NEW YORK (AP) — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Saturday that he would attempt to improve his relations with Washington, which have been rocky in recent months.

”Sometimes I make mistakes, I tend to respond to any official from the government of Mr. Bush who verbally attacks Venezuela,” Chavez said during a speech at a Manhattan church, his last public event in New York before heading to Cuba to meet with his close ally Fidel Castro.

Chavez said the Rev. Jesse Jackson and U.S. Rep. Jose Serrano, D-N.Y., who sat with him at the church, had advised him ”not to be provoked” by representatives of the U.S. government.
nytimes.com

Hurricane Hugo at the UN
“Practically no one in the United States knows that we’ve donated millions of dollars to the governorship of Louisiana, to the New Orleans Red Cross. We’re now giving care to more than 5,000 victims, and now we’re going to supply gasoline, freely in some cases, and with discounts in other cases, to the poorest of communities, starting with New Orleans and its surroundings… We’ve been helping. And we’ve been even rescuing people.” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez; “Nightline” with Ted Koppel, 9-16-05

Hugo Chavez’s performance at the UN was greeted with the bucket-loads of bile that one expects from America’s rightward-titling media. Washington Post hatchet-man Colum Lynch provided a typical summary of the speech by dismissing it as “a rant” from the Venezuelan “bad-boy”. But, Lynch isn’t alone in his hostility; the outpouring of venom came from all corners; appearing in many newspapers across the nation, invoking the hackneyed expressions of contempt for any foreign leader who rebuffs Washington or who follows redistributive economic policies.

…Unlike Bush, Chavez’s record is backed up by a solid performance in nearly every area of social development. Its no wonder the elitist American media, driven by their class-based ideology, has tried so desperately to discredit him.

Chavez oratory to the General Assembly will undoubtedly elevate him in the eyes of many as a serious futurist who offers genuine solutions for a war-ravaged planet. His personal fortitude and optimism are matched by his selfless conduct as President; working persistently on behalf of his people and strengthening global relations. His iconic image around the world is well deserved.

“We will fight for Venezuela, for Latin American integration and the world. We reaffirm our infinite faith in humankind. We are thirsty for peace and justice in order to survive as species… Now is the time to not allow our hands to be idle or our souls to rest until we save humanity.”

His speech was received with thunderous applause.

The United States and its allies said yesterday that they would push for a resolution critical of Iran from the United Nations nuclear monitoring agency, although the body might not refer the country to the Security Council for sanctions.

The action came a day after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran stood before the General Assembly, vowing to press ahead with a nuclear program and berating the United States and Europe for trying to interfere. Western diplomatic officials said the address had essentially played into their hands, making the monitoring body, the International Atomic Energy Agency, more likely to approve a strong resolution at its meeting, which begins today.
nytimes.com

TEL AVIV, Sept. 18 – Daniel C. Kurtzer has spent the last four years trying to represent the United States to Israel, two countries that think they understand each other.

“I think this is the most complicated, complex and politically challenging relationship of any we have in the world,” Mr. Kurtzer said. Not only do the leaders have inevitably close relations and connections that often bypass the ambassadors in Tel Aviv and Washington, “but the other country is a key factor in the domestic politics of the other.”

“The sense of intimacy at the top tends to make it challenging for both the ambassador in Washington and here to stay in the game and manage the policy flow,” Mr. Kurtzer said in an interview last week. It can lead to misunderstandings, like the Israeli assumption that its sale of antimissile weapons to China would not really matter to the United States, which was outraged. The Middle East as an issue “has been at the nexus of the most serious foreign-policy issues of the last 25 years,” he said, so as a job, “it’s hard to do.”

By most accounts Mr. Kurtzer, an observant Orthodox Jew with close family ties to Israel, did his job well, first as ambassador to Egypt beginning in 1997 and then to Israel, beginning in July 2001, as the hopes for peace he helped nurture as part of an agreement reached in Oslo more than a decade ago crashed and burned in suicide bombings and a cycle of retaliation.

