The US government says it is mulling all its options – including the military one – in response to an IAEA report that Iran has begun enriching uranium on a small scale and is slowly building up its enrichment capabilities.

The IAEA recently stated it “has not seen any [Iranian] diversion of nuclear material to nuclear weapons”, a charge made by the Bush administration.

However, the nuclear watchdog says there are many outstanding questions about Iran’s nuclear programme that the Islamic republic has yet to answer.

Iran plans to set up 3000 enrichment centrifuges later this year.

With talks to resolve the issue appearing less and less likely, the United States and a European Union troika made up of Britain, France and Germany persuaded the watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to report Iran to the Security Council for action.

The current standoff has led to a spate of media stories suggesting the US and/or Israel might be planning a military strike to disrupt Iranian nuclear facilities.

However, Adam Ereli, a spokesman for the US State Department, told Aljazeera.net that a military move “is not something we’re looking at right now”.

“What we’re looking at is diplomatic action with our partners from the international community to prevent Iran from causing trouble which it intends on doing by supporting terrorism and developing a nuclear weapon.”
aljazeera.net

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, March 6 — Pakistani security forces battled pro-Taliban rebels holding out in a town near the Afghan border on Monday, killing 19 of them as the toll from three days of clashes rose to more than 120, the military said.

The rebels launched attacks on government positions in Miran Shah on Saturday as President Bush met Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, in the capital. The fighting has raged since.

“Helicopter gunships have been pounding militant positions around Miran Shah,” said a resident of the town that serves as the administrative capital of North Waziristan, a tribal region. “The situation is very tense.”

The semiautonomous ethnic Pashtun lands along the Afghan border are Pakistan’s front line in the war on terrorism.

After U.S. and Afghan opposition forces ousted the Taliban in late 2001, many al-Qaeda militants fled to the area, which was awash in weapons. Taliban supporters among the Pashtun clans offered al-Qaeda a refuge.

Hundreds of people have been killed since late 2004 as Pakistani forces have been trying to clear foreign militants from the border area and subdue their Pakistani allies.
washingtonpost.com

* KHALIS – A car bomb killed three Iraqi soldiers and wounded one other in the town of Khalis, north east of Baghdad, the Iraqi army said.
* BAGHDAD – Six civilians were wounded when two car bombs parked on the side of the road were detonated in northern and northeastern Baghdad, police said. The target of the explosions was not clear, they said.
* BAGHDAD – A roadside bomb exploded in the New Baghdad district in the east of the capital, police said. There were no casualties.
BAQUBA – Gunmen killed three members of radical Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s office in Baquba, police and hospital sources said. Two other members were wounded.
BAGHDAD – Three mortar rounds landed on the headquarters of the National Dialogue Front, a Sunni Arab party headed by Salih al-Mutlak. No casualties were reported.
KIRKUK – Three students and a soldier were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded as an Iraqi army patrol drove by Kirkuk University in central Kirkuk, 250 km (150 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.
HAWIJA – A policeman was killed and another wounded in a drive-by shooting on the Kirkuk-Hawija highway, 60 km (40 miles) southwest of Kirkuk, police said.
BAGHDAD – Five civilians were wounded when a car bomb exploded in southern Baghdad, police said. The target of the explosion was not clear.
BAGHDAD – A civilian was killed and his wife was wounded when a car bomb struck at a U.S. patrol in western Baghdad, police said.
BAQUBA – A car bomb killed one civilian and wounded three police officers. The policemen had arrived at the scene after gunmen had killed a policeman on a patrol.
HILLA – Three traffic policemen and four civilians were wounded when a car bomb went off in central Hilla, 100 km (60 miles) south of Baghdad. Another car bomb exploded in northern Hilla but no casualties were reported.
BALAD – A policeman was wounded when four mortar rounds landed in and around Balad police station in Balad, 90 km (55 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.
BAIJI – Three policemen were killed and four were wounded when gunmen attacked their patrol in the oil refinery city of Baiji, 180 km (110 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.
TIKRIT – A Sunni shrine was destroyed on Monday when gunmen planted bombs inside it in the city of Tikrit, 175 km (110 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.
alertnet.org

Rumsfeld Says Media Exaggerating Iraqi Civilian Deaths
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld today presented an upbeat report of the conflict in Iraq and said he agrees with the commander of the U.S.-led coalition, Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., that the news media has exaggerated the number of civilian casualties in the conflict.

