Oil storage tanks ruptured by Hurricane Katrina may have dumped as much as 3.7m gallons of crude oil into the lower Mississippi river and surrounding wetlands.

Officials estimate the spillage at roughly a third of the volume of the huge spill when the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground off Alaska in 1989. Last night experts said they could not yet assess the short-term effects of the spills but were hopeful there would be few long-term effects. Some of the oil is expected to find its way into the Gulf of Mexico.

But officials at the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality remain cautious because it is difficult to gain access to the area, which can be reached only by water. It is also unclear how much oil has been lost.
financialtimes.com

WASHINGTON — A new Democratic effort to whip up indignation about the Bush administration’s handling of Hurricane Katrina also tried to raise money for Democratic candidates.

Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat and the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, issued an appeal Thursday urging people to sign an online petition to fire the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency over his handling of the Katrina response.

After an inquiry from the Associated Press, the DSCC quickly pulled down the page and said they would donate to charity any money raised by the anti-FEMA petition.

When recipients clicked on a link to the petition, the top center of the screen _ above the call to “Fire the FEMA director” _ had asked for a donation to the DSCC.
nynewsday.com

British Home Secretary Charles Clarke has warned that European citizens will have to accept that civil liberties may have to be bartered away in exchange for protection from terrorists and organised criminals.
theregister.co.uk

More than 200 detainees in Guantánamo Bay are in their fifth week of a hunger strike, the Guardian has been told.
Statements from prisoners in the camp which were declassified by the US government on Wednesday reveal that the men are starving themselves in protest at the conditions in the camp and at their alleged maltreatment – including desecration of the Qur’an – by American guards.

The statements, written on August 11, have just been given to the British human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith. They show that prisoners are determined to starve them selves to death. In one, Binyam Mohammed, a former London schoolboy, said: “I do not plan to stop until I either die or we are respected.
guardian.co.uk

Some 25,000 body bags have been sent to the New Orleans area, as authorities begin to recover the dead in the city.

The official death toll stands at 83 in the city, including 30 elderly people found in a flooded nursing home. But thousands are feared to have died.

Bodies remain in the stagnant flood waters as health fears grow for up to 10,000 people still in the city.

Three people are also known to have died from contaminated flood water, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

They are believed to have contracted infections after coming into contact with cholera-related bacteria.

New Orleans’ mayor has ordered the forced evacuation of the city, which used to have a population of 450,000.

A temporary morgue in a town about 70 miles (113km) away is preparing to handle 5,000 corpses.

A state health official told the Associated Press he did not know how many bodies to expect.
bbc.co.uk

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko fired his government Thursday, saying the abrupt action was motivated by an absence of team spirit among Cabinet members and other top aides.

Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s fragile coalition of former opposition leaders fell amid the greatest crisis to face Yushchenko in his seven months in power.
nytimes.com

So much for the bogus “orange revolution.”

New York Times: Infection, Stroke
JERUSALEM, Sept. 7 – The medical records of Yasir Arafat, which have been kept secret since his unexplained death last year at a French military hospital, show that he died from a stroke that resulted from a bleeding disorder caused by an unidentified infection.

The first independent review of the records, obtained by The New York Times, suggests that poisoning was highly unlikely and dispels a rumor that he may have died of AIDS. Nonetheless, the records show that despite extensive testing, his doctors could not determine the underlying infection.

Arafat seemed frail in his final months but not, by anyone’s account, at death’s door when he suddenly fell ill last October. After more than two weeks without improvement, he was airlifted to a French hospital, where he died on Nov. 11. The cause of death was never announced and speculation has remained rife.
nytimes.com

Haaretz (Jerusalem): AIDS, poisoning
An analysis of the confidential medical report on Yasser Arafat’s death reveals three main possibilities as to the cause: poisoning, AIDS or an infection.

Israel and foreign doctors who have seen the report say the details do not lead to a conclusive determination on what caused the death.

After Arafat died on November 11, 2004 at a military hospital in Paris, copies of the pathology report compiled by the hospital staff – and kept under wraps until now – were handed over to Arafat’s widow, Suha, and senior Palestinian Authority officials. The report’s findings are now being published for the first time in the revised edition of “The Seventh War” by journalists Amos Harel and Avi Isacharoff, to be released next week by Yedioth Ahronoth in Hebrew.

The report does not lift the veil of mystery surrounding Arafat’s death entirely: It lists the immediate cause of death as a massive brain hemorrhage, but adds that “a discussion among a large number of medical experts… shows that it is impossible to pinpoint a cause that will explain the combination of symptoms that led to the death of the patient.”