“It took him awhile to realize that Oslo was over,” said Yossi Klein Halevi, a writer for The New Republic and a senior fellow at the Shalem Center, a conservative research organization in Jerusalem. “But he proved to be a fast learner. I think he began to see the Oslo process the way most of us here had come to see it, as a disaster for Israel.”
Full: nytimes.com

That attack, and a string of others that have followed, all aimed at Shiites, have brought new vulnerability and dysfunction to the streets of Baghdad, the capital. For days, three of the four main roads leading in and out of Kadhimiya have been closed. Neighborhoods have been unusually quiet, as Shiites stay home, afraid to venture out. The violence has also reinforced a new reality of the war here: That Shiites are now paying the highest price in blood of any group in Iraq.

“Americans are not attacked anymore; it’s the Shiites who suffer from these bombings,” said a 40-year-old owner of a cigarette shop in front of the bombing site, who gave only his nickname, Abu Ali. “It is increasing now. Sometimes several in one day.”

American service members are clearly still a major target of insurgent attacks, with deaths reported every week, and the overall toll in the war nearing 2,000. But in recent months, insurgents have pointedly shifted their focus toward killing Shiite civilians, with the number of attacks on mosques, markets and populated areas rising sharply since the spring. The threat of further massacres was sharpened last week when the architect of much of the killing, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, declared a “full-scale war on Shiites all over Iraq, wherever and whenever they are found.”
nytimes.com

Has ‘al Zarqawi’s’ bio changed again? It said he fought beside bin Laden in Afrghanistan, and named his group ‘al Quaeda in Iraq’. I have to look in the archive, but isn’t ‘he’ a Shi’ite? The quotes reflect the fact that I am not at all convinced of ‘his’ existence.

If some of those who died in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have been described as stubborn holdouts who ignored an order to evacuate, then these citizens of New Orleans defy that portrait: The 16 whose bodies were wrapped in white sheets in the chapel of Memorial Medical Center. The 34 whose corpses were abandoned and floating in St. Rita’s Nursing Home. The 15 whose bodies were stored in an operating room turned makeshift morgue at Methodist Hospital.

“The statement that you can judge a society by the way it treats elders and the vulnerable is a good way to look at our society.” Alice Hedt, National Citizens’ Coalition for Nursing Home Reform executive director
The count does not stop there. Of the dead collected so far in the New Orleans area, more than a quarter of them, or at least 154, were patients, mostly elderly, who died in hospitals or nursing homes, according to interviews with officials from 8 area hospitals and 26 nursing homes. By the scores, people without choice of whether to leave or stay perished in New Orleans, trapped in health care facilities and in many cases abandoned by their would-be government rescuers.

Heroic efforts by doctors and nurses across the city prevented the toll from being vastly higher. Yet the breadth of the collapse of one of society’s most basic covenants – to care for the helpless – suggests that the elderly and critically ill plummeted to the bottom of priority lists as calamity engulfed New Orleans.
nytimes.com

…The minister for constitutional affairs, Harriet Harman, agreed that some of Britain’s black and poor communities were beginning to resemble those in the US.

“We don’t want to get into a situation like America – but if you look at the figures we are already looking like America,” she told the Independent. “In London, poor, young and black people don’t register to vote.”

Among the measures Mr Phillips will suggest is for “white” schools to be forced to take larger numbers of ethnic minority pupils to aid integration.

Mr Phillips admits his message is “bleak”, but says the UK must heed the lessons of Hurricane Katrina.

“The fact is that we are a society which – almost without noticing it – is becoming more divided by race and religion,” he will say.

Some districts are on their way to “literal black holes into which nobody goes without fear and trepidation and from which nobody ever escapes undamaged”.

He will warn that this situation risks culminating in a “New Orleans-style Britain of passively coexisting ethnic and religious communities, eyeing each other over the fences of our differences”.

In his assessment of the UK following the July 7 terror attacks on London, Mr Phillips will add: “We are sleepwalking our way to segregation.

“We are becoming strangers to each other and leaving communities to be marooned outside the mainstream.”
guardian.co.uk

“Literal black holes…”

Your Excellencies, friends, good afternoon:

The original purpose of this meeting has been completely distorted. The imposed center of debate has been a so-called reform process that overshadows the most urgent issues, what the peoples of the world claim with urgency: the adoption of measures that deal with the real problems that block and sabotage the efforts made by our countries for real development and life.

Five years after the Millennium Summit, the harsh reality is that the great majority of estimated goals- which were very modest indeed- will not be met.

