CARACAS, Venezuela – The White House may be focused on Iraq and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, but in Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez’s most pressing concern seems to be the Bush administration. Or, as he frequently puts it, the administration’s grand plans to kill him and invade this oil-rich country.

The threats are so great, Mr. Chávez has said, that he has been forced to cancel numerous public appearances and create a civilian militia force that will make the Yankee hordes “bite the dust.” And he warns that if the Americans are so foolish as to invade, “you can forget the Venezuelan oil.”

“If the government of the United States attempts to commit the foolhardy enterprise of attacking us, it would be embarked on a 100-year war,” Mr. Chávez told Ted Koppel in a “Nightline” interview in September. “We are prepared. They would not manage to control Venezuela, the same way they haven’t been able to control Iraq.”

Wherever he can – in speeches, interviews, inaugurations of public works projects, his weekly television show – Mr. Chávez rings the alarm bell. “If something happens to me,” he warned in August, “the responsible one will be President George W. Bush.”

With every warning about Mr. Danger – the Venezuelan government’s title for Mr. Bush – American officials offer weary denials, a flurry of them coming after Pat Robertson, a religious broadcaster and Bush supporter, suggested this summer on his television show that the United States should assassinate the Venezuelan president.

[On the CNN program “Late Edition” on Oct. 9, Mr. Robertson was back on the attack, citing unidentified sources who accused Mr. Chávez of sending “either $1 million or $1.2 million in cash” to Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11 attacks and asserting that Venezuela was trying to acquire a nuclear weapons capacity. The Venezuelan vice president, José Vicente Rangel, dismissed Mr. Robertson’s remarks, saying, “He’s crazy, at the very least.”]

With each threat and criticism from the north, real or imagined, Mr. Chávez lashes back, seemingly thriving on the atmosphere of confrontation.
nytimes.com

Yeah right, crazy Chavez.

Aid began to flood into Pakistan yesterday as the death toll from the weekend’s earthquake continued to spiral and anger over the slow pace of the recovery effort boiled over in remote parts of Kashmir, which have been without supplies for days.

Consignments of food, medical supplies, tents and sniffer dogs were landed in Islamabad as the authorities struggled to get relief to devastated areas. Key highways have been blocked by landslides and many communities have been without water and electricity for days.

In Pakistan, officials said the death toll would reach 40,000 by the end of the week. In Indian-administered Kashmir, the number of dead had passed 800, with more than 10,000 people still missing in the mountainous region in Kupwara district, near the India-Pakistan frontier.
guardian.co.uk

Scientists have called for a more balanced approach in distributing the billions of pounds available for controlling tropical diseases. In a paper published today, they said that a focus by governments and charities on the big three tropical diseases – HIV, malaria and tuberculosis – had left millions of the poorest people in Africa without treatment for a range of illnesses.

The neglected diseases, which include schistosomiasis, river blindness, ascariasis, elephantiasis and trachoma, affect more than 750 million people and kill at least 500,000 every year.
guardian.co.uk

There will be as many as 50 million environmental refugees in the world in five years’ time.

That is the conclusion of experts at the United Nations University, who say that a new definition of “environmental refugee” is urgently needed.

They believe that already environmental degradation forces as many people away from their homes as political and social unrest.

The UNU issued its statement to mark UN Day for Disaster Reduction.

“There are many different environmental issues involved and there can be interactions between them,” said Janos Bogardi, director of the United Nations University’s Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) in Bonn, Germany.

“In poorer rural areas especially, one of the biggest sources of refugees is land degradation and desertification, which may be caused by unsustainable land use interacting with climate change, amplified by population growth,” he told the BBC News website.

“A second issue is flooding, caused I would say by increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere super-imposed with probably some natural fluctuations.”
bbc.co.uk

WASHINGTON — In a more hopeful time, buoyed by the promise of science, it was thought hurricanes could be tricked into dispersing, earthquakes could be disarmed by nuclear explosions and floodwaters held at bay by great mounds of dirt.

Such conceits are another victim of a year of destruction.

The planet’s controlling forces romp over dreams like those. Usually the best that can be done is to see the danger coming long enough to run.

Rich and poor nations have taken the hit over a period so twisted in nature’s assaults that one month, rich is helping poor and the next, poor is helping rich as best it can, and then the poor gets slammed once again.

