A man accused of masterminding the blowing-up of a Cuban airliner off Barbados in 1976 which killed 73 people was arrested in Miami yesterday.
Luis Posada Carriles’s arrest came hours after the Cuban president, Fidel Castro, led a march by an estimated 1.2 million people on Havana’s US diplomatic mission calling for his extradition.

Mr Posada emerged from hiding for a blitz of media interviews after slipping into the US from Mexico two months ago.

Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s president and a close ally of the Cuban president, asked Washington to extradite Mr Posada, who has Venezuelan citizenship and who lived there at the time of the bombing, last week.
Until last night, when he was taken into custody by immigration authorities, the US had made no apparent moves to detain him since his lawyer said a month ago that he was in the country. But the homeland security department said it did not normally return people to Cuba or to countries acting on Cuba’s behalf.

Interviewed in the Miami Herald yesterday, Mr Posada denied any involvement in the 1976 bombing, but did not confirm or deny a role in bombings of hotels in Cuba in 1997 in which an Italian died.

Mr Posada was freed last August from a Panamanian prison when he was pardoned over a plot to kill Mr Castro in 2000, and, since entering the US via a people-smuggler, has applied for political asylum.

The presence of Mr Posada, a former CIA collaborator, has forced Washington to choose between an anti-terrorism stance and backing for Cuban exiles. Over the past five weeks, Mr Castro has charged the US with hypocrisy in 16 live televised speeches, each lasting up to four hours.
Full: guardian.co.uk

Sergeant Kevin Benderman cannot shake the images from his head. There are bombed villages and desperate people. There are dogs eating corpses thrown into a mass grave. And most unremitting of all, there is the image of a young Iraqi girl, no more than eight or nine, one arm severely burnt and blistered, and the sound of her screams.

Last January, these memories became too much for this veteran of the war in Iraq. Informed his unit was about to return, he told his commanders he wanted out and applied to be considered a conscientious objector. The Army refused and charged him with desertion. Last week, his case – which carries a penalty of up to seven years’ imprisonment – started before a military judge at Fort Stewart in Georgia.

“If I am sincere in what I say and there’s consequences because of my actions, I am prepared to stand up and take it,” Sgt Benderman said. “If I have to go to prison because I don’t want to kill anybody, so be it.”

The case of Sgt Benderman and those of others like him has focused attention on the thousands of US troops who have gone AWOL (Absent Without Leave) since the start of President George Bush’s so-called war on terror. The most recent Pentagon figures suggest there are 5,133 troops missing from duty. Of these 2,376 are sought by the Army, 1,410 by the Navy, 1,297 by the Marines and 50 by the Air Force. Some have been missing for decades.

But campaigners say the true figure could be far higher. Staff who run a volunteer hotline to help desperate soldiers and recruits who want to get out, say the number of calls has increased by 50 per cent since 9/11. Last year alone, the GI Rights Hotline took more than 30,000 calls. At present, the hotline gets 3,000 calls a month and the volunteers say that by the time a soldier or recruit dials the help-line they have almost always made up their mind to get out by one means or another.
Full: independent.co.uk

A court was told yesterday that a murder charge against one of Kenya’s most prominent white farmers should be dropped on the recommendation of its attorney general.
The Hon Thomas Cholmondeley, 37, whose father, Lord Delamere, is one of Kenya’s biggest landowners, had been accused of shooting and killing Samson ole Sisina, a plainclothes game warden, on the Delamere family’s ranch, Soysambu.

The warden was on the 100,000 acre (40,000 hectares) farm, along with two colleagues, for an undercover investigation into the trade in “bushmeat” from illegally slaughtered buffalo or impala.

…Mr Sisina was a Masai, and dropping the charge may cause widespread anger. The Masai nurse grievances against white farmers for settling on land they once roamed with their cattle.

Outside court, Kitaei Ole Nkoiboni, a Masai councillor in the town of Narok, said: “We are very angry and bitter that once again we are not seeing justice done. One of our sons has died in the dedication of his duty; yet what we see today is that you can kill and get away with it.”

The Delameres have lived in the Rift valley for more than a century, and enjoy close links with Kenya’s ruling elite. The fourth Baron Delamere, father of the current baron, was part of the hedonistic “Happy Valley” set dramatised by the film White Mischief, set in 1941.
Full: guardian.co.uk

Campaigners in the Brazilian Amazon fear a group of as yet uncontacted indigenous peoples in a remote corner of the rainforest face “annihilation” after a court overturned state efforts to protect them from logging firms.
The supreme court ruled that the company can continue logging in the densely forested area at the Pardo river in north-west Mato Grosso state, which borders Bolivia.