We pretended reducing by half the 842 million hungry people by the year 2015. At the current rate that goal will be achieved by the year 2215. Who in this audience will be there to celebrate it? That is only if the human race is able to survive the destruction that threats our natural environment.

We had claimed the aspiration of achieving universal primary education by the year 2015. At the current rate that goal will be reached after the year 2100. Let us prepare, then, to celebrate it.

Friends of the world, this takes us to a sad conclusion: The United Nations has exhausted its model, and it is not all about reform. The XXI century claims deep changes that will only be possible if a new organization is founded. This UN does not work. We have to say it. It is the truth. These transformations – the ones Venezuela is referring to- have, according to us, two phases: The immediate phase and the aspiration phase, a utopia. The first is framed by the agreements that were signed in the old system. We do not run away from them. We even bring concrete proposals in that model for the short term. But the dream of an ever-lasting world peace, the dream of a world not ashamed by hunger, disease, illiteracy, extreme necessity, needs-apart from roots- to spread its wings to fly. We need to spread our wings and fly. We are aware of a frightening neoliberal globalization, but there is also the reality of an interconnected world that we have to face not as a problem but as a challenge. We could, on the basis of national realities, exchange knowledge, integrate markets, interconnect, but at the same time we must understand that there are problems that do not have a national solution: radioactive clouds, world oil prices, diseases, warming of the planet or the hole in the ozone layer. These are not domestic problems. As we stride toward a new United Nations model that includes all of us when they talk about the people, we are bringing four indispensable and urgent reform proposals to this Assembly: the first; the expansion of the Security Council in its permanent categories as well as the non permanent categories, thus allowing new developed and developing countries as new permanent and non permanent categories. The second; we need to assure the necessary improvement of the work methodology in order to increase transparency, not to diminish it. The third; we need to immediately suppress- we have said this repeatedly in Venezuela for the past six years- the veto in the decisions taken by the Security Council, that elitist trace is incompatible with democracy, incompatible with the principles of equality and democracy.
And the fourth; we need to strengthen the role of the Secretary General; his/her political functions regarding preventive diplomacy, that role must be consolidated. The seriousness of all problems calls for deep transformations. Mere reforms are not enough to recover that “we” all the peoples of the world are waiting for. More than just reforms we in Venezuela call for the foundation of a new United Nations, or as the teacher of Simón Bolívar, Simón Rodríguez said: “Either we invent or we err.”

At the Porto Alegre World Social Forum last January different personalities asked for the United Nations to move outside the United States if the repeated violations to international rule of law continue. Today we know that there were never any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The people of the United States have always been very rigorous in demanding the truth to their leaders; the people of the world demand the same thing. There were never any weapons of mass destruction; however, Iraq was bombed, occupied and it is still occupied. All this happened over the United Nations. That is why we propose this Assembly that the United Nations should leave a country that does not respect the resolutions taken by this same Assembly. Some proposals have pointed out to Jerusalem as an international city as an alternative. The proposal is generous enough to propose an answer to the current conflict affecting Palestine. Nonetheless, it may have some characteristics that could make it very difficult to become a reality. That is why we are bringing a proposal made by Simón Bolívar, the great Liberator of the South, in 1815. Bolívar proposed then the creation of an international city that would host the idea of unity.

We believe it is time to think about the creation of an international city with its own sovereignty, with its own strength and morality to represent all nations of the world. Such international city has to balance five centuries of unbalance. The headquarters of the United Nations must be in the South.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are facing an unprecedented energy crisis in which an unstoppable increase of energy is perilously reaching record highs, as well as the incapacity of increase oil supply and the perspective of a decline in the proven reserves of fuel worldwide. Oil is starting to become exhausted.

For the year 2020 the daily demand for oil will be 120 million barrels. Such demand, even without counting future increments- would consume in 20 years what humanity has used up to now. This means that more carbon dioxide will inevitably be increased, thus warming our planet even more.

Hurricane Katrina has been a painful example of the cost of ignoring such realities. The warming of the oceans is the fundamental factor behind the demolishing increase in the strength of the hurricanes we have witnessed in the last years. Let this occasion be an outlet to send our deepest condolences to the people of the United States. Their people are brothers and sisters of all of us in the Americas and the rest of the world.

