SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (Reuters) – A U.S. free trade pact with Central America, already delayed by a legal wrangle, has run into further trouble at presidential elections in Costa Rica where voters punished the main pro-trade candidate.

Costa Rica’s electoral board began a recount on Tuesday of the vote from the weekend, which ended with a near dead heat despite opinion polls showing free trade advocate Oscar Arias would win easily.

Arias, a former president who strongly backs the U.S.-Central American Free Agreement, or CAFTA, won just over 40 percent of votes on Sunday, on a par with main rival Otton Solis who wants to renegotiate the deal.

A winner should be announced in two weeks. If it turns out that no candidate garners minimum support of more than 40 percent, a new round of voting will be held on April 2.

“Even if Arias wins, it is still bad news for CAFTA because Costa Ricans said, ‘Hold on, this is something we have to look at,'” said Michael Lettieri of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs think tank in Washington.
reuters.com

Evo Morales is just an inspirational symbol for his people? Think again. Bolivia’s first Indian president has shown political acuity in his early days in office, skillfully maneuvering and sticking to his radical program for transforming the country while keeping adversaries at home and abroad at bay.

On Feb. 6, just 15 days after his inauguration, Morales called for the mobilization of the country’s peasant organizations to shield his government against efforts by “some transnational corporations” to destabilize the country to stop the “nationalization” of energy resources. The plot, he said, had been detected by the armed forces.

A day after swearing in, Morales shook up the Bolivian high command by choosing a low-ranking general to head the military, effectively forcing higher-ranking generals to resign. The move was a key move, as the Bolivian armed forces have a long history of intervening in Bolivian politics.

Morales also called on peasant and other popular organizations to rally behind his call for the election of a constituent assembly in early July, to draft a new constituent for Bolivia. “The oligarchs,” he said, “should not be given time to breathe” as the country tries to reshape its basic institutions.
counterpunch.org

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil – While the world community scrutinizes Iran’s nuclear plans, Latin America’s biggest country is weeks away from taking a controversial step and firing up the region’s first major uranium enrichment plant.

That move will make Brazil the ninth country to produce large amounts of enriched uranium, which can be used to generate nuclear energy and, when highly enriched, to make nuclear weapons.

Brazilians, who have long nurtured hopes of becoming a world superpower, are reacting with pride to the new facility in Resende, about 70 miles from Rio de Janeiro.
realcities.com

…Via Fox, the Bush Regime streams steady doses of its “opiate to the masses” via a distribution network reaching 85 million cable subscribers. Fox and most other mainstream media entities are the syringes mainlining the mind-altering, psychosis-inducing propaganda munificently showered upon Americans by the Party. Social Darwinists comprising the Party, including major corporate shareholders and executives, Israeli interests, the military industrial complex, plutocrats, the power players of the Religious Right, and intellectual elites hold the Great Beast (us “commoners”) at bay with a powerfully addictive state of being called the American Dream.

It is indeed a Brave New World. As many Americans somnambulate through their existence, they are virtually oblivious and indifferent to the profound human misery which must occur in order for a tiny fraction of humanity to experience the American Dream. When (or if) their Soma fix finally wears off, I suspect they will be ready to chew off their own arms to escape the disease-ridden whores with whom they have unwittingly climbed into bed. Mirroring Hitler’s Germany, this nation of “decent, God-fearing” people is pledging allegiance to a murderous regime. Are the comfort of conformity and the safety of loyalty to the Empire worth the price of one’s soul?

America’s ruling class has created a scintillating facade to hide its dystopia, assuring the Great Beast that we all have the right and the means to attain the looks of a Victoria’s Secret model, the money of a Donald Trump, and the athletic ability of a Michael Vick. Infomercials, work from home schemes, plastic surgery, hypnosis, and myriad other avenues to instant success and immediate gratification abound amongst the virtually infinite number of hollow pursuits littering the spiritually barren landscape of the United States. Those who fall short of the “American ideal” simply need to continue upping their dose American Soma. If that fails and they fall victim to the ravages of unbridled addiction, spiritual emptiness, poverty, despair, self-hatred, or anorexia, they can simply end their misery with a drug overdose or a shotgun blast to the face. America’s predator class, the pushers of the opiate of the masses, is not concerned with the suffering they inflict. In their zeal to appease the triumvirate they worship (power, money, and narcissistic desires), the “chosen ones” of our society do not hesitate to sacrifice the rights, dignity, sanity and even lives of hundreds of millions of innocent human beings. After all, if they come from amongst the rabble of the Great Beast, how can they be truly human and why would their anguish or death matter?
axisoflogic.com

WASHINGTON, Feb. 10 — Thousands of applicants for federal emergency relief money after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita used duplicate or invalid Social Security numbers or bogus addresses, suggesting that the $2.3 billion program was a victim of extensive fraud, a Congressional auditor will report Monday.

