The French interior minister, Dominique de Villepin, yesterday unveiled a package of tough new anti-immigration measures and warned that mass amnesties for migrants who had entered the country illegally were “completely out of the question”.
Unlike the Spanish government, which this week issued residency and work permits to some 700,000 illegal workers, Mr de Villepin said Paris considered that previous mass amnesties, in 1981 and 1997, had encouraged further waves of illegal immigration.

“It is essential that we be extremely strict and firm,” he said. Putting the number of illegal immigrants in France at “between 200,000 and 400,000”, he said the phenomenon had become “a growing source of concern because of the mafia-like activities that feed these criminal networks.”
Full: guardian.co.uk

Man does not live on bread alone, but Americans have become increasingly reliant on doughy carbohydrates in their diet. Now many in a rapidly expanding country are asking: “What Would Jesus Eat?”
That is the title of one of a growing number of Christian diet plans crowding the lifestyle shelves of mainstream bookshops. Other bestsellers include The Maker’s Diet, The Hallelujah Diet and Body by God. For the persistently overweight, they hold the promise of spiritual and bodily redemption.

The selling strategies vary. Stephen Arterburn, the host of a Christian radio show and author of Lose it For Life, says: “If you want the world to notice Jesus, it helps to look and live like Jesus. We don’t do this so we can look in the mirror and be more attractive. We do it so people can look at us and see Jesus.”
Don Colbert, a Florida doctor and author of What Would Jesus Eat?, portrays his book as a way of putting some backbone into weak-willed believers.

“They’re letting the flesh rule them and they’re eating anything they want,” he told the Guardian. “We’re making them accountable. Many people will not eat the right kinds of food unless they’re held accountable and before they put something in their mouths ask: ‘Would Jesus eat this?'”

Dr Colbert said Jesus ate “whole grains, fresh fruits, seeds and nuts, rather than processed food”. His book has recipes for Middle Eastern dishes such as hummus.
Full: guardian.co.uk

oy the possibilities are endless: the loaves and fishes diet, the water and wine diet (new wine in new wineskin of course). The easiest thing though would just be to ask a billion Muslims what they eat over there.

There will be no red carpet for Adam Curtis when his film The Power of Nightmares receives its gala screening at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday. There would be no point: his film has no leading ladies who could disport themselves in backless numbers or lantern-jawed himbos to vogue fatuously before the snappers. Unless, of course, two of his chief protagonists, Osama bin Laden and Paul Wolfowitz, could be prevailed upon to pose together for the world’s press on the Grand Palais steps.

“They did offer the full carpet treatment, but I declined,” says Curtis. “I just had this horrible thought of me plodding up the steps and lenses dropping all around me.” And yet the screening at Cannes is a great honour for Curtis. “They’re suddenly talking about me as an auteur,” he says. “I just think I’m a journalist. I do feel a bit like an animal in a zoo that’s been put in the wrong cage and they’ll find out and all go, ‘Oi! that’s not a giraffe, it’s a vicuna!'” A vicuna, as you will know, is a llama-like ruminant.

Last year, Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore’s documentary, described by the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw as a “barnstorming anti-war/anti-Bush polemic tossed like an incendiary device into the crowded Cannes festival”, won the Palme d’Or. This year something more discreet, but perhaps no less incendiary, is go ing to go off at Cannes in the form of Curtis’s Bafta-winning documentary. Like Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith and Woody Allen’s Match Point, Curtis’s film is not in competition, but it is nonetheless this year’s Fahrenheit 9/11, shaking festival-goers out of their aesthetic reveries with a political analysis of the causes and consequences of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

Curtis does not care for the Moore parallel. “Moore is a political agitprop film-maker. I am not – you’d be hard pushed to tell my politics from watching it. It was an attempt at historical explanation for September 11. You see, up to this point nobody had done a proper history of the ideas and groups that have created our modern world. It’s weird that nobody had done before me.”
Full:guardian.co.uk

WASHINGTON, May 11 – The United States and other countries have forcibly sent dozens of terror suspects to Egypt, according to a report released Wednesday by Human Rights Watch. The rights group and the State Department have both said Egypt regularly uses extreme interrogation methods on detainees.

The group said it had documented 63 cases since 1994 in which suspected Islamic militants were sent to Egypt for detention and interrogation. The figures do not include people seized after the attacks of September 2001 who were sent mainly by Middle East countries and American intelligence authorities.

The report said the total number sent to Egypt since the Sept. 11 attacks could be as high as 200 people. American officials have not disputed that people have been sent to countries where detainees are subjected to extreme interrogation tactics but have denied that anyone had been sent to another country for the purpose of torture. Among other countries to which the United States has sent detainees are Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Syria.

Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said sending someone to a country where he was likely to be tortured was banned under international law. “Egypt’s terrible record of torturing prisoners means that no country should forcibly send a suspect there,” he said.

