Across the world, they are coming: the water wars. From Israel to India, from Turkey to Botswana, arguments are going on over disputed water supplies that may soon burst into open conflict.

Yesterday, Britain’s Defence Secretary, John Reid, pointed to the factor hastening the violent collision between a rising world population and a shrinking world water resource: global warming.
independent.co.uk

Excuse me??

Military scientists in the United States are developing a way of manipulating sharks by remote control to turn them into underwater spies or weapons.

Engineers funded by the Pentagon have created electronic brain implants for fish that they hope will be able to influence the movements of sharks and perhaps even decode what they are sensing.

Although both Cold War superpowers have trained sea mammals such as dolphins and killer whales to carry out quasi-military duties, this is probably the first time the military have seriously considered using fish.
independent.co.uk

WASHINGTON (AP) – The nation’s students do glaringly worse on a tough federal test than they do on state exams in reading and math, raising doubts about how much kids are learning.

The number of children who were proficient or better on state exams was often solid, if not lofty, in 2005. States have wide latitude in deciding what proficiency means.

But on the National Assessment of Educational Progress – the gold-standard measure of achievement in the U.S. – most states don’t come close to matching up, a new analysis shows.

The performance gap was often enormous. The number of fourth-graders and eighth-graders who scored proficient or better on state tests was often 30, 40 or 50 percentage points lower on the federal exam – the one the president and Congress use to chart the nation’s progress.

The size of that discrepancy raises questions about whether states are setting lower standards. Congress, in fact, has required every state to take part in the federal testing for that very reason – as a way to expose states that otherwise report rosy achievement.

The Education Trust, a nonprofit think tank that tracks state compliance with the No Child Left Behind law, released the comparison of test scores in a report on Thursday.

“There ought to be questions about whether state standards are preparing students for the challenges of college, work and the real world,” said Daria Hall, senior policy analyst at Education Trust.

Under President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, all children must be proficient in reading and math by 2014.
guardian.co.uk

or else what?

KARACHI, Pakistan — An apparent suicide bomber detonated explosives outside the U.S. consulate in Karachi Thursday killing four people, including an American diplomat and a Pakistani security officer, and wounding about 50 others, according to officials.

The attack came two days before President Bush is scheduled to visit Pakistan, following his journey to Afghanistan and India. It also followed what Pakistani officials said was a major assault by the Pakistani military that killed 40 to 45 militants in a tribal region of the country.

Bush, at a news conference in New Delhi, said the attack would not alter his travel plans. “We have lost at least one U.S. citizen in the bombing,” he said, “a foreign service officer. And I send our country’s deepest condolences to that person’s loved ones and families. Terrorists and killers are not going to prevent me from going to Pakistan.”

Initial reports from officials said a car bomber was apparently attempting to approach the consulate when he was approached by a Pakistani security guard and a security van, which tried to intercept the vehicle.

It then hit the van and exploded, apparently just as the official was entering the building, according to security officials in Karachi.

The blast ripped through a roadside parking lot of the Marriott Hotel, about 65 feet from the consulate gate, wire services said, shattering windows at the consulate and on all 10 floors of the hotel. Ten cars were destroyed, and charred wreckage was flung as far as 200 yards.
washingtonpost.com

BEAUMONT, Texas (AP) – Donna Francis pressed a pile of FEMA paperwork and phone numbers to her chest as the minutes slipped away in the lobby of the Best Value Inn.

“Hopefully I can go pull a rabbit out of my hat,” said Francis, a victim of Hurricane Rita, as she waited to make a plea to her Federal Emergency Management Agency caseworker an hour before six months of government-paid hotel rooms ended.

The single mother was among hurricane refugees in nearly 3,000 hotel rooms nationwide Wednesday who were confronted with a choice they had long dreaded: either remain in their hotel and pay the bill with their own money or other federal assistance, or check out and find a new place to live.

Wednesday’s deadline sparked protests in at least one city.
guardian.co.uk

In a well-ordered world, Gerard Latortue whould now be sitting quietly in a jail in The Hague, preparing to defend himself against charges of treason, terrorism, false imprisonment, malicious prosecution and, possibly, genocide.

Instead, on Wednesday last week, he was sitting, immaculately tailored, as always, in a conference room at United Nations headquarters, as the secretary-general of the Organisation of American States (OAS) vainly attempted to give a decent burial to US government policies in Haiti.
It was a farce.

Officiating at the obsequies was the Guyanese-born assistant secretary-general of the OAS, chosen, one imagines, because his clean hands distinguished him from a motley gang of bloodstained bureaucrats who have for two years connived at one of the most blatant and infamous rapes of human rights in modern history.
jamaicaobservor.com

The Puzzling Alliance of Chavannes Jean-Baptiste and Charles Henri Baker
Imagine in U.S. politics if Cesar Chavez had suddenly endorsed and collaborated with George Wallace in his Presidential campaign, and the
United Farm Workers had joined racist white plantation owners in their last-ditch effort to maintain total apartheid in the U.S. South. This is not an inappropriate comparison to the recent bizarre alliance in Haiti between Chavannes Jean-Baptiste’s powerful and genuinely grassroots peasant organization, MPP (Papaye Peasant’s Movement) and Charles Henri Baker, the elite owner of a Haitian garment industry sweatshop. Despite years of fighting U.S. economic polices toward Haiti, from the Creole Pig fiasco under the Duvaliers to the disastrous neoliberalism of the past decade, Chavannes and the MPP now uncritically support openly neo-liberalist and Duvalierist members of the tiny, mostly “blanc” (light-skinned, Francophone), Haitian elite, who are in turn supported by U.S. right-wing groups like the IRI (International Republican Institute), funded by USAID.

