WASHINGTON (AP) — Despite record profits, oil and gas producers may avoid billions of dollars in royalty payments to the government because of a decade-old law designed to spur production when energy prices are low.

The Interior Department estimates that as much as $66 billion worth of oil and natural gas taken from the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico between now and 2011 will be exempt from government royalty payments.

That could amount to the government losing an estimated $7 billion to $9.5 billion based on anticipated production and current price projections for oil and gas, according to an analysis in the department’s five-year budget plan.
nytimes.com

WASHINGTON – President Bush has requested billions more to prepare for potential disasters such as a biological attack or an influenza epidemic, but his proposed budget for next year would zero out popular health projects that supporters say target more mundane, but more certain, killers.

If enacted, the 2007 budget would eliminate federal programs that support inner-city Indian health clinics, defibrillators in rural areas, an educational campaign about Alzheimer’s disease, traumatic brain-injury centers, and a nationwide registry for Lou Gehrig’s disease. It would cut close to $1 billion in health care grants to states and would kill the entire budget of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Paralysis Resource Center.

In a $2.8 trillion budget, the amounts involved may seem minuscule, but proponents argue that the health care projects Bush has singled out are the “ultimate homeland security,” as Vinay Nadkarni put it. The spokesman for the American Heart Association said he cannot fathom why the administration has recommended eliminating a $1.5 million program that provides defibrillators to rural communities and trains local personnel on how to use the machines to restart hearts that go into cardiac arrest.
bradenton.com

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Feb. 13 — Haiti’s hopes for a peaceful presidential election exploded Monday in a torrent of violence as mobs overturned cars, set piles of tires ablaze and built elaborate roadblocks across major highways, protesting delays in the vote count and alleged fraud in last Tuesday’s balloting.

Demonstrators paralyzed cities across the country, from Cap-Haitien in the north to this impoverished seaside capital, where tens of thousands of people took to the streets to demand that Rene Preval — a former president and favorite of this city’s poor — be named president.

Haiti’s distinctive “tap-taps,” the colorfully painted trucks that ferry hundreds of thousands of passengers a day, were effectively stilled by roadblocks, set up by armed thugs demanding bribes, on the major arteries connecting cities.

In Port-au-Prince, at least one protester was killed, a luxury hotel was occupied by demonstrators and the international airport was closed. There were reports that U.N peacekeeping forces had shot into the crowds, but U.N. officials here said they had fired only into the air.

U.N. troops did not intervene when a boisterous crowd burst into the Montana Hotel, where election results were being prepared, and ran through the halls and jumped into the pool.

Hoping to quell the unrest, Preval — who is far ahead of all rivals with 90 percent of votes counted — flew to the capital late Monday on a U.N. helicopter from his home town in a remote mountain village. Preval had urged calm in recent days, but he had also stoked emotions among followers by accusing Haiti’s electoral commission of lowering his vote total to force him into a runoff and by mockingly singing, “They’re stealing our votes,” on his porch.

“We have questions about the electoral process,” Preval told reporters late Monday after meeting with the top U.N. official in Haiti and ambassadors from the United States, France, Canada and Brazil. “We want to see how we can save the process.”
washingtonpost.com

As Haiti intrudes again on the U.S. consciousness with a new round of troubled elections, Americans see a violent, backward, poverty-stricken country run by descendants of African slaves. There are feelings of condescension mixed with a touch of racism.

But what few Americans know is that they owe this Caribbean nation a profound historical debt. Indeed, perhaps no nation has done more for the United States than Haiti and been treated as badly in return.

If not for Haiti – which in the 1700s rivaled the American colonies as the most valuable European possession in the Western Hemisphere – the course of U.S. history would have been very different. It is possible that the United States might never have expanded much beyond the Appalachian Mountains.
consortiumnews.com

The response to Hurricane Katrina was “a national failure” and “an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare”, according to details from the first of three anticipated reports into the disaster, published yesterday.

The report, by a committee of Republicans in the House of Representatives, declared that “all the little pigs built houses of straw”.

The report, entitled A Failure of Initiative, is due to be published on Wednesday. It criticises the homeland security chief, Michael Chertoff, saying his detachment from events led him to implement federal emergency response measures “late, ineffectively or not at all”.

It finds that President George Bush was the one person who could have cut through the bureaucratic paralysis crippling the federal response to last summer’s hurricane. “Earlier presidential involvement could have speeded the response,” it says.

It adds that the White House did not “substantiate, analyse and act on the information at its disposal”. It also questions why the “untrained” Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) chief, Michael Brown, was selected to lead the response to the disaster, noting that he and the US military set up rival chains of command.
guardian.co.uk

Mainstream press left out the role played by black communities

“They are focusing on how many slaves the Church owned, what properties the Church owned and how many slaves it owned, reducing the role of Christianity in the chattel enslavement of Africans
Dr William Lez Henry, Sociologist and Cultural Historian”

Reports last week in the mainstream press made quite a meal of the Church of England (C of E) apology over its participation in what Europeans refer to as ‘The Transatlantic Slave Trade.’

