RABAT, Morocco – Morocco on Monday defended its use of force in preventing Africans from crossing into two Spanish enclaves on its northern coast as it started deporting some of those caught storming border fences in recent weeks.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Communications Minister Nabil Benabdallah also accused neighboring Algeria, with which Morocco has tense relations, of leaving its borders “completely open” and allowing immigrants through “without any surveillance.”

Morocco has been criticized for its handling of attempts by thousands of Africans to rush razor-wire fences protecting the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. At least a dozen migrants have been killed.

Benabdallah said Morocco is in a no-win situation. Previously it was criticized for not doing enough to stem African immigration. “Then, when we used other means, including force, we created some humanitarian problems. It is not possible to fight this problem without causing humanitarian problems,” he said.
news.yahoo.com

Morocco is in a no-win situation because it is doing Spain’s dirty work.

BAGHDAD, Iraq – The 22 bodies, lined up in coffins in a mosque courtyard Friday, are as shriveled as ancient mummies after lying a month in the desert where they were dumped, bound and bullet-ridden. They were Sunni Arabs, rounded up from their Baghdad homes one night by men in police uniforms.

Relatives and neighbors in mourning are convinced they were killed by government-linked Shiite death squads they say are behind corpses that turn up nearly every day in and around the capital — two more on Friday. Now some Sunnis are vowing to take action to protect themselves.

At least 539 bodies have been found since Iraq’s interim government was formed April 28 — 204 in Baghdad — according to an Associated Press count. The identities of many are unknown, but 116 are known to be Sunnis, 43 Shiites and one Kurd. Some are likely victims of crime — including kidnappings — rampant in some cities and as dangerous to Iraqis as political violence.

The count may be low since one or two bodies are found almost daily and are never reported.

Both minority-Sunnis and Shiites accuse one another of using death squads — and the accusations are deepening the Sunni-Shiite divide at a time when mistrust is already high over a new constitution that Iraqis will vote on in eight days. Shiites overwhelmingly support the charter, Sunnis oppose it, saying it will fragment Iraq.

Shiite deaths are generally attributed to Sunni insurgents, who hit Shiite sites with suicide attacks, bombings and shootings, but also carry out targeted slayings, leaving groups of Shiite bodies to be found later. Insurgents have disguised themselves as police — most recently in an attack last week south of Baghdad in which they dragged five Shiite teachers and their driver into a school and shot them to death.

But there have been several cases of Sunni Arabs who turn up dead in large groups after being taken by men claiming to be Interior Ministry forces. The largest group of bodies found outside Baghdad was 36 Sunnis discovered Aug. 25 in a dry riverbed near Badrah, close to the Iranian border, after being kidnapped in Baghdad.
news.yahoo.com

Negroponte.

…In a very real sense, during the last four years the Bush team has dangerously undercut America’s seemingly secure perch on top of the global totem pole by transforming a manageable, though serious, challenge largely of regional origin into an international debacle. Because America is extraordinarily powerful and rich, it can afford, for a while longer, a policy articulated with rhetorical excess and pursued with historical blindness. But in the process, America is likely to become isolated in a hostile world, increasingly vulnerable to terrorist acts and less and less able to exercise constructive global influence. Flailing away with a stick at a hornets’ nest while loudly proclaiming “I will stay the course” is an exercise in catastrophic leadership…
commondreams.org

Aw Zbig! Where you been? When you and your CFR and Carlyle Group buddies show up to distance yourselves from your own hatchetmen, what does this say? It’s time to put the dissent to sleep with a new cast of kinder, gentler, imperialist running dogs.

CHURCHILL, Manitoba – It seems harsh to say that bad news for polar bears is good for Pat Broe. Mr. Broe, a Denver entrepreneur, is no more to blame than anyone else for a meltdown at the top of the world that threatens Arctic mammals and ancient traditions and lends credibility to dark visions of global warming.

Still, the newest study of the Arctic ice cap – finding that it faded this summer to its smallest size ever recorded – is beginning to make Mr. Broe look like a visionary for buying this derelict Hudson Bay port from the Canadian government in 1997. Especially at the price he paid: about $7.

By Mr. Broe’s calculations, Churchill could bring in as much as $100 million a year as a port on Arctic shipping lanes shorter by thousands of miles than routes to the south, and traffic would only increase as the retreat of ice in the region clears the way for a longer shipping season.

