Baghdad, police said.
BALAD – A roadside bomb exploded near a mosque killing two people and wounding one in the small town of Yathrib near Balad 85 km (55 miles) north of Baghdad on Friday, police said on Saturday. In a separate incident a U.S. military unit raided a house and killed a 25-year-old man in al-Thuluya near Balad on Friday, police said on Saturday.
alertnet.org

No One Knows How Many Iraqis Have Died
BAGHDAD, Iraq – Three years into the war, one grim measure of its impact on Iraqis can be seen at Baghdad’s morgue: There, the staff has photographed and catalogued more than 24,000 bodies from the Baghdad area alone since 2003, almost all killed in violence.

Despite such snapshots, the overall number of Iraqi civilians and soldiers killed since the U.S.-led invasion in spring 2003 remains murky. Bloodshed has worsened each year, pushing the Iraqi death toll into the tens of thousands. But no one knows the exact toll.

President Bush has said he thinks violence claimed at least 30,000 Iraqi dead as of December, while some researchers have cited numbers of 50,000, 75,000 or beyond.

The Pentagon has carefully counted the number of American military dead — now more than 2,300 — but declines to release its tally of Iraqi civilian or insurgent deaths.

The health ministry estimates 1,093 civilians died in the first two months of this year, nearly a quarter of the deaths government ministries reported in all of 2005.

The Iraqi government, however, has swung wildly in its casualty estimates, leading many to view its figures with skepticism.

At the Baghdad morgue, more than 10,000 corpses were delivered in 2005, up from more than 8,000 in 2004 and about 6,000 in 2003, said the morgue’s director Dr. Faik Baker. All were corpses from either suspicious deaths or violent or war-related deaths — things like car bombs and gunshot wounds, tribal reprisals or crime — and not from natural causes.

By contrast, the morgue recorded fewer than 3,000 violent or suspicious deaths in 2002, before the war, Baker said. The tally at the Baghdad morgue alone — one of several mortuaries in Iraq — thus exceeds figures from Iraqi government ministries that say 7,429 Iraqis were killed across all of Iraq in 2005.

Stop your meddling, Iraqi minister tells US
AMID rising American frustration with the political deadlock in Iraq, the National Security Minister, Abdul Karim al-Enzy, has rebuked Washington for interfering in Iraq’s domestic affairs.

In a remarkable broadside against the US, Mr Enzy charged that it was deliberately slowing Iraq’s redevelopment because of a self-serving agenda that included oil and the “war on terror”.

The attack came as the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, told a Senate inquiry in Washington that Iraq’s political leaders needed “to recognise the seriousness of the situation and form a government of national unity that will govern from the centre, and to do it in a reasonably prompt manner”.

To that end, US diplomats have demanded a more generous sharing of key portfolios among Iraq’s religious and ethnic populations than the dominant Shiite religious parties are willing to concede.

In particular, they are urging the dismissal of the hardline Interior Minister, Bayan Jabr.

But in an interview with the Herald, Mr Enzy snapped: “The last time I checked, Bayan Jabr was Interior Minister of Iraq – not of the US or the UN. He is one of our best and this is interference in our business.”

Mr Enzy argued that if the US-led coalition in Iraq had been more serious about rebuilding the country’s security forces in the first year of the occupation, it could now be making substantial cuts in foreign troop numbers in Iraq. “We don’t want foreign forces here, but it’s impossible for them to leave now, because we’re on the edge of civil war,” he said.

“The truth is the Americans don’t want us to reach the levels of courage and competence needed to deal with the insurgency because they want to stay here.

“They came for their own strategic interests. A lot of the world’s oil is in this region and they want to use Iraq as a battlefield in the war on terror because they believe they can contain the terrorism in Iraq.”

Iraqi Shi’ite cleric calls U.S., Britain and Israel a ‘Triad of Evil’
In a television interview Friday night, radical Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr described the United States, Israel and Britain as a “Triad of Evil”.

Speaking on state-run Iraqiya television, the anti-American al-Sadr also said last month’s attack on a Shi’ite shrine in the central city of Samarra was carried “in collusion with the occupiers and the Zionist Entity of Israel,” meaning for the U.S. and Israel. Hundreds of Iraqis died in the subsequent sectarian violence, much of which Sunni Muslims said was the work of al-Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi Army.

