Jean-Marie Guéhenno, undersecretary-general for UN peacekeeping operations and former French ambassador to the European Union, says real progress has been made in Haiti. The poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti has been wracked by violence since the February 2004 ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and elections there have been postponed four times because of instability. But Guehenno says Haiti is moving “closer to a key milestone,” the rescheduled elections February 7, and most of the country “is more or less…stabilized.” For real progress to be made, however, the United Nations must be clear it is ready to “really stay the course.” He spoke with cfr.org’s Mary Crane January 9, 2005.

Let’s start by summing up the United Nations’ presence in Haiti since the departure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide two years ago. Can you tell us what the status of UN peacekeeping forces is in Haiti?

Maybe I should start by saying that the United Nations has been involved in Haiti several times in the past, and I think when we were requested to come back to Haiti after the departure of President Aristide, it was clear, I think to everybody, that this time the international community should really stay the course and learn from past failures.

The main lesson from the past failures is that there was never a sufficiently comprehensive effort in Haiti. An election is an important event, but an election is the beginning of something, not the end, and it has to be complemented by a much broader effort to rebuild the state. And that’s why in Haiti today we want to address the situation on a number of fronts. First, of course, is to bring security to Haiti. The beginning of the mission, as you know, was difficult because the troops were not necessarily prepared for the challenges they encountered.

And where are most of the troops from?

Most of the troops come from Latin America. We have troops from Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Guatemala–there are a number of Latin American countries. These are the main countries. The leadership of the mission is also from Latin America. Since the tragic death of [UN mission commander] General [Urano Teixeira da Matta] Bacellar this weekend, we will certainly have another Brazilian commander and we are in touch with Brazil to identify a suitable force commander. It’s really our intention to keep a Brazilian force commander and Brazil has made a major commitment to the mission.

So when I look at the strategy of the mission, [the] first [priority is] to bring a measure of security. Everyone is focused on what is not yet right–that is, the disarray in [the capital] Port-au-Prince. But what I see is the progress that has [been made] in the rest of the country. When you look at what the situation was even a few months ago, when [there were] road-blocking attempts in the northern part of the country, that has stopped. Myself, I was in Port-au-Prince earlier this year in June and I wanted to visit some of the tough places and one of them was Bel Air. The only way I could visit Bel Air was in an armored personal carrier with a blue helmet and jacket, and now you can walk in Bel Air.

Today, there is one place that remains a very tough spot indeed and that is [the Port-au-Prince suburb of] Cité Soleil, which is a focus of our attention. We are not going to let the situation in Soleil fester. This is a touchy situation because it’s a slum, an urban environment with a high-density population. It’s the kind of place that’s very difficult to operate a military force. We are looking at ways to strengthen our posture there so we can stop the activity of the gangs and at the same time not hurt civilians.
nytimes.com

Class war takes on a new meaning in Cite Soley
Cite Soley, one of Port-au-Prince’s poorest neighborhoods, is home to around 500,000 people living in abject poverty. According to Jean-Joseph Joel, the Secretary General of the local branch of Fanmi Lavalas, the area’s residents are virtual prisoners, and their movements restricted by armed police at checkpoints. Vilified as bandits or chimeres by the elite-run press, he says they face persecution if they do manage to escape the neighborhood. There is no work and signs of malnutrition are obvious in the children.

Since the February 2004 coup d’etat that ousted democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Cite Soley has been one of the battlefields where a war against Haiti’s poor majority is being waged. Muliple killings of civilians have been committed by UN forces carrying out the will of the country’s elite and of the international community. Dieunord Edme, a Cite Soley resident, shows us the place in the market where his wife, Annette Moleron, was gunned down by MINUSTAH (Mission Nations Unies Stabilization en Haiti) soldiers on January 7th during an operation that claimed the lives of four women in a marketplace. He shows us bullet holes in the metal roof over the market’s stalls.

Victims of the deadly July 6th 2005 UN massacre, an event documented by the Haiti Information Project, which the UN denies ever happened, show us their scars. One woman lifts her shirt to show us where the MINUSTAH bullet entered her then pregnant belly, ! and the mark of the cesarean section performed to remove the baby that was killed. As we drive out of the neighborhood we pass a horribly bloated corpse by the side of the road. A MINUSTAH tank is parked nearby, keeping watch. Local residents say the man, who worked as a porter, was killed five days previously but every time someone went to try to remove the body, MINUSTAH started firing. It is apparent that they want to keep his body as a warning to others.