With major companies and nations large and small adopting similar logic, the Arctic is undergoing nothing less than a great rush for virgin territory and natural resources worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Even before the polar ice began shrinking more each summer, countries were pushing into the frigid Barents Sea, lured by undersea oil and gas fields and emboldened by advances in technology. But now, as thinning ice stands to simplify construction of drilling rigs, exploration is likely to move even farther north.

Last year, scientists found tantalizing hints of oil in seabed samples just 200 miles from the North Pole. All told, one quarter of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas resources lies in the Arctic, according to the United States Geological Survey.

The polar thaw is also starting to unlock other treasures: lucrative shipping routes, perhaps even the storied Northwest Passage; new cruise ship destinations; and important commercial fisheries.

“It’s the positive side of global warming, if there is a positive side.”
nytimes.com

In Canada’s Wilderness, Measuring the Cost of Oil Profits

FORT McMURRAY, Alberta – Just north of this boomtown of saloons and strip malls, a moonscape is expanding along with the price of oil.

Deep craters wider than football fields are being dug out of the pine and spruce forests and muskeg swamps by many of the largest multinational oil companies. Huge refineries that burn natural gas to refine the excavated gooey sands into synthetic oil are spreading where wolves and coyotes once roamed.

Beside the mining pits, propane cannons and scarecrows installed by the companies shoo away migrating birds from giant toxic lakes filled with water that was used in the process that separates oil sands from clay and dirt.

About 82,000 acres of forest and wetlands have been cleared or otherwise disturbed since development of oil sands began in earnest here in the late 1960’s, and that is just the start. It is estimated that the current daily production of just over one million barrels of oil – the equivalent of Texas’ daily production, and 5 percent of the United States’ daily consumption – will triple by 2015 and sextuple by 2030. The pockets of oil sands in northern Alberta – which all together equal the size of Florida – are only beginning to be developed.

Because the oil sands region is so remote, the environmental damage receives little attention from the Canadian news media or public comment from Prime Minister Paul Martin’s government. But industry leaders acknowledge that they face an enormous challenge because refining oil sands is several times more energy intensive than conventional oil production. In addition, the process is a major source of heat-trapping gases and far more destructive to the landscape than traditional drilling.

That’s right boys. Accelerate global warming to hasten the catastrophe. And they say the MUSLIMS have a ‘problem with modernity…wow

President Bush’s principal adviser Karl Rove is to be questioned again over the improper naming of a CIA official. Mohamed ElBaradei, accused by the American right of being insufficiently aggressive, wins the Nobel Peace Prize for his stalwart work at the helm of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Pentagon official Larry Franklin pleads guilty to passing on classified information to Israel. Just a normal week in politics. But there is a thread linking these events and it is Iraq.

Politicians tell us they acted in good faith on the road to war, and maybe they did, but that leaves a prickly question: who was so keen to prove that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat that they forged documents purporting to show that he was trying to buy 500 tons of uranium from Niger to develop nuclear weapons? The forgery was revealed to the Security Council by ElBaradei. That was not an intelligence error. It was a straightforward lie, an invention intended to mislead public opinion and help start a war.

At the beginning of 2001, a few weeks before George Bush took office, there was a break-in at the Niger embassy in Rome. Strangely, nothing of value was taken. Months later came 9/11 and a month after that, as George Bush wondered how to get back at the terrorists, a report from the Italian security service (Sismi) reached the CIA: Iraq was seeking to buy uranium.

Disappointingly for the neocons, the CIA sent Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to check the story: he reported that it was nonsense. When the story was repeated by Bush, Wilson went public. His wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame, was then outed by the White House. Hence Rove’s predicament.
informationclearinghouse.info

AUSTIN, Tex. – The Home Depot became the nation’s largest home improvement chain by figuring out how to make hardware friendly to consumers and how to put everything from plumbing fixtures to petunias under one roof.

But the company is facing a knotty problem figuring out where to put one important part of the home-improvement business: the dozens of day laborers who gather outside its stores here and across the nation.

Morning after morning in city after city, contractors as well as homeowners needing an extra hand or two drive up to a Home Depot and hire laborers to paint walls, nail down roofing or trim branches, usually for $8 to $10 an hour. Not only has this caused friction between the stores and neighboring businesses and homeowners who do not want the men around, but it has also thrust the company into the nationwide debate about what to do about these workers, the majority of them illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

In Illinois, several Hispanic groups are angry with the company because 40 day laborers have been arrested in recent months, accused of criminal trespassing at a Home Depot in Cicero. One Hispanic shopper was arrested by mistake.