The Triad of Evil reference was an obvious play on words U.S. President Bush used in his 2002 State of the Union address, when he labeled Iraq, Iran and North Korea an “axis of evil.”

Al-Sadr, whose militia launched two uprisings against U.S. troops in 2004, refused to name any group that he believed was behind the bombing of the Askariyah shrine in Samarra but hinted at members of Saddam Hussein’s former regime or Sunni Muslim extremists.

“Those who carry arms could be takfiri extremists, Saddamists or others. But those who control arms are the Triad of Evil that are Israel, America and Britain,” said the black-turbaned cleric during the one-hour interview.

Donald Rumsfeld has made a killing out of bird flu. The US Defence Secretary has made more than $5m (£2.9m) in capital gains from selling shares in the biotechnology firm that discovered and developed Tamiflu, the drug being bought in massive amounts by Governments to treat a possible human pandemic of the disease.
independent.co.uk

An oil spill discovered at Prudhoe Bay field is the largest ever on Alaska’s North Slope region, US officials say.

They estimate that up to 267,000 gallons (one million litres) of crude leaked from a corroded transit pipeline at the state’s northern tip.

The spill was detected on 2 March and plugged. Local environmentalists have described it as “a catastrophe”.

In 1989, the Exxon Valdez shipping disaster spilled 11m gallons (42m litres) of oil onto the Alaskan coast.

“I can confirm it’s the largest spill of crude oil on the North Slope that we have record of,” Linda Giguere, from Alaska’s state department of environmental conservation, was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency.

The estimate is based on a survey conducted several days ago at the site where the leak was discovered, officials say.

The spill covers about two acres (one hectare) of the snow-covered tundra in the sparsely populated region on Alaska’s north coast, some 1,040km (650 miles) north of the state’s biggest city, Anchorage.
bbc.co.uk

The world’s great rivers are drying up at an alarming rate, with devastating consequences for humanity, animals and the future of the planet.

The Independent on Sunday can today reveal that more than half the world’s 500 mightiest rivers have been seriously depleted. Some have been reduced to a trickle in what the United Nations will this week warn is a “disaster in the making”.

From the Nile to China’s Yellow River, some of the world’s great water systems are now under such pressure that they often fail to deposit their water in the ocean or are interrupted in the course to the sea, with grave consequences for the planet.

Adding to the disaster, all of the 20 longer rivers are being disrupted by big dams. One-fifth of all freshwater fish species either face extinction or are already extinct.

The Nile and Pakistan’s Indus are greatly reduced by the time they reach the sea. Some, such as the Colorado and China’s Yellow River, now rarely reach the ocean at all. Others, such as the Jordan and the Rio Grande on the US-Mexico border, are dry for much of their length.
independent.co.uk

…Marcos: We always turn to look towards the bottom, not only in our own country, but in Latin America particularly. When Evo Morales presented this invitation for his presidential inauguration, we said that we were not turning our gaze upwards, neither in Bolivia nor in Latin America, and in that sense, we don’t judge governments, whose judgment belongs to the people who are there. We look with interest at the Bolivian indigenous mobilization, and the Ecuadorian one. In fact, they are mentioned in the Sixth Declaration.

The struggle of the Argentine youth, fundamentally, this whole piquetero movement, and of the youth in general in Argentina, with whom we strongly identify with. Also with the movement to recover memory, of the pain from what was the long night of terror in Argentina, in Uruguay, in Chile. And in that sense, we prefer to look at the bottom, exchange experiences and understand their own assessments of what is happening.

We think, fundamentally, that the future story of Latin America, not only of Mexico but for all of Latin America, will be constructed from the bottom–that the rest of what’s happening, in any case, are steps. Maybe false steps, maybe firm ones, that’s yet to be seen. But fundamentally, it will be the people from the bottom that will be able to take charge of it, organizing themselves in another way. The old recipes or the old parameters should serve as a reference, yes, of what was done, but not as something that should be re-adopted to do something new.

