A global conference to review the non-proliferation treaty is due to end today, almost certainly in deadlock, jeopardising what is seen as the best chance of containing the spread of nuclear weapons.

Observers at the month-long conference in New York said there was broad agreement on how to tighten the 35-year-old treaty but substantive agreement had been blocked by hardline positions adopted by the US and Iran.

The US rejected references in any final text to the comprehensive test ban treaty (CTBT), which Bill Clinton was the first US president to sign, in 1996, but which was never ratified by the Senate.

The Bush administration has said it will stick to its moratorium on nuclear tests but would not accede to a global treaty outlawing them.

Iran has opposed all attempts to constrain or even mention its nuclear programme, which it says is purely for peaceful purposes but which many countries fear could be a front for a weapons programme. “Why this conference matters is that it is a chance for all the member countries to come together and breathe new life into the treaty,” said Joseph Cirincione, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “What you see is that the vast majority of the countries are in basic agreement … but they have been blocked by an uncoordinated but parallel action by the US and Iran.”
Full: guardian.co.uk

Mahathir Mohamad, modern Malaysia’s founding father and moderate Islam’s self-styled champion, denounced the Bush administration yesterday as a “rogue regime” bent on terrorising innocent civilians. He also said he was disappointed that Tony Blair, who he called a “proven liar”, had won re-election after joining the US invasion of Iraq.
Reflecting the rage felt across the Muslim world over abuse scandals in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, and continuing violence in Palestine and Iraq, Mr Mahathir said President George Bush and other US politicians were “ignorant” people who believed might made right – a return to colonial-era “old thinking”.

Speaking to the Guardian at his offices in Putrajaya, near Kuala Lumpur, Mr Mahathir also claimed that the Israeli government had been given a free hand by Washington to continue to expropriate Palestinian land and entrench its control over Jerusalem. The war on terror would not end until the Middle East conflict was justly resolved, he said.
Asked whether he regretted his statement that “Jews rule the world by proxy”, which caused an international furore in 2003, Mr Mahathir said he took nothing back.

“US politicians are scared stiff of the Jews because anybody who votes against the Jews will lose elections. The Jews in America are supporting the Jews in Israel. Israel and other Jews control the most powerful nation in the world. And that is what I mean [about Jews controlling the world]. I stand by that view.”
Full: guardian.co.uk

WASHINGTON (AP) – The Bush administration asked a federal appeals court Friday to restore its ability to compel Internet service providers to turn over information about their customers or subscribers as part of its fight against terrorism.

The legal filing with the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in New York comes amid a debate in Congress over renewal of the Patriot Act and whether to expand the FBI’s power to seek records without the approval of a judge or grand jury.
Full: guardian.co.uk

Well-heeled consultants and companies in the west are the beneficiaries of a global aid system which results in less than 40p in every pound helping to eradicate poverty in the developing world, according to a report out today.
Just over a month before Britain will make a doubling of aid a centrepiece of the Gleneagles summit, the charity ActionAid said the bulk of the money currently allocated was wasted, misdirected or recycled within rich countries.

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It found that 61% of aid flows were “phantom” rather than “real” – rising to almost 90% in the case of France and the United States.
The report accused rich countries of “political grandstanding” and highlighted the ways in which they were disguising how real aid flows were even lower than they appeared to be.

“Failure to target aid at the poorest countries, runaway spending on overpriced technical assistance from international consultants, tying aid to purchases from donor countries’ own firms, cumbersome and ill-coordinated planning, implementation, monitoring and reporting requirements, excessive administrative costs, late and partial disbursements, double counting of debt relief, and aid spending on immigration services all deflate the value of aid,” the charity said.

Compared with a UN target of spending 0.7%, rich countries were ostensibly spending 0.25% of their national income on aid each year. The figure came down to 0.1% when “phantom” aid was stripped out.

The G7 countries – Britain, the US, Germany, Italy, France, Canada and Japan – spent only 0.07% of national income on real aid and would need a tenfold increase to hit the UN target, ActionAid said.
Full: guardian.co.uk

Puts a whole new spin on the Blair/Brown aid crusade doesn’t it.

US health officials are examining rare reports of blindness among some men using the impotence drug Viagra.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is investigating up to 50 reports of non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy blindness, or NAION.

FDA spokeswoman, Susan Cruzan, said they have no evidence yet that the drug is to blame but added, “We take this seriously.”
Full: guardian.co.uk

The United States wants Britain’s proposed identity cards to have the same microchip and technology as the ones used on American documents.

The aim of getting the same microchip is to ensure compatability in screening terrorist suspects. But it will also mean that information contained in the British cards can be accessed across the Atlantic.
Full:independent.co.uk

by Jonathan Schell
A metaphorical “nuclear option” — the cutoff of debate in the Senate on judicial nominees — has just been defused, but a literal nuclear option, called “global strike,” has been created in its place. In a shocking innovation in American nuclear policy, recently disclosed in the Washington Post by military analyst William Arkin, the administration has created and placed on continuous high alert a force whereby the President can launch a pinpoint strike, including a nuclear strike, anywhere on earth with a few hours’ notice. The senatorial “nuclear option” was covered extensively, but somehow this actual nuclear option — a “full-spectrum” capability (in the words of the presidential order) with “precision kinetic (nuclear and conventional) and non-kinetic (elements of space and information operations)” — was almost entirely ignored.

