JOHANNESBURG, May 24 — Three Americans were among at least 26 security workers arrested and jailed last week in Congo on suspicion of plotting a coup in advance of national elections in July, officials and news services reported Wednesday.

Fifteen of the suspects are employed by a South African security company, Omega Security Solutions, whose parent company has offices in Pretoria, the South African capital. A company official said the detained Americans work for two U.S. companies that are arranging security and logistics for the campaign of a presidential candidate in Congo. The other suspects are Nigerians.

From Kinshasa, the capital of Congo, Interior Minister Theophile Mbemba said 32 men with military gear were arrested, but he offered few other details, the Associated Press reported. “It is clear that they were military personnel with political plans. . . . They were part of a coup attempt, and they will face justice in Congo,” he said.
washingtonpost.com

ORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) – New Orleans, still down and out from last year’s assault by Hurricane Katrina, is the U.S. city most likely to be struck by hurricane force winds during the 2006 storm season, a researcher said on Wednesday.

The forecast gives New Orleans a nearly 30 percent chance of being hit by a hurricane and a one in 10 chance the storm will be a Category 3 or stronger, meaning sustained winds of at least 111 miles per hour (178 km per hour), said Chuck Watson of Kinetic Analysis Corp., Savannah, Georgia a risk assessment firm.
reuters.com

“De la Cruz lives a hundred meters from a Coca Cola bottler that extracts 1.7 million liters of water each year from the local aquifer, leaving 70% of the households in Ecatepec without running water. The bottler’s yearly extractions are equivalent to what five indigenous villages in the highlands are allotted each year.”
axisoflogic.com

Bolivia is South America’s poorest country. Every night, 615,000 Bolivian children under 13 years of age go to bed hungry, according to a recent report by the United Nations World Food Program. Life in the countryside has changed little since colonial times, and cities lack basic public services. Clearly, there is an urgent need for infrastructure investments to help raise the living standards of the people in the Andean country.

This, ostensibly, is the role of international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Nevertheless, the head of the IMF’s mission to Bolivia, Antonio Furtado, made an announcement last week that the IMF will not extend new credits to Bolivia.
axisoflogic.com

Bolivia rebuts Bush’s accusations of undermining democracy
The Bolivian government on Tuesday rebutted U.S. President George W. Bush’s criticism that Bolivia is eroding democracy, according to reports from La Paz, capital of Bolivia.

Bush’s criticism was “barely credible,” said Alex Contreras, spokesman for the Bolivian government. He called on Bush to respect Bolivia’s dignity and sovereignty.

“The administration of President Evo Morales is promoting and strengthening democracy,” said Contreras, noting the Bolivia-U.S. diplomatic ties should be without interference.”

He said no nations can force Bolivia to take a direction which it does not want to.

“It would be truer to say that the United States is eroding democracy,” said the spokesman, accusing Washington of supporting dictatorship and interfering in other countries’ internal affairs.

The White House yesterday ruled out previously authorised direct talks between Tehran and the US ambassador in Baghdad, which were to have focused on the situation in Iraq. The move marks a hardening of the Bush administration’s position, despite pressure from the international community to enter into direct dialogue with Iran.

A White House official said that although the US envoy had originally been granted a mandate for talks with Iran, “we have decided not to pursue it.”
guardian.co.uk

KANDAHAR: Sixty Taliban and five Afghan security forces members were killed in a new clash in Afghanistan on Wednesday as the US-led coalition defended itself against mounting criticism of civilian deaths.

The suspected insurgents were killed in a ‘fierce’ six-hour battle and subsequent clean-up operation in Uruzgan late on Tuesday, said a top Afghan general and the coalition.

The Afghan army called in coalition air support, said Afghan General Rahmatullah Raufi. Four soldiers and a policeman also died, said he and a police spokesman.
dailytimes.com

A Taliban comeback? Ahmed Rashid
Musharraf is between a rock and a hard place. A fair election would most likely result in a parliament hostile to continued army rule. A rigged election endangers his grip on power and the army’s prestige. However, military rule has run its course in Pakistan. It is deeply unpopular and no longer has the credibility to resist Islamic fundamentalists

As unprecedented Taliban violence sweeps across southern Afghanistan, four players in the region, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the US and NATO, are locked in a tense standoff rather than cooperating to defeat the terrorists. At stake is the future survival of Afghanistan’s moderate government and stability in Pakistan.

To prop up Afghanistan and combat the Taliban, the US and NATO may have to make major concessions to Pakistan’s military regime, but any concessions would anger the Afghans, encourage the extremists and allow the unpopular military to dominate Pakistan’s political scene for another five years.

Taliban grows in strength, US admits
The Taliban are growing in strength, the US military admitted yesterday as it defended 16 civilian deaths inflicted by its bombers during southern Afghanistan’s most violent week in years.
Hundreds of insurgents have taken root in three key southern provinces at the heart of the current Nato deployment, said a US spokesman, Colonel Tim Collins.

“There’s no doubt the Taliban have grown in strength and influence in certain areas in Kandahar, Helmand and in southern Uruzgan,” he said. “That’s why we are going after them.”

