“We got a serious situation in St. Bernard Parish,” its president, Henry “Junior” Rodriguez, told CNN on Tuesday.

“We got people living in tents and automobiles. We got people living in barns. We got people living in their houses — in tents,” he said on “American Morning.”

“This is the beginning of winter. This is unacceptable.”

Tuesday morning, it was 41 degrees in New Orleans.

A site with 50 to 55 trailers is operational, Rodriguez said, and another may be able to handle 45 trailers within a couple days. But the 100 or so trailers fall far short of the 12,000 trailers needed for the number of people estimated to return home, he added.

Adding to Rodriguez’s frustration is the fact that 1,400 trailers are sitting unused in St. Bernard Parish. The parish ordered them from a private contractor days after the hurricane hit on August 29, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency has not agreed to pay for them.
cnn.com

NASA is again threatening the lives of people on Earth.

On January 11, the window opens for a launch from Cape Canaveral of a rocket lofting a space probe with 24 pounds of plutonium fuel on board. Plutonium is considered the most deadly radioactive substance.

Once it separates from the rocket, the probe, on what NASA calls its New Horizons mission, would move through space powered by conventional chemical fuel.

The plutonium is in a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG) that is to provide on-board electricity for the probe’s instruments–a mere 180 watts when it gets to its destination of Pluto.

Until after the probe leaves the rocket and breaks from the Earth’s gravitational pull, the plutonium endangers life on Earth.

Because a fatal dose of plutonium is just a millionth of a gram, anyone breathing just the tiniest particle of plutonium dispersed in an accident could die.

NASA has divided the sequence into four phases before what it calls “escape” of the probe from the Earth’s gravity. It is most concerned about the launch phase.

NASA’s Final Environmental Impact Statement for the New Horizons Mission (EIS) says there is “about 6 percent probability” of an accident during launch.
counterpunch.org

Savaged by dogs, Electrocuted With Cattle Prods, Burned By Toxic Chemicals, Does such barbaric abuse inside U.S. jails explain the horrors that were committed in Iraq?

They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking place inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a four-month investigation for BBC Channel 4 . It’s terrible to watch some of the videos and realise that you’re not only seeing torture in action but, in the most extreme cases, you are witnessing young men dying.
informationclearinghouse.info

Europeans Outraged at Schwarzenegger

More and more evidence is mounting that Iran’s ayatollahs have their hands deep into the Shiite-led government of Iraq. Astonishingly though, the Bush administration – and its allied phalanx of neoconservatives – have turned a blind eye to Iran’s influence in Iraq. That’s because the Iraqi Shiites, who run the regime in Baghdad, are supposed to be the “good guys,” i.e., the ones we are defending in Iraq. As I’ve written before, the United States has 160,000 troops in Iraq serving as the Praetorian guard for that Shiite regime. We’re killing hundreds of Sunnis all over western Iraq on their behalf.

Before we get to the latest reports of more torture prisons run by the Shiites, along with death squads, consider the following items from the news.

Knight Ridder, perhaps the single best news organization covering the war in Iraq and its political fallout, carried an important exchange in which the head of the Badr Brigade, the paramilitary force backed by Iran, flatly admits that his 20,000-strong secret army – which is the arm of the ruling Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) – is funded by Iran:

politician Ayad Allawi. “Allawi receives money from America, from the CIA, but nobody talks about that. All they talk about is our funding from Iran,” he said, raising his voice. “We are funded by some (Persian) Gulf countries and the Islamic Republic of Iran. We don’t hide it.”
news.yahoo.com

Shia relish chance to rule as Iraqis prepare to vote

“I expect the Shia religious parties will get about 110 to 115 seats in the new parliament,” said one political observer in Baghdad. “They will be in a commanding position.” He ticked off their advantages. The largest party in the coalition is the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri) under Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, which already controls provincial councils in nine out of 18 Iraqi provinces. It has its powerful militia, the Badr Organisation, and is backed by Iran.

Williams was executed by lethal injection at 12:35am today.

…Most of those who support his state sponsored murder do not live in war torn regions of the Golden State of California. Thus it is difficult for these privileged people to understand the benefits of Stan’s contributions on behalf of non-violence. However, because blacks are sentenced to death twice as frequently as whites who’ve been convicted of the same crime it appears that this may be more than a misunderstanding.

If a young black man is shot in South Central does it make a sound in Thousand Oaks?
counterpunch.org

Mumia Abu Jamal–Tookie: From Chaos to Consciousness

…”My detractors in the media and elsewhere have questioned my redemption. Their doubt is driven largely by my open apology (….at http://www.tookie.com) to Black folks and others who might have been offended by the fact that I helped create the Crips youth gang in Los Angeles 34 years ago. My detractors argue that I could not be redeemed because I have not apologized to the family members of the victims that I was convicted of killing.

“But please allow me to clarify. I will never apologize for capital crimes that I did not commit — not even to save my life. And I did not commit the crimes for which I was sentenced to be executed by the State of California.

