KEY WEST, Fla. (AP) – The Navy and marine wildlife experts are investigating whether the beaching of dozens of dolphins in the Florida Keys followed the use of sonar by a submarine on a training exercise off the coast.

More than 20 rough-toothed dolphins have died since Wednesday’s beaching by about 70 of the marine mammals, Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary spokeswoman Cheva Heck said Saturday.

A day before the dolphins swam ashore, the USS Philadelphia had conducted exercises with Navy SEALs off Key West, about 45 miles from Marathon, where the dolphins became stranded.

Navy officials refused to say if the submarine, based at Groton, Conn., used its sonar during the exercise.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

Tony Blair will next week demand a radical shake-up of the west’s approach to the world’s poorest continent when his year-long Africa Commission calls for a doubling of aid, the dismantling of trade barriers, the writing off of debts and immediate action to stamp out corruption.

In what is being billed as the most serious analysis of Africa’s problems for a generation, the prime minister will use the launch of next Friday’s report to urge a new partnership between developed and developing countries.

The report’s recommendations – likely to be the subject of hard bargaining between Britain and her G8 allies in the run-up to the Gleneagles summit in July – include tough measures to tackle bribery by western multinationals in addition to huge injections of cash to fund health, education and improvements to Africa’s rudimentary infrastructure.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

Spotlight falls on corruption of Africa
Forty-six countries in the world are listed as politically “fragile” by the Department for International Development, and 23 of them are in sub-Saharan Africa.

That accounts for nearly half the countries of the region. In the last forty years, more wars have been fought in this corner of the world than anywhere else.

This is the scale of the crisis of governance in Africa which Tony Blair’s Commission on Africa had to consider.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

Well isn’t Africa fortunate, being so thoroughly considered at long last. It’s all about the West’s approach and the West’s ‘concern’. Britain abopve all others set the stage for the corruption it is so eager now to ‘crack down’ on. Well England has a long history in Africa of cracking down on resistance and stamping out the people’s aspirations. They are to be trusted no more today than they were then.

Lagos poet “AJ” Daga Tola is also a musician and activist who lives in some of the worst urban conditions on earth. The main road to his eight foot square shack in Ajegunle slum is ankle-high in litter. The open drain down his alley overflows with black sewage. Fires smoulder below the nearby motorway bridge; armies of hawkers sell water on the permanently jammed expressway; and burned-out lorries and cars are dumped on either side of the road.

“Everyone here wakes up in anger,” says the man who has taken the initial letters of the slum as his first name. “The frustration of being alive in a society like this is excruciating. People find it very hard and it is getting worse. Day in, day out, poor people from all over Africa arrive in this place, still seeing Lagos as the land of opportunity. They are met at the bus stops by gangs of youths who demand payments. There is extortion at every point. Only one in 10 people have regular work.”

Roughly one million people live in Ajegunle – known in Lagos as “Jungle City” – which is just one of many dozens of chaotic slum areas across the mega-city that now stretches over roughly 300 square kilometres with a population density greater than either Mumbai or Calcutta. Some, like Makoko, are built partly on water with families eking out a precarious and unhealthy existence in shacks balanced on stilts. All are dangerous, volatile and unhealthy.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States said on Saturday that Syria’s plan to gradually withdraw from Lebanon fell short and urged that Syrian remove all of its troops from the country.

While announcing a partial withdrawal, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said that did mean his country would end its role in Lebanon.

“We mean complete withdrawal — no half-hearted measures,” said Darla Jordan, spokeswoman for the State Department.

U.S. officials have said Washington and European allies are considering “next steps” if Syria fails to pull out, including diplomatic and economic sanctions and a tougher U.N. resolution.
Full Article: nytimes.com/reutersl

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, March 4 (Reuters) – Thousands of supporters of the deposed president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, marched peacefully on Friday through a Haitian slum, calling for his return and praising United Nations troops that secured the demonstration.

