HAMBANTOTA, Sri Lanka – Next door to four houses flattened by the tsunami, three rooms of Poorima Jayaratne’s home still stood intact. She had a ready explanation for that anomaly, and her entire family’s survival: she was a Buddhist, and her neighbors were not.

“Most of the people who lost relatives were Muslim,” said Ms. Jayaratne, 30, adding for good measure that two Christians were also missing. As proof, she pointed to the poster of Lord Buddha that still clung to the standing portion of her house.

The earthquake and tsunami that killed at least 150,000 people reached from Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim majority nation, to India, the world’s largest Hindu one. It hit Thailand’s Buddhist majority and Muslim minority, and this tiny island country, which is mostly Buddhist but has sizable Hindu, Muslim and Christian populations.

Across nations and religions there has been a search for explanations of not only why the tsunami came but why it killed some and not others – and a vibrant, sometimes virulent cottage industry is supplying them.

Some discern a lesson that humanity should unite, citing the bodies of people of all religions tumbling together into mass graves, while others see affirmations of the rightness of their own path. Amid sympathy, there is judgment; beneath public compassion, a private moralizing.
Full Article: nytimes.com

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 – The White House confirmed today that the search in Iraq for the banned weapons it had cited as justifying the war that ousted Saddam Hussein has been quietly ended after nearly two years, with no evidence of their existence.

That means that the conclusions of an interim report last fall by the leader of the weapons hunt, Charles A. Duelfer, will stand. That report undercut prewar administration contentions that Iraq possessed biological and chemical weapons, was building a nuclear capability and might share weapons with Al Qaeda. A White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, insisted today that the war was justified. He rejected the suggestion that the administration’s credibility had been gravely wounded in ways that could weaken its future response to perceived threats.

The administration appeared to be dropping today even the suggestion that banned weapons might be deeply buried or well hidden in Iraq.
Full Article: nytimes.com

The son of former Prime Minister Lady Margaret Thatcher is accused of helping to finance an alleged coup.

He is reported to have agreed to a plea bargain and will make an unscheduled appearance at a court in Cape Town.

He will plead guilty to being negligent in investing in an aircraft said to have been used by alleged coup plotters, a BBC correspondent said.

The businessman had previously denied being involved in a plan to topple the government of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea but was barred from leaving South Africa while investigations continued.
Full Article:news.bbc.co.uk

LA PAZ, Bolivia (Reuters) – Anti-government protests in Bolivia on Tuesday paralyzed two cities and pushed authorities to meet a key demand — the cancellation of a water concession run by a foreign company.

A two-day civic strike called by business, labor and neighborhood groups to protest a rise in gas prices brought to a halt the normally bustling Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s richest and largest city with 1.2 million people. Streets were blocked and public transport was grounded.

The government said it will not reverse the gas price hikes decreed two weeks ago because it cannot afford the $30 million in fuel subsidies needed to keep prices down.

In El Alto, the poor combative city of 800,000 that overlooks the capital La Paz, protests continued for a second day against the gas price hikes and also the city’s water utility, owned by France’s Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux .

Protesters cut off roads leading into the capital and to the international airport outside El Alto.

Late Tuesday, Bolivian President Carlos Mesa’s government agreed to cancel the French company’s concession in both El Alto and La Paz for failure to fulfill its contract.

About 200,000 people in El Alto still don’t have running water, although the contract stipulates 100 percent coverage, and the government said connection costs were too high. The company has denied any wrongdoing.

Even with the government’s gesture, El Alto’s leaders said they would not end their strike.

The government of South America’s poorest nation is on alert after uprisings in 2003, centered in El Alto, turned into a bloody revolt against the former president, who fled Bolivia for the United States.
Full Article:nytimes/reuters

The United States warned Russia against selling missiles to Syria amid reports that Moscow was ready to provide Damascus with a sophisticated weapon that could hit any target in Israel.

