KIEV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko fired his government Thursday, saying the abrupt action was motivated by an absence of team spirit among Cabinet members and other top aides.

Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s fragile coalition of former opposition leaders fell amid the greatest crisis to face Yushchenko in his seven months in power.
nytimes.com

So much for the bogus “orange revolution.”

New York Times: Infection, Stroke
JERUSALEM, Sept. 7 – The medical records of Yasir Arafat, which have been kept secret since his unexplained death last year at a French military hospital, show that he died from a stroke that resulted from a bleeding disorder caused by an unidentified infection.

The first independent review of the records, obtained by The New York Times, suggests that poisoning was highly unlikely and dispels a rumor that he may have died of AIDS. Nonetheless, the records show that despite extensive testing, his doctors could not determine the underlying infection.

Arafat seemed frail in his final months but not, by anyone’s account, at death’s door when he suddenly fell ill last October. After more than two weeks without improvement, he was airlifted to a French hospital, where he died on Nov. 11. The cause of death was never announced and speculation has remained rife.
nytimes.com

Haaretz (Jerusalem): AIDS, poisoning
An analysis of the confidential medical report on Yasser Arafat’s death reveals three main possibilities as to the cause: poisoning, AIDS or an infection.

Israel and foreign doctors who have seen the report say the details do not lead to a conclusive determination on what caused the death.

After Arafat died on November 11, 2004 at a military hospital in Paris, copies of the pathology report compiled by the hospital staff – and kept under wraps until now – were handed over to Arafat’s widow, Suha, and senior Palestinian Authority officials. The report’s findings are now being published for the first time in the revised edition of “The Seventh War” by journalists Amos Harel and Avi Isacharoff, to be released next week by Yedioth Ahronoth in Hebrew.

The report does not lift the veil of mystery surrounding Arafat’s death entirely: It lists the immediate cause of death as a massive brain hemorrhage, but adds that “a discussion among a large number of medical experts… shows that it is impossible to pinpoint a cause that will explain the combination of symptoms that led to the death of the patient.”

Dr. Ashraf al-Kurdi, Arafat’s personal physician who played no part in the late PA chairman’s medical care during the final weeks of his life, said that he knows that the French doctors found the AIDS virus in Arafat’s blood. Al-Kurdi refuses to divulge the source of this information, but claims that the virus was put into Arafat’s blood in an effort to blur the traces of poisoning, which was the cause of death.

Most senior Palestinian officials, including Mohammed Dahlan and Jibril Rajoub, have said in interviews with the book’s authors that they are convinced Arafat was poisoned by Israel. The Palestinians mention Israel’s assassination attempt by means of poison on Hamas leader Khaled Meshal in Amman in 1997. According to the officials, Arafat was not sufficiently cautious and could easily have been poisoned, because he would receive candies and medicines from visitors and consume them without medical supervision.
haaretz.com

by Priyamvada Gopal
A few years ago, Tony Blair termed the state of Africa a ‘scar on the world’s conscience’. It was not the first time that the dubious honour of being a moral touchstone had been conferred upon the continent. By the late 19th century too, Africa was the foil for various European crises of conscience even as major European powers were busy consolidating colonial regimes across large swathes of the globe. In his remarkable book, King Leopold’s Ghost (1999), which chronicles the brutalities of the Belgian monarch’s venal reign over the Congo, Adam Hochschild has shown how British popular outrage over extreme degradation ‘elsewhere’ could serve to normalize injustices at home and in Britain’s own colonies. Interestingly, Leopold had undertaken his own violent expropriation of the Congo’s land and natural resources by establishing humanitarian bodies such as the ‘International Africa Association’, whipping up righteous European indignation at ‘Arab slave traders.’ He had his celebrity allies, like the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who extolled the ‘wisdom and goodness’ of Leopold’s ostensibly humanitarian reign which also came to be known as the ‘rubber terror’ during which thousands of Africans were forced into servitude, maimed and killed to feed Europe’s hunger for the newly discovered material.

