by Martin Bright
A furious row has broken out over claims in a new book by BBC broadcaster James Naughtie that US Secretary of State Colin Powell described neo-conservatives in the Bush administration as ‘fucking crazies’ during the build-up to war in Iraq.

Powell’s extraordinary outburst is alleged to have taken place during a telephone conversation with Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. The two became close friends during the intense negotiations in the summer of 2002 to build an international coalition for intervention via the United Nations. The ‘crazies’ are said to be Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.

Last week, the offices of Powell and Straw contacted Public Affairs, the US publishers of Naughtie’s book, to say they would vigorously deny the claims if publication went ahead. But as no legal action was threatened, the US launch of the book, The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency, will proceed as planned this week.

Naughtie stands by his claims and is said to be privately delighted that Powell and Straw have reacted so violently to the suggestion that the former US general had fallen out with the ‘neo-cons’.

Provocatively, the phrase ‘fucking crazies’ will be quoted on the jacket of the book, according to a source at the publisher. ‘We were surprised to receive calls from the offices of Jack Straw and Colin Powell within 24 hours of each other,’ the source said.

Full Article:Guardian UK

by Robin McKie
Something strange is tugging at America’s oldest spacecraft. As the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes head towards distant stars, scientists have discovered that the craft – launched more than 30 years ago – appear to be in the grip of a mysterious force that is holding them back as they sweep out of the solar system.

Some researchers say unseen ‘dark matter’ may permeate the universe and that this is affecting the Pioneers’ passage. Others say flaws in our understanding of the laws of gravity best explain the crafts’ wayward behaviour.

As a result, scientists are to press a European Space Agency (Esa) meeting, called Cosmic Visions, in Paris this week for backing for a mission that would follow the Pioneers and pinpoint the cause of their erratic movements.

The strange behaviour of the Pioneers – which swept by Jupiter and Saturn in the Eighties – was discovered by John Anderson and Slava Turyshev of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and Michael Martin Neito of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

They had been tracking the probes using the giant dishes of Nasa’s Deep Space Network. By the time the two spaceships had swept beyond Pluto, they noted there were persistent anomalies in their trajectories. Every time they looked the Pioneers were in the wrong place. The effect was not large, but it was significant. Something more than the Sun’s gravity appeared to have a grip on the craft.

The reasons for the anomaly have caused a rift among physicists, however. Some believe the effect may simply be flaws with the probes. Gas from fuel tanks may be leaking from them, slowing their passages, say some astronomers. ‘Unless there is really good evidence to the contrary, we should stick to simple ideas like these and not go around blaming strange new types of particle or flaws in general relativity,’ said Professor Martin Barstow, of Leicester University.

But this view has been rejected by Anderson. ‘It’s hard to imagine such a leak happening on both probes at the same time in such a way as to produce an identical acceleration,’ he said.

And most scientists back him. ‘The effect is real,’ said Bernard Haisch of the California Institute for Physics and Astrophysics.

One proposal put forward is that Newton’s idea that the force of gravity weakens as distance increases may be incorrect over very large spaces, and may drop off over very long distances.

‘It is time to settle the Pioneer issue with a new deep-space mission that will test for, and decide on, the anomaly,’ Anderson, Turyshev and Nieto state in Physics World .

By fitting a Pioneer follow-up probe with new measuring equipment, navigational device and communications gear, it should be possible to discover if the probes are in the grip of a new force of nature.

Guardian UK

KABUL (Reuters) – A rocket attack aimed at Kabul’s international airport showed the Taliban have the ability to target anywhere in Afghanistan, the group said on Friday, warning the Americans the country would become their “burial ground.”

Although the four rockets fell well short or wide of their target, Mullah Dadullah Akhund — the Taliban’s military commander and a member of its 10-member ruling council — said U.S.-led forces in the country were pinned down in their bases.

He was speaking a day after the Arabic satellite TV channel al Jazeera broadcast a video of Osama bin Laden’s Egyptian-born deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, claiming that mujahideen fighters had U.S. forces pinned down in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“The enemy are limited to their capitals,” al-Zawahri said in the tape, broadcast two days before the third anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. Washington quickly blamed al Qaeda and sent troops to Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban.

“The Americans are hiding in their trenches and refuse to come out to face the mujahideen, as the mujahideen shell and fire on them, and cut roads off around them. Their defense is only to bomb by air, wasting U.S. money as they kick up dust.”

Full Article: NY Times

Sebastião Salgado introduces his journey to the untouched corners of the planet

“…Thus, for all the damage already caused to the environment, a world of purity, even innocence, can still be found in these wilderness areas. As an attempt to reconnect our species with our planet, I now intend to explore this world in order to record the unblemished faces of nature and humanity: how nature looked without men and women; and how humanity and nature long coexisted in what today we now call ecological balance.

