Britain expressed outrage yesterday after Robert Mugabe took advantage of a United Nations ceremony in Rome to compare Tony Blair to Italy’s wartime dictator, Benito Mussolini. Departing from his prepared text at the 60th anniversary celebrations of the UN’s biggest agency, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the Zimbabwean leader described the prime minister and the US president, George Bush, as “international terrorists”.

He also denounced their invasion of Iraq, saying they were “the two unholy men of our millennium who, in the same way as Hitler and Mussolini formed [an] unholy alliance, formed an alliance to attack an innocent country”.
guardian.co.uk

At the northern edge of Jerusalem, on the main road to the Palestinian city of Ramallah, three towering concrete walls are converging around a rapidly built maze of cages, turnstiles and bomb-proof rooms.
When construction at Qalandiya is completed in the coming weeks, the remaining gaps in the 8m (26ft)-high walls will close and those still permitted to travel between the two cities will be channelled through a warren of identity and security checks reminiscent of an international frontier.

The Israeli military built the crossing without fanfare over recent months, along with other similar posts along the length of the vast new “security barrier” that is enveloping Jerusalem, while the world’s attention was focussed on the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon’s removal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip.

But these de facto border posts are just one element in a web of construction evidently intended to redraw Israel’s borders deep inside the Palestinian territories and secure all of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and to do it fast so as to put the whole issue beyond negotiation. As foreign leaders, including Tony Blair, praised Mr Sharon for his “courage” in pulling out of Gaza last month, Israel was accelerating construction of the West Bank barrier, expropriating more land in the West Bank than it was surrendering in Gaza, and building thousands of new homes in Jewish settlements.

“It’s a trade off: the Gaza Strip for the settlement blocks; the Gaza Strip for Palestinian land; the Gaza Strip for unilaterally imposing borders,” said Dror Etkes, director of the Israeli organisation Settlement Watch. “They don’t know how long they’ve got. That’s why they’re building like maniacs.”

At the core of the strategy is the 420-mile West Bank barrier which many Israeli politicians regard as marking out a future border. Its route carves out large areas for expansion of the main Jewish settlements of Ariel, Maale Adumim and Gush Etzion, and expropriates swaths of Palestinian land by separating it from its owners.

In parallel, new building on Jewish settlements during the first quarter of this year rose by 83% on the same period in 2004. About 4,000 homes are under construction in Israel’s West Bank colonies, with thousands more homes approved in the Ariel and Maale Adumim blocks that penetrate deep into the occupied territories.
guardian.co.uk

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – Saddam Hussein and seven senior members of his 23-year regime will go on trial Wednesday to face charges they ordered the 1982 killings of nearly 150 people from the mainly Shiite town of Dujail following a failed attempt on Saddam’s life.

Court officials have said they are trying Saddam on the Dujail massacre first because it was the easiest and quickest case to put together. Other cases they are investigating – including a crackdown on the Kurds that killed an estimated 180,000 people – involve much larger numbers of victims, more witnesses and more documentation.

If convicted, Saddam and his co-defendants could face the death penalty, but they could appeal before another chamber of the Iraqi Special tribunal.

Saddam and his co-defendants are expected to hear the charges against them during Wednesday’s hearing, and the court will address procedural matters. The trial is then expected to be adjourned for several weeks.

Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari complained Monday that the Iraqi court took an unjustifiably long time to prepare its case and brushed aside concerns that the court could be biased against the former dictator.
guardian.co.uk

…For an embattled President Bush, combating the mullahs of Tehran may be a useful means of diverting attention from Iraq and reestablishing control of the Republican party prior to next year’s congressional elections. From this perspective, even an escalating conflict would rally the nation behind a war president. As for the succession to President Bush, Bob Woodward has named Mr Cheney as a likely candidate, a step that would be easier in a wartime atmosphere. Mr Cheney would doubtless point out that US military spending, while huge compared to other nations, is at a far lower percentage of gross domestic product than during the Reagan years. With regard to Mr Blair’s position, it would be helpful to know whether he has committed Britain to preventing an Iranian bomb “come what may” as he did with Iraq.
guardian.co.uk

Iraq’s election commission announced Monday that officials were investigating “unusually high” numbers of “yes” votes in about a dozen provinces during Iraq’s landmark referendum on a new constitution, raising questions about irregularities in the balloting.

