The fourth session of the General Conference of Arab Parties here Tuesday voiced support for Iran’s right to acquire peaceful nuclear technology.

Secretary-General of the Congress of Arab Parties Abdul Aziz al-Seyyed told reporters at a press conference held at the end of the three-day session that Iran was being targeted by big powers because it was a regional power with policies that did not please these powers.

Arab countries treat Iran as a Muslim brother state, the official said, and added that Arab states desired good relations with members of the Islamic world. “And that is why we are trying to establish sustainable relations with Iran.”
irna.ir

Sabotage not ruled out after Iran pipeline blaze
TEHRAN (AFP) – A crude oil pipeline in Iran’s restive southwestern province of Khuzestan has been hit by a fire, state media said, with officials not ruling out the possibility of sabotage.

Local oil official Abdolreza Asadi said the pipeline linking the city of Ahvaz to a refinery in Abadan was ablaze overnight Tuesday, with Ahvaz fire chief Abdol Hamid Talebzadeh saying the “major fire” was put out after 10 hours.

A state television report said sabotage had not been ruled out and that an investigation was underway.

“The repair on the damaged pipeline has started and it will soon resume transporting oil,” Asadi said, adding that Iran’s biggest oil refinery at Abadan was in the meantime being fed by different pipelines.

In October last year, two major fires along oil and gas pipelines in Khuzestan were also reported and sabotage also deemed a possibility.

* BAGHDAD – A car bomb exploded near a mosque in New Baghdad on the eastern side of the city, killing three people and wounding 10 others, police said.
NEAR FALLUJA – Three bodies of unidentified civilians with gunshot wounds to the head, chest and limbs were found on a main road in a village just south of Falluja, 50 km (30 miles) west of Baghdad, a police official said.
BAGHDAD – Two civilians were killed and at least seven wounded when a car bomb apparently targeting Iraqi soldiers exploded in front of a hospital in central Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD – An Oil Ministry official said three of the 18 men found bound and strangled on Tuesday were employees of the state oil pipeline company in Dora in the south of the capital. There was still no information on the other 15 bodies.
BAGHDAD – Six civilians were killed and eight wounded when a roadside bomb went off near an Iraqi army patrol in western Baghdad, police and hospital officials said.
FALLUJA – A U.S. Marine was killed in combat on Wednesday in Anbar Province, the U.S. military said.
BAGHDAD – Gunmen killed two people employed in the Green Zone, home to the Iraqi government and foreign embassies. The two were on their way to work when they were attacked in the western Mansour district, police said.
alertnet.org

Daniel Pipes Finds Comfort in Muslims Killing Muslims
One of the abiding myths about the War on Iraq is that the neocons were too stupid to realize that they would confront an unrelenting, indigenous resistance to their occupation of Iraq. Unwittingly, the story line goes, they led the U.S. into a conflict which has now produced a civil war. But this simply does not fit the facts. The neocons clearly anticipated such an outcome before they launched their war as Stephen Zunes documents in Antiwar.com:

“Top analysts in the CIA and State Department, as well as large numbers of Middle East experts, warned that a U.S. invasion of Iraq could result in a violent ethnic and sectarian conflict. Even some of the war’s intellectual architects acknowledged as much: In a 1997 paper, prior to becoming major figures in the Bush foreign policy team, David Wurmser, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith predicted that a post-Saddam Iraq would likely be “ripped apart” by sectarianism and other cleavages but called on the United States to “expedite” such a collapse anyway.”

Yet the line persists that the neocons had no idea what they were getting into. This cannot be correct as they think a lot about what they do and they plan carefully. Not only is that charge absurd on the face of it, but it is arrogant on the part of those who level it. And it is the worst political mistake possible underestimating your adversary.

