A bomb attack destroyed the golden dome of one of Iraq’s holiest Shia shrines today, sparking demonstrations and calls for revenge amongst the protesters.

There were no confirmed casualties in the explosion, which took place at 6.55am (0355 GMT) at the al-Askari shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad. Early reports had quoted police saying they feared people may have been be buried under the debris.

Iraq’s national security adviser, Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, said two armed men wearing special forces uniforms broke into the shrine, overcame the guards and set off explosives.

The shrine – one of the four holiest Shia sites in Iraq – was extensively damaged and the mosque’s golden dome destroyed.

Mr al-Rubaie blamed Sunni militants for the bombing but insisted they would not draw Iraq into a civil war. He appealed for calm.

Up to 2,000 protesters in Najaf called on Shias to “rise up” and “take revenge” for the attack on the shrine, which contains the tombs of two Shia imams reputed to be descendants of the prophet Muhammad. It is part of the Imam Ali al-Hadi mausoleum.

“This criminal act aims at igniting civil strife,” said Mahmoud al-Samarie, a 28-year-old builder. “We demand an investigation so that the criminals who did this be punished. If the government fails to do so, then we will take arm and chase the people behind this attack.”

The Iraqi prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, declared three days of mourning and appealed for unity. He called the apparently sectarian attack an assault on all Muslims.
guardian.co.uk

Blast kills 22 as Straw calls for end to sectarianism

First promote ‘sectarianism’ and then speak out piously about stopping it. Yeah right.

Twenty-five years after he hung up his barrister’s wig, Jack Straw faces the unwelcome prospect of returning to court. Craig Murray, our former Ambassador to Uzbekistan, intends to call the Foreign Secretary to give evidence in any legal action over his forthcoming memoirs.

This month, Straw’s staff wrote to Murray – who was sacked for blowing the whistle on human rights abuses – saying they’d “actively consider a claim for breach of confidence or Crown copyright” over his book, Murder in Samarkand.

Despite that threat, Murray’s publishers, Mainstream, tell me they “intend to proceed” with the memoir, which will hit the shelves in July.

Meanwhile, Murray has used an interview with The Bookseller to launch a personal offensive against Straw, saying he has “proof that the Government has been obtaining intelligence from torture, and that Jack Straw approved it.”
independent.co.uk

…The ruling party is facing a serious and occasionally violent revolt in downtrodden communities, resulting in no-go areas for its members. Councillors have been beaten, shot and burned out of their homes. Party meetings have been ambushed. Several local branches have disbanded or gone underground.

“It is not safe for me. I cannot go back in the current climate,” said Papi Tselane, 44, one of 14 ANC councillors forced to flee the township of Khutsong after a mob destroyed their houses. The councillors are living in a mining compound. Several councillors have stepped down, said Bobo Ndlakuza, the ANC’s election coordinator for Merafong municipality, which includes Khutsong. “Some members think it is not worth their lives and just lie low.”

The party is being targeted in what was its heartland, the sprawls of shacks and low-cost homes where millions of impoverished black people live.

The cause of unrest is economic. People are fed up waiting for jobs and basic services such as electricity, clean water and sanitation. The service delivery protests, as they are known, flared last year and have grown in frequency and passion in the run-up to local elections on March 1. Khutsong, a township of 170,000, 40 miles from Johannesburg, has seen some of the worst trouble.
guardian.co.uk

MOGADISHU (AFP) – At least 15 people were killed and 23 wounded in fighting between gunmen loyal to warlords controlling Somalia’s capital and Islamic court security militia, in what residents called the fiercest battles in five years.

This brings the death toll to 33 and dozens wounded, according to witnesses and medical sources, since the clashes erupted on Saturday.

The fighting pits gunmen backed by the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT) — a coalition of warlords — against Islamic court militia along a road in southern Mogadishu’s Daynile district, they said.
news.yahoo.com

…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.
zmag.org

“The Venezuelan government has given a Christian missionary group from the US until Sunday to leave the country.”
– The BBC, Feb 12

The BBC news report (provided below) refers to the government’s expulsion of U.S. missionaries from the Amazon region of Venezuela where they work to convert the Yanomamö Indians to christianity.

