Three Chicago-area children have died of a toxic shock syndrome-like illness caused by a superbug they caught in the community and not in the hospital, where the germ is usually found.

The cases show that this already worrisome staph germ has become even more dangerous by acquiring the ability to cause this shock-like condition.

“There’s a new kid on the block,” said Dr. John Bartlett of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, referring to the added strength of the superbug known as methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.

“The fact that there are three community-acquired staph aureus cases is really scary,” continued Bartlett, an infectious disease specialist.
abcnews.go.com

t has long been an article of faith among America’s senior policymakers — Democrats and Republicans alike — that military force is an effective tool for ensuring control over foreign sources of oil. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first president to embrace this view, in February 1945, when he promised King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia that the United States would establish a military protectorate over his country in return for privileged access to Saudi oil — a promise that continues to govern U.S. policy today. Every president since Roosevelt has endorsed this basic proposition, and has contributed in one way or another to the buildup of American military power in the greater Persian Gulf region.

American presidents have never hesitated to use this power when deemed necessary to protect U.S. oil interests in the Gulf. When, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the first President Bush sent hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia in August 1990, he did so with absolute confidence that the application of American military power would eventually result in the safe delivery of ever-increasing quantities of Middle Eastern oil to the United States. This presumption was clearly a critical factor in the younger Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in March 2003.

Now, more than two years after that invasion, the growing Iraqi quagmire has demonstrated that the application of military force can have the very opposite effect: It can diminish — rather than enhance — America’s access to foreign oil.
commondreams.org

The motivation for Iraq’s invasion was not primarily oil.

Lawmaker Cautions Against Eminent Domain in Rebuilding
Maxine Waters Sees Threat to Poor Blacks in New Orleans
by Carolyn Lochhead

WASHINGTON – Rep. Maxine Waters, a Los Angeles Democrat, warned Tuesday against using government’s power of eminent domain to redevelop New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina concentrated its devastation on largely poor African American neighborhoods.

“We have to watch the redevelopment in New Orleans for a lot of reasons, and one of them is to make sure that the shadow government of the rich and the powerful does not end up abusing eminent domain to take property that belongs to poor people in order to get them out of the city.”

Waters’ comments came after the Senate Judiciary Committee held its first hearing on legislation to cut off federal funding for cities that use eminent domain to condemn private property for economic redevelopment, including such private uses as shopping malls, hotels and condominiums.

Congress is searching for ways to blunt the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in June in Kelo vs. New London, Conn., which held that governments can condemn private property if the project serves a “public purpose.”

The decision created a public uproar and a rare alliance of conservative and liberal lawmakers, many of them minorities, concerned about government incursions on private property.
commondreams.com

NEW ORLEANS – Searchers looking for bodies smashed into homes that had been locked or submerged under Hurricane Katrina’s highest floodwaters, pushing the overall body count past 1,000 as another hurricane threatens to prolong the hunt for the dead.

The death toll in Louisiana stood at 799 on Wednesday, an increase of 153 since the weekend and nearly 80 percent of the 1,036 deaths attributed to Katrina across the Gulf Coast region. Officials said the effort could last another four to six weeks.

“There still could be quite a few, especially in the deepest flooded areas,” said U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Jeffrey Pettitt. “Some of the houses, they haven’t been in yet.”
news.yahoo.com

by Phil Toler
No matter how they spin it, the red-handed nabbing of two British agents-provocateurs in Basra will lift the veil of deceit that has cloaked the otherwise unexplainable internecine attacks between Sunnis and Shi’ites. The long-held Israeli/Neocon goal has been to break up Iraq, among other Arab states, into more easily managed Bantustans. The obvious fault lines among the Sunni, Shia, and Kurd communities made Wolfowitz believe achieving the goal would be a cakewalk. It wasn’t the toppling of Saddam he was talking about, you see, and all those terrible ‘mistakes’ made by Proconsuls Garner and Bremmer were as carefully calculated as the rest of this bloody farce.

What happened in Basra, from the Iraqi standpoint — which is all that matters now that the end-game approacheth — is that two Brits in robes were driving a civilian car packed with explosives. Their mission was to throw a heavy distraction at the Shia militias who were quite upset that three of their chiefs were taken captive by the Brits. They sought to blow up a huge bomb in the busy marketplace, with the obvious blame pointing to Sunnis. But, as often happens with such false flag tactics, they backfired.