Word of the review came as Sunni Arab leaders repeated accusations of fraud after initial reports from the provinces suggested the constitution had passed. Among the Sunni allegations are that police took ballot boxes from heavily “no” districts, and that some “yes” areas had more votes than registered voters.

The Electoral Commission made no mention of fraud, and an official with knowledge of the election process cautioned that it was too early to say whether the unusual numbers were incorrect or if they would affect the outcome.

But questions about the numbers raised tensions over Saturday’s referendum, which has already sharply divided Iraqis. Most of the Shiite majority and the Kurds _ the coalition which controls the government _ support the charter, while most Sunni Arabs sharply opposed a document they fear will tear Iraq to pieces and leave them weak and out of power.

Irregularities in Shiite and Kurdish areas, expected to vote strongly “yes,” may not affect the outcome. The main electoral battlegrounds were provinces with mixed populations, two of which went strongly “yes.” There were conflicting reports whether those two provinces were among those with questionable figures.
breitbart.com

…Q: Moving on to the subject you’ve been most closely associated with in the last few years: reparations for slavery. Why do you think that’s necessary?

Robinson: Let me give you some conditions that don’t get talked about. The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world: two million people. The country with one-twentieth of the world’s population has one-fourth of those in prison. One out of every eight prisoners in the world is an African American. We are warehousing people as a profit to shareholders or for benefits to communities that get to host federal prisons. It is modern slavery. The whole future of America’s black community is at risk. One out of every three young black men in Washington, D.C., is under one arm or the other of the criminal justice system. These are the continuing consequences of slavery.

We have sustained so much psychic damage and so much loss of memory. Every people, in order to remain healthy and strong, has to have a grasp of its foundation story. Culture is a chrysalis—it is protective, it takes care of you. That’s what cultures are for. You cannot rob a people of language, culture, mother, father, the value of their labor—all of that—without doing vast damage to those people. People need their history like they need air and food. You deprive them of that for 246 years and follow that by 100 years of de jure discrimination, and then you say with the Voting Rights Act: It’s over, you just go take care of yourself!

Average people do not survive that. You plant twenty coconut trees over here, and twenty coconut trees over there, and you water this batch and don’t water that batch. Of the batch you water, nineteen will survive and one will die. Of the batch you don’t water, nineteen will die and one will survive. And then we have somebody like George Bush. I can’t think of a more mediocre human talent than George Bush. He obviously is a product of family advantage, and he’s the worst American President of all time.

Anyway, in my arguments for reparations, I’m not talking about writing checks to people. The word reparations means to repair. We’ve opened this gap in society between the two races. Whites have more than eleven times the net worth or wealth of African Americans. They make greater salaries. Our unemployment rate is twice theirs. You look at the prison system and who that’s chewing up. Now we’ve got the advent of AIDS. Fifty-four percent of new infections are inAfrican Americans. Many infected men are coming out of prison and infecting their women. So when I talk about reparations, I say there has to be a material component. It has to have a component of education that is compensatory. It has to have a component of economic development that’s compensatory. But in the last analysis the greater damage is here [points to his head]. So I’m not really talking about money. And I’m not really talking about the concerns of people who say, “I didn’t benefit from slavery.” Nobody said you did.

It’s important for white America to be able to face up. Far beyond its relations with the black community, it is important for white Americans. It’s important in helping us in our approaches to the rest of the world, and in being sensitive to Islam, and to look at the way other cultures handle their management of themselves, and to look at it with respect, with the possibility that you even might learn something. We’ve got a country that never takes any responsibility for anything. It forgets its role and makes everybody else forget what happened, too. And that it is not just dangerous for the victim, but also for the perpetrator.
progressive.org

WASHINGTON (AP) — It was billed as a conversation with U.S. troops, but the questions President Bush asked on a teleconference call Thursday were choreographed to match his goals for the war in Iraq and Saturday’s vote on a new Iraqi constitution.