In his ruling, Judge Luiz Fux said that the company Sulmap Sul Amazonia would suffer “irreversible damage” if logging was banned.

The group of hunter-gatherers, known by a neighbouring group as the “little people” was first sighted in the 1980s, but workers of the government’s indigenous peoples protection agency, known as Funai, only found signs of a hurried departure in their abandoned villages when sent to contact them.
Arrows, hammocks, baskets of nuts and footprints have been found, but no direct contact has been made, as the group flees into the forest.
Full:guardian.co.uk

by Petuuche Gilbert
…The conquerors should be so proud of themselves. We are profoundly brainwashed that we behave as conquered people. This is the legacy of Ońate and the conquerors. Colonialism remains alive and well. We have Spanish forms of civil governments and we select our own leaders to rule ourselves. We rely on the land grant system to have our land rights respected. We are devout Catholics. We are proud American citizens and we proudly put our hands on our chests as we say the Pledge of Allegiance. We are proud to be called Native Americans. How tragic and what a travesty this is. As indigenous peoples we never ask ourselves why. Why do we have blind patriotism to a nation that stole our land, committed genocide and instituted creative law intended to keep us as political prisoners.

Today we, the indigenous people, fight for our human right to be free, sovereign and self-determining people. To become this is the challenge is upon all of us here. The United States of America is the most ardent enemy of indigenous people. This nation refuses to respect and recognize us as PEOPLES because peoples in international law have the right to self-determination. During the Decade of the Worlds Indigenous Peoples we aggressively pursued for the right of self-determination to be enshrined in the draft United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This did not happen as the decade ended in 2004. Prior to this indigenous people at the last World Conference on Racism, indigenous people accused the world’s nation-states of being racist by refusing to recognize indigenous people to be as peoples. This struggle for self-determination continues at the Organization of American States as they work to adopt an Inter-American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In it we are not considered to be indigenous peoples with the full right of self-determination…
Full:counterpunch.org

NAJAF, Iraq – Anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr came out of hiding Monday for the first time since his fighters clashed with American forces in August, delivering a fiery speech demanding that coalition forces leave Iraq and that Saddam Hussein be punished.

Al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric whose militia battled U.S. forces in Baghdad and Najaf last year, held a press conference in his father’s home in this holy Shiite Muslim city, 100 miles south of Baghdad. Al-Sadr criticized the American-led occupation and called for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.

He also demanded punishment for Saddam, who brutally suppressed Shiites during his three-decade rule and now is being held in a U.S. military detention facility in Baghdad awaiting trial on war crimes charges.

“I demand several things, including punishing Saddam and calling on the Iraqi government, religious movements and political factions to work hard to kick out the occupier,” al-Sadr said. “I want the immediate withdrawal of the occupation forces.”

Al-Sadr’s reappearance coincides with mediation efforts involving Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi to get murder charges against the cleric dropped. An Iraqi judge has issued an arrest warrant charging al-Sadr and his key lieutenant, Riyadh al-Nouri, in the 2003 assassination of moderate cleric Abdul Majid al-Khoei.

Al-Sadr also accused the United States of trying to foment a sectarian conflict, and he demanded the coalition release all detainees.

“The occupier is trying to make up a sectarian war between the Sunnis and Shiites,” al-Sadr said. “It is not acceptable to direct the allegations of ugly acts committed by the occupier against the Shiites, to the Sunnis, we also condemn and denounce all the terrorist acts.”
Full: news.yahoo.com

CARACAS, Venezuela – The United States has CNN and Fox, while the Arab world can watch Al Jazeera or American-financed Al Iraqiya in Iraq.

Now, an initiative pushed by Hugo Chávez, the left-leaning president of Venezuela, will soon give Latin America Telesur, a regionwide television station that he says is aimed at “counteracting the media dictatorship of the big international news networks.”

A venture that involves Argentina, Cuba, Brazil and Uruguay but is largely financed by Venezuela, Telesur will have a decidedly Latin feel, says its director, Aram Aharonian. The station, scheduled to begin broadcasting in July and testing its signal late this month, will show long documentaries about landless peasants in Brazil or indigenous movements in the Andes while offering nitty-gritty reports about politics and sports from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego.

