MEXICO CITY — “The wall” does not yet exist, and it may never be built, but already the proposed 700 miles of fencing and electric sensors loom like a new Berlin Wall in the Latin American imagination.

The plan for a barrier along the border with Mexico was approved by the U.S. House in December and is scheduled to be debated by the Senate next month.

El muro, as it is called in Spanish, has been in the news for weeks not only in countries such as Mexico and El Salvador that are increasingly dependent on the money migrants send back home, but also those farther away, such as Argentina and Chile. Across the region, el muro is seen as an ominous new symbol of the United States’ unchecked power.

“The U.S. government has fostered an atmosphere of collective paranoia, given a green light to its spies … and institutionalized torture,” Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya said. “The only thing missing was a wall.”
commondreams.org

The office of SETA, El Salvador’s water workers union, sits like a mouse at the elephant’s feet. The union’s plain, two room office sits next door to the huge, block-long two story building which is the headquarters for El Salvador’s national water company, ANDA (National Water and Sewage Administration). Inside the SETA office, union reps equipped with an old computer and chairs with broken rollers are bracing for a fight against government attempts to privatize their industry. Representatives for SETA say losing the fight could mean the “extinction” of their union and limits on Salvadoran’s access to clean water.

boligiTropical El Salvador receives in rainfall three times what its 6 million inhabitants consume annually, but water is a delicate topic where less than 6 in 10 households have it piped in. Even in urban San Salvador, where potable water is more pervasive, service is unpredictable.

“We wake up at four o’clock in the morning to fill our containers,” says Azucena, who lives in San Martín, a San Salvador suburb. “If not, you have to wait three days until it comes again.” To demonstrate, she turns the knob to the only faucet in her two room home. Nothing comes out.

Sometimes water stops running for days, sending residents scrambling to bathe or relieve themselves at friends’ houses. Those who can afford $15-20 a month can buy drinking water from private companies that sell five gallon containers door-to-door out of large blue trucks. The cost is about 6 times the monthly ANDA bill and out of reach for most Salvadorans. About 70 percent of people with a job earn the minimum wage of $158 per month.
upsidedownworld.org

The Nigerian press is reporting that attacks by militant Ijaw tribe youth on Shell oil facilities is threatening the long-term prospects for stability and commerce in the Niger Delta, sharply curtailing oil production and pushing up crude oil prices on the world market.

In This Day of Lagos newspaper, Mike Oduniyi reports that Comrade Joseph Evah, national coordinator of the Ijaw Monitoring Group, said that strikes by the government military task force in the Delta would not be effective in resolving the crisis. Evah said that the government needed to act promptly to implement recommendations by Ijaw leaders to develop the region and provide jobs for its impoverished populace.

After the military bombed a village Feb. 15 to take out a militant post and center for hijacking crude oil, the Vanguard (Lagos) reported that Evah said over 100 persons were missing and that 25 including women and children were killed.

Evah accused the government of genocide and threatened to drag the government before the United Nations for crimes against humanity.
news.ncmonlline.com

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AFP) – Iraqi tanks deployed in Baghdad to pacify the city after an eruption of sectarian violence, but the bombing of a Sunni mosque and a mortar attack shattered the relative calm.

Four people were killed and 15 wounded in the bomb attack outside a Sunni mosque in eastern Baghdad as the faithful were leaving evening prayers, security officials said.
news.yahoo.com

Pentagon: Iraqi Troops Downgraded
WASHINGTON — The only Iraqi battalion capable of fighting without U.S. support has been downgraded to a level requiring them to fight with American troops backing them up, the Pentagon said Friday.

The battalion, made up of 700 to 800 Iraqi Army soldiers, has repeatedly been offered by the U.S. as an example of the growing independence of the Iraqi military.