The United States, giver of tsunami aid in December, accepted hurricane aid from some of those same countries in September. Now it is giving to South Asia a second time, in response to the weekend earthquakes. India is sending tents, food, blankets and medicine to its foe, Pakistan, geology briefly shoving aside geopolitics.

More than 176,000 people died in the earthquake and tsunami of December; an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 in the quake Saturday; perhaps 1,000 or more in Guatemalan landslides last week; more than 1,200 in Katrina. Asian beaches, mountainous Kashmir villages and American urban streets and casinos all were overwhelmed.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

After World War II, nothing seemed too far-fetched for science, not once the atom was split and, again, not once men stepped on the moon.

In one of the most enduring efforts, still alive but hardly about to happen, man thought he could seed clouds, make it rain reliably and put a stop to devastating drought.

The effort continues, especially in China; there, rockets, anti-aircraft guns and aircraft regularly pelt the sky with chemicals. The results so far: China has lots of experience, but limited success, in making the rains come.

If humans are inexorably warming the globe, they’ve proved unable to fine-tune the megaforces to their benefit.

They can cause earthquakes, little ones, by injecting fluids into deep wells, filling huge reservoirs with water or setting off nuclear explosions, but they can’t prevent any, says the U.S. Geological Survey. Any notion of “lubricating” tectonic plates to relieve destructive tension would only make things worse, if it made any difference.
washingtonpost.com

Such a diasastrous disconnect, the price of assuming ‘dominion over nature.’

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. – Former Education Secretary William Bennett on Saturday blamed the news media for distorting his remarks about aborting black babies, saying he had intended to make “a bad argument in order to put it down.”

Bennett, making his first public speech since the comment aired on his radio show last month, said the meaning of his remark linking the crime rate with black abortions was reversed in many news reports.

“I was putting forward a bad argument in order to put it down,” Bennett said, drawing sustained applause from nearly 4,500 people attending the Bakersfield Business Conference. “They reported and emphasized only the abhorrent argument, not my shooting it down.”
news.yahoo.com

Arrogant fool.

RABAT, Morocco – Morocco on Monday defended its use of force in preventing Africans from crossing into two Spanish enclaves on its northern coast as it started deporting some of those caught storming border fences in recent weeks.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Communications Minister Nabil Benabdallah also accused neighboring Algeria, with which Morocco has tense relations, of leaving its borders “completely open” and allowing immigrants through “without any surveillance.”

Morocco has been criticized for its handling of attempts by thousands of Africans to rush razor-wire fences protecting the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. At least a dozen migrants have been killed.

Benabdallah said Morocco is in a no-win situation. Previously it was criticized for not doing enough to stem African immigration. “Then, when we used other means, including force, we created some humanitarian problems. It is not possible to fight this problem without causing humanitarian problems,” he said.
news.yahoo.com

Morocco is in a no-win situation because it is doing Spain’s dirty work.

BAGHDAD, Iraq – The 22 bodies, lined up in coffins in a mosque courtyard Friday, are as shriveled as ancient mummies after lying a month in the desert where they were dumped, bound and bullet-ridden. They were Sunni Arabs, rounded up from their Baghdad homes one night by men in police uniforms.

Relatives and neighbors in mourning are convinced they were killed by government-linked Shiite death squads they say are behind corpses that turn up nearly every day in and around the capital — two more on Friday. Now some Sunnis are vowing to take action to protect themselves.

At least 539 bodies have been found since Iraq’s interim government was formed April 28 — 204 in Baghdad — according to an Associated Press count. The identities of many are unknown, but 116 are known to be Sunnis, 43 Shiites and one Kurd. Some are likely victims of crime — including kidnappings — rampant in some cities and as dangerous to Iraqis as political violence.

The count may be low since one or two bodies are found almost daily and are never reported.

Both minority-Sunnis and Shiites accuse one another of using death squads — and the accusations are deepening the Sunni-Shiite divide at a time when mistrust is already high over a new constitution that Iraqis will vote on in eight days. Shiites overwhelmingly support the charter, Sunnis oppose it, saying it will fragment Iraq.

Shiite deaths are generally attributed to Sunni insurgents, who hit Shiite sites with suicide attacks, bombings and shootings, but also carry out targeted slayings, leaving groups of Shiite bodies to be found later. Insurgents have disguised themselves as police — most recently in an attack last week south of Baghdad in which they dragged five Shiite teachers and their driver into a school and shot them to death.