But Russia denied it had any such plans.
Full Article: news.yahoo.com

Israel Opposes ‘Russia – Syria Missile Deal’ – Reports
JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel is trying to stop Russia selling missiles to arch-foe Syria, which the Jewish state accuses of backing Hizbollah guerrillas and Palestinian militants, Israeli and Russian media said on Wednesday.

Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom did not confirm details but told Reuters: “We held discussions on this here among ourselves a few days ago. We hope to reach the necessary understandings with the Russian government.”

A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry in Moscow said he had no knowledge of a Russian-Syrian arms deal in the works.

Channel Two television said Russia planned to sell Syria arms including an unspecified number of SA-18 shoulder-fired missiles, which could threaten Israeli aircraft over Syria and southern Lebanon.
Full Article: nytimes.com/reuters

The Earth is still ringing like a bell about two weeks after the earthquake that shook the Indian Ocean and triggered the tsunamis in Asia, according to Australian scientists.

Survivors haul a badly-damaged van Sunday Jan 9, 2005 following the earthquake and tsunami which hit the area two weeks ago in Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh province in northwest Indonesia. [AP]
Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Sunday quoted Herb McQueen from the Australian National University as saying that a gravity meter is still detecting ringing from the rare seismic event.

He said the data is being studied by scientists across the world.

“Normally a reasonably large earthquake will continue reverberating for a couple of days on our charts, but this one has been going steadily for the last 12 to 13 days and shows no signs of letting up actually,” he said.
Full Article: chinadaily.com
“There’s still a measurable oscillation,” and “I’ve never seen the earth ringing this long after an earthquake,” he said.

Long-term environmental lessons must be drawn from Asia’s tsunami disaster, especially the consequences of ripping out mangroves and destroying coral reefs that help protect coasts from sea and storms, experts say.

“Places that had healthy coral reefs and intact mangroves were far less badly hit than places where the reefs had been damaged and the mangroves ripped out and replaced by beachfront hotels and prawn farms,” said Simon Cripps, director of the Global Marine Programme at the environment group WWF Internationational.

“Coral reefs act as a natural breakwater and mangroves are a natural shock absorber, and this applies to floods and cyclones as well as tsunamis,” he said in an interview from Geneva.

He compared the outcome of the December 26 tsunami in the Maldives, the low-lying archipelago which emphasises good coral management in its policy of upmarket tourism; and the Thai resort of Phuket, where mangroves and a coastline belt have been replaced by aquaculture and a hotel strip.

Both places were swamped and suffered severe economic damage. In the Maldives, just over 100 people have been counted as dead and missing in a populace of 270,000; in Phuket, where there is a roughly similar size of population at peak season, the toll is nearly 1,000.
Full Article: terradaily.com

The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq
By Michael Hirsh and John Barry
Newsweek
Updated: 5:27 p.m. ET Jan. 10, 2005Jan. 8 – What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called “the Salvador option”—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. “What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are,” one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. “We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing.” Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking “the back” of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out.

Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported “nationalist” forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras. There is no evidence, however, that Negroponte knew anything about the Salvadoran death squads or the Iran-Contra scandal at the time. The Iraq ambassador, in a phone call to NEWSWEEK on Jan. 10, said he was not involved in military strategy in Iraq. He called the insertion of his name into this report “utterly gratuitous.”)
Full Article:msnbc.msn.com

I thought those bad old days were the worst I would ever see. Maybe what’s really the worst is the numbing lack of surprise at what these criminals are capable of.

By Charles Demers
Remember the heady, idealistic days of early 2005? You know, like, January 1st through to, say, the 7th or 8th? After the three-hundred-and-sixty-six day bloodbath that was 2004, and once the Are-the-Tourists-Okay? angle of the Tsunami story was driven into the ground–because apparently middle-aged sex tourists are still a more compelling image of Thai suffering than orphaned locals–it really seemed as though, this year, mourning brown-skinned folks as though they were real people would be en vogue.

