…Ongoing protests represent more than the untidy aftermath of a completed treaty negotiation. The current controversies around CAFTA implementation signal an escalating debate about the shape of corporate globalization in the Americas. CAFTA’s provisions mandating the reduction of specific tariffs are clear. But some of the most dramatic implications of the agreement, like privatization, are not as well defined. In coming years they will be contested in national parliaments, in trade courts and on the streets.

“Neoliberal governments in the region are going to try to use CAFTA to privatize things like water and healthcare,” says Stansbury. “That’s something that people can stop. It’s the new battlefield.”
commondreams.org

Anger at President Bush swept through parts of India on Friday as protesters burned his effigy and carried posters of Osama bin Laden. Three people were killed in clashes, and 18 were injured.

While most Indians look favorably upon the United States, and though the protests have not been as large as expected, anti-Bush demonstrations have been held in various Indian cities by communists and Muslim groups during his visit.

Violence erupted in the city of Lucknow when dozens of armed Muslims tried to force Hindu shop owners to shut their stores to protest Bush’s visit, said Senior Superintendent of Police Ashutosh Pandey. The two sides argued, exchanged blows, and finally shot at each other, killing a Muslim teenager, Pandey said.

Television stations showed shrieking people carrying the injured on fruit carts through narrow streets choked with protesters.

In the southern city of Hyderabad, demonstrators burned an effigy of Bush around the time that he arrived there.

Chanting “Bush hands off India” and “Bush go home,” several hundred communist and Muslim demonstrators marched through the city, and shops in the Muslim-dominated Charminar neighborhood were closed in protest. Some 40 percent of the city’s 7 million people are Muslim.
breitbart.com

Not as many as expected Commies and Muslims…ok then.

Dinner with George and Manmohan

Since World War II, the US has consistently asserted and reasserted itself as the security agency of the global corporate interests, who in exchange sustain the deficit-ridden American (war) economy and the dollar hegemony. In such a situation, the American desperation is natural whenever a potential competitor or troublemaker emerges. In order to preclude such threats it has to continuously refurbish its ranks and partnerships. The American exercise to stabilize its tumultuous economy and hegemony in the post-Cold War situation has wonderfully synchronized with the Indian need to sustain itself as an important market (as the South Asian hegemon), while securing a place for its own expansionist corporate interests in the global market. The joint statement is an epitome of this ‘corporatist’ synchrony.

It was way back in 1998 the American corporate leaders warned its political protégé about the dire consequences of the sanctions that the US hurriedly imposed on India after the Pokhran blasts–that rival economic interests may take advantage of the American withdrawal. This prefaced Clinton’s visit, in order to assure India of the ceremonial nature of those sanctions. Since then, the love affair has continually bloomed and boomed. It has been well supported by the US-India CEOs, who made recommendations for broadening bilateral economic relations, which the Joint Statement vows to implement. The statement indicates towards supporting the corporate world in its endeavor to prosper on the misery of the global majority. The official acceptance of the ideology of establishing “corporate fund” for combating diseases, like, for example, HIV/AIDS, only means towing the interests of the pharmaceutical monopolies against universalizing and cheapening medical facilities and drugs. The Indian state’s subservience to this notion is indicative of the keenness of the Indian pharmaceutical companies that have become transnational in recent years to sow the benefits from the global police regime under the US which condemns ‘piracy’, and violation of ‘property rights’.

02/27/06 “WorldNetDaily” — — Investors from the United Arab Emirates helped fund the $23 million Neil Bush raised for Ignite!, the learning systems company that holds lucrative No Child Left Behind Act contracts in Florida and Texas. The “Cow” is an Ignite! portable computer designed to work in a classroom, providing interactive instruction aimed at improving students’ scores on standardized tests. If you loved Billy Carter and “Billy Beer,” you’re certain to love Neil Bush and the “Ignite! Cow.”
informationclearinghouse.info

Thirty new terrorist organizations have emerged since the September 11, 2001, attacks, outpacing U.S. efforts to crush the threat, said Brig. Gen. Robert L. Caslen, the Pentagon’s deputy director for the war on terrorism.

“We are not killing them faster than they are being created,” Gen. Caslen told a gathering at the Woodrow Wilson Center yesterday, warning that the war could take decades to resolve.

Gen. Caslen said that two years ago the Department of Defense had not settled on a clear definition of the nature of the war. Moreover, because each government department had its own perspective, “we all had different strategies,” he said.

The Defense Department now has defined the nature of the war, he said. The enemy, he said, is “a transnational movement of extremist organizations, networks and individuals that use violence and terrorism as a means to promote their end.” It is not a global insurgency, the general said.
washingtontimes.com

A bomb exploded in the southern Iranian city of Ahwaz, hours after two men were hung for an attack last year, according to Iranian reports.
The percussion bomb shattered the windows of a building in the Kianpars area of the city on Thursday evening, but no casualties were reported.

The attack is the latest in a series to hit the restive Khuzestan Province, at the heart of Iran’s oil industry.

Eight people died in bomb attacks on a government office and bank a month ago.

Iran has accused British forces stationed just across the Iran-Iraq border of co-operating with ethnic Arab separatist groups who said they were behind the blasts. The UK has denied any involvement.
bbc.co.uk

The Monolith Crumbles: Reality and Revisionism in Iran
It is a well-known fact – except among the American media, the American government, and about 98.7 percent of the American people – that Iran is not a monolithic state where sheep-like masses bray with a single voice in chorus with their demented leaders, but is, on the contrary, a complex society where many conflicting opinions on matters political, religious, social, historical, etc., contend with each other in open debate. True, it does have a government dominated by repressive clerics, who exercise the kind of veto power over secular law that George W. Bush’s vaunted “base” dreams of seeing established in the United States; but Iran is far more open than, say, Saudi Arabia or China, just to name two countries where the Bush Family and friends have long engorged their bellies through insider connections with the ruling cliques.

