A ravaged US state is fighting back against mining bosses who backed Bush.

Maria Gunnoe sits at the top of the valley her family has called home for three generations and points to the artificial moonscape that has replaced the once wooded and rolling hills.

Above her home there now sits a huge strip mine. Two more strip mines are eating away the hills on the opposite side of the valley. ‘I’m being attacked on all sides,’ she said.

This is not ordinary strip mining. This is mountaintop removal – activists dub it ‘strip mining on steroids’. It is the stuff of science fiction and it is booming in the Appalachian mountains, bringing with it environmental degradation and human despair. It is fuelled by a mining industry that has paid millions of dollars into Republican campaign coffers and received in return an unprecedented relaxation of rules.

Mountaintop removal mining does exactly what it says – in order to get at thin seams of coal that lie within, like cream through the middle of a sponge cake. Millions of tons of rock are blown up, scraped away and poured into surrounding valleys, filling them to the brim. What was a mountain range is turned into a flat and almost barren desert of rock.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

President Bush said the public’s decision to reelect him was a ratification of his approach toward Iraq and that there was no reason to hold any administration officials accountable for mistakes or misjudgments in prewar planning or managing the violent aftermath.

“We had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 elections,” Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. “The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me.”
Full Article: washingtonpost.com

surreal

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 15 – The threat of death hung so heavily over the election rally, held this week on the fifth floor of the General Factory for Vegetable Oil, that the speakers refused to say whether they were candidates at all.

“Too dangerous,” said Hussein Ali, who solicited votes for the United Iraqi Alliance, a party fielding dozens of candidates for the elections here. “It’s a secret.”
Full Article: nytimes.com

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania, Jan. 15 (UPI) — Britain’s chancellor used a trip to Africa to say the days of the United Kingdom having to apologize for its colonial past are finished.

Gordon Brown made the comments in Tanzania during a one-week trip, which included signing a debt relief deal with Tanzania that will cost British taxpayers $1.87 billion, the BBC reported Saturday.

On top of the relief deal with Tanzania, Brown said Britain would make similar offers to 70 poorer nations around the world.

His comments on how long Britain should keep apologizing followed accusations by South African President Thabo Mbeki, in which he charged English settlers treated Africans like savages.

Brown said, in general, English settlers were honorably motivated to colonize Africa.
interestalert.com

Yup, time to stop apologizing for history and start rewriting it.

by Robert Fisk
Journalism yields a world of clichés but here, for once, the first cliché that comes to mind is true. Baghdad is a city of fear. Fearful Iraqis, fearful militiamen, fearful American soldiers, fearful journalists.

Jan. 30, that day upon which the blessings of democracy will shower upon us, is approaching with all the certainty and speed of doomsday. The latest Zarqawi video shows the execution of six Iraqi policemen. Each shot in the back of the head, one by one. A survivor plays dead. Then a gunman walks confidently up behind him and blows his head apart with bullets.

These images haunt everyone. At the al-Hurriya intersection Tuesday morning, four truckloads of Iraqi national guardsmen — the future saviors of Iraq, according to President Bush — are passing my car. Their rifles are porcupine quills, pointing at every motorist, every Iraqi on the pavement, the Iraqi army pointing their weapons at their own people. And they are all wearing masks — black hoods or ski masks or kuffiyas that leave only slits for frightened eyes.

Just before it collapsed finally into the hands of the insurgents last summer, I saw exactly the same scene in the streets of Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad. Now I am watching them in the capital.

…The American generals — with a unique mixture of mendacity and hope amid the insurgency — are now saying that only four of Iraq’s 18 provinces may not be able to “fully” participate in the elections. Good news. Until you sit down with the population statistics and realize — as the generals, of course, all know — that those four provinces contain more than half the population of Iraq.
Full Article: commondreams.org

Troops from the US-led force in Iraq have caused widespread damage and severe contamination to the remains of the ancient city of Babylon, according to a damning report released today by the British Museum.

John Curtis, keeper of the museum’s Ancient Near East department and an authority on Iraq’s many archaeological sites, found “substantial damage” on an investigative visit to Babylon last month.

The ancient city has been used by US and Polish forces as a military depot for the past two years, despite objections from archaeologists.

“This is tantamount to establishing a military camp around the Great Pyramid in Egypt or around Stonehenge in Britain,” says the report, which has been seen by the Guardian.

Among the damage found by Mr Curtis, who was invited to Babylon by Iraqi antiquities experts, were cracks and gaps where somebody had tried to gouge out the decorated bricks forming the famous dragons of the Ishtar Gate.