In the latest violence a six-hour battle erupted in mountainous Uruzgan province yesterday when a joint coalition-Afghan patrol came under rocket and small arms fire at a village near the provincial capital, Tirin Kot, according to a military statement.

After cornering the Taliban inside a compound, the coalition forces called in air support, the statement said. British, French and American planes pounded the area with bombs and rockets.

Twenty-four Taliban and five Afghan security forces were killed, according to the report, which could not be verified.

A British military plane with the newly arrived ambassador, Stephan Evans, caught fire as it landed in Helmand, where 3,300 troops are deploying. Two passengers received minor injuries.

The US defended itself against Afghan criticism of an air strike on Sunday night that killed at least 16 civilians at Azizi in western Kandahar. The military did not know civilians were in the houses when A-10 “warthog” planes fired at buildings, said Col Collins.

But Col Collins also blamed the Taliban’s use of “human shield” tactics. “The Taliban knowingly, wilfully chose to occupy homes of these people,” he said.

The Iraqi Oil Ministry’s inspector general reported this week that $1 billion of Iraq’s oil is being illegally smuggled out of the country every month.

Smuggling on a large scale, coupled with increasing violence and the lack of basic services like water and electricity, has caused increasing tensions in the southern oil city of Basra. Over 100 civilians have been killed in Basra so far this month. Residents there are pointing the finger at the governor and the British military, which occupies the city.
antiwar.com

LONDON – The United States is riding roughshod over human rights by outsourcing key anti-terror work in Iraq to private contractors, who operate beyond Iraqi law and outside the military chain of command, Amnesty International said Tuesday.

It called for tighter rules on the use of contractors in a statement released with its 2006 annual report detailing human rights violations in 150 countries around the world. The rights watchdog said contracting for military detention, security and intelligence operations had fueled violations.
news.yahoo.com

Several recent studies have punctured the conception, assiduously fostered by the media and political defenders of the profit system, that American capitalism makes possible the rapid acquisition of wealth for anyone motivated to work for it.

The truth is very different. A study by economist Tom Hertz of American University, ‘Understanding Mobility in America’, finds that a child born into a poor family, defined as the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution, has an infinitesimal one-in-a-hundred chance of making it into the top five percent income level.

Hertz’s report, issued by the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress (CAP), studied both ‘intergenerational mobility’ and ‘short-term mobility.’ Intergenerational mobility, comparing an individual’s economic status with that of his or her parents, is taken as a measure of equality of opportunity, since economic success independent of the status of one’s family would seem to indicate that merit and work are the principal sources of material rewards.

As far as intergenerational mobility is concerned, it is not only the children of the poor in the US who have little chance of becoming wealthy. Children born in the middle quintile (the 40-60th percentile of incomes in the country, $42,000 to $54,300) also have only a 1.8 percent chance of reaching the top five percent, a likelihood not much higher than in poor families. These findings were based on a study of over 4,000 children whose parents’ income was determined in 1968 and whose own income was then reviewed as adults in 1995, 1996, 1997 and 1999.

Breaking the data down by race showed that, within the framework of increasing pressure on the working class as a whole, black families continue to face higher burdens. While 47 percent of poor families remain poor in subsequent generations, this figure is 32 percent for whites and 63 percent for blacks. Only 3 percent of African-Americans jump from the bottom quarter of the income distribution to the top 25 percent, while for whites this number, still small, is 14 percent.
axisoflogic.com

…I think what happens is that — well, I don’t come to, you know, the U.S. that often, and like, for instance, this time I came to do an event with Eduardo Galeano, but I really wasn’t — I didn’t want to do any — except for this, I made it clear that I didn’t want to be working on this trip, because I want to think about some things. But I think it’s the opposite problem that I have. I think that there are many ways of shutting people down, and one is to increase the burners on this celebrity thing until you become so celebrity that all you are is celebrity.

For example, I’ll give you a wonderful example of how it works, say, in India. I was at a meeting in Delhi a few months ago, the Association of Parents for Disappeared People. Now, women had come down from Kashmir. There are 10,000 or so disappeared people in Kashmir, which nobody talks about in the mainstream media at all. Here were these women whose mothers or brothers or sons or husbands had — I’m sorry, not mothers, but whatever — all these people who were speaking of their personal experiences, and there were other speakers, and there was me. And the next day in this more-or-less rightwing paper called Indian Express, there was a big picture of me, really close so that you couldn’t see the context. You couldn’t see who had organized the meeting or what it was about, nothing. And underneath it said, “Arundhati Roy at the International Day of the Disappeared.” So, you have the news, but it says nothing, you know? That’s the kind of thing that can happen.

Actually, I’m somebody who is invited to mainstream forums, and I’m not shunned out. You know, I can say what I have to say. But the point is, Amy, that there is a delicate line between just being so far — you know, just being so isolated that you become the spokesperson for everything, and this kind of person that it suits them to have one person who’s saying something and listen to it and ignore what is being said, and I don’t want to move so far away from everybody else, that if you want to listen to me, then why don’t you listen to so and so? Why don’t you speak to so and so? Why don’t you get some other voices, because otherwise it sounds like you’re this lone brave, amazing person, which is unpolitical.
democracynow.org