LOS ANGELES – Scientists have discovered sexually altered fish off the Southern California coast, raising concerns that treated sewage discharged into the ocean contains chemicals that can affect an animal’s reproductive system.

So-called intersex animals are not new, but most previous instances were in freshwater. Environmentalists say this is among the first studies to document the effects in a marine environment.

Last year, federal scientists reported finding egg-growing male fish in Maryland’s Potomac River. They think the abnormality may be caused by pollutants from sewage plants, feedlots and factories.
news.yahoo.com

This isn’t the real America

By Jimmy Carter

11/14/05 “Los Angeles Times” — — IN RECENT YEARS, I have become increasingly concerned by a host of radical government policies that now threaten many basic principles espoused by all previous administrations, Democratic and Republican.

These include the rudimentary American commitment to peace, economic and social justice, civil liberties, our environment and human rights.

Also endangered are our historic commitments to providing citizens with truthful information, treating dissenting voices and beliefs with respect, state and local autonomy and fiscal responsibility…
informationclearinghouse.info

In whose universe, Jimmy?

…“U.S. forces have used Hellfire missiles and dropped 500-pound bombs on homes believed to house insurgents,” CNN reported. “Marine Capt. Brendon Heatherman said troops were clearing every home in central Husaybah, looking out for homemade bombs and ‘bad guys,’” the network added

“It’s a cesspool; it’s time for this area to get cleaned up,” Col. Stephen W. Davis, of the Second Marine Division, said of Husaybah,” the Times reported

“Some officers called in airstrikes,” the newspaper reported. “Others ordered Abrams tanks to blast away with their main cannons. ‘I got bombs; he got bombs,’ Colonel Davis said. ‘I got more bombs than he got.’”

“There had been an exodus of families during the past several weeks, officers said,” according to the Times, which added, “The Marine Corps says it plans to go through all the residences in Husaybah and the immediate area, a total of 4,000 homes.”

What are the effect of Hellfire missiles and 500-pound bombs on mudbrick Iraqi homes? What happened to those who joined the exodus from the city? What becomes of those who remain behind, when heavily armed combat troops told they are being sent into a “cesspool” kick down their doors? Neither the Times nor CNN provide any insight on such matters.

There are reports that give at least a partial answer to these questions, but they find little reflection in the American mass media.

According to the United Nations-affiliated news agency, IRIN, scores of civilians have been killed and thousands driven from their homes by the offensive against the impoverished city near the border with Syria.

“The situation is becoming critical,” Ferdous al-Abadi, spokesman for the Iraqi Red Crescent Society (IRCS) told IRIN. “People are seriously suffering.”

According to the news agency, “One doctor in al-Qaim said [on Saturday, the first day of the offensive] that the US military’s regular use of anti-personnel cluster bombs had left at least 31 dead and 44 wounded, among them women and children.”

According to the International Red Crescent Society, people began fleeing Husaybah a week before the US onslaught began, IRIN reported. It added that the relief agency’s local volunteers put the number of displaced persons at 4,000, many of whom are living in makeshift camps and tents in the desert.

The Arab satellite news agency Aljazeera reported that strikes by US warplanes in al-Jamahir, al-Risala and other Husaybah neighborhoods had demolished homes and killed or wounded dozens of people.

Quoting an Iraqi journalist, the news network reported, “The US shelling has demolished government buildings, including al-Jamahir primary school, al-Qaim preparatory school for boys, the educational supervision building, al-Qaim post office and communication centre, al-Qaim education directorate and two mosques in the city.”

The journalist added, “The city is suffering a complete lack of all of life’s basic necessities. There is no fuel and winter is upon us. There is no food and there are no services whatsoever, not even health services.” He added that ambulances cannot respond to emergencies because they face being fired upon by US forces.

The Associated Press, meanwhile, reported that “Scores of terrified Iraqis fled the besieged town of Husaybah Sunday, waving white flags and hauling their belongings to escape a second day of fighting…” The news agency added, “Residents said coalition forces warned people by loudspeakers to leave on foot because troops would fire on vehicles.”

The Pentagon chose to launch the offensive on the final day of Eid al-Fitr, a three-day festival that is one of Islam’s principal holidays. The Washington Post, which had an Iraqi correspondent in Baquba, spoke by cell phone to a 45-year-old government employee as he trudged out of Husaybah with his wife and three children: “We are in the third day of Eid,” he said “We are leaving the town not for fun but to save ourselves from death. Instead of having my family for a picnic in an amusement park, I am taking them out of the town, walking and expecting death every moment. Let Bush see how he created a generation that hates the Americans.”

The violence unleashed against Husaybah follows a series of bombing raids against neighboring al-Qaim on October 31. The US military said that the air raids involved the use of “precision guided munitions” and destroyed two “terrorist safe houses.”