Rumsfeld said that while insurgents are “obviously trying to ignite a civil war,” Iraqi security forces have “taken the lead in controlling the situation” and the Iraqi government has taken “a number of key steps that have had a calming effect in the situation.”

But the news media in the United States and abroad has misreported the number of Iraqi civilians that have been killed and the number of mosques that have come under attack, Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon news conference.

Iraq Weapons — Made in Iran?

Intelligence Officials Say Weapons Responsible for Increasing U.S. Deaths in Iraq

March 6, 2006 — – U.S. military and intelligence officials tell ABC News that they have caught shipments of deadly new bombs at the Iran-Iraq border.

They are a very nasty piece of business, capable of penetrating U.S. troops’ strongest armor.

What the United States says links them to Iran are tell-tale manufacturing signatures — certain types of machine-shop welds and material indicating they are built by the same bomb factory.

“The signature is the same because they are exactly the same in production,” says explosives expert Kevin Barry. “So it’s the same make and model.”

U.S. officials say roadside bomb attacks against American forces in Iraq have become much more deadly as more and more of the Iran-designed and Iran-produced bombs have been smuggled in from the country since last October.

“I think the evidence is strong that the Iranian government is making these IEDs, and the Iranian government is sending them across the border and they are killing U.S. troops once they get there,” says Richard Clarke, former White House counterterrorism chief and an ABC News consultant. “I think it’s very hard to escape the conclusion that, in all probability, the Iranian government is knowingly killing U.S. troops.”

OH ok. Forget the nukes, let’s attack them anyway.

US envoy to Iraq: ‘We have opened the Pandora’s box’
The US ambassador to Baghdad conceded yesterday that the Iraq invasion had opened a Pandora’s box of sectarian conflicts which could lead to a regional war and the rise of religious extremists who “would make Taliban Afghanistan look like child’s play”.

Zalmay Khalilzad broke with the Bush administration’s generally upbeat orthodoxy to present a stark profile of a volatile situation in danger of sliding into chaos.

Mr Khalilzad told the Los Angeles Times Iraq had been pulled back from the brink of civil war after the February 22 bombing of a Shia shrine in Samarra. However, another similar incident would leave Iraq “really vulnerable” to that happening, he said. “We have opened the Pandora’s box and the question is, what is the way forward?” He added that the best approach was to build bridges between religious and ethnic communities.

On February 7, 2006 (and with due homage to the great Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano) the people of Haiti were not to be denied. Few people anywhere have endured more oppression and human misery or for a longer period of time (with all too few periods of relief). In spite of an election process orchestrated, controlled and shamelessly rigged by an interim puppet government (the IGH) and an oppressive occupying force (UN Blue Helmets supposedly there to maintain order and protect them), they overcame overwhelming obstacles and elected Rene Preval for the second time as their President (his first time in office was from 1996-2000). It’s no secret that the real power calling the shots in Haiti is not in Port-au-Prince. It’s in Washington making policy, giving orders and letting its approved proxies do its bidding, which has been bloody and brutal since US Marines in the dead of night kidnapped and deposed democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide at gunpoint in February, 2004.

In a normal country with a tradition of stability and democracy (or any one for that matter) the election of the peoples’ choice would be a cause for celebration. Indeed for the first time in the past 2 years the Haitian people are celebrating and hope finally for an end to the nightmare they’ve been through. But nothing is ever simple in Haiti, a country that for over 500 years has had very few periods of stability free from the oppressive heel of a foreign occupier or repressive dictatorship. They never had a real democracy until the election of Jean-Bertand Aristide in 1991. Two US led, directed or authorized coups later (both against President Aristide), they have one again at least in the office of president. But do they really have good reason to rejoice?

Before continuing I must point out that until February 7 Jean-Bertand Aristide was still Haiti’s democratically elected President. It’s a valid argument to say he’s entitled to remain so for the remainder of the time he lost, but he graciously never requested it and now calls Rene Preval “my President.” The benighted Haitian people loved Aristide, called him their President and want and expect him to return. They now have every reason to feel the oddest combination of joy and fear as they await future events to unfold without knowing what will haappen.
zmag.org

Less than six months ago Brazil’s President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, appeared down and out. Racked by a campaign funding scandal that enveloped his party, he was trailing in the polls and there would doubts he would even fight for re-election.

