Cuban President Fidel Castro has portrayed as wishful thinking reports from the United States that he is suffering from Parkinson’s Disease.
In a speech lasting over five hours, he said he felt fine and remarked that his ideological enemies had declared him dead on several previous occasions.

On Wednesday, a Miami newspaper said the CIA recently concluded that Mr Castro is showing signs of Parkinson’s.

CIA experts made the diagnosis after analysing his public appearances.
bbc.co.uk

Riot police have fired water cannon at stone-throwing protesters marching on the summit of 21 Pacific Rim leaders in South Korea.
Stalled global trade talks are topping the agenda of a two-day summit of Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (Apec) members, meeting in Busan.

Some members have criticised the EU as an obstacle to progress and free trade.

There has also been a setback for Washington as South Korea revealed plans to withdraw troops from Iraq.

The South Korean parliament still has to make a decision but proposals are to pull out about a third of its 3,000 troops in Iraq.

The news comes a day after US President George Bush thanked South Korea for its help with the reconstruction of Iraq.

America was also the target of the thousands of slogan-chanting protesters outside the summit. Farmers are against proposals to allow in more imports of foreign rice and shouted: “No to Bush, No to Apec. No to foreign rice imports.”

Two farmers are reported to have killed themselves by drinking herbicide, leaving suicide notes blaming the rice market plans.

Police surrounding the summit were forced to block the demonstrators with shipping containers and drive them back with water cannon. More than 30,000 riot police are on duty in the port city and a naval blockade is protecting the seafront conference centre where the leaders are gathering.
bbc.co.uk

11/16/05 “Washington Post” — — The Federal Emergency Management Agency yesterday warned an estimated 150,000 Hurricane Katrina evacuees living in government-subsidized hotels that they have until Dec. 1 to find other housing before it stops paying for their rooms.

The announcement effectively starts the clock ticking toward a new exodus of Gulf Coast storm victims who have been living rent-free in 5,700 hotels in 51 states and U.S. territories under the $273 million program.
informationclearinghouse.info

Merry Christmas

WASHINGTON – House Republicans sweated out a victory on a major budget cut bill in the wee hours Friday, salvaging a major pillar of their agenda despite divisions within the party and nervousness among moderates that the vote could cost them in next year’s elections.

The bill, passed 217-215 after a 25-minute-long roll call, makes modest but politically painful cuts across an array of programs for the poor, students and farmers.

The victory on the deficit-control bill came hours after an embarrassing and rare defeat on a $602 billion spending bill for education, health care and job training programs this year. The earlier 224-209 vote halted what had been a steady drive to complete annual appropriations bills freezing many agency budgets.

The broader budget bill would slice almost $50 billion from the deficit by the end of the decade by curbing rapidly growing benefit programs such as Medicaid, food stamps and student loan subsidies. Republicans said reining in such programs whose costs spiral upward each year automatically s the first step to restoring fiscal discipline.
news.yahoo.com

The joint hearing of the US Senate’s Energy and Commerce committees on oil profits Wednesday had its comical side. Republican and Democratic lawmakers, many of them millionaires themselves and recipients of fat campaign contributions from the oil companies, feigned dismay and even outrage over the vast sums that have poured into the coffers of big oil—and the pockets of its CEOs—as a result of soaring fuel costs over the past several months.

The exercise recalled nothing so much as the scene from the film “Casablanca” in which Inspector Renault—himself on the take—declares that he is “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here.”
axisoflogic.com

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Joseph Wilson, the husband of outed CIA operative Valerie Plame, called on Thursday for an inquiry by The Washington Post into the conduct of journalist Bob Woodward, who repeatedly criticized the leak investigation without disclosing his own involvement.

“It certainly gives the appearance of a conflict of interest. He was taking an advocacy position when he was a party to it,” Wilson said.

Woodward testified under oath on Monday to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that a senior Bush administration official casually told him in mid-June 2003 about Plame’s position at the CIA.

The surprise testimony appeared to contradict Fitzgerald’s assertion that Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, was the first government official to divulge information to reporters about Plame. The disclosure could prolong the leak investigation as Fitzgerald pursues new leads in the case, lawyers said.

Libby’s defense team contended Woodward’s story undercut Fitzgerald’s case against Libby, who was indicted in late October on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in the criminal probe, which was launched two years ago.

Wilson, a former ambassador turned White House critic, told Reuters that The Washington Post should reveal the name of Woodward’s source, and conduct an inquiry to determine why he withheld the information for more than two years from his editors and the federal prosecutor.

Before publicly disclosing his involvement in the leak case on Wednesday, Woodward was a frequent critic of Fitzgerald’s investigation in television and radio appearances. Woodward has described the case as laughable and Fitzgerald’s behavior as “disgraceful” and has referred to him as “a junkyard dog.”

