A state of emergency has been declared in five of Ecuador’s provinces as indigenous groups continue protests against free trade talks with the US.
Peasants have been blocking roads in highland areas since last week in an action which has cost millions of dollars in lost trade.

Protesters fear the trade deal to be negotiated in Washington this week will damage their way of life.

The state of emergency bans public meetings and imposes a curfew.

It was declared by President Alfredo Palacio in the highland provinces of Cotopaxi, Canar, Chimborazo and Imbabura, as well as parts of Pichincha, where the capital Quito is located.

“The president took this decision after exhausting all other options for dialogue,” said Interior Minister Felipe Vega.

A final round of talks about the free trade deal is scheduled to begin in Washington on 23 March, with a deal expected to be concluded in early April.

Ecuador’s neighbours Colombia and Peru have already signed deals with the US.
bbc.co.uk

U.S. Meddling in Peruvian Presidential Race?
Something smells funny about the recent denunciation of maverick Peruvian presidential candidate Ollanta Humala for alleged human rights violations. Before the accusations, Humala was riding high as the leading candidate in Peru’s presidential elections. Investigations illustrate that Humala’s accusers are subsidized by the US Government funded Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Washington may be interfering in this election to protect its own interests.

The former army officer heads a nationalist and anti- neoliberal coalition between his new Peruvian Nationalist Party and the ten-year-old center-left Union for Peru party. Humala, a mestizo, was never part of Lima’s white ruling elite which has traditionally run the major institutions of the country. He is often derided for being an upstart “cholo” (indigenous), which sheds light on the colonial racism still inherent within Peruvian society. So much of Humala’s support comes from the impoverished non-white majority who has suffered from the “neoliberal reforms” of the unpopular sitting president Alejandro Toledo.

Erasing Indigenous Peru
Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the most famous intellectuals in Latin America. His name ranks with those of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende, and Miguel Angel Asturias as one of the top writers of the legendary Latin American “boom” of the sixties and seventies. His novels are probing, philosophical, and often hilarious page-turners. In the first decade of his career, Vargas Llosa retooled the structure of the novel with the confidence and mastery of a seasoned expert, or, in his case, a genius. Many times he has left my jaw on the floor and my mind reeling.

Mario Vargas Llosa is also a Peruvian. He was born and raised in Peru, and his first novels took place in Peru and explored Peruvian history and life. His masterpiece, Conversation in the Cathedral, is widely considered to be The Great Peruvian Novel, and a contender for The Great Latin American Novel. I am a particular fan, having read the novel twice in the original Spanish. Even while I was punch drunk with the power of the story, however, I knew that something was terribly wrong.

There are no indigenous people in Conversation in the Cathedral. The novel, which mostly takes place in Lima, probes many class and race issues between European descendants, mestizos and African descendants. The millions of indigenous people living in the Andes, the Amazon basin, and cities throughout the country, however, are missing.

This largely explains why Vargas Llosa lost the presidential race against Alberto Fujimori in 1990. A commentator at the time noted that Vargas Llosa ran his campaign throughout the Peruvian countryside as if he were running for office in Switzerland. Fujimori, an unknown professor at a Lima-based agricultural university, slaughtered him. Fujimori then ripped off Vargas Llosa’s neoliberal economic program, became an iron-fisted dictator, and, eventually, a self-exiled criminal protected from extradition by the Japanese government. Vargas Llosa moved to Europe and returned to novels, most of which stepped out of Peruvian reality.

Now Vargas Llosa is back, kind of. In an article published in the national Mexican newspaper, La Reforma, on 12 March 2006, Vargas Llosa lamented the poll results showing that the retired army commander, Ollanta Humala, is number two in the race, with a third of the decided voters. Vargas Llosa’s attack against Humala and his defense of the Christian Democrat candidate, Lourdes Flores, are of little interest compared to his description of who Humala’s supporters are, and why they support him. This, in turn, puts forth Vargas Llosa’s views on who is poor and why in Peru. His answer is stunning and worth quoting in full:

“At least a third of the population lives trapped in conditions that shut them out of all the benefits derived from Peru’s good macroeconomic statistics.

“Rural peasants, marginalized urban sectors, migrants who cannot fit themselves into the cities, unemployed, and retired people who cannot plug the gap with their thin pensions, etcetera.”

Who is missing? One of the largest and most diverse indigenous populations on the planet. Unless they are supposed to be captured in Vargas Llosa’s “etcetera,” they simply do not exist for him. They are not there. The word “indigenous” does not appear anywhere in his article.

