BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) – Iraqi’s justice minister said Tuesday that U.S. officials are trying to delay interrogations of Saddam Hussein.

Justice Minister Abdel Hussein Shandal, in Brussels for an international conference on Iraq, also accused the U.S. of concealing information about the ousted Iraqi leader.

“It seems there are lots of secrets they want to hide,” he told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview.

Shandal also said Saddam’s trial would be over by the end of the year.

American officials have privately urged caution about rushing into a trial, saying the Iraqis need to developed a solid judicial system. They also worry it could interfere with the important constitution writing process and inflame sectarian tensions.

Though Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari’s Shiite-led government is determined to put Saddam on trial, circumstances may not allow it.

His government earlier this month said Saddam’s trial would be held within two months, but later backtracked. No trial date has been set for Saddam or any of the other former regime officials being held in custody.

Saddam’s trial could be a highly divisive issue in already turbulent Iraq. If court proceedings begin in two months, they will coincide with the crucial process of drafting the constitution. The draft must be finished by mid-August and approved in a referendum two months later, clearing the way for December elections.

Saddam, 68, is still being interrogated, the justice minister said.

“The process requires collecting evidence but the rule of Saddam was for 35 years, and it needs a lot of evidence, a lot of interrogations,” he told The Associated Press.
Full: apnews.myway.com

Yes I’m sure.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Culture wars raging in the United States are reaping new victims as monster-screen IMAX cinemas and top museums are dragged into the fierce debate over the origin of life.

Pressure from ultraconservative religious groups has prompted some theaters equipped with the high quality panoramic IMAX screens to cancel showings of several movies which refer to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Some politically powerful religious groups dismiss the theory, despite its widespread acceptance throughout the rest of the world.

Instead, they advance a hypothesis that holds that the universe is so complex that it must have been designed by an “intelligent” being, i.e. God, and is not the result of random natural selection.

Many scientists have savagely attacked “intelligent design”, arguing the theory is not significantly sound, and is simply the latest political shot from religious creationists.

Since the beginning of this year, numerous movie theaters in highly religious states in the US south have refused to show documentary films like “Cosmic Voyage,” “Volcanos of the Deep Sea” and “Galapagos” named after the islands Darwin used to showcase his theory.

The films crimes? Mentioning the idea that the Universe is the product of a “Big Bang” explosion or that the origin of life is in the oceans.

“Volcanos of the Deep Sea” has prompted some radical religious conservatives to blow their own tops.

But oceanographer Richard Lutz, who collaborated on the movie, said the controversy centered on “a reference in the film that life may have originated in the deep sea.”

Lutz, a professor of Marine Ecology at Rutgers University, said he was troubled to see other film producers steer clear of scientific subjects that risk controversy and low box office receipts.

Earlier this year, the Museum of Science and History of Fort Worth, Texas, refused to show the volcano film after a screening for a test audience.

“At the time, we had better choices that scored better in our screening tests,” said Margaret Ritsch, the museum’s Director of Public Affairs.

She admitted, however, that some people had made comments about the theory of evolution.

Valentine Kass, a science education program director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) which helped finance the film, hit out at the campaign against the IMAX movie.

“It is very troubling if science museums don’t want to promote what we consider totally accepted ideas of science. It is not a positive trend at all.”

Blocking scientific movies from IMAX theaters is only one part of the creationists’ agenda; they also promote their own films that document their theory of a cosmos-crafting higher intelligence.

“The Privileged Planet: The Search for Purpose in the Universe,” is one such film, based on work by University of Iowa astronomy professor Guillermo Gonzalez.

Stirring outrage from the scientific community, the Museum of Natural History at Washington’s world-famed Smithsonian Institution agreed to show the movie.

The Smithsonian, however, was forced to issue a statement making clear that it did not consider intelligent design geled with scientific fact.

“We have determined that the content of the film is not consistent with the mission of the Smithsonian Institution’s scientific research,” the statement said.

But the Smithsonian still plans to show “Privileged Planet” as scheduled on June 23.
news.yahoo.com

Bob Geldof, take note. All the rich nations’ efforts to alleviate poverty in Africa will fail unless climate change can be checked, a coalition of British aid agencies and environment groups warns today.