The examination of the so-called Expedited Assistance program determined that the Federal Emergency Management Agency failed to take even the most basic steps to confirm the identifies of about 1.4 million people who sought expedited cash assistance, leaving the program vulnerable to the “significant fraud and abuse,” the Government Accountability Office intends to report.

The auditors did not try to estimate the total dollar amount of fraudulent claims. But the report says that FEMA itself had found that 900,000 of the 2.5 million applications for all forms of individual assistance were “potential duplicates.”

Even when FEMA’s automated computer system picked out what might be fraudulent applications, payments were at times still sent, says the advance testimony of Gregory D. Kutz, the managing director of the G.A.O.’s forensic audits unit.

The controls were so lax that auditors were able to secure their own $2,000 relief check by using “falsified identifies, bogus addresses and fabricated disaster stories,” and then simply waiting for the money to arrive in the mail, says the report for the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.
nytimes.com

The suggestion here is that a bunch of bad black people are scamming, but I’ll bet there is much more to this story than a bunch of duplicate $2000 checks.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) – The first Mardi Gras parade since Hurricane Katrina marched through the French Quarter pulling carts with blue tarps, effigies of Mayor Ray Nagin and Gov. Kathleen Blanco and floats with themes such as “Give Me That Mold Time Religion.”

The Krewe du Vieux lampooned Katrina and public officials blamed for the bungled response to the catastrophe in their parade Saturday themed “C’est Levee,” a play on the French phrase meaning “that’s life.”

Mardi Gras has long been an occasion for the city to laugh at tragedy and aim barbs at authorities. Given all the pain New Orleans has suffered in the past year, the irreverence should reach new heights this season.

“It is hard living here now. We need to have our opportunity to release,” said organizer Keith Twitchell. “If you don’t laugh, you’re dead. There’s a lot to cry about here.”

One display asked France to buy Louisiana back, suggesting the state might get better treatment than it has from the American government. Another float was themed “Fridge Over Troubled Water.” In place of a parade map, the Krewe du Vieux had a “projected path” adorned with a swirly hurricane symbol.

Still, in the midst of revelry and satire, even the city known as the Big Easy has a serious side.

The Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club, a 90-year-old historically black group that holds one of the city’s most beloved parades, held a service and lit 10 candles in honor of club members who have died since the storm. An eleventh was lit to honor the hundreds of people killed by Katrina.

Mardi Gras parades typically run on weekends leading up to and on Mardi Gras, which falls on Feb. 28 this year, almost exactly six months after the Aug. 29 storm. The parades are put on by private clubs across the city; Krewe du Vieux is a smaller French Quarter parade that runs in advance of the major parades.

Masked riders in the parades have long used the opportunity to mock the ruling class and government officials, said Mardi Gras expert Arthur Hardy. The tradition goes back to 1873, when the Mistick Krewe of Comus themed its parade “The Missing Links to Darwin’s Origin of the Species” and portrayed Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant as a tobacco grub.

Hardy said the satire serves as a coping mechanism.

“It’s almost like you laugh to keep from crying. It’s a chance to say ‘This can’t keep us down,”’ he said.

Even groups that are typically less tongue-in-cheek are taking swipes at the storm and politicians this year.

The Krewe of Carrollton, which holds its parade on Feb. 19, chose the theme “Blue Roof Blues” – a reference to the tarps protecting damaged and leaky roofs. The Krewe of Mid-City will use blue tarps along the bottom of its floats – in part out of necessity because of flooding at its warehouse.

The Mid-City parade, scheduled for Feb. 26, will have floats called “New Orleans Culture” – that’s culture as in mold – and “I drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was gone,” a bitter twist on the line from Don McLean’s “American Pie.”
guardian.co.uk

This goes a lot deeper than some release mechanism. The roots of Carnival and Mardi Gras are in African ‘spirituality’, and point to its particular strength as a tradition that is responsive to lived reality. There is a reason that Haitian ‘voudou’ (as one example) is indestructible:it is in many aspects an ongoing conversation with and about Haiti’s brutal history, and provides not simply a mechanism for coping with tragedy,but is a taproot that links people in this hemisphere back to the most ancient truths. ‘Religion’ in its realest sense.

