by Patrick Cockburn
Iraqis reacted with astonishment and derision yesterday to a claim made by the interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, before the US Congress that 14 or 15 out of Iraq’s 18 provinces “are completely safe.”

“The truth is exactly the reverse,” said a lorry driver, Abu Akil, as he queued for diesel yesterday. “There are 15 provinces which are dangerous and only the three Kurdish provinces in the north are OK. This speech was designed to be heard Americans and not by Iraqis.”

The lorry drivers, desperate to feed their families, take great risks but they admit that many roads are now too dangerous. “The speech was ridiculous,” said Maithan Maki. “When Allawi became Prime Minister I was in favour of him but things have got worse and worse.” Mr Allawi’s visit to the US may be doing him lasting damage in Iraq, reinforcing the impression that he is a pawn and out of touch with real events. Iraqis were aware when the US appointed him interim Prime Minister that he had long been financed by the CIA and MI6, but were prepared to forgive this if he could restore security.

Full Article: Independent UK

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Iraq’s elections should be nationwide, a top Bush administration official said on Friday, clashing publicly with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s suggestion that voting might not take place in the most violent areas.

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said the elections scheduled for January will not be perfect, but they should encompass the entire country.

Rumsfeld also appeared to back away from his outspoken remarks on Thursday that while the elections will take place on time, they might not be held in places where security could not be guaranteed.

Full Article: Reuters

by Amy Bracken
GONAIVES, Haiti (AP) – Workers used dump trucks to empty more than 100 bodies into a 14-foot-deep hole on Wednesday – the first mass grave for the more than 1,070 flood victims of Tropical Storm Jeanne. Bystanders shrieked, held their noses against the stench and demanded that officials collect bodies in waterlogged fields. The government late Wednesday said up to 1,250 people were still missing and that the death toll could rise to 2,000 people.

Meteorologists, meanwhile, said Jeanne could strike the United States by this weekend. It was too soon to tell where, but the National Hurricane Center in Miami warned people in the northwest and central Bahamas and along the southeast U.S. coast to beware of dangerous surf and rip currents kicked up by Jeanne in the coming days.

At 5 p.m., Jeanne was centered about 500 miles east of the Bahamian island of Great Abaco. It was moving west-southwest and was expected to strengthen and turn toward the west in the next 24 hours. Hurricane-force winds extended 45 miles and tropical-storm force winds another 140 miles.

In Gonaives, U.N. peacekeepers fired into the air to keep a hungry crowd at bay as aid workers handed out the first food in days for some in this city devastated by the floods. Residents were growing impatient because of decaying bodies and a lack of food and drinking water.

“We’re demanding they come and take the bodies from our fields. Dogs are eating them,” said Jean Lebrun, a 35-year-old farmer. “We can only drink the water people died in.”

Dieufort Deslorges of the government’s civil protection agency said 1,013 bodies had been recovered in Gonaives and 58 elsewhere. He said some of the missing likely died and that their bodies washed out to sea.

In Gonaives, rescuers pulled bodies from mud and rubble – some still under water five days after Jeanne lashed the area with torrential rains for some 30 hours – then added them to the pile in body bags that lay in mud and grime in front of three morgues.

Full Article: myway.com

by Bill Gertz
U.S. intelligence agencies concluded recently that al Qaeda — fearing its credibility is on the line — is moving ahead with plans for a major, “spectacular” attack, despite disruptions of some operations by recent arrests in Britain and Pakistan.

    Officials said recent intelligence assessments of the group, which is blamed for the September 11 attacks, state that an attack is coming and that the danger will remain high until the Nov. 2 elections and last until Inauguration Day on Jan. 20.

    ”They [al Qaeda] think their credibility is on the line because there hasn’t been a major attack since 9/11,” said one official familiar with intelligence reports on the group.

    A second official said: “There isn’t reason to believe that the recent arrests have disrupted their plans.”

    Authorities in Pakistan and Britain recently arrested key al Qaeda leaders, but the group uses tight “compartmentation” of its operations. The process, used by intelligence services, keeps information about operations within small “cells” of terrorists to protect secrecy.

    Thus, details of the possible attack remain murky, but analysts say it is planned to be bigger and deadlier than the September 11 attacks, which killed 3,000 people.