The tussle over what is news, and who gets to tell it, is going on in many parts of the world. Here, it goes to the heart of a heated propaganda war that Venezuela’s government is intent on winning, both in Venezuela and across Latin America, where Mr. Chávez and his nemesis, the United States, are trolling for support from neighboring countries as they try isolating each other.

Telesur journalists talk of an “antihegemonic network,” a not-so-veiled reproach to American media. Anchors on Telesur – which is a truncation of Television of the South – will include journalists like Ati Kiwa, a Colombian Indian who dresses in the traditional white robes of her Arhuaco tribe.

“This is not just my dream, but the dream of many journalists in Latin America, that we will see our own reality on the air,” said Mr. Aharonian, 59, an Uruguayan journalist who has lived in Caracas since 1986. “We want to see ourselves through television, showing the diversity and richness.”

But critics say that here in a part of the world that has a long tradition of independent journalism, Mr. Chávez’s intention is to stifle dissent rather than to broaden coverage with a propaganda machine financed by an ideologically driven government flush with oil money.
Full: nytimes.com

If Chavez is so intent on stifling dissent,why are all the tv stations but ONE in Venezuela run by the opposition? If there’s anybody who should know about the ‘propaganda’ machine, it’s the NY Times.

WASHINGTON, May 15 – Executives at National Public Radio are increasingly at odds with the Bush appointees who lead the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

In one of several points of conflict in recent months, the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which allocates federal funds for public radio and television, is considering a plan to monitor Middle East coverage on NPR news programs for evidence of bias, a corporation spokesman said on Friday.

The corporation’s board has told its staff that it should consider redirecting money away from national newscasts and toward music programs produced by NPR stations.

Top officials at NPR and member stations are upset as well about the corporation’s decision to appoint two ombudsmen to judge the content of programs for balance. And managers of public radio stations criticized the corporation in a resolution offered at their annual meeting two weeks ago urging it not to interfere in NPR editorial decisions.
Full: nytimes.com

CANNES — The last episode of the seminal sci-fi saga “Star Wars” screened at the Cannes film festival Sunday, completing a six-part series that remains a major part of popular culture — and delivering a galactic jab to U.S. President George W Bush.

“Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith” was seen ahead of a celebrity-laden evening screening to be attended by its creator and director, George Lucas, and its cast, including Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen.

Reaction at advance screenings was effusive, with festival-goers, critics and journalists at Cannes applauding at the moment the infamous Darth Vader came into being.

But there were also murmurs at the parallels being drawn between Bush’s administration and the birth of the space opera’s evil Empire.

Baddies’ dialogue about bloodshed and despicable acts being needed to bring “peace and stability” to the movie’s universe, mainly through a fabricated war, set the scene.

And then came the zinger, with the protagonist, Anakin Skywalker, saying just before becoming Darth Vader: “You are either with me — or you are my enemy.”

To the Cannes audience, often sympathetic to anti-Bush messages in cinema as last year’s triumph here of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” attested, that immediately recalled Bush’s 2001 ultimatum, “You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror.”

Lucas, speaking to reporters, emphasised that the original “Star Wars” was written at the end of the Vietnam war, when Richard Nixon was U.S. president, but that the issue being explored was still very much alive today.

“The issue was, how does a democracy turn itself into a dictatorship?” he said.

“When I wrote it, Iraq (the U.S.-led war) didn’t exist… but the parallels of what we did in Vietnam and Iraq are unbelievable.”

He acknowledged an uncomfortable feeling that the United States was in danger of losing its democratic ideals, like in the movie.

“I didn’t think it was going to get this close. I hope this doesn’t come true in our country.”

Although he didn’t mention Bush by name, Lucas took what sounded like another dig while explaining the transformation of the once-good Anakin Skywalker to the very bad Darth Vader.

“Most bad people think they’re good people,” he said.
Full: japantoday.com

CANNES, France (Reuters) – The dark underside of the United States has taken center stage in several films at Cannes this year, capped on Monday with a scathing attack of past and present racism in America by Danish director Lars von Trier.

“Manderlay,” about a fictional Alabama plantation where people are living in 1933 as if slavery were never abolished, staggered festival-goers with a disturbing portrayal of America that fails, even today, to come to terms with its racist past.

There are a number of other films that examine dark and depressing aspects of the United States and “American Dream” losers, filled with violence, drugs and alcohol abuse. They were made by directors from the United States, Canada and Europe.
Full: reuters.myway.com”>