LAVACA – In an increasingly familiar scene along the Texas coast, black smoke and flames streamed from a Point Comfort industrial plant Thursday, following an explosion that injured at least 11 workers.

…The blast at the Formosa plant was the third to strike a Texas industrial facility this year and the second to hit one of the Taiwan-based company’s U.S. facilities in 17 months.

…Diane Wilson, an activist and local shrimper who has protested against the company — a campaign that culminated in August 2002, when she chained herself to one of the plant’s towers — said a serious incident was bound to happen.

“When Formosa was building this plant we had so much evidence about the shoddy way it was put together and the poor quality of the work,” said Wilson, who was in New York City promoting her first book An Unreasonable Woman, about her fight against large petrochemical companies. “I’m not surprised at all.”

Last April, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality fined the facility $150,000 for violations of air pollution laws that included releases of toxic chemicals such as vinyl chloride.
commondreams.org

NEW ORLEANS — They clear rotten seafood from stinking restaurant freezers, wash excrement from the floors of the Superdome, rip out wads of soaked insulation. The work is hot, nasty and critical to the recovery of New Orleans.

And yet, many of the workers are not actually from New Orleans. Many of those engaged in the huge cleanup and reconstruction effort here — nobody has an exact count — are immigrants, both legal and illegal, from Mexico and Central America.

Meanwhile, as many as 80,000 New Orleanians sit idle in shelters around the country. They are out of work, homeless and destitute. That irks some civic and union leaders.

“I’ve got nothing against our Hispanic brothers, but we have a whole lot of skilled laborers in shelters that could be doing this work,” said Oliver Thomas, president of the City Council. “We could put a whole lot of money in the pockets of New Orleanians by doing this reconstruction work.”
washtimes.com

Crazy ain’t it? What are they making, 5 bucks an hour?

Republicans in Congress Propose Budget Cuts to Fund Storm Relief
…“As usual, the prime targets are the poor and others who rely on federal programs for their health, education, disability, agriculture, and veterans’ benefits,” said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, the senior Democrat on the Agriculture Committee.

When our daughter Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza strip on March 16 2003, an immediate impulse was to get her words out to the world. She had been working in Rafah with a nonviolent resistance organisation, the International Solidarity Movement, trying to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes and wells. Her emails home had had a powerful impact on our family, making us think about the situation in the Middle East in ways we had never done before. Without a direct connection to Israel and Palestine, we had not understood the devastating nature of the Palestinians’ situation. Coming from the US, our allegiance and empathy had always been with the people of Israel.
guardian.co.uk

Romanian authorities called for all farm birds in the southeastern Danube delta to be kept indoors after the country’s first three cases of bird flu were detected in the region.

“The virus has been identified in three ducks in the village of Ceanurlia de Jos (southeastern Romania),” Agriculture Minister Gheorghe Flutur said.

“We have already imposed quarantine measures in the village and the health authorities in the Danube delta have been put on alert,” he told a press conference.

“The virus was probably carried into Romania by migrating birds from Russia,” Flutur said.

The Romanian test results were to be sent to a European Union-approved laboratory in Britain for further analysis.
breitbart.com.news

1918 Killer Flu Was From Birds, Shares H5N1 Gene Mutations
From Patricia Doyle, PhD BBC News
The Spanish flu virus that killed 50 million people in 1918-19 was probably a strain that originated in birds, research has shown. US scientists have found the 1918 virus shares genetic mutations with the bird flu virus now circulating in Asia.

Writing in Nature, they say their work underlines the threat the current strain poses to humans worldwide. A second paper in Science reveals another US team has successfully recreated the 1918 virus in mice. The virus is contained at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] under stringent safety conditions. It is hoped to carry out experiments to further understand the biological properties that made the virus so virulent.
www.nature.com

Plane Carrying Viruses Crashes in Canada

Bush Plan Shows U.S. Is Not Ready for Deadly Flu
A plan developed by the Bush administration to deal with any possible outbreak of pandemic flu shows that the United States is woefully unprepared for what could become the worst disaster in the nation’s history.

A draft of the final plan, which has been years in the making and is expected to be released later this month, says a large outbreak that began in Asia would be likely, because of modern travel patterns, to reach the United States within “a few months or even weeks.”

If such an outbreak occurred, hospitals would become overwhelmed, riots would engulf vaccination clinics, and even power and food would be in short supply, according to the plan, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The 381-page plan calls for quarantine and travel restrictions but concedes that such measures “are unlikely to delay introduction of pandemic disease into the U.S. by more than a month or two.”