Bogado: What can men do, for example, to increase the representation of women anywhere in the world–from families to cultural centers and beyond?

Marcos: In that respect, well, for us and for all organizations and movements, we still have a long way to go, because there is still a really big distance between the intention of actually being better, and really respecting the Other–in this case women–and what our realistic practice is.

And I’m not only referring to the excuse of “this is how we were educated and there’s nothing we can do …” which is often men’s excuse–and of women too, who obey this type of thinking and argue for it one way or another among other women.

Something else that we’ve seen in our process is that at the hour that we [insurgents] arrived in the communities and they integrated us as part of them, we saw significant, unplanned changes. The first change is made internally among the relationship between women. The fact that one group of indigenous women, whose fundamental horizon was the home, getting married quite young, having a lot of children, and dedicating themselves to the home–could now go to the mountains and learn to use arms, be commanders of military troops, signified for the communities, and for the indigenous women in the communities, a very strong revolution. It is there that they started to propose that they should participate in the assemblies, and in the organizing decisions, and started to propose that they should hold positions of responsibility. It was not like that before.

But in reality, the pioneers of this transformation of the indigenous Zapatista woman are a merit of the women insurgents. To become a guerrilla in the mountainous conditions is very difficult for men, and for the women, it is doubly or triply difficult–and I’m not saying that they are more fragile or anything like that: it’s that in addition to the hostile mountainous conditions, they also have to be able to put up with the hostile conditions of a patriarchal system of our own machismo, of our relationships with one another.

[Another difficulty that the women face] is the repudiation of their communities which sees it as a bad thing for a woman to go out and do something else. [After passing their training] a group of insurgent women are now the ones who are superior, and when they head back down to the communities, they now are the ones who show the way, lead, and explain the struggle. At first this creates a type of revolt, a rebellion among the women that starts to take over spaces. Among the first rebellions is one that prohibits the sale of women into marriage, which used to be an indigenous custom, and it gives, in fact (even though it’s not on paper yet) the women the right to pick their partner.

We also think that while there is an economic dependence from women on men, it will be very difficult for anything else to develop. Because in the end, the women can be very rebellious, and very capable and all of that, but if she depends on a man economically, she has few possibilities. So in that sense, in the communities of the Autonomous Rebellious Municipalities, and in the Councils of Good Government, the same women that are already authorities with responsibilities at the municipal level, or on the Councils of Good Government, open spaces, projects, and economic organization for women in such a way that they construct their economic independence, and that gives more substance to [the women’s] other independence.

Nevertheless, we’re still lacking a lot in the area of domestic violence from men against women. We have gained some in other areas, for example, girls who were not going to school are now going to school. They weren’t going before because they were women, and because there weren’t any schools, and now there are schools and they go, regardless of whether they are men or women. And women are already in the highest posts of civil authority–because in the military authority, in the political organizing, we can say that women need to be included–but in matters of civil society, we [insurgents] don’t hold authority, we only advise. So in reality, the women in the communities now reach the civil authority and autonomous municipal posts, which was unthinkable for a woman to reach before. [They reach those positions] through their own struggle, not through the authority of the EZLN.
counterpunch.org

…The United States was urged to “freeze”, “desist” and “stop” actions being taken or threatened to be taken against the Western Shoshone Peoples of the Western Shoshone Nation, in a Friday decision by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). The U.S. has until July 15, 2006 to provide the UN committee with information on the action it had taken.

This action challenges the US government’s assertion of federal ownership of nearly 90 percent of Western Shoshone lands.

“The mines are polluting our waters, destroying hot springs and exploding sacred mountains-our burials along with them–attempting to erase our signature on the land,” says Lalo. “We are coerced and threatened by mining and Federal agencies when we seek to continue spiritual prayers for traditional food or medicine on Shoshone land.”

According to Lalo, “We have endured murder of our Newe people for centuries, as chronicled in military records, but now we are asked to endure a more painful death from the U.S. governmental agencies — a separation from land and spiritual renewal.”

The decision expressed particular concern that the U.S.’ basis for claiming federal title to Western Shoshone land rests on a theory of “gradual encroachment” through a “compensation” process in the Indian Claims Commission.
speroforum.com