This ugly violence that has swept Cite Soley in the last week, and for many months prior, does not come out of thin air. Someone above the UN is calling the shots, and they wield lethal power. Reginald Boulos, the president of the Haitian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and sweatshop magnate Andy Apaid – both members of the Canadian and US-backed Group 184 – called for a one-day general business strike Monday. The stated goal of this strike was to put pressure on MINUSTAH to clamp down harder on crime! and kidnappings. As an announcement heard on Radio Metropole stated in a threatening tone, “Don’t leave your houses. Let the police and the military do their work. Anyone who leaves their house takes their life into their own hands.”

Television evangelist Jerry Falwell couldn’t resist bragging and finally admitting the truth: he and former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu did conspire-at a critical time-to trip up President Bill Clinton and specifically use the pressure of the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal to force Clinton to abandon pressure on Israel to withdraw from the occupied West Bank.

Falwell’s confession didn’t make national news-as it should have. Instead, the preacher’s confession came buried in a lengthy story in the December 2005 issue of Vanity Fair. Entitled “American Rapture” the article (by Craig Unger) described the long-standing and still-flourishing love affair between American dispensationalist evangelicals such as Falwell and the hardline Jewish extremist forces in Israel then under the leadership of Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu.
axisoflogic.com

Pakistani police tear-gassed tribesmen who burned down a US-funded aid agency office after the deaths of 18 villagers in an airstrike targeting Al-Qaeda’s number two, witnesses said.

Some demonstrators set fire to the offices of Associated Development Construction, a non-governmental organisation funded by the US Agency for International Development, an official at the aid group said.

“They have attacked our office in reaction to the deaths on Friday and put it on fire, it is badly damaged,” site engineer Fazal Maibood told AFP.

The mob had also stolen hundreds of bags of cement, and up to 20 tons of steel construction material were damaged by the fire, he added.

Hundreds of tribal policemen had been deployed in Khar and other nearby towns to keep order, witnesses said.

Police later fired tear gas shells to disperse the mob after the crowd headed towards a music and video cassette market, while security forces fired two shots in the air, the AFP reporter said.

Security men were also seen arresting young tribesmen and bundling them into the backs of vans.

Pakistani officials said Saturday that they were investigating whether Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, was killed in what a US intelligence official described as an attack by a US Predator drone.

Earlier Haroon Rasheed, a legislator from Pakistan’s fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami party, condemned the airstrike as a “slap on the face of the country’s sovereignty” as the crowd chanted anti-US slogans, witnesses said.

“It is shameful that innocent people of Pakistan are being killed by a foreign country with total impunity towards the state of Pakistan,” he told the protesters.
commondreams.org

Review of String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design by Leonard Susskind

Physicists are not like ordinary people, and string theorists are not like ordinary physicists. Even compared with their peers, crafters of the arcane model of reality that is string theory think in terms of sweeping explanations of nature’s design. Leonard Susskind, a founder of the theory and one of its leading practitioners, brazenly lays out this no-boundaries attitude on the first page of his new book. His research, he declares, “touches not only on current paradigm shifts in physics and cosmology, but also on the profound cultural questions that are rocking our social and political landscape: can science explain the extraordinary fact that the universe appears to be uncannily, nay, spectacularly, well designed for our own existence?”

What troubles Susskind is an intelligent design argument considerably more vexing than the anti-evolution grumblings recently on trial in Dover, Pa. Biologists can point to unambiguous evidence that evolution truly does happen and that it can account for many otherwise inexplicable aspects of how organisms function. For those who take a more cosmic perspective, however, the appearance of design is not so simply refuted. If gravity were slightly stronger than it is, for instance, stars would burn out quickly and collapse into black holes; if gravity were a touch weaker, stars would never have formed in the first place. The same holds true for pretty much every fundamental property of the forces and particles that make up the universe. Change any one of them and life would not be possible. To the creationist, this cosmic comity is evidence of the glory of God. To the scientist, it is an embarrassing reminder of our ignorance about the origin of physical law.