But there have been several cases of Sunni Arabs who turn up dead in large groups after being taken by men claiming to be Interior Ministry forces. The largest group of bodies found outside Baghdad was 36 Sunnis discovered Aug. 25 in a dry riverbed near Badrah, close to the Iranian border, after being kidnapped in Baghdad.
news.yahoo.com

Negroponte.

…In a very real sense, during the last four years the Bush team has dangerously undercut America’s seemingly secure perch on top of the global totem pole by transforming a manageable, though serious, challenge largely of regional origin into an international debacle. Because America is extraordinarily powerful and rich, it can afford, for a while longer, a policy articulated with rhetorical excess and pursued with historical blindness. But in the process, America is likely to become isolated in a hostile world, increasingly vulnerable to terrorist acts and less and less able to exercise constructive global influence. Flailing away with a stick at a hornets’ nest while loudly proclaiming “I will stay the course” is an exercise in catastrophic leadership…
commondreams.org

Aw Zbig! Where you been? When you and your CFR and Carlyle Group buddies show up to distance yourselves from your own hatchetmen, what does this say? It’s time to put the dissent to sleep with a new cast of kinder, gentler, imperialist running dogs.

CHURCHILL, Manitoba – It seems harsh to say that bad news for polar bears is good for Pat Broe. Mr. Broe, a Denver entrepreneur, is no more to blame than anyone else for a meltdown at the top of the world that threatens Arctic mammals and ancient traditions and lends credibility to dark visions of global warming.

Still, the newest study of the Arctic ice cap – finding that it faded this summer to its smallest size ever recorded – is beginning to make Mr. Broe look like a visionary for buying this derelict Hudson Bay port from the Canadian government in 1997. Especially at the price he paid: about $7.

By Mr. Broe’s calculations, Churchill could bring in as much as $100 million a year as a port on Arctic shipping lanes shorter by thousands of miles than routes to the south, and traffic would only increase as the retreat of ice in the region clears the way for a longer shipping season.

With major companies and nations large and small adopting similar logic, the Arctic is undergoing nothing less than a great rush for virgin territory and natural resources worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Even before the polar ice began shrinking more each summer, countries were pushing into the frigid Barents Sea, lured by undersea oil and gas fields and emboldened by advances in technology. But now, as thinning ice stands to simplify construction of drilling rigs, exploration is likely to move even farther north.

Last year, scientists found tantalizing hints of oil in seabed samples just 200 miles from the North Pole. All told, one quarter of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas resources lies in the Arctic, according to the United States Geological Survey.

The polar thaw is also starting to unlock other treasures: lucrative shipping routes, perhaps even the storied Northwest Passage; new cruise ship destinations; and important commercial fisheries.

“It’s the positive side of global warming, if there is a positive side.”
nytimes.com

In Canada’s Wilderness, Measuring the Cost of Oil Profits

FORT McMURRAY, Alberta – Just north of this boomtown of saloons and strip malls, a moonscape is expanding along with the price of oil.

Deep craters wider than football fields are being dug out of the pine and spruce forests and muskeg swamps by many of the largest multinational oil companies. Huge refineries that burn natural gas to refine the excavated gooey sands into synthetic oil are spreading where wolves and coyotes once roamed.

Beside the mining pits, propane cannons and scarecrows installed by the companies shoo away migrating birds from giant toxic lakes filled with water that was used in the process that separates oil sands from clay and dirt.

About 82,000 acres of forest and wetlands have been cleared or otherwise disturbed since development of oil sands began in earnest here in the late 1960’s, and that is just the start. It is estimated that the current daily production of just over one million barrels of oil – the equivalent of Texas’ daily production, and 5 percent of the United States’ daily consumption – will triple by 2015 and sextuple by 2030. The pockets of oil sands in northern Alberta – which all together equal the size of Florida – are only beginning to be developed.

Because the oil sands region is so remote, the environmental damage receives little attention from the Canadian news media or public comment from Prime Minister Paul Martin’s government. But industry leaders acknowledge that they face an enormous challenge because refining oil sands is several times more energy intensive than conventional oil production. In addition, the process is a major source of heat-trapping gases and far more destructive to the landscape than traditional drilling.

That’s right boys. Accelerate global warming to hasten the catastrophe. And they say the MUSLIMS have a ‘problem with modernity…wow