Thirty-eight years after he was assassinated on a motel balcony, photographs, recordings and police files that describe the death of Martin Luther King Jr. have been placed on the internet.

On yesterday’s anniversary of Dr King’s death, the Shelby County Register’s office in Memphis, Tennessee, made available hours of tapes, including hurried police calls from the scene of the crime, hundreds of photographs and thousands of pages of files and transcripts of the trial of James Earl Ray, the man found guilty of the shooting.

Dr King was shot in the jaw while he spoke to supporters from his balcony outside Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in downtown Memphis in the early evening of April 4, 1968. He was in the city, and under police surveillance, trying to lead a peaceful protest of sanitation workers. He died an hour later.
timesonline.co.uk

A small group in the Venezuelan state of Zulia — a state critical to the nation’s oil industry — has caused a stir by pushing for more autonomy.

MARACAIBO, Venezuela – The state of Zulia has always thought of itself as the Texas of Venezuela — a land dominated by oil, cattle and largely conservative politicians. So it’s no surprise that some of its people would want more autonomy.

”We want our own government,” said Néstor Suárez, an economics professor and president of the pro-autonomy group Own Way. “We are against big central governments.”

That central government, of course, is run by President Hugo Chávez, whose politics and economics are moving toward socialism in the mold of Cuba — expanding social-service programs and seizing some ”idle” lands and factories.

Suárez — whose movement favors traditional capitalist policies — said the group is still in its early stages but is not seeking independence from Venezuela. He likens its goal to Spain’s Catalonia province and China’s Hong Kong, areas with semi-autonomous economic and political systems.

But Own Way’s ideas nevertheless are causing a national stir, with Chávez charging that the Bush administration, which he has repeatedly accused of trying to topple him, is backing the proposal in an attempt to grab Zulia’s vast oil reserves.

The United States has called all of the accusations ridiculous.

Still, Zulia is important. With about four million people in an area the size of West Virginia, it has the second-highest population and is one of the richest of Venezuela’s states. Its Lake Maracaibo is one of the country’s main oil-producing areas.
freerepublic.com

The same thing is happening in Bolivia. Of course it is also ‘ridiculous’ to assume that the US has a hand in this.

A handful of the world’s largest food companies and commodity traders, including McDonald’s in the UK, are driving illegal and rapid destruction of the Amazon rainforest, according to a six-year investigation of the Brazilian soya bean industry.

The report, published today, follows a 7,000km chain that starts with the clearing of virgin forest by farmers and leads directly to Chicken McNuggets being sold in British and European fast food restaurants. It also alleges that much of the soya animal feed arriving in the UK from Brazil is a product of “forest crime” and that McDonald’s and British supermarkets have turned a blind eye to the destruction of the forest.
guardian.co.uk

Colombia suffers one of the highest levels of armed violence in the world, although there has been a significant improvement since 2002, according to a joint report by the Conflict Analysis Resource Center and the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey.

Between 1979 and 2005 more than 475,000 people were killed by the use of firearms through crime, organised and petty, and the ongoing conflict between the government and guerrilla groups. Most victims have been young men.

The report concentrates on measuring the impact of armed violence on human security. It also describes the production, trade, use, and trafficking of arms in Colombia and the regulatory framework in the country.
news.ft.com

Colombia Tops List of Land Mine Victims
…According to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Colombia had the third-highest number of land mine victims in 2004 after Cambodia and Afghanistan. The count was incomplete for 2005.

The Colombian government’s Land Mines Observatory recorded 1,070 land mine victims in Colombia in 2005 and said the number was more than in any other country. One quarter of these incidents resulted in deaths.

Land mines are perhaps the perfect embodiment of Colombia’s civil war, a mechanism designed to kill and maim that draws no distinction between armed combatant and innocent civilian.

The majority of the victims are soldiers, many of whom are slowly trudging their way through heavily mined leftist strongholds in southern Colombia in the country’s biggest offensive against the rebels. But a full quarter of those injured or killed, according to government figures, are civilians caught in the middle of the violence.

Colombia: Drug Wars Force Forest Nomads To Flee
150 Indians belonging to one of the last nomadic tribes in the Amazon have been forced to flee their land after becoming caught up in Colombia’s drugs war.

Large numbers of left-wing guerrillas have taken over the Indians’ territory, and are engaged in fighting with the Colombian army and right-wing paramilitaries. All sides are seeking to control the lucrative drugs trade which thrives in this remote region.

The Indians belong to the Nukak-Makú tribe, who live in the eastern Colombian Amazon. The tribe first made contact with white people in 1988. Around half the tribe have died since then from diseases such as flu and measles, leaving a population of about 500. In 1997 a Survival campaign succeeded in gaining legal protection of the Indians’ territory on paper.