Using emotional quotes from Archbishop Rowan Williams referring to “the shame and the sinfulness of our predecessors” and its “repentance and apology” not being “words alone”; once again the British establishment has tried to claim the moral high ground on the issue of ‘The African Holocaust.’

Nowhere in any of the news reports the mainstream media offered up was there any mention of the involvement of reparations movements, campaign groups and church leaders from the black communities.

Black Britain learnt from Kofi Mawuli Klu, joint co-ordinator of Rendezvous of Victory (ROV) an anti-slavery, African led abolitionist heritage organisation, of the events that led to the C of E’s apology.

He explained that after the ROV’s People’s University of Lifelong Learning launch in 2004, (the year that the United Nations designated as the International Year for the Commemoration of the Struggle against Slavery) supported by Home Office Minister Fiona Mc Taggart; the C of E invited ROV to be part of a working group for its 2007 project.

Mawuli Klu then became part of the Executive of the Working Committee established by representatives of church groups. Anti-Slavery International (ASI) was also brought on board. He told black Britain:

“ROV was there as an African led community organisation so that the views of black communities could be fed into the discussions and debates.”

According to Mawuli Klu, the first meetings revealed that: “The only people the Church of England seemed to know about were: William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, John Newton and all the white abolitionists.”
blackbritain.co.uk

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) – U.S. missionaries accused by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez of espionage have been forced from their remote outposts among jungle tribes by a government order, the final pair leaving Thursday after years of evangelical work.

The New Tribes Mission flew those two out of the rain forest to regroup with other missionaries in the eastern city of Puerto Ordaz. There they will decide what to do next: leave the country or continue with a legal battle seeking to overturn the government’s order to expel them from indigenous areas by Sunday.

Most of the group’s missionaries are Americans.
guardian.co.uk

Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, promised to strengthen military ties with north Africa yesterday in a visit that highlighted the growing importance of the region in Washington’s battle against radical Islamists.

Mr Rumsfeld told authorities in Algiers that he wanted to increase military and counter-terrorism cooperation with them. Pentagon officials admitted that arms sales were a possibility.

“We look forward to strengthening our military-to-military relationship and our cooperation in counter-terrorism,” Mr Rumsfeld said during a joint appearance with Algeria’s president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika. In what officials said was the first ever visit by a US defence secretary to Algeria, Mr Rumsfeld avoided saying whether future cooperation was dependent on political reforms.
guardian.co.uk

Thawra Youssef is familiar with this aspect of Iraqi history. She grew up in a Basra neighborhood called Hakaka, where many of the dark-skinned people lived at the time of the rebellion. Her mother, who worked as a maid in the homes of one of the wealthiest lightskinned families in Basra, told her that her family came from Kenya and that their family had arrived in Iraq through slavery.

“Our whole family used to talk about how our roots are from Africa,” says Youssef, who straightens her tightly curled hair and wears it in a soft bouffant. Sometimes she will drape a see through black scarf over her head when she steps out into town.

Youssef, a graduate student at Baghdad University’s College of Fine Arts, is writing a dissertation about African-inspired healing ceremonies that she says are held exclusively within the Black community where she grew up.

For the past two years she has researched the ceremonies, which were orally passed down and are held to cure the sick, the shtanga, and one called Nouba, which takes its name from the Nubian region in the Sudan. There are also ceremonies for happy occasions, such as weddings, and to remember the dead.
24hourscholar.com

…How many citizens have any real idea of what the Enlightenment really was? French philosophers did take humanity forward by recognising no external authority of any kind, but there was a darker side. Voltaire: “Blacks are inferior to Europeans, but superior to apes.” Hume: “The black might develop certain attributes of human beings, the way the parrot manages to speak a few words.” There is much more in a similar vein from their colleagues. It is this aspect of the Enlightenment that appears to be more in tune with some of the generalised anti-Muslim ravings in the media.

What I find interesting is that these demonstrations and embassy-burnings are a response to a tasteless cartoon. Did the Danish imam who travelled round the Muslim world pleading for this show the same anger at Danish troops being sent to Iraq? The occupation of Iraq has costs tens of thousands of Iraqi lives. Where is the response to that or the tortures in Abu Ghraib? Or the rapes of Iraqi women by occupying soldiers? Where is the response to the daily deaths of Palestinians? These are the issues that anger me. Last year Afghans protested after a US marine in Guantánamo had urinated on the Qur’an. It was a vile act and there was an official inquiry. The marine in question explained that he had been urinating on a prisoner and a few drops had fallen accidentally on the Qur’an – as if pissing on a prisoner (an old imperial habit) was somehow more acceptable.

Yesterday, footage of British soldiers brutalising and abusing civilians in Iraq – beating teenagers with batons until they pass out, posing for the camera as they kick corpses – was made public. No one can seriously imagine these are the isolated incidents the Ministry of Defence claims; they are of course the norm under colonial occupations. Who will protest now – the media pundits defending the Enlightenment or Muslim clerics frothing over the cartoons?
guardian.co.uk