    Potential targets include the White House, Pentagon, U.S. Capitol and congressional buildings, as well as landmarks and business centers in New York, the officials said. The officials said that there is no specific information about targets.

Full Article: Washington Times

Bigger and deadlier, fireworks celebrating the re-election of George W. Bush. Boom.

The US is the largest single user of depleted uranium (DU) in weaponry.  It is also the largest seller and exporter of depleted uranium weapon technology.

DU is used in smart bombs, bunker busters, anti-tank weapons, and the tow missiles.  All very highly effective. As we saw in Gulf War I, the US bunker buster bombs tipped with DU were penetrating concrete shielding up to 10 feet thick.

The bunker buster”s effectiveness is that it can penetrate and then explode – raising the destructiveness and a higher body count than convention bombs.  Cruise missiles can penetrate deeper before the explosion happens.  As an anti-tank weapon, rounds tipped with DU can penetrate the tank”s hull and then do its dirty deed.

Deplete Uranium is actually a misnomer.  It is uranium, incredibly hard and a very dense metal, yes. But it is still very much radioactive.  The US is quick to defend the use of DUs and scorns all scientific finds that indicate there might be serious lingering problems.  Weapons using DU can be rightfully called a “dirty bomb”.  The US classifies a “dirty bomb” as an explosive device that permeates the surrounding area with radioactive/biological/chemical material.  Such is the fears of the US homeland Security.  The bomb itself is not the object of fear; it is the spread of the radioactive/biological/chemical material that encases the bomb that brings Homeland Security the night sweats.

In the mechanics of DU tipped weapons when the device explodes, the force of the blast breaks the DU tip into a cloud of dust that coats everything within the target, and as with all explosions, there is the dust and debris that is jettisoned outward – this includes the dust from the DU.  As the dust settles, the contaminated material also settles to earth or becomes airborne and drifts to other parts of that country.  Now we have radioactive material spreading over a large area. 

The US has moved away from the term DU, and has come up with a more polite term of “dense metal” – but it is still DU and still a dirty bomb.

Full Article: Pravda

by Bill Berkowitz
“The rapture is a racket,” writes Barbara R. Rossing in the first sentence of her recently published book The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation (Westview Press, 2004). Rossing, a New Testament scholar and an associate professor at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, maintains that the Rapture is a fraud of monumental proportions, as well as a disturbing way to instill fear in people.

“Whether prescribing a violent script for Israel or survivalism in the United States, this theology distorts God’s vision for the world,” Rossing writes. “In place of healing, the Rapture proclaims escape. In place of Jesus’ blessing of peacemaking, the Rapture voyeuristically glorifies violence and war. […] This theology is not biblical. We are not Raptured off the earth, nor is God. No, God has come to live in the world through Jesus. God created the world, God loves the world, and God will never leave the world behind!”

What if the Book of Revelation doesn’t spell doom and gloom? What if it doesn’t mandate the death, destruction and annihilation of all but true believers? What will Rapture-mongers do?

The Rev. Tim LaHaye and his co-author Jerry Jenkins are as responsible as anyone for taking The Rapture mainstream. Their Left Behind series of apocalyptic novels, published by Tyndale House, have sold nearly 60 million copies and for several years have been regular staples on the fiction best seller lists across the country. The final volume in the 12-volume series, Glorious Appearing, was released this spring and it quickly found its way onto the best seller lists.

The Rev. LaHaye — a longtime, high-profile religious right political leader who co-founded The Moral Majority with Rev. Jerry Falwell in 1979 — does the novels’ imagining, while Jenkins, the author of more than 100 books including Out of the Blue with former Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Orel Hershiser and Just As I Am, the Rev. Billy Graham’s memoir, does the writing.

Their message is a variation of President Bush’s “Either you’re with us, or you’re with them” war against terrorism mantra: Either you accept Jesus Christ as your savior or, the Rev. LaHaye told CNN’s Larry King, you will be left behind.

Full Article: workingforchange.com

WASHINGTON – Glaciers once held up by a floating ice shelf off Antarctica are now sliding off into the sea — and they are going fast, scientists said on Tuesday.

Two separate studies from climate researchers and the space agency NASA show the glaciers are flowing into Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, freed by the 2002 breakup of the Larsen B ice shelf.

Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the researchers said their satellite measurements suggest climate warming can lead to rapid sea level rise.

The teams at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said the findings also prove that ice shelves hold back glaciers.

Many teams of researchers are keeping a close eye on parts of Antarctica that are steadily melting.

Large ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula disintegrated in 1995 and 2002 as a result of climate warming. But these floating ice shelves did not affect sea level as they melted.

Glaciers, however, are another story. They rest on land and when they slide off into the water they instantly affect sea level.

It was not clear how the loss of the Larsen B ice shelf would affect nearby glaciers.

But soon after its collapse, researchers saw nearby glaciers flowing up to eight times faster than before.

“If anyone was waiting to find out whether Antarctica would respond quickly to climate warming, I think the answer is yes,” said Theodore Scambos, a University of Colorado glacier expert who worked on one study.

“We’ve seen 150 miles of coastline change drastically in just 15 years.”

Full Article: commondreams.com

by Marc Lacey
LAIKIPIA, Kenya – The view from above explains why this rugged area of Kenya has a problem on its hands.

As far as the eye can see there is wilderness: trees and scrub and, roaming between thickets, elephants, antelope and giraffes, not to speak of endangered species like the black rhino. But then, interrupting the National Geographic vistas, one spots a fence, a long straight one that goes on for miles and miles.

On the other side of the fence, the landscape changes abruptly. Much of the vegetation is gone. Wild animals are nowhere to be found, although one can spot herds of cows, goats and sheep roaming about. Their heads point constantly to the dry earth, as they scrounge for nourishment.

The herds belong to Masai tribesmen, and they are far too large for the land available. One result is a barren landscape, overgrazed and unhealthy, and certainly no place of refuge for Africa’s endangered species. Recently, though, herders have begun cutting the fences that crisscross central Kenya’s Laikipia district and marching their livestock onto the private land inside.

On the other side of those fences is another form of endangered species, the white settler. One settler is Kuki Gallman, an Italian by birth who moved to Kenya 30 years ago with her husband and later became a Kenyan citizen. She has chronicled her life in a series of books, including “I Dreamed of Africa,” which became a movie featuring Kim Basinger as Ms. Gallman.

Ms. Gallman is one of several dozen white ranchers in Laikipia with combined holdings that stretch far and wide. Her ranch, Ol Ari Nyiro, sprawls over 100,000 acres just north of the equator, and boasts the largest population of black rhinos outside a national park.

Conservationists at Ms. Gallman’s ranch and at others across Laikipia are hard at work trying to preserve the rhino and the other animal rarities of the area, like the Grevy’s zebra and the reticulated giraffe. But the Masai are intent on moving them to a different habitat, which could threaten the animals’ survival.

The Masai say Laikipia was stolen from their ancestors a century ago in a colonial-era treaty between a Masai leader and the British that transferred the land from the Masai to the whites. They say that the document is now out of date and that the vast ranches of Laikipia owned by whites are now officially a part of Masailand.

Inside the ranch houses there is anger at the destruction of the private lands and fear that the conflict could sharpen. But there is also some sympathy for the plight of the Masai and a bit of resignation that this wonderful way of life might not last as long as their leases, some of which extend in excess of 900 years.

“I’m sympathetic to them,” said Laria Grant, 32, whose father bought a 14,000-acre cattle ranch known as El Karama around the time of independence in 1963. “I know how it would feel if I were them, even 100 years later. To me, it’s not the exact details of the lease that’s the issue. It’s about land and their feelings toward it. They’re poor and can see our huge acreage of beautiful grass across the fence. But we feel as strongly about this land as they do.”

The Masai refer to the settlers as “mzungus,” the Swahili term for white people or foreigners. But most of the white landholders are Kenyan citizens, albeit not with ties to the country that stretch back as long as those of the Masai.

“I’m as much a Kenyan as they are,” said Martin Evans, a white rancher who has cattle, sheep, goats and camels on his 30,000 acres. “My dad was born here and I was born here and my sons were born here, too. I’m as Kenyan as anyone else.”

…Ms. Gallman and other landholders say they contribute much to Kenya as well as to the local population. There are the salaries they pay their staff, which in Ms. Gallman’s case numbers about 200. There are the community outreach programs they have begun, like the scholarship program set up by a rancher, Michael Dyer, for Masai youth and the Masai-run tourist lodge. And there is the conservation they engage in, the landholders say, by fencing their property or just by keeping it pristine.