Now, those in the Shi’ite community who favor the withdrawal of the occupation troops, sidelined only by their apparent power grab in the elections, are smelling the salts of reality and will come out of their stupor to realize the Yanks have screwed them yet again. They’ll go back to the bloody beginning, say, to the massive bombing of the UN Headquarters in Baghdad, and recalculate. They know they weren’t responsible, and it will dawn on them that the ‘coalition’ had far more to gain from the routing of the international body, such as it is, than the ‘dead-enders’ in the Sunni Community. Same goes for the Jordanian Embassy, the scores of journalists, the mosque bombings, and virtually all of the so-called suicide bombers. These actions all had the effect of fomenting civil war with the Kurds, who are heavily backed by the Israelis, being the only local party to gain from the mayhem.

Early in the war, there were reports of Iraqi men being detained by occupation authorities for several hours while they were interrogated and had their vehicles ‘searched’. The were released on the condition they must go to a specific police station to pick up their papers, or some such necessity. Fortunately, a lucky few discovered by happenstance that explosives had been placed in their vehicle with the purpose remote detonation at whatever destination they were directed to. Apparently the trick still works, because the rash of ‘suicide’ car bombings is unceasing.

But back to Basra. The Yanks have to placate the Shia — at least enough to feel secure that they will not be overwhelmed from the rear, the only point of escape if such becomes necessary. It was the only reason elections were held in a way that would guarantee nominal Shia control of the ‘government’. But, perhaps with Iran’s nominal assistance, the Shia began to look for proof of coalition involvement in acts that really only benefit the coalition. Hence the capture of the two Brit operatives en flagrante. You can ignore comfortably British claims their disguised boys were just surveying suspected militants. If that was their true mission, why would they shoot up the Iraqi police who stopped them, and why would storming of the police station occur before negotiations could produce the soldiers’ release with far less hoopla? More crucial, why would the usually calm city of Basra erupt in such rage? Perhaps they’re feeling the twisting Yankee knife in their backs yet again.

As for the other predictions I have made, the potential for economic collapse has been virtually guaranteed by Katrina and her sibling, Rita, which is poised to take out the drilling platforms Katrina missed. Throw in further damage to refineries, and they’re going to have to retrofit the nation’s gas pumps to accommodate triple digit fill-ups. Toss in roughly the cost of another Iraqi war, which has quietly surpassed the Vietnam debacle in one third less time, to sop out the pork to Halliburton and the like for hurricane cleanup, and it’s clear the numbers in the debit column will overwhelm real American assets to back them up. It’s all blue sky from here on out, baby.

As for the growth of doubts about the official legend of 9/11, a former Bush official has bluntly stated that the WTC buildings were brought down by explosives, and it is reported that the probe into the outed CIA asset has begun to sniff at the edges of the strange anomalies for which no answer has been given. And this is the real danger for the Neocons, the only thing that could conceivably bring down the Bush administration, or lead to unabashed martial law so that all would know the color of their true designs. In this regard, America will collapse from the rot within and on a schedule that resembles the famously aggressive Spartans far more than Britain or Rome.

Enjoy your Fall, folks, I’ve got to go stock the storm shelter.
axisoflogic.com

Hundreds of policemen and civilians marched in Basra yesterday denouncing “British aggression” in the raid to free the two undercover soldiers arrested by Iraqi police on Monday.
The protesters, some carrying handguns and AK-47s, chanted “No to occupation” and waved banners calling for the two men be tried as terrorists. Soldiers and armed police watched the march but did not intervene.

Senior aides to Moqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi militia were at the heart of Monday’s events, hit back at what they said were “distortions and nonsense” designed to discredit the firebrand cleric. “What is all this talk of infiltration of the police and destabilisation of Basra by supporters of Moqtada?” asked Abbas al-Rubaei, a spokesman for Mr Sadr in Sadr city in eastern Baghdad.

“The real problem of stability in Basra was the fact that British forces attacked a police station and in doing so released 150 Salafists [Sunni militants] on to the streets.” He was referring to reports, denied by British forces, that 150 prisoners escaped when British tanks demolished a prison wall to rescue the two men.
guardian.co.uk

Fake Terrorism Is a Coalition’s Best Friend
The story sounds amazing, almost fantastical.

