by Mike Whitney
Tom Friedman is the most popular columnist in the United States. He’s also the voice of the American establishment. From his perch at the CFR (Council of Foreign Relations) he delivers his affable-sounding polemics; spreading a gospel of free markets and endless war. His many accolades, including a stockpile of Pulitzer prizes, attest to his ability to convert the self-serving doctrine of personal accumulation into the highest form of personal virtue.

Friedman is forever the casual acquaintance, the man on the street, whispering a friendly word of advice to his readers. The world according to Tom is getting “flatter” all the time. This is his snappy, non-threatening expression for globalization. Friedman is the foremost pitch-man for the new economic paradigm; ignoring the tens of thousands of high-paying American jobs that have fled the country and the withering blow that outsourcing has delivered to the middle-class. He carefully avoids the details of how the neoliberal agenda has crushed third world nations with its austerity measures; privatizing resources, deregulating business and compromising national sovereignty. Instead, he champions the dismal results as a sign of emergent democracy.

“For globalism to work,” Friedman avers, “America cannot be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is…The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist–McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonald-Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.” (NYTs March 28, 1999)

It’s doubtful that anyone has ever written a more succinct defense of American militarism. Friedman’s analysis casually mixes Machiavelli with Adam Smith; producing a poignant description of how the real world operates. Behind the illusion of “free markets” and globalization the same coercive, “hidden fist” is guiding events. For all his “folksiness”, Friedman’s world view is no different than that of George Bush.
Full: counterpunch.org

KABUL, Afghanistan, May 13 – Thousands of Muslims, from Gaza to Pakistan to Indonesia, emerged from prayer services on Friday to join Afghans in rapidly spreading protests over the reported desecration of a Koran by American interrogators at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

In Afghanistan, at least 8 people were killed and more than 40 injured in clashes, bringing the death toll over four days of anti-American rioting to at least 16, with more than 100 injured. For the first time a policeman was killed in the violence.

Three protesters were killed and 23 people wounded as the police grappled with a crowd of more than 1,500 in Baharak, in far northeastern Badakhstan, the police chief of the province, Gen. Shah Jehan Nuri, said in a telephone interview. Ten police officers and members of the border police, who are based in the town, were among the injured, he said.

In three Pakistan cities, Peshawar, Quetta and Multan, hundreds of protesters led largely by religious parties burned American flags and chanted anti-American slogans after Friday Prayer. The protests were peaceful, though, thanks in large part to the large numbers of police officers deployed outside mosques and official buildings.

Hundreds of people gathered peacefully outside a mosque in Jakarta on Friday while a statement was read condemning the United States for the reported abuses. In Gaza, about 1,500 members of the radical Islamic group Hamas marched through the Jabaliya refugee camp as outrage spread over the reports, including a brief item in Newsweek, that interrogators at Guantánamo Bay had flushed a Koran down the toilet in an effort to upset detainees.

Protesters carrying the green banners of Islam and Hamas shouted, “Protect our holy book!” Some burned American and Israeli flags. Anti-American protests are rare among militant Palestinians, who decry American support for Israel but emphasize that their struggle is with Israel, not the United States.

The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said Friday that officials at the Department of Defense were investigating reports of the desecration, and that “they take such allegations very seriously,” but he did not indicate when the investigation would be completed, Reuters reported. “We will not tolerate any disrespect for the holy Koran,” he added.
Full: nytimes.com

by Randeep Ranesh
On the southern fringes of New Delhi, up from the city’s latest spaghetti junction and past its military barracks, is a field that is forever foreign.

Behind a three-storey sandstone gatehouse are manicured lawns, watered gardens and 1,000 graves of the fallen heroes of the British-raised Indian army who died in two world wars. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission, based in London, pays for their upkeep.

The plot is a study in quiet tranquillity far from the rude chaos of India outside. Hidden from most maps, the only pilgrims are the dwindling band of war veterans and the families of the dead.

Naresh Kalra, the official in charge of the cemetery, says barely 70 people come a year. Indians rarely ever pay homage to soldiers such as Captain CH Howard of the Burma Rifles or AJ Watson of the Royal Air Force who died serving “their motherland”.
Many more know Nicholson’s cemetery, a 45-minute drive away. Under matted shrubs lie the shattered marble tombstones of those who expired during the British Raj. Here also are war graves.