…Naomi gives a smile as she recounts how she found another church which took her in and sent her to Kinshasa. She has ended up in a hostel run by War Child. She is lucky. Tens of thousands of children live in the cemeteries, markets and streets of Kinshasa feeding on rubbish, begging and stealing. Most are there because of witchcraft accusations – mostly from their own families. The phenomenon is spreading, with recent cases of child abuse motivated by the belief that the child is possessed by evil spirits, showing up in London, Paris and Amsterdam.

I found Nelphy Lelu, a lanky 14-year-old, in another Kinshasa hostel. He has British citizenship and until recently he went to New Rush Hall School in Hainault, north-east London, and speaks with a soft London accent. He dreamt a man in black was trying to kill him and told his mother, who took him to a church in Tottenham, where the pastor declared him to be a witch. His mother beat him and he was taken into care before his mother brought him to Kinshasa. There he was sent to his grandmother, where the beatings continued.

As Congolese society has disintegrated, undermined by the country’s rulers and ravaged by Aids and poverty, the family has collapsed. Children have been the main victims, often accused of witchcraft when families suffer misfortunes.
guardian.co.uk

This article fails to mention that this witchcraft scare originated in evangelical churches in Congo. Just another of the countless rotten fruits of the European, and mainly British (until recently) “Christianizing mission.” Churches demonize children and then take them in to ‘save’ them. Some sick sh**.

“We are being challenged by Islam these years – globally as well as locally. It is a challenge we have to take seriously. We have let this issue float about for too long because we are tolerant and lazy. We have to show our opposition to Islam and we have to, at times, run the risk of having unflattering labels placed on us because there are some things for which we should display no tolerance. And when we are tolerant, we must know whether it is because of convenience or conviction”.
– Queen Margrethe II of
Denmark, 15 April 2005

Tolerance is a falsehood often pronounced with difficulty in all of Western societies. Small countries such as Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, and Sweden are leading the pack in the war on Muslims at home, and may be on the road to encouraging a new Holocaust against humanity.

While these countries are part of the U.S.-led coalition, which is responsible for the mass murder of Iraqis, they have also introduced discriminate and draconian immigration laws which are specifically directed against Muslims fleeing war and economic hardship. The pretexts are always the phantom of the “War on Terror”.

Historically, Muslims have been at the receiving end of Western-Christian violence for centuries. Following the 9/11 attack on the USA, Western Europe joined the U.S. in its anti-Muslim crusade: “We are all Americans now” united against Muslims. Although, 9/11 stills a mystery, it is used to legitimise a new form of Western-Christian fascism. Media pundits such as Christopher Hitchens and Daniele Pipes, who support the anti-Muslim ideology, are springing up like mushrooms all over the Western world. Using the cliché of “free speech”, they are fuelling a vicious and violent war against Muslims around the world.
axisoflogic.com

PATNA: Her frail frame disguises the steel within, which not only saw her tame the abusive men folk who battered their wives after getting drunk but also earned her a opportunity to address a United Nations meet in faraway New York.

For Girija Devi, 59, a Dalit Mushar (rat-eating caste) woman from the dingy Bhirkhia-Chipulia village, about 30 km from Motihari, the headquarters of Bihar’s East Champaran district, it will be a long journey to New York where she will address the 15th session of the UN’s division of advancement of woman and department of economic and social affairs later this month–in Bhojpuri.
newindpress.com

And what about political rights for all Dalit people?

NEW DELHI: Seven political parties, including CPI, CPI(M) And Samajwadi Party, on Friday decided to oppose the forthcoming visit of US President George W Bush to the country.

“Under President Bush, the US continues to occupy Iraq and oppress its people. It threatens Syria and has targeted Iran on the issue of its nuclear programme. It backs the naked oppression of the Palestinian people by Israel.

“He is certainly not welcome in India,” a joint statement of CPI, CPI(M), RSP, AIFB, CPI(ML) Liberation, JD(S) and SP said after a decision in this regard was taken at a meeting on Thursday.

“We have constituted a broad-based committee against Bush’s visit and decided to organise under its banner a massive peoples march and rally to protest against his visit,” it said, calling the American leader an “enemy of sovereign nations”.
newindpress.com