Until recently, most physicists took it on faith that as they refined their theories and upgraded their experiments they would eventually expose a set of underlying rules requiring the universe to be this way and this way only. In “A Brief History of Time,” Stephen Hawking recalled Albert Einstein’s question “How much choice did God have in constructing the universe?” before replying that, judging from the latest ideas in physics, God “had no freedom at all.” Like many leading physicists at the time, Hawking believed that scientists were closing in on nature’s essential rules – the ones that even God must obey – and that string theory was leading them on a likely path to enlightenment.

Although string theory resists translation into ordinary language, its central conceit boils down to this: All the different particles and forces in the universe are composed of wriggling strands of energy whose properties depend solely on the mode of their vibration. Understand the properties of those strands, the thinking once went, and you will understand why the universe is the way it is. Recent work, most notably by Joseph Polchinski of the University of California, Santa Barbara, has dashed that hope. The latest version of string theory (now rechristened M-theory for reasons that even the founder of M-theory cannot explain) does not yield a single model of physics. Rather, it yields a gargantuan number of models: about 10500, give or take a few trillion.

Not one to despair over lemons, Susskind finds lemonade in that insane-sounding result. He proposes that those 10500 possibilities represent not a flaw in string theory but a profound insight into the nature of reality. Each potential model, he suggests, corresponds to an actual place – another universe as real as our own. In the spirit of kooky science and good science fiction, he coins new names to go with these new possibilities. He calls the enormous range of environments governed by all the possible laws of physics the “Landscape.” The near-infinite collection of pocket universes described by those various laws becomes the “megaverse.”
nytimes.com

First Chapter: The Cosmic Landscape

…Workers in some of Baltimore’s homeless shelters and soup kitchens had noticed something new and troubling about many of the visitors coming in for meals and shelter: they happened to have full-time jobs. In response, local religious leaders successfully persuaded the City Council to raise the base pay for city contract workers to $6.10 an hour from $4.25, the federal minimum at the time. The Baltimore campaign was ostensibly about money. But to those who thought about it more deeply, it was about the force of particular moral propositions: first, that work should be rewarded, and second, that no one who works full time should have to live in poverty.

So Kern and another colleague were dispatched to find out if what happened in Baltimore could be tried – and expanded – elsewhere. As she plowed through documents, Kern was unsure whether to look for a particular law or the absence of one. Really, what she was trying to do was compile a list of places in the U.S. where citizens or officials could legally mount campaigns to raise the minimum wage above the federal standard. In other words, she needed to know if anything stood in the way, like a state regulation or court decision. What she discovered was that in many states a law more ambitious than Baltimore’s – one that didn’t apply to only city contractors but to all local businesses – seemed permissible.
nytimes.com

Full text in Rootsie Forum

She’s running a little late (wardrobe malfunction) and she’s limping a little bit from the day before yesterday when she fell down the stairs in a fit of excitement (more on that later), but she’s still rocking her platforms (it helps her hurt foot, she says, to walk in heels), strolling very slowly into the National Museum of the American Indian, apologizing for her tardiness, chewing gum and smiling and shaking hands with the museum director.

And here comes her mom, bringing up the rear. With a video camera. Mom. But Mom is intent on capturing everything (for a documentary), all this newness , the movie premieres, the newspaper interviews, the museum visitors doing the whozzat double take. So, after a little sotto voce negotiating — in German — Q’orianka (Cor-ee-AHN-ka, which means “Golden Eagle” in Quechua) Kilcher, the 15-year-old star of Terrence Malick’s “The New World,” does her mother’s bidding, and stands there, in the lobby where everybody can see her, holding up a copy of her very first magazine cover (the reason she went tumbling down the stairs), smiling for the camera while her younger brother and her publicist and her agent and her agent’s son and a handful of passersby look on.

In “The New World,” which opens Friday, Colin Farrell plays Capt. John Smith to Q’orianka Kilcher’s Pocahontas. “I don’t care about the attention,” says the actress, 15, of her fast-budding fame. (New Line Cinema Via Reuters)
“I feel so conceited,” Q’orianka moans, gripping the latest edition of the Indian museum’s magazine.

All this attention takes considerable adjustment. After all, before her head shot was passed along to Malick’s casting directors, Q’orianka’s previous screen experience amounted to a brief stint on “Star Search” (she sings, too) and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role in “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.” But adjusting is what Q’orianka, part Quechua-Huachipaeri Indian, part Swiss-Alaskan, will have to do. In Malick’s much-acclaimed “New World” — his fourth film in 32 years — the home-schooled ninth-grader plays a sinuous Pocahontas to then-29-year-old Colin Farrell’s grizzled John Smith. She even gets to kiss Farrell — yes, her first kiss.
washingtonpost.com

The story of the real Pocahontas is one of the many shameful travesties in the annals of the Native American genocide. How could a liaison between a teen-aged native girl and a white colonizer (she was actually passed from one to another) be understood as anything but rape? Pocahontas was the poster-girl for tobacco in England, and she died hideously there in her early 20’s in its hostile climes.