The United States began sending terror suspects to Egypt in the mid-1990’s when the practice, known formally as rendition, began to play a larger role in counterterrorism, according to officials from the Clinton administration.
Full: nytimes.com

Q: Scott, yesterday the White House was on red alert, was evacuated. The first lady and Nancy Reagan were taken to a secure location. The Vice President was evacuated from the grounds. The Capitol building was evacuated. The continuity of government plan was initiated. And yet the president wasn’t told of yesterday’s events until after he finished his bike ride, about 36 minutes after the all-clear had been sent. Is he satisfied with the fact that he wasn’t notified about this?

McCLELLAN: Yes. I think you just brought up a very good point — the protocols that were in place after Sept. 11 were followed. The president was never considered to be in danger because he was at an off-site location. The president has a tremendous amount of trust in his Secret Service detail. …

Q: The fact that the president wasn’t in danger is one aspect of this. But he’s also the commander in chief. There was a military operation underway. Other people were in contact with the White House. Shouldn’t the commander in chief have been notified of what was going on?

McCLELLAN: John, the protocols that we put in place after Sept. 11 were being followed. They did not require presidential authority for this situation. I think you have to look at each situation and the circumstances surrounding the situation. And that’s what officials here at the White House were doing. …

Q: Even on a personal level, did nobody here at the White House think that calling the president to say, by the way, your wife has been evacuated from the White House, we just want to let you know everything is OK?

McCLELLAN: Actually, all the protocols were followed and people were — officials that you point out were taken to secure locations or evacuated, in some cases. I think, again, you have to look at the circumstances surrounding the situation, and it depends on the situation and the circumstance. …

Q: Nobody thought to say, by the way, this is going on, but it’s all under control?

McCLELLAN: And I think it depends on each situation and the circumstances surrounding the situation when you’re making those decisions.

Q: Isn’t there a bit of an appearance problem, notwithstanding the president’s safety was not in question, protocols were followed, that today, looking at it, he was enjoying a bike ride, and that recreation time was not considered expendable to inform him of this.

McCLELLAN: Well, I mean, John mentioned 36 minutes after the all-clear. Remember, this was a matter of minutes when all this was happening. …

Q: But has the President even indicated that even if everything was followed that he would prefer to be notified, that if the choice is: tell the commander in chief or let him continue to exercise, that he would prefer to be informed?

MR. McCLELLAN: Again, it depends on the situation and the circumstances. And you have to take all that into account, and I think that’s what people were doing here at the White House, as well as those people that were with the president.

Q: I think there’s a disconnect here because, I mean, yesterday you had more than 30,000 people who were evacuated, you had millions of people who were watching this on television, and there was a sense at some point — it was a short window, a 15-minute window, but there was a sense of confusion among some on the streets. There was a sense of fear. And people are wondering was this not a moment for the president to exercise some leadership, some guidance during that period of time?

MR. McCLELLAN: The president did lead, and the president did that after September the 11th when we put the protocols in place to make sure that situations like this were addressed before it was too late. And that was the case — that was the case in this situation. …
full: editorandpublisher.com

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) – FBI agents posing as cocaine traffickers in Arizona caught 16 current and former U.S. soldiers and law enforcement personnel who took about $220,000 in bribes to help move the drugs through checkpoints, Justice Department officials said Thursday.
Those charged include a former Immigration and Naturalization Service inspector, a former Army sergeant, a former federal prison guard, current and former members of the Arizona Army National Guard and the state corrections department, and a Nogales police officer, officials said.

“Many individuals charged were sworn personnel having the task of protecting society and securing America’s borders. The importance of these tasks cannot be overstated and we cannot tolerate, nor can the American people afford, this type of corruption,” FBI agent Jana D. Monroe, who directs the bureau’s operations in Arizona, said during a news conference in Tucson.

All 16 have agreed to plead guilty to being part of a bribery and extortion conspiracy, the result of the nearly 3 1/2-year FBI sting, acting assistant attorney general John C. Richter and Monroe said. Officials said more arrests are anticipated.
Full:apnews.myway.com

ORLANDO, Fla. — Florida’s busiest airport will begin using high-tech iris-scanning technology to filter out possible terrorists and add an additional layer of security, according to Local 6 News.

Workers and other people at Orlando International Airport will have both irises scanned at special computers to determine their identity.

“This will be an additional layer of information that is enrolled, which will be biometric information,” OIA director of security Brigitte Rivera Goersch said. “Employees irises will be enrolled for the additional layer of security.”

The Airport Access Control Pilot Program or AACPP is a first of its kind, according to the report.

A person would be required to stand in front of a special mirror and have both eyes scanned.

“It has to verify both irises, not just one iris,” Goersch. “Statistically it is very reliable. Iris scanners — the technology of iris scanning — is considered one of the most reliable biometric technologies.”

