As the European press asserted its right to publish hostile cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed, anger in the Arab world reached boiling point in Gaza where gunmen converged on European Union offices and gave the Danish, Norwegian, French and German governments 48 hours to apologise.

In the West Bank city of Nablus, a German citizen was seized – and later released – after armed militants roamed hotels threatening to kidnap nationals of European countries in which the cartoons – one of which shows the Prophet wearing a turban in the shape of a bomb with a burning fuse – have been published.

Newspapers in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands reprinted one or more of the Danish cartoons that have caused the storm.

Yesterday’s incidents prompted the EU to review the security of its representatives in the occupied Palestinian territories, where armed militants warned the staff at its Technical Assistance Office in Gaza City that they were demanding that all French citizens leave Gaza.

“Any citizen of these countries [that printed the cartoon] who are present in Gaza will put themselves in danger,” a gunman in a Fatah-linked armed unit said at the site.
independent.co.uk

This is not a matter of press freedom or church and state; it’s rabid jingoism, ‘yellow journalism’ as part of the lead-up to a full-on war. Just flip the script: what if al Jazeera published a cartoon of Jesus on the cross with an AK-47?

VIENNA — European and U.S. diplomats expressed confidence Thursday that they would win the votes necessary to report concerns about Iran’s nuclear research program to the United Nations Security Council.

With the support of oncereluctant Russia and China, there was little doubt that the International Atomic Energy Agency’s board of governors would approve the resolution. All countries with veto power on the Security Council — the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China — now support the measure.

Diplomats worked into the night to achieve unanimity on the 35-member IAEA board, a stand they said would make the resolution’s message stronger. Syria, Cuba and Venezuela appeared to be inclined to vote no, sources said.
latimes.com

Tough talk from Tehran
t is another sign of the escalating crisis over Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions that the Islamic republic’s foreign minister has warned of swift retaliation if, as expected, it is reported to the United Nations security council. Manouchehr Mottaki uses an interview with the Guardian today to threaten “severe consequences,” including an end to snap inspections and other co-operation with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Mr Mottaki said something similar to Jack Straw yesterday. Like the threat by the commander of the revolutionary guard that Iran would fire missiles if attacked, this was, to put it mildly, extremely unhelpful.

The decision to report Iran to the UN has been made by all five permanent members of the security council, which is as good as things get in terms of international legitimacy. The IAEA is the UN’s nuclear watchdog. President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is being dishonest when he accuses the west of acting like the “lord of the world” in denying his country the peaceful use of the atom. Russia and China, hardly American vassals, are on the same side. This is not a replay of the Iraq crisis. Not yet anyway.

The Threat of Nuclear War
Any intelligent, informed person will have realized by now that the sabre-rattling warmongers in Washington DC and 10 Downing Street are planning a military attack against Iran in the near future.

The Israelis are noisy enough in their threats to conduct an air-strike on Iran by the end of next March and since June 2005 US strategic forces have been prepared to launch an attack using not only conventional weapons but so-called ‘tactical’ nukes and nuclear ‘city-busters’ .

If the planned attack is launched, it will be the first time since the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan that the USA will have again used nuclear weapons. The first time they did this it was against a country with which they were already at war. In the case of Iran, they will do so against a non-nuclear country which in no way has committed an aggression against any other country, least of all the US.

All the huffing and puffing presently going on about Iran’s contravention of the International Atomic Energy Authority’s regulations is not only patently untrue , it hides a much more machiavellian purpose. It will give the USA the legal semblance for making a nuclear attack.

By now, most Palestinians recognize Israel’s entrenched system of colonialism, racism and denial of basic human rights as a form of apartheid. In fact, Palestinians are far from alone in holding this view of Israel

By Omar Barghouti

02/02/06 “PACBI” — — Leading South African intellectuals, politicians and human rights advocates subscribe to the same school of thought. For instance, in an article in the Guardian tellingly entitled “Apartheid in the Holy Land,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote:

“I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. […] Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon?”[1]
In fact, many Jews have not forgotten. Inside Israel, some Jewish politicians and journalists have made clear analogies between Israel and South Africa. Roman Bronfman, Chair of the Democratic Choice faction in the Yahad party, criticized what he termed “an apartheid regime in the occupied territories,” adding, “The policy of apartheid has also infiltrated sovereign Israel, and discriminates daily against Israeli Arabs and other minorities. The struggle against such a fascist viewpoint is the job of every humanist.”[2]

Esther Levitan, the Jewish grandmother once condemned to indefinite solitary confinement without trial in apartheid South Africa for her activism in the ANC, admitted in an interview with Ha’aretz that she considered Israel appallingly racist, saying: “Israelis have this loathsome hatred of Arabs that makes me sick. […] They will create a worse apartheid here.”[3]
informationclearinghouse.info

Open Letter: ‘Just Be Fair With Us’
Feb. 6, 2006 issue – My message to the West—to America, to Europe, to everybody—is this: Hamas wants peace. We hate bloodshed and killing. We don’t want to fight. There is a verse in the Qur’an that says whoever kills one soul kills all souls. And whoever brings life to people brings life to a nation.