“I’m a curator of a living museum,” said Ms. Gallman, who brings schoolchildren from around the world to her property. “Nature here is so majestic. The world will need places like this more and more in the future. They are impossible to reconstruct once they’re gone. My dream for the future is just that this place will remain whole.”

Full Article: New York Times

How hideous. “A living museum”?? What are the Masai, a picturesque backdrop? And who are these white settlers but the children and grandchildren of invaders? By ignoring history, it is possible for a white then to say “I’m as Kenyan as anyone else,” and “we feel as strongly about this land as they do.” I doubt that very much. And the reporter presents a situation which he feels to be morally complex, what with the wildlife and the toursists and all, while it is actually very simple: whites stole the land from the Masai, and the Masai are claiming it back.

By Joseph Guyler Delva
GONAIVES, Haiti (Reuters) – Survivors of devastating flooding in Haiti wandered mud-clogged streets in search of food on Tuesday and officials said the death toll could rise about 660.

Tropical Storm Jeanne swept north of Haiti during the weekend, drenching the impoverished Caribbean nation of 8 million, inundating cities and sending deadly mudslides through towns and villages.

The government put the death toll at 662 and expected it to rise as relief workers recovered bodies and reached areas isolated by the now receding water.

The known toll included 550 deaths in Gonaives, 65 in Haiti’s Northwest province and 47 in other towns.

Elie Cantave, the top government official for the province of Artibonite, Haiti’s most fertile agricultural area, said the toll could rise as around 400 people were missing in Gonaives and surrounding towns.

Relief supplies were starting to reach the worst-hit areas, but the pace was slowed by waterlogged roads and worries about security in a country that is still unstable after an armed revolt ousted ex-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February.

In Gonaives, a coastal city of 200,000 where large areas were inundated at the weekend, officials said 550 people died, many more were missing and half the population needed immediate assistance with food, water and shelter.

Full Article: netscapenews.com

Privilege even softens the effects of ‘natural disasters.’ Seems like there’s no such thing as natural disasters anymore…The hundreds dead in Gonaives is as much an effect of 500 years of racism as any other colonial atrocity.

Adam Jay
Kofi Annan, the secretary-general of the United Nations, today cited the torture of Iraqi prisoners by US forces as an example of how fundamental laws were being “shamelessly disregarded”.

Speaking shortly before George Bush delivered a speech in which he insisted the world was a better place since US action in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr Annan called on member countries to uphold the rule of law at home and abroad, at a time he described as a “fork in the road”.

He said the laws being ignored included “those that ordain respect for civilians, for the vulnerable – especially children” and proceeded to implicitly criticise the US by mentioning the “disgraceful abuse” of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib jail.

Mr Annan also referred to hostage taking and the “cold-blooded massacre” of civilians in Iraq, as well as the school siege in Beslan and population displacement and rape in Darfur. He condemned the actions of Palestinian suicide bombers and “Israel’s excessive use of force… in Palestine [where] we see homes destroyed, lands seized, and needless civilian casualties”.

…Republicans’ attitude towards the organisation is unlikely to soften following Mr Annan’s assertion that: “Every nation that proclaims the rule of law at home must respect it abroad; and every nation that insists on it abroad must enforce it at home… At times even the necessary fight against terrorism is allowed to encroach unnecessarily on civil liberties.”

Mr Annan, who last week called the US-led invasion of Iraq illegal, was speaking on the opening day of a two-week session of the UN General Assembly. He accepted some criticism of the organisation, conceding that the legal framework put in place by the UN was “riddled with gaps and weaknesses”.

“Too often it is applied selectively, and enforced arbitrarily,” he continued. “It lacks the teeth that turn a body of laws into an effective legal system… Rule of law as a mere concept is not enough. Laws must be put into practice, and permeate their fabrics of our lives.”

And with Mr Bush about to get to his feet to deliver his own definition of freedom, Mr Annan concluded his speech with the words: “Each generation has its part to play in the age-long struggle to strengthen the rule of law for all – which alone can guarantee freedom for all. Let our generation not be found wanting.”

Full Article: Guardian UK