More favourable arrangements for African debt relief, aid and trade – the point of the rock star’s forthcoming Live8 concerts and items on the agenda for the Gleneagles G8 summit – will count for nothing unless the effects of global warming are countered, say the development and green groups in a hard-hitting new report.

To combat climate change, rich countries must cut their greenhouse gas emissions further, far beyond the targets laid down in the Kyoto Protocol, they say. But more than that, aid policy for Africa as a whole needs a complete rethink in climate change terms, because the continent is uniquely vulnerable to climatic shifts, with 70 per cent of its people being immediately dependent on rain-fed, small-scale agriculture.

Aid needs to be targeted in a new way, they insist, and what will be vital in the future will not be big development projects, such as industrial-scale agriculture, so much as steps to make small communities more resilient in the face of potentially devastating rises in temperature or drops in rainfall.
Full: indepemdent.co.uk

LONDON – When Prime Minister Tony Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser dined with Condoleezza Rice six months after Sept. 11, the then-U.S. national security adviser didn’t want to discuss Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida. She wanted to talk about “regime change” in Iraq, setting the stage for the U.S.-led invasion more than a year later.

President Bush wanted Blair’s support, but British officials worried the White House was rushing to war, according to a series of leaked secret Downing Street memos that have renewed questions and debate about Washington’s motives for ousting Saddam Hussein.

In one of the memos, British Foreign Office political director Peter Ricketts openly asks whether the Bush administration had a clear and compelling military reason for war.

“U.S. scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qaida is so far frankly unconvincing,” Ricketts says in the memo. “For Iraq, `regime change’ does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam.”
Full: yahoo.com

This ‘news’ just keeps breaking and breaking. Maybe it is the smoking gun. Bush is expendable if he gets too unpopular. A democratic president would serve the terrible status quo just as well, and put a kinder gentler face on it. Nothing like a big impeachment trial to divert and distract.

…WHEN WILL WE GET OSAMA BIN LADEN? That is a question that goes far deeper than you know. In the chain that you need to successfully wrap up the war on terror, we have some weak links. And I find that until we strengthen all the links, we’re probably not going to be able to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice. We are making very good progress on it. But when you go to the very difficult question of dealing with sanctuaries in sovereign states, you’re dealing with a problem of our sense of international obligation, fair play. We have to find a way to work in a conventional world in unconventional ways that are acceptable to the international community.

IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU HAVE A PRETTY GOOD IDEA OF WHERE HE IS. WHERE? I have an excellent idea of where he is. What’s the next question?
Full: time.com

Me too. He’s in the palace with Prince Fahd. They’re holding hands and giving each other open mouth kisses.

LIVE 8 founder Bob Geldof is determined to see his international concerts stay focused on the plight of Africa’s poor — and not fall into cliched Bush bashing and global warming rhetoric!

Geldof has ordered show organizers and producers to redouble all efforts to keep LIVE 8 performers “on message” during the July 2 event, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

“Please remember, absolutely no ranting and raving about Bush or Blair and the Iraq war, this is not why you have been invited to appear,” Geldoff said to the manager of a top recording artist, who asked not to be identified. “We want to bring Mr. Bush in, not run him away.”

[Geldof tells next week’s TIME magazine how Bush “has actually done more than any American President for Africa.”]

“Bob wants no attention on global warming, or the war,” the manager warns, “He is very determined, he does not want to lose control of the message… But we have the most unpopular American president since Nixon, soldiers are dying… you are going to see some righteous anger on stage.”

LIVE 8 will be a series of free international concerts with unprecedented star power.

Will Smith is host of a hip-hop-heavy show in Philly with 50 Cent and P Diddy headlining; Pink Floyd and the Sex Pistols will reunite in London on the same bill as U2, Coldplay, Keane, Madonna, Elton John, Mariah Carey, Sting and Paul McCartney. Concerts will also be held in Paris, Berlin and Rome.

BBC and AOL plan live broadcast and streaming worldwide.

[FOOTNOTE: U2’s Bono has been attacked by his rock peers for associating with Bush and Blair. Fellow Irish star Sinead O’Connor says, “I think you risk losing your credibility by going to a party at Downing Street. I would draw a line at drinking wine and eating cheese with the Prime Minister.”]
Full: drudgereport.com

Even this right-wing website is amused. What a fool.

