PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – A spokesman for former Haitian President Rene Preval said Wednesday that unconfirmed early results showed him with a wide lead in the country’s presidential race — even though many ballots were still being carried in from remote polling places by plane, truck and mule.

The claim from Preval’s team could not be verified, and the first official results were not expected to be released until Thursday, said Jacques Bernard, director general of Haiti’s electoral council. Final results could come on Friday or Saturday, he said.

Tuesday’s elections were the first since the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted in a bloody revolt two years ago, and officials said collecting and tabulating the results would take several days.

But some polling stations posted unconfirmed local results outside. These showed strong early support for Preval, a shy and soft-spoken 63-year-old agronomist widely supported by Haiti’s poor masses.

At a large polling center near the huge slum of Cite Soleil, unconfirmed results taped to large columns inside showed Preval winning about 90 percent of the votes cast there.

Across the capital in Petionville, home to many of Haiti’s wealthiest citizens as well the poor Haitians who serve them, Preval took slightly more than 70 percent of the vote at another polling station, according to posted results.

Preval’s political adviser, Bob Manuel, said preliminary calculations show the former president having won 67 percent of the nationwide vote, with 16 percent of votes counted.

Preval himself was in his rural hometown of Marmelade and wasn’t speaking to reporters. He emerged from his family home once, briefly dancing along to a band playing outside and waving to supporters.

Bernard said only a small percentage of balloting results had reached the capital, slowing the vote count. “By Friday night or Saturday noon, we will have a clear idea of the results of the election,” he told reporters

Haitians eagerly awaited the first returns Wednesday as scores of U.N. peacekeepers patrolled quiet streets in the capital, Port-au-Prince. Tuesday’s voting, guarded by a 9,000-strong U.N. force, was fraught with early delays but largely free of the violence that has plagued the capital since Aristide fled.

The leading contender among the 33 presidential candidates was Preval, the only elected leader in Haitian history to finish his term. He is also a former ally of Aristide, who remains in exile in South Africa.
yahoo.com

Going to Great Lengths to Vote in Haiti
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Haitians wearied by spiraling unrest and gang violence turned out in huge numbers Tuesday to choose a new president and parliament and perhaps put their impoverished Caribbean homeland on the path to some prosperity and peace.

Clutching her newly printed voter identification card, Marie Vincent, 20, a resident of Cite Soleil, the Haitian capital’s most notorious slum, arrived at her polling station at 3:30 a.m., 2 1/2 hours before it was scheduled to open. Late in the morning, she was still waiting.

“I’m ready to spend the entire day here,” Vincent said. “Because we want change in the country.”

“We have tens of thousands of people outside some polling stations. Huge numbers,” said David Wimhurst, a spokesman for the United Nations, which provided security and technical aid for the election.

With the State Department’s unwarranted recent expulsion of Venezuelan diplomat Jeny Figueredo from her post as second-in-command of that country’s Washington’s embassy, its conflict with Caracas has reached its most stressful phase yet. Building on a diplomatic tug of war over a widening range of issues, including Washington’s efforts to frustrate the Chávez government’s desire to purchase upgraded military equipment for its modestly equipped armed forces, the quid-pro-quo expulsion of the Venezuelan official was just one more instance where the Bush administration calculatedly poured salt on the deepening wound affecting the two nations’ relations. This step followed Venezuela’s public accusation that U.S. naval attaché John Correa was engaged in espionage, which led to his ejection from the country (Venezuela had no reason to invent this claim and Washington, every reason to deny it). The scorched earth diplomacy with which Washington responded, made certain that Washington’s strategy was more that just one more hostile sortie against an admittedly abrasive Chávez. Hemispheric public opinion now deserves to be sharply focused on the expulsion issue as an example of using diplomacy to worsen, rather than improve, relations between the two growing antagonists.
coha.org

BOGOTA, Colombia — A founder of Colombia’s anti-rebel paramilitary movement laid down his weapon Tuesday, ending nearly three decades of outlawed jungle warfare.

Ramon Isaza was joined by 990 fighters from his Medio Magdalena bloc of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, handing over 754 weapons, 15 vehicles and abundant munitions.

The ceremony in Puerto Triunfo, 90 miles northwest of Bogota, brings to more than 22,000 the number of right-wing fighters to demobilize under a peace deal between the AUC and the government, Peace Commissioner Luis Carlos Restrepo said in a statement.

In exchange for promising to never again take up arms, each rank-and-file fighter will receive a monthly stipend of about $180 and amnesty from prosecution for rebellion and other crimes. AUC leaders such as Isaza will serve a maximum of eight years in jail if found guilty of any heinous crimes, including massacres.
latimes.com

t the World Bank, they are sometimes referred to as “the entourage,” “the palace guard,” or “the circle of trust,” because of their close relationship with bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz. They are Americans with ties to the Bush administration, and the immense clout they wield has sparked a furor in the ranks of the giant development leader.

Their roles have rekindled fears among the staff that Wolfowitz, the former U.S. deputy defense secretary, is bent on imposing a conservative agenda on the bank. Wolfowitz has repeatedly sought to dispel such concerns since he became bank president in June. He has pledged his commitment to the bank’s mission of alleviating poverty, and his unassuming manner has charmed many staffers who were averse to his role as a chief strategist of the U.S.-Iraq war.

