PARIS (AP) — People screamed to be rescued from flames — some even jumped from windows — as a fire roared through a Paris hotel early Friday used by the government to house needy African families. At least 20 people were killed, half of them children, officials said.

More than 50 people were injured, 11 seriously. The fire was thought to have started in a first-floor breakfast room of the one-star Paris Opera hotel in the capital’s 9th district, a popular tourist area, fire officials said.
Full Article: nytimes.com

I guess Africans only rate one-star i.e. firetraps.

JERUSALEM, April 14 – A prominent Israeli rabbi has reversed an earlier ban and ruled that the anti-impotency drug Viagra can be made kosher for Passover, an Israeli newspaper reported Thursday.

The rabbi, Mordechai Eliahu, a former Sephardic chief rabbi, said Viagra could be taken if the pill was placed in special gelatin capsules before the weeklong observance begins April 23, The Jerusalem Post reported.
Full Article: nytimes.com

Either the administrators of New York City’s Public School 34 aren’t hip to semantics, or their most recent interpretation and application of the term “savage” is entirely incongruent to the discourse of White-patriarchal-privilege, and most specifically here, the hastening assault against the Haitian Global Community by a myriad selection of American society. For further elaboration, please see the following.

As a seasoned and rather proud cynic, there are few displays of barbarism that tweak the nerves, bring about a spat of fury, a vitriolic spasm, and what have you. Forget that last bit of deceit. In reality, all too often, I do succumb to the sexy red temptress of rage. The latest chapter of rancor and virulence proliferated by New York Public School 34’s Assistant Principle Nancy Miller and Principle Pauline Shakespeare has my bowels in fits.

“While all my city is heavy I drop elephant shit
Smeared the face of the fascist priest’s pulpit”
Zach De La Rocha

Yup.

New York’s cultural cabal stays heavy, dropping fecal matter from the fuselage of pig despotism, late-night blackface, mayoral-Mussolinism and the like; Stuka war eagles razing the Black, Brown and Migrant communities like the Ho Chi Minh trail. For the Haitian Community, Operation Phoenix leapt through McNamara’s porthole of kill-tha-gook and embedded itself within the psyche of city-commandants. Nou tout Viet Cong ­ We are all Viet Cong. Savages, in short.

Thirteen fourth grade students on public trial. The jury ­ PS34 populace. The courtroom ­ school cafeteria. The crime ­ being Haitian. In response to a classroom conflict involving two students, educational hack Nancy Miller, as white-cloaked-judge in de facto robe, sentenced the youths to public humiliation and ethnic degradation. As punishment for acting in the universal vein of childhood, she sat the children on the cafeteria floor before the student-jury, forced them to eat their lunch of rice and chicken with bare hands, subjecting them to a primary-educational-stoning, equipped with demeaning glances and ridicule per their peers. According to the “guilty” parties, Miller’s articulation was as such: “In Haiti, they treat you like animals, and I will treat you the same way here.” Yes Ms. Miller, in Haiti, they, Blancs yo (Whites / foreigners / outsiders, aka UN, U$, France, Canada, USAID, OAS, CIA, 184, Haitian Elite) do treat us as inferior peoples, acting as only savages can. We expect no less from you, you studious apprentice. Only through the lens of a dysfunctional clique of negrophobes could such a valiant people be “considered inferior.” If time travel were possible, now would be an excellent time to send message to General Le Clerc and Napoleon Bonaparte. The query: How humiliating was the serving, guerilla style in 1804?

The plot thickens. Principle Pauline Shakespeare, a sister no less ­ pause for dramatic effect, a fucking sister ­ exemplified the role of house-hand, Sanbo, McWhorter, Watts, Powell, Condoskeeza, Cosby, Blackwell; attempted a cover up, in doing so, efforting to bribe the gesticulating “savages,” rather “animals,” with ice cream. Shit, you know tha ghetto’s got sweet teeth. Miller and Shakespeare promoted the stereotype to the wrong community. In Haiti, we sharpen sugar cane stalks to pierce United Nations APV’s.
Full Article: counterpunch.org

By Maria Carrion
With his controversial past statements on the United Nations now being used as munition against his candidacy to be the United States Ambassador at the UN, President George W. Bush’s nominee John Bolton has an uphill battle in proving himself as anything but an enemy of the global body.

But at his raucous confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week, Bolton pointed to his pro-bono work on a little-known area of the world as evidence that he respects the work of the UN: Africa’s last colony, the Western Sahara. Bolton assisted former Secretary of State James Baker when his then-boss was appointed UN Special Envoy to the Western Sahara and given the task of organizing a referendum for self-determination in the territory, which has been occupied by Morocco for the past 30 years. For just a minute, Bolton put this tiny territory on the Senate’s map.