The event is intended to give residents in the town of Augsburg in south Germany, a taste of Africa with craft sellers, drummers, story tellers, music groups and food from around Africa.

But campaigners, including representative of Germany’s black community and academics, say setting it in the town’s zoo is racist.

“People are upset by the idea of placing [the festival] in a zoo between the baboons and the zebras,” said Noah So, who founded Der Braune Mob – an organisation that monitors race issues in the German media.

‘Exotic atmosphere’

“It is just not the right place to display human beings, let alone their culture,” she told the BBC’s Network Africa programme.

“There is an urge to see those who are not white as part of something exotic or romanticised.”
Noah Sow

“Two hundred years ago African people were displayed in zoos. Now we’re in 2005 and one could get the impression that nothing’s really changed.”
Full: bbc.co.uk

Yeah one could that ‘impression’ couldn’t they? And Ota Benga, a twa man from Congo, was ‘displayed’ at the World’s Fair and the Bronx Zoo in 1906.

Shortly after Bob Geldof called for a million people to converge in Edinburgh for the opening day of the G8 summit, Midge Ure, the co-organiser of Live 8, was asked if he was worried about the events being hijacked by anarchists. His response was that Live 8 was, in fact, hijacking the anarchists’ event. There is more than a little truth in this statement. What is becoming increasingly clear, however, is that Blair and Brown, in turn, are trying to do something similar with the Live 8 and Make Poverty History campaigns.

The spin surrounding the summit is beginning to appear as little more than a cynical attempt to buy off a section of what is commonly called the “global justice” or “anti-capitalist” movement by feigning serious engagement with some of its core issues: global poverty and ecological crisis.

This is the first G8 summit in the UK since the battle of Seattle, an event which brought the contemporary anti-capitalist movement into the spotlight and succeeded in breaking both the “there is no alternative” spell of neoliberalism and the “one size fits all” dogma that had plagued the old left.

This was a leaderless movement that began to talk about building diverse communities of self-determination, direct democracy and ecological sustainability. They declared: “Another world is possible.” A world, of course, free of poverty, but also one free of the G8, whose raison d’etre, after all, is to manage a system that prioritises the pursuit of private profit over people and planet. In other words, they talked about a world without capitalism.

Blair and Brown do not want a repeat of Seattle, or Genoa, or any of the other summits that have been accompanied by mass acts of disobedience. They want a stage-managed, benign spectacle, and so they play along with Live 8 and Make Poverty History, creating the world’s first “embedded” mass protest.

Blair’s wearing of the Make Poverty History wristband and Brown’s presentation of a modest new debt-relief programme (one, we might add, with stringent conditions attached) were carefully manipulated spectacles designed to obscure the fact that the G8’s policies are at the very core of the world’s problems.

While the coming together of hundreds of thousands of people for the Make Poverty History and Live 8 events certainly should be understood as a genuine expression of human solidarity, if we are serious about wanting to change the way in which the world works it is essential that we do not make poverty of history in attempting to do so.

In other words, we need to ask ourselves: who have, historically, been the agents of change? And, importantly, who has the ability to change the way in which the world works today? The answer, of course, is not Bob and Bono. But neither is it Blair and Brown. It’s ordinary, everyday people. It’s us. It’s you.
Full: guardian.co.uk

Sorry kids. If by ‘us’ you mean privileged Europeans and Americans, ‘we’ possess no such agency. The whole problem with Europe from the start has been their view that ‘the world’ is theirs to change. It’s Jean Paul Sartre’s 100th birthday. People ought to read his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and see what he learned from an African. Sartre’s preface

In the Capitol basement yesterday, long-suffering House Democrats took a trip to the land of make-believe.

They pretended a small conference room was the Judiciary Committee hearing room, draping white linens over folding tables to make them look like witness tables and bringing in cardboard name tags and extra flags to make the whole thing look official.

Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) banged a large wooden gavel and got the other lawmakers to call him “Mr. Chairman.” He liked that so much that he started calling himself “the chairman” and spouted other chairmanly phrases, such as “unanimous consent” and “without objection so ordered.” The dress-up game looked realistic enough on C-SPAN, so two dozen more Democrats came downstairs to play along.

