NEW YORK (AFP) – The United States recently debated launching military strikes inside Syria against camps used by insurgents operating in neighboring Iraq, a US magazine reported.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice successfully opposed the idea at a meeting of senior American officials held on October 1, Newsweek reported, citing unnamed US government sources.

Rice reportedly argued that diplomatic isolation was a more effective approach, with a UN report pending that may blame Syria for the assassination of former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri.
nws.yahoo.com

THE huge mushroom cloud soared skywards, the captain was gripped by fear, believing his plane was about to be engulfed by the fall-out from a nuclear explosion. After declaring mayday and ordering his crew to don oxygen masks, the experienced pilot had the presence of mind to record that the cloud measured an estimated 200 miles in diameter and was tipped by an eerie light, like nothing he had seen before. Eventually, it soared harmlessly into the atmosphere, leaving the passenger jet to continue safely on its journey from Anchorage, in Alaska, to Tokyo.

But far below, a fleet of fishing boats trawling the sea between Japan and the Soviet Union was drenched by a violent but short-lived downpour before the weather suddenly cleared. Nuclear tests and volcanic activity were later ruled out but scientists concluded that this was not a natural phenomenon. More than two decades later suspicion still exists that the stunned airline crew and fishermen in 1973 were witnessing a sinister Cold War experiment, in which water from the Sea of Japan was blown into the air to create clouds and rain.

British government papers, just released by the National Archives, show that throughout the Seventies there was deep mistrust between the two superpowers over environmental warfare. The documents reveal that both the US, which led the field, and the Soviet Union had secret military programmes with the goal of controlling the world’s climate. “By the year 2025 the United States will own the weather, ” one scientist is said to have boasted.
globalresearch.ca

PILAR, Paraguay, Sept 26 (Reuters) – An American army reservist in fatigues clutches a stethoscope as she readies to check the blood pressure of a woman in this dusty Paraguayan city where U.S. soldiers offer basic medical treatment to the poor.

The troops’ presence is part of joint military exercises being carried out by U.S. and Paraguayan soldiers.

But the sight of the American soldiers has fanned fears of greater U.S. military intentions among some Paraguayans, made South American neighbors uneasy and sparked media speculation of ulterior American motives.

Among them: establishing a military base here to monitor natural gas reserves in neighboring Bolivia where leftists could soon take power. Others charge U.S. financial interest in a nearby fresh water reserve, one of the world’s largest.

The rumors highlight the tense relations Washington has with its “backyard” as Latin Americans grow critical of U.S.-pushed market reforms and the Iraq war. Decades of U.S. intervention, from Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup in Chile to Central American wars in the 1980s, have added to the unease.
alertnet.org

The governor of Basra province has accused British forces of destabilising security following the arrest of 12 people over attacks against UK troops.

The men, some of whom are police officers, are still being questioned.

…The 12 detainees, some of whom are accused of supporting radical Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr, are thought to include the director of Basra’s state-run electricity company Odai Awad.

Employees of the company are threatening a strike unless he is released within 24 hours.

Mr al-Waili told the Associated Press news agency: “The British troops are responsible for destabilising security in the province.

“Recent random raids and arrests conducted by British forces…should have been co-ordinated with the Iraqi security forces and the governor.”
bbc.co.uk

Iran denies British attacks link
…An Iranian foreign ministry spokesman denied the charge, saying it was a “lie” and accusing Britain of fomenting unrest in Iraq.

Speaking on Iranian TV, Hamid Reza-Asefi said: “This is a lie. The British are the cause of instability and crisis in Iraq.

“By drafting such scenarios they are trying to find a partner in their crimes.”

He added: “From the very beginning, we have stated our position very clearly – a stable Iraq is in our interests and that is what the Iraqi authorities have said themselves on many occasions.”

Villagers desperate to find survivors dug with bare hands Sunday through the debris of a collapsed school where children had been heard crying beneath the rubble after a massive earthquake killed more than 30,000 people in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir alone.

“I have been informed by my department that more than 30,000 people have died in Kashmir,” Tariq Mahmmod, communications minister for the Himalayan region, told The Associated Press.

Saturday’s magnitude-7.6 quake also struck India and Afghanistan, which reported hundreds dead.