It is unpractical and unethical to sacrifice the human race by appealing in an insane manner the validity of a socioeconomic model that has a galloping destructive capacity. It would be suicidal to spread it and impose it as an infallible remedy for the evils which are caused precisely by them.

Not too long ago the President of the United States went to an Organization of American States’ meeting to propose Latin America and the Caribbean to increase market-oriented policies, open market policies-that is neoliberalism- when it is precisely the fundamental cause of the great evils and the great tragedies currently suffered by our people. : The neoliberal capitalism, the Washington Consensus. All this has generated is a high degree of misery, inequality and infinite tragedy for all the peoples on his continent.

What we need now more than ever Mr. President is a new international order. Let us recall the United Nations General assembly in its sixth extraordinary session period in 1974, 31 years ago, where a new International Economic Order action plan was adopted, as well as the States Economic Rights and Duties Charter by an overwhelming majority, 120 votes for the motion, 6 against and 10 abstentions. This was the period when voting was possible at the United Nations. Now it is impossible to vote. Now they approve documents such as this one which I denounce on behalf of Venezuela as null, void and illegitimate. This document was approved violating the current laws of the United Nations. This document is invalid! This document should be discussed; the Venezuelan government will make it public. We cannot accept an open and shameless dictatorship in the United Nations. These matters should be discussed and that is why I petition my colleagues, heads of states and heads of governments, to discuss it.

I just came from a meeting with President Néstor Kirchner and well, I was pulling this document out; this document was handed out five minutes before- and only in English- to our delegation. This document was approved by a dictatorial hammer which I am here denouncing as illegal, null, void and illegitimate.

Hear this, Mr. President: if we accept this, we are indeed lost. Let us turn off the lights, close all doors and windows! That would be unbelievable: us accepting a dictatorship here in this hall.

Now more than ever- we were saying- we need to retake ideas that were left on the road such as the proposal approved at this Assembly in 1974 regarding a New Economic International Order. Article 2 of that text confirms the right of states to nationalizing the property and natural resources that belonged to foreign investors. It also proposed to create cartels of raw material producers. In the Resolution 3021, May, 1974, the Assembly expressed its will to work with utmost urgency in the creation of a New Economic International Order based on- listen carefully, please- “the equity, sovereign equality, interdependence, common interest and cooperation among all states regardless of their economic and social systems, correcting the inequalities and repairing the injustices among developed and developing countries, thus assuring present and future generations, peace, justice and a social and economic development that grows at a sustainable rate.”

The main goal of the New Economic International Order was to modify the old economic order conceived at Breton Woods.

We the people now claim- this is the case of Venezuela- a new international economic order. But it is also urgent a new international political order. Let us not permit that a few countries try to reinterpret the principles of International Law in order to impose new doctrines such as “pre-emptive warfare.” Oh do they threaten us with that pre-emptive war! And what about the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine? We need to ask ourselves. Who is going to protect us? How are they going to protect us?

I believe one of the countries that require protection is precisely the United States. That was shown painfully with the tragedy caused by Hurricane Katrina; they do not have a government that protects them from the announced nature disasters, if we are going to talk about protecting each other; these are very dangerous concepts that shape imperialism, interventionism as they try to legalize the violation of the national sovereignty. The full respect towards the principles of International Law and the United Nations Charter must be, Mr. President, the keystone for international relations in today’s world and the base for the new order we are currently proposing.

It is urgent to fight, in an efficient manner, international terrorism. Nonetheless, we must not use it as an excuse to launch unjustified military aggressions which violate international law. Such has been the doctrine following September 11. Only a true and close cooperation and the end of the double discourse that some countries of the North apply regarding terrorism, could end this terrible calamity.

In just seven years of Bolivarian Revolution, the people of Venezuela can claim important social and economic advances.

One million four hundred and six thousand Venezuelans learned to read and write. We are 25 million total. And the country will-in a few days- be declared illiteracy-free territory. And three million Venezuelans, who had always been excluded because of poverty, are now part of primary, secondary and higher studies.

