Astronomers announced today the discovery of the smallest planet so far found outside of our solar system. About seven-and-a-half times as massive as Earth, and about twice as wide, this new extrasolar planet may be the first rocky world ever found orbiting a star similar to our own.

“This is the smallest extrasolar planet yet detected and the first of a new class of rocky terrestrial planets,” said team member Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. “It’s like Earth’s bigger cousin.”

Currently around 150 extrasolar planets are known, and the number continues to grow. But most of these far-off worlds are large gas giants like Jupiter. Only recently have astronomers started detecting smaller massed objects

“We keep pushing the limits of what we can detect, and we’re getting closer and closer to finding Earths,” said team member Steven Vogt from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Full: www.space.com

China’s communist authorities have intensified their campaign against the party’s biggest potential enemy – the internet – with the recruitment of a growing army of secret web commentators, sophisticated new monitoring software and a warning that all bloggers and bulletin board operators must register with the government or be closed down and fined.
Full: guardian.co.uk

by Gary Younge
…Such selective amnesia is not confined to the south or to segregation. The war on terror is being fought with convenient disregard for the fact that the terrorists the US is fighting today it armed only yesterday, and that among its allies today are vicious dictators that it will undoubtedly attack tomorrow. Nor is it confined to the US. The whole debate around debt relief in the UK takes place as though Britain had no responsibility for the state that Africa is in today. Those who lambast Africa for its rampant corruption and poor governance forget that most of these dictators have been knowingly propped up by the west. They lecture Africa on the need for democracy apparently unaware that the continent only got a shot at democracy once Europeans left.

Those who deride Make Poverty History and other activists for their naivety in trying to challenge inequalities bequeathed from the past are in need of a new slogan for a new wristband: Make History Impoverished. For the trouble is not that this sense of collective historical identity does not exist – Britons and Americans have no trouble saying “We beat the Germans and the Japanese” when referring to the second world war. It’s that they apply it only selectively. Nobody says, “We backed death squads”, “We lynched children”, or “We tortured Kenyans” – even though these happened more recently.

The target here is not individual guilt – there are therapists for that – but a collective reckoning with the past that would help make sense of the present. Like everyone else, African-Americans, Africans and Arabs must naturally take responsibility for their own actions. But to pretend that their choices are not shaped and limited by the past is not just dishonest; it leads ineluctably to the racist conclusion that Arabs can’t handle democracy, black Americans are inveterate criminals and Africans just can’t cut it in the modern world.

“I am born with a past,” writes Alasdair MacIntyre in his book After Virtue. “And to try to cut myself off from that past is to deform my present relationships.”
guardian.co.uk

This article is better than most, but still the problem is how the rest of the world is subjected to the white world’s interminable conversations with itself, these narratives of empire:we will be the ones who will ‘make poverty history.’ If we think in terms of reparations rather than aid, then it naturally follows that it is for Africa to dictate the terms.

Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa has left me bewildered. As an anthropologist interested in “traditional” medicine, I was delighted to see its report’s attempt to take an Africa-centred point of view. Reading a sentence stating that “history shows African cultures to have been tremendously adaptive, absorbing a wide range of outside influences” is a relief to those of us who have tried for years to make this point. The commission is far better placed than any academic to bring to the world’s attention the energy and ingenuity with which African people have engaged and resolved the problems facing them.

But I was frustrated by what seems to be our incapacity to escape our own mental traditions – the casts of mind that always seem to come into play when we imagine Africa. Nowhere were these more in evidence than in the report’s discussion of the role of religion in African social life. On the one hand, it justly draws attention to the significance of religions in enriching social relations, creating accountability and empowering local people.

On the other hand, the report seems to be impressed by religion chiefly because of its potential usefulness as a tool for economic development. We are told that religion succeeds where the state fails, that faith leaders have a significant role to play in shaping social attitudes, that religion can be a model for the state and that it commands the kind of loyalty and energy that was given to nationalist causes during and just after Africa’s struggles for independence.

To regard religion in Africa in these terms is to put their religion where our politics should be. Our error begins with the place in our imaginations that we force Africa to occupy. We are subject to “African exceptionalism”: a sense thatAfrica is so different, so impossible to organise, that any undertaking is practically pointless. It is the sense that African people are unruly as citizens and irresponsible as politicians and bureaucrats. Africa’s state is always behind. We never perceive it as leading the way. Economically and politically, Africa is held back, not yet caught up. Exceptionalism heightens the temptation to look at the continent as a problem or an illness.
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Bush administration officials said yesterday that revisions to reports on climate change made by Philip A. Cooney, a former oil-industry lobbyist now working at the White House, were part of the normal review before publishing projects that involved many agencies.