One day before Libby was charged, Woodward said he saw no evidence of criminal intent.
reuters.myway.com

A North Carolina man who was charged yesterday with accepting kickbacks and bribes as a comptroller and financial officer for the American occupation authority in Iraq was hired despite having served prison time for felony fraud in the 1990’s.

The job gave the man, Robert J. Stein, control over $82 million in cash earmarked for Iraqi rebuilding projects.

Along with a web of other conspirators who have not yet been named, Mr. Stein and his wife received “bribes, kickbacks and gratuities amounting to at least $200,000 per month” to steer lucrative construction contracts to companies run by another American, Philip H. Bloom, an affidavit outlining the criminal complaint says. Mr. Stein’s wife, who was not named, has not been charged with wrongdoing in the case; Mr. Bloom was charged with a range of crimes on Wednesday.

In the staccato language of the affidavit, filed in Federal District Court in the District of Columbia, Mr. Stein, 50, was charged with wire fraud, conspiracy, interstate transportation of stolen property and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

But the list of charges does little justice to the astonishing brazenness of the accusations described in the complaint, including a wire transfer of a $140,000 bribe, arranged by Mr. Bloom, to buy real estate for Mr. Stein in North Carolina. The affidavit also says that $65,762.63 was spent to buy cars for Mr. Stein and his wife (he bought a Chevrolet; she a Toyota), $44,471 for home improvements and $48,073 for jewelry, out of $258,000 sent directly to the Bragg Mutual Federal Credit Union into accounts controlled by the Steins.
nytimes.com

American Faces Charge of Graft for Work in Iraq
11/17/05 “New York Times” — — In what is expected to be the first of a series of criminal charges against officials and contractors overseeing the rebuilding of Iraq, an American has been charged with paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and kickbacks to American occupation authorities and their spouses to obtain construction contracts, according to a complaint unsealed late yesterday.

The man, Philip H. Bloom, who controlled three companies that did work in Iraq in the multibillion-dollar reconstruction effort, was charged with conspiracy, wire fraud, conspiracy to launder money and interstate transportation of stolen property, all in connection with obtaining up to $3.5 million in reportedly fraudulent contracts.

WASHINGTON – While Congress investigated Jack Abramoff’s efforts to win influence inside government, its members held a secret: Nearly three dozen lawmakers pressed to block a Louisiana Indian casino while collecting large donations from the lobbyist and his tribal clients.

Many lawmakers, including leaders in both parties, intervened with letters to Interior Secretary Gale Norton within days of receiving money from tribes represented by Abramoff or using the lobbyist’s restaurant for fundraising, an Associated Press review of campaign reports, IRS records and congressional correspondence found.

Lawmakers said their intervention had nothing to do with Abramoff and that the timing of donations was a coincidence. They said they wrote letters because they opposed the expansion of tribal gambling, even though they continued to accept donations from casino-operating tribes.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., held a fundraiser at Abramoff’s Signatures restaurant in Washington on June 3, 2003, that collected at least $21,500 for Hastert’s Keep Our Majority political action committee from the lobbyist’s firm and tribal clients.

Seven days later, Hastert wrote Norton urging her to reject the Jena tribe of Choctaw Indians’ request for a new casino. Hastert’s three top House deputies also signed the letter.
news.yahoo.com

“Sunni groups have been trying to present evidence – photographs, videos and testimony – for months, but they have only been taken seriously now that the Americans have become involved.

“Most of the press today have run the photographs [of the abused prisoners]. They have been in circulation for some time, but it is only now that they are being widely published.

“I’ve been collecting testimony today from people who have been held in all sorts of centres: interestingly, none of them was held in the Jadriya prison – they were all held in other places, which have apparently not been declared. It suggests that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

“This is going to do nothing to calm the tensions between the ethnic groups. We have always laboured under the impression – which now turns out to be a myth – that the Shia groups have been restrained in the face of provocation from the Sunni community.

“Now it has become much more publicly clear that the Shia have been waging their own form of civil war through their security services and death squads.
informationclearinghouse.info

Torture photos

Huge blasts near Baghdad ministry

…”Both Iraqis and coalition people often exaggerate the role of foreign infiltrators and downplay the role of Iraqi resentment in the insurgency,” said Anthony H. Cordesman, a former Pentagon official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, who is writing a book about the Iraqi insurgency.

“It makes the government’s counterinsurgency efforts seem more legitimate, and it links what’s going on in Iraq to the war on terrorism,” he continued. “When people go out into battle, they often characterize enemies in the most negative way possible. Obviously there are all kinds of interacting political prejudices they can bring out by blaming outsiders.”
informationclearinghouse.info