Now the man universally known as Lula appears to have bounced back and arrives in London today for a three-day state visit. He has lost 30lbs, foresworn alcohol and been politically reinvigorated by new numbers that show his approval rating has jumped to 53.3 per cent from a low of 47 per cent in November and suggest he could win re-election in October.

Mr da Silva has also gone back on the attack and dropped the defensive tone he adopted at the peak of the scandal.

Speaking during a tour of Brazil’s northeastern region, where he was born, he said. “I haven’t done everything that needs to be done. But I’ve certainly already done much more than the elite that governed this country for nearly 500 years and forgot about the poor part of the population.”
independent.co.uk

Brazil leader begins London visit
The Brazilian President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has arrived in London at the start of a three-day state visit.

He will attend a royal banquet at Buckingham Palace on his first evening in London and will meet Tony Blair for talks at Downing Street on Thursday.

The two leaders are likely to discuss the shooting of Brazilian man Jean Charles de Menezes in London last July.

The visit comes as the Crown Prosecution Service considers whether to charge police over the shooting.

The Foreign Office has flatly denied press reports that the Queen will publicly apologise for the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, but diplomats acknowledge the case is likely to be discussed by President Lula and Tony Blair.

British officials have sought to play down the rift caused by his death.

Mr Menezes was killed after being mistaken for a suicide bomber
The Brazilian government has expressed concern that the dead man’s family have not seen the report into the killing by the Independent Police Complaints Commission.

The governor of South Dakota signed into law on Monday a ban on nearly all abortions in the state, setting up a court fight aimed at challenging the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalised abortion in the United States.

The new law makes it a crime for doctors to perform an abortion unless the procedure is necessary to save a woman’s life and makes no exception for cases of rape or incest. Doctors could get up to five years in prison for performing an illegal abortion.
independent.co.uk

NEW ORLEANS – The Army Corps of Engineers seems likely to fulfill a promise by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans’s toppled flood walls to their original, pre-Katrina height by June 1, but two teams of independent experts monitoring the $1.6 billion reconstruction project say large sections of the rebuilt levee system will be substantially weaker than before the hurricane hit.

These experts say the Corps, racing to rebuild 169 miles of levees destroyed or damaged by Katrina, is taking shortcuts to compress what is usually a years-long construction process into a few weeks. They say that weak, substandard materials are being used in some levee walls, citing lab tests as evidence. And they say the Corps is deferring repairs to flood walls that survived Katrina but suffered structural damage that could cause them to topple in a future storm.

The Corps strongly disputes the assertion — by engineers from a National Science Foundation-funded panel and a Louisiana team appointed to monitor the rebuilding — that substandard materials are being used in construction. Agency officials maintain that the new levees are rigorously inspected at each step. But they acknowledge that much more work will be needed after June 1, the beginning of hurricane season, and that the finished system still will not be strong enough to withstand a storm the magnitude of Katrina.
msnbc.msn.com

By and large I count myself among those who believe that what is generally promoted as a race discussion usually ends up a waste of time. Now that we’re past Black History Month, during which columnist Clarence Page suggested that his PBS NewsHour viewers might look to the 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin for racial guidance, maybe we can also get past sepia-toned reminiscences of slavery and eulogies for Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King to the real grainy Technicolor ways folk live today, or try to. It’s an understatement that the ravishment of the Gulf Coast, destruction of a major American city and dispossession of its majority-black residents have set conditions for more than talk. But that ongoing catastrophe also demands that when we do speak, we better tell it like it is.

Whenever people say things like Hurricane Katrina “ripped the veil off racism and poverty” I am reminded of a line from a song in Craig Brewer’s film Hustle and Flow: “It might be new to you but it’s been like this for years.” In fact, the film pricked my race/class sensibilities more than anything else in the midst of the latest round of race talk.

Shot in the working-class neighborhoods of Brewer’s hometown, Memphis, Tennessee, Hustle and Flow is the story of DJay (played by Oscar nominee Terrence Howard), a pimp having a “midlife crisis.” He’s 35, the same age as his father when he died, and he fears his life will soon be over unless he changes course.

