QUITO, Ecuador (Reuters) – Ecuadorean troops fired tear gas on Wednesday at protesters accused of holding 24 petroleum workers hostage to demand a share of the country’s oil wealth in demonstrations that shut one of country’s main oil pipelines.

Soldiers briefly shot tear gas canisters into a crowd who on Tuesday stormed the Sardina oil pumping station, 55 miles

east of Quito, according to an Ecuadorean military official and protesters.

Government negotiators were trying to revive talks with Napo province protesters in the latest challenge to hit embattled President Alfredo Palacio and strike at the 530,000 barrel-per-day output of Latin America’s No. 5 oil producer.
reuters.com

CHICAGO (AP) — Olympic gold medal speedskater Shani Davis is one of four plaintiffs suing the city of Chicago and former police superintendent Terry Hillard, claiming they were stopped and searched for illegal weapons because of their skin color.

Davis, Quincy Joyner and Damien Joyner filed a lawsuit on March 24, 2003. A fourth plaintiff, Damane Grier, was added to the lawsuit a few months later. All four are from Chicago and are black.

Harvey Grossman, the director of American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, said an inordinate number of blacks and Latinos are stopped on the street and searched for illegal weapons, and the organization wants police to document stops.

“We’ve been receiving complaints about this for years and years,” he said. “Why did you stop this person? State the reasonable suspicion you had. … And we also want that data to be stored, so you can see what an officer is doing over time.”
sports.yahoo.com

NEW ORLEANS, February 22, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Just after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans rumors circulated that at least one hospital had euthanized patients during the mayhem. LifeSiteNews.com reported in September 2005, that an unnamed doctor admitted to a UK newspaper that such activities had taken place at Memorial Medical Center. In October another doctor at the hospital confirmed in a CNN interview that he suspected such activities and admitted he left the hospital saying he would rather abandon patients than actively kill them. Later in October hospital workers were subpoenaed for an investigation.

National Public Radio now reports on its access to court documents in the case. In a February 16 report, NPR says it has reviewed secret court documents related to the investigation and not yet released to the public. The documents, says NPR “reveal chilling details about events at Memorial hospital in the chaotic days following the storm, including hospital administrators who saw a doctor filling syringes with painkillers and heard plans to give patients lethal doses. The witnesses also heard staff discussing the agonizing decision to end patients’ lives.”

The allegations revolve around a group of patients left on the seventh floor at Memorial Medical Center. This floor was leased to a different entity, LifeCare Hospitals. According to NPR, the patients on the seventh floor were all DNR patients — they had “do not resuscitate” orders.
lifesite.net

The jailing of Holocaust denier David Irving in Austria is a reminder of how easy it is to imitate evil even as one excoriates it. The law that convicted Irving is of the sort the Nazis would have invoked, albeit for far different purposes, and was a routine offense in Orwell’s 1984.

Many fail to see this irony because they are engaged in the greatest Holocaust denial of all: a refusal to look seriously at why there was a Holocaust in the first place. To blame it all on anti-Semitism is as dangerously ahistorical as to deny its existence. Yes, Jews were the victims, but why did an ancient and widespread prejudice produce such an extreme result in this case?

We avoid this question because it takes us places we don’t want to go. Like the role of modern bureaucracy and technology in the magnification of evil. Like the commingling of corporate and state interests in a way the world had never seen before. Like the failure of Germany’s liberal elite to stand effectively against wrong eerily echoed today in the failure of America’s liberal elite to do likewise.

Some of the most important lessons of the Holocaust are simply missed. Among these, as Richard Rubenstein has pointed out, is that it could only have been carried out by “an advanced political community with a highly trained, tightly disciplined police and civil service bureaucracy.
counterpunch.org

Iran offered to help finance the cash-strapped Palestinian Authority led by Hamas, a move that prompted an immediate warning from Israel, AFP reported.

The Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, announced the offer after a meeting with Hamas political leader, Khaled Mashaal, in Tehran, state radio reported.

Larijani said the decision was taken after the United States said it won’t finance a Hamas-led government. “The United States proved that it would not support democracy when it cut its aid to the Palestinian government after Hamas won the elections. We will certainly help the Palestinians,” Larijani said.

“Hamas is a genuine popular movement which has always pursued the objective of recovering the rights of the oppressed Palestinian people; but unfortunately the Americans have never paid any attention to this matter,”

The Americans‘ decision “to stop financial aid shows that they are not seeking to promote democracy in the region, contrary to their claims on the Middle East [road-map] proposal,” he added.

Asked if Israel would block the Iranian funds., Israel’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said: “we would be entitled to use all legal means to prevent that money from reaching its destination.”

Anti-Zionism jews pledge support for Hamas’ Haniyeh
Following Hamas’ announcement of appointing Ismail Haniyeh as the new Prime Minister of its government, Rabbi Hirsch, of the Neturei Karta of the Orthodox Jewry, sent the new PM a greeting message expressing the Jews’ support of the newly democratically elected Palestinian government led by Hamas, the Islamist anti-occupation movement that has a rich history of struggle for the welfare of the Palestinian population that has long suffered under the merciless occupation of the Israeli forces.