News agencies started turning away, slowly, from the fates of small, exclusive sea-side resorts, and started talking about the indigenous human toll of the South East Asian catastrophe; news that’s not, it should be pointed out, without its relevance to the goings-on of American capitalism: the post-traumatic suffering of those lucky children who survived the waves raises relevant commercial questions, like how many Asian kids is Nike’s Philip Knight going to have to fire as absenteeism skyrockets whilst they look for their parents’ bodies? (A quick aside: Remember how nobody wanted to give up wearing Nikes despite the devastation the company wrought on South-East Asia? Seriously, though, that Tsunami was positively Shakespearean.)

Despite their status as walking contradictions in terms, “Television Journalists” waxed poetic about the devastation. Suddenly bereft of their go-to metaphor–“Huge waves of refugees,” “Market ebbs and flows,” and so on–reporters struggled to find the proper timbre for such chilling, desperate news. We started talking about debt relief, and aid packages, and we were all so swept up in the profoundly humanitarian moment that it didn’t even seem to bother anybody that American helicopters weren’t readily available to help, bogged down as they were in a Quagmire.

And it was that very Quagmire, in Babylon, that snapped us back into the realpolitik of our current post-January 10th paradigm. Shifty, far-out, conspiratorially anti-government sources like Newsweek began to report on a raging debate in the Pentagon that has definitively put to rest any Tsunami-mirage hopes that in 2005, the white North might assign even mildly human-like values to non-white lives: The debate over the “Salvador Option,” a term in an of itself so chilling and inhuman as to recall the moral fitness of another first-world regime that weighed the “option” of Madagascar against Zyklon B.

What’s that? You’re not familiar with the ‘Salvador Option’? Well, remember in the 1980s, when all those fiery, irrationally passionate Latinos and their wacky hippy allies advanced the unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that the CIA was orchestrating bands of marauding assassins and torturers in El Salvador against the left-wing FMLN guerrillas, as well as Catholic clergy and innocent civilians? Well–and we don’t really need to dwell on thisñ essentially, every accusation they made was true, and we’re tacitly admitting it now, only because we’re hoping to do the exact same thing (except openly this time) in Iraq. So while you thought the question to ask new Bush appointees like Gonzales was ‘Do you condone torture’, it turns out that the more germane question might be ‘Do you condone mutilating nuns’ genitalia and leaving bishops dead in ditches?’ And the answer you’ll get, at this point, is: We’ll let you know. Also, according to Newsweek, “The interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is said to be among the most forthright proponents of the Salvador option.” Thank God that the tyrant Hussein is in U.S. custody, so that dedicated democrats like Allawi can set themselves to the difficult task of building a free and thriving political expression for Iraqi civil society.
Full Article: counterpunch.org

The police in Washington, D.C. are using new behavioral profiling methods to profile people riding the metro there. Officers are now targeting people who seem to be looking around the station more than other passengers, avoid eye contact or seem to be loitering in stations. If riders meet these criteria, the police are stopping them for questioning. This is all part of security preparations for the upcoming second Bush inauguration.

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed lawsuits to challenge a similar series of actions by police in Boston police at Logan Airport. Past cases have indicated that race is not an acceptable factor in determining whether or not a suspect should be questioned.

Massachusetts officials defended their program. ‘Logan’s Behavior Pattern Recognition program is specifically designed to ensure the protection of everyone’s constitutional and civil rights,’ the agency said in a statement. ‘Racial profiling is not an effective law enforcement tool and plays no role in behavior pattern recognition.’

The program has helped catch some pickpockets in the D.C. area since its implimentation in the last six months. Officers involved in the program are both plain clothes and uniformed.

With the inauguration approaching, additional security measures will be taken including the use of bomb sniffing dogs and machines that may help screen packages carried by passengers. Two Metro stops will be closed during the inauguration itself.

A spokesperson for the D.C. police indicated that ‘A handful [of screeners] will be placed in strategic locations throughout the area’ without being more specific. Officials are concerned that terrorists may try to disrupt the inaugural in an attack similar to the one carried out in Madrid’s subway last year.
Full Article: elitestv.com