Authorities briefly closed part of Penn Station on Friday and commuters headed to work under the watchful eyes of police after a newly disclosed terror threat against the New York subway system.

A discarded soda bottle filled with an unidentified green liquid was found at the station during morning rush hour, Amtrak officials said. The substance did not pose a threat to passengers and was removed for testing.
breitbart.com

Yeah I hear it’s called…Mountain Dew.

Veteran UK broadcaster Sir David Frost is to join Arabic-language TV station al-Jazeera, the network has confirmed.

Sir David is to appear on al-Jazeera International, the pan-Arab news network’s new English-language channel, due to be launched next spring.

The Qatar-based channel said Sir David, who broadcast his final Breakfast with Frost programme for the BBC in May, would be among the “key on-air talent”.

Sir David was quoted as saying he felt “excitement” about his new role.

“Most of the television I have done over the years has been aimed at British and American audiences,” he said.

“This time, while our target is still Britain and America, the excitement is that it is also the six billion other inhabitants of the globe.”
bbc.co.uk

SAN ANTONIO – This city has its critics of the war in Iraq and its angry mothers who try to shame recruiters into going home. More than anything, though, it has a powerful patriotism and a deep respect for the military life.

At a time when the divide is widening between the cities and regions that send their children to war and those that do not, San Antonio remains a ready source of what the military needs most: people.

This metropolis – the home of the Alamo and the site of an Army presence since 1845 – is a top recruiting market for every branch of the military. The Army, in particular, which has struggled to sign up new soldiers during the continuing violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, has found the San Antonio area to be a reliable and steady source of recruits.

Nationwide, every one of the Army’s 41 recruiting battalions failed to meet its recruiting goal in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, falling 7,000 soldiers short of the goal needed to refill the ranks, according to Army figures. Not since 1979 has the Army missed its annual quota by so many recruits. And yet San Antonio’s recruiters, covering the city of 1.2 million people as well as the area stretching north to Austin and south to the Mexican border, ranked first among battalions by signing up 2,118 people for active duty, 86 percent of its goal.
nytimes.com

That’s right, send the Mexicans. They do all the work here.

Britain was the principal slaving nation of the modern world. In The Empire Pays Back, a documentary broadcast by Channel 4 on Monday, Robert Beckford called on the British to take stock of this past. Why, he asked, had Britain made no apology for African slavery, as it had done for the Irish potato famine? Why was there no substantial public monument of national contrition equivalent to Berlin’s Holocaust Museum? Why, most crucially, was there no recognition of how wealth extracted from Africa and Africans made possible the vigour and prosperity of modern Britain? Was there not a case for Britain to pay reparations to the descendants of African slaves?

These are timely questions in a summer in which Blair and Bush, their hands still wet with Iraqi blood, sought to rebrand themselves as the saviours of Africa. The G8’s debt-forgiveness initiative was spun successfully as an act of western altruism. The generous Massas never bothered to explain that, in order to benefit, governments must agree to “conditions”, which included allowing profit-making companies to take over public services. This was no gift; it was what the merchant bankers would call a “debt-for-equity swap”, the equity here being national sovereignty. The sweetest bit of the deal was that the money owed, already more than repaid in interest, had mostly gone to buy industrial imports from the west and Japan, and oil from nations who bank their profits in London and New York. Only in a bookkeeping sense had it ever left the rich world. No one considered that Africa’s debt was trivial compared to what the west really owes Africa.
zmag.org

ROME – Five people, including a convicted Mafia figure, went on trial Thursday for murder in the 1982 death of the Italian financier known as “God’s banker” for his close ties with the Vatican.

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The body of Roberto Calvi was found hanging from scaffolding under London’s Blackfriars Bridge on June 18, 1982, with rocks and cash stuffed into his suit.

Although initially ruled a suicide, his family pressed for further investigation, and Italian prosecutors concluded in 2003 that he had been slain.

Calvi was a key figure in one of modern Italy’s biggest banking scandals, which involved elements of the country’s power brokers — businessmen, politicians, Masonic groups and the Vatican hierarchy.

He was found dead as his Banco Ambrosiano collapsed following the disappearance of $1.3 billion in loans the bank had provided to several dummy companies in Latin America.

