In the Capitol basement yesterday, long-suffering House Democrats took a trip to the land of make-believe.

They pretended a small conference room was the Judiciary Committee hearing room, draping white linens over folding tables to make them look like witness tables and bringing in cardboard name tags and extra flags to make the whole thing look official.

Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) banged a large wooden gavel and got the other lawmakers to call him “Mr. Chairman.” He liked that so much that he started calling himself “the chairman” and spouted other chairmanly phrases, such as “unanimous consent” and “without objection so ordered.” The dress-up game looked realistic enough on C-SPAN, so two dozen more Democrats came downstairs to play along.

The session was a mock impeachment inquiry over the Iraq war. As luck would have it, all four of the witnesses agreed that President Bush lied to the nation and was guilty of high crimes — and that a British memo on “fixed” intelligence that surfaced last month was the smoking gun equivalent to the Watergate tapes. Conyers was having so much fun that he ignored aides’ entreaties to end the session.

“At the next hearing,” he told his colleagues, “we could use a little subpoena power.” That brought the house down.

As Conyers and his hearty band of playmates know, subpoena power and other perks of a real committee are but a fantasy unless Democrats can regain the majority in the House. But that’s only one of the obstacles they’re up against as they try to convince America that the “Downing Street Memo” is important.

A search of the congressional record yesterday found that of the 535 members of Congress, only one — Conyers — had mentioned the memo on the floor of either chamber. House Democratic leaders did not join in Conyers’s session, and Senate Democrats, who have the power to hold such events in real committee rooms, have not troubled themselves.

The hearing was only nominally about the Downing Street Memo and its assertion that in the summer of 2002 Bush was already determined to go to war and was making the intelligence fit his case. Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador whose wife was outed as a CIA operative, barely mentioned the memo in his opening statement. Cindy Sheehan, who lost a son in Iraq, said the memo “only confirms what I already suspected.”

No matter: The lawmakers and the witnesses saw this as a chance to rally against the war. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) proclaimed it “one of the biggest scandals in the history of this country.” Conyers said the memos “establish a prima facie case of going to war under false pretenses.” Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) concluded that “the time has come to get out” of Iraq.

The session took an awkward turn when witness Ray McGovern, a former intelligence analyst, declared that the United States went to war in Iraq for oil, Israel and military bases craved by administration “neocons” so “the United States and Israel could dominate that part of the world.” He said that Israel should not be considered an ally and that Bush was doing the bidding of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

“Israel is not allowed to be brought up in polite conversation,” McGovern said. “The last time I did this, the previous director of Central Intelligence called me anti-Semitic.”

Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), who prompted the question by wondering whether the true war motive was Iraq’s threat to Israel, thanked McGovern for his “candid answer.”

At Democratic headquarters, where an overflow crowd watched the hearing on television, activists handed out documents repeating two accusations — that an Israeli company had warning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and that there was an “insider trading scam” on 9/11 — that previously has been used to suggest Israel was behind the attacks.

The event organizer, Democrats.com, distributed stickers saying “Bush lied/100,000 people died.” One man’s T-shirt proclaimed, “Whether you like Bush or not, he’s still an incompetent liar,” while a large poster of Uncle Sam announced: “Got kids? I want yours for cannon fodder.”

Conyers’s firm hand on the gavel could not prevent something of a free-for-all; at one point, a former State Department worker rose from the audience to propose criminal charges against Bush officials. Early in the hearing, somebody accidentally turned off the lights; later, a witness knocked down a flag. Matters were even worse at Democratic headquarters, where the C-SPAN feed ended after just an hour, causing the activists to groan and one to shout “Conspiracy!”

The glitches and the antiwar theatrics proved something of a distraction from the message the organizers aimed to deliver: that for the Bush White House, as lawyer John C. Bonifaz put it, the British memo is “the equivalent to the revelation that there was a taping system in the Nixon White House.”

Of course, Democrats controlled the real committees back then — though Conyers was not deterred. “We have a lot of work to do as a result of this first panel,” he told his colleagues. ” ‘Tis the beginning of our work.”
Full: washingtonpost.com

Yup those black folks down in the basement raising a ruckus. The dismissive tone of this article tries to paint this as a minstrel show farce but guess what–it is a devastating indictment of the condition of this government when the only way there can be a hearing on high crimes and misdemeanors is in a makeshift room in the basement. I guess it’s the only place in the building where a word can be said against Israel.