Napoleon A. Chagnon is a Professor Emeritus of Sociobiology at U.C. Santa Barbara. He first made contact with the Yanomamö Indians in Venezuela’s Amazonia, in 1964. An editorial review of the Fifth Edition of his book, Yanomamö, The Fierce People speaks of its author, Napoleon A. Chagnon,”He gives an unforgettable portrait of an extraordinary people in this eloquent, meticulously detailed, and often passionate book.”

Based upon my first reading of the Third Edition of the book many years ago and third reading again this year, this editorial description of Chagnon’s book is modest. When the 3rd Edition was published, Chagnon had lived with the Yanamomo for about 4 years. In the last chapter of the 3rd Edition, Chagnon describes the effects of the missionaries – Catholic and Protestant – on these amazing human beings.

In addition to their “contribution” of “civilized” clothing to the Yanomamö culture, the missionaries brought with them a number of other less benign gifts: disease, guns, tourism and a systematic eradication of their way of life. Some would disagree with my use of the term – but I think of it as a form of genocide. This “systematic erasure” of their culture has never been complete. The Yanomamö are a strong and resilient people. Nonetheless, the overall effects of the missionaries’ attempt to convert these people from their way of life and view of the world to their own brand of christianity is a modern tragedy.
axisoflogic.com

Unfair tactics and confusing rules still make it tough for many minorities to cast election ballots, and the barriers are so common that the federal safeguards for voters must be renewed, a detailed new report from a civil rights group says.

“Protecting Minority Voters: The Voting Rights Act, 1982-2005” pulls together research and testimony from voters around the country to urge lawmakers to renew the parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that will expire in August 2007.

“The past and the present look a whole lot alike in the prevalence of racial discrimination in voting,” said Barbara Arnwine, director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which spearheaded the project. “It was shocking to … not only see the continuing reality of racial discrimination in voting but to see how pervasive these problems are nationwide.”
news.yahoo.com

NEW ORLEANS — The official death toll of Hurricane Katrina is more than 1,300. The unofficial toll of the storm may take that a lot higher.

Though not quantifiable in the orthodox fashion, because so many area health agencies are still in disarray, a belief exists among many here that the natural mortality rate of New Orleanians — whether still in the city or relocated — has increased dramatically since, and perhaps because of, Katrina.

The daily newspaper has seen a rise in reported deaths. Local funeral homes are burying just as many people as they did last year, though the population has decreased. Families say that their kin who had been in good health are dying, and attribute that to the stress brought on by the hurricane, flooding and relocations.

It is too early for state officials to have statistics for last year, said Bob Johannessen of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals. And epidemiologists are reluctant to draw conclusions based on anecdotal information.

Still, stress here is palpable, and it is overwhelming people of all ages, said psychiatrist James Barbee, director of an anxiety clinic at Louisiana State University. “People are struggling terribly.”

Barbee said he has seen many more patients with serious problems — hypertension, diabetes out of control, suicidal tendencies — than before the storm. “Katrina took all order away from lives,” he said, and the effect can be extremely deleterious.

The increase in deaths is seen the pages of the local newspaper, the Times-Picayune, where the number of deaths reported in January was up 25 percent from the same month in 2005, according to publisher Ashton Phelps Jr.

New Orleans Parish Coroner Frank Minyard said he doesn’t keep records on natural deaths, but that he believes “stress causes an increase in the rise of natural-death rates.”

Louis Charbonnet, 67, president of Charbonnet-Labat Funeral Home on St. Philip Street in the Tremé neighborhood, said, “It’s an absolute fact.” New Orleanians are “dying away,” he said. “They are distressed by being displaced.”
washingtonpost.com

Six Months After Katrina: Who Was Left Behind – Then and Now
The Katrina evacuation was totally self-help. If you had the resources, a car, money and a place to go, you left. Over one million people evacuated – 80 to 90% of the population. No provisions were made for those who could not evacuate themselves. To this day no one has a reliable estimate of how many people were left behind in Katrina – that in itself says quite a bit about what happened.

