Israel and the United States will begin discussing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s “convergence plan” this week. The working assumption among senior Israeli officials is that the administration supports the plan and views it as “the only game in town.”

Two major issues are on the agenda: the timeline for the plan and the nature of the support to be extended by the U.S. government.

Olmert leaves next week for his first White House visit as Israel’s elected prime minister, during which he will present the convergence idea to President George W. Bush. Aides to Olmert, who flew out Saturday night to prepare for the visit, will meet with White House officials to decide on the manner in which the plan is to be presented at the meeting between the leaders, as well as the statements that will follow the meeting. These preliminary sessions were defined as a “coordination of expectations.”
haaretz.com

The American secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, traded barbs during bad-tempered talks at a foreign ministers’ summit in New York on Iran’s nuclear programme.

…Mr Lavrov arrived at the Waldorf for the meeting seething about a speech on Kremlin policies delivered by Dick Cheney, the vice-president, the previous week in Lithuania. The Russian repeatedly complained about the comments and then threatened to veto a Security Council resolution, drafted by Britain and France and backed by the US, that would force Iran to abandon enrichment of uranium.

Although Moscow has made clear that it opposes any use of mandatory powers, the other ministers were left in no doubt that Mr Lavrov’s approach reflected fury over the Cheney speech. As the mood worsened, Mr Lavrov accused the Americans of seeking to undermine efforts by Britain, France and Germany to solve the crisis.

He singled out Nicholas Burns, the State Department’s number three, for particular flak, complaining about his criticism of Russian involvement in Iran’s

Bushehr nuclear plant. Already frustrated, Ms Rice, a Russia expert, took exception to his remarks about Mr Burns and curtly told her guest: “This meeting isn’t going anywhere.” The gathering in Ms Rice’s suite had been intended as a 30-minute chat before dinner but turned into a two-hour session. By the time the foreign ministers sat down to eat at 10.30pm, their sea bass was shrivelled and, to Mrs Beckett’s surprise, the bickering continued in front of senior officials.
telegraph.co.uk

HARTFORD, Conn. – U.S. military troops with severe psychological problems have been sent to Iraq or kept in combat, even when superiors have been aware of signs of mental illness, a newspaper reported for Sunday editions.
msnbc.msn.com

It is so hard to explain the degree of insensitivity demonstrated by the current Chilean government, formed by many victims of state terrorism during the Pinochet dictatorship, as it is to describe the indifference and racism showed by the Chilean media that prefers to report the firing of two trucks belonging to a forest company rather than the case of a hunger strike in Temuco that today holds its 58th day, in which its four members, all mapuches, literally face their deaths.

Four prisoners, Juan and Jaime Marileo, Juan Carlos Huenulao and activist Patricio Troncoso, are officially “terrorists” and were condemmed to more than ten years of prison because of the fire in a farm that belongs to multimillionaire Eleodoro Matte, one of the few Chileans to appear in the Forbes and Fortune rankings, in a trial so full with irregularities that socialist senator Alejandro Navarro wonders : ‘who knows in Chile of prisoners whose trials have been declared annulled by two organisms from the United nations?’. In fact, the very UN relator, Mexican Rodolfo Stavenhagen, has qualified the process as an aberration.

In a previous trial, labeled as a simple fire by a local judge of the zone, about 500 miles south of the capital of Chile, was reversed by the supreme court, under strong pressures from the government and land-owners lobbysts, that labeled the burnings as a terrorist act, which implied a summary trial with hidden witnesses, that ended with convictions of more than ten years to those who, in every step of the process, declared themselves not guilty.

The trial, a legal aberration in which nobody, except the mapuche organizations and human right defenders seem to have noticed, is based on the ‘anti terrorist law’ passed by Pinochet, a regulation that surely has affected some of the current members of the government.

Chilean society feels a strong sympathy for the mapuche demands that, at least as shown in every poll, they widely support. This is due to the fact that most Chileans feel they are a mixture between Spanish and Mapuche, although there is also some racism in Chilean people who always make adistinction between a Chilean and an “Indian”, a kind of schizophrenia inherited from the educational system, that teaches that the Chilean military occupation in the late XIX century was, in fact, a “pacification” and, on the other hand, the press, that labels as “terrorists” those Mapuches who dare to ask for their usurped lands.

