Panic and retaliation among progressive Democrats over Green challenges are behind HR 4694, say Greens, citing the bill’s prohibitive petition requirements, ban on private contributions; Greens call the bill patently unconstitutional.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Green Party leaders called on Congress to reject a House bill that combines public funding of congressional campaigns with a scheme to ban third party and independents from such races.

HR 4694 (“Let the People Decide Clean Campaign Act”) would grant nominees of parties (i.e., Democrats and Republicans) that had averaged 25% of the vote for House races in a given district in the last two elections would get full public funding.
gp.org

…By 2007, the Army projects it will be short 3,500 active-duty officers, primarily captains and majors — positions that are needed for new combat brigades and other units that are critical to plans for expanding and reorganizing the nation’s ground forces. One factor in the shortfall is that the Army took in too few officers in the 1990s, personnel officials say.

…In another sign of the pressing demand for officers, the Army is recalling hundreds of officers who had returned to civilian life but who are still subject to call-up, sparking protests from some who have already served in Iraq and now face more than a year of extended war-zone duty.
washingtonpost.com

MILWAUKEE — One woman here killed a friend after they argued over a brown silk dress. A man killed a neighbor whose 10-year-old son had mistakenly used his dish soap. Two men argued over a cellphone, and pulling out their guns, the police say, killed a 13-year-old girl in the crossfire.

While violent crime has been at historic lows nationwide and in cities like New York, Miami and Los Angeles, it is rising sharply here and in many other places across the country.

And while such crime in the 1990’s was characterized by battles over gangs and drug turf, the police say the current rise in homicides has been set off by something more bewildering: petty disputes that hardly seem the stuff of fistfights, much less gunfire or stabbings.

…Police Chief Nannette H. Hegerty of Milwaukee calls it “the rage thing.”

…The police say the suspects and the victims tend to be black, young — midteens to mid-20’s — and have previous criminal records. They tend to know each other. Several cities said that domestic violence had also risen. And the murders tend to be limited to particular neighborhoods. Downtown Milwaukee has not had a homicide in about five years, but in largely black neighborhoods on the north side, murders rose from 57 in 2004 to 94 last year.

…The neighborhoods with the most murders tend to be the poorest. In Milwaukee, Mallory O’Brien, an epidemiologist brought in to direct the new homicide review commission, said suspects and victims tend to have been born to teenage mothers. The city has one of the nation’s highest teen pregnancy rates for blacks, and among black men, one of the lowest high school graduation rates. An industrial base that used to provide jobs for those without a high school diploma has shrunk.
nytimes.com

Canaries in the coal mine, the morst vulnerable people most impacted by disastrous policies at home and abroad. A feature of the discourse about this is never making the connection with rampant militarism, and most certainly never with a shameful history and the present reality of racism. Black boys are full of rage? Go figure.

Latest interim results in Haiti’s election suggest the presidential race will go to a second, run-off round.

Former President Rene Preval, a one-time ally of ousted leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide, is now polling 50.2% with half the votes counted.

Mr Preval needs at least 50% to avoid a run-off. His supporters are alleging fraud after seeing his share drop from more than 60% in first results issued.

But international observers say the poll was free and fair.

Another ex-leader, Leslie Manigat, has 11.4%, while industrialist Charles Henry Baker has 8.3%, latest results show.

The country – the poorest in the Americas – is choosing a 129-member parliament as well as a new president.

The election process has so far been peaceful but the news of a possible second round could bring fresh instability, says the BBC’s Claire Marshall in the capital, Port-au-Prince.

“We all voted for Preval. I really hope there isn’t a second round because it will mean the election results were fiddled with and there will be trouble,” one woman in an impoverished slum, where Preval enjoys strong support, told the BBC.

Charles Henry Baker has also alleged fraud, claiming some people were allowed to vote more than once because voter lists were not followed.

International observers say there were some minor procedural irregularities during Tuesday’s voting but have deemed the election free and fair.

The US State Department has also declared the voting process free from fraud.

“The key here is that there is a high turnout. The Haitian people invested in this election process,” state department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

However, in an implicit warning to Mr Preval – who once had strong links with Mr Aristide – the spokesman said the US expects the deposed leader to remain in exile in South Africa.
bbc.co.uk

and a few hours previous:

Hope grows for Haiti peace as Preval nears election victory
Rene Preval, the former close ally of the exiled President Aristide, appeared to be heading for a convincing victory in the Haitian presidential elections yesterday. While counting continues in the election, which took place on Tuesday, officials and rival candidates agreed that Mr Preval was virtually certain to top the poll.

Early returns indicated that Mr Preval, a former president and prime minister, was on 61% with his nearest rival, Leslie Manigat, on 15%. Charlito Baker, a rightwing businessman who has waged the most aggressively anti-Preval campaign, had around 5% of the vote. There are 32 candidates, and Mr Preval has to win more than 50% of the total votes in order to avoid a run-off on March 19. A clear result is expected at the weekend.

Unreal, the way this sh** goes down right before our eyes.