“This is an important time,” Allison Barber, deputy assistant defense secretary, said, coaching the soldiers before Bush arrived. “The president is looking forward to having just a conversation with you.”

Barber said the president was interested in three topics: the overall security situation in Iraq, security preparations for the weekend vote and efforts to train Iraqi troops.

As she spoke in Washington, a live shot of 10 soldiers from the Army’s 42nd Infantry Division and one Iraqi soldier was beamed into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building from Tikrit – the birthplace of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

“I’m going to ask somebody to grab those two water bottles against the wall and move them out of the camera shot for me,” Barber said.

A brief rehearsal ensued.
“OK, so let’s just walk through this,” Barber said. “Captain Kennedy, you answer the first question and you hand the mike to whom?”

“Captain Smith,” Kennedy said.

McClellan says he sees nothing wrong with the fact that Pentagon officials coached the soldiers.

“Captain. Smith? You take the mike and you hand it to whom?” she asked.

“Captain Kennedy,” the soldier replied.
And so it went.
washingtontimes.com

The US has announced the creation of a new intelligence agency led by the CIA to co-ordinate all American overseas spying activities.

The National Clandestine Service (NCS) will oversee all human espionage operations – meaning spying by people rather than by technical means.

The move is the latest in the post-9/11 reforms of US intelligence agencies.

Analysts say the NCS restores some authority to the CIA after it lost overall control of US intelligence.

‘Expression of confidence’

The chief of the new service will supervise the CIA’s espionage operations and co-ordinate all overseas spying, including those of the FBI and the Pentagon.

The director of the new agency, whose identity will remain secret and is simply known as “Jose”, will report directly to the head of the CIA, Porter Goss.
bbc.co.uk

Jose???

The high hopes for Ukraine after Yushchenko took power are being dashed as rival elites squabble over spoils

Those who doubted how revolutionary Ukraine’s “orange revolution” would turn out to be have no reason for pleasure now. The massive disappointment felt by tens of thousands in Kiev, which recent visitors report, far outweighs any intellectual satisfaction there is in having predicted that Viktor Yushchenko’s assumption of power would not transform the country, politically or economically. Indeed, “realists” like myself were also wrong. We did not expect things to unravel so fast.
guardian.co.uk

They are the stadium giants of rock, one of the biggest draws in the business, who built a reputation on protest anthems and support for the global battle against poverty and Aids.
He is a powerful US Republican who, like every powerful US Republican with an election in the offing, needs to do a little fundraising. But Rick Santorum’s plans to drum up cash on the sidelines of U2 gigs have not impressed the band.

“U2 concerts are categorically not fundraisers for any politician – they are rock concerts for U2 fans,” said Jamie Drummond, executive director of DATA, an Africa advocacy group co-founded by U2 singer Bono.
With the band’s Vertigo tour of the US well under way, the spokesman stressed that political fundraisers – a normal part of large music and sports events in the US – were in no way linked to the band, its music or its message.

“Neither DATA nor Bono are involved in these [fundraisers], and they cannot be controlled,” he added.

Mr Santorum’s get-together reportedly involves a $1,000 (£570) event during this weekend’s Philadelphia show. Other events are planned for other shows on the tour, which runs until the end of December. And he is not alone. Hillary Clinton has also offered a small number of invitees the chance to join her in a suite in Washington at next week’s gig. A cool $2,500 will secure the contributor a chance to rub shoulders with the Democratic elite while watching Bono and the Edge grind out the old favourites.

A spokeswoman for Ms Clinton said: “We do a meet-and-greet with the senator, and then go in and listen to music.”
guardian.co.uk