Dr. Ashraf al-Kurdi, Arafat’s personal physician who played no part in the late PA chairman’s medical care during the final weeks of his life, said that he knows that the French doctors found the AIDS virus in Arafat’s blood. Al-Kurdi refuses to divulge the source of this information, but claims that the virus was put into Arafat’s blood in an effort to blur the traces of poisoning, which was the cause of death.

Most senior Palestinian officials, including Mohammed Dahlan and Jibril Rajoub, have said in interviews with the book’s authors that they are convinced Arafat was poisoned by Israel. The Palestinians mention Israel’s assassination attempt by means of poison on Hamas leader Khaled Meshal in Amman in 1997. According to the officials, Arafat was not sufficiently cautious and could easily have been poisoned, because he would receive candies and medicines from visitors and consume them without medical supervision.
haaretz.com

by Priyamvada Gopal
A few years ago, Tony Blair termed the state of Africa a ‘scar on the world’s conscience’. It was not the first time that the dubious honour of being a moral touchstone had been conferred upon the continent. By the late 19th century too, Africa was the foil for various European crises of conscience even as major European powers were busy consolidating colonial regimes across large swathes of the globe. In his remarkable book, King Leopold’s Ghost (1999), which chronicles the brutalities of the Belgian monarch’s venal reign over the Congo, Adam Hochschild has shown how British popular outrage over extreme degradation ‘elsewhere’ could serve to normalize injustices at home and in Britain’s own colonies. Interestingly, Leopold had undertaken his own violent expropriation of the Congo’s land and natural resources by establishing humanitarian bodies such as the ‘International Africa Association’, whipping up righteous European indignation at ‘Arab slave traders.’ He had his celebrity allies, like the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who extolled the ‘wisdom and goodness’ of Leopold’s ostensibly humanitarian reign which also came to be known as the ‘rubber terror’ during which thousands of Africans were forced into servitude, maimed and killed to feed Europe’s hunger for the newly discovered material.

Despite a shared penchant for self-regarding moralism and for all the unconscionable bloodletting that he has sponsored in Iraq—which now rebounds on British civilians (most of whom opposed the invasion)—Tony Blair is no Leopold. But the two historical moments have something in common. Then as now, the technology of modern warfare was used to help ‘civilisation overcome barbarism’. It was then too that international humanitarian crusades came to have distinct political uses. Firstly, vast tracts of African or Asian land and resources come under indirect or direct command of the benefactor nations. An equally significant, though less visible, fact was that the emphasis on situations of extreme degradation had the effect of minimizing other kinds of misrule and violence even within progressive quarters. For instance, remarkable activists like the intrepid E.D Morel, who founded the hugely important Congo Reform Movement to expose Leopold’s murderous reign in that region, refused to criticize Britain’s colonial practices which could also include the expropriation of resources and the use of forced labour. With scrutiny focused on material misdeeds elsewhere, Britain could function, Hochschild suggests, as a kind of new and different ‘Moral Empire.’
zmag.org

LUCKNOW, India, Sept. 7 – Government ministers descended on this storied North Indian state capital on Wednesday to kick off an ambitious rural health initiative. The city’s roads were freshly tarred, and banners hung along the main boulevard to welcome its chief guest: former President Bill Clinton.

All were victims of the viral disease known as Japanese encephalitis, which causes high fever, aches, eventual coma and often death. It has struck this region with a particular fury this year, shining a harsh light on India’s inability to halt an entirely preventable disease that has killed or stunted some of its most vulnerable citizens for the last quarter-century – the young rural poor.

The director general of the state government’s health department said Wednesday that since July 1 the death toll had reached nearly 500, and those were only cases reported to government hospitals across the state. Reuters on Wednesday gave a figure of 600.

More than 1,500 suspected cases of Japanese encephalitis have been reported so far, according to the state.
nytimes.com

LONDON (Reuters) – Global warming is causing soil to release huge amounts of carbon, making efforts to fight global warming tougher than previously thought, scientists said on Wednesday.

A study in the journal Nature looked at the carbon content of soil in England and Wales from 1978-2003 and found that it fell steadily, with some 13 million tonnes of carbon released from British soil each year.

The team from Britain’s National Soil Resources Institute at Cranfield University said its results implied a similar process would be under way in other temperate areas across the globe.

“Our findings suggest the soil part of the equation is scarier than we had thought,” Professor Guy Kirk, of Cranfield University, told journalists at a science conference in Dublin. “The consequence is that there is more urgency about doing something.”

Since the carbon appeared to be released from soil regardless of how the soil was used, they concluded that the main cause must be climate change itself.

Though they could not say where all the missing carbon had gone, much of it may be entering the atmosphere as the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane, which scientists say has caused global warming.
breitbart.com