Neturei Karta has long rejected the bloody Zionist policy pursued by the Israeli government, the result of which was the killing and the suffering of thousands of innocent Palestinians, including women and children.

Neturei Karta stands as one of the strong anti-Zionism Jewish groups that support the Palestinians’ struggle to liberate their lands. It acknowledges that Zionism contradicts the original teachings and principles presented in the Holy Torah.

Palestinians Are Being Robbed by Israel
It is evidently difficult to scrub off the sticker that is glued onto the front window. That’s why when a new car from Germany or South Korea or the United States rolls onto the packed streets of Gaza or Ramallah, it generally has the big label with thick, red Hebrew letters forming the word “Checked” stuck on its windshield for several months.

The label is a mark of the special customs and security checks conducted at the Israeli seaports of Ashdod or Haifa, which serve as the main entrances for most of the foreign goods bound for the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians import all sorts of products: water pumps from Sweden, bulldozers and boxes of corn flakes from the United States, plastic toys from China, washing machines from France and cheese from Denmark — and virtually all of them reach their destinations only after they’ve been through Israeli port authorities and Israeli security checks.

At the ports, Palestinian importers are required to pay the Israeli authorities the value-added tax of 17%, as well as whatever custom taxes are due on goods that come in on their way to the West Bank or Gaza. These transactions (along with direct Palestinian transactions with Israeli firms and merchants) last year yielded revenues of $711 million.

But whose revenues are they?

The enormity of the problems in tackling Afghanistan’s massive opium crop has become apparent as the first wave of British troops are deployed in one of the most dangerous parts of the country.

British Government ministers had repeatedly declared that one of the primary tasks of the 5,700- strong expeditionary force was to help end Afghan heroin production, which supplies 90 per cent of the narcotic in Britain. But the commander of the British forces in southern Iraq insisted yesterday that his troops would play no part in destroying poppy fields, while senior British civil servants cautioned that ending cultivation may take years.
independent.co.uk

2 killed, 14 injured in bomb explosion in Afghanistan

Of the 98 deaths, at least 34 were suspected or confirmed homicides that were “caused by intentional or reckless behavior”, the U.S. human rights group says.

According to the report, 11 more deaths are deemed suspicious and that between eight and 12 detainees were tortured to death. In once case, a prisoner was forced to jump off a bridge into Iraq’s Tigris river and another was pushed inside a sleeping bad and suffocated.
aljazeera.com

So the Bush White House, with Tom Tancredo oddly in tow, wants to sell public land throughout the west to help rural schools, primarily schools in California, Oregon, and Washington. It seems these schools got used to a token payment from timber sales on public land. Some cynics might call it payola; nevertheless, the timber has run out, even though the pass-back expectations of the locals have not.

Thus, we arrive at the present national crisis.

Here in Colorado the land on the immediate auction block runs to about 21,000 acres, much of it important recreation land to those unworthy louts who live and work in our cities and hunger for a modest retreat from the work-a-day world. Let them buy their own land seems to be the prevailing logic from the White House.

There are other help options of course. We could look at reducing the future cost of the Administration’s Iraqi adventure, giving that money to schools. In the selling, Iraq was promised to cost only $70 billion and magically lead to flowers sprouting from gun barrels. It is already over $300 billion with no end in sight, and there are no flowers except to bury the mourned dead. But this option has one drawback, the powerful don’t like it. After all it’s their war, and they don’t do the dying.
counterpunch.org

Secret Service agents guarding Vice President Dick Cheney when he shot Texas lawyer Harry Whittington on a hunting outing two weeks ago say Cheney was “clearly inebriated” at the time of the shooting.
Agents observed several members of the hunting party, including the Vice President, consuming alcohol before and during the hunting expedition, the report notes, and Cheney exhibited “visible signs” of impairment, including slurred speech and erratic actions.

According to those who have talked with the agents and others present at the outing, Cheney was drunk when he gunned down his friend and the day-and-a-half delay in allowing Texas law enforcement officials on the ranch where the shooting occurred gave all members of the hunting party time to sober up.

We talked with a number of administration officials who are privy to inside information on the Vice President’s shooting “accident” and all admit Secret Service agents and others say they saw Cheney consume far more than the “one beer’ he claimed he drank at lunch earlier that day.

“This was a South Texas hunt,” says one White House aide. “Of course there was drinking. There’s always drinking. Lots of it.”

One agent at the scene has been placed on administrative leave and another requested reassignment this week. A memo reportedly written by one agent has been destroyed, sources said Wednesday afternoon.
capitolhillblue.com

PRETORIA, South Africa (AP) — Ousted Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide said Tuesday he was willing to return home after two years in exile.

In an interview with South African television, Aristide stopped short of setting a date. He said he would decide on his return after consulting with Haitian President-elect Rene Preval, the South African government, the United Nations and other involved countries.
cnn.com