MEXICO CITY, March 19 — For more than a decade, the idea that private companies would be able to bring water to the world’s poor has been a mantra of development policies promoted by international lending agencies and many governments.

It has not happened. In the past decade, according to a private water suppliers trade group, private companies have managed to extend water service to just 10 million people, less than 1 percent of those who need it. Some 1.1 billion people still lack access to clean water, the United Nations says.

The reality behind those numbers is sinking in. At the fourth World Water Forum, a six-day conference here of industry, governments and nongovernmental organizations, there is little talk of privatization.

Instead, many people here want to return to relying on the local public utilities that still supply 90 percent of the water to those households that have it.
nytimes.com

Big water companies quit poor countries
Millions of people could have to wait years for clean water as some of the world’s largest companies pull out of developing countries because of growing doubts about privatisation projects, a major UN report reveals today.

Political and consumer unease about multimillion-pound schemes that were intended to end the cycle of drought and death that has afflicted many countries is forcing major multinationals to think again. “Due to the political and high-risk operations, many multinational water companies are decreasing their activities in developing countries,” says the UN’s second world water development report, published today in Mexico City.

Multinationals sent in to profit off what other multinationals have despoiled. Sweet deal.

Temperatures in East African highlands have risen by half a degree Celsius in the last 50 years, scientists found.

Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they say this small rise may have doubled the number of malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
bbc.co.uk

The law lords today overturned a court ruling that teenager Shabina Begum’s human rights were violated when she was banned from wearing full Islamic dress at school.
Shabina, 17, won a landmark victory last March that Denbigh high school in Luton, Bedfordshire, had infringed her human rights after teachers would not let her wear a traditional jilbab covering her body completely.

Today’s judgment was warmly welcomed by headteachers, who feared the earlier ruling would make it impossible to enforce any school uniform policy.

Shabina said she was disappointed, but happy the case was over. She said she would be discussing with her lawyers whether they would apply to take the case to the European court of human rights.

The school, which had agreed a uniform policy with parents and community leaders allowing girls to wear the shalwar kameez (trousers and tunic), went to the highest court in the land last month to ask a panel of five judges at the House of Lords to overturn the ruling at the court of appeal.
guardian.co.uk

Nearly seven months after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and forced out hundreds of thousands of residents, most evacuees say they have not found a permanent place to live, have depleted their savings and consider their life worse than before the hurricane, according to interviews with more than 300 evacuees conducted by The New York Times.

The interviews suggested that while blacks and whites suffered similar rates of emotional trauma, blacks bore a heavier economic and social burden. And even as both groups flounder, most said they believed that the rest of the nation, and politicians in Washington, have moved on.

“I don’t think anybody cares, really,” said Robert Rodrigue, a semiretired computer programmer who has returned to his home in the suburb of Metairie. “New Orleans is kind of like at the bottom of the country, and they just forget about us.”
nytimes.com

Humans have provoked the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65m years ago, according to a UN report that calls for unprecedented worldwide efforts to address the slide.
The report paints a grim picture of life on earth, with declining numbers of plants, animals, insects and birds across the globe, and warns that the current extinction rate is up to 1,000 times faster than in the past. Some 844 animals and plants are known to have disappeared in the last 500 years.

Released yesterday to mark the start of a UN environment programme meeting in Curitiba, Brazil, the report says: “In effect, we are currently responsible for the sixth major extinction event in the history of earth.” A rising human population of 6.5bn is wrecking the environment for thousands of other species, it adds, and undermining efforts agreed at a 2002 UN summit in Johannesburg to slow the rate of decline by 2010. The global demand for biological resources now exceeds the planet’s capacity to renew them by 20%.

The report, Global Biodiversity Outlook 2 from the secretariat of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, says: “The direct causes of biodiversity loss – habitat change, over-exploitation, the introduction of invasive alien species, nutrient loading and climate change – show no sign of abating.” It is bleaker than a first UN review of the diversity of life, issued in 2001, and says the 2010 goal can only be attained with “unprecedented additional efforts”.

About 6m hectares (15m acres) of primary forest are felled each year and about a third of mangrove swamps have been lost since the 1980s. In the Caribbean, average hard coral cover has declined from 50% to 10% in the last three decades. Up to 52% of higher bird species studied are threatened with extinction and the number of large fish in the North Atlantic has declined by two-thirds in the last 50 years.