Seventeen million Venezuelans-almost 70% of the population- are receiving, and for the first time, universal healthcare, including the medicine, and in a few years, all Venezuelans will have free access to an excellent healthcare service. More thatn a million seven hundred tons of food are channeled to over 12 million people at subsidized prices, almost half the population. One million gets them completely free, as they are in a transition period. More than 700 thousand new jobs have been created, thus reducing unemployment by 9 points. All of this amid internal and external aggressions, including a coup d’etat and an oil industry shutdown organized by Washington. Regardless of the conspiracies, the lies spread by powerful media outlets, and the permanent threat of the empire and its allies, they even call for the assassination of a president. The only country where a person is able to call for the assassination of a head of state is the United States. Such was the case of a Reverend called Pat Robertson, very close to the White House: He called for my assassination and he is a free person. That is international terrorism!

We will fight for Venezuela, for Latin American integration and the world. We reaffirm our infinite faith in humankind. We are thirsty for peace and justice in order to survive as species. Simón Bolívar, founding father of our country and guide of our revolution swore to never allow his hands to be idle or his soul to rest until he had broken the shackles which bound us to the empire. Now is the time to not allow our hands to be idle or our souls to rest until we save humanity.
Translated by Néstor Sánchez
informationclearinghouse.info

UNITED NATIONS – Iran’s president proclaimed his country’s “inalienable right” to produce nuclear fuel Saturday, defiantly rejecting a European offer of economic incentives if the Mideast nation would halt its uranium enrichment program.

In a fiery speech to the U.N. General Assembly, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denied his nation had any intention of producing nuclear weapons. To prove that, he offered foreign countries and companies a role in Iran’s nuclear energy production.

The Iranian leader lashed out at the United States for its insistence on keeping its nuclear weapons even as it rejected Iran’s efforts to build a peaceful energy program.

He said Iran has a right to produce nuclear fuel under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and implicitly accused the Europeans and Americans of “misrepresenting” Iran’s desire for civilian nuclear energy “as the pursuit of nuclear weapons.”

“This is nothing more than a pure propaganda ploy,” he said.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran reiterates its previously and repeatedly declared position that in accordance with our religious principles, pursuit of nuclear weapons is prohibited,” Ahmadinejad said.

The Europeans and Americans have argued that Iran doesn’t need to enrich uranium because it can obtain it from other countries, but Ahmadinejad said “the peaceful use of nuclear energy without a fuel cycle is an empty proposition.”

To reassure the international community of Iran’s peaceful intentions, Ahmadinejad said his government is prepared to take “the most far reaching step outside the requirements of the NPT… in keeping with Iran’s inalienable right to have access to a nuclear fuel cycle.”

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, has already installed cameras to monitor Iran’s nuclear activities, he said.

As a further “confidence building measure and in order to provide the greatest degree of transparency the Islamic Republic of Iran is prepared to engage in serious partnership with private and public sectors of other countries in the implementation of uranium enrichment programs in Iran,” he said.
news.yahoo.com

A hunger strike at the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has unsettled senior commanders there and produced the most serious challenge yet to the military’s effort to manage the detention of hundreds of terrorism suspects, lawyers and officials say.

As many as 200 prisoners – more than a third of the camp – have refused food in recent weeks to protest conditions and prolonged confinement without trial, according to the accounts of lawyers who represent them. While military officials put the number of those participating at 105, they acknowledge that 20 of them, whose health and survival are being threatened, are being kept at the camp’s hospital and fed through nasal tubes and sometimes given fluids intravenously.

The military authorities were so concerned about ending a previous strike this summer that they allowed the establishment of a six-member prisoners’ grievance committee, lawyers said. The committee, a sharp departure from past practice in which camp authorities refused to cede any control or role to the detainees, was quickly ended, the lawyers say.
nytimes.com

Sept. 15, 2005 — It could kill a billion people worldwide, make ghost towns out of parts of major cities, and there is not enough medicine to fight it. It is called the avian flu.

This week, the U.S. government agreed to stockpile $100 million worth of a still-experimental vaccine, while at the United Nations Summit in New York, both the head of the U.N. World Health Organization and President Bush warned of the virus’ deadly potential.

“We must also remain on the offensive against new threats to public health, such as the Avian influenza,” Bush said in his speech to world leaders. “If left unchallenged, the virus could become the first pandemic of the 21st century.”

According to Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Bush’s call to remain on the offensive has come too late.
abcnews.go.com