Therefore it must have come as a great shock to the system for Americans this week to hear Iran’s former president, Mohammad Khatami, rail against the ignorant Holocaust revisionism mouthed by his successor, the hardline flibbertigibbet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (Excerpts after the jump below.) Or rather, it would have come as a shock to the American system to hear Khatami’s words – if Americans had actually been told about them. But it serves no interests among America’s own ruling cliques to dilute the current line of the day: that Iran is a hellhole of unremitting evil, a new Nazi Germany led by a new Hitler. So Khatami’s remarks, reported widely elsewhere in the world, were not allowed to disturb the lie-drugged slumber of the American consciousness.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) – A suicide bomber detonated a car bomb near a Canadian armored vehicle in southern Afghanistan on Friday, killing himself but causing no casualties to Canadian troops, the Afghan army said.

The blast occurred in Daman district, about 15 km (10 miles) south of the city of Kandahar and about 10 km (six miles) from the airport, where Canadian troops are based.
ca.reuters,com

A bomb ripped through a vegetable market in a Shia section of Baghdad and a senior Sunni leader escaped assassination as at least 36 people were killed yesterday in a surge of violence that pushed Iraq closer still to sectarian civil war.

An aide to Ibrahim al- Jaafari, the Prime Minister, meanwhile, lashed out at Sunni, Kurdish and secular political leaders who have mounted a campaign to deny him another term, saying the Shia United Iraqi alliance will not change its candidate.
independent.co.uk

Shiites in Iraqi city of Basra threaten boycott of oil and goods
Basra/Baghdad – The influential Shiite-Islamic Fadhila Party in the southern Iraqi port city of Basra on Friday threatened to halt the traffic of oil and other goods from southern Iraq into the centre of the country.

The threat would be carried out if the party’s demands were not taken into consideration in the formation of the future Iraqi government, said Fadhila party leader Sheikh Sabah al-Saedi in his Friday sermon in Basra.

Among the party’s demands were that there would be no ‘remnants of the old regime’ of Saddam Hussein in the new government and that the ministries of the interior and defence would remain in the hands of the Shiite alliance.

Previously cabinet talks had centred on promoting Sunni leadership of at least one of the ‘armed’ ministries (interior or defence) for the sake of national unity.

Al-Saedi also called for the ‘execution’ of Saddam Hussein, who persecuted Shiites and is currently standing trial before a special tribunal in Baghdad.

According to observers, the threat to hinder the flow of goods and oil would be an extreme form of pressure, as two thirds of Iraq’s oil is found in the south of the country, and production and transport of oil from the north has practically been brought to a standstill by insurgent acts of sabotage.

In addition, Basra is the only sea sea port the country has.

Last December, in okaying the execution of Stan Tookie Williams, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger went out of his way to smear a whole history of Black struggle against racism. Schwarzenegger’s statement denying clemency claimed that Stan’s record of turning his life around must be a lie–because Stan identified with Black revolutionaries of the past and present, dedicating his autobiography to a number.

The most abuse of all was heaped on George Jackson–whose inclusion in Stan’s dedication “is a significant indicator that Williams is not reformed,” read Schwarzenegger’s statement.

Jackson, author of the widely read prison memoir Soledad Brother, had been thrown in jail for a petty robbery, and became a revolutionary behind bars. He was murdered in August 1971 by guards at San Quentin prison in an alleged “escape attempt.”
counterpunch.org

Rampant child malnutrition in poor countries is usually not caused principally by lack of food, nor are large, politically popular programs to feed schoolchildren the right way to tackle a problem stunting the intellectual and physical development of more than 100 million children worldwide, a new World Bank report says.

The irreversible damage malnutrition causes to children occurs by age 2, long before they begin primary school, and the bank contends that efforts to combat this scourge must concentrate on the brief window of opportunity between gestation and age 2, with a focus on teaching mothers to properly feed and care for babies and toddlers.

While many experts would agree with the bank’s assessment of the evidence on malnutrition, its policy recommendations are sure to be controversial at a time when the world is pushing to halve poverty in the coming decade and school feeding programs are often seen as part of the solution.

The bank, the largest financier of antipoverty programs in developing countries, maintains in the report released today, “Repositioning Nutrition as Central to Development,” that countries like India with staggering rates of malnutrition need to change their approach to speed up progress.

Nutritionists at the bank say programs should emphasize changing the behaviors of mothers — for example, to breastfeed exclusively for the first six months of life or seek quick treatment for their children’s diarrhea and other common childhood illnesses, rather than directly providing food.
nytimes.com

How insane is this?

WASHINGTON — Archaeological finds from Mexico and Peru show that, long before Europeans arrived, women served as warriors, governors and priestesses.

An exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery includes little pottery jugs and massive stone images portraying women in a variety of roles in addition to traditional homemakers and care givers.

“Women were not only daughters, wives, mothers and grandmothers, but also healers, midwives, scribes, artists, poets, priestesses, warriors, governors and even goddesses in pre-Columbian society,” said Judy L. Larson, director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, in announcing the exhibit.
latimes.com