This project is designed to reconnect us to how the world was before humanity altered it almost beyond recognition. It is a project that follows on from the long photographic research that led to my books and exhibitions, Other Americas, Sahel: L’Homme en Détresse, Workers and Migrations. In these early undertakings, I did not focus specifically on the environment, but I was constantly confronted by dismaying evidence of the dramatic deterioration of humanity’s relationship with nature. All too often, extreme poverty and migration were both a cause and a result of the degradation and pollution of nature’s resources…”

Full Article and photos: Guardian UK

by Pete Bohmer
Understanding Cuban society objectively is incredibly difficult, given 45 years of unremitting US propaganda against Fidel Castro, the Cuban government and Cuban society. Even for those individuals critical of the U.S. mainstream media, constantly hearing the Cuban government called a dictatorship that has failed its people, influences our perceptions. So do interviews or discussions with Cubans who have immigrated to the United States, most of whom are very critical of the Cuban system. I urge the reader to be open to the following article which presents a viewpoint at variance with the mainstream one of Cuba. This positive, but not uncritical analysis of Cuba, is based on in-depth study of Cuba for more than 35 years, two visits to Cuba in the early 1990’s, living there for four months in 2001, and the recent trip I made with 23 students in April and May, 2004.

To understand Cuban society, we have to place the political economy of Cuba today, its successes and real problems, in the context of the following:

1. 400 years of Spanish colonialism. This began with genocidal attacks against the indigenous people of Cuba, followed by an economy organized around sugar plantations, where most of the labor force were enslaved and super-exploited Africans. Slavery ended in 1886, but extreme racism and economic segregation of blacks continued until 1959.

2. U.S. domination and aggression. During the 1895-1898 Cuban war for independence, the U.S. intervened militarily, claiming to support independence for Cuba, but then dominated Cuba economically and politically until 1959. As a condition for the U.S. ending its military occupation of Cuba, Cuba had to sign the Platt Amendment, which was the basis for establishing the U.S. base in Guantanamo, Cuba. Today in Guantanamo, prisoners from around the world are being held indefinitely with no rights and subject to brutal treatment by the U.S. military. In addition, the U.S. and Cuban elites dominated Cuba from 1902 to 1959, with the U.S. sending troops and supporting Cuban governments who were favorable to U.S. investors and undermining those who weren’t.

Full Article: zmag.org

by Miles Benson
WASHINGTON — Democrat John Kerry has already lost the 2004 presidential race and the country should get ready for another four years of President Bush’s leadership, Ralph Nader said Thursday.

“Bush is mocking him, he’s taunting him,” Nader said. “There’s no strategy by the Democrats.”

Nader, battling to get on ballots as an independent presidential candidate, predicted Bush would win by a margin so large that his own candidacy would not be seen as a factor in the outcome. Democratic leaders blamed Nader for former Vice President Al Gore’s loss to Bush in 2000.

“The telltale sign” of looming defeat is the Democrats’ failure to register 9 million black voters, Nader told reporters.

“They’re going to lose it because John Kerry has surrounded himself with corporate consultants who represent some of the seediest and most craven companies and industries, and they are not letting him think for himself,” said Nader, whose fight against corporate influence over government and politics is his own rationale for running.

Kerry “blew it,” Nader said, by neglecting the Democratic Party’s historic roots.

“The biggest winning strategy for the Kerry campaign is the living wage. One of every three workers doesn’t make a living wage. That is what the Democratic Party used to stand for.”

With just under eight weeks remaining before Election Day, Nader said Kerry and his running mate, Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., have “lost the clarity of being an alternative to Bush and Cheney, even though this is the most vulnerable administration in many years.”

Full Article: commondreams.org

by Stephen Leahy
BROOKLIN, Canada – Climate change will soon make the Arctic regions of the world nearly unrecognisable, dramatically disrupting traditional Inuit and other northern native peoples’ way of life, according to a new report that has yet to be publicly released.

The dire predictions are just some of the findings by the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), an unprecedented four-year scientific investigation into the current and future impact of climate change in the region.

“This assessment projects the end of the Inuit as a hunting culture,” said Sheila Watt-Cloutier, chairwoman of the group that represents about 155,000 Inuit in the Arctic regions of Canada, Russia, Greenland, and the United States.

The report predicts the depletion of summer sea ice, which will push marine mammals like polar bears, walrus and some seal species into extinction by the middle of this century, Watt-Cloutier told IPS.

The assessment was commissioned by the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental body involving the eight Arctic nations — Canada, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Russia, and the United States.

The Inuit and other Arctic peoples also participate in the Council and contributed to the ACIA report, along with over 600 hundred scientists from around the world. Although complete, it will not be made public or presented to governments until after the U.S. presidential elections at a conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, Nov. 9-12.