Grand Theft Baghdad
After an investment of billions, Bowen reports that slightly more than a third of all water projects planned will ever actually be completed. Currently, two of three Iraqis are left with no potable water; only one in five has sewerage. Furthermore, recent figures suggest that at 4,000 megawatts, nation-wide electrical generating capacity is below pre-war levels and far below the goal of 6,000 MW. Instead of rebuilding several steam-turbine power stations— as Iraqi engineers and managers recommended—the CPA’s crony contractors chose to build new natural gas and diesel-powered combustion-turbine stations, despite the fact that Iraq doesn’t have adequate supplies of either. As a result of this arrogance and neglect, billions were wasted while the electricity in Baghdad is on for just a few hours each day.

Death Squads, Shrine Bombers, Civil War: Iraq’s Going According to the Plan?
Mysterious bombers blow up an important Shia shrine in Samarra. Government death squads murder members of the armed opposition. A wave of fury is unleashed against Sunni mosques, killing dozens. Moqtada al-Sadr orders his Mehdi Army to protect the Sunni mosques in a show of Iraqi solidarity. The occupier insists that everything is going according to plan. But if this is so, then what is the plan?

THE world’s coral reefs could disappear within a few decades along with hundreds of species of plankton and shellfish, according to new studies into man’s impact on the oceans.

Researchers have found that carbon dioxide, the gas already blamed for causing global warming, is also raising the acid levels in the sea. The shells of coral and other marine life dissolve in acid. The process is happening so fast that many such species, including coral, crabs, oysters and mussels, may become unable to build and repair their shells and will die out, say the researchers.

“Increased carbon dioxide emissions are making the world’s oceans more acidic and could cause a mass extinction of marine life similar to the one that occurred on land when the dinosaurs disappeared,” said Professor Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution’s global ecology department.

When CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels dissolves in the ocean, it forms carbonic acid. A little of this can benefit marine life by providing carbonate ions — a vital constituent in the biochemical process by which sea creatures such as corals and molluscs build their shells.

Caldeira found, however, that the huge volumes of carbon dioxide being released by humans are dissolving into the oceans so fast that sea creatures can no longer absorb it. Consequently, the levels of carbonic acid are rising and the oceans are “turning sour.”
commondreams.org

LONDON (Reuters) – The ancestors of modern man moved into and across Europe, ousting the Neanderthals, faster than previously thought, a new analysis of radiocarbon data shows.

Rather than taking some 7,000 years to colonize Europe from Africa, the reinterpreted data shows the process may only have taken 5,000 years, scientist Paul Mellars from Cambridge University said in the science journal Nature on Wednesday.

“The same chronological pattern points to a substantially shorter period of chronological and demographic overlap between the earliest … modern humans and the last survivors of the preceding Neanderthal populations,” he wrote.

The reassessment is based on advances in eliminating modern carbon contamination from ancient bone fragments and recalibration of fluctuations in the pattern of the earth’s original carbon 14 content.

Populations of anatomically and behaviorally modern humans first appeared in the near eastern region some 45,000 years ago and slowly expanded into southeastern Europe.

Previously it was thought that this spread took place between 43,000 and 36,000 years ago, but the re-evaluated data suggests that it actually happened between 46,000 and 41,000 years ago — starting earlier and moving faster.

“Evidently the native Neanderthal populations of Europe succumbed much more rapidly to competition from the expanding biologically and behaviorally modern populations than previous estimates have generally assumed,” Mellars wrote.
news.yahoo.com

For those who are still considering the debate on whether men prefer blondes, a study may have provided proof in favour of the flaxen-haired, if only because they appeal to the “caveman” within.

Academic researchers have discovered that women in northern Europe evolved with light hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to stand out from the crowd and lure men away from the far more common brunette.

Blond hair originated through genetic necessity at a time when there was a shortage of both food and males, leading to a high ratio of women competing for smaller numbers of potential partners, according to the study published this week in the academic journal, Evolution and Human Behaviour.

Until these shortages about 10,000 to 11,000 years ago, humans had uniformly dark hair and eyes.

The physical ardour required with hunting bison, reindeer and mammoths in some regions meant many male hunters died and left women with a shrinking pool of breeders.

Flaxen-haired women arose out of a rare mutation but increased in numbers because their chances of breeding turned out to be better.

