…”Imagine this: you are deep in debt but every day you write cheques for millions of dollars you don’t have — another luxury car, a holiday home at the beach, the world trip of a lifetime. Your cheques should be worthless but they keep buying stuff because those cheques you write never reach the bank! You have an agreement with the owners of one thing everyone wants, call it petrol/gas, that they will accept only your cheques as payment. This means everyone must hoard your cheques so they can buy petrol/gas. Since they have to keep a stock of your cheques, they use them to buy other stuff too. You write a cheque to buy a TV, the TV shop owner swaps your cheque for petrol/gas, that seller buys some vegetables at the fruit shop, the fruiterer passes it on to buy bread, the baker buys some flour with it, and on it goes, round and round — but never back to the bank. You have a debt on your books, but so long as your cheque never reaches the bank, you don’t have to pay. In effect, you have received your TV free. This is the position the USA has enjoyed for 30 years.”
pravda.ru

(IsraelNN.com) Former US President Jimmy Carter has called Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s unilateral Convergence Plan “illegal” and a violation of the Camp David Accords he brokered between Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1978. Carter further characterized the plan to retain large Jewish communities under Israeli sovereignty as a “confiscation of land”.

The former American president wrote in USA Today on Tuesday, “It is inconceivable that any Palestinian, Arab leader, or any objective member of the international community would accept this illegal action as a permanent solution to the continuing altercation in the Middle East.”

Instead of unilateral moves, Carter called on Israel to negotiate with Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), regardless of the Palestinian Authority’s current Hamas legislature. He claimed such an agreement “would also remove one of the major causes of international terrorism and greatly ease tensions that could precipitate a regional or even global conflict.”
israelnn.com

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran is enlisting Syria and the militant Palestinian Hamas group Ñ both also deeply at odds with the United States, Israel and some in western Europe Ñ as allies in the battle over its disputed nuclear program.

The move has prompted Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Dan Gillerman to declare that “a dark cloud is looming above our region, and it is metastasizing as a result of the statements and actions by leaders of Iran, Syria and the newly elected government of the Palestinian Authority.”
news.yahoo.com

A US lawmaker and former Marine colonel accused US Marines of killing innocent Iraqi civilians after a Marine comrade had been killed by a roadside bomb.

“Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood,” John Murtha told reporters. The November 19 incident occurred in Haditha, Iraq.

“There was no firefight” that led to the shootings at close range, the Vietnam war veteran said, denying early official accounts, which said that a roadside bomb had killed the Iraqis.

“There were no (roadside bombs) that killed these innocent people,” he said.

Time magazine reported the shootings on March 27, based on an Iraqi human rights group and locals, who said that 15 unarmed Iraqis died, including women and children, when Marines barged into their home throwing grenades and shooting.

“It’s much worse than reported in Time magazine,” Murtha said.
breitbart.com

One person is being assassinated in Basra every hour, as order in Iraq’s second city disintegrates, according to an Iraqi Defence Ministry official.

And a quarter of all Iraqi children suffer from malnutrition, a survey of 20,000 households by the Iraqi government and Unicef says.

The number of violent killings in Basra is now at a level close to that of Baghdad, and marks the failure of the British Army’s three-year attempt to quell violence there. Police no longer dare go to the site of a murder because they fear being attacked. The governor of Basra, Mohammed Misbahal-Wa’ili, is trying to sack the city’s police chief, claiming that the police have not carried out a single investigation into hundreds of recent assassinations.

The collapse of government authority in Iraq is increasing at every level and leaders in Baghdad have yet to form a cabinet, five months after parliamentary elections on 15 December.

Insurgent attacks on American and British troops are also proving more lethal, with 44 US soldiers and seven British killed so far this month, and with daily losses exceeding anything seen for more than a year.

Majid al-Sari, an adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Defence, describing the situation in Basra to the daily al-Zaman, said that on average one person was being assassinated every hour. Militiamen and tribesmen are often the only real authority. When Sheikh Hassan Jarih al-Karamishi was killed by men dressed in police uniforms at the weekend, Mr Sari said his heavily armed armed tribesmen stormed one police station in south Basra, killing 11 police, and burnt down two other buildings, headquarters for a political party.

Tribes who once lived in the marshlands outside Basra are engaged in constant feuds with other tribes. While militias owe allegiance to Shia parties, they are also suspected of receiving funds from Kuwaiti and Iranian intelligence.
indepependent.co.uk

BAGHDAD, 17 May (IRIN) – Sajida Youssef, a housekeeper, waited more than 24 hours for the body of her son, who had been murdered by thieves, to be released from Baghdad’s central morgue.

“Not only is there the suffering of having my son brutally killed, but now I must wait hours until the mortuary can examine his body,” said Sajida.

Lack of space, a shortage of doctors and an increase in the number of victims of daily violence countrywide has put pressure on Baghdad’s only mortuary, which used to release bodies in five hours or less. “We have a lack of equipment and professionals,” said Dr Fa’aq Ameen, director of the health ministry’s Forensic Medicine Institute.