The impacts of climate change are already widely felt in the Arctic. Thawing permafrost — the normally perpetually frozen layer of earth — has collapsed roads and buildings. Unexpectedly thinner sea ice and small streams that have become raging rivers has led to several drownings in recent years, according to Watt-Cloutier.

“Our traditional wisdom on how to survive and thrive on the land is becoming useless because everything is changing and changing fast.”

Alaska experienced its warmest and driest summer ever this year, Patricia Anderson of the ACIA Secretariat University of Alaska said in an interview. Temperatures soared 10 degrees C. above normal and millions of hectares of forest burned in the worst wildfires ever recorded, following several recent years with major fires.

Full Article:commondreams.org

MILWAUKEE, WI – Call it the Chips Ahoy! School of International Studies: Fifth-graders at Fratney Street School in Milwaukee learn about causes of terrorism with a small bag of cookies and a large map of the world.

Bob Peterson teaches students that overpopulation and poverty help make it easier to recruit terrorists for attacks like those on Sept. 11, 2001.

Schools have been teaching about Sept. 11 since that morning nearly three years ago, but this year, Families of September 11, founded by victims’ relatives, is honoring Peterson and three others for curricula on terrorism’s root causes. At a Smithsonian Institution conference today, the group will issue guidelines for educators.

In one of Peterson’s lessons, students stand, arranged by population, on a huge world map. Peterson hands out cookies according to gross national products: The 16 students in Asia each get one cookie, and the three in Africa split half a cookie among them. In North America, one student enjoys eight cookies.

Though he doesn’t “blame America” for the attacks, Peterson says, even children “can be encouraged to ask deep questions” about the causes of terrorism.

Opponents say that runs the risk of creating empathy for terrorists. Teachers must ensure “that students aren’t taking away an overly simplistic view of why terrorism happens,” says Kathleen Porter-Magee of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a think tank that has pushed for more rigorous history curricula. Though students might understand its causes, she says, terrorism is irrational.

Full Article: commondreams.org

This is the sorry state of the terrorism discourse in the United States. ‘Poverty’ and ‘overpopulation’ are why ‘they’ hate us. And why are they poor? Colonial/imperial piracy and pillage. I can guarantee that’s not in the ‘enlightened’ curriculum. And the one advocating the ‘more rigorous history curriculum’ thinks that children should be taught that terrorism has no cause at all. Poor kids.

by Peyman Pejman
BAGHDAD – Armed groups and foreign terrorists have established new camps in central Iraq as government forces attack rebels in the north and south, officials say.

The reports follow an admission by U.S. central command chief Gen. John Abizaid that there are more areas in Iraq under rebel control today than there were last year.

The revelations could be damning for the government of U.S. appointed interim prime minister Iyad Allawi who has promised to uproot armed opposition to the nascent government.

New camps have been reported in the ‘Sunni triangle’ zone that includes Falluja and Ramadi. Iraqi and western sources say the camps have been established recently and fortified in the past couple of months.

Reports are coming in of new armed groups organising themselves in parts of the country earlier thought safe, as fighting escalates in other parts of Iraq. Over the past few days fighting has erupted again in many parts of the country including Falluja and Mosul in the north and Sadr City in Baghdad.

Full Article: commondreams.org

“Africa has been waiting to be discovered with the eyes of a lover.” Ben Okri declares his love to Africa.

by Ben Okri
Heart-shaped Africa is the feeling centre of the world. Continents are metaphors as much as they are places. And a people are spiritual states of humanity as distinguishable in what they represent as lilies and roses and daffodils.

Have we forgotten what Africa is? Africa is our dreamland, is our spiritual homeland. There is a realm inside every human being that is Africa. We all have an Africa within us. And so when the Africa outside is sick with troubles, the Africa inside us makes us ill with neuroses. The sheer quantity of neuroses, of anorexia, of inexplicable psychic illness in the world is possibly indirectly due to the illness, the troubles in Africa. We have to heal the Africa in us if we are going to be whole again. We have to heal the Africa outside us if the human race is going to be at peace again in a new dynamic way. There is a relationship between the troubles in a people and the troubles in the world, in the atmosphere. The troubles of Africa contribute immensely to the sheer weight and size of world suffering. And this world suffering affects everyone on this planet, affects children and their health, affects our sleep, our anxiety, our unknown suffering; for it is possible to suffer without knowing it.

And so we have to heal our Africa within. We have to re-discover the true Africa, the Africa of laughter, of joy, of originality, of improvisation, the Africa of legend, of story-telling, of playfulness, the Africa of brilliant colours, the Africa of generosity, of hospitality and kindness to strangers, the Africa of immense compassion, the Africa of wisdom, of proverbs, of divination, of paradox, the Africa of ingenuity, and surprise, the Africa of a four-dimensional attitude to time, the Africa of magic, of faith, of patience, of endurance, of a profound knowledge of nature’s ways and the secret cycles of destiny.

Full Article:odemagazine.com