Now the neocons are beginning to advocate for civil war in Iraq quite openly. The clearest statement of this strategy as yet comes from pre-eminent neocon and ardent Zionist Daniel Pipes. In a recent piece in the Jerusalem Post, Pipes spills the beans. He writes:

“The bombing on February 22 of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, Iraq, was a tragedy, but it was not an American or a coalition tragedy. Iraq’s plight is neither a coalition responsibility nor a particular danger to the West. Fixing Iraq is neither the coalition’s responsibility, nor its burden. When Sunni terrorists target Shi’ites and vice versa, non-Muslims are less likely to be hurt. Civil war in Iraq, in short, would be a humanitarian tragedy, but not a strategic one.”

“The Country Has Already Collapsed”
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Headlines from Iraq seem to be getting progressively worse. Not only are suicide attacks and bombings a daily occurrence, but particularly after the February attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra — a Shiite holy site — deadly sectarian violence has increased. Are we witnessing a country falling apart?

Marina Ottaway: At this point in Iraq, you do not have a central government — so you don’t have a legitimate authority running the country. You don’t have a government with the power to establish or maintain order. What you have is a nominal government that can only stay in power because the Americans are there. The government is supposed to have derived legitimacy from the constitution and the elections. But I think the government we end up with, won’t have much legitimacy either.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Why not? After all, the Iraqis went to the polls and chose their representatives. That seems pretty legitimate, does it not?

Ottaway: It is now almost three months after the elections and there is still no government. The Iraqis continue postponing the opening of parliament because according to the constitution, after they open parliament, they only have two months to form the government. They don’t think they can form a government that quickly. A government that takes over five months to form is not a government that is going to have very much legitimacy in the end. The country has already collapsed. Now the challenge is figuring out a way to deal with this fact.

U.S. Sets Plans to Aid Iraq in Civil War
The U.S. military will rely primarily on Iraq’s security forces to put down a civil war in that country if one breaks out, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told lawmakers yesterday.

Sectarian violence in Iraq has reached a level unprecedented since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and is now eclipsing the insurgency as the chief security threat there, said Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, who appeared with Rumsfeld.

“The plan is to prevent a civil war, and to the extent one were to occur, to have the . . . Iraqi security forces deal with it to the extent they’re able to,” Rumsfeld told the Senate Appropriations Committee when pressed to explain how the United States intended to respond should Iraq descend wholesale into internecine strife.

If civil war becomes reality, “it’s very clear that the Iraqi forces will handle it, but they’ll handle it with our help,” Abizaid said later when asked to elaborate on Rumsfeld’s remark.

Night-time knock on door heralds secret assassins
The cars may be back on the streets of Baghdad, but the shuttered homes of Street Number 60 provide a grim reminder that the sectarian violence that flared after the destruction of the Golden Mosque continues under cover of darkness.

Each house in this street in the southern neighbourhood of Dora once housed a family. Now most lie empty, their owners having fled after armed groups warned Shia in this predominately Sunni area to leave or die.

“It is like a gangster film,” said one resident too frightened of reprisals to give his name or even profession.

“Darkness comes and then people with masks set up checkpoints.

“There is a knock on the door and those who answer are either abused or killed.

“Those abused are not expected to wait to be warned twice. I see them pack their car and leave.”

Every day brings killings and kidnaps in Baghdad and no one knows the culprits.

It is the thread that links cars, carpets and cameras and is also responsible for three-course meals, bookshops and modern medicine.
The Islamic civilisation, according to the curators of a national exhibition that opened this week, has made an enormous but largely neglected contribution to the way we live in the west.

The project, 1001 Inventions: Discover the Muslim Heritage of Our World, supported by the Home Office and the Department for Trade and Industry, uncovers the Islamic civilisation’s overlooked contribution to science, technology and art during the dark ages in European history.

It lifts the veil on hundreds of innovations – from kiosks and chess through to windmills and cryptography – that are often popularly associated with the western world but originate from Muslim scholarship and science.

Based on more than 3,000 peer-reviewed academic studies, the exhibition charts Islamic innovations during ten decades of “missing history” spanning from the 6th to the 16th century and covering an area stretching from China to southern Spain.
guardian.co.uk

None of this history has been ‘lost’ or ‘missing’ to Muslims, or to anybody else who cares enough to know.