“There are policy people and scientists who are involved in this process, in the interagency review process, and he’s one of the policy people involved in that process,” Mr. McClellan said, according to a transcript by Federal News Service Inc. “And he’s someone who’s very familiar with the issues relating to climate change and the environment.”

The revisions, many of which cast doubt on findings that climate scientists say are robust, prompted strong criticisms of the administration from scientists and environmental groups after they were reported yesterday in The New York Times.

Mr. Cooney, 45, is chief of staff to the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which helps shape and carry out the president’s environmental policies. A lawyer with no scientific training, he moved to the White House in 2001 after having worked for more than 10 years for the American Petroleum Institute, the oil-industry lobby. His last title there was climate team leader, and his focus was defeating plans to restrict heat-trapping gases.
Full: nytimes.com

Good to know old boy is keeping his ‘focus.’

A popular campaign which mobilised millions of people to demand that rich countries lift Africa out of debt, poverty and disease will score a stunning victory later today.

At lunchtime, the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, will unveil a deal to slash billions of pounds of debt payments by some of the world’s poorest countries.

The final terms of the deal were struck last night after last-minute negotiations between finance ministers from the G8 nations.

Mr Brown yesterday hailed the agreement as “the biggest debt settlement the world has ever seen” that would be worth more than $50bn (£25bn). “America, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Canada and Italy have all come together with one proposal, that is comprehensive, in other words it involves dozens of countries,” he said. He added that 18 countries would have their $40bn debt of wiped out immediately, saving them aid payments of $15bn over the next decade. That would be extended to a further nine countries in 12 to 18 months – taking the total to $51bn and a final 11 raising the total-write-off to $55bn.
Full: independent.co.uk

Ah the pageants of imperialism…stunning victory? For whom? Against whom? As far as I remember, this ‘massive mobilization’ started up about 2 weeks ago, while Brown and Blair came up with their big plan 6 months ago. “A face saving exercise for politicians?” This plan was cooked up by politicians for politicians, and the ‘massive mobilization’ was convened practically overnight to lend it some credibility. This is what Western ‘democracy’ looks like. If you want to see real peoples’ mobilization for truly democratic goals, check Bolivia. You don’t hear anybody in this supposed left-wing Make Poverty History campaign speaking out against privatization. This is just the 21st century face of the Scramble for Africa. And now, as then, the voice of Africa is not heard. Only Brown et. al. are qualified to speak for them, think for them, plan for them, do for them. And with few exceptions, all these activists and anarchists and whatnot are completely off the mark in their analysis, if you can call it that. Reparations. Not aid. Dialogue. Not a one-way self-congratulatory conversation. A true engagement with history, not the digging up of a poor black boy’s body 50 years later to put his dead murderer on trial (I’m talking about Emmett Till). An end to corporate imperialism. Yeah right, like that will be happening anytime soon. Here is the utter moral bunkruptcy of the West on pitiful display: it is not only unwilling but totally unable to acknowledge and address its own mess, let alone bring justice anywhere to anyone.
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Orwellian “Scenarios”

A recent Report of the Homeland Security Council entitled Planning Scenarios describes in minute detail, the Bush administration’s preparations in the case of a terrorist attack by an outside enemy called the Universal Adversary (UA).

The Universal Adversary, is identified in the scenarios as an abstract entity used for the purposes of simulation. Yet upon more careful examination, this Universal Adversary is by no means illusory. It includes the following categories of potential “conspirators”:

“foreign [Islamic] terrorists” ,

“domestic radical groups”, [antiwar and civil rights groups]

“state sponsored adversaries” [“rogue states”, “unstable nations”]

“disgruntled employees” [labor and union activists].

According to the Planning Scenarios Report :

“Because the attacks could be caused by foreign terrorists; domestic radical groups; state sponsored adversaries; or in some cases, disgruntled employees, the perpetrator has been named, the Universal Adversary (UA). The focus of the scenarios is on response capabilities and needs, not threat-based prevention activities.” (See Planning Scenarios )

The domestic radical groups and labor activists, which visibly constitute a threat to the established political order, are now conveniently lumped together with foreign Islamic terrorists, suggesting that the PATRIOT anti-terror laws together with the Big Brother law enforcement apparatus are eventually intended to be used against potential domestic “adversaries”.

While the Universal Adversary is “make-believe”, the simulations constitute a dress rehearsal of a real life emergency situation:

“The scenarios have been developed in a way that allows them to be adapted to local conditions throughout the country”

Fifteen Distinct Scenarios

The scenarios cover the entire array of threats:

15 distinct threat scenarios to the Security of America carried out by four categories of enemies: Islamic terrorists, radical groups, rogue adversaries and labor activists.