“Being a condemned prisoner, I am viewed among the least able to qualify as a promoter of redemption and of peace. But the most wretched among society can be redeemed, find peace and reach out to others to lift them up. Redemption cannot be faked or intellectualized. It must be subjective, experienced, and shared. In the past redemption was an alien concept to me. But from 1988 to 1994, while I lived in solitary confinement, I embarked on a transitional path toward redemption. I underwent years of education, soul-searching, edification, spiritual cultivation, and fighting to transcend my inner demons.

“Subsequently, the redeeming process for me symbolized the end of a bad beginning–and a new start.” [From: *The New Abolitionist*, Aug. ’05, p. 2]

BATON ROUGE, La., Dec. 8 – The small room where Tracy Jackson, Jerel Brown and their four young children share a twin bed and thin mattress on the floor is the 14th place they have laid their heads since Hurricane Katrina struck just over 14 weeks ago.

Five shelters. Six hotel rooms. Twelve days in the home of a good Samaritan in a tiny Louisiana town where they were the only black people. Six weeks in Durham, N.C., in the two-bedroom apartment that a church found for Mr. Brown’s mother after the storm, where no buses ran nearby and a cab to Wal-Mart cost $10.

And, since shortly before Thanksgiving, this dark room decorated with a Cinderella princess poster in a shotgun shack, where nearly all they have is packed in a plastic tub and several suitcases stacked on top of each other in the cramped closet.
nytimes.com

Only twice can I remember an entertainer agitating audience members to the point that they stormed out of a performance or sat stone silent. Richard Pryor was that entertainer. The first time he did it was at a concert I attended on New Year’s Eve at a small club in Hollywood. Pryor cut loose with a bitter, expletive laced, diatribe on black and white relations. He aimed his sharpest barbs at the whites. He needled, hectored, and browbeat them for their racial sins. Midway through his rant, the predictable happened. A trickle of whites made a beeline for the door. Pryor, nonplussed by the sound of their marching feet, didn’t relent from his verbal tongue lash. The trickle quickly turned into a stamped. Even then Pryor didn’t miss a beat he continued to hurl barbs at their backs.
counterpunch.org

…In exchange for World Bank loans to build a 670-mile underground pipeline through Cameroon to export its oil, the Chadian government passed a law requiring that almost all of the money it earns on oil exports be spent for poverty reduction and that 10 percent be put aside as a “future generations fund,” to leave something behind once the estimated one billion barrels of oil have been exhausted.

But in October, Chad’s government abruptly announced at a meeting with the World Bank in N’Djamena, the capital, that it plans to alter that law and funnel more money into its general budget and increase spending on security.

“In the World Bank’s view, these modifications alone will fail to provide a lasting solution to the recurring financial problems that Chad faces,” the statement said. “To the contrary, they threaten to undermine the objectives of socioeconomic development, poverty reduction, accountability and transparency that guided World Bank Group and other international support for the Chad-Cameroon pipeline project.”
nytimes.com

It’s an open secret that Wolfowitz is a disciple of Chavez…

Australia was last night in the grip of its worst race clashes since independence, with youths battering cars and shattering shop windows as violence spread through Sydney’s suburbs for a second day.

The attacks came in retaliation for Sunday’s violence, in which 5,000 people rampaged across Cronulla beach chanting racist slogans, leaving more than 40 police officers injured. Members of the crowd had wrapped themselves in the Australian flag and chanted: “No more Lebs [Lebanese]”, attacking men and women of Middle Eastern appearance. Several victims were evacuated in police vans.

…But Mr Howard denied there was any “underlying racism” behind the events.
guardian.co.uk

…except for the vicious racism that established the country in the first place…

This list of “MOST WANTED” corporate criminals gives you information about the abusive behavior of this year’s top fourteen worst corporations, tells you who is responsible, and how to connect with and support people who are doing something about it. The more you know, the less these corporations can continue their abuses out of public eyesight: so share this information with your friends, get on the phone with the CEOs themselves, and exercise your rights as a citizen and consumer today.
globalexchange.org

They bleat about the free market, then hold out their begging bowls

Never underestimate the self-pity of the ruling classes. Since Labour took office in 1997 the Confederation of British Industry has been engaged in one long whinge. It doesn’t matter that our taxes are among the lowest and our regulations among the weakest in the developed world. It doesn’t matter that the rich are richer than they have ever been. The CBI is the monster with a thousand stomachs that will never be satisfied.

In the submission it made to the chancellor’s pre-budget report, it demanded that the government spend less on everything except business. The state should cut its planned spending on health, social security and local authorities, and use some of the savings to protect and enhance its “support and advisory services for trade and businesses”. Our higher-education budget should be used to supply free research for corporations. The regional development agencies should “expand their activities to support more extensive business-to-business networking and collaboration”. Further road taxes should be abandoned, and the climate-change levy “should be frozen”, but the government should help businesses by building more roads and airports. This is what the CBI means by free enterprise.

How Abramoff Spread the Wealth