NAIROBI, Jan. 7 — On New Year’s Day, groups of angry Masai herders attempted to drive their emaciated cattle onto the manicured lawns of the presidential residence so their animals could graze on the thick carpets of green grass in the morning sun.

With a drought turning their fields and pastures into dusty gray wastelands, and with millions of people in the region facing a food shortage, the herders wanted to make a point, organizers of the action said.

“Africa is not so poor that it doesn’t have enough food or grazing land to feed itself. There’s plenty of food here,” said Ben Ole Koissaba, a leader of the Masai, one of the largest and most powerful tribes in Kenya. “Many countries around the world face drought, but people don’t starve. We think it’s ludicrous for the government to treat its citizens this way. Why does this keep happening?”
washingtonpost.com

The movement built by Cesar Chavez has failed to expand on its early successes organizing poor rural laborers. As their plight is used to attract donations that benefit others, services for those in the fields are left to languish.

…in the canyons of Carlsbad north of San Diego, hundreds of farmworkers burrow into the hills each year, covering their shacks with leaves and branches to stay out of view of multimilliondollar homes. They live without drinking water, toilets, refrigeration. Fireworks and music from nearby Legoland pierce the nighttime skies.

In a larger camp a dozen miles to the south in Del Mar, farmworkers wash their clothes in a stream, bathe in the soapy water, then catch crayfish that they boil for dinner.
latimes.com

Attorney General Menachem Mazuz told the cabinet on Sunday that Israel should give monetary compensation to Palestinians whose olive trees have been cut down.

According to Mazuz, 2,400 trees were axed in a recent wave of vandalism in the West Bank, apparently by militant settlers.

“There’s a pervasive feeling of lawlessness,” Mazuz said, adding, “This phenomenon is part of a wider phenomenon of a lack of law enforcement against Israelis in the territories.”

The attorney general said that after the state pays the Palestinians the guilty parties – presumably settlers – will, in turn, need to compensate the state.

“All security and law enforcement officials must devote themselves to a determined struggle against this grave phenomenon, and those responsible must be caught and brought to trial.”
haaretz.com

Fanatic Netanyahu stands waiting with a bomb for Iran
“Netanyahu has the inside track on winning the election and forming the government – by a narrow margin. One of the more likely outcomes is that voters who would have gone with Sharon to Kadima will be less likely to support Olmert. They will come home to Likud,” said Gerald Steinberg, a professor of political studies at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv.

Sharon: End of an unrepentant terrorist
All Arabs, whether Egyptians, Palestinians, Lebanese or Jordanians, put ARIEL SHARON at the top of the list of Israeli leaders who treated them with both violence and contempt. To the Arab world at large, the image of the ailing Prime Minister is solidly fixed as the “Butcher” or the “War Criminal”, and the basic feeling now at the prospect of his death was that it would be a shame if he passed away peacefully in bed.

The U.S. digging in for a long stay in Iraq
As PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH announced an end to the U.S.’s funding to “rebuild” IRAQ, contracts were being made to build a $1 billion U.S. Embassy complex in Baghdad’s heavily-fortified Green Zone, which houses Iraqi government offices, the U.S. military command and some Western embassies.

The U.S. readies its WMDs
…New U.S. policies that involve the use of nuclear weapons were formulated in the administration document “Nuclear Posture Review” of 2001 and became more defined in a Pentagon draft document “Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations,” Jorge Hirsch, a professor of physics at the University of California San Diego, wrote in an article published on a San Diego Union-Tribune website.

These policies, the drafters of which occupy the upper echelons of the BUSH administration, allow the use of nuclear weapons against adversary underground installations, against adversaries using or intending to use weapons of mass destruction against U.S. forces and for rapid and favorable war termination on U.S. terms.

Hirsch suggests that those policies could be implemented in the near future against the Persian Gulf.

Americans are quite well advanced in their planning for the use of those weapons, which raises the fears that other countries will, out of fear, try to build their own. A new concept of warfare is being developed.

The final straw for President Bush in Iraq
According to a poll of Military Times readers, support for President THE U.S. PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH’s leadership as commander-in-chief and support for the war in Iraq is dropping among the U.S. military. Over the course of the last year support for IRAQ WAR dropped 9 percent, and barely a majority, 54 percent, view the commander-in-chief’s performance as positive.