In California, a group called Save Our State has held protests at numerous Home Depots, asserting that the company has aided illegal immigration. But in Los Angeles, a city councilman has proposed requiring all new large home-improvement stores to build shelters that would provide day laborers with basic amenities like toilets and drinking water.
nytimes.com

GUATEMALA CITY – Guatemalan officials said they would abandon communities buried by landslides and declare them mass graveyards as reports of devastation trickled in from some of the more than 100 communities cut off from the outside world after killer mudslides.

Guatemala’s death toll from torrential rains last week associated with Hurricane Stan stood at 652; 384 were missing.

The worst-hit communities will be abandoned and declared graveyards, officials said, after they stopped most efforts to dig out increasingly decomposed bodies.
news.yahoo.com

Morocco’s authorities have said they will begin flying hundreds of illegal West African migrants to Senegal.
The flights are due to take off from near the Algerian border where migrants had been left after being expelled from Spanish enclaves in North Africa.

Humanitarian groups have criticised the expulsions and accused Morocco’s security forces of being heavy handed.

Spain’s foreign minister is visiting Morocco to discuss the crisis as it reviews its deportations policy.

Senegal has still to confirm a flight is expected on Monday.

A government official in the Melilla enclave said no more deportations were planned at the moment.

The aid agency, Medecins Sans Frontieres, said on Friday it had found more than 500 migrants abandoned by Moroccan police in the Sahara desert without food or water, some of whom had been illegally expelled by Spanish police.

The migrants who remain in Melilla say their treatment at the hands of the Moroccan security forces was appalling, the BBC’s Chris Morris in Melilla says.

They have appealed to Spain not to deport anyone else back across the border.

Spain and Morocco have taken a tougher line against the migrants in the last few days, after thousands of people tried to storm the high razor wire fences which surround Melilla and Ceuta.

Hundreds of migrants made it across, but at least 11 were killed.
bbc.co.uk

Hurricane Katrina thrust racial disparities onto the nation’s political agenda and top civil rights leaders, fueled by outrage over the disaster, are heading to Washington. The occasion is the 10th anniversary of Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March, a long-planned event that now is shaping up as a stage for black America to respond to the devastation in New Orleans.

“Because Katrina put it out there, no one can play the pretend game any more that there isn’t poverty and inequality in this country,” said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League. “The Millions More Movement — Katrina gives it added significance.”

Though Farrakhan has long stirred controversy — and lately he has speculated that New Orleans’ levees were bombed to destroy black neighborhoods — his event will unite a wide array of prominent social justice advocates. The guest list for Saturday’s event includes members of Congress, hip-hop artists, civil rights activists, media pundits, academics and business leaders. Muslim and Christian religious figures will also participate.
news.yahoo.com

…The APTN tape shows an officer hitting the suspect, Robert Davis, at least four times in the head Saturday night outside a French Quarter bar. Davis appeared to resist, twisting and flailing as he was dragged to the ground by four officers.

Another of the officers then kneed Davis and punched him twice. Davis was face-down on the sidewalk with blood streaming down his arm and into the gutter.

Then a fifth officer ordered APTN producer Rich Matthews and the cameraman to stop recording. When Matthews held up his credentials, the officer grabbed the producer, leaned him backward over a car, jabbed him in the stomach and unleashed a profanity-laced tirade.

“I’ve been here for six weeks trying to keep … alive. … Go home!” shouted the officer, who identified himself as S.M. Smith.

In addition to Smith, the other officers charged were identified as Lance Schilling and Robert Evangelist. Smith is an eight-year veteran of the force, while Evangelist and Schilling have served three years each.

“The incidents taped by our cameraman are extremely troubling,” said Mike Silverman, AP’s managing editor. “We are heartened that the police department is taking them seriously and promising a thorough investigation.”

Police said Davis, of New Orleans, was booked on public intoxication, resisting arrest, battery on a police officer and public intimidation. He was treated at a hospital and released into police custody.

A mug shot of Davis, provided by a jailer, showed him with his right eye swollen shut, an apparent abrasion on the left side of his neck and a cut on his right temple.

Davis, who is black, was subdued at the intersection of Conti and Bourbon streets. Three of the officers appeared to be white, and the other is light skinned. The officer who hit Matthews is white. Defillo said race was not an issue.

Two of the officers in the video appeared to be federal officers.
news.yahoo.com