The film’s look, feel and sound are all intimately familiar. From the dirt on the walls of a shotgun house to the hot, wet, sticky red clay-tinted heat of a Southern summer and the ever-present, almost useless dirty portable fan. From the train track separating the haves from the have-nots to the get-by job that gets you to the weekend to the juke joint where anything happens. From the sound of the blues – even in rap music – right down to the neighborhood, language and attitudes, Brewer puts a face on the people that those such as Bill Cosby wish to be invisible. Some of them are even white.

Brewer’s people could be among the 35 percent of blacks currently living below the poverty line in the United States or the poorest 20 percent or so of Louisiana residents. Hustle and Flow reveals what Katrina revealed: those who’ve been left to fend for themselves. In New Orleans almost 40 percent of New Orleans’ households, nearly all of them black, earned less than $20,000 a year.

I have lived in either a predominately black or all-black neighborhood for most of my forty-nine years. It is not an endorsement of segregation; it’s just the way it is. Yet, there are a couple of things to appreciate about longstanding southern black neighborhoods. For one thing, different economic classes still live amongst one another. They intermix and interact. This social interaction is represented in the film by DJay’s relationship with Key, played by Anthony Anderson. Key, an old school friend, has become a middle-class audio technician. In addition, many of us move up and down – on and off the economic ladder throughout our lives. And most demographic data not only bear out that class intermix but also the precariousness of paycheck-to-paycheck living. Moreover, the typical black family doesn’t conform to the 2 parents, 2 kids model. Single women head 62% of black families and 67% of black children are born out of wedlock. Moreover, blacks more readily accept whites into those communities than vice versa, even poor whites, even gentrifying white “pioneers.”

Although there has been racial progress in the United States, for many African Americans life is like ice-skating up hill. According to the most recent American Housing Survey only 49 percent of blacks are homeowners as compared with 76 percent of whites. Even with comparable credit, blacks are 210 percent more likely than whites to be rejected for a mortgage. When black borrowers are fortunate enough to get a non-government home loan, a little less than a third of them will have to bear high-interest sub-prime financing, which usually doesn’t mesh well with a sub-prime car loan and/or the interest on a payday loan. No surprise, the national foreclosure rate for blacks sits right at 50 percent, and half of all African Americans live in unaffordable, inadequate or crowded housing. Among people living on the street or in their cars, 40 percent are black.

Wealth, equity, control over property – these markers of the “American dream” are largely white privileges. At the onset of the last recession, between 1999 and 2001, the net worth of Hispanic and black households fell by 27 percent. As of 2002, the Pew Hispanic Center reports, the median Hispanic household had a net worth of $7,932 and the median black family had $5,998, while the median white family had $88,651. And, almost a third of black households and more than a quarter of Hispanic ones had zero or negative net worth.

The meaning of the numbers is obvious: a sizable number of households and the individuals in them are barely getting by. And those in the middle class are seldom permanently middle class. That is not to say there are no recognizable class lines. Lots of black families lead economically stable lives and have decent credit.

Yet the majority of blacks live under conditions where any little bind affects their whole life. They are the people who lose their sub-prime loan homes, choose between car repair or insurance, gas or taxes, food or medicine, and frequently need an extension on the electric or phone bill. They rent the cheapest place they can find and try to hold on in traditional neighborhoods in the face of just about everything – from economic redlining to strict property code enforcement to urban pioneering to population disbursement or marginalization. They routinely face racial profiling and aggressive, if not brutal, law enforcement, jail and unemployability. A majority is in the South, where 54 percent of blacks still live. Others are concentrated in the ghettos although many cities have driven poor people out of the core of metropolitan areas all across the country. And then there are those holdouts who occupied the waterfront – be it the bayous, the barrier islands, along a lake or river, because that’s where their ancestors fled to – only to have that land taken by developers, or a storm, because it is waterfront.

That’s why Hustle and Flow is such a notable picture. It is not just the story of a pimp in Memphis who needs to make music. It is the story of another city on the Mississippi delta. New Orleans was built on race dating back to the day when the first Africans fled out to the bayous to be free just as a runaway Jim in Huck Finn was attempting to do. It’s that superficial sense of freedom and abandon that still draws tourists to a battered New Orleans, although the benefits of an economy based on the arts and nightlife never will trickle down to everyone. That is, unless you consider the four-man stand-up band that used to live in the Ninth Ward and is now playing and dancing in the street on a weekend night in The French Quarters for the money out-of-towners throw in the collection box as trickle down economics.
hollerif.blogspot.com

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — War. College. A better job. The answers are as numerous as the number of young black people who are deciding against a military career.