I guess we’re supposed to feel good about ourselves that we embrace this new multiracial star. What a sickness.

Sorry, pale blonds. People with mixed-race faces appear healthier and more appealing, so have evolutionary advantages, research reveals.

With her blond flowing locks and pale skin, the goddess of love, Venus, is seen as the epitome of beauty, as depicted by generations of artists such as Botticelli.

But new research appears to turn this theory on its head. Scientists now believe that people of mixed race, particularly Eurasians, possess certain genetic advantages that lead to greater health and, as a result, increased attractiveness.

In the first study of its kind, Caucasians and Japanese people rated Eurasian faces as more attractive than faces of either race. Researchers developed a series of faces, ranging from those with exaggerated Caucasian features to those with exaggerated Japanese features. When Caucasian and Japanese volunteers looked at photographs of Caucasian, Japanese and Eurasian faces, both groups rated the Eurasian faces the most attractive and healthiest. People from other racial backgrounds will, of course, have their own preferred blends.

One researcher said the results proved that “our preferences are shaped by evolution”. Humans would have encountered few individuals of mixed race when they first evolved. Only with the West’s colonisation of Africa, the Americas and the Far East, as well as the trade links that were then established around the world, did different races mix more readily.
independent.co.uk

Spinning evolutionary hypotheses about race without considering social and historical factors is the hallmark of European science. 150 years ago, it was used as a justification for theft and slaughter. The implications of the idea that racial composition reflects or confers evolutionary fitness is a most dangerous idea, and it’s certain that the ultimate losers in equations such as this are always dark-skinned Africans.

…The human brain has multiple mirror neuron systems that specialize in carrying out and understanding not just the actions of others but their intentions, the social meaning of their behavior and their emotions.

“We are exquisitely social creatures,” Dr. Rizzolatti said. “Our survival depends on understanding the actions, intentions and emotions of others.”

He continued, “Mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling, not by thinking.”

The discovery is shaking up numerous scientific disciplines, shifting the understanding of culture, empathy, philosophy, language, imitation, autism and psychotherapy.

Everyday experiences are also being viewed in a new light. Mirror neurons reveal how children learn, why people respond to certain types of sports, dance, music and art, why watching media violence may be harmful and why many men like pornography.

How can a single mirror neuron or system of mirror neurons be so incredibly smart?
nytimes.com

It is a time of sleep deprivation, constant tiredness and a regular inability to carry out even the simplest task. But now scientists have discovered – after experimenting on the California deer mouse, laboratory rats, and humans – that pregnancy also confers startling benefits: it actually boosts brainpower.

During pregnancy, learning and memory skills improve dramatically, say researchers, reversing the popular myth that it is a time of dumbing down. Key brain areas also alter in size; changes that can persist for decades. Far from transforming mothers into weakened emotional wrecks who lose car keys and drop in IQ, it turns out having children makes them cleverer. It’s just hard to spot thanks to all that lost sleep.

‘Many benefits seem to emerge from motherhood, as the maternal brain rises to the reproductive challenge,’ says Professor Craig Kinsley, of Richmond University, and Professor Kelly Lambert, of Randolph-Macon College, both in Virginia, writing in the latest Scientific American. ‘In other words, when the going gets tough, the brain gets going.’

guardian.co.uk

The deputy leader of al-Qaeda was not in a Pakistani village near the Afghan border which was hit in an apparent missile attack, Pakistan officials say.
The unnamed officials said the attack – in which at least 18 people were killed – was based on “false information”.

Quoting intelligence sources, US media said it was a CIA raid. The US military says it is not aware of any operations taking place in the Bajaur tribal area.

Pakistan’s information minister condemned the attack.

Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told a news conference the US ambassador would be summoned to explain.

The Pakistani government wanted “to assure the people we will not allow such incidents to reoccur”, Mr Ahmed said.
bbc.co.uk

The idea of state sovereignty has surely fallen victim to this ‘war on terror.