“Susan’s case is a perfect example of the vicious cycle that develops when doctors prescribe drugs for unapproved uses. She was given Provigil to counter the sedating effects of Klonopin, which was prescribed to counter the side effects of Paxil.”

Many experts say the wide-spread epidemic of mental health problems in the US is man-made. The case of Susan Florence is a testament to this theory of man-made insanity.

While mania, psychosis, anxiety, agitation, hostility, depression, and confusion may be signs of mental illness, these same “symptoms” are referred to as side effects on the labels of the most commonly prescribed psychiatric medications used to treat mental illness.

Once Susan Florence was placed on medication, whenever she experienced a side effect from one drug, her doctor simply prescribed another until she ended up in a drug-induced frenzy for which it would have been impossible to distinguish which drug, or combination thereof, was causing the adverse reactions.
mediamonitors.net

NEW YORK A Gallup report released today reveals that more than half of all Americans, rejecting evolution theory and scientific evidence, agree with the statement, “God created man exactly how Bible describes it.”

Another 31% says that man did evolve, but “God guided.” Only 12% back evolution and say “God had no part.”

Gallup summarized it this way: “Surveys repeatedly show that a substantial portion of Americans do not believe that the theory of evolution best explains where life came from.” They are “not so quick to agree with the preponderance of scientific evidence.”

The report was written by the director of the The Gallup Poll, Frank Newport.

Breaking down the numbers, Gallup finds that Republican backing for what it calls “God created human beings in present form” stands at 57% with Democrats at 44%.

Support for this Bible view rises steadily with age: from 43% for those 18 to 29, to 59% for those 65 and older. It declines steadily with education, dropping from 58% for those with high school degrees to a still-substantial 25% with postgraduate degrees.
editorandpublisher.com

Lani Guinier became a household name in 1993 when Bill Clinton appointed her to head the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and then, under pressure from conservatives, withdrew her nomination without a confirmation hearing. Guinier is currently the Bennett Boskey Professor of Law at Harvard University where, in 1998, she became the first black woman to be tenured at the law school.

Guinier’s latest book, Meritocracy Inc.: How Wealth Became Merit, Class Became Race, and College Education Became a Gift from the Poor to the Rich, will be published in 2007. This past summer, she offered a glimpse of her upcoming book in this interview with D&S intern Rebecca Parrish.

Rebecca Parrish: What is meritocracy? What is the difference between the conventional understanding and the way you are using the term in Meritocracy, Inc.?

Lani Guinier: The conventional understanding of meritocracy is that it is a system for awarding or allocating scarce resources to those who most deserve them. The idea behind meritocracy is that people should achieve status or realize the promise of upward mobility based on their individual talent or individual effort. It is conceived as a repudiation of systems like aristocracy where individuals inherit their social status.

I am arguing that many of the criteria we associate with individual talent and effort do not measure the individual in isolation but rather parallel the phenomena associated with aristocracy; what we’re calling individual talent is actually a function of that individual’s social position or opportunities gained by virtue of family and ancestry. So, although the system we call “meritocracy” is presumed to be more democratic and egalitarian than aristocracy, it is in fact reproducing that which it was intended to dislodge.

Michael Young, a British sociologist, created the term in 1958 when he wrote a science fiction novel called The Rise of Meritocracy. The book was a satire in which he depicted a society where people in power could legitimate their status using “merit” as the justificatory terminology and in which others could be determined not simply to have been poor or left out but to be deservingly disenfranchised.
dollarsandsense.org

Last year, the United States found 727,304 homeless people nationwide, meaning about one in every 400 Americans were without a home, according to the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2005 issued by the Information Office of China’s State Council Thursday.