Losing the support of active duty military could be the final straw for PRESIDENT BUSH in IRAQ. Already, the foreign policy establishment – former military, former intelligence officials and former Foreign Service officers – have publicly expressed their opposition to the war. In addition, Gold Star families who have lost loved ones, military families with members currently serving, and IRAQ WAR veterans are speaking out against the war. And, there have been increasing cases of soldiers refusing to return to IRAQ. In addition, the military has been unable to meet its recruitment goals.

from the ‘Conspiracy Theories’ section:

FBI evidence of Mossad involvement in September 11 attacks on the U.S.?!
On the day of the September 11, 2001 attacks, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was asked how they could affect Israeli-U.S. relations. His quick reply was: “It’s very good…….Well, it’s not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy (for Israel)”.

An article by reporter Jim Galloway, published on The Austin American-Statesman on Nov. 25, 2001, stated that the FBI had evidence suggesting that the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence, along with some rogue American and foreign spy agencies, may be deeply involved in or even entirely responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks as well as other acts of terrorism against the United States.

The new U.S. 20 dollar bill contains hidden pictures of 9/11- “Coincidence or a Conspiracy”?
Can simple geometric folding of the $20 bill contain a representation of September 11 attacks on the United States?

This was sent by one of Al Jazeera friends, and we would like to share it with you.

“Instead of a new beginning, Iraq is caught in a very old colonial trap”
The current political turmoil in Iraq is the direct result of the illegal occupation, and although the country’s political future is very much in flux, oil remains the central feature of the political landscape.

The newest U.S. strategy: Iraqis kill each other instead of the Marines

DAKAR, Senegal, Jan. 6 (AP) – War-ravaged Congo is suffering the world’s deadliest medical crisis, with 38,000 people dying each month, mostly from easily treatable conditions like diarrhea and respiratory infections, said a study published Friday in Britain’s leading medical journal.

Nearly four million people died between 1998 and 2004 alone, an indirect result of years of fighting that has brought on a collapse of public health services, the study in the journal, Lancet, concluded.

Major fighting ended in Congo in 2002, but the situation remains dire because of continued insecurity, poor access to health care and inadequate international aid. The problems are particularly acute in eastern Congo.

The study was based on a survey of 19,500 households across Congo, a country of 60 million, between April and July 2004. Health Ministry workers and staff members of an aid group, the International Rescue Committee, conducted the interviews.

The results showed that Congo’s monthly mortality rate was 40 percent higher than the average for sub-Saharan Africa. Mortality rates were highest in Congo’s eastern provinces, where death rates were 93 percent higher than the average for sub-Saharan Africa.

Congo’s government dismissed the report. “I consider that a big lie,” said Henri Mova Sakanyi, the minister of information. “These figures are very exaggerated. All over the world, people die of disease. It’s not just Congo.”
nytimes.com

SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico, Jan. 4 – This is the oddest political campaign to emerge in Mexico in many a year.

Zapatista supporters of Subcommander Marcos awaited him in Palenque on Tuesday. In his speeches, he blames “savage capitalism” and the rich for social problems from gay-baiting to racism to domestic violence.

The candidate is a Marxist rebel leader who once started a civil war, wears a ski mask, smokes a pipe, keeps a crippled rooster as a mascot and is not on the ballot for any political office.

Yet the start of a six-month national tour led by the man known as Subcommander Marcos has all the earmarks of a run-of-the-mill campaign for political office: slogans, chants, partisan songs, rallies large and small, a campaign caravan making stops in towns and cities, jabs at other politicians, cute presentations from children and hugs from local community leaders, shaking hands with admirers over a line of bodyguards, and the occasional obligation to kiss, or at least hug, a baby or two.

Marcos, a captivating speaker who now calls himself Delegate Zero, even has a stump speech of sorts, in which he blames “savage capitalism” and the sins of the rich for everything from gay-baiting to racism to domestic violence.

He intends to deliver it all over the country in advance of the presidential election in July, trying to convince voters that there is no real difference among the three candidates from the major parties because all are going to cater to an oligarchy of business leaders.

“In the coming days we are going to hear a ton of promises, lies, trying to give us hope that, yes, things are now going to get better if we change one government for another,” he said Tuesday before a crowd of 4,000 masked followers in the town square of Palenque, site of noted Maya ruins. “Time and time again, every year, every three years, every six years, they sell us this lie.”