The deserts of north Africa are threatening to leap the Mediterranean and creep through Spain, according to government figures made public as part of a national campaign to halt desertification.
A third of the country is at risk of being turned into desert as climate change and tourism add to the effects of farming.

More than 90% of land bordering the Mediterranean from Almeria in the south to Tarragona in the north is considered to be at high risk. But that figure climbs to almost 100% in Alicante and Murcia.

Spain’s environment ministry has announced a Ł50m programme to combat desertification. Over-grazing and irrigation methods that wash away topsoil were to blame for some of the damage, experts said. Building developments and climate change were doing the rest.
Full:guardian.co.uk

PRETORIA, South Africa, June 18 – The World Bank needs to streamline its bureaucracy and refocus its lending on rebuilding decaying infrastructures in poor nations, the bank’s new president, Paul A. Wolfowitz, said Saturday at the conclusion of his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa.

At a news conference with South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, Mr. Wolfowitz said African leaders’ commitments to address corruption and misfeasance had opened new opportunities to combat poverty in this, the world’s poorest region. But he acknowledged that future lending would have to be better managed.

“There is increasing recognition that the reason they have these debts is that a lot of governments in the past didn’t spend that money well – and that’s an understatement,” he said. “You know what I’m talking about, corruption.”

He praised Mr. Mbeki, who recently dismissed his deputy president after a trial linked him to a bribery scheme, for leading efforts for better government in the region.

In his first trip abroad as president of the bank Mr. Wolfowitz spent six days in Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Rwanda and South Africa, much of it visiting rural areas to see first-hand the region’s needs.

Earlier, Mr. Wolfowitz condemned Zimbabwe’s uprooting of hundreds of thousands of slum dwellers, calling it inhuman and saying it must damage the country’s development prospects. “It’s a tragedy,” he said.
Full: nytimes.com

What insufferable hypocrisy.

PRETORIA, South Africa, June 18 – The World Bank needs to streamline its bureaucracy and refocus its lending on rebuilding decaying infrastructures in poor nations, the bank’s new president, Paul A. Wolfowitz, said Saturday at the conclusion of his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa.

At a news conference with South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, Mr. Wolfowitz said African leaders’ commitments to address corruption and misfeasance had opened new opportunities to combat poverty in this, the world’s poorest region. But he acknowledged that future lending would have to be better managed.

“There is increasing recognition that the reason they have these debts is that a lot of governments in the past didn’t spend that money well – and that’s an understatement,” he said. “You know what I’m talking about, corruption.”

He praised Mr. Mbeki, who recently dismissed his deputy president after a trial linked him to a bribery scheme, for leading efforts for better government in the region.

In his first trip abroad as president of the bank Mr. Wolfowitz spent six days in Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Rwanda and South Africa, much of it visiting rural areas to see first-hand the region’s needs.

Earlier, Mr. Wolfowitz condemned Zimbabwe’s uprooting of hundreds of thousands of slum dwellers, calling it inhuman and saying it must damage the country’s development prospects. “It’s a tragedy,” he said.
Full: nytimes.com

What insufferable hypocrisy.

BRUSSELS, June 18 – Something shattered in Europe on Friday night.

The leaders of the 25 European Union nations went home after a failed two-day summit meeting in anger and in shame, as domestic politics and national interests defeated lofty notions of sacrifice and solidarity for the benefit of all.

The battle over money and the shelving of the bloc’s historic constitution, after the crushing no votes in France and the Netherlands, stripped away all pretense of an organization with a common vision and reflected the fears of many leaders in the face of rising popular opposition to the project called Europe.

Their attacks on one another after they failed to agree on a future budget – for 2007 through 2013 – seemed destructive and unnecessary, and it is not at all clear that they will be able to repair their relationships. Even if they do, the damage to the organization is done.

Most embarrassing for the European Union was a last-minute attempt by its 10 newest members to salvage the budget agreement late on Friday night. They offered to give up some of their own aid from the union so that the older and richer members could keep theirs.

For the new members, that offer was an opportunity to prove their worth. Criticizing the “egoism” of countries driven by national interests, Prime Minister Marek Belka of Poland said, “Nobody will be able to say that for Poland, the European Union is just a pile of money.”