The session was a mock impeachment inquiry over the Iraq war. As luck would have it, all four of the witnesses agreed that President Bush lied to the nation and was guilty of high crimes — and that a British memo on “fixed” intelligence that surfaced last month was the smoking gun equivalent to the Watergate tapes. Conyers was having so much fun that he ignored aides’ entreaties to end the session.

“At the next hearing,” he told his colleagues, “we could use a little subpoena power.” That brought the house down.

As Conyers and his hearty band of playmates know, subpoena power and other perks of a real committee are but a fantasy unless Democrats can regain the majority in the House. But that’s only one of the obstacles they’re up against as they try to convince America that the “Downing Street Memo” is important.

A search of the congressional record yesterday found that of the 535 members of Congress, only one — Conyers — had mentioned the memo on the floor of either chamber. House Democratic leaders did not join in Conyers’s session, and Senate Democrats, who have the power to hold such events in real committee rooms, have not troubled themselves.

The hearing was only nominally about the Downing Street Memo and its assertion that in the summer of 2002 Bush was already determined to go to war and was making the intelligence fit his case. Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador whose wife was outed as a CIA operative, barely mentioned the memo in his opening statement. Cindy Sheehan, who lost a son in Iraq, said the memo “only confirms what I already suspected.”

No matter: The lawmakers and the witnesses saw this as a chance to rally against the war. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) proclaimed it “one of the biggest scandals in the history of this country.” Conyers said the memos “establish a prima facie case of going to war under false pretenses.” Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) concluded that “the time has come to get out” of Iraq.

The session took an awkward turn when witness Ray McGovern, a former intelligence analyst, declared that the United States went to war in Iraq for oil, Israel and military bases craved by administration “neocons” so “the United States and Israel could dominate that part of the world.” He said that Israel should not be considered an ally and that Bush was doing the bidding of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

“Israel is not allowed to be brought up in polite conversation,” McGovern said. “The last time I did this, the previous director of Central Intelligence called me anti-Semitic.”

Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), who prompted the question by wondering whether the true war motive was Iraq’s threat to Israel, thanked McGovern for his “candid answer.”

At Democratic headquarters, where an overflow crowd watched the hearing on television, activists handed out documents repeating two accusations — that an Israeli company had warning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and that there was an “insider trading scam” on 9/11 — that previously has been used to suggest Israel was behind the attacks.

The event organizer, Democrats.com, distributed stickers saying “Bush lied/100,000 people died.” One man’s T-shirt proclaimed, “Whether you like Bush or not, he’s still an incompetent liar,” while a large poster of Uncle Sam announced: “Got kids? I want yours for cannon fodder.”

Conyers’s firm hand on the gavel could not prevent something of a free-for-all; at one point, a former State Department worker rose from the audience to propose criminal charges against Bush officials. Early in the hearing, somebody accidentally turned off the lights; later, a witness knocked down a flag. Matters were even worse at Democratic headquarters, where the C-SPAN feed ended after just an hour, causing the activists to groan and one to shout “Conspiracy!”

The glitches and the antiwar theatrics proved something of a distraction from the message the organizers aimed to deliver: that for the Bush White House, as lawyer John C. Bonifaz put it, the British memo is “the equivalent to the revelation that there was a taping system in the Nixon White House.”

Of course, Democrats controlled the real committees back then — though Conyers was not deterred. “We have a lot of work to do as a result of this first panel,” he told his colleagues. ” ‘Tis the beginning of our work.”
Full: washingtonpost.com

Yup those black folks down in the basement raising a ruckus. The dismissive tone of this article tries to paint this as a minstrel show farce but guess what–it is a devastating indictment of the condition of this government when the only way there can be a hearing on high crimes and misdemeanors is in a makeshift room in the basement. I guess it’s the only place in the building where a word can be said against Israel.

The deserts of north Africa are threatening to leap the Mediterranean and creep through Spain, according to government figures made public as part of a national campaign to halt desertification.
A third of the country is at risk of being turned into desert as climate change and tourism add to the effects of farming.

More than 90% of land bordering the Mediterranean from Almeria in the south to Tarragona in the north is considered to be at high risk. But that figure climbs to almost 100% in Alicante and Murcia.

Spain’s environment ministry has announced a £50m programme to combat desertification. Over-grazing and irrigation methods that wash away topsoil were to blame for some of the damage, experts said. Building developments and climate change were doing the rest.
Full:guardian.co.uk