The Vatican had provided letters of credit for the loans, and the Vatican’s bank agreed to pay $250 million to Ambrosiano’s creditors but denied any wrongdoing.
yahoo.com

This was the moment when, briefly, the international fascist network,the P-2 Masonic cell in Italy, Latin American death squads, the Vatican, the mafia, elements of the U.S. governmant were briefly revealed to be parts of the same many-headed dragon. What transpired after this was the collapse of the Italian government, the bankruptcy of the Continental Bank of Illinois (through which the Vatican Bank laundered $500 million worth of counterfeit Mafia bonds, and very likely, the murder of the first Pope John Paul 33 days into his reign.

I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America’s fabled “marketplace of ideas” now functions.

How many of you, I wonder, have heard a friend or a family member in the last few years remark that it’s almost as if America has entered “an alternate universe”?

I thought maybe it was an aberration when three-quarters of Americans said they believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11, 2001. But more than four years later, between a third and a half still believe Saddam was personally responsible for planning and supporting the attack.

At first I thought the exhaustive, non-stop coverage of the O.J. trial was just an unfortunate excess that marked an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. But now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time.

Are we still routinely torturing helpless prisoners, and if so, does it feel right that we as American citizens are not outraged by the practice? And does it feel right to have no ongoing discussion of whether or not this abhorrent, medieval behavior is being carried out in the name of the American people? If the gap between rich and poor is widening steadily and economic stress is mounting for low-income families, why do we seem increasingly apathetic and lethargic in our role as citizens?

On the eve of the nation’s decision to invade Iraq, our longest serving senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor asked: “Why is this chamber empty? Why are these halls silent?”

The decision that was then being considered by the Senate with virtually no meaningful debate turned out to be a fateful one. A few days ago, the former head of the National Security Agency, Retired Lt. General William Odom, said, “The invasion of Iraq, I believe, will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history.”

But whether you agree with his assessment or not, Senator Byrd’s question is like the others that I have just posed here: he was saying, in effect, this is strange, isn’t it? Aren’t we supposed to have full and vigorous debates about questions as important as the choice between war and peace?
commondreams.org

Dems’ Strategy on Iraq: Hit the Gas When You Can See the Cliff Up Ahead
…The fact is, Harman’s efforts will likely be nothing but another veiled attempt by the insulated Democratic “Strategic Class” in Washington to continue perpetuating the worst right-wing lies about progressives on foreign policy. You know the lies: progressives are unpatriotic because they opposed blindly invading Iraq on the basis of what we knew were clearly fabrications; because progressives advocate for a more multilateral, cooperative foreign policy, they are weak; And because progressives want our military to actually focus on the real enemies in the War on Terror (ie. al Qaeda and the 9/11 bombers rather than Iraq and Saddam Hussein), they are not tough.

These lies, mind you, haven’t gained real traction without the help of self-destructive Democrats themselves. People like Harman, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN), and Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) have all openly reinforced these “Democrats-are-weak-on-national-security” lies in order to get themselves headlines. It is the political equivalent of saying “Thank you sir, may I have another?” instead of simply calling out the right-wing spin on progressives’ defense positions for what it is: a bunch of steaming horse manure.

And remember — America knows it is horse manure. The public opposes the war, wants an exit strategy, believes the conflict is damaging U.S. national security, and thinks the war is hurting the effort to win the War on Terror. It seems the only people who are unwilling to say that the “weak-on-national-security” line is a lie are Democrats themselves — the very people being smeared with the lie in the first place.

Instead, Democrats have refused to support legislation forcing the President to outline an exit strategy from Iraq, and have sent their top leaders out to telling the public that the party simply doesn’t need a coherent position on the War. Just see profile-in-courage Rahm Emanuel’s embarrassingly inane verbal acrobatics on Meet the Press this last week. Then, read here and here his cadre of D.C. Democratic operative friends kissing his ass for the performance and praising him as a saint as American troops are left in a violent quagmire (hmm…wonder if anyone is jonesing for a nice fat DCCC consulting contract?).

True, we shouldn’t be surprised by the “Strategic Class’s” behavior. Harman and the elitist cadre of foreign policy “experts” in D.C. are by and large people who never have to actually experience the bloody, life-and-death real-world consequences of their complicity in the neocon’s pro-war agenda. These people, who have paralyzed the party from taking an official and coherent position on the war, are the personification of the thumb-in-the-wind political prevarication that the public disdains.

But even these morally bankrupt souls have to be able to see the obvious, right? Even if they are willing to sell out America’s national security in order to feel “tough” and “strong,” at the very least shouldn’t they still respond to their own selfish electoral prospects? Can they not understand that ignoring Iraq is not only hideously heartless and woefully weak, but also politically precarious as the 2006 elections approach?