Most famous is that of Brigadier General John Nicholson. A strapping, 6ft Irishman, Nicholson “led the assault of Delhi but fell in the hour of victory” in what is known by Indians as the first war of independence, or recorded in British history as the 1857 Indian mutiny.

Nicholson’s motherland has largely forgotten the 35-year-old brigadier general. The Raj has disappeared from the imagination of Britons, save for images of steam trains, “civilising” missionary work and impressive monuments built for royal visits.

It is easy to explain why. Modern states would rather remember their triumphs rather than the means they used to achieve them. But this leaves two truths – that of the rulers and that of the ruled. One people’s heroes are another’s villains.
Full: guardian.co.uk
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by Naomi Klein
I recently caught a glimpse of the effects of torture in action at an event honouring Maher Arar. The Syrian-born Canadian is the world’s most famous victim of “rendition”, the process by which US officials outsource torture to foreign countries. Arar was switching planes in New York when US interrogators detained him and “rendered” him to Syria, where he was held for 10 months in a cell slightly larger than a grave and taken out periodically for beatings.

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Arar was being honoured for his courage by the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations, a mainstream advocacy organisation. The audience gave him a heartfelt standing ovation, but there was fear mixed in with the celebration. Many of the prominent community leaders kept their distance from Arar, responding to him only tentatively. Some speakers were unable even to mention the honoured guest by name, as if he had something they could catch. And perhaps they were right: the tenuous “evidence” – later discredited – that landed Arar in a rat-infested cell was guilt by association. And if that could happen to Arar, a successful software engineer and family man, who is safe?
In a rare public speech, Arar addressed this fear directly. He told the audience that an independent commissioner has been trying to gather evidence of law-enforcement officials breaking the rules when investigating Muslim Canadians. The commissioner has heard dozens of stories of threats, harassment and inappropriate home visits. But, Arar said, “not a single person made a public complaint. Fear prevented them from doing so.” Fear of being the next Maher Arar.

The fear is even thicker among Muslims in the United States, where the Patriot Act gives police the power to seize the records of any mosque, school, library or community group on mere suspicion of terrorist links. When this intense surveillance is paired with the ever-present threat of torture, the message is clear: you are being watched, your neighbour may be a spy, the government can find out anything about you. If you misstep, you could disappear on to a plane bound for Syria, or into “the deep dark hole that is Guantánamo Bay”, to borrow a phrase from Michael Ratner, president of the Centre for Constitutional Rights.
Full: guardian.co.uk
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It’s still dark when Juarez Santana Rocha tumbles off of his mattress, woken by music suddenly blaring from the truck carrying a noisy sound system.

He and more than a thousand others from the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia have half an hour to gather their backpacks, grab some bread, gulp a coffee and form a line on the BR-060 motorway.

Ahead of them the day will bring yet another leg of their epic 130-mile walk to the capital, Brasilia, calling for agrarian reform. At the same moment thousands of others are whooping their colleagues from slumber in 22 other giant tents in the camp, each from a different state, for the 17-day haul.

By first light there are 11,000 landless farmers, members of the Movimento Sem Terra, or MST, lined up in three strict columns along the motorway, a thin red line stretching for more than two miles.
Full: guardian.co.uk

Pope Benedict yesterday revealed that he had set his predecessor, John Paul II, on the road to possible sainthood just 26 days after the late pontiff’s death.
Yesterday’s announcement – in Latin – that the late pope was to be considered for beatification, the stepping stone to sainthood, broke all records. At least five years are meant to elapse after the death of a candidate before the Vatican initiates the necessary procedures.

The only other so-called “dispensation” since the rule was introduced in 1983 was for Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who was beatified two years ago. But, in her case, it took more than a year for the Vatican to agree to an exception.

The Pope also yesterday resolved the most pressing staff issue in his in-basket with the appointment of a Californian to take over from him as the Roman Catholic church’s doctrinal “policeman”. As archbishop of progressive San Francisco, William Levada has been at the leading edge of the church’s often awkward encounters with social change.

The purpose of the five-year rule is to let passions cool. Never has that seemed more necessary than in the case of John Paul II, who was cheered to the grave last month by a crowd chanting “Sant-o, Sant-o” (“Saint, Saint”) and holding up banners demanding his immediate canonisation.