…Most of the promised development projects, like schools, roads and electricity supplies, have failed to materialise. Instead, they say, their land and water have been polluted by oil spills and their air ruined by the constant burning-off of natural gas.

There is an apocryphal story often told about the origin of the disquiet in the Delta.

In the 1990s the then military ruler, Sani Abacha, invited people from the Delta to the new purpose-built capital, Abuja.

When they saw its huge, well-ordered roads, bridges and high-rise buildings, they realised what the oil money could do, and how little of it they saw.

And so the trouble began.
bbc.co.uk

…Mrs. King and her late husband, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., were renowned proponents of nonviolence and racial and economic justice. They had close ties to peace and social action organizations. Mrs. King was a fixture at antiwar rallies. She was a dignified and reserved public figure, yes; a shrinking violet, no. To recall, she was arrested here in Washington at the South African Embassy in an anti-apartheid protest.

So it should have come as no surprise that during a six-hour funeral for a woman whose life was dedicated to the civil rights and peace movements — and on a program with more than 35 participants — a few would have something to say about racism, the futility of war, and military spending when it trumps the needs of the poor. That the outspoken critics happen to have been a preacher, an ex-president and a mayor, and that they did it in the presence of a sitting president, is hardly the outrageous act that conservative pundits have made it out to be.
washingtonpost.com

Michael Brown, head of the federal disaster agency at the time of Hurricane Katrina, has reopened a painful wound for President George Bush, charging that the White House knew New Orleans’ protective levees had broken far earlier than it had acknowledged.

Testifying to a Senate committee yesterday, Mr Brown said that by the evening of Monday 29 August, his Fema agency had reported to superiors that catastrophic floodwaters were pouring into the city, that fires were breaking out and large numbers of people were stranded.

Conditions, a Fema message said that evening, were “far more serious” than media reports suggested. Nonetheless the following morning, Mr Bush told the country from his ranch in Texas that New Orleans had “dodged the bullet”.
independent.co.uk

Pensacola FLA: Officials are investigating the death of a 14-year-old boy allegedly brutally beaten by guards at a young offenders’ “boot camp” hours before he died. A video apparently shows the guards punching, kicking and choking the boy after he became unco-operative during a work-out session.

…Frank McKeithen, the Bay County Sheriff, said politicians over-reacted and made “inaccurate statements”. But the boy’s mother, Gina Jones, demanded to see the video, saying her son’s organs were so damaged they could not be donated.The boy was sent to the camp after being arrested for joy-riding in his grandmother’s car. She did not want to press charges. The results of a post-mortem examination have not been released.
independent.co.uk

It is not often that the left agrees with Tony Blair, let alone George Bush. But the good sense the two leaders have shown in the Danish cartoons affair by siding with leftwing and liberal critics of the offensive drawings’ publication is one of the more remarkable aspects of the drama. The Bush-Blair position is a useful antidote to those who claim that fear is stalking the offices of western newspapers, where cowardly executives allegedly shrink from publishing anything that might upset Muslims. Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, which first printed the unfunny cartoons, says he wanted to break away from Denmark’s “self-censorship” in the face of Islam. Other European papers that followed suit boasted of courage.

They will find it hard to claim that the men who sent ground troops into one of the oldest capital cities of the Arab world, and still keep them there on an open-ended basis in spite of opposition from a majority of Iraqis, are afraid to upset Muslims. Nor can one seriously argue that Bush is now trying to appease the Islamic world after “learning a lesson” from Iraq. He continues to inflame many Muslims with his sabre-rattling over Iran.

The fact is that on the cartoon issue the great neocon and his ideological advisers were pragmatic and smart enough to see that the drawings were in poor taste, deliberately provocative and grotesquely inaccurate in suggesting that every Muslim is a murderous would-be martyr and, worse still, that the Qur’an advocates suicide bombing.

Bush’s reaction shows that Americans have a better understanding of multiculturalism than most Europeans.
guardian.co.uk

Oh I very highly doubt it: this is what they call in the biz ‘good cop
bad cop.’ The essential cluelessness on both sides of the pond is the same.

Israel has accused Russia of stabbing it in the back after President Vladimir Putin invited Hamas leaders to visit Moscow as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people after the Islamic group’s election landslide last month.

The Russian government responded by saying that all the big powers would inevitably have to talk to Hamas if they wanted to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict.
guardian.co.uk

Architects threaten to boycott Israel over ‘apartheid’ barrier
A group including some of Britain’s most prominent architects is considering calling for an economic boycott of Israel’s construction industry in protest at the building of Israeli settlements and the separation barrier in the Occupied Territories.

Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine, whose members include Richard Rogers and the architectural critic Charles Jenckes, met for the first time last week in secret at the London headquarters of Lord Rogers’ practice. He introduced the meeting, and the 60 attendees went on to condemn the illegal annexation of Palestinian land and the construction of the vast fence and concrete separation barrier running through the West Bank and Jerusalem.

The group said that architects, planners and engineers working on Israeli projects in the occupied territories were “complicit in social, political and economic oppression”, and “in violation of their professional code of ethics”.

It said that: “Planning, architecture and other construction disciplines are being used to promote an apartheid system of environmental control.”