The figures came from The USA Today published on Oct. 12, 2005.
“The Los Angeles County has become ‘the homeless capital of America,’ with the average number of vagabonds or people in shelters hitting 90,000 a day, including 35,000 people chronically homeless,” the report quotes an article of The Los Angeles Times on June 16, 2005 as saying.
“The United States dubs the world’s richest country, however, it maintains the highest poverty rate among developed countries,” the report says, given a study of eight advanced countries by London School of Economics in 2005, which found that the United States had the worst social inequality.

On the one hand, the report says, in recent years the fortunes of the rich have continued to rise in the United States. According to two new studies by Spectrem Group, a Chicago-based wealth-research firm, and the Boston Consulting Group, millionaire households (excluding the value of primary residences) in the United States controlled more than 11 trillion in assets in 2004, up more than 8 percent from 2003.
Meanwhile, the income of ordinary employees in the United States has seen a sharp decline, causing the increase of poor population. The data issued by the U.S. Census Bureau said that the nation’s official poverty rate rose from 12.5 percent in 2003 to 12.7 percent in 2004, with the number of people in poverty rising by 1.1 million from 35.9 million to 37 million, which means one in every eight Americans live in poverty. Poverty rates in cities such as Detroit, Miami and Newark exceeded 28 percent.

These problems indicate that poverty, hunger and homelessness are quite serious in America, worker’s economic, social and cultural rights are not guaranteed, the report says.
english.people.com.cn

There was good news for rich people yesterday, when an annual listing of the world’s billionaires showed there were more of them than ever.

The 793 billionaires making the 2006 list published by Forbes magazine is an increase of 102 on last year. And the rich keep getting richer, with their total net worth up 18%. The combined value of their billions is put at $2.6 trillion, a fraction less than the US federal government’s entire budget proposal for next year.
guardian.co.uk

WASHINGTON — As the U.S. enters its fourth year in Iraq this month, the annual cost of military operations is growing — even as the Pentagon assumes the number of troops there will shrink.

Monthly expenditures are running at $5.9 billion; the U.S. commitment in Afghanistan adds roughly another $1 billion. Taken together, annual spending for the two wars will reach $117.6 billion for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30 — 18% above funding for the prior 12 months.

That escalation reflects the fact that America’s military today is a higher-cost war machine than the one that fought in Vietnam decades ago. But it has also produced bipartisan concern in Congress that “emergency spending” for Iraq has become a way for the Pentagon to meet other needs.
wsj.com

The US trade deficit ballooned to a record $68.5bn in January, far surpassing expectations and raising the prospect of a large drag on economic growth in the first months of the year.

The sensitive bilateral trade deficit with China climbed to $17.9bn in January from $16.3bn, a figure that is likely to hinder administration efforts to contain mounting frustration in Congress over the rising deficit, and create a tense backdrop for the official visit of Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, next month.

With President George W. Bush facing a revolt from congressional Republicans over the Dubai ports deal, the administration could find itself in a weakened position in its long-standing efforts to stave off punitive trade legislation against China. The Republican chairman of the Senate finance committee said last month he would begin drawing up a bill to deal with the growing array of US trade frictions with China.

“The American people need a Congress and an administration that will get tough on trade policy to rein in these runaway deficits,” said Benjamin Cardin, the senior Democrat on the House of Representatives subcommittee on trade. “When you look at trade deficits in the context of growing foreign ownership of our national debt, you see that we’re increasingly beholden to the very countries whose markets we’d like to open to American goods. Unless we reverse this dangerous trend, we’ll soon find ourselves without negotiating leverage to promote our trade agenda.”
news.ft.com

China rejects US rights ‘hypocrisy’
China has rejected US criticism of its record on human rights in an official rejoinder which says racial discrimination and crime are still rife in America.

The State Council, China’s cabinet, denounced America on Thursday for what it called rampant violence and widespread discrimination against minorities, especially blacks, in its annual response to the US state department’s report on human rights worldwide.

“As in previous years, the state department pointed the finger at human rights situations in more than 190 countries and regions, including China, but kept silent on the serious violations of human rights in the United States,” the Chinese report said.