The crowd of masked supporters, many of them farmers bused in that morning, held banners with slogans like “Death to the Free Trade Agreement” and “Death to Neoliberal Globalization.” A red flag with hammer and sickle flew in the crowd. Nearby someone had strung up large portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.

“This is only going to change from the bottom and from the left,” Marcos continued, picking up a recurrent theme. Then he promised a better, more equal world “where we can be respected for the work that we do, the value that we have as human beings, and not for our bank accounts or, let’s say, a car, the type of vehicle we drive or the clothing we wear, a world where workers occupy a place that they deserve.”
nytimes.com

These people just don’t get that the threat the Zapatistas pose to the powers that be is all the greater because they are NOT hammer and sickle Marx and Lenin Marxists, but reflect indigenous values.

ELTON, La. — The dizzying downfall of lobbyist Jack Abramoff means more than just another Washington political scandal in this rural outpost of tin-roofed homes and fraying trailers.

It is a measure of vengeance.

Abramoff, the once-powerful lobbyist at the center of a wide-ranging public corruption investigation, pleaded guilty Jan. 3 to fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe public officials in a deal that requires him to provide evidence about members of Congress.

Led on by what they say were his false promises of political access, leaders of the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, which is based here, paid Abramoff and his partners about $32 million for lobbying and other services — more than $38,000 for each of their 837 tribal members. By their accounting, they got very little in return.

It was thievery, tribal members said, that echoes the historic losses of Native Americans to European settlers.

“Abramoff and his partner are the contemporary faces of the exploitation of native peoples,” said David Sickey, a member of the tribal council. “In the 17th and 18th century, native people were exploited for their land. In 2005, they’re being exploited for their wealth.”
washingtonpost.com

ALBERT Hofmann, the father of LSD, walked slowly across the small corner office of his modernist home on a grassy Alpine hilltop here, hoping to show a visitor the vista that sweeps before him on clear days. But outside there was only a white blanket of fog hanging just beyond the crest of the hill. He picked up a photograph of the view on his desk instead, left there perhaps to convince visitors of what really lies beyond the windowpane.

Mr. Hofmann will turn 100 on Wednesday, a milestone to be marked by a symposium in nearby Basel on the chemical compound that he discovered and that famously unlocked the Blakean doors of perception, altering consciousnesses around the world. As the years accumulate behind him, Mr. Hofmann’s conversation turns ever more insistently around one theme: man’s oneness with nature and the dangers of an increasing inattention to that fact.

“It’s very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature,” he said, listing to the right in a green armchair that looked out over frost-dusted fields and snow-laced trees. A glass pitcher held a bouquet of roses on the coffee table before him. “In the big cities, there are people who have never seen living nature, all things are products of humans,” he said. “The bigger the town, the less they see and understand nature.” And, yes, he said, LSD, which he calls his “problem child,” could help reconnect people to the universe.
nytimes.com

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US President George W. Bush has defied Congress again by placing a slew of controversial political allies in key national security and foreign policy posts, circumventing the requisite approval process in the Senate.

Bush resorted to the same recess appointment procedure he used in August to install John Bolton as US ambassador to the United Nations, despite Capitol Hill’s strong opposition to the nominee.

On Wednesday, the bureaucratic maneuver was used to fill key vacancies in the Defense, State and Homeland Security Departments with officials whose approval by the Senate was in doubt.

The White House said Bush had appointed Gordon England, a former Navy secretary, to the post of deputy secretary of defense left vacant by Paul Wolfowitz, a leading architect of the Iraq war, who resigned the second-highest Pentagon job last year to become president of the World Bank.

A former General Dynamics executive, England was designated acting deputy defense secretary in May, but his Senate confirmation hearing hit a roadblock when at least two Republican senators, Olympia Snowe of Maine and Trent Lott of Mississippi, put it on hold over his decisions concerning the local shipbuilding industry.

The recess appointment, which presidents can made when Congress is in recess, will allow England and others to remain in their jobs until January 2007, when the current congressional session ends.

However, England’s appointed was expected to generate less controversy than that of Dorrance Smith, who was named assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, or the Pentagon’s chief spokesman.

In November, Smith penned an article for The Wall Street Journal blasting all major US television networks and the government of Qatar for cooperating with Al-Jazeera in showing gruesome battlefield footage obtained by the Arab television channel in Iraq.

He decried what he called “the ongoing relationship between terrorists, Al-Jazeera and the networks” and asked if the US government should maintain normal relations with Qatar as long as its government continued to subsidize Al-Jazeera.