Pakistan’s army called the earthquake the country’s worst-ever disaster and appealed for urgent help. Rival India, the United States, the United Nations, Britain, Russia, China, Turkey, Japan and Germany all offered assistance.
breitbart.com

SANTIAGO ATITLÁN, Guatemala — Dozens of Mayan Indians used hand tools to dig through hardening mud yesterday, searching for bodies under a landslide that swallowed a Guatemalan neighborhood and pushed the regionwide death toll from a week of pounding rains to 617.

There were also reports that between 1,200 and 1,400 people may have been killed in a single massive mudslide early Wednesday in the Guatemalan village of Panabaj. A fire brigade official in the village told the Reuters news agency that no survivors were left after torrential rains dropped a suffocating wall of mud onto the hillside community of 250 houses.

One of the hardest hit was the lakeside town of Santiago Atitlán, where the side of a volcano collapsed, killing at least 208 people. Officials said the victims were among 508 people killed and an additional 337 missing in Guatemala.

The rest of the dead were scattered throughout El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras and Costa Rica.
seattletimes.nwsource.com

WASHINGTON — Like most of those whose lives were upended by Hurricane Katrina, 52-year-old school bus driver Emanuel Wilson can thank the federal government for the fact that he has money to pay rent. He’s also been given food stamps to make sure he can buy groceries. And if he had young children, the government would almost certainly be helping them get back to school.

But what Wilson needs is chemotherapy, and that is something the government seems unable to help him with. Wilson was being treated with monthly chemo injections for his intestinal cancer before the hurricane.

He has been denied assistance largely because, before the storm, he had what the government says it wants every American to have: health insurance.

The New Orleans man’s plight illustrates one of the most perplexing twists in the still-faltering federal effort to help Gulf Coast hurricane victims: a seemingly inconsistent approach to victims’ healthcare needs that appears to punish those who had taken the most responsibility for their own care.

Under the present rules for Katrina victims, if you are destitute, the government will pay your medical bills. Ditto if you are severely disabled or have children. But if you’re an adult who had a job that included health benefits and you lost that job because of the storm, the government can’t seem to help.
news.yahoo.com/latimes

Ramesh Khadka began the journey to his slaughter in this valley of rivers, where green rice terraces march up the mountains like stairs toward the heavens.

After passing among a series of shadowy, indifferent middlemen, he finished it a month later in a dusty ditch in western Iraq.

There, bound and helpless, the teenager was shot three times in the back of the head by insurgents, his execution and that of 11 of his countrymen captured on videotape.

The 19-year-old and his colleagues were on their way to jobs at a U.S. military base in Al Anbar province when they were kidnapped. The killings last year remain the worst case of violence against private contractors in the Iraq war.

The incident and its aftermath raise troubling questions about America’s reliance on the world’s poorest people to do the dirtiest jobs in one of the most dangerous places on Earth.

Contractors working for the United States, including KBR, a Houston-based subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., have brought tens of thousands of workers into Iraq from impoverished countries such as Nepal, the Philippines and Bangladesh to do menial jobs, from cooking and serving food to cleaning toilets.

In relying on a workforce of third-country nationals, however, the U.S. has embraced a system of labor migration rife with abuse, corruption and exploitation, according to dozens of contractors, migrant workers, labor officials and advocates interviewed in four countries.

The system revolves around so-called labor brokers, whose numbers have exploded during the last decade in the Middle East and Asia. Such agencies take advantage of porous borders and rising global demand for cheap labor to move poor workers from one country to low-paying jobs in another.

Although millions of Iraqis are desperate for jobs, the U.S. military requires that contractors such as KBR hire foreigners to work at bases to avoid the possibility of insurgent infiltration.
news.yahoo.com/latimes

Federal agencies and the media have begun to pay attention to the safety and health of workers involved in the Hurricane Katrina rescue, response and cleanup. The main reason is clearly the toxic soup that has consumed the New Orleans area, but hovering in the background are the lessons learned from the cleanup operation following the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, which left thousands of workers with serious long-term health problems.

The potential hazards in New Orleans, and to a lesser extent throughout the Gulf Coast, range from the more common hurricane-related hazards – such as electrical hazards, falling tree limbs, and dust containing lead, silica and asbestos – to the unique hazards caused by the New Orleans flood: raw sewage, rotting human and animal bodies, medical waste, and chemicals such as gasoline, oil, corrosives, lead and other heavy metals. Many of these materials will persist in the soil for years to come as the city is rebuilt.

