Baghdad — You hear the moans first. They’re low and soft, broken sometimes by staccato sobbing.

Then comes the crying and the keening. Sometimes it’s just one person. Sometimes two. Sometimes a group of people, family members, hugging and crying and asking the question no one can answer: “Why?”

This was the scene outside the emergency room at the Baghdad Teaching Hospital on Friday. Suicide bombers had struck the Shiite Buratha Mosque, just across the Tigris River to the west, as Friday prayers ended. At least 79 people were killed, and at least 160 were injured. Many of the victims were brought to this hospital.

Family and friends, Iraqi police, commandos and soldiers, all jammed the narrow street leading to the entrance of the emergency room. A steady stream of people walked slowly down the tree-lined street. At the door, uniformed guards checked identifications and searched for weapons.

It was an ideal spot for another suicide bomber.
sfgate.com

TWO employees of the Niger embassy in Rome were responsible for the forgery of a notorious set of documents used to help justify the Iraq war, an official investigation has allegedly found.

According to Nato sources, the investigation has evidence that Niger’s consul and its ambassador’s personal assistant faked a contract to show Saddam Hussein had bought uranium ore from the impoverished west African country.

The documents, which emerged in 2002, were used in a US State Department fact sheet on Iraq’s weapons programme to build the case for war. They were denounced as forgeries by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) shortly before the 2003 invasion.

The revelation spawned a series of conspiracy theories, most alleging that the British, Italians, or even Dick Cheney, the American vice-president, had had a hand in forging them to back the case for war.
timesonline.co.uk

They were bored one day and decided to fake a contract.

ISRAELI military intelligence officials have accused President George W Bush’s administration of undermining their attempts to infiltrate Al-Qaeda’s operations in Iraq by revealing the contents of a secret letter written by Osama Bin Laden’s second-in-command, writes Uzi Mahnaimi.

Israel passed the letter — in which Ayman al-Zawahiri outlined his Middle East strategy to Abu Musab al- Zarqawi, the Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq — to Washington last October on condition of strict anonymity.

Israeli officials were dismayed, however, when John Negroponte, the US director of national intelligence, made it available in both English and its original Arabic on his office web site.

Bush then referred to it during his weekly address. “The Al-Qaeda letter points to Vietnam as a model,” the president declared. “Al-Qaeda believes that America can be made to run again. They are gravely mistaken. America will not run and we will not forget our responsibilities.”

Israeli intelligence sources said officials who had worked on “Operation Tiramisu” inside Iraq took emergency steps to protect their sources, but it was not clear how successful they had been in averting the damage to their intelligence network.

They said Bush’s indiscretion had undone months of painstaking effort.

At first I thought it was a typo, or that they have promoted Zarqawi to Bin Ladin’s ‘second in command.’

The President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, is recruiting and training a people’s militia to help lead a “war of resistance” against what he claims is the threat of a US invasion. Housewives, students, construction workers and the unemployed are being recruited for the country’s Territorial Guard. The first training sessions with firearms have already taken place.

“I can assure you right away that also in this battle we will defeat the US empire,” Mr Chavez said in a speech last week. A former army officer who turned to politics after his attempt at a coup in 1992 failed, he has raised the spectre of a US invasion so often that Washington’s ambassador, William Brownfield, put it on record last year that “the United States has never invaded … and will never invade Venezuela”.
independent.co.uk

The recently inaugurated Chilean president Michelle Bachelet said that for Chile to become a full member of Mercosur would mean “back stepping”.

“That’s why we are so enthusiastic and push so hard for a Free Trade Association of the Americas, FTAA”, added Ms Bachelet in a long weekend interview with Buenos Aires daily La Nación.

“The difficulty has always been that Chile has economic reforms in place. Becoming a full member of Mercosur would mean back stepping on those reforms”, she underlined.

“What is needed is a basic FTAA, in which minimum conditions are equivalent for all countries, and from there on keep advancing. An FTAA of this kind would enable all countries to join. That’s why we are enthusiastic and push hard for TFAA”, added the Chilean president.

Mercosur, basically a customs union launched in 1991 fifteen years ago this Monday March 27, experienced an encouraging advance during the first few years and rapidly became a reference for the region.

However, problems began to emerge with the so called asymmetries, (different degrees of development of the members’ economies) and more serious, Mercosur lack of capacity to address and overcome those challenges.