The outburst prompted Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, to ask whether Smith, a former media adviser to ex-US administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer, “should be representing the United States government … with that kind of attitude and approach.”
yahoo news.com

The list goes on, each one worse than the one before…

AS ARIEL SHARON’S career comes to an end, the whitewashing is already underway. Literally overnight he was being hailed as “a man of courage and peace” who had generated “hopes for a far-reaching accord” with an electoral campaign promising “to end conflict with the Palestinians.”

But even if end-of-career assessments often stretch the truth, and even if far too many people fall for the old saw about the gruff old warrior miraculously turning into a man of peace, the reality is that miracles don’t happen, and only rarely have words and realities been separated by such a yawning abyss.

From the beginning to the end of his career, Sharon was a man of ruthless and often gratuitous violence. The waypoints of his career are all drenched in blood, from the massacre he directed at the village of Qibya in 1953, in which his men destroyed whole houses with their occupants — men, women and children — still inside, to the ruinous invasion of Lebanon in 1982, in which his army laid siege to Beirut, cut off water, electricity and food supplies and subjected the city’s hapless residents to weeks of indiscriminate bombardment by land, sea and air.

As a purely gratuitous bonus, Sharon and his army later facilitated the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, and in all about 20,000 people — almost all innocent civilians — were killed during his Lebanon adventure.

Sharon’s approach to peacemaking in recent years wasn’t very different from his approach to war. Extrajudicial assassinations, mass home demolitions, the construction of hideous barriers and walls, population transfers and illegal annexations — these were his stock in trade as “a man of courage and peace.”
latimes.com

A ‘Butcher’ Capable of Making Peace
CAIRO — They have called him “the Butcher” and seldom mention his name without listing the places where he has been blamed for bloodshed: Sabra, Shatila, Jenin. During long decades of Middle East strife, few men have been more thoroughly reviled in the Arab world than Ariel Sharon.

But after years of battles and vitriol, and memories of the deaths in those Palestinian refugee camps, many Arabs grappled this week with a nuanced reaction to the failing health of a warrior who helped change the borders of Arab countries.

As the realization hit the region that the Israeli prime minister might no longer lead the Jewish state, a mood of regret and uncertainty crept into the tone of Arab analysts and editorials. As Sharon clung to life, the leaders of Egypt and Jordan, Arab countries that signed peace treaties with Israel, sent word of their concern.

In the end, after all their historical grievances against his wartime tactics, many Arabs saw Sharon as the only leader stubborn and strong enough to push Israel into accepting a Palestinian state. Arabs worried that the loss of Sharon would throw Israel into tumult and freeze already stagnant peace talks.

“It’s not that they bought that Sharon suddenly turned into a man of peace, but they saw him as capable of making peace. There is a very big difference,” said Iman Hamdi, a professor of political science at the American University of Cairo. “They may still think he’s a butcher, they may still hate him, but he’s the only one with the guts to withdraw from Gaza.”
Well they haved NOT withdrawn from Gaza, and this Reagan-type fallacy of saying that only a war-monger has the balls to make peace is sickening.

The Truth You Don’t Hear
What is the current situation on the ground in Palestine? The Israeli narrative that continues to dominate the international media presents an image that is absolutely at odds with reality. The Gaza redeployment was spun as the beginning of a peace process; a great retreat by General Ariel Sharon, who was portrayed as a man of peace. Yet the fact remains that Palestine is 27,000 square kilometres, of which the West Bank constitutes only 5,860 square kilometres, and the Gaza Strip, just 360 sq km. This is equal to only 1.3 per cent of the total land of historic Palestine. So even if Sharon really had withdrawn from Gaza, this would amount to just 5.8 per cent of the occupied territories.

But the Israelis did not get out of Gaza. A big fuss was created about the great sacrifice Israel was making and how painful it was for settlers to leave. If you steal a piece of land and keep it for 20 years, of course it becomes painful to leave it but it is still something stolen that should be returned to its owners. Prior to the disengagement, a total of 152 settlements existed in the occupied territories: 101 in the West Bank, 30 in East Jerusalem, and 21 in the Gaza Strip. These figures do not include the settlements that Sharon and the Israeli army have created in the West Bank without officially recognising them. With the disengagement, and the evacuation of settlements in Gaza and four small settlements in the Jenin area of the West Bank, 127 settlements have been left in place.