Many of the Senators attending the hearings might have never heard of the Western Sahara, a stretch of land that lies between Morocco and Mauritania. In 1975, Morocco invaded the Western Sahara following the withdrawal of Spain, its former colonial ruler. The invasion had the support of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and was facilitated by Spain with the signing of an agreement that allowed Morocco and Mauritania to take possession of the land. Mauritania later withdrew.

The brutal military invasion was followed by a repopulation campaign known as the Green March, with hundreds of thousands of Moroccan citizens moving to the area with the promise of financial aid and a better life. At the same time, almost 200,000 Sahrawis, as the natives of the land are known, were forced into exile, settling in camps in Algeria, whose government has supported them financially and militarily. Others too frail to make the long trip by foot through the Sahara Desert stayed behind in the occupied lands, creating traumatic family separations that have lasted to this day. Thousands of others were killed, disappeared or jailed, while many young men and some women joined the newly-formed Polisario Front in a war against Morocco that lasted until 1991, and that produced thousands of deaths on both sides. With US aid, Morocco built a wall ­ more like an interminable sand trench lined with over a million landmines ­ stretching for over one thousand kilometers between the occupied lands and a small part of the Western Sahara controlled by the Polisario Front, known as the “liberated zone.” Morocco refers to it as the “protective wall”; Sahrawis call it the “wall of shame.”
Full Article: counterpunch.org

Saddam Hussein’s effigy was pulled down again in Baghdad’s Firdos Square at the weekend. But unlike the made-for-TV event when US troops first entered the Iraqi capital, the toppling of Saddam on the occupation’s second anniversary was different.

Instead of being done by US marines with a few dozen Iraqi bystanders, 300,000 Iraqis were on hand. They threw down effigies of Bush and Blair as well as the old dictator, at a rally that did not celebrate liberation but called for the immediate departure of foreign troops.

For most Iraqis, with the exception of the Kurds, Washington’s “liberation” never was. Wounded national pride was greater than relief at Saddam’s departure. Iraqis were soon angered by the failure to get power and water supplies repaired, the brutality of US army tactics, and the disappearance of their country’s precious oil revenues into inadequately supervised accounts, or handed to foreigners under contracts that produced no benefits for Iraqis.

From last autumn’s disastrous attack on Falluja to the huge increase in detention without trial, the casualties go on rising. After an amnesty last summer, the numbers of “security detainees” have gone up again and reached a record 17,000.

The weekend’s vast protest shows that opposition is still growing, in spite of US and British government claims to have Iraqis’ best interests at heart. It was the biggest demonstration since foreign troops invaded.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

The man chosen by George Bush to be the new US director of national intelligence yesterday denied that he had covered up human rights abuses when he was Washington’s ambassador to Honduras.

John Negroponte came under fierce questioning from the Senate intelligence committee as his nomination for the role was considered.

The questioning coincided with the publication of diplomatic cables sent by Mr Negroponte in the 1980s which indicate that he secretly sought to undermine the peace process in central America and entertained the head of a group trying to violently overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The documents show that he sought to cover up clandestine US involvement in the war in Nicaragua.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

CHICAGO – The Secret Service sent agents to investigate a college art gallery exhibit of mock postage stamps, one depicting President Bush with a gun pointed at his head.

The exhibit, called “Axis of Evil: The Secret History of Sin,” opened last week at Columbia College in Chicago. It features stamps designed by 47 artists addressing issues such as the Roman Catholic sex abuse scandal, racism and the war in Iraq.

None of the artists is tied to the college.

Secret Service spokesman Tom Mazur would not say Tuesday whether the inquiry had been completed or whom the Secret Service had interviewed, but he said no artwork had been confiscated.

The investigation began after authorities received a call from a Chicago resident.

“We need to ensure, as best we can, that this is nothing more than artwork with a political statement,” Mazur said.
Full Article: news.yahoo.com

Well what else would it be?

MOUNT TALANG, Indonesia (AFP) – Massive quakes in Indonesia have stirred two huge volcanoes from their slumber and sent shockwaves reverberating along a vast and volatile region known as the Pacific “Ring of Fire.”

Both on land or underwater, the volatile edges of the north Pacific, bounded by the east Asian rim and the west coast of the Americas, are alive with near-constant seismic activity.

Some of the most dramatic natural disasters of recent history have happened within the Ring’s arc, which stretches from Chile, north to Alaska and then west to encompass Japan, Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands.

From the nuclear-like explosion of Krakatoa volcano off Indonesia in 1883 to the eruption of Mount St Helens in the United States in 1980, the Ring’s awesome power is legendary.

