CARACAS, Venezuela, May 8 (AP) – President Hugo Chávez said Sunday that foreign oil companies working in the country must pay taxes he insists that they owe, or else leave.

During his Sunday television and radio show, Mr. Chávez said that many private companies had been evading taxes for years. Tax officials have said that many declare losses to avoid paying income tax.

The announcement appeared to be the latest move by Venezuela to put more pressure on foreign oil companies. Last month, the oil minister, Rafael Ramírez, announced that private oil companies operating in the country would have to convert to joint ventures with the government within six months, potentially bringing a substantial amount of new revenue to Venezuela. Mr. Ramírez also announced that the country’s tax collection agency was investigating possible tax evasion by the companies, estimating that they may owe $2 billion in unpaid taxes since 2000.

Venezuela opened its oil industry to foreign oil companies in the 1990’s. During that time, 32 operating agreements were signed with companies like ChevronTexaco, British Petroleum, Total, Petrobras, Repsol YPF, Royal Dutch/Shell and the China National Petroleum Corporation.

According to Venezuelan law, oil companies usually must pay a 30 percent royalty on what they produce in the country. But companies producing heavy crude, which is expensive to produce, were allowed to pay a 1 percent royalty until last year, when the government raised it to 16 percent.
Full:nytimes.com

ALGIERS, May 8 (Reuters) – President Abdelaziz Bouteflika asked France in a speech published Sunday to admit its part in what he called the massacres of 45,000 Algerians who took to the streets to demand independence on May 8, 1945, as Europe celebrated victory over Nazi Germany.

Algeria is commemorating the 60th anniversary of the repression of pro-independence demonstrators under French colonial rule as Europeans are celebrating the end of World War II in Europe.

“The paradox of the massacres of May 8, 1945, is that when the heroic Algerian combatants returned from the fronts in Europe, Africa and elsewhere where they defended France’s honor and interests,” Mr. Bouteflika said in the speech, “the French administration fired on peaceful demonstrators.” The speech, given in the city of Sétif on Saturday, was published by Algeria’s state media.
Full: nytimes.com

MIAMI, May 5 – From the United States through Latin America and the Caribbean, Luis Posada Carriles has spent 45 years fighting a violent, losing battle to overthrow Fidel Castro. Now he may have nowhere to hide but here.

Mr. Posada, a Cuban exile, has long been a symbol for the armed anti-Castro movement in the United States. He remains a prime suspect in the bombing of a Cuban commercial airliner that killed 73 people in 1976. He has admitted to plotting attacks that damaged tourist spots in Havana and killed an Italian visitor there in 1997. He was convicted in Panama in a 2000 bomb plot against Mr. Castro. He is no longer welcome in his old Latin America haunts.

Mr. Posada, 77, sneaked back into Florida six weeks ago in an effort to seek political asylum for having served as a cold war soldier on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1960’s, his lawyer, Eduardo Soto, said at a news conference last month.

But the government of Venezuela wants to extradite and retry him for the Cuban airline bombing. Mr. Posada was involved “up to his eyeballs” in planning the attack, said Carter Cornick, a retired counterterrorism specialist for the Federal Bureau of Investigation who investigated Mr. Posada’s role in that case. A newly declassified 1976 F.B.I. document places Mr. Posada, who had been a senior Venezuelan intelligence officer, at two meetings where the bombing was planned.

As “the author or accomplice of homicide,” Venezuela’s Supreme Court said Tuesday, “he must be extradited and judged.”

The United States government has no plan yet in place for handling the extradition request, according to spokesmen for several agencies. Roger F. Noriega, the top State Department official for Western Hemisphere affairs, said he did not even know whether Mr. Posada was in the country. In fact, Mr. Posada has not been seen in public, and his lawyer did not return repeated telephone calls seeking to confirm his presence.

Mr. Posada’s case could create tension between the politics of the global war on terrorism and the ghosts of the cold war on communism. If Mr. Posada has indeed illegally entered the United States, the Bush administration has three choices: granting him asylum; jailing him for illegal entry; or granting Venezuela’s request for extradition.
Full: nytimes.com

Indonesia’s post-tsunami recovery is at a near standstill and millions of people will be relying on aid from non-governmental organisations and international agencies for months, the head of the country’s reconstruction body said yesterday.

Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, appointed last week to run the rehabilitation and reconstruction agency for Aceh and Nias, said there was “no sense of [government] urgency” in Aceh and that “close to zero” of promised government funds had been disbursed.

“It’s shocking. Very limited things have been done for the poor people,” Mr Kuntoro, a former energy minister, said. “There are no roads being built, there are no bridges being built, there are no harbours being built. When it comes to reconstruction, zero.”

Reports of aid arriving late, or not at all, have become common in Aceh, the province in northern Sumatra worst hit by the Boxing Day tsunami.
Full:guardian.co.uk

WASHINGTON, May 8 – Governors and state legislators have devised proposals for sweeping changes in Medicaid to curb its rapid growth and save billions of dollars.

Under the proposals, some beneficiaries would have to pay more for care, and states would have more latitude to limit the scope of services.

The proposals, drafted by separate working groups of governors and state legislators, provide guidance to Congress, which 10 days ago endorsed a budget blueprint that would cut projected Medicaid spending by $10 billion over the next five years.