Defense Department statistics show that the number of black active-duty enlisted personnel has declined 14 percent since 2000.

The decrease is particularly acute among the troops most active in the Middle East: The number of black enlisted soldiers has dropped by 19 percent and the number of black enlisted Marines has fallen by 26 percent in the same period.

Even in this area near Fort Bragg, where serving in uniform is a family tradition, the drop in Army enlistment by blacks from 2000 to 2005 matches the national average.

Kashonda Leycock is the daughter of a soldier, and the 17-year-old has been a member of the Junior ROTC at Westover High School for more than two years.

She joined to prove to her parents and herself she could do it — not because she wants to join the military. She doesn’t. Her primary objection is the war in Iraq.

“Why are we fighting?” Leycock asked. “Nobody has really said why the war is still going on. I don’t think it should be going on because it’s not solving anything. … None of my people want to go there.”

The lack of support for the war by blacks — in uniform or not — is striking. A poll of Cumberland County residents, commissioned last year by The Fayetteville Observer, showed that 69 percent of whites said the war in Iraq was worth the costs. Only 19 percent of blacks agreed.
news14charlotte.com

Supreme Court Upholds Law on College Military Recruiting
WASHINGTON, March 6 — The Supreme Court upheld a law today that cuts federal funding from universities that do not give military recruiters the same access to students that other potential employers receive.

The court ruled that the law does not violate the free-speech rights of universities that object to the military’s exclusion of gay men and lesbians who are open about their sexual orientation.

The opinion by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was unanimous.

It was a setback, although hardly an unexpected one, to a coalition of law schools that brought the constitutional challenge, as well as to the Association of American Law Schools, which represents nearly all accredited law schools and since 1991 has required adherence to a nondiscrimination policy on sexual orientation as a condition of membership.

Many law schools initially chose to comply with by barring military recruiters completely or by taking such steps as refusing to help the recruiters schedule appointments or relegating them to less favorable locations for meeting with students.

Congress responded with a series of increasingly punitive measures, all known as the Solomon Amendment, culminating in the 2004 statute at issue in the case. It requires access for military recruiters “that is at least equal in quality and scope” to access for other employers, on pain of forfeiting grants to the entire university from eight federal agencies, including the Departments of Defense, Education, and Health and Human Services.

With hundreds of millions of dollars potentially at stake, all but a handful of law schools yielded. Nearly three dozen banded together as the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, with the acronym FAIR, and turned to the courts.

Carl C. Monk, executive director of the Association of American Law Schools, said in an interview today that the association would continue to require its member schools to engage in “significant” activities to counter the impact of the Solomon Amendment, including organizing faculty forums.

The government suffered another defeat on its controversial ID cards bill tonight when peers voted by a sizeable majority in the Lords to ensure the planned identity cards were voluntary.

Accusing the government of introducing compulsory ID cards by “stealth” and breaking a manifesto commitment to implement a voluntary scheme, peers voted 227 to 166, a majority of 61.

Peers warned that under the new law, whenever an individual wished to renew a passport, he or she would have to enter their biometric details on the national identity register.
guardian.co.uk

Plan for new nuclear programme approaches meltdown after report
Tony Blair’s backing for nuclear power suffered a blow yesterday when the Government’s own advisory body on sustainable development came down firmly against the building of a new generation of reactors.

Despite the Prime Minister’s well-known support for the nuclear industry, the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) concluded that a new nuclear programme was not the answer to the twin challenges of climate change and security of supply. In a hard-hitting report, the 15-strong Commission identified five “major disadvantages” to nuclear power:

* The lack of a long-term strategy for dealing with highly toxic nuclear waste

* Uncertainty over the cost of new nuclear stations and the risk that taxpayers would be left to pick up the tab;

* The danger that going down the nuclear route would lock the UK into a centralised system for distributing energy for the next 50 years;

* The risk a new nuclear programme would undermine efforts to improve energy efficiency;

* The threat of terrorist attacks and radiation exposure if other countries with lower safety standards also opt for nuclear.