…When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans it was the city’s poor – almost exclusively African Americans – who were left to fend for themselves as the city drowned in a lake of toxic sludge. Now, three months on, the same people have been abandoned once again by a reconstruction effort that seems determined to prevent them from returning. They are the victims of a devastating combination of forced evictions, a failure to reopen the city’s public house projects, rent gouging and – as in the case of Mildred – a decision to write off whole neighbourhoods.

They are victims too of a reconstruction effort that, while its funding remains stalled in Congress, and lacking proper leadership, has been left to the care of the private sector with little interest in the city’s poor. As a rapacious free market has come to dominate the rebuilding of the Louisiana city, it has seen spiralling prices and the influx of property speculators keen to cash in on the disaster. The result is one of the most shocking pieces of urban planning that black and poor America has seen: reconstruction as survival of the wealthiest.
guardian.co.uk

ISRAEL’S armed forces have been ordered by Ariel Sharon, the prime minister, to be ready by the end of March for possible strikes on secret uranium enrichment sites in Iran, military sources have revealed.
timesonline.co.uk

Bibi’s Election Bluff: Iran Attack
As Livia Rokach (daughter of Israel Rokach, Minister of the Interior in the government of Moshe Sharett, second prime minister of Israel) spelled out in her book, Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, the “Israeli political /military establishment never seriously believed in an Arab threat to the existence of Israel. On the contrary, it sought and applied every means to exacerbate the dilemma of the Arab regimes after the 1948 war. The Arab governments were extremely reluctant to engage in any military confrontation with Israel, yet in order to survive they needed to project to their populations and to the exiled Palestinians in their countries some kind of reaction to Israel’s aggressive policies and continuous acts of harassment. In other words, the Arab threat was an Israeli-invented myth which for internal and inter-Arab reasons the Arab regimes could not completely deny, though they constantly feared Israeli preparations for a new war.” Bibi Netanyahu, as a staunch Jabotinsky Zionist, is playing this old game with Iran.

Of course, Bibi will not go it alone—he has the support and goading (not that he needs much) of the American dual loyalty neocons, the Zionist mafia currently in control of U.S. foreign policy. “The ultimate neocon goal is a U.S. war with Iran over the nuclear issue,” writes Andrew I. Killgore for the Washington Report On Middle Eastern Affairs, “That would serve to postpone indefinitely Washington’s attention to the Palestine question. In ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy For Securing the Realm,’ the 1996 white paper prepared for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu by the neocons/Zionists Richard Perle, David Wurmser and Douglas Feith, the authors envisaged America fighting Israel’s enemies in the Middle East. It contained not a word about the consequences for the United States—raising a question about the judgment, if not the loyalty, of the three authors.”

Zia ul-Haq Mossad Hit is Non-News in America

…The one unarguable fact is that no serious, conclusive, or even comprehensive inquiry into the crash has been undertaken in the United States, although one of its top diplomats, Arnold Raphel, and an American general were killed—and in an Americanbuilt aircraft. Congress held a few hearings, but the FBI was kept away from the case for a year. No official report was made public. Indeed, a file in the National Archives containing about 250 pages of documents on the event is still classified secret.
Classified secret because the U.S. government knows damn well who killed President Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, Arnold Raphel, and an American general—the Israelis, the same Israelis who attacked the USS Liberty and killed 34 US seamen and wounded 171 out of a crew of 297. “Despite the overwhelming evidence that Israel attacked the ship and killed American servicemen deliberately, the Johnson Administration and Congress covered up the entire incident,” Eric S. Margolis quotes James Bamford from his book Body of Secrets. “Why?” asks Margolis. “Domestic politics. Johnson, a man never noted for high moral values, preferred to cover up the attack rather than anger a key constituency and major financial backer of the Democratic Party. Congress was even less eager to touch this ‘third rail’ issue.”

SANTIAGO, Chile, Dec. 10 – Chileans go to the polls on Sunday to elect a new president, and for the first time in their country’s turbulent political history, the front-running candidate is a woman.

She is Michelle Bachelet, 54, a former defense minister and health minister who has become the standard-bearer of the center-left coalition of Socialists and Christian Democrats that has been in power here since Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s brutal military dictatorship ended in 1990. She is also a doctor, a former political prisoner and exile and the daughter of a prominent general who was convicted of treason, tortured and died in prison shortly after General Pinochet seized power in 1973.
nytimes.com

Carol Thatcher yesterday revealed that her mother, Baroness Thatcher, the former prime minister, is suffering from a deteriorating memory that has wiped out the present, while sharpening her recall of wartime events.

In an frank insight into the Thatcher family, Carol – who recently chewed kangaroo testicles on the way to being crowned Queen of the Jungle in the game show I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! – also launched a bitter attack on her disgraced businessman brother, Mark, blaming his escapades for aggravating their mother’s decline.

Lady Thatcher, Carol reveals, is now “very frail”. “She cannot remember the beginning of the sentence by the time she reaches the end.” According to Carol, Lady Thatcher, 80, is now far more able to remember her Spam recipes from the 1940s than absorb and retain new information.
independent.co.uk

…Progressive and investigative journalist web site administrators are beginning to talk to each other about it, e-mail users are beginning to understand why their e-mail is being disrupted by it, major search engines appear to be complying with it, and the low to equal signal-to-noise ratio of legitimate e-mail and spam appears to be perpetuated by it.

