A Spanish delegation says it has reached a “good understanding” with Bolivian President Evo Morales over his energy nationalisation programme.

The issue matters to Spain because of the huge Bolivian gas reserves controlled by Spanish firm Repsol.

But Spain’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Bernardino Leon, said he respected Bolivia’s decision to nationalise.

He said Spanish firms would have to decide whether to stay in Bolivia under the new terms.

Earlier this week Mr Morales took control of Bolivia’s natural gas industry and told foreign firms to leave if they were not willing to comply with the new conditions.

The Bolivian government has said it will start renegotiating energy contracts with all foreign companies from next week, giving them 180 days reach agreement, or face eviction.

In the meantime, the government will take 82% of profits.
bbc.co.uk

WASHINGTON – CIA Director Porter Goss abruptly resigned yesterday amid allegations that he and a top aide may have attended Watergate poker parties where bribes and prostitutes were provided to a corrupt congressman.

Kyle (Dusty) Foggo, the No. 3 official at the CIA, could soon be indicted in a widening FBI investigation of the parties thrown by defense contractor Brent Wilkes, named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the bribery conviction of former Rep. Randall (Duke) Cunningham, law enforcement sources said.

A CIA spokeswoman said Foggo went to the lavish weekly hospitality-suite parties at the Watergate and Westin Grand hotels but “just for poker.”

Intelligence and law enforcement sources said solid evidence had yet to emerge that Goss also went to the parties, but Goss and Foggo share a fondness for poker and expensive cigars, and the FBI investigation was continuing.
nydailynews.com

Exit of Chief Viewed as Move to Recast C.I.A.
WASHINGTON, May 6 Ñ The choice of Gen. Michael V. Hayden of the Air Force as the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency is only a first step in a planned overhaul to permanently change the mission and functions of the legendary spy agency, intelligence officials said Saturday.

Porter J. Goss, who was forced to resign Friday, was seen as an obstacle to an effort by John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, to focus the agency on its core mission of combating terrorism and stealing secrets abroad. General Hayden, who will be nominated to the post on Monday, is currently Mr. Negroponte’s deputy, and he is regarded as an enthusiastic champion of the agency’s adoption of that narrower role.

A senior intelligence official said that General Hayden, in a recent presentation to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, had sharply criticized Mr. Goss for resisting that transformation. Mr. Goss was seen as trying to protect the C.I.A.’s longtime role as government’s premier center for intelligence analysis, but under General Hayden, who is currently Mr. Negroponte’s top deputy, much of that function is intended to move elsewhere.

Either most members of the media elite have a reading comprehension problem which would necessarily result in low scores for them on standard IQ tests or they deliberately misrepresent to you what they have read.

Now, that’s not too serious when you can determine for yourself whether they are dolts or liars. But in the case of the most recent report Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei has made to the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, since it is still confidential, there is no site where that report is posted.

Hence, secure in the knowledge that you’ll have to take their word for it, there are more than a few inflammatory accounts extant of what the report said.
worldnetdaily.com

European diplomats say the US is blocking a plan to resume direct financial aid to the Palestinians.

The European Commission is considering plans to send funds to the office of the president, bypassing the Hamas-led Palestinian government.

…The United Nations estimates that a quarter of the Palestinian population depends on government salaries. The PA employs some 165,000 people.

But the severance of donor funding has meant that the government has been unable to pay wages for March and April.

BBC Middle East analyst Roger hardy says the Bush administration wants to maintain the economic pressure on the Hamas-led government.

The official view in Washington is that if Hamas refuses to recognise Israel, and eventually collapses, it will have no-one to blame but itself.

But, our correspondent says, many in Europe feel that wielding the big stick against Hamas will be counter-productive, and that it is in no-one’s interests for Gaza and the West Bank to descend ever deeper into poverty and lawlessness.
bbc.co.uk

The next generation of American Veterans is on its way home. Over 1.3 million American troops have already served in Iraq or Afghanistan, and tens of thousands more will return from combat over the years to come. After these young men and women put away their uniforms, they will still be coping with the consequences of years spent at war. When these conflicts have faded from the headlines, will we, as Americans, continue to honor our yellow-ribbon commitment to ‘Support the Troops’? Already there are many disturbing signs that we are not prepared to meet that obligation.

More than a year ago, I met my first homeless Iraq Vet. Only months after her return from combat, former Army Specialist Nicole Goodwin, 24, was staying in New York City shelters with her infant daughter. Just a few days later, I met former Private First Class Herold Noel. Herold had driven fuel trucks to the front lines during the invasion of Iraq, but when I met him, Herold was on three kinds of medication for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and living in his car with his son, a shy two-year-old named Anthony.