Despite a shared penchant for self-regarding moralism and for all the unconscionable bloodletting that he has sponsored in Iraq—which now rebounds on British civilians (most of whom opposed the invasion)—Tony Blair is no Leopold. But the two historical moments have something in common. Then as now, the technology of modern warfare was used to help ‘civilisation overcome barbarism’. It was then too that international humanitarian crusades came to have distinct political uses. Firstly, vast tracts of African or Asian land and resources come under indirect or direct command of the benefactor nations. An equally significant, though less visible, fact was that the emphasis on situations of extreme degradation had the effect of minimizing other kinds of misrule and violence even within progressive quarters. For instance, remarkable activists like the intrepid E.D Morel, who founded the hugely important Congo Reform Movement to expose Leopold’s murderous reign in that region, refused to criticize Britain’s colonial practices which could also include the expropriation of resources and the use of forced labour. With scrutiny focused on material misdeeds elsewhere, Britain could function, Hochschild suggests, as a kind of new and different ‘Moral Empire.’
zmag.org

LUCKNOW, India, Sept. 7 – Government ministers descended on this storied North Indian state capital on Wednesday to kick off an ambitious rural health initiative. The city’s roads were freshly tarred, and banners hung along the main boulevard to welcome its chief guest: former President Bill Clinton.

All were victims of the viral disease known as Japanese encephalitis, which causes high fever, aches, eventual coma and often death. It has struck this region with a particular fury this year, shining a harsh light on India’s inability to halt an entirely preventable disease that has killed or stunted some of its most vulnerable citizens for the last quarter-century – the young rural poor.

The director general of the state government’s health department said Wednesday that since July 1 the death toll had reached nearly 500, and those were only cases reported to government hospitals across the state. Reuters on Wednesday gave a figure of 600.

More than 1,500 suspected cases of Japanese encephalitis have been reported so far, according to the state.
nytimes.com

LONDON (Reuters) – Global warming is causing soil to release huge amounts of carbon, making efforts to fight global warming tougher than previously thought, scientists said on Wednesday.

A study in the journal Nature looked at the carbon content of soil in England and Wales from 1978-2003 and found that it fell steadily, with some 13 million tonnes of carbon released from British soil each year.

The team from Britain’s National Soil Resources Institute at Cranfield University said its results implied a similar process would be under way in other temperate areas across the globe.

“Our findings suggest the soil part of the equation is scarier than we had thought,” Professor Guy Kirk, of Cranfield University, told journalists at a science conference in Dublin. “The consequence is that there is more urgency about doing something.”

Since the carbon appeared to be released from soil regardless of how the soil was used, they concluded that the main cause must be climate change itself.

Though they could not say where all the missing carbon had gone, much of it may be entering the atmosphere as the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane, which scientists say has caused global warming.
breitbart.com

by Chris Floyd
“How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home.”
Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone”

Let’s be clear about one thing. Nothing that has happened in the past week — the mass destruction in the Mississippi Delta, the obliteration of the city of New Orleans, the murderous abandonment of thousands of people to death, chaos and disease will change the Bush Administration or American politics at all. Not one whit. The Bush Administration will not reverse its brutal policies; its Congressional rubber-stamps will not revolt against the White House; the national Democrats will not suddenly grow a spine. There will be no real change, and the bitter corrosion of injustice, indifference and inhumanity that is consuming American society will go on as before.
counterpunch.org

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – When U.S. officials asked the media not to take pictures of those killed by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, they were censoring a key part of the disaster story, free speech watchdogs said on Wednesday.

The move by the Federal Emergency Management Agency is in line with the Bush administration’s ban on images of flag-draped U.S. military coffins returning from the Iraq war, media monitors said in separate telephone interviews.

“It’s impossible for me to imagine how you report a story whose subject is death without allowing the public to see images of the subject of the story,” said Larry Siems of the PEN American Center, an authors’ group that defends free expression.

U.S. newspapers, television outlets and Web sites have featured pictures of shrouded corpses and makeshift graves in New Orleans.

