A continent that inflicted colonial brutality all over the globe for 200 years has little claim to the superiority of its values.

Is the argument over the Danish cartoons really reducible to a matter of free speech? Even if we believe that free speech is a fundamental value, that does not give us carte blanche to say what we like in any context, regardless of consequence or effect. Respect for others, especially in an increasingly interdependent world, is a value of at least equal importance.

Europe has never had to worry too much about context or effect because for around 200 years it dominated and colonised most of the world. Such was Europe’s omnipotence that it never needed to take into account the sensibilities, beliefs and attitudes of those that it colonised, however sacred and sensitive they might have been. On the contrary, European countries imposed their rulers, religion, beliefs, language, racial hierarchy and customs on those to whom they were entirely alien. There is a profound hypocrisy – and deep historical ignorance – when Europeans complain about the problems posed by the ethnic and religious minorities in their midst, for that is exactly what European colonial rule meant for peoples around the world. With one crucial difference, of course: the white minorities ruled the roost, whereas Europe’s new ethnic minorities are marginalised, excluded and castigated, as recent events have shown.
guardian.co.uk

Dozens of Western multinationals have made millions of pounds in profits from exploiting African bio-resources taken from some of the poorest nations on earth, with not a penny offered in return.

Pharmaceutical firms are accused of breaching the United Nations convention on biodiversity, which states that nations have sovereignty over their own natural resources, by scouring continents for samples of unique materials, from plants to bacteria.

A ground-breaking report identifies numerous materials, taken from Africa to Western laboratories, which have developed and patented products worth hundreds of millions of pounds – from a trailing plant beloved of gardeners across Europe to a natural cure for impotence and a microbe used in fading designer jeans.

In some cases companies accept that their product is based on a traditional source and yet there is no evidence the companies have compensated countries from which they took them.

“It’s a new form of colonial pillaging,” said Beth Burrows, of the US-based Edmonds Institute, the environmental group that published the report. “We have identified a number of cases that require a lot of explanation. The problem is that we have a world [where companies] are used to taking whatever they want from wherever and thinking they are doing it for the good of mankind.”
independent.co.uk

The Paraguayan government confirmed on Tuesday that a British prospecting company has found oil and natural gas in the north of Paraguay, whose energy has depended on import.

The company, CDS Energy, has spotted oil and gas in Independencia III, an exploratory well in Gabino Mendoza, in Chaco, Public Works and Communications Minister Jose Alderete told Paraguayan daily ABC Color.

The CDS has sent its latest samples to laboratories in Texas in the United States, and the results are expected by the end of February, the newspaper said.

CDS sources told the paper that the well would produce fuel. The final well will be 3.2 km deep, but the test wells went no deeper than 1.6 km, they said.

Experts involved in the exploration said they had found sizeable quantities of natural gas and small amounts of crude oil.
The CDS has drilled a total of five holes in Paraguay, under a contract signed by the country’s ministry of public works.
people’sdaily/China

The landing of hundreds of US troops at a port city in the Dominican Republic, barely 80 miles from the Haitian border, sparked protests and warnings that Washington may be preparing another military intervention aimed at quelling the popular unrest that has erupted in Haiti over attempts to rig the presidential election.

Some 800 US troops have disembarked at the Dominican port of Barahona as part of the “New Horizons” military exercise that is to extend for several months and will reportedly involve as many as 14,000 military personnel. The city is the closest major port in the Dominican Republic to the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince.

Hundreds of demonstrators marched on the US Embassy in Santo Domingo as well as on the US military camp in Barahona, approximately 120 miles southwest of the capital.
wsws.org

Haitian Front-Runner [President] Breaks Silence; Charges Fraud
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Feb. 14 — René Préval, whose support among the poor masses has made him the favorite to become Haiti’s next president, stepped out of the silence he began after the election last week to charge Tuesday that “massive fraud and gross errors had stained the process.”

When hurricane Katrina hit, there was no evacuation plan for 7,000 prisoners in the New Orleans city jail, generally known as Orleans Parish Prison (OPP), or the approximate 1,500 prisoners in nearby jails. According to first-hand accounts gathered by advocates, prisoners were abandoned in their cells while the water was rising around them. They were subjected to a heavily armed “rescue” by state prison guards that involved beatings, mace and being left in the sun with no water or food for several days, followed by a transfer to state maximum security prisons. Although their treatment brought national attention to the condition of prisoners in Louisiana, and comparison to prison abuse scandals from Attica to Abu Ghraib, local government officials have attempted to dodge accountability and continue with business as usual.
zmag.org

WASHINGTON, Feb. 16 — President Bush said Thursday that Vice President Dick Cheney had handled the disclosure of an accidental shooting of a hunting partner “just fine” and that the incident had been a “traumatic moment” for Mr. Cheney as well as a tragic one for the victim.