The Pope timed his announcement to coincide with the anniversary of what John Paul considered was his miraculous survival of an as sassination attempt in 1981. In his last book, published in February, the late pontiff said it was “just as if someone guided” the bullet that narrowly missed killing him.
Full: guardian.co.uk

Well there’s two ways of looking at that.
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A team of geneticists believe they have shed light on many aspects of how modern humans emigrated from Africa by analyzing the DNA of the Orang Asli, the original inhabitants of Malaysia. Because the Orang Asli appear to be directly descended from the first emigrants from Africa, they have provided valuable new clues about that momentous event in early human history.

The geneticists conclude that there was only one migration of modern humans out of Africa – that it took a southern route to India, Southeast Asia and Australasia, and consisted of a single band of hunter-gatherers, probably just a few hundred people strong.

A further inference is that because these events took place during the last Ice Age, Europe was at first too cold for human habitation and was populated only later – not directly from Africa but as an offshoot of the southern migration which trekked back through the lands that are now India and Iran to reach the Near East and Europe.

The findings depend on analysis of mitochondrial DNA, a type of genetic material inherited only through the female line. They are reported in today’s issue of Science by a team of geneticists led by Vincent Macaulay of the University of Glasgow.

Everyone in the world can be placed on a single family tree, in terms of their mitochondrial DNA, because everyone has inherited that piece of DNA from a single female, the mitochondrial Eve, who lived some 200,000 years ago. There were, of course, many other women in that ancient population, but over the generations one mitochondrial DNA replaced all the others through the process known as genetic drift. With the help of mutations that have built up on the one surviving copy, geneticists can arrange people in lineages and estimate the time of origin of each lineage.

With this approach, Dr. Macaulay’s team calculates that the emigration from Africa took place about 65,000 years ago, pushed along the coastlines of India and Southeast Asia, and reached Australia by 50,000 years ago, the date of the earliest known archaeological site.

The Orang Asli – meaning “original men” in Malay – are probably one of the surviving populations descended from this first migration, since they have several ancient mitochondrial DNA lineages that are found nowhere else. These lineages are between 42,000 and 63,000 years old, the geneticists say.

Groups of Orang Asli like the Semang have probably been able to remain intact because they are adapted to the harsh life of living in forests, said Dr. Stephen Oppenheimer, the member of the geneticists’ team who collected blood samples in Malaysia.

Some archaeologists believe that Europe was colonized by a second migration, which traveled north out of Africa. This fits with the earliest known modern human sites – which date to 45,000 years ago in the Levant and 40,000 years ago in Europe.

But Dr. Macaulay’s team says there could only have been one migration, not two, because the mitochondrial lineages of everyone outside Africa converge at the same time to the same common ancestors. Therefore, people from the southern migration, probably in India, must have struck inland to reach the Levant, and later Europe, the geneticists say.

Dr. Macaulay said it was not clear why only one group had succeeded in leaving Africa. One possibility is that since the migration occurred by one population budding into another, leaving people in place at each site, the first emigrants may have blocked others from leaving.

Another possibility is that the terrain was so difficult for hunter-gatherers, who must carry all their belongings with them, that only one group succeeded in the exodus.

Although there is general, but not complete, agreement that modern humans emigrated from Africa in recent times, there is still a difference between geneticists and archaeologists as to the timing of this event. Archaeologists tend to view the genetic data as providing invaluable information about the interrelationship between groups of people, but they place less confidence in the dates derived from genetic family trees.

There is no evidence of modern humans outside Africa earlier than 50,000 years ago, says Dr. Richard Klein, an archaeologist at Stanford University. Also, if something happened 65,000 years ago to allow people to leave Africa, as Dr. Macaulay’s team suggests, there should surely be some record of this event in the archaeological record within Africa, Dr. Klein said. Yet signs of modern human behavior do not appear in Africa until the transition between the Middle and Later Stone Age, 50,000 years ago, he said.

“If they want to push such an idea, find me a 65,000-year-old site with evidence of human occupation outside of Africa,” Dr. Klein said.

Geneticists counter that many of the coastline sites occupied by the first emigrants would now lie under water, since sea level has risen more than 200 feet since the last Ice Age. Dr. Klein expressed reservations about this argument, noting that rather than waiting for the rising sea levels to overwhelm them, people would build new sites further inland.