All of this brings back bad memories from the aftermath of 9/11 when police, fire, rescue, construction, utility and volunteer workers in New York were exposed to a similar array of hazards. Asbestos, glass, concrete and hazardous chemicals were pulverized when the buildings fell and then cooked for weeks while the fires sent out plumes of toxic smoke.

Dr. Stephen Levin of the Selikoff Center for Occupational & Environmental Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York estimates that of the 12,000 workers and volunteers screened by the hospital, half have persistent respiratory problems, such as asthma, inflammation and sinusitis. One emergency medical technician died recently of respiratory illness related to his exposure. Many others are so severely ill they can’t work. About 300 firefighters have retired with disabilities from injuries and illnesses they believe are related to World Trade Center work.
americanprogress.org

La Nueva Orleans
NO MATTER WHAT ALL the politicians and activists want, African Americans and impoverished white Cajuns will not be first in line to rebuild the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast and New Orleans. Latino immigrants, many of them undocumented, will. And when they’re done, they’re going to stay, making New Orleans look like Los Angeles. It’s the federal government that will have made the transformation possible, further exposing the hollowness of the immigration debate.

President Bush has promised that Washington will pick up the greater part of the cost for “one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen.” To that end, he suspended provisions of the Davis-Bacon Act that would have required government contractors to pay prevailing wages in Louisiana and devastated parts of Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. And the Department of Homeland Security has temporarily suspended sanctioning employers who hire workers who cannot document their citizenship. The idea is to benefit Americans who may have lost everything in the hurricane, but the main effect will be to let contractors hire illegal immigrants.

Mexican and Central American laborers are already arriving in southeastern Louisiana. One construction firm based in Metairie, La., sent a foreman to Houston to round up 150 workers willing to do cleanup work for $15 an hour, more than twice their wages in Texas. The men — most of whom are undocumented, according to news accounts — live outside New Orleans in mobile homes without running water and electricity. The foreman expects them to stay “until there’s no more work” but “there’s going to be a lot of construction jobs for a really long time.”

This week Karen Hughes, long-time political adviser to George Bush, began her new mission as the State Department’s official defender of America’s image with a tour of the Middle East.

She might have been more help to her beleaguered president had she stayed at home and used her PR skills on her neighbors. At the end of a cruel and turbulent summer, nobody is more dismayed and demoralized about America than Americans.

They have watched with growing disbelief and horror as a convergence of events – dominated by the unending war in Iraq and two hurricanes – have exposed ugly and disturbing things in the undergrowth that shame and embarrass Americans and undermine their belief in the nation and its values.

With TV providing a ceaseless backdrop of the country’s failings – a crippled and tone-deaf president, a negligent government, corruption, military atrocities, soaring debt, racial conflict, poverty, bloated bodies in floodwater, people dying on camera for want of food, water and medicine – it seemed things were falling apart in the land where happiness is promoted in the constitution.

Disillusioning news was everywhere. In the flight from Hurricane Rita, evacuees fought knife fights over cans of petrol. In storm-hit Louisiana there were long queues at gun stores as people armed themselves against looters.

America, which has the world’s costliest health care, had, it turned out, higher infant mortality rates than the broke and despised Cuba.

Tom De Lay, Republican enforcer in the House of Representatives, was indicted for conspiracy and money laundering. The leader of the Republicans in the Senate was under investigation for his stock dealings. And Osama bin Laden was still on the loose.

Americans are the planet’s biggest flag wavers. They are reared on the conceit that theirs is the world’s best and most enviable country, born only the day before yesterday but a model society with freedom, opportunity and prosperity not found, they think, in older cultures.

They rejoice that “We are No.1”, and in many ways they are.

But events have revealed a creeping mildew of pain and privation, graft and injustice and much incompetence lurking beneath the glow of star-spangled superiority.

Many here feel the country is breaking down and losing its moral and political authority.

“US in funk” say the headlines. “I am ashamed to be an American,” say the letters to the editor. We are seeing, say the commentators, a crumbling – and humbling – of America.
informationclearinghouse.info