…TV da Gente, which means “our TV”, has been heralded as giant step forward in the country’s fight against discrimination, and to mark the broadcast high-ranking politicians, celebrities and civil rights activists gathered at the Casa Verde studio in north Sao Paulo.

“This will turn out to be the most important development ever in terms of communication for black communities all around the world,” a veteran American civil rights activist, 72-year-old James Meredith, told the Guardian. “Unlike the United States and South Africa, Brazil established a system of white supremacy without the obvious signs like segregation or apartheid. Until Brazilians start to face up to this reality the legacy of slavery will continue.”
guardian.co.uk

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is set to quit his ruling Likud party and run separately in next year’s elections, reports says.

He will meet President Moshe Katsav on Monday morning to ask him to dissolve parliament, Israeli radio said.

Mr Sharon is said to have made the decision to leave the party he helped to found after long talks with aides.

The BBC’s James Reynolds says there has been no word from Mr Sharon, but it is significant there has been no denial.
bbc.co.uk

Despite initial claims that Yasser Arafat’s absence – as an ‘obstacle’ to peace – would reinvigorate the Arab-Israel peace process, events on the ground fail to point toward such a reality, one year after the powerful Palestinian leader’s death.

The Israeli government’s unfaltering commitment to unilateral action shows that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon still deems the Palestinian leadership ‘irrelevant’ to the peace process, a label that was exclusively pinned on Arafat for years before his death on November 11, 2004.

But if Arafat’s mysterious illness and subsequent death in France represented the end of an era, it was because the absence of Arafat, even as a living symbol, was a matter of great consequence. That said, one must not indulge in misrepresenting the Palestinian struggle by reducing it to the legacy of one man.
zmag.org

“The fundamental cause of crime in capitalist societies is the capitalist goal in life, which each member of society strives to achieve. This goal in life only recognizes the pursuit of sensual pleasure for human beings as the sole way to attain happiness. The capitalist goal in life has no room for spiritual, moral or humanitarian pursuits and therefore people are not concerned about the moral or religious implications of their actions.”
usa.mediamonitors.net

Sonair, the airline of Sonangol, Angola’s state-owned oil company, Sonangol, operates direct flights between Houston and Luanda. Foreign oilmen are whisked from the airport to pink villas in fenced compounds or via helicopter directly to offshore the rigs floating in Angola’s the country’s prolific deep-water fields.

The vessels which that drill for, pump, store and offload crude in waters of up to two kilometres deep cost billions of dollars and resemble spacecraft in their technological sophistication.

Angola, already sub-Saharan Africa’s second-largest oil producer after Nigeria, is also one of the world’s fastest-growing oil provinces, pumping 1.3 million barrels a day. Riggers compare it in significance to the North Sea at its peak.

While “offshore Angola” is prized for its isolation from the onshore conflict afflicting Nigeria or the Middle East, conditions in much of the country are dire.

A large portion of Luanda’s population inhabit hovels pieced together from cement and tin, red earthen bricks or cast-off materials such as car panels.
gulf-news.com

Last year a concerned reader wrote to the Idaho Observer: “Driving across Idaho and Nevada we saw normal condensation trails in the skies above north Idaho and we were habitually looking up as we drove toward Las Vegas. We had noticed that the sparsely populated areas in Nevada had brilliantly clear blue skies and that the occasional airplane left vapor trails that dissipated normally. But as soon as we neared Las Vegas, in the skies directly above the city, we watched what appeared to be a military C-135 Transports spraying something over the populated areas. When the planes were no longer directly over Las Vegas, they continued flying leaving a vapor trail that dissipated normally.”

It has been reported that the “chemtrails” contain ethylene dibromide — a substance that has been an additive to gasoline and airplane fuels as well as a banned pesticide. Ethylene dibromide has been linked to kidney and liver damage and is an immunosuppressive and a lung irritant.

William Thomas, who has researched chemtrails since their appearance in the latter 90s, has noted stunted plant growth in once-healthy gardens and wilderness areas in Santa Fe and Aspen. Similar
plant problems are commonly associated with chemtrails in other regions of the U.S.
prisonplanet.com

OTTAWA (CP) – Records show a privately owned airplane that has been linked to an alleged CIA front flew from Newfoundland to the United States on Friday, raising new questions about Canada’s role in the fight against terrorism.

Flight data obtained by The Canadian Press reveals the 40-seat turboprop plane travelled from St. John’s, N.L., to New Hampshire and finally on to its home base in North Carolina.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has come under scrutiny in recent months over its apparent use of civilian aircraft to ferry terrorism suspects around the globe.
macleans.ca

Greenland’s glaciers have begun to race towards the ocean, leading scientists to predict that the vast island’s ice cap is approaching irreversible meltdown, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

Lines on this satellite image of Greenland’s Helheim glacier show the positions of the glacier front between 2001 and 2005. Image: I. Howat et al.
Research to be published in a few days’ time shows how glaciers that have been stable for centuries have started to shrink dramatically as temperatures in the Arctic have soared with global warming. On top of this, record amounts of the ice cap’s surface turned to water this summer.

The two developments – the most alarming manifestations of climate change to date – suggest that the ice cap is melting far more rapidly than scientists had thought, with immense consequences for civilisation and the planet. Its complete disappearance would raise the levels of the world’s seas by 20 feet, spelling inundation for London and other coastal cities around the globe, along with much of low-lying countries such as Bangladesh.

More immediately, the vast amount of fresh water discharged into the ocean as the ice melts threatens to shut down the Gulf Stream, which protects Britain and the rest of northern Europe from a freezing climate like that of Labrador.
commondreams.org

…”Generation Rx” contends that large drug companies have co-opted the federal government, seduced the medical establishment and mesmerized a temperamentally supine public into taking far more drugs than is strictly necessary, much less healthy. Worse, Americans have fallen victim to “polypharmacy”: using so many drugs for so many ailments that they have no idea how the various medications are interacting.
nytimes.com

November 15 2005 – Former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury Dr. Paul Craig Roberts expressed his dire warning that the US government has fallen into the hands of psychopaths and that the Neo-Cons in the Bush administration may be set to stage another terror attack in the US as part of a black operation to demolish growing dissent and coerce the public to rally behind the government once again.

During an interview with the Alex Jones Show, Roberts cited a Capitol Hill Blue article concerning a leaked memo circulating between top Republican leaders.

The memo outlines potential strategies to bring their agenda back online, including the capture of Osama bin Laden, a drastic turnaround in the economy or a resolution of the war in Iraq.

The most alarming option includes a terrorist attack that would validate the President’s war on terror and “restore his image as leader of he American people.”
axisoflogic.com