But for the older members, it was a humiliation. “When I heard one after the other, all the new member states – each poorer than the other – say that in the interest of an agreement they would be ready to renounce part of the money they are due, I was ashamed,” Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg’s prime minister and the departing European Union president, told journalists after talks collapsed.
Full: nytimes.com

Forced to the basement of the US Capitol and prevented from holding an official hearing, Michigan representative John Conyers defied Republicans and held a forum on Thursday calling for a congressional inquiry into the infamous British document known as the “Downing Street memo”.

Three dozen Democratic representatives shuffled in and out of a small room to join Mr Conyers in declaring that the Downing Street memo was the first “primary source” document to report that prewar intelligence was intentionally manipulated in order make a case for invading Iraq.

Not only did Republican leaders consign the Democrats to the basement, but Democrats also claimed that the House scheduled 11 votes concurrent with the forum to maximise the difficulty of attending it. Because the forum wasn’t an official hearing, it won’t become a part of the Congressional record – but members worked to make sure that the attending media and activists captured their words for posterity.
The Downing Street memo, so far disputed by Washington and London in some of its details, but not its authenticity, reports on minutes of a meeting between the British prime minister, Tony Blair, and his national security team on July 23 2002.

First reported by the London Sunday Times on May 1 this year, the internal memo states that, in the opinion of “C” (Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of the British secret intelligence service), “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the [Bush administration’s] policy”. The author of the memo added that it “seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action”.

Since then, several other British government memos have become public that also make the case that the White House was planning the war long before it admitted to doing so.

The Democratic representatives attending the forum said they believed that if such information had got out prior to the war, neither the House nor the Senate would have supported the October 11 2002 congressional vote giving the president the power to order the invasion.

To the Democrats taking turns to speak at the forum on Thursday, the memo was tantamount to the first word of tapes in the Nixon White House during the Watergate scandal. Impeachment was on these representatives’ minds as four long-time critics of the war in Iraq, including the former ambassador Joe Wilson, repeatedly urged Congress to hold an official inquiry into the validity and origins of the Downing Street memo.

“We sent our troops to war under dubious pretences,” asserted Mr Wilson, who travelled, at the government’s behest, to Niger in February 2002. There, he discovered President Bush’s claim that Iraq was attempting to obtain uranium in Africa was false. The White House later retracted the accusation.

Speaking on the question of impeachment, representative Charles B Rangel, D-NY, asked, point blank: “Has the president misled, or deliberately misled, the Congress?”

The answer is at the heart of Mr Conyers’ push for further investigation. Misleading Congress is an impeachable offence, and Mr Conyers’ petition for an inquiry into the memo seemed a first step in that direction – though no one made that call outright.

“Many of us find it unacceptable to put our brave men and women in harm’s way, based on false information,” Mr Conyers said.

Though most of those at the forum voted against the war in Iraq, Mr Conyers, who is the ranking Democrat on the House judiciary committee, insisted the forum was not partisan politicking, but a function of their oversight duty.

As members of Congress crammed into the small room, no bigger than 30ft by 50ft, Democratic representatives spoke and then scurried out to make scheduled votes. After being denied a hearing, then forced to the basement, which representative Jim McDermott, D-Wash, called unprecedented, the Democrats believed Republicans had purposely scheduled 11 votes to interrupt the forum.

“Absolutely, it was absolutely timed,” Mr McDermott said in an interview after the forum. “There was no need to do it then. And they were having a major appropriations hearing at the same time. That was also to keep people away, because appropriations are your chance to get money for your district that you’ve been working all year on.”

McDermott spoke as representative Maxine Waters, D-Calif, delayed her aide and sprinted down the hall in her high heels to do an interview with Pacifica Radio. Covered mostly by liberal media outlets, the forum got some mainstream news attention, from the AP to the Baltimore Sun to CNN.

Democrats who dropped by included representatives Barney Frank, of Massachusetts, Charles Rangel, of New York, Virginia’s Jim Moran, and Barbara Lee of Oakland, California.

Following the forum, Mr Conyers led Democratic representatives and activists on a march to the White House, hoping to deliver a letter with more than 550,000 signatures of the public and more than 120 members of Congress, mostly – but not all – Democrats. The White House spokesman Scott McClellan told the Associated Press that Conyers was “simply trying to rehash old debates”.

As he left, the mild but indefatigable Mr Conyers was a little angry that the forum was denied a proper room in the Capitol.

“They tried to shut us out,” he said after the hearing. “They tried to cut us off. They put us in a tiny room. The significance shouldn’t be lost on anybody.”
Full: guardian.co.uk

Not to mention the fact that the Congressional Black Caucus is leading this initiative.