Many of the proposals resemble ideas advanced by President Bush as part of his 2006 budget. In some cases, the governors embrace Mr. Bush’s proposals but go further. At the same time, they also reject some of the president’s recommendations that they believe would shift costs to the states.

John Adams Hurson, a member of the Maryland House of Delegates who is president of the National Conference of State Legislatures, said: “I am a Democrat, a liberal Democrat, but we can’t sustain the current Medicaid program. It’s fiscal madness. It doesn’t guarantee good care, and it’s a budget buster. We need to instill a greater sense of personal responsibility so people understand that this care is not free.”

A coalition of beneficiary advocates, labor unions and health care providers is already gearing up to fight any significant cutbacks in Medicaid. The coalition includes AARP, Families USA, pediatricians, hospitals and nursing homes.

State officials say their goal is not just to save money, but also to avoid wholesale cuts in coverage like those in Tennessee, which is dropping more than 300,000 people from its Medicaid rolls, and in Missouri, which is dropping 90,000.
Full:nytimes.com

George Bush risked a further deterioration in relations with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, yesterday when he met critics of the Kremlin’s human rights record and told them he supported their work to build a “civil society” and democracy.
The US president held a 35-minute meeting with some of Mr Putin’s more vocal critics in his hotel minutes before he attended a Victory Day parade in Red Square at the invitation of Mr Putin.

The meeting, described by one of those who attended as an “important sign to Mr Putin that America is interested in the development of independent society in Russia”, let Mr Bush hear from organisations working in the fields of human rights, media freedom and environmental issues in Russia.
Manana Aslamazyan, from the media support group Internews Russia, said Mr Bush told them the US was ready to support their work. “He said that we need to work for more democracy in Russia,” she said.
Full:guardian.co.uk

May 16 issue – In case anyone still doesn’t understand that recruiting is now the toughest job in the Army, the service missed its April goal by 42 percent. It was the third month in a row that the active-duty recruiting mission was not accomplished. Worse, the Pentagon was counting on absorbing a decent share of some 27,000 service members that the Air Force and Navy are letting go this year as part of Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld’s grand realignment plan. Operation Blue to Green—trading blue service uniforms for Army green—this year was expected to turn 3,500 airmen and sailors into soldiers and help the military adjust to quick-deployment, land-based warfare.
Full:msn.com

A Muslim woman author, once described as Osama bin Laden’s worst nightmare, is to call for the setting up of an Islamic reform movement to press for a change in the faith’s attitudes towards human rights, women and pluralist societies at a public meeting this week.

Irshad Manji, a Canadian-based writer and broadcaster, is to launch her campaign for Ijtihad (independent thinking) with a claim for Islamic pluralism and the aim of setting up a foundation for young, reform-minded Muslims to explore and challenge their faith.

“No community, no ethnicity, no culture and no religion ought to be immune from respecting the universality of human rights,” she said.
“This, of course, is a controversial message in an age of cultural relativism. I truly believe we can become pluralists without becoming relativists.

“Through our screaming self-pity and conspicuous silences, we Muslims are conspiring against ourselves. We’re in crisis and we are dragging the rest of the world with us. If ever there was a moment for an Islamic reformation, it is now.”

Ms Manji is the author of the bestselling book The Trouble with Islam: A Call for Honesty and Change, which as well as being read in the west has been published in Pakistan and is to appear this year in Turkey, Iraq and India.
Full: guardian.co.uk

Well, good luck with this. I’d say the three religions of Abraham aren’t worth saving. I’m sure Ms. Manji is the darling of the right wing, even if she doesn’t want to be.

Spain declared an amnesty yesterday for about 700,000 illegal immigrants – bucking a Europe-wide trend of cracking down on economic migrants, while striking at exploitation of those working secretly and fearfully in the black economy.
The Socialist government claimed that a three-month qualification period that ended at the weekend – during which illegal workers and their employers could apply for residency and work permits – had attracted most of the country’s illegal workers.

“We can feel very satisfied,” said the labour minister, Jesús Caldera. “Almost 700,000 jobs brought out of the black economy – that represents 80% to 90% of all such jobs held by immigrants in Spain.”
Officials said that, with workers’ families included, more than a million people would no longer have to hide from police or labour inspectors.

Long queues had built up outside government offices as the deadline for the amnesty drew near. Ecuadorians, Romanians, Moroccans and Colombians made up most of the applications. “If you get the papers, you go from being nobody to being somebody … you exist,” one Ecuadorian, Alvaro Salgado, 30, told Reuters news agency as he queued to apply on Saturday.
Full:guardian.co.uk

by Tim Wise
Whenever I write an article about racism, or give a speech concerning the ongoing reality of discrimination in the labor market, I am assailed by those who refuse to believe what virtually any study done in the past two decades confirms: namely, that people of color are not seeing things, nor crazy when they suggest that racial bias is very much a modern-day phenomenon.

These assaults typically arrive in my e-mail inbox, within hours of an article going out over the web, as if pre-prepared long before, and as if their authors were simply waiting for an opportunity to pick an electronic fight.

Sometimes their retorts are little more than racist rants about how blacks and Latinos are lazy, or how American Indians are all drunk. But oftentimes the denial comes wrapped in far more sophisticated garb than that, occasionally bordering on the scholarly, in fact.

While some of the conservatives who regale me with their rationalizations for racial inequality manage to quote a gaggle of right wing “experts” to help make their case, the claims they forward are hardly the stronger for it.
Full: blackcommentator.com