Who was left behind in the self-help evacuation?

In the hospital, we could not see who was left behind because we did not have electricity or TV. We certainly knew the 2000 of us were left behind, and from the hospital we could see others. Some were floating in the street – face down. Some were paddling down the street – helping older folks get to high ground. Some were swimming down the streets. We could hear people left behind screaming for help from rooftops. We routinely heard gunshots as people trapped on rooftops tried to get the attention of helicopters crisscrossing the skies above. We could see the people trapped in the Salvation Army home a block away. We could hear breaking glass as people scrambled to get away from flooded one story homes and into the higher ground of several story office buildings. We saw people swimming to the local drugstore and swimming out with provisions. But we had no idea how many were actually left behind. The poor, especially those without cars, were left behind. Twenty-seven percent of the people of New Orleans did not have access to a car. Government authorities knew in advance that “.100,000 citizens of New Orleans did not have means of personal transportation.” Greyhound and Amtrak stopped service on the Saturday before the hurricane. These are people who did not have cars because they were poor – over 125,000 people, 27% of the people of New Orleans, lived below the very low federal poverty level before Katrina.

Capitalism is Racism: An Update on the New Orleans Tragedy
…The September article opened with the statement, “The late Malcolm X said that: ‘You cannot have capitalism without racism’….” This claim can be understood when considered in the historical context of the fact that the early (white) capitalists in America were, among other things, slave holders while the early African Americans were brought here by force and violence in order to be slaves for the purpose of maximizing profits for the rich land owners by reducing labor costs. As a result of this vicious practice, the African American people were brought to America in such a circumstance that they were actually considered to be material resources, or property, rather than being economic earners, or humans. Later, after the slaves gained their freedom, these good people continued to be held at the very bottom of the economic ladder without any real means of climbing above whatever rung of that ladder its builder, the white “master class” of capitalist ownership, made available to them. Since it is a basic tenet of capitalist economics that those at the top will always rise at a more rapid and greater rate than those at the bottom, those at the bottom will inevitably always remain there.

President Bush yesterday strongly defended an Arab company’s attempt to take over the operation of seaports in Baltimore and five other cities, threatening a veto if Congress tries to kill a deal his administration has blessed.

Facing a sharp bipartisan backlash, Bush took the unusual step of summoning reporters to the front of Air Force One to condemn efforts to block a firm from the United Arab Emirates from purchasing the rights to manage ports that include those in New York and New Orleans.
washingtopost.com

Hey, these are his boys, and a deal’s a deal.

Its regional influence fortuitously boosted by the US invasion of Iraq and the advent of a Shia-dominated government in Baghdad, Iran’s leadership is contemplating another unintended gift from Washington: the chance to become a power in Palestine.
guardian.co.uk

I don’t believe in luck

Iran was not referred to the Security Council for Noncompliance
02/21/06 “ICH” — — How powerful is the corporate information-system we call the mainstream media?

Is it powerful enough, for example, to mislead the public into believing that Iran has been “referred” to the United Nations Security Council for violations to the NPT, thus paving the way for another war on the back of false information?

The IAEA DID NOT report on Iran’s “noncompliance” to the Security Council, because there is no evidence that Iran has done anything wrong. In fact, as nuclear physicist Gordon Prather points out in his recent article, “March Madness”, “THE BOARD DIDN’T REPORT ANYTHING.”

Then why does the media keep insisting that Iran is being called before the Security Council for noncompliance?

Could it be that the media is simply executing an agenda that is deliberately designed to deceive?

There was no “referral” and there will be no “punitive action” because there are no violations. “Rather”, as Prather ads, “the IAEA Board ‘REQUESTED’ that Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei report to the Security Council”…”calling on Iran to-among other things-implement ‘transparency measures’”.

These “transparency measures” have nothing to do with Iran’s obligations under the NPT. They are additional demands made at the behest of the Bush administration (through strong-arm tactics with nations on the IAEA Board) that will force Iran to provide access to “individuals, documentation relating to procurement, dual-use equipment, certain military owned workshops, and research and development as the Agency may request in support of its ongoing investigations”.

March madness