A car driving through the outskirts of a besieged city opens fire on a police checkpoint, killing one. In pursuit, the police surround and detain the drivers and find the vehicle packed with explosives – perhaps part of an insurgent’s plan to destroy lives and cripple property. If that isn’t enough, when the suspects are thrown in prison their allies drive right up to the walls of the jail, break through them and brave petroleum bombs and burning clothes to rescue their comrades. 150 other prisoners break free in the ensuing melee.

Incredible, no? Yet this story took place in the southern Iraqi city of Basra recently. Violence continues to escalate in the breakout’s aftermath… just not for the reasons you think.

You see, the drivers of the explosive-laden car were not members of an insurgency group – they were British Special Forces. Their rescuers? British soldiers driving British tanks.

BAGHDAD, Iraq – About 500 civilians and policemen, some waving pistols and AK-47s, rallied Wednesday in the southern city of Basra and denounced “British aggression” following London’s decision to use force to free two of its soldiers being held by Iraqi police.

Attacks by insurgents continued in and around Baghdad, with a roadside bomb wounding two U.S. soldiers. The blast came a day after the death toll for U.S. forces in Iraq rose to more than 1,900.

The demonstrators in Basra shouted “No to occupation!” and carried banners condemning “British aggression and demanding the freed soldiers be tried in an Iraqi court as “terrorists.”

Some of the protesters met with the Basra police chief, Gen. Hassan Sawadi, to demand a British apology, said police spokesman Col. Karim al-Zaidi. Heavily armed soldiers and police watched the protest but didn’t intervene. Al-Zaidi said the demonstration was arranged by some policemen, not by the force or its commander.

Clashes between British forces and Iraqi police have killed five civilians, including two who died of their injuries Wednesday in a hospital, authorities said.

The fighting occurred Monday night when British forces used armored vehicles to storm a Basra jail and free their two soldiers who had been arrested by police. During the raid, British forces learned that Shiite Muslim militiamen and police had moved the men to a nearby house. The British then stormed that house and rescued them.

Interior Minister Bayan Jabr disputed the British account. He told the British Broadcasting Corp. the two soldiers never left police custody or the jail, were not handed to militants, and that the British army acted on a “rumor” when it stormed the jail.

Britain defended its action, saying the men were first stopped by plainclothes gunmen, then moved by militiamen from a jail to a private home while British officials tried to negotiate their release with Iraqi officials.

Lisa Glover, a British Foreign Office spokeswoman in Baghdad, said Wednesday the two soldiers “were challenged by armed men in plain clothes … and they obviously didn’t know who there were being challenged by.” But “when Iraqi police asked them to stop, they did,” she said in an interview with The Associated Press.

She said British officials had been negotiating with Iraqi authorities in Basra for the release of the two soldiers with an Iraqi judge present. “When it became apparent they were no longer at the station, but had been moved elsewhere, we naturally became concerned.”

British Defense Minister John Reid said his forces were “absolutely right” to act. A spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said the operation was “very unfortunate.”

“At this time, where there are forces in Basra and all over Iraq, such things are expected to happen,” al-Jaafari said after talks with Reid in London. “As for us, it will not affect the relationship between Iraq and Britain, and we hope that together we will reach … the truth of the matter.”

Reid said “there has not been a fundamental breakdown in trust between the British government and the Iraqi government,” and he vowed British troops would stay in Iraq until the country was stable. “We will not cut and run and we will not leave the job half done,” Reid said.

After British armored vehicles stormed the jail to free two commandos, National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie said the operation was “a violation of Iraqi sovereignty.”

Al-Jaafari’s office in Baghdad issued a statement Tuesday afternoon, insisting there is no crisis in relations between the two countries.

At first, Basra police said the men shot and killed a policeman, but on Tuesday al-Jaafari’s spokesman, Haydar al-Abadi, said the men — who were wearing civilian clothes — were grabbed for behaving suspiciously and collecting information.

The British said the soldiers had been handed over to a militia. The Basra governor confirmed the claim, saying the Britons were in the custody of the al-Mahdi Army, the militia controlled by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

“The two British were being kept in a house controlled by militiamen when the rescue operation took place,” said Gov. Mohammed al-Waili.