Perhaps just as bizarre has been the continuing uncritical support (at least until now) by MPP’s U.S. funder, Grassroots International. GI consistently takes a strong stand against what it calls the U.S. “death plan,” structural adjustment and the whole World Bank neo-liberal program, yet remained silent for years after Chavannes and MPP became closely linked to precisely the U.S. “death plan” agenda, in their growing support for the successful overthrow of the Aristide government, and their close alliance with opposition groups with a neoliberal agenda and worse.

Advertising hoardings promoting “Own direction for Zulia” in the context of “liberal capitalism” appeared in this western state of Venezuela and which was labelled part of a secessionist campaign by local media.

The digital publication Aporrea (www.aporrea.org ) indicated that the “Zulianity” adopted by a section of the opposition is the start of “a new campaign to propel an imperialist coup” against the revolutionary process of President Hugo Chavez.

These hoardings contain a subliminal message about the separation of this state from the rest of Venezuela. Zulia is controlled by the opposition and this campaign is a project previously denounced by Venezuelan authorities.

Advertising hoardings promoting “Own direction for Zulia” in the context of “liberal capitalism” appeared in this western state of Venezuela and which was labelled part of a secessionist campaign by local media.

Analysts confirm that the proposal of a capitalist direction for Zulia is intended to prepare the general public for a violent separation from the rest of Venezuela and the privatization of public services.

Let’s also remember that on “Zulia Day” the US Ambassador in Venezuela, William Brownfield was invited to a local television programme in which he catalogued Zulia as the best state of Venezuela. In 2005, Brownfield visited Zulia some 17 times and this state is also where the war games exercise “Operation Balboa” to invade Venezuela was played out in Madrid in May 2001 by NATO and US commanders.

Authorities and the media had previously alerted about the existence of a secessionist plan for Zulia as part of actions planned against the government of President Chavez.

This state where a great deal of Venezuela’s oil wealth is located, is controlled by opposition governor Manuel Rosales who has been accused of participating in conspiracy meetings with ex military coup mongers and Colombian paramilitaries.
axisoflogic.com

Walking across the central plaza in Oaxaca City time slows down. Stepping into the expanse of cobblestone walkways that weave through trees and flower beds, surrounded by old colonial government buildings and sidewalk cafes, one feels one’s hurry diminish like a drop in temperature. Taking a stroll and then leaning back with an espresso seem to be the most natural activities in the world.

And this is no accident, the state of Oaxaca spent 80 million dollars in the past two years renovating the plaza, crafting the image that the Mexican state so dearly loves to export: the perfect balance of an antique culture represented in art and architecture and the conveniences and luxuries of capitalism.

This is the preferred snapshot of the “new” Mexico and the “democratic change” attributed to President Vicente Fox’s six years in office. The idyllic colonial plaza equipped with credit-card ready shops and restaurants. The route of the Other Campaign through Oaxaca, however, revealed a different image of this intersection between Mexico’s elder culture and its contemporary capitalism: the molded concrete of a prison wall.

Throughout Oaxaca Subcomandante Marcos listened to hours of testimony from family members and co-workers of indigenous activists who have been taken prisoner. The charges range from belonging to the armed Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) to acts of murder and kidnapping. Yet the evidence—when there is any—is reduced to a signed confession, extracted under torture.
zmag.org

WARRI, Nigeria (AP) – Militants released six foreign oil workers, including a diabetic Texan celebrating his 69th birthday Wednesday, taken captive last month to press fighters’ demands for a greater share of oil revenues generated in this restive southern state.

But three other hostages – two Americans and a Briton – were kept by militants from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta. A militant spokesman said all “low-value” hostages taken Feb. 18 had been freed.
guardian.co.uk

From cabbies to shahs, most Iranians believe political events can be traced back to English interference.

Watching his fellow countrymen observe the annual Shia Islamic mourning ceremony of Ashura, the disaffected Tehran taxi driver voiced a wish to convert to Christianity that may not have been as sincere as it was incongruous. But whatever his true ecclesiastical leanings, his beliefs about the source of the religious tyranny that so irked him about Iran were real.

“It is England that has imposed these mullahs on us,” the cabbie mused, resisting all protestations at the notion’s absurdity.

The idea that the Islamic revolution was a plot hatched in Whitehall, and that its spiritual leader, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was some sort of heavily disguised 007 in the secret service of Her Majesty’s government does indeed seem weird. But not to many Iranians.

Suggestions that the convulsive events of 1979, which ushered in the Islamic republic, were manipulated and orchestrated by the British are widely accepted here as a given. It is a belief held, even before his reign was swept to oblivion in a revolutionary tidal wave, by the last shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

Resentful that the British had deposed his pro-German father during the second world war, the shah commissioned a television drama, My Uncle Napoleon, whose main character’s catchphrase was: “The British are behind everything”. The shah echoed this mantra during his reign’s last desperate days, telling the American ambassador, William Sullivan, that he “detected the hand of the English” behind the street demonstrations raging against him. Sullivan surmised that the teetering monarch had lost his mind and, with it, the will to survive.

But the shah was reflecting a broader mindset. The sun may have long set on British imperial might but in Iran it has been replaced by an enduring mirage of dominance which still shines brightly. If the rest of the world has become accustomed to the American hegemonic age, to Iranians Inglestan still wields the true power, albeit stealthily. Behind events great and small, they are ready to perceive the sleight of a hidden British hand. Belief in the “old coloniser’s” diabolic powers unites Iranians in a way matched by no other issue, including the Islamic regime’s pursuit of nuclear technology.
guardian.co.uk

Oh yeah, those crazy Iranians. Let’s bomb them.