But the Mapuche drama and their struggle shouldn’t be a concern to those who are worried about their neighbors: it should matter to all those who concern only for themselves and their families in the same region where, three summer seasons ago, faced a profound drought. One of the consequences of the Chilean silvicultural / forestry development and a pillar for the so-called /economic miracle/ is that foreign species like pines and eucaliptus consume up to 90 liters of water per day. In fact, mapuches are well aware that their struggle is not only for land, it is also for water, and today is for their lives.
zmag.org

The presidents of Venezuela and Bolivia, Latin America’s most outspoken leaders, yesterday rebuffed demands by the European Union and other leaders at a summit in Vienna to temper their policies on foreign investment and energy, declaring that a new political era had arrived.

Tony Blair, who attended the summit of European Union, Latin American and Caribbean countries, called for a “responsible approach” to the debate.

“Neo-liberalism has begun its decline and has come to an end,” the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, said at the gathering of nearly 60 heads of state, according to Reuters. “Now a new era has begun in Latin America. Some call it populism, trying to disfigure our beauty. But it is the … voice of the people that is being heard.”
guardian.co.uk

BOLIVIA would like to become a member of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Bolivian President Evo Morales said overnight.

“I would like my country to be part of OPEC,” said Mr Morales, attending the European Union-Latin American summit in Vienna.

“It is a desire. Who wouldn’t like to be one of those countries?” Mr Morales said.

Bolivia is the second major producer of gas in Latin America and also produces oil.
heraldsun.news.com

TORONTO (AP) Ñ Bolivia’s plan to nationalize its natural gas industry and exert greater state control over all of its natural resources has North American mining companies fretting over their future prospects extracting the nation’s rich resources of gold, silver and tin.

The chairman of one of the world’s largest gold producers told his shareholders he would now “put my buck” on exploration in Pakistan, rather than the South American countries throwing up more roadblocks to foreign investors.
news.yahoo.com

WASHINGTON — Allowing U.S. companies to explore the oil resources of Cuba would expand the nation’s energy sources, says Sen. Larry E. Craig, Idaho Republican, who is pushing legislation to tap the petroleum potential of the Cuban coast.

“China, India, Norway, Canada and Spain have already bid and — in the cases of China, Spain and Canada — bought the rights to do exploratory drilling in the North Cuba Basin,” Mr. Craig said. “We should allow U.S. companies to do the same thing that other foreign oil companies around the world are doing: explore and build the infrastructure to sell oil in this region of Cuban waters.”
wpherald.com

NAIROBI, Kenya, May 12 A new front in the fight against terrorism has broken out on the streets of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, as a group of Islamists battle Somali warlords allied with Washington’s aim of rooting out Muslim extremism from the region.
nytimes.com

‘allied with Washington’s aims’…that’s putting it mildly. The Times so elegant and so intelligent.

Warring Somali ministers warned
Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf has warned his ministers that they cannot continue to serve in his government while leading militias into battle.
His comments follow a week of fighting between an alliance of warlords – some of whom have seats in the transitional government – and an Islamist militia.

About 150 people, mainly civilians, have died in the capital Mogadishu.

One warlord, the Security Minister Mohamed Qanyare, says his militia is fighting “al-Qaeda in Somalia”.

Mr Abdullahi called on both sides to end the fighting, and told the BBC the alliance of warlords “are not fighting on behalf of the government”.

Map of the Somali capital, Mogadishu
He said it was up to parliament “to take an appropriate action against those members who are waging the war”.

And he called on the US to work with the government not “individuals in the capital” to fight terrorism.

There are strong suspicions the US has been secretly funding the warlords, although Washington insists it has not violated the arms embargo in Somalia, the BBC’s Africa Editor David Bamford says.

But a top US diplomat in Africa, Jendayi Frazer, acknowledged on Friday that the White House would work with those who can help “prevent Somalia becoming a safe haven for terrorists”.

THE HAGUE (Reuters) – Iran has legitimate security concerns that the United States must address if the crisis over Tehran’s nuclear programme is to be resolved, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Friday.

“This is primarily a regional security issue,” Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) he told a debate in The Hague.

“Iran is surrounded by countries that have nuclear weapons, Russia has nuclear weapons, Pakistan has nuclear weapons, Israel has nuclear weapons, Iraq has used chemical weapons against them. There is a sense of insecurity,” he said.

“When you talk about the Iranian issue, the only solution is a package that should inter alia include security issues.”
news.yahoo.com

Poor guy is sounding like Dorothy in Oz these days…