According to a doctor in the city, however, the bombs killed and injured scores of people and made hundreds homeless. The local hospital put the number of dead at 43, including a large number of women and children. A local tribal leader insisted that there were no “terrorists” in either the demolished homes or the surrounding neighborhood.

Once again, Washington claims that it is unleashing murderous firepower in order to defeat “Al Qaeda” and “foreign fighters.” It was the same a year ago in Fallujah, when it could claim to have killed only 35 such “foreigners”—Arabs who share with the Iraqis a common language, culture and history of struggle against foreign imperialist oppression—out of some 2,000 people massacred there.

While the US military has reported arresting hundreds in Husaybah, it has given no indication as to the nationality of those detained. The Associated Press indicated that the prisoners were members of “a pro-insurgent Iraqi tribe.” No doubt, if the Pentagon could identify Syrian or other “foreign” fighters, it would do so to further the Bush administration’s lying claim that the struggle in Iraq is one being waged to defeat “terrorism.”

This is clearly not the case. The US occupation forces are waging a dirty colonial war against the Iraqi people with the purpose of suppressing mass opposition to the country’s subjugation.

The methods that are being employed in Husaybah, like those used in Fallujah a year ago, constitute war crimes under the terms of the Geneva Conventions and the precedents set by the Nuremberg trials of the leaders of Germany’s Nazi regime.

In defending the administration’s policy in Iraq before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared: “Our political-military strategy has to be to clear, hold and build: to clear areas from insurgent control, to hold them securely, and to build durable, national Iraqi institutions.”

In reality, this strategy has been reduced to “clearing” cities with massive violence, only to see resistance reemerge as soon as the operation has ended. This is the third such major offensive that the American military has conducted in the area in the last few months. Last May, the Pentagon declared “Operation Matador” a success, and then it launched two such offensives—“Operation Iron Fist” and “Operation River Gate” in the same area a month ago.

The New York Times article acknowledged in a rare moment of candor that it is “as hard as ever for the Americans to win widespread support among the people.” As Colonel Davis told the paper, “We don’t do a lot of hearts and minds out here because it’s irrelevant.”

Meanwhile, one US marine was shot to death in Husaybah and another four US soldiers were killed south of Baghdad Monday when a suicide car bomber drove into a checkpoint they were manning. These latest casualties bring the total number of American soldiers killed since the war began to 2055. Twenty-six troops have been killed in the first week of November alone, a rate that is on track for making the month the deadliest since last year.
axisoflogic.com

The New York Times has published allegations that Iran is attempting to build a nuclear warhead. The claims come less than two weeks before a decision by the UN nuclear watchdog on whether to report Tehran to the Security Council over its suspected weapons programme.

An Iranian foreign ministry spokesman dismissed the report as an attempt to step up pressure on Tehran before the International Atomic Energy Agency meeting on 24 November.

According to The New York Times, senior American intelligence officials had shown the IAEA experts computer simulations contained on what they described as a stolen Iranian laptop. The US officials said the data was the strongest evidence so far that Iran was trying to develop a compact warhead for its Shahab missile, but they would not say where the laptop came from.

Diplomats told AP news agency that they expected Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the IAEA, to go to Tehran in the next few days to discuss a proposal that calls on Iran to move its uranium enrichment programme to Russia.
independent.co.uk

NY Times: Relying on Computer, U.S. Seeks to Prove Iran’s Nuclear Aims

…The documents, the Americans acknowledged from the start, do not prove that Iran has an atomic bomb. They presented them as the strongest evidence yet that, despite Iran’s insistence that its nuclear program is peaceful, the country is trying to develop a compact warhead to fit atop its Shahab missile, which can reach Israel and other countries in the Middle East.

The briefing for officials of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, including its director Mohamed ElBaradei, was a secret part of an American campaign to increase international pressure on Iran. But while the intelligence has sold well among countries like Britain, France and Germany, which reviewed the documents as long as a year ago, it has been a tougher sell with countries outside the inner circle.

Well the Times may have ditched Judy Miller, but here we go again…it’s amazing the things you can do with a laptop…

Scientists in Vietnam believe the H5N1 bird flu strain has mutated, allowing it to breed more effectively in mammals, though not necessarily in humans, online newspaper VnExpress said yesterday.

Scientists at the Pasteur Institute found significant variations in 24 samples from humans and poultry. The findings corroborate the belief that H5N1 would not have to mix with a human flu strain to become a form causing a human pandemic.
guardian.co.uk

There was a telling moment during the Mar del Plata summit of the Americas in Argentina earlier this month. As the 34 leaders walked to the seaside spot chosen for their group photograph, they chatted and joked among themselves. But while they strolled in groups, one leader walked alone: the US president.

George Bush’s isolation was more than symbolic. It was borne out by the failure of the summit to rubberstamp the US-backed creation of a south American trade zone. Both President Bush’s isolation and the failure of the latest US-inspired trade plan for the continent highlight a question preoccupying US policy-makers and Latin American leaders: is the region drifting away from the influence of its northern neighbour?