The march in the Bel-Air neighborhood of Port-au-Prince was the second pro-Aristide demonstration in five days. On Monday, the police opened fire on a demonstration and killed at least three Aristide supporters. On Friday, United Nations officials mounted their first major operation to secure a demonstration, with 300 heavily armed peacekeepers. Brazilian peacekeepers kept the route under tight control, blocking Haitian police officers who wanted to enter the march’s perimeter.
Full Article:nytimes.com

by Michael D.Yates
…The ghosts of Karl Marx and Edward Abbey haunt the contemporary United States. Marx needs no introduction to readers of this magazine, but perhaps Abbey does. Edward Abbey was born in 1927 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, a small town about thirty miles from where I was born. He spent some of his youth on a hardscrabble farm in the nearby tiny village of Home, Pennsylvania, but he lived most of his adult life in the desert and canyon country of the Southwest. He was a novelist, essayist, poet, and a radical environmentalist. Among his best works are Desert Solitaire, an account of a year he spent as a park ranger at Arches National Monument (now a national park) in Moab, Utah, and The Monkey Wrench Gang, the novel which inspired a generation of militant environmentalists.

Marx argued that capitalist societies tended to exhibit poles of wealth and misery, with each pole tightly connected to the other. This prediction has been dismissed by mainstream thinkers, who argue that while there might have been some truth to it in capitalism’s early years, the advanced capitalist countries have shown that all boats tend to rise on the tide of the system’s incredible economic growth. However, if we look at the United States today, nearly 140 years after the onset of full-scale capitalism in the 1870s, we see that Marx’s prediction still has a lot of life in it.

Marx was speaking of relative misery, that is, how those at the bottom compared to those at the top. Workers create profit by their labor, and the capitalists take this profit because they own the workplaces. If the workers are not organized, employers will squeeze more and more profit from their labor, and the workers will become relatively worse off over time. Growing inequality is therefore the consequence of uncontested employer power. Other things being equal, there is no limit to rising inequality except the natural limits imposed by the inability of workers to minimally sustain themselves. Of course, if workers are organized, both at their workplaces and politically, they can and have placed social limits on the growth of inequality.

Today, the power of capital in the United States is more and more uncontested. Labor unions continue to hemorrhage members, and they exert a very limited power politically. The state is more firmly in the hands of employers than it has been in seventy years. Property rights reign supreme in the law, and capital is pretty much free to do what it wants, whether that means firing workers trying to organize unions or moving operations to a low-wage venue in another country. Workers are becoming more insecure, without allies or organizations, and slowly but surely losing the social securities won by hard struggle many years ago.
monthlyreview.org
(more…)

by Saul Landau and Farrah Hassen
After 9/11, Administration neo-cons offered a “noble lie” to sell the public on the need to invade and occupy Iraq (The Iraqis will shower our troops with flowers and kisses). The same group has invented a new “virtuous prevarication” to build support for an attack on Syria. Ignoring recent testimony by CIA Director Porter J. Goss that “Islamic extremists are exploiting the Iraqi conflict to recruit new anti-U.S. jihadists” (Washington Post, February 17, 2005), this group of high US officials in Defense, State and the Vice President’s office have organized a “get Syria” movement.

Without evidence, US officials accused Damascus of responsibility for the February 14 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in Beirut, and of sponsoring terrorism in Iraq as well.

Anti-Syria rhetoric followed from the Iraq precedent. Following the 9/11 attacks, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and then-Defense Policy Board Chair Richard Perle found they could convince President Bush to switch from traditionalist (do little) policy to aggressively asserting naked military power.
Full Article:counterpunch.org

WASHINGTON (AP) – A pair of Jewish groups accused Sen. Robert Byrd on Wednesday of making an outrageous and reprehensible comparison between Adolf Hitler’s Nazis and a Senate GOP plan to block Democrats from filibustering. A GOP senator called for Byrd to retract his remarks.

Byrd spokesman Tom Gavin denied that Byrd, D-W.Va., had compared Republicans to Hitler. He said that instead, the reference to Nazis in a Senate speech on Tuesday was meant to underscore that the past should not be ignored.

“Terrible chapters of history ought never be repeated,” Gavin said. “All one needs to do is to look at history to see how dangerous it is to curb the rights of the minority.”

But Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the Senate’s No. 3 Republican, called for Byrd to retract his statement.

“Senator Byrd’s inappropriate remarks comparing his Republican colleagues with Nazis are inexcusable,” Santorum said in a statement. “These comments lessen the credibility of the senator and the decorum of the Senate. He should retract his statement and ask for pardon.”

Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said Wednesday that Byrd’s remarks showed “a profound lack of understanding as to who Hitler was” and that the senator should apologize to the American people.

“It is hideous, outrageous and offensive for Senator Byrd to suggest that the Republican Party’s tactics could in any way resemble those of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party,” Foxman said.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

Methinks they dost protest too much.

Columbia University and the New Anti-Semitism
Rape, massacre, theft, torture, ethnic cleansing: these are not crimes which nations can defend with ease – especially when unearthed by their own historians. Israel recently faced this most troubling predicament. Combing through declassified state archives, Israeli scholars of the past twenty years have discovered their nation was founded upon the mass expulsion and deliberate destruction of the native Palestinian people. (1) Israel, it turned out, was far more Goliath than David. Since this presented somewhat of a public relations problem for a state still engaged in brutalizing Palestinians and stealing their land, a new self-justifying rationale needed to be authored.
Enter the “new anti-Semitism.” This doctrine turns reality on its head, declaring criticism of Israel’s racist behavior to be itself racist ­ “anti-Semitic.” Empathy for Palestinians being beaten, bullied, and bulldozed out of existence, the doctrine goes, is nothing but some disguised expression of Jew-hatred. Goose-stepping Germans and uprooted Palestinians are portrayed as part of the same unbroken line of anti-Semitism, even though those inhabiting concentration camps today ­ “the largest ever to exist,” says Israeli historian Baruch Kimmerling – are the Palestinians themselves. (2) But no matter. Abusing the memory of Holocaust victims to shut down criticism of Israeli crimes ­ crimes unearthed mostly by Jewish historians – may be obscene, but it is also effective.

Wielding this new ideological weapon, Israel’s champions aim to cut down pro-Palestinian voices inside America with the same ruthlessness Israeli soldiers employ to shoot up Palestinian children outside their homes. (3) The latest targets in this well-organized hit are Arab-American professors at Columbia University who teach Middle Eastern studies. The targets have been judiciously selected. Since these particular professors are Arab in an age when bombing and torturing Arabs has virtually become a national sport, they make for easy prey; and since they have added to their original sin of being Arab the even graver sin of speaking the truth about Israel’s past ­ no less in a country which subsidizes Israel’s existence – they also make for necessary prey.
Full Article: counterpunch.org

WASHINGTON (AP) – A woman fired by the FBI after alleging security lapses in its translator program has gained support from two members of Congress who said Wednesday they will question the Justice Department about her accusations.

After listening to former translator Sibel Edmonds complain about her treatment at the hands of the Justice Department and the FBI, Reps. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., and Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said their staffs would debrief Edmonds and confront Justice Department officials with the information.

Edmonds alleges she was fired after complaining to FBI managers about shoddy wiretap translations and telling them an interpreter with a relative at a foreign embassy might have compromised national security after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by passing information from an FBI wiretap to the target of an investigation.

Edmonds commented on the issue while testifying at a House Government Reform subcommittee hearing on the government’s designation of information as classified. She told lawmakers the people she accused were still working at the FBI.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

China’s ambassador to the United Nations last week called for international controls on the Internet.

Chinese Ambassador Sha Zukang told a UN conference that controls should be multilateral, transparent and democratic, with the full involvement of governments, the private sector, civil society and international organizations.

“It should ensure an equitable distribution of resources, facilitate access for all and ensure a stable and secure functioning,” he said at the conference on Internet governance.

Sha said China opposes the “monopolization” of the Internet by one state, a reference to the Untied States, which ultimately controls the digital medium.

“It is of crucial importance to conduct research on establishing a multilateral governance mechanism that is more rational and just and more conducive to the Internet development in a direction of stable, secure and responsible functioning and more conducive to the continuous technological innovation,” he said.
Full Article: worldtribune.com