The mud biscuits sold in the markets and stacked high by the street vendors in the most desperate parts of Port-au-Prince are made in a part of the city known as Fort-Dimanche. There, close to the site of a former prison, once used by the dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier to lock up political prisoners, women combine clay, water, a little margarine and a scratch of salt. Sometimes they will crumble a foil-wrapped cube of bouillon into the mixture, which they stir, shape into discs the size of a saucer and leave to bake in the Caribbean sun.

In Haiti, these mud cakes are traditionally eaten by expectant mothers who believe they contain nutrients and minerals important to the health of a newborn child. But in recent months they have been sold increasingly to other people, who are too poor to afford anything else. “I have been selling more in the last year. People have less money,” says Mafie, the young woman sitting behind a pile of the pale brown mud cakes at Salamoun market.

In their own way, these biscuits, known in Creole simply as terre, tell a bigger story. One year after the enforced departure of Haiti’s elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the country he was forced to flee, having been long undermined by the US authorities, is in a hellish state of affairs. Unstable, deadly, wracked by division and wrecked by a hurricane that tore through the country in September, many of the citizens who voted for the bespectacled former priest with a prayer that he might bring them hope and salvation are forced to fill their bellies with cakes fashioned from mud. Naturally enough, they taste like dirt.
independent.co.uk
(more…)

Twenty storeys above the streets of Dubai tiny figures of workmen hammer steel into place day and night in the Middle East’s biggest construction boom.

Labourers from south Asia man the forest of cranes along the half-built tower blocks south and west of Jumeira Beach, the world’s second-biggest building site after Shanghai and a magnet for those hoping to make money by buying property here, ranging from Afghan warlords to the England football team.

The sheikhs who run Dubai plan to make it the commercial capital of the Middle East, so dozens of skyscrapers and thousands of apartment blocks are shooting up. The boom has sucked in an army of workers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, unskilled men who toil for years away from families to save £30 a month.
Full Article: independent.co.uk

Nepal’s security forces are blamed for the disappearance and probable deaths of hundreds of Nepalese civilians, particularly in the month since King Gyanendra seized power.

Nepal has been in the grip of a Maoist insurgency since 1996. As the Maoists have taken control of more territory – they are now a few miles from the capital, Kathmandu – Nepalese security forces have responded with increasingly heavy-handed and repressive tactics.

In 2003 and 2004, the United Nations working group on disappearances said Nepal had the highest rate of disappearances in the world. Over the past five years, more than 1,200 people have vanished, documented by local human rights groups.
Full Article: independent.co.uk

Peers bitterly criticised the Government’s proposals for house arrest yesterday as a string of former judges and law lords declared that planned anti-terror laws undermined Britain’s historic legal rights.

Peers lined up to attack the Prevention of Terrorism Bill as they started four days of debate on it, warning that it was “unconstitutional” and attacked fundamental protection for citizens by allowing ministers to hold or tag people without trial.
Full Article: independent.co.uk

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay (AP) – A doctor took office as Uruguay’s first socialist president Tuesday, joining the ranks of left-leaning leaders in Latin America – now six in all – governing a majority of the region’s people with a cautious approach to U.S.-backed free-market policies.

In one of his first official acts, Tabare Vazquez restored full diplomatic ties with communist Cuba, more than two years after a diplomatic row divided the countries.

Thousands of Uruguayans – many waving flags and chanting “Ur-u-guay!” – filled Montevideo’s streets for the inauguration of Vazquez, a 65-year-old cancer specialist whose swearing-in ended more than 170 years of power by two moderate parties.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

How Latin America turned to the left
Today Washington’s unqualified, 100 per cent loyal allies to the south of its border with Mexico are no more than one or two – El Salvador and Honduras certainly, but who else? Even Chile defied the superpower by refusing to support the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a slight not yet entirely forgotten in Washington.

Instead, a de facto centre-left bloc is emerging across the continent. Its members vary greatly from Chile, the economic poster-boy, to Washington’s bugbear Venezuela. One thing, however, they have in common. They may not be necessarily opposed to the US on every issue, but they are no longer beholden to it.

Their drift away is testament to an historic failure of American foreign policy. In recent years the US approach to Latin America has been hopelessly distorted by its fixation with one modest-sized island 90 miles south of the Florida Keys. In economic and military terms Cuba is of little significance, but its symbolic importance has been vastly magnified by the attentions lavished upon it by Washington.
Full Article: independent.co.uk

A procedure that involves drilling two holes into a person’s skull and then implanting electrodes in the brain has shown promise in treating individuals who are severely depressed and resistant to other types of treatment.
Full Article: forbes.com

The judge in charge of Saddam Hussein’s trial was in fear for his life today after his identity was revealed by a UK newspaper.