“Police who are members of the militia group took them to a nearby house after jail authorities learned the facility was about to be stormed,” he said, demanding that the British soldiers be handed over to local authorities for trial. He would not say what charges they might face.

Britain’s position appeared to be strengthened by al-Rubaie, who acknowledged that one problem coalition forces face is that insurgents have joined the ranks of security forces.

“Iraqi security forces in general, police in particular, in many parts of Iraq, I have to admit, have been penetrated by some of the insurgents, some of the terrorists as well,” he said in an interview with the BBC on Tuesday night.

Officials in Basra, speaking on condition of anonymity because they feared for their lives, said at least 60 percent of the police force there is made up of Shiite militiamen from one of three groups: the Mahdi Army; the Badr Brigade, the armed wing of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq; and Hezbollah in Iraq, a small group based in the southern marshlands.

All militia have deep historical, religious and political ties to Iran, where many Shiite political and religious figures took refuge during the rule of Saddam Hussein.
news.yahoo.com

Nice how they add the touch about Iran at the end…

Israel is seeking to rally international support for a tough United Nations stand against Iran’s nuclear ambitions with a warning that it could have the knowledge to produce a nuclear bomb “within six months”.

As Israel tried to stiffen resolve among the members of the International Atomic Energy Agency who are meeting in Vienna, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon urged the US to take the lead in ensuring Iran was brought before the UN Security Council “as soon as possible”.

Mr Sharon told Fox News that Iran was “afraid of a Security Council meeting and sanctions that might be taken against them”.

Mr Sharon appeared to indicate that Israel was not contemplating a unilateral military strike on a nuclear plant in Iran, of the sort it carried out on the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981. While acknowledging that Israel cannot “live with” Iran as a nuclear military power, he added: “I don’t think [it] is the sole responsibility of Israel. I think this only can be an international pressure on Iran.”
independent.co.uk

Others say 6-10 years away, Israel says 6 months to ‘have the knowledge to produce a nuclear bomb’. What does that mean?

“Rogue elements” in Iraq’s police force must be rooted out, the head of the multi-national force in Basra has said.
Colonel Bill Dunham told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he wants to work with Iraqi authorities “to weed them out”.

This comes after the British Army said it had to rescue two of its soldiers after they were arrested in Basra and handed to a militant group by police.

UK defence chief John Reid is to discuss Basra tensions when he meets Iraqi prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari.

Chief of staff Col Dunham told BBC News of the need to “reinforce the good parts” of Iraq’s police service.
bbc.co.uk

Look at what this story has morphed into: ‘militant elements’ in the police force!
What about two British ‘elite special forces’ DRESSED AS ARABS IN A CAR PACKED WITH EXPLOSIVES’?? Getting set for a ‘suicide bombing’? How did the two Iraqi police end up dead? When in a spot, just flip the script and blame ‘them’. I presented the three articles from yesterday’s bog to a class and we went to town on them, especially the BBC one, with its o so civilized talk of ‘staging’ and ‘theater’ and clinical precision James Bond in and out…THEY BLEW OPEN A JAIL AND 150 PRISONERS RAN OUT! Why did they want those guys back so badly? The way they’re playing off the story here just raises suspicion that they have been caught attempting a faux-‘insurgent’ attack. If that’s not the case, why don’t they just explain? Instead they use the old strategy of blaming ‘them.’

UK Guardian:Military anger at delay to Iraq pull-out plan
Plans to withdraw substantial numbers of British troops from Iraq next month have been abandoned after the explosion of violence in Basra on Monday night. The decision has dismayed military commanders, who are concerned about growing pressure on their soldiers.

“We are not planning a withdrawal,” a senior defence source said yesterday, referring to a plan to hand over control of two southern provinces to the Iraqis.

The fragile situation in the south of the country was dramatically exposed when Iraqi police arrested two undercover British SAS soldiers on Monday and handed them over to militiamen before they were rescued. The incident came after months of concern that local security forces in the region had been infiltrated by radicals.

Both the left-wing rags, the Guardian and Independent, ran articles with the same theme: we need to get out. Another way to deflect. This particular ‘explosion of violence’ appears to have little or nothing to do with infiltration by ‘radicals’!

The New York Times take:
In Basra, the bizarre fight on Monday between some police officers and British soldiers threatened to further destabilize the region, a Shiite-dominated area that had been relatively calm but has had a surge of skirmishes among rival Shiite militias that control much of the Iraqi police and military forces there. The fight broke out when British forces attacked a police station after the detention of two British soldiers apparently disguised in local dress.