The report concludes: “Biodiversity is in decline at all levels and geographical scales,” and international travel, trade and tourism are expected to introduce more alien species to fragile ecosystems.
guardian.co.uk

HIALEAH, Fla. — A new pay-for-performance program for Florida’s teachers will tie raises and bonuses directly to pupils’ standardized-test scores beginning next year, marking the first time a state has so closely linked the wages of individual school personnel to their students’ exam results.

The effort, now being adopted by local districts, is viewed as a landmark in the movement to restructure American schools by having them face the same kind of competitive pressures placed on private enterprise, and advocates say it could serve as a national model to replace traditional teacher pay plans that award raises based largely on academic degrees and years of experience.

Gov. Jeb Bush (R) has characterized the new policy, which bases a teacher’s pay on improvements in test scores, as a matter of common sense, asking, “What’s wrong about paying good teachers more for doing a better job?”

But teachers unions and some education experts say any effort to evaluate teachers exclusively on test-score improvements will not work, because schools are not factories and their output is not so easily measured. An exam, they say, cannot measure how much teachers have inspired students, or whether they have instilled in them a lifelong curiosity. Moreover, some critics say, the explicit profit motive could overshadow teacher-student relationships.
washingtonpost.com

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Twice in the past year, Muhammad Said has survived assassination attempts that left his car riddled with bullets. He works part time as a bodyguard for his father, a Baghdad city councilman, and helps a friend who has contracts with the American military. Both are very dangerous jobs.

So last month, Mr. Said, a slim, baby-faced 23-year-old, did what a small but growing number of Iraqis are doing: He walked into the offices of the Iraq Insurance Company and bought a terrorism insurance policy. It looked like an ordinary life insurance policy, but with a one-page rider adding coverage for “the following dangers: 1) explosions caused by weapons of war and car bombs; 2) assassinations; 3) terrorist attacks.”

It cost him 125,000 dinars, about $90. Mr. Said paid more than most people because of his risky occupation. The payout, if he dies, is five million dinars, around $3,500, or about what an Iraqi policeman earns in a year.

That guarantee appears to be the first off-the-shelf terrorism policy in the world, insurance experts say. In most countries, of course, there is no need for it: death by terrorism is rare enough that it is usually covered by ordinary accident insurance. In Iraq it is not, partly because the state used to compensate the families of war victims directly. So the Iraq Insurance Company began stepping into the gap about a year ago.

“Am I worth only five million dinars?” Mr. Said asked wearily, after signing his policy. “It is not a solution. But Iraqis can be attacked by anyone, just walking on the street: Americans, insurgents, the Iraqi Army.” The payout is not a lot of money, even by Iraqi standards. But in a country where terrorism kills hundreds of people a month and no one can rely on the government or employers to provide for their relatives afterward, it seems to be an idea with a future.

The Iraq Insurance Company, a state-owned group, has sold about 200 individual terrorism policies in the last year, and is now negotiating with several government ministries and private companies for group policies that would cover thousands of employees.

The idea of insuring ordinary people in what may be the most violent place on earth came from Abbas Shaheed al-Taiee, an executive at the Iraq Insurance Company.

“It is a kind of gift to the Iraqi people,” said Mr. Shaheed, 53, a big, heavyset man with terribly serious eyes and a reputation as a master salesman. “We have expanded the principles of life insurance to cover everything that happens in Iraq.”
nytimes.com

Yeah. Real humanitarians.

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Sunday lobbed a litany of insults at U.S. President George W. Bush ranging from “donkey” to “drunkard” in response to a White House report branding the left-wing leader a demagogue.

Chavez is one of Bush’s fiercest critics and has repeatedly accused the U.S. government of seeking to oust him from the presidency of Venezuela, the world’s No. 5 oil exporter and a supplier of around 15 percent of U.S. crude imports.

“You are a donkey, Mr. Bush,” said Chavez, speaking in English on his weekly Sunday broadcast.

“You’re an alcoholic Mr. Danger, or rather, you’re a drunkard,” Chavez said, referring to Bush by a nickname he frequently uses to describe the U.S. president.
reuters.com

by Naeim Giladi
…Alexis de Tocqueville once observed that it is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth. Certainly it has been easier for the world to accept the Zionist lie that Jews were evicted from Muslim lands because of anti-Semitism, and that Israelis, never the Arabs, were the pursuers of peace. The truth is far more discerning: bigger players on the world stage were pulling the strings.
inminds.co.uk

A very important article…