The Iraqi Special Tribunal had asked the media to protect his anonymity. But he was named by Robert Fisk, foreign correspondent of The Independent.

Downing Street warned that the judge now faced reprisals from Saddam loyalists. A Foreign Office source added: “Obviously this shows questionable judgment about an individual’s safety.” When TV footage was broadcast yesterday, censors made sure the judge was pictured only from behind.

Simon Kelner, editor of The Independent, defended his decision, saying: “This was not a British court, it was an Iraqi court. We don’t want to compromise the judge’s safety but the cameras showed side views of him and he was instantly recognised by many Iraqis.”
thisislondon.co.uk

This is an attempt to neutralize Fisk, one of the few on-the-scene journalist who reports anything real.

Paul Wolfowitz, US deputy secretary of defence, has emerged as a leading candidate to replace James Wolfensohn as the president of the World Bank.

Mr Wolfowitz is one of a small number of people being considered for the US nomination, administration insiders said.

The nomination of Mr Wolfowitz, one of the chief architects of the Iraq war and a former US ambassador to Indonesia, would likely be highly controversial, and could raise new questions about the process by which the World Bank chief is selected. One administration official said his nomination “would have enormous repercussions within the development community”.

Others on the US shortlist include Randall Tobias, former head of Eli Lilly and the administration’s co-ordinator on Aids.

Leadership of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund is decided by all the shareholders in the institutions. But the US and Europe in effect divide up the top jobs, with an American heading the bank and a European running the fund.
Full Article: financialtimes.com

Ah yes, it can be said truly that the wolves are at the door…

HILLAH, Iraq (AP) – A suicide car bomber blasted a crowd of police and national guard recruits Monday as they gathered for physicals outside a medical clinic south of Baghdad, killing at least 115 people and wounding 132 – the single deadliest attack in the two-year insurgency.

Torn limbs and other body parts littered the street outside the clinic in Hillah, a predominantly Shiite area about 60 miles south of Baghdad.

Monday’s blast outside the clinic was so powerful it nearly vaporized the suicide bomber’s car, leaving only its engine partially intact. The injured were piled into pickup trucks and ambulances and taken to nearby hospitals.

The deadliest previous single attack occurred Aug. 29, 2003, when a car bomb exploded outside a mosque in Najaf, killing more than 85 people, including Shiite leader Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim. Although officials never gave a final death toll, there were suspicions it may have been higher.
Full Article: apnews.myway.com

by Diana Johnstone
When power becomes blatantly criminal, it’s time to make people shut up. That time seems to have come throughout the Empire. Freedom of speech is increasingly threatened, both in the United States and in “old Europe”, although the attacks come from quite different angles.

In the United States, the assault is clearly led by far right fanatics such as David Horowitz, who is inciting students to denounce professors who dare try to teach them something they didn’t think they already knew. The purpose is clearly to ban criticism of United States war policy.

In old Europe, the assault is more subtle and probably less lucid in its aims. It is led n part by people who consider themselves on the left and who seem blissfully unaware of the danger of limiting freedom of speech.

In Germany, it has long been illegal to deny that the Holocaust took place: the offense called “the Auschwitz lie” can be punished by up to three years in prison. German television insists relentlessly on Hitler and his crimes, as if he were still lurking in the wings. This has done nothing to prevent the rise of neo-Nazi groups. It may even have helped them grow, in accordance with the phenomenon, demonstrated in the Soviet zone, that establishing “official truth”-even if true-can be the best way to make many people believe the contrary. But more than that, the far right in Germany seems to be gaining ground as a result of widespread disillusion, especially in Eastern Germany, with the neoliberal economic policies that were supposed to bring prosperity but instead have brought growing unemployment and poverty.

In any case, the center left government of Social Democrats and Greens has undertaken to react to rightist demonstrations by broadening the law against “Volksverhetzung”-a concept that can be translated as “incitement of the masses” or “poisoning of the minds of the people”. In the future, it should not be enough to prosecute persons who “approve, justify, deny or play down genocide of Jews and gypsies” in a way apt to “disturb public peace” (a vague notion). The new law would make it equally criminal to speak in any of those ways about any case of “genocide” condemned by any international court whose jurisdiction has been recognized by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Now, judicial history is marked by famously unjust verdicts reversed after long struggles to right the wrong. But the German law could make it a crime to challenge the International Tribunal on Former Yugoslavia, set up by NATO powers to control and manipulate political conflict in the Balkans, when it officially convicts Serbs for “genocide”. Anyone who points out that the Tribunal’s definition of “genocide” has been contrived for political purposes, and that its procedures are blatantly prejudiced, might risk being arrested.
Full Article: counterpunch.org