…The congressional report was sponsored by Barbara Boxer, a California senator, and Henry Waxman, a congressman from the same state. They said it had uncovered “significant and widespread deficiencies” in 22 human pesticide experiments it reviewed.

“In violation of ethical standards, the experiments appear to have inflicted harm on human subjects, failed to obtain informed consent, dismissed adverse outcomes and lacked scientific validity,” the report found. “In many of the experiments, the subjects were instructed to swallow capsules of toxic pesticides with orange juice or water at breakfast.”

The “informed consent” forms were often loaded with jargon, hard to understand or deliberately misleading about potential health risks. Some studies dismissed unfavourable results. In one test, all eight subjects became sick after exposure to a pesticide, but in the report their symptoms were discounted and attributed to “viral illness”.
Full: guardian.co.uk

WASHINGTON (AP) – A subsidiary of Houston-based Halliburton has been awarded $30 million to build an improved 220-bed prison for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Pentagon announced.

Kellogg Brown and Root Services Inc. of Arlington, Va., is to build a two-story prison that includes day rooms, exercise areas, medical bays, air conditioning and a security control room, according to the Pentagon. It is to be completed by July 2006.
Full: guardian.co.uk

Nice.

RICHMOND, Va. (June 17, 2005) – People with bigger brains are smarter than their smaller-brained counterparts, according to a study conducted by a Virginia Commonwealth University researcher published in the journal “Intelligence.”

The study, published on line June 16, could settle a long-standing scientific debate about the relationship between brain size and intelligence. Ever since German anatomist and physiologist Frederick Tiedmann wrote in 1836 that there exists “an indisputable connection between the size of the brain and the mental energy displayed by the individual man,” scientists have been searching for biological evidence to prove his claim.

“For all age and sex groups, it is now very clear that brain volume and intelligence are related,” said lead researcher Michael A. McDaniel, Ph.D., an industrial and organizational psychologist who specializes in the study of intelligence and other predictors of job performance.

The study is the most comprehensive of its kind, drawing conclusions from 26 previous – mostly recent – international studies involving brain volume and intelligence. It was only five years ago, with the increased use of MRI-based brain assessments, that more data relating to brain volume and intelligence became available.

McDaniel, a professor in management in VCU’s School of Business, found that, on average, intelligence increases with increasing brain volume. Intelligence was measured with standardized intelligence tests, which have important consequences on peoples’ lives, such as where they’ll go to college or what kind of job they get. Critics have called the tests inaccurate or irrelevant to the real world, he said.

“But when intelligence is correlated with a biological reality such as brain volume, it becomes harder to argue that human intelligence can’t be measured or that the scores do not reflect something meaningful,” said McDaniel.
Full: vcu.edu

This is sick, still trying to put forward this racist argument.

The developed world came in for criticism on Monday at a conference on African revival for “the blackmail involved in international aid” and a vested interests in wars.

Blackmail has become “quite a common fixture of ‘aid’,” theologian and former anti-apartheid activist Allan Boesak said, addressing a Pretoria conference on the African Renaissance.

In 1995, he said, United States subsidies for arms exports accounted for more than half that country’s bilateral aid, and 40 percent of total US aid.

‘War is a highly profitable business’
“This emphasis on weapons exports comes at the expense of programmes designed to promote economic development and social welfare in recipient countries,” he said.

If he were an African leader, Boesak told the conference to many approving nods, “I would look very closely at agreements I sign with (US President) George Bush today, and see what is aid…”

On the questions of wars, he said these not only cost money, but also “make money for somebody”.

“War is, above all, a highly profitable business, and we ignore that fact at our peril,” Boesak said. “It helps explains the millions dead in wars since 1945… namely the common interest of the military-industrial complexes of the West and East and the power elites of the developing world.”

Turning to debt relief, he said the cancellation of the debt of 18 of the world’s poorest countries, announced by the Group of Eight (G8) industrialised nations at the weekend, was a drop in the ocean.

“We are not touching reality here, ladies and gentlemen,” he said.

Unless discussions about debt relief yield tangible results, and more aid than the promised $40-billion is received, “the African Renaissance may yet die in its infancy”.

Boesak referred extensively to Africa’s colonial and apartheid past, and what he described as the “destruction of kingdoms, the rape of our continent and the theft of our land”.

The ongoing exploitation of Africa ensured the continued development of rich nations, he said.
Full: ioa.co.za