But on Tuesday, FEMA refused to take reporters and photographers along on boats seeking victims in flooded areas, saying they would take up valuable space need in the recovery effort and asked them not to take pictures of the dead.
reuters.myway.com

WASHINGTON, DC — Adding to the controversy regarding the Army Corps of Engineers diverting $250 million from the SELA (Southeast Louisiana) Urban Flood Control Program to Iraq and Halliburton reconstruction projects, is the revelation that FEMA outsourced hurricane recovery planning to the Baton Rouge-based consulting firm Innovative Emergency Management (IEM), Inc. to develop a “Catastrophic Hurricane Disaster Plan for New Orleans & Southeast Louisiana.” The award was announced on June 3, 2004 on the firm’s web site but was taken down just as Hurricane Katrina’s winds and waves first started pounding New Orleans. It would now appear that the hurricane plan IEM and its team developed wasn’t worth a damned thing.

IEM’s team partners for the more than $500,000 contract are Dewberry of Arlington, VA, URS Corporation of San Francisco, and James Lee Witt Associates. Witt was FEMA Director under Bill Clinton. IEM’s president is Madhu Beriwal. The company was founded in 1985. Dewberry and URS are engineering firms. IEM is also a Defense Department contractor and has contracts with the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) along with team members Booz Allen Hamilton and Lockheed Martin.
globalresearch.ca

Los Angeles Times
WHAT THE WORLD has witnessed this past week is an image of poverty and social disarray that tears away the affluent mask of the United States.

Instead of the much-celebrated American can-do machine that promises to bring freedom and prosperity to less fortunate people abroad, we have seen a callous official incompetence that puts even Third World rulers to shame. The well-reported litany of mistakes by the Bush administration in failing to prevent and respond to Katrina’s destruction grew longer with each hour’s grim revelation from the streets of an apocalyptic New Orleans.

Yet the problem is much deeper. For half a century, free-market purists have to great effect denigrated the essential role that modern government performs as some terrible liberal plot. Thus, the symbolism of New Orleans’ flooding is tragically apt: Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Louisiana Gov. Huey Long’s ambitious populist reforms in the 1930s eased Louisiana out of feudalism and toward modernity; the Reagan Revolution and the callousness of both Bush administrations have sent them back toward the abyss.
Full: informationclearinghouse.info

-Aaron Broussard, president Jefferson Parish council, MSNBC, TRANSCRIPT Meet the Press with Tim Russert, VIDEO: “Feds criticized for slow response,” and VIDEO: “She drowned Friday night,” September 4, 2005 (VIDEO Mirror)

“‘Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now,” he insisted. Broussard hinted that he thought President Bush should be held responsible, saying, ‘whoever is at the top of this totem pole, that totem pole needs to be chain-sawed off and we’ve got to start with some new leadership.'”
-Newsmax, “La. Official: Feds ‘Murdered’ Flood Victims,” September 5, 2005

“Even though dry land routes exist leading out of the city, emergency officials continued to prevent able-bodied storm victims from trying to walk across the Crescent City Bridge, citing the dangers they said would be posed by an uncontrolled exit from the city. ‘The last thing we need is people walking an en masse exodus on the interstate,’ said Louisiana State Police Lt. Lawrence McLeary. ‘Number one, they could probably be in shock and need medical attention. We don’t know if they’re lawless going out of town and we don’t want them walking around wreaking havoc.'”
-James Janega and Howard Witt, “Help arrives, but many in New Orleans still wait for deliverance,” September 2, 2005

Female reporter: “Is it true that the levees were blown up on purpose?”
White House Press Bullshitter: “This is not the time or the place for questions like that!”
-Press Conference with Ex-President George Bush Sr. Sir Knight of the British Empire and Ex-President Bill Clinton-Blythe-Rockefeller IV, MSNBC Morning Show, September 5, 2005

“Repair crews have patched the ruptured levee along the 17th Street Canal and have begun pumping water from New Orleans, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Monday. Helicopters closed the approximately 300-foot breach by filling it with more than 200 15,000-pound sandbags [BUT PHOTO AND VIDEO SHOWED A SECTION LEFT OPEN]. Trucks also poured loads of fill dirt into the damaged section. Crews intentionally breached levees in St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes Monday so that water would flow back into Lake Borgne, John Rickey, a corps spokesman said.”
-CNN, “Pumps begin to drain New Orleans,” September 5, 2005 (click for satellite images of all levee breaks)
piratenews.org

Lots more quotes and full Broussard transcript here.