In this case, “it,” is what privacy and computer experts have long warned about: massive censorship of the web on a nationwide and global scale. For many years, the web has been heavily censored in countries around the world. That censorship continues at this very moment. Now it is happening right here in America. The agreement by the Congress to extend an enhanced Patriot Act for another four years will permit the political enforcers of the Bush administration, who use law enforcement as their proxies, to further clamp censorship controls on the web.
axisoflogic.com

…The basics: the Fed has surveyed 60,000 American families. It found 88.1% to be “food secure” – they don’t worry about getting food. But 11.9% are “food insecure” – sometimes they don’t know if they can afford food, but by doing without medications or delaying the rent they avoid hunger. That category is 13.5 million households. Finally 3.9%, or 4.4 million American households, sometimes go hungry for lack of money.

The statistics also show a 14.7% increase in hunger in one year – as we enter another year of recovery from the recession.

The interior numbers show that the South and the West are hungrier, that Blacks and Hispanics are more vulnerable, that households headed by single women are more vulnerable – and, of course, the poor. (1)

America is the biggest food producer of the world. We ship gargantuan piles of it to hungry foreign countries. Fifty four percent of the world’s exported corn is from the United States. (2)

A separate survey last year in Los Angeles found 2.9 million in California suffer food insecurity or hunger – some 10% of San Fernando Valley folks are at risk of not getting enough to eat, and if compared by race, Blacks are most at risk, then Whites, then Hispanics. Among low-income adults the food risk percentages grow huge, with Latinos leading at 38.2%. The poor always say high rents are the single biggest drain on what money they have; the homeless daily have to choose between a motel room and food. In California, food insecurity has increased 16% over two years. (3)

California is the biggest food producing state.
opednews.com

Nadeen cradles her folder. She carefully lays it on the table and takes out four books, a notebook, a pencil and what looks like a passport. The ‘passport’, she says, contains a list of the books she has read recently.
She enjoys holding the books and turning them around in her hands and pointing out characters.

Nadeen Hawareen, aged seven, from Ramallah is one of thousands of Palestinian children who are offered lessons, books and activities by the Tamer Institute. She has been taught to use the books to trigger her imagination. She can paint what happens in her books or act out scenes with her friends.

Tamer was founded in 1989 during the first intifada, when Palestinian children needed an education despite school closures and curfews. The Israeli army, surprised by the Palestinian protest, took brutal measures to regain control, breaking the bones of stone throwers and closing Palestinian areas.

Jehan Helou, the institute’s director, said: ‘Local communities and civil society tried to find ways of compensating for the closure of schools to ensure that a generation did not grow up illiterate. It tried to be informal, in contrast to the traditional style in schools, and to encourage the seeking of knowledge through reading, creative writing, drama and art.’
guardian.co.uk

…”Junk WTO,” they chanted. ”Our world is not for sale.”

Police have been busy securing neighborhoods around the meeting venue, putting up mesh on buildings and blocking off streets to prevent the violence that has marred past WTO summits.

Members of the militant Korean Peasants League held up a banner that said, ”This hamburger is made of people’s meat. Can you enjoy it?” The sign showed a hamburger made of hands and feet. The group opposes further opening South Korea’s market to agricultural imports.

British activist Tom Grundy was dressed like a chicken and held a sign that said, ”WTO: more dangerous than chicken flu.”

”We need to raise awareness of the true intention of the WTO. It’s undemocratically elected. It undermines and overrides any law a country wants to bring to protect workers and the environment,” he said.

Activists with the Indonesian Migrants’ Workers Union were carrying a giant red and brown spider with a monster’s head, which they said symbolized the WTO. They chanted ”Sink WTO now!” Other demonstrators pounded on drums and clanged cymbals.

One Hong Kong protester posed as a slave master with a whip, while another wore a pig’s mask to portray an exploitative employer.

Another group wheeled along lifesize statues of emaciated people, trying to make the point that farm subsidies in wealthy countries contribute to world hunger by keeping poor nations from selling their farm goods, according to a leaflet from a group that called itself the Danish Association for International Cooperation.

Members of the Indian farmers’ group Tamil Nadu Dalit Women’s Movement chanted, ”WTO out of agriculture.” The group’s spokeswoman, Fatima Bernad, said that opening India’s market to imports would be devastating for farmers.
nytimkes.com

12/10/05 “Zaman” — — As the presence of foreign troops in Iraq is under debate, the largest Shiite and Sunni groups issued a declaration on Friday demanding a deadline announcement for the US pullout.

The declaration condemns terrorism, violence, kidnapping and murders; It also provides a legal aspect to insurgency, and vows not to normalize relations with Israel.

It was signed by radical Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr, the Prime Minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, the Deputy Prime Minister, Ahmed Celebi, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and supporters of the Sunni Iraqi Common Front, among others. The Front, in control of the Duleimi tribe, is very popular with the Sunnis ahead of the December 15 elections. It is expected to win a large portion of Sunni votes owing to the inclusion of the former president of the Iraqi Turkmen Front, Faruq Abdurrahman, as a member of the Sunni front. The Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution of Iraq, the largest Shiite group, has also signed the declaration, which attaches special importance to the document as well.
informationclearinghouse.info

If America Left Iraq: The case for cutting and running

If the people the U.S. military is ostensibly protecting want it to go, why do the soldiers stay? The most common answer is that it would be irresponsible for the United States to depart before some measure of peace has been assured. The American presence, this argument goes, is the only thing keeping Iraq from an all-out civil war that could take millions of lives and would profoundly destabilize the region. But is that really the case?

…’The hard part is how do we create an environment in which nuclear weapons – like slavery or genocide – are regarded as a taboo and a historical anomaly?’
guardian.co.uk