Peter Frost, a Canadian anthropologist and author of the study, published under the aegis of St Andrews University in Fife, said hair colour became popular as a result of the “pressures of sexual selection on early European women”.

Human hair and eye colour is unusually diverse in northern and eastern Europe … [and their] origin over a short span of evolutionary time indicate some kind of selection. Sexual selection is particularly indicated because it is known to favour colour traits,” he said.

He added that the environment skewed the sex ratio in favour of men “to leave more women than men unmated at any one time”.

Such an imbalance, he said, would have increased the pressures of sexual selection on early European women, one possible outcome being an unusual complex of colour traits: hair and eye colour diversity and, possibly, extreme skin de-pigmentation.

There are at least seven different shades of blond hair in Europe and the question of how such a large variation developed in a relatively short period of time in a geographical region has always remained a mystery. Dr Frost concluded that the lighter shades of blond hair evolved as a response to food shortages in areas where women could not collect food for themselves and were utterly reliant on the male hunters, as they were in some parts of northern Europe.

But while blondes may have had more fun at the dawn of time, researchers at City University in London last year found that modern men responded more positively to pictures of brunettes and redheaded women than to their blonde counterparts.

Experts said that as relations between men and women have evolved, men may have become more attracted by brains, represented in their psyche by brunettes, than the more physical charms of blond hair.

Peter Ayton, professor of psychology at City University, who led the research, said dark hair could now be more a potent symbol than blond.

“As the role of women has evolved, men’s expectations of women have changed,” Professor Ayton said. “They are looking for more intense, equal partnerships and appearance has a large role to play. It is even possible that certain hair colours can indicate wealth and experience.”
independent.co.uk

When disaster visited them in Zimbabwe it had a name, Robert Mugabe. Now disaster has followed white farmers into exile in Zambia but this time there is no villain, just bad luck.

Hounded from Zimbabwe, things went well at first for the 200 farmers who crossed the border to Zambia. Welcomed by the government, they leased tracts of fertile land and borrowed money to buy equipment and seed. Within two years the new arrivals were producing bumper harvests of maize and tobacco, helping to transform a hunger-stricken nation into a breadbasket and exporter.

In this peaceful corner of southern Africa the settlers, part of the diaspora from one of the continent’s last white tribes, thought they could start anew. Now that dream has withered. A fickle economic wind has gusted through Zambia, scattering the farmers’ calculations and driving many to the brink of ruin.

HOUNDED? One of the continent’s LAST WHITE TRIBES? BRINGING PEACE AND PLENTY TO THE POOR ZAMBIANS? Sick sick sick

IN THE NIGER DELTA, Nigeria, Feb. 24 — They have, by all appearances, just a handful of boats, some machine guns and grenade launchers and, perhaps equally important, an e-mail address.

But with just those tools the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta has managed to shut down nearly a fifth of this nation’s vast oil production, briefly push global crude oil prices up more than $1.50 a barrel and throw Nigeria’s government into crisis over the group’s demand that the oil-rich but squalid region be given a greater share of the wealth it creates.

“They have marginalized us for many years now!” shouted a machine-gun-wielding member of the militant group, his face covered in black cloth. “We are taking the bull by the horns now. Niger Delta is ready.”
nytimes.com

BOGOTÁ, Colombia, Feb. 26 — Venezuela’s oil minister, in blunt comments published in a Caracas newspaper on Sunday, warned the United States that it could steer oil exports away from the United States and toward other markets.

The minister, Rafael Ramírez, said Venezuela, which is the world’s fifth-largest oil exporter and supplies more than 10 percent of American oil imports, could act in the face of what he described as aggression by the Bush administration.

Although such warnings have become part of President Hugo Chávez’s verbal arsenal against the Bush administration, the comments by Mr. Ramírez, coupled with the increasing sale of oil to China, are seen by oil experts and political analysts as a signal that Venezuela is serious about finding new buyers.

“Physically it’s very feasible, and politically it’s very feasible,” said Lawrence Goldstein, president of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation, a New York policy analysis group financed by the industry. “It comes with an economic penalty, but apparently Chávez is willing to pay that price.”
nytimes.com