Mr. Bush’s comments were his first on the matter since Mr. Cheney wounded the victim, a 78-year-old lawyer, Harry M. Whittington, on a quail-hunting expedition in Texas last weekend and his first public reaction to an interview that Mr. Cheney gave about the incident on Wednesday to Fox News.

The remarks came on the same day that the local sheriff’s department investigating the shooting said its inquiry was closed and no charges would be filed.

The president’s words appeared to be an effort to tamp down widespread talk about tensions between him and Mr. Cheney. Mr. Bush’s aides had made little secret all week that they wished Mr. Cheney had handled the matter differently — in particular by disclosing it more quickly and via a more established channel than the Web site of a local newspaper in Texas. And on Wednesday, the White House signaled that Mr. Bush was sympathetic to that view. The incident was not made public for more than 18 hours.

“I thought his explanation yesterday was a powerful explanation,” Mr. Bush told reporters in the Oval Office, speaking of Mr. Cheney’s interview on Fox. “This is a man who likes the outdoors, and he likes to hunt. And he heard a bird flush and he turned and pulled the trigger and saw his friend get wounded. And it was a deeply traumatic moment for him, and obviously it was a tragic moment for Mr. Whittington.”
nytimes.com

WASHINGTON – A federal judge ordered the Bush administration on Thursday to release documents about its warrantless surveillance program or spell out what it is withholding, a setback to efforts to keep the program under wraps.

At the same time, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said he had worked out an agreement with the White House to consider legislation and provide more information to Congress on the eavesdropping program. The panel’s top Democrat, who has requested a full-scale investigation, immediately objected to what he called an abdication of the committee’s responsibilities.

U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy ruled that a private group, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, will suffer irreparable harm if the documents it has been seeking since December are not processed promptly under the Freedom of Information Act. He gave the Justice Department 20 days to respond to the group’s request.
news.yahoo.com

The White House today rejected a United Nations report saying that the Guantanamo Bay detention center should be closed and that treatment of detainees in some cases amounted to torture, calling it a “rehash” of old allegations.

The U.N. report — officially released today but reported in Monday’s Los Angeles Times — concludes that the U.S. treatment of detainees violated their rights to physical and mental health and, in some cases, constituted torture.

It also urged the United States to close the military prison in Cuba and bring the captives to trial on U.S. territory, charging that Washington’s justification for the continued detention is a distortion of international law.

The report, compiled by five U.N. envoys who interviewed former prisoners, detainees’ lawyers and families, and U.S. officials, followed an 18-month investigation ordered by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. The team did not have access to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Nonetheless, its findings — notably a conclusion that the violent force-feeding of hunger strikers, incidents of excessive violence used in transporting prisoners and combinations of interrogation techniques “must be assessed as amounting to torture” — are likely to stoke U.S. and international criticism of the prison.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan defended the treatment of detainees held at the prison at a news conference today.

“These are dangerous terrorists that we’re talking about that are there,” he said. “We know that Al Qaeda terrorists are trained in trying to disseminate false allegations.”
latimes.com

Now there’s some rebuttal: you’re just saying what you’ve always said, can’t you come up with anything new? If there are ‘dangerous terrorists’ there, put ’em on trial.

Chertoff evokes 9-11 in his Katrina Defense
WASHINGTON — Embattled Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff testified Wednesday that he did not take charge of his department’s faltering response to Hurricane Katrina because his personal experience during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks had convinced him that micromanaging by senior officials could make matters worse.

This is their ‘defense’ for every atrocity.

A high court judge yesterday delivered a stinging attack on America, saying its idea of what constituted torture was out of step with that of “most civilised nations”.

The criticism, directed at the Bush administration’s approach to human rights, was made by Mr Justice Collins during a hearing over the refusal by ministers to request the release of three British residents held at Guantánamo Bay.

The judge said: “America’s idea of what is torture is not the same as ours and does not appear to coincide with that of most civilised nations.” He made his comments, he said, after learning of the UN report that said Guantánamo should be shut down without delay because torture was still being carried out there.
guardian.co.uk

Israel will bar Gazan workers and goods from entering Israeli territory and impose other harsh economic sanctions after a Hamas-dominated parliament is sworn in this weekend, security officials have said.

In the face of growing international and Israeli pressure to shun Hamas, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas will insist the group accept his goal of reaching a peace agreement with Israel if it wants to take power, Palestinian officials said.

Abbas’ demands set the stage for a possible showdown between Hamas and Abbas, whose Fatah Party was routed in last month’s legislative election. A Hamas leader expressed confidence a compromise would be reached.

The Israeli campaign against Hamas is focused on bringing the perpetually cash-strapped Palestinian Authority to its knees by drying up desperately needed income.
aljazeera.net