The scenarios simulate operations carried out by the Universal Adversary (UA). They include inter alia a nuclear detonation (with a small 10-Kiloton improvised nuclear device, anthrax attacks, a biological disease outbreak including a pandemic influenza, not to mention a biological plague outbreak. Various forms of chemical weapons attacks are also envisaged including the use of toxic industrial chemicals, and nerve gas. Radiological attacks through the emission of a radioactive aerosol are also envisaged. (See Text box below)

What is revealing in the “doomsday scripts” is that they bear no resemblance to the weaponry used by clandestine urban “terrorists”. In fact, in several cases, they correspond to weapons systems which are part of the US arsenal and which have been used in US sponsored military operations. The description of the nuclear device bears a canny resemblance to America’s tactical nuclear weapon (“mini nuke”) , which also has a 10-kiloton yield, approximately two-thirds of a Hiroshima bomb. That Homeland Security should actually envisage a make believe scenario of large scale nuclear attacks by ‘domestic radicals’ and/or Islamic terrorists borders on the absurd.

With regard to the nerve gas attack scenario, in a cruel irony, it is the same type of nerve gas (as well as mustard gas) used by the US military against civilians in Fallujah.
Full: globalresearch.ca

by James Petras
For over a century social analysts of the right and left have been predicting the disappearance of the peasantry, with the advance of capitalism. Even today some of the more prominent authors of the Left, like Eric Hobsbawn, write of the marginalization of the peasantry deducing their conclusions from quantitative demographic data.

In terms of policy, on the neo-liberal right, President Da Silva of Brazil and his Agricultural Minister have provided vast resources to the agro-business export sector, and have relegated ecological, human rights, small farmers and landless workers demands to the lowest of priorities.

Despite this apparent consensus among academics and politicians, the peasantry refuses to disappear, or to play a marginal role. Despite the decline in the relative percentage of rural inhabitants, the peasantry over the past 20 years has re-emerged as an historical actor, playing a central role in changing regimes, determining national agendas, leading struggles against international trade agreements (ALCA or Free Trade Area of the Americas) as well as establishing regional and local bases of power. In many countries coalitions of landless farm workers, small family farmers and peasants have been central to national struggles against neo-liberal regimes and free trade policies. In some cases rural movements have detonated larger struggles, activating urban classes, trade unions, civic groups and human rights organizations.
axisoflogic.com

President Bush apparently thinks he can dismiss the damning “Downing Street memo” with a few glib words.

If he is right, it is a sad commentary on the state of American democracy and values.

The memo, recounting the details of a July 23, 2002, meeting at British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s official residence on 10 Downing St., strongly suggested that the message had been sent across the Atlantic that the Bush White House had made the decision to wage war on Iraq. The minutes of the meeting indicated that Blair and his top-level intelligence and foreign-policy aides were given clear signals that military action was “inevitable.”

In the most disturbing passage of the minutes, the head of Britain’s MI6 intelligence service, reporting on his recent trip to Washington, told the group that “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” of a war to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

Bush was finally asked about the memo directly this week, during a media availability with Blair. Bush tried to discredit the memo because of the timing of its disclosure — just days before Blair’s re-election. But it is important to note that no one has challenged the authenticity of the memo nor the accuracy of its account of the meeting.

Bush also scoffed at the suggestion that the decision to go to war had been made by July 2002, nearly a year before U.S. bombs began raining on Baghdad. “There’s nothing farther from the truth,” Bush told reporters. “My conversation with the prime minister was, how can we do this peacefully?”
Full:sfgate.com/san fran chronicle

NEW DELHI – India’s economic boom is causing unsustainable environmental damage and is blinding people to the misery of hundreds of millions of poor, prize-winning author and activist Arundhati Roy said.

“Even if you know what is going on, you can’t help thinking India is this cool place now, Bollywood is ‘in’ and all of us have mobile phones,” Roy told Reuters in an interview.

“But it is almost as if the light is shining so brightly that you do not notice the darkness,” she said. “There is no understanding whatsoever of what price is being paid by the rivers and mountains and irrigation and ground water, there is no questioning of that because we are on a roll.”

“India shining” was the campaign motto of the Bharatiya Janata Party which lost last year’s election, unable to capitalise on the fast-growing economy and failing to convince the rural poor that economic reforms were benefitting them.

Roy won the 1997 Booker prize for her first novel “The God of Small Things”. Since then, she has become a leading environmental activist and opponent of big dams, which have displaced millions.

She said India’s environment faced a major crisis, caused by industrial pollution, by big dams, and in particular by unsustainable use of ground water to irrigate thirsty cash crops such as soyabeans, peanuts and sugarcane.

“When the only logic is the market, when there is no respect for ecosystems, for the amount of water available… then we are in for a lot of trouble,” she said. “You have to have a system where people have access to some amount of water to grow whatever is sustainable for them to survive.”
Full: commondreams.org
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