But after months of seeming tranquillity, the bank is stewing with discontent over Wolfowitz’s choice of several confidantes with administration or Republican connections to serve in key bank posts. The most influential is Robin Cleveland, who worked closely with Wolfowitz when she was a senior official at the Office of Management and Budget and is now his top adviser. Two others are Kevin S. Kellems, a former spokesman for Vice President Cheney who last month became the bank’s chief communications strategist; and Suzanne Rich Folsom, a former Republican activist named last month to head the Department of Institutional Integrity, the bank’s internal watchdog unit. Kellems also holds the title of senior adviser to the president, and Folsom has the title of counselor to the president.
washingtonpost.com

Kurt Nimmo
As suspected, and claimed on this blog over the weekend, the inflammatory anti-Muslim cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten were a deliberate provocation designed to outrage and incite Muslims and thus engender support in Europe and America for the manufactured “clash of civilizations” engineered by the Straussian neocons. As Christopher Bollyn writes for the American Free Press, the neocon operative behind the cartoon scheme is Flemming Rose, cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, who has “has clear ties to the Zionist Neo-Cons.” Rose “traveled to Philadelphia in October 2004 to visit Daniel Pipes, the Neo-Con ideologue who says the only path to Middle East peace will come through a total Israeli military victory. Rose then penned a positive article about Pipes, who compares ‘militant Islam’ with fascism and communism,” Bollyn reveals.
kurtnimmo.com

The acting Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said yesterday that he plans to annex the Jordan Valley and major Jewish settlement blocks to Israel in drawing new borders, according to a television station that recorded an interview with him yesterday.

In Mr Olmert’s first policy statement since he succeeded Ariel Sharon last month, Channel 2 television said that he made clear he intends to carry through his predecessor’s vision of creating an emasculated Palestinian state on Israel’s terms.
guardian.co.uk

Hamas sets out conditions for peace
The political leader of Hamas said today that he would only accept a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict if Israel withdraws to its pre-1967 borders and accepts the right of return of Palestinian refugees.
“When Israel says that it … will withdraw from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and grant the right of return, stop settlements and recognise the rights of the Palestinians to self-determination, only then Hamas will be ready to take a serious step,” Khaled Meshal told the BBC.

“There’s a problem that happened to the Palestinians. They were a people that used to live on their land, and did not find justice from the international community,” he said.

“There are roots to the problem, but in reality we now say that if Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, there could be peace and security in the region, and agreements between the sides, until the international community finds a way to solve everybody’s problems.”

Asked whether, if Israel “changed”, and was prepared to implement a two-state solution along the pre-1967 borders, Hamas would accept it, and live in peace alongside it, Mr Meshal said: “If Israel changes, come and ask me to change.”

Iran Greatest Threat, Most Americans Think
A new poll finds Americans now think Iran is the biggest threat to the U.S.

As recently as October, Iraq, China, and North Korea ranked as the most threatening.

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which did the poll, says among people who’ve been following recent news about Iran, there’s even greater concern.

President Bush has been warning about Tehran’s nuclear program, which also worries many other countries.

The UN Security Council is taking it up, which prompted Tehran to order UN surveillance gear and seals be removed.

The poll found two-thirds or more of Americans think if Iran develops nuclear weapons, it’s likely to attack Israel, Europe, or the U.S.
This is the level of discourse taking place in most of the country. It sounds like it’s written for third-graders, and indeed millions of Americans can’t read any better.

…But contrary to conventional wisdom in dominant media, Bush’s supposed super-candid “addicted to oil” statement was more about deception than frankness. This is for two reasons. The first one is simple: the U.S. imports just 20 percent of its petroleum from the Middle East, the obvious geographic meaning (though he may also have had Venezuela in mind) of Bush’s phrase “unstable parts of the world.”

The second reason is a bit more complex. When it comes to America, Iraq, oil, war, and world geography, the really honest and relevant point regarding U.S. policy is that Uncle Sam is addicted to global dominance and empire. That addiction and not any direct-use reliance on Persian Gulf petroleum is the real reason “we” are in Iraq (against the wishes of “our” own populace not to mention those of the Iraqis) and not likely to leave anytime soon.
zmag.org

The neo-liberal transformation of Iraq is portrayed as a humanitarian venture. Western corporations and occupying governments now talk of the liberation of Iraq from the “tyranny of Saddam’s planned economy”.

On the day that major hostilities were declared over, Tony Blair told the Iraqi people, “Saddam Hussein and his regime plundered your nation’s wealth. While many of you live in poverty, they have the lives of luxury. The money from Iraqi oil will be yours – to be used to build prosperity for you and your families.”

This has turned out to be another shameless lie. Saddam’s regime was undoubtedly corrupt, in the sense that he established a system of patronage and rewards for the elite that remained closest to him. But the scale and intensity of the corruption and fraud perpetrated by the occupation is unprecedented in modern history.

The largest part of the money spent by the US-British occupation was not US or international donor funds, but oil revenue that belongs to the Iraqi people. During the period of direct rule the US spent, or committed to spend, around £11.3 billion, most of which was disbursed to US corporations.

Of this expenditure, £5 billion is unaccounted for. From the available evidence we know that much of it has vanished into the hands of corporations, corrupt public officials and elite Iraqi deal fixers.
socialistworker.co.uk

Iraqi voices are drowned out in a blizzard of occupiers’ spin
The deception that launched the invasion of Iraq now increasingly shapes media coverage of the occupation.

Three years after invading Iraq, George Bush and Tony Blair are still dipping into the trough of deception and disinformation that launched the war: hailing non-existent progress, declaring sanctimonious satisfaction with sectarian elections and holding out the mirage of early withdrawal. In reality, the occupation and divide-and-rule tactics have spawned death squads, torture, kidnappings, chemical attacks, polluted water, depleted uranium, bombardment of civilians, probably more than 100,000 people dead and a relentless deterioration in Iraqis’ daily lives.

WASHINGTON – At least nine senators were among 200 people herded into a Capitol parking garage Wednesday night after a security sensor indicated the presence of a nerve agent in their office building. Later tests proved negative.

“Test results have been cleared and all test results are negative, so that’s very good news,” said Capitol Police Sgt. Kimberly Schneider.
yahoo.com