He saw a 2,600-year-old brick pavement crushed by military vehicles, archaeological fragments scattered across the site, and trenches driven into ancient deposits.

Vast amounts of sand and earth, visibly mixed with archaeological fragments, were gouged from the site to fill thousands of sandbags and metal mesh baskets. When this practice was stopped, large quantities of sand and earth were brought in from elsewhere, contaminating the site for future generations of archaeologists.

Mr Curtis called for an international investigation by archaeologists chosen by the Iraqis to record all the damage done by the occupation forces.

Last night the US military defended its operations at the site, but said all earth-moving projects had been stopped and it was considering moving troops away to protect the ruins.

Babylon, a city renowned for its beauty and its splendour 1,000 years before Europe built anything comparable, was chosen as the site for a US military base in April 2003, just after the invasion of Iraq.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suspended ties with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas on Friday, until Abbas makes an effort to stop terror.

“Israel informed international leaders today that there will be no meetings with Abbas until he makes a real effort to stop the terror,” said Sharon spokesman Assaf Shariv.
Full Article: haaretzdaily.com

Powell Demands Abbas Stop Terrorists

WASHINGTON (AP) – Faced with a sudden setback to Middle East peace prospects, Secretary of State Colin Powell insisted Friday that new Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas bring under control terror groups that are killing Israelis.

“He’s got to get those terrorists under control,” Powell said after six Israelis were killed in a bombing and shooting attack at a Gaza crossing. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon responded by cutting all contact with Abbas.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

What a farce. I wonder what Abbas gets in return for taking this job…or maybe he’s just a chump.

Fallujah’s Refugees Won’t Return Home, Won’t Vote

by Robert Fisk
The Independent
They live beneath old fly-blown tents in the car-park of the Mustafa mosque and their canvas-roofed kitchen stands next to a pool of raw sewage, but the refugees from Fallujah will not return home.

First, because many have no homes to go to; second, because they are – with the encouragement of local clerics – listing a series of demands that include the withdrawal of all American soldiers from the city, the maintenance of security by Fallujans themselves, massive compensation payments and the return of money and valuables which those who have just visited Fallujah say were stolen by American troops.

And they are very definitely not going to vote in the 30 January elections. Squatting on the floor of his concrete-walled office in his black robes to eat a lunch of chicken and rice, Sheikh Hussein – he pleads with me not to print his family name – insists that his people are not against elections.

“We are not rejecting this election for the sake of it,” he says. “We are rejecting it because it is the ‘tent’ of the occupation. It is the vehicle for the Americans to ensure that [interim President Iyad] Allawi gets back in. And we are still under occupation.”
Full Article: counterpunch.org

Sitting in the cockpit of the Allouette helicopter as it banked over the South African veldt last March, the vista must have looked golden to Sir Mark Thatcher. He was about to embark on a great adventure and the prize was no less than control of an African nation’s oil wealth.

The plan was to use the helicopter as a gunship in a coup that would overthrow the president of Equatorial Guinea and replace him with an opposition leader. The reward for the kingmakers would be millions of dollars in oil concessions.

But by yesterday, the dreams of fabulous wealth had crashed. Sir Mark Thatcher sat frowning, clutching his worry beads, in Cape Town High Court. A banner hanging from a building opposite read ” Save Me, Mummy”, while a small group of protestors standing at the entrance shouted: “Shame, shame, shame.”

Full Article: independent.co.uk

THE Pentagon considered developing a host of non-lethal chemical weapons that would disrupt discipline and morale among enemy troops, newly declassified documents reveal.

Most bizarre among the plans was one for the development of an “aphrodisiac” chemical weapon that would make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other. Provoking widespread homosexual behaviour among troops would cause a “distasteful but completely non-lethal” blow to morale, the proposal says.

Other ideas included chemical weapons that attract swarms of enraged wasps or angry rats to troop positions, making them uninhabitable. Another was to develop a chemical that caused “severe and lasting halitosis”, making it easy to identify guerrillas trying to blend in with civilians. There was also the idea of making troops’ skin unbearably sensitive to sunlight.

The proposals, from the US Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, date from 1994. The lab sought Pentagon funding for research into what it called “harassing, annoying and ‘bad guy’-identifying chemicals”. The plans have been posted online by the Sunshine Project, an organisation that exposes research into chemical and biological weapons.

Spokesman Edward Hammond says it was not known if the proposed $7.5 million, six-year research plan was ever pursued.
newscientist.com