…Venezuelan authorities said last week they had “confidential evidence” that U.S. Embassy staff were involved with a group of Venezuelan military officers accused of passing state secrets to the U.S. Defense Department.

A U.S. Embassy spokeswoman said they had received a letter from authorities demanding Correa appear before investigators earlier this week and on Thursday another ordering him out.

Venezuela has 65 military officials in the United States and Washington has 21 officials in Venezuela.
yahoo.com

President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who came to power pledging to tackle corruption, has sacked the entire staff of Liberia’s finance ministry.

Weeks after taking over from a postwar transitional government, Africa’s first elected female president went to the ministry to deliver the news personally. Ms Johnson-Sirleaf, a former finance minister, said all the dismissed employees would be allowed to reapply for their jobs, but called on those involved in graft to “disappear.”
guardian.co.uk

Airport workers blocked the main approach road to New Delhi’s domestic airport yesterday as a strike entered its second day, hitting cargo and hospitality services at airports across the country. Police and paramilitary forces were deployed at key airports to ensure flights took off and landed on time.

Some 22,000 airport workers, mostly cleaners and administrators, are protesting against the government’s decision to privatise New Delhi and Mumbai airports. The two airports handle almost 65% of India’s international traffic – about 19 million passengers a year.
guardian.co.uk

There is no meaningful response to climate change without massive social change. A cap on this and a quota on the other won’t do it. Tinker at the edges as we may, we cannot sustain earth’s life-support systems within the present economic system.

Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production in a finite planet. And yet this ideological model remains the central organising principle of our lives, and as long as it continues to be so it will automatically undo (with its invisible hand) every single green initiative anybody cares to come up with.
guardian.co.uk

Tornadoes early Thursday tore through New Orleans neighborhoods that were hit hard by Hurricane Katrina just five months earlier, collapsing at least one previously damaged house and battering the airport, authorities said.

Roofs were ripped off and utility poles came down, but no serious injuries were reported.

“Don’t ever ask the question, `What else could happen?'” said Marcia Paul Leone, a mortgage banker who was surveying the new damage to her Katrina-flooded home.

She would go no farther than the front porch of her house Thursday morning. Windows were blown out, and the building appeared to be leaning.

“I’ve been in the mortgage business for 20 years. I know when something’s unsafe,” she said.

Electricity was knocked out at Louis Armstrong International Airport, grounding passenger flights and leaving travelers to wait in a dimly lit terminal powered by generators. The storm also ripped off part of a concourse roof, slammed one jetway into another, and flipped motorized runway luggage carts.
breitbart.com

Nearly 2,000 people in the Seychelles have been infected with an incurable mosquito-borne disease that has spread to three Indian Ocean islands prompting health alerts, officials said.

Jules Gedeon, the Seychelles director for community health, said the number of people diagnosed with “chikungunya” was steadily rising since it was first reported in November and nearly 1,000 cases had been reported in January alone

….”Chikungunya” is Swahili for “that which bends up” and refers to the stooped posture of those afflicted by the crippling and extremely painful disease for which there is no known vaccine or cure.

It is characterized by high fever and severe rashes, and while non-fatal in itself and most people eventually recover, it can provide opportunities for other diseases to set in.

Health officials in the Seychelles attributed the recent sharp rise in cases of chikungunya to heavy rains that have been pounding the island since December.
breitbart.com

…We a family
the Outsiders will always be
remember who we are
we’re making history
no one understands how we stay together
I tell them we’re brothers
and life isn’t the same without each other.
— Rap lyrics by Outsider Mark Cevallos

They called themselves the “Outsiders”: a bunch of spiky-haired, barely teenage boys from Van Nuys whose families came from Mexico and other parts of Latin America.

Eleven of them entered Birmingham High as freshmen in the fall of 2001.

There was Isaac, a tough guy the girls adored; David, a gifted student and a baseball player; and Polo Morales, a fatherless boy who loved football. There were others: An eloquent rapper, a fearless skateboarder, a rock ‘n’ roll drummer. The boys break-danced together and spent hours writing lyrics to rock and rap songs.

Navigating the streets of their neighborhood, they had learned never to walk alone.

Belonging to a group meant they didn’t have to. The Outsiders were not a gang. Gangs killed people. They simply watched one another’s backs. If one needed a dollar, another spotted him. If one got punched, another punched back.

As students, none was exceptional. Half of the boys had earned too few credits to participate in graduation from junior high, but the Los Angeles Unified School District’s social promotion policy allowed them to move on to high school anyway.

They expected to graduate together.

By late spring of 2005, only four of the 11 were left.
latimes.com