Herold and Nicole are not isolated cases. Ricky Singh, of the Brooklyn-based veterans’ service organization Black Veterans for Social Justice does outreach in some of the toughest parts of New York. Mr. Singh, on the front lines of the new battle against homelessness, says he has seen the dozens of homeless Iraq War veterans, ‘and we know that this is only the tip of the iceberg.’
military.com

Bloddy battles were fought on the streets of Basra last night after a British helicopter crashed in the city, reportedly killing four airmen and drawing an Iraqi crowd shouting ‘Victory to the Mahdi army’.

At least three British army vehicles were set on fire as the crowd hurled petrol bombs at troops trying to reach the blazing wreckage. Iraqi police officials believed the aircraft had been brought down by a shoulder-fired missile. Four charred bodies were seen inside it, reports said.

In the ensuing fighting, unconfirmed reports suggested that four Iraqis – some of them bystanders and thought to include a child – had also been killed. Soldiers fired three live rounds as they moved to seal off the area. A curfew was imposed from 8pm local time in a bid to restore calm.
guardian.co.uk

An Aljazeera correspondent in Afghanistan said Muhamad Hanif, a spokesman for the Taliban, claimed that his movement had brought down the US Chinook.

The US-led forces said the 10 multinational force soldiers on board were all killed, but denied that the Chinook, which crashed near the Pakistan border, had been brought down by the Taliban.
aljazeera.net

The ACLU released evidence Thursday showing that the FBI has been monitoring the peace group, School of Americas Watch. SOA Watch was founded by Father Roy Bourgeois in 1990. The group conducts research on the U.S Army School of the Americas, now renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. The School, which is located at Fort Benning, Georgia, trains hundreds of soldiers from Latin America each year and is funded entirely by the U.S government. SOA Watch holds an annual vigil calling for the closure of the facility. Last year the vigil drew 19,000 people.

SOA Watch is the latest organization that the ACLU has found to have been subject to U.S government surveillance in the name of counterterrorism efforts. In December, NBC News revealed the existence of a secret Pentagon database to track intelligence gathered inside the United States including information on anti-war protests and rallies. The database included information on counter-military recruiting meetings held at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Forth, Florida and anti-nuclear protests staged in Nebraska on the 50th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki.

And in March the ACLU uncovered files showing that the FBI had been monitoring and possibly infiltrating the Thomas Merton Center which is a Pittsburgh-based peace center, actively opposed to the war in Iraq.
democracynow.org

Politicians and pundits in the United States love to talk about our ‘national character,’ typically in rapturous tones of triumphalism.

Often that character is asserted as a noble force but not defined: Earlier this year, for example, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said our national character — presumed to be benevolent — requires us to be welcoming to legal immigrants.

Other times it must be defended against foreigners who just don’t understand us: Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland last month explained that too many Middle Easterners fall prey to depictions of Americans routinely raping, killing, firebombing mosques and torturing innocents as a function of national character.

And sometimes character is political destiny: In New Delhi last month, President Bush proclaimed that ‘democracy is more than a form of government, it is the central promise of our national character.’ Luckily for India, its national character shares the same feature, according to Bush.

Can a nation have a coherent character? If we take the question seriously — investigating reality rather than merely asserting nobility — we see in the U.S. national character signs of pathology and decay as well as health and vigor. What if, for purposes of analysis, we treated the nation as a person? Scan the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (the bible of mental-health professionals, now in its fourth edition) and one category jumps out: Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

DSM-IV describes the disorder as ‘a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy’ that can be diagnosed when any five of these nine criteria are met:

1. a grandiose sense of self-importance.
2. preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.
3. believes he or she is special and unique.
4. requires excessive admiration.
5. sense of entitlement.
6. interpersonally exploitative, taking advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends.
7. lacks empathy.
8. often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.
9. shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.
Narcissistic tendencies to self-aggrandize are not unique to the United States, of course. But given the predominance of U.S. power in the world, we should worry most about the consequences of such narcissism here.
axisoflogic.com

…The primary founder of the Democratic Party was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was not perfect, but his thought was far more democratic and libertarian than most of his contemporaries. This is especially true when you consider that his peers were the Founding Fathers, most of whom were quite comfortable with monarchy and aristocracy and openly hostile toward democracy. Jefferson was not a pure democrat in the Athenian sense and his status as a slaveowner taints his image in the eyes of modern liberals and leftists. These are valid criticisms. However, true democracy was unheard-of in the 1780s, aside from the pages of history books and its small-scale practice in Switzerland and some New England towns. When it came to slavery, Jefferson did not practice what he preached, but what he preached should not be overlooked. He condemned slavery as a great evil deserving of divine judgment, and asserted that all people are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights.
counterpunch.org