“Our work is getting more difficult because more Iraqis are being brutally killed, requiring lengthy investigations and examinations that can take hours and sometimes days.”

An average of 70 civilians are killed in Baghdad every day, largely a result of the sectarian violence which has been on the rise since the 22 February attack on a revered Shi’ite shrine in Samarra city. Every month, the mortuary receives more than 1,500 bodies, not including the bodies of people killed in the north and south of the country.
alertnet.org

Unusual political stability in Turkey faces upheaval from Iraq’s impending fracture along sectarian lines. The birth of an independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq will end Turkey’s E.U. accession hopes. The collapse of the accession process will strongly undermine the legitimacy of the ruling Justice and Development Party (A.K.P.), making it increasingly vulnerable to political attacks from Turkey’s secular establishment. These attacks could prompt the disintegration of the Erdogan government as soon as the end of 2006.
pinr.com

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) — Islamic militants, some armed with machine guns, battled Afghan, U.S. and Canadian forces and exploded two suicide car bombs Thursday, some of the deadliest violence in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban.

More than 100 people were killed in the string of attacks that started late Wednesday: dozens of insurgents, at least 15 Afghan police, an American civilian training Afghan forces, and the first female Canadian soldier to die in combat.

The fighting concentrated in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar raised new concerns for the future of Afghanistan’s fragile democracy. The Taliban have stepped up attacks in recent months, with roadside bombs and suicide assaults, but this week’s fighting marked an escalation in a region where the U.S.-led coalition is to cede control of security operations to NATO by July.

President Hamid Karzai said the violence emanated from the mountainous border trial regions of neighboring Pakistan, populated by the ethnic Pashtuns who make up the majority of the Taliban militants and are believed to be hiding Osama bin Laden.

“We have credible reports that inside Pakistan, in the madrassas, the mullahs and teachers are saying to their students: ‘Go to Afghanistan for jihad. Burn the schools and clinics,”‘ Karzai said.

Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Tasnim Aslam, called the allegations “baseless.”
ksdk.com

Samihullah is just the kind of returned refugee his country needs. Aged 30, with a wife and two children, he was well educated in the camps across the border in Pakistan. After the Taliban were pushed out in 2001, he returned home and joined the Afghan Ministry of Education, where he helped to rebuild the higher-education sector. But not any more.

I found him working as a security guard at the UN’s World Food Programme headquarters in Kabul. With allowances he earns a total of $270 a month there, compared with $50 at the Afghan higher education. The decision to move jobs was not a hard one.

But it is the international system that is sucking Afghanistan dry. Any returnee who speaks English can be guaranteed a job at a higher level in the UN, or the myriad big NGOs that have set up shop in Kabul.

Ashraf Ghani, who was Finance Minister in the first year after the Taliban fell, and is now chancellor of Kabul University, says the international community has failed Afghanistan. Rather than build up the government, it has created a parallel system that has actively weakened the capacity of Afghanistan to run its own affairs.

Mr Ghani’s greatest fear is that by failing to empower the Afghan government, the world could be helping the Taliban to regroup, as they feed on the resentment of people at the slow pace of change. He says “The cheapest way of bringing development and security is government.”
independent.co.uk

“I have no embarrassment at all. No shame.” Bono says it himself, in the course of his luvvie interview with comic Eddie Izzard, and that’s a typically ‘disarming’ tactic. But don’t be disarmed: Bono’s shamelessness is of a whole different order from anything we’ve seen before, and it crosses new frontiers in the edition of the London Independent that he allegedly ‘edited’ today (16 May).

For a day, you see, it’s the RED Independent. (The capital letters in RED are obligatory, for some reason.) Much of the paper is given our to plugging Brand RED, this corporate PR strategy that sees a few big companies buy Bono-bestowed credibility in return for some shillings to Africa. If the word for Bono is indeed ‘shameless’, then the word that comes to mind in relation to the newspaper itself (a usually credible outlet in Irish mogul Tony O’Reilly’s media empire) is ‘prostitute’.

Much of Bono’s RED Indy is online, but its special qualities are best appreciated on paper. RED is somehow related to the colour red anyway, so we get a front-page created by celebrity artist Damien Hirst, soaked in red and declaring “NO NEWS TODAY” and an asterisk leading to the small print: “Just 6,500 Africans died today as a result of a preventable, treatable disease. (HIV/AIDS)” So far, not terrible, highlighting the issue and its absence from the conventional Western news agenda. But why does it say “Genesis 1.27” on the cover? That’s the line about how “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Since Bono is responsible for creating this paper in his image, does that mean he’s God?

It’s not an entirely facetious question. Certainly this edition, largely given over to Africa and AIDS, creates an image of a continent in dire need of an outside Savior. On page after page, in stories, photographs and advertisements, Africans are presented as pathetic victims, often children. No Africans write about Africa. Only one is presented in an interview as having any agency at all, Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. It is remarkable that even for the sake of appearances Bono is incapable of hiding his essential paternalism.
counterpunch.org