Offering new details about the incident, the British military accused the Basra police of turning over the soldiers to hostile Shiite militiamen. That action was a crucial factor in the decision to begin a rescue attempt and knock down the police station’s walls with armored vehicles, British officials said.

Pictures of the fighting included images of a British soldier aflame as he scrambled from his burning armored vehicle, and of hundreds of Iraqis throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at the troops. The British military said no soldiers were seriously wounded.

Ultimately, the two soldiers were not at the jail but were later rescued from a home in Basra, the British military said.

The governor of Basra Province, Muhammad al-Waili, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying militiamen loyal to the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr had taken custody of the soldiers because of the looming British attack on the police station. He also called for the soldiers to be handed back to the Basra authorities for trial.

This was buried deep in another story. At least they said the guys were ‘in local dress’.

Damn the blind eyes of anyone who still can’t see after Basra.

How it began:

“Two persons wearing Arab uniforms opened fire at a police station in Basra. A police patrol followed the attackers and captured them to discover they were two British soldiers,” an Interior Ministry source told Xinhua. The two soldiers were using a civilian car packed with explosives, the source said.

Here are the two while in Iraqi police custody. Reuters appended a note to each photo over the wire: “ATTENTION EDITORS – THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT REQUESTS THAT THE IDENTIFICATION OF THIS MAN IS NOT REVEALED, EITHER VIA PIXELLATION OF THEIR FACES OR BY NOT PUBLISHING THE PHOTOS.”

As you probably know, they didn’t remain in custody for long:

British forces using tanks broke down the walls of the central jail in the southern city of Basra late Monday and freed two Britons, allegedly undercover commandos, who had been arrested on charges of shooting two Iraqi policemen.

Witnesses said about 150 Iraqi prisoners also fled the jail.

Violence flared earlier in the day as demonstrators hurled stones and Molotov cocktails at British tanks; at least four people were killed.

The British Defense Ministry spun, but found it difficult to maneuver with its pants about its ankles. “We‘ve heard nothing to suggest we stormed the prison,” a defense ministry spokesman in London said. “We understand there were negotiations.” When it found some equilibrium, it changed its story to better comport with the undeniables: “We understand that the authorities ordered their release. Unfortunately they weren’t released and we became concerned for their safety and as a result a Warrior infantry fighting vehicle broke down the perimeter wall in one place.”

These hard men, likely SAS ops, must have had some stories to tell, otherwise tanks would not have negotiated their way through the prison walls of Britain’s reputed hosts so soon after their capture.

Walking into the untidied mess of this astonishing and grotesque and predictable story feels a bit like the British detective catching the killer red-handed: “Well well well, what have we here?” We have long had reason to suspect imperial instigation to Iraq’s sectarian violence, but here, as clearly as we’ve ever seen it, is the provocateur state revealed: two British “undercover soldiers” in Arab dress, caught firing upon police from a car laden with explosives. And the British government all but admitting its culpability by breaking them out of prison.

It doesn’t make sense? Only if you haven’t been paying attention. This is the subtext of the Iraq tragedy: blow up the Hajis and play the Sunnis on the Shias; create the chaos that introduces the conditions necessary for the long-game, and the long-held aspirations of the neoconservatives to divide Iraq into ethnographic bantustans.

I wonder what will be made of this story by those who think escalating bloodshed in Iraq is a measure of the failure of US policy, and not its success, and who believe black ops and false flags are figments of our paranoiac fantasies. Probably, as with so much that would bedevil their worldview if only they were intellectually honest enough to permit it, this too will be filtered out and forgotten. But our burden is we won’t forget. And damned if the Iraqis will.

A British soldier jumps from a burning tank which was set ablaze after a shooting incident in the southern Iraqi city of Basra September 19, 2005. Angry crowds attacked a British tank with petrol bombs and rocks in Basra on Monday after Iraqi authorities said they had detained two British undercover soldiers in the southern city for firing on police.
rigorouintuition.blogspot.com

Xinhua News:Iraqi police detain two British soldiers in Basra

BBC: Iraq Probe Into Soldier Incident

Looks like we might have some concrete proof that thos pesky ‘insurgents’ are US