“You know just like we did with the airplanes with the cockpit doors and air marshals and all of that kind of stuff,” federal security director Art Meinke said. It is just another step to try to figure out what can we do better.”
Full:local6.com

ALIAH GLEASON IS A BIG, lively girl with a round face, a quick wit, and a sharp tongue. She’s 13 and in eighth grade at Dessau Middle School in Pflugerville, Texas, an Austin suburb, but could pass for several years older. She is the second of four daughters of Calvin and Anaka Gleason, an African American couple who run a struggling business taking people on casino bus trips.

In the early part of seventh grade, Aliah was a B and C student who “got in trouble for running my mouth.” Sometimes her antics went overboard—like the time she barked at a teacher she thought was ugly. “I was calling this teacher a man because she had a mustache,” Aliah recalled over breakfast with her parents at an Austin restaurant.

School officials considered Aliah disruptive, deemed her to have an “oppositional disorder,” and placed her in a special education track. Her parents viewed her as a spirited child who was bright but had a tendency to argue and clown. Then one day, psychologists from the University of Texas (UT) visited the school to conduct a mental health screening for sixth- and seventh-grade girls, and Aliah’s life took a dramatic turn.

A few weeks later, the Gleasons got a “Dear parents” form letter from the head of the screening program. “You will be glad to know your daughter did not report experiencing a significant level of distress,” it said. Not long after, they got a very different phone call from a UT psychologist, who told them Aliah had scored high on a suicide rating and needed further evaluation. The Gleasons reluctantly agreed to have Aliah see a UT consulting psychiatrist. She concluded Aliah was suicidal but did not hospitalize her, referring her instead to an emergency clinic for further evaluation. Six weeks later, in January 2004, a child-protection worker went to Aliah’s school, interviewed her, then summoned Calvin Gleason to the school and told him to take Aliah to Austin State Hospital, a state mental facility. He refused, and after a heated conversation, she placed Aliah in emergency custody and had a police officer drive her to the hospital.

The Gleasons would not be allowed to see or even speak to their daughter for the next five months, and Aliah would spend a total of nine months in a state psychiatric hospital and residential treatment facilities. While in the hospital, she was placed in restraints more than 26 times and medicated—against her will and without her parents’ consent—with at least 12 different psychiatric drugs, many of them simultaneously.
Full:motherjones.com
(more…)

King Abdullah of Jordan has agreed to pardon Ahmed Chalabi, the controversial Iraqi political leader, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for fraud after his bank collapsed with $300m (£160m) in missing deposits in 1989.

Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi President, asked the king to resolve the differences between Jordan and Mr Chalabi, now Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq, during a visit to Ammanthis week.

Latif Rashid, the Iraqi minister of water resources, said Mr Talabani confirmed to him that King Abdullah had promised, in effect, to quash the conviction. He expected there would first be a meeting between Jordanian officials and Mr Chalabi “who has some questions of his own.”

The expected pardon, is the latest twist in the extraordinary career of Mr Chalabi, now again in the ascendant as an important member of the Shia coalition and the new Iraqi government. Only a year ago US soldiers raided his house in Baghdad, put a gun to his head, arrested two of his supporters and seized papers. He was accused of passing intelligence information to Iran.

Previously an ally of the neoconservatives and of the civilians in the Pentagon whom he managed to convince of the need to topple Saddam Hussein, Mr Chalabi sought new friends. He cultivated Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia clergyman whose militia the US Army was trying to destroy. He became a leader of one of the main factions in the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shia coalition which triumphed in the election on 30 January.

Again Mr Chalabi has escaped not only political annihilation, but has emerged from a crisis with his power enhanced.
Full: counterpunch.org

spook

The chief of an Indian village in a remote area of Brazil yesterday unveiled the shopping list of basic equipment that could help him save a traditional way of life almost destroyed by agribusiness and forest clearance.

“We are fighting for the survival of our people and our language and culture,” said Kuissi, of the Kisedje people, during a visit to the University of Manchester. “We can’t say what the future is going to be like.”

Kuissi and two colleagues have left Brazil for the first time to tell their story in Britain and Germany and explain that just £60,000 could make all the difference to the lives of their people.
The wishlist includes a tractor, a pick-up, a radio, solar equipment, an aluminium boat, an outboard motor and a computer. “We need the money to buy white man’s tools to be able to recover the land from the white man’s destruction.”

The Kisedje were first contacted by white explorers in 1959 and moved to protected land in the Xingu Indian Park. But the people were not vaccinated and numbers dropped to 62. The population has now recovered to 378 people, all of them speaking their own language. They are also back on most of their homelands.

“We never forgot our village,” Kuissi said. “We never imagined that the forest would be destroyed by the white people.”
Full:guardian.co.uk