The order to enable the force, Arkin writes, was given by George W. Bush in January 2003. In July 2004, Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated to Adm. James Ellis Jr., then-commander of Stratcom, “the President charged you to ‘be ready to strike at any moment’s notice in any dark corner of the world’ [and] that’s exactly what you’ve done.” And last fall, Lieut. Gen. Bruce Carlson, commander of the 8th Air Force, stated, “We have the capacity to plan and execute global strikes.”
Full: commondreams.org

by Tom Engelhardt
Call it Star Wars, parts VII-XXII; but last week, just as Revenge of the Sith was opening galaxy-wide — multiplexes on Tatooine alone were expected to pull in billions — reporter Tim Weiner revealed on the front page of the New York Times that a new presidential directive will soon essentially green-light the future U.S. militarization of space. (When, in December 2001, the administration withdrew from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which forbade the weaponization of space, it opened the way for exactly the kind of Pentagon R&D that now threatens to come to mutant fruition in the heavens.) Just three days before Weiner’s piece appeared, military analyst William Arkin reported in the Washington Post that “[e]arly last summer, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved a top secret ‘Interim Global Strike Alert Order,'” preparing the way for devastating attacks against hostile powers developing weapons of mass destruction, air strikes that could be carried out more or less on demand anywhere on the planet and, if so desired, included a “nuclear option.”

These two actions don’t represent separate worlds of planning. One of the imagined future weapons for Rumsfeld’s “global strike” force, for instance, turns out to be a CAV (Common Aero Vehicle) which, from space, could theoretically hit any target on Earth with a massive dose of conventional munitions on half an hour’s notice. Of this weapon, the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus wrote, “The first-generation CAV, expected to be ready by 2010, will have ‘an incredible capability to provide the warfighter with a global reach capability against high payoff targets,’ Gen. Lance W. Lord, commander of Air Force Space Command, told the House Armed Services Committee… The system could, Lord said, ‘deliver a conventional payload precisely on target within minutes of a valid command and control release order.'”

Such “global strike” space weaponry, while not (yet) nuclearized, would not be far off in impact. For instance, according to Weiner, one such weapon, Hypervelocity Rod Bundles (nicknamed “Rods from God”), aims “to hurl cylinders of tungsten, titanium or uranium from the edge of space to destroy targets on the ground, striking at speeds of about 7,200 miles an hour with the force of a small nuclear weapon.” In this way, the boundaries between the previously almost unusable nuclear option and more conventional war-fighting options are slowly — and quite consciously — being blurred by the Bush administration.
Full: zmag.org

by Norman Solomon
Memorial Day weekend brings media rituals. Old Glory flutters on television and newsprint. Grave ceremonies and oratory pay homage to the fallen. Many officials and pundits speak of remembering the dead. But for all the talk of war and remembrance, no time is more infused with insidious forgetting than the last days of May.

This is a holiday that features solemn evasion. Speech-makers and commentators praise the “ultimate sacrifice” of American soldiers — but say nothing about the duplicity of those who sacrificed them. War efforts are equated with indubitable patriotism. Journalists claim to be writing the latest draft of history, but actual history is no more present than the dead.

In the truncated media universe of Memorial Day, the act of remembering bypasses any history that indicates an American war was not inevitable and unavoidable. The populace is made to understand that God and nature must be death dealers. We are encouraged to extol those who bravely gave their lives and took the lives of others — but not confront those, high in the U.S. government’s executive and legislative branches, who cravenly gave their fervent blessings to gratuitous carnage.

It has become popular to describe the U.S. invasion of Iraq as some kind of anomaly, a departure from Washington’s previous record of seeking peaceful alternatives to war and refusing to engage in aggression. Such depictions amount to a kind of pseudo-historical baby food, chopped up and strained so it can be stomached.

But during the last half century — when, for days or months or many years, U.S. troops and planes assaulted the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq again — the rationales from the White House were always based on major falsehoods, avidly promoted by the U.S. mass media. In the light of real history, the U.S. soldiers who are honored each Memorial Day were pawns of methodical deception. Media spin and the edicts of authorities induced them to kill “enemy” combatants and civilians, for whom Pentagon buglers have never played a single mournful note.

The Orwellian process of rigorous forgetting is not only about past wars. It’s also about the next war.
Full: commondreams.com

by Mos Def
Earlier this month the federal government issued a statement in which they labeled Joanne Chesimard, known to most in the Black community as Assata Shakur, as a domestic terrorist. In so doing, they also increased the bounty on her head from $150,000 to an unprecedented $1,000,000. Viewed through the lens of U.S. law enforcement, Shakur is an escaped cop-killer. Viewed through the lens of many Black people, including me, she is a wrongly convicted woman and a hero of epic proportions.

My first memory of Assata Shakur was the “Wanted” posters all over my Brooklyn neighborhood. They said her name was Joanne Chesimard, that she was a killer, an escaped convict, and armed and dangerous. They made her sound like a super-villain, like something out of a comic book. But even then, as a child, I couldn’t believe what I was being told. When I looked at those posters and the mug shot of a slight, brown, high-cheekboned woman with a full afro, I saw someone who looked like she was in my family, an aunt, a mother. She looked like she had soul. Later, as a junior high school student, when I read her autobiography, Assata, I would discover that not only did she have soul, she also had immeasurable heart, courage and love. And I would come to believe that that very heart and soul she possessed was exactly why Assata Shakur was shot, arrested, framed and convicted of the murder of a New Jersey State Trooper.
Full: allhiphop.com