Between now and the end of 2006, 11 presidential elections will be held in Latin America. The political changes and challenges that ensue could see a continent redrawn.

“In a real way Latin America is up for grabs,” said Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a Washington-based thinktank. “At the very time when the US has one of the most conservative administrations, it’s dealing with a Latin America that is moving to the left, not to the far-out left, but sufficiently to the left that Latin America is beginning to think about non-traditional relationships and affiliations.”

Washington’s unease is heightened by the presence of leaders who, at least nominally, come from the left. In Brazil, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was elected from the Workers’ party; Chile elected Ricardo Lagos, the first socialist president since Salvador Allende; Argentinians voted in Nestor Kirchner, who came from the leftwing faction of the Peronist party; and Uruguay chose Tabaré Vázquez, the candidate of a coalition of leftwing and progressive groups.

Indigenous political groups are revitalising the political terrain in several countries, while the strict free-market neo-liberalism espoused by the US could be threatened by the election of candidates promoting a mixed economy and government spending to alleviate poverty. In February the CIA director, Porter Goss, listed the coming elections as one of the “potential areas of instability” that cause the agency concern.
guardian.co.uk

In the realest way, the people of Latin America are telling the imperialists once and for all that they are NOT up for grabs…and in the meanwhile, they give the rest of us hope, and for this I thank them.

U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton said Sunday that she supports the separation fence Israel is building along the edges of the West Bank, and that the onus is on the Palestinian Authority to fight terrorism.

“This is not against the Palestinian people,” Clinton, a New York Democrat, said during a tour of a section of the barrier being built around Jerusalem.

“This is against the terrorists. The Palestinian people have to help to prevent terrorism. They have to change the attitudes about terrorism.”

Clinton’s comments echoed Israel’s position…
haaretzdaily.com

AMMAN, Jordan (AP) – Some 1,100 Iraqi lawyers have withdrawn from Saddam Hussein’s defense team, citing insufficient protection following the slayings of two peers representing co-defendants of the ousted Iraqi leader.

In a statement obtained Sunday, the lawyers did not say whether Saddam’s chief Iraqi attorney, Khalil al-Dulaimi, was among those who withdrew. But the statement said other members of the team in Baghdad were continuing their duties “under complex and dangerous circumstances.”
guardian.co.uk

The U.S. military, in its’ desperate attempt to crush the growing armed Iraqi resistance, is employing what Pentagon strategists call the “Salvador option”. To terrorize the Iraqi people into submission the U.S. is funding, training, directing, and sometimes staffing, death squads–as was done during the brutal counter-insurgency campaign in Central America in the 1980s. The U.S. imperialist state is betting that this strategy of terror will effectively beat the Iraqis into submission, thus guaranteeing control of the oil and allowing U.S. forces to be unleashed in new wars of pillage from Damascus, to Tehran, to Caracas.

This war abroad, as some sections of the U.S. anti-war movement have argued, cannot be seen in isolation from the war at home. The brutal colonial war in Iraq is but the flip slide of the war at home against workers, immigrants, and other oppressed people. Indeed, New Orleans, and the whole Gulf coast, has become the latest front in this domestic conflict. Grass Roots activists in the region argue that the Bush-led regime, with support from the Democrats, are using hurricane Katrina to deepen and expand the racist and anti-working class neoliberal offensive of privatization, austerity, and attacks on civil liberties. In short, the U.S. government is coupling its’ Salvador option abroad with a “Chilean option” at home. Just as the U.S. and Latin American ruling classes used Pinochet’s Chile as a template for the rest of Latin America, the Bush regime wants to “shock and awe” the U.S. working class by rapidly creating a neoliberal wonderland in New Orleans to be exported across the country. This article documents the neoliberal offensive in New Orleans, with a particular emphasis on public housing, both before Katrina and during its’ post-disaster intensification. I conclude by highlighting how grass roots movements are challenging this agenda and showing that another anti-racist, pro-working class world, is possible.
zmag.org

DAMASCUS, Syria – A senior Palestinian official has called for a U.N. investigation into the death of Yasser Arafat, reiterating allegations that the Palestinian leader was poisoned by Israel.

Farouk Kaddoumi, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s mainstream Fatah faction, said Arafat was poisoned by Israel “because he was a stumbling block to (Israeli) plans.” Other Palestinians have made the same charge in the past and Israel has repeatedly denied it.

The PLO will ask the U.N. Security Council “to form an international investigating commission into the assassination of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.” Kaddoumi told reporters on Saturday.

Arafat died in a French hospital on Nov. 11, 2004 at age 75. The exact cause of death remains unknown, fueling persistent rumors that he was either poisoned or died of AIDS.

Kaddoumi was speaking in Damascus after meeting representatives of the Syria-based radical Palestinian factions opposed to the PLO’s peace accords with Israel. He said all Palestinian groups are united in holding Israel fully responsible for Arafat’s death.
news.yahoo.com