But it gained new notoriety when on December 26 last year, a massive 9.3 magnitude earthquake occurred off Indonesia unleashing tsunamis that devastated shores around the Indian Ocean, killing more than 220,000 people.
Full Article: news.yahoo.com

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The Bush administration helps the cause of Islamic terrorism by failing to engage in serious dialogue with the international community, author Salman Rushdie said on Tuesday.

Rushdie — infamous for living for years under threat of death after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1989 pronouncement that his novel “The Satanic Verses” was blasphemous — said he believes U.S. isolationism has turned not just its enemies against America, but its allies too.

“What I think plays into Islamic terrorism is … the curious ability of the current administration to unite people against it,” Rushdie told Reuters in an interview.

Rushdie said he found it striking how the “colossal sympathy” the world felt for the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has been squandered so quickly.

“It seems really remarkable that the moment you leave America … you find not just America’s natural enemies, but America’s natural allies talking in language more critical than I, in my life, have ever heard about the United States,” he said.

The novelist, born in India and raised in Britain, attributed the shift in sentiment toward the United States to the Bush administration’s “unilateralist policies” and its “unwillingness to engage with the rest of the world in a serious way.”

“This go-it-alone attitude gets people’s backs up,” he said of President Bush’s foreign policy.

LACK OF LISTENING
As president of the PEN American Center, a writers group, Rushdie helped organize an international literary festival this week in New York — an event he hopes will help restore global dialogue.

“There seems to have been a breach in our ability to listen to each other,” he said.

“It’s really important at this particular moment in the history of the world that ordinary American people should get as broad a sense of how the world is thinking.”

Such dialogue, he said, is “crucial, especially if at the political level there is a relative uninterest in maintaining that global dialogue.”

The PEN World Voices festival, from April 16-22, is set to bring more than 100 international authors to New York to participate in more than 40 events, including readings and discussions on topics from politics and literature to erotica.

The event is the first international gathering organized by PEN since 1986, when Norman Mailer headed the group.

Rushdie, who wrote an op-ed in March syndicated by The New York Times calling for less religion in politics, took Bush to task on that issue too.

“It worries me more when religious discourse becomes the language of politics,” he said. “I think it is happening a lot more here than it used to.”

Rushdie said his latest novel, “Shalimar the Clown,” will be published in September.

“I decided to murder an American ambassador,” he said of its plot, in which a U.S. envoy to India is killed after he retires to America. “It seems to be a political murder, but actually it turns out to be completely personal.”
reuters.myway.com

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia – Mekbeb Abebe Welde is the spitting image of Ethiopia’s fallen emperor, Haile Selassie. Mr. Abebe has the same pointy chin, down-turned nose and slight build. When he picks up a cup of macchiato and puts it to his lips, as he did in a local cafe the other day, he does so ever so gracefully, more like a prince than a cabdriver.

But Mr. Abebe, 33, is a cabdriver. He lives a humble life in Ethiopia’s crowded capital, scrounging to survive as so many others here do.

Still, Mr. Abebe’s friends call him “Prince” and bow down when they see him, deference that stems from more than his resemblance to the emperor. Some here think Mr. Abebe really is a son born out of wedlock to the ruler, who claimed blood ties to the biblical King Solomon.

The monarchy was wiped out in this country in 1975, after the emperor died at age 83, but everyone knows the emperor’s official kin. Mr. Abebe, on the other hand, exists in a netherworld, gossiped about, pointed at and subjected at times to angry diatribes about the emperor’s misrule but not accepted by the emperor’s acknowledged flesh and blood.

Mr. Abebe has petitioned the royal family to recognize him, to no avail. No one seems interested in his offer to undergo a DNA test.

Even if he were welcomed into the family, he would not necessarily win great treasure. The emperor’s relatives live well, but most of their vast holdings were long ago seized by the state. He might enjoy prestige among devotees of the emperor, but he would have to suffer scorn from the emperor’s many detractors. Mr. Abebe says it is acceptance by blood relations that motivates him, not treasure or acclaim.

Still, it would not be so bad to be able to travel the world, as the emperor’s acknowledged relatives do. Mr. Abebe could perhaps go off to some “big name” university to get an education. He might get a big gated home to replace his modest dwelling. As the emperor’s son, he could walk into the Sheraton Addis, where the cost of a glass of orange juice exceeds many Ethiopians’ daily wage, and afford to quench his thirst.

It is family lore more than anything else that Mr. Abebe offers as evidence of his blood ties. His mother, Almaz Tadesse Goshu, was one of the emperor’s many servants. They supposedly had a liaison late in the emperor’s tenure, long after his wife had died.

Mr. Abebe says his mother’s husband divorced her when he learned the child she was carrying was the emperor’s. She died when Mekbeb was 7; he was taken in by a general who had been close to the emperor.
Full Article: nytimes.com