Meantime Washington in the mid nineties launched the idea of a free trade association, on the lines of the North American Free Trade Association, Nafta, extending from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.
mercosurpress.com

Despite her impressive credentials as a victim of Pinochet, she shows her true intentions.

LEON, Nicaragua (Reuters) — After years of setbacks, many Nicaraguans from Leon, the cradle of the 1979 Sandinista revolution, believe their aging former guerrilla leaders could soon return to power in elections that also could prove a diplomatic nightmare for Washington.

“We need a change. It’s been bad, bad, bad,” said 60-year-old war Sandinista war veteran Daniel Sauro, referring to 16 years of pro-Washington governments that took power after Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega’s electoral defeat in 1990.

Sauro lives in a city where colonial churches and dilapidated houses are still splattered with aging bullet holes from 1970s street battles between leftist rebels and the army.

“We need to give Ortega another chance to show he can govern in times of peace,” Sauro said.

Like many Nicaraguans, he complains about crime, corruption and low wages and looks back with nostalgia to the heady revolutionary days of 1979.

The graying Ortega — a Cold War U.S. foe and loser of the last three elections — is a favorite to win a vote that could cement an emerging shift to the left in Latin America.

Leon was one of the first cities that leftist rebels occupied in the 1979 uprising and loyalty has stayed strong — the town has always elected a Sandinista mayor despite a swing against the movement in much of Nicaragua.

But now national support for the Sandinistas, who in the 1980s led a Soviet- and Cuban-backed government that battled U.S.-funded Contra rebels, is returning to Nicaragua before presidential elections in November, pollsters say.

Many voters are tired of pro-Washington governments that have failed to raise living standards in one of the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nations.
cnn.com

In this interview Abel Mamani outlines his hopes and the challenges his Ministry will face. He explains that the Bolivian Government’s policies on water will be based on the understanding that Water is a human right and must be managed by the state and the community.
upsidedownworld.org

ZIRAHUÉN, MICHOACÁN, MÉXICO: To shouts of “Zapata lives, the struggle continues!” and “Cárdenas, understand, our land is not for sale!” about 500 indigenous peasant farmers from the “Caracol in Rebellion of Lake Zirahuén” received Zapatista Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos with a march. They later expressed to him their determination to continue the struggle to defend their communal lands in the face of an ambitious tourism mega-project.
axisoflogic.com

When we read the Christian Science Monitor’s report on the Peruvian elections, “Ollanta Humala leads the polls ahead of Sunday’s vote. He reflects views of leaders in Venezuela and Bolivia”, we read disinformation and fear. At the same time, we have to smile at another lame attempt by the corporate media to marginalize yet another successful, indigenous, revolutionary leader in Latin America, Ollanta Humala of Peru. Their fear is born from their knowledge that Humala’s allegiance is to the people, rejecting the homage paid to Washington by his predecessor, President Alejandro Toledos, a World Bank consultant and before him, Alberto Fujimori.
axisoflogic.com

Coca crisis hangs over Peru elections

Any unannounced ‘gringo’ visitor to this tiny village is a dead man. As endless coca fields spread into the forests of Peru’s Apurimac jungle, mountains of coca leaves dry in the sun of Llaruri’s dirt streets, at the heart of one of the world’s largest cocaine-producing areas.

‘Last time, I came here with a Canadian engineer and coca farmers thought we wanted to eradicate their crops, so they blocked the road, drove us away at gunpoint and threatened to shoot us,’ said my driver as we approached the village. ‘A local teacher saved us at the last minute by suggesting that they should check our identities first.’

For the United States, a key backer of Peru’s anti-cocaine strategy, today’s presidential elections pose an enormous challenge to its war against drugs. Nationalist front-runner and former military officer Ollanta Humala has promised a radical shift in anti-narcotics policy, echoing proposals from the recently elected Bolivian President, Evo Morales.

While Colombia remains the world’s top cocaine producer, Peru – at number two – is rapidly gaining ground, driven by the area around the Apurimac river, where half of its cocaine is produced. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says that cocaine production in Apurimac increased by 70 per cent to 53 tonnes in 2004, with up to 90 per cent of all coca production being used for cocaine. And it warns that output could be about to increase further.

Communities nationwide appear intent on testing the lengths they can go to suppress or expel their homeless populations — anything to avoid having to see, let alone help, the least fortunate.
newstandardnews.net