Dr. Macaulay said that genetic dates have improved in recent years now that it is affordable to decode the whole ring of mitochondrial DNA, not just a small segment as before. But he said he agreed “that archaeological dates are much firmer than the genetic ones” and that it is possible his 65,000-year date for the African exodus is too old.

Dr. Macaulay’s team has been able to estimate the size of the population in Africa from which the founders are descended. The calculation indicates a maximum of 550 women, but the true size may have been considerably less. This points to a single group of hunter-gatherers, perhaps a couple of hundred strong, as the ancestors of all humans outside of Africa, Dr. Macaulay said.
Full: nytimes.com

KABUL, Afghanistan, May 12 – Anti-American violence spread to 10 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces and into Pakistan on Thursday as four more protesters died in a third day of demonstrations and clashes with the police.

At one of three anti-American demonstrations Thursday in Kabul, students set fire to a drawing of President Bush and tossed it into the air.

Hundreds of students took part in three separate demonstrations here in the capital, where they burned an American flag, and a provincial office of CARE International was ransacked in a continuation of the most widespread protests against the American presence since the fall of the Taliban government more than three years ago.

In the most violent single incident, the police fired on hundreds of tribesmen from Khogiani, a district in eastern Afghanistan, who were trying to march in protest on Jalalabad, the town where four people died and 60 were wounded on Wednesday.
Full: nytimes.com

Haiti’s former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune remains near death. He has been on a hunger strike for over three weeks. He was imprisoned in June and has yet to see a judge in his case.

Meanwhile, the convictions of 38 Haitian former military leaders convicted of atrocities in 1994 have been annulled. Among them could be Louis Jodel Chamblain, the death squad leader who helped lead last year’s coup.

Today, in a Democracy Now national broadcast exclusive, we spend the hour with ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Fourteen months ago, Aristide was flown to the Central African Republic in what he called a modern-day kidnapping in the service of a coup d’etat backed by the United States.

Aristide was ousted by some of the same forces involved in the coup against him over a decade earlier. At that time, the leader of the FRAPH paramilitary death squad was on the payroll of U.S. intelligence agencies. The number two man – Louis Jodel Chamblain – was one of the leaders of this current coup.

Two weeks after this latest ouster, President Aristide defied Washington and returned to the Caribbean accompanied by a delegation of U.S. and Jamaican lawmakers. Aristide was eventually granted asylum in South Africa, where he now lives.

I reached him yesterday for the first extended broadcast interview in this country since moving to South Africa. I began by asking him about the condition of Yvon Neptune.

* Jean-Bertrand Aristide, speaking from South Africa.

AMY GOODMAN: Aristide was eventually granted asylum in South Africa, where he now lives. I reached him yesterday for the first extended national broadcast interview in this country since he moved to South Africa. I began by asking him about the condition of the ousted Prime Minister Yvon Neptune.

JEAN-BERTRAND ARISTIDE: It is very sad what we have as information about our Prime Minister, Yvon Neptune. He is still in hunger strike. How long he will be able to survive, we don’t know. That’s why we grasp this opportunity to ask everybody who can do something to not hesitate, because it is a matter of life and death. We need to save his life.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us what you believe needs to be done?

JEAN-BERTRAND ARISTIDE: I think it’s — mobilization throughout the world, if I can put it this way, in the sense that we need many, many voices to equal the voices of Haiti. The people of Haiti want life and not death. They want peace and not violence. They want democracy and not repression. So Prime Minister Yvon Neptune and So Ann and hundreds of others who are in jail, they all need that mobilization. Whoever can say something, whoever can do something, please do it, because the Haitian people right now are waiting for your help.
Full:zmag.org
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VIENNA (Reuters) – France, Britain and Germany have warned Iran they will break off talks and join Washington in seeking U.N. Security Council action if Tehran makes good on its threats to resume atomic work, EU officials said on Thursday.

The foreign ministers of the European Union’s three biggest powers sent a toughly worded letter to Hassan Rohani, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, warning that resuming potentially arms-related nuclear work “would bring the negotiating process to an end,” an EU diplomat quoted the letter as saying.

“The consequences could only be negative for Iran,” it said.
Full: reuters.my.com

A UN war this time? All nice and ‘legal’?