Until recently most of the Nukak were trying to continue their nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life in the face of waves of violence against them and the colonisation of their lands by poor Colombians growing coca. However, the scale of the fighting now taking place has made their life in the forest impossible, and the very survival of the tribe is now at risk.

The administration’s proposal would modernize the nation’s complex of laboratories and factories as well as produce new bombs.

The Bush administration Wednesday unveiled a blueprint for rebuilding the nation’s decrepit nuclear weapons complex, including restoration of a large-scale bomb manufacturing capacity.

The plan calls for the most sweeping realignment and modernization of the nation’s massive system of laboratories and factories for nuclear bombs since the end of the Cold War.

Until now, the nation has depended on carefully maintaining aging bombs produced during the Cold War arms race, some several decades old. The administration, however, wants the capability to turn out 125 new nuclear bombs per year by 2022, as the Pentagon retires older bombs that it says will no longer be reliable or safe.

Under the plan, all of the nation’s plutonium would be consolidated into a single facility that could be more effectively and cheaply defended against possible terrorist attacks. The plan would remove the plutonium kept at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory by 2014, though transfers of the material could start sooner. In recent years, concern has grown that Livermore, surrounded by residential neighborhoods in the Bay Area, could not repel a terrorist attack.
latimes.com

If there is a world journalism record for being arrested by Sudan’s dictatorial government, I probably hold it: I was detained on the first morning of my first visit. Despite many less eventful subsequent visits to Sudan, I remain very wary of the regime.

Nevertheless, Khartoum does have a point about the dangers of western military intervention in Darfur. In February President Bush, during an unscripted question-and-answer session in Florida, suggested an expanded international role in Darfur, with “Nato stewardship” of a UN force there. This statement caught many policy makers off guard.

Nato is already assisting with logistics for the 7,800 African Union peacekeepers in Darfur. Bush is pushing for a large UN force – perhaps 20,000 troops – to replace the AU, arguing that this would end the fighting there. This sounds good but won’t work. Putting white, western, Christian troops in Darfur would unite all those fighting each other – in a holy war against outsiders. Defence officials in London and Brussels cautioned Washington by invoking the 1993 debacle in Somalia. But the genie of western-directed forces is out of the bottle.
guardian.co.uk

Isreali gunboats stop Palestinians from fishing as a communal punishment or to prevent attacks.

His nets empty and his fibreglass hull perforated by machinegun bullets, Omar sits glumly on the shoreline contemplating the looming demise of the Gaza fishing industry.
Unable to afford the rising prices of lamb, beef and flour in their sealed-off coastal strip, Palestinians crowd their markets in search of fish. Now that poultry supplies are depleted by the threat of bird flu, the clamour for fish is even greater.

But, confronted by Israeli gunboats in fishing grounds they consider their own, the impoverished fishermen are unable to meet the demand.

The heart of the issue is the continued Israeli control of Gaza’s borders, airspace and waters, more than six months after it claimed to have ended its military rule of Gaza by evacuating 8,000 Jewish settlers and all its military bases.

A study by the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP), released this week, identifies Israeli restrictions on fishing boats as a key factor in the decline of an industry that, it says, could be finished by October 2007.
timesonline.co.uk

Swiss teenagers sent to a centre for problem children based at a remote Spanish farmhouse were allegedly locked up in pig pens and kept on a diet of milk and muesli if they misbehaved, according to police.

The case came to light after some of the children ran away and one was found at a nearby railway station.

Police in the north-eastern town of Sant Llorenç de la Muga arrested three people who had been running the centre and accused them of illegally detaining children and using physical and psychological violence against them. “Those in charge of the centre allegedly mistreated the children daily, shutting them up for days on end in pig pens if they did not want to work or worked poorly,” a Spanish police statement said. “Some children were shut up eight hours a day in the pig pens for three months,” it added. Police said other children were allegedly confined in a space measuring one square metre.
guardian.co.uk

More than a million Georgians could be evacuated after being told they are at risk from catastrophic flooding, landslides and mud flows, says the country’s chief environmental adviser.

Geologists and other experts are examining mountainsides and river valleys so people in disaster-prone areas can be evacuated in time. The homes of 400,000 families in 3,000 settlements are at risk, says Emi Tsereteli, of the State University of Georgia, head of the environment ministry emergency taskforce. He blamed Georgia’s worsening problems on climate change and man-made factors such as illegal logging on steep mountainsides.
guardian.co.uk

A bumper crop of opium poppies in Afghanistan has raised fears that an influx of cheap and dangerously pure heroin could flood the UK within the next few months.

Drug experts have warned that, with the price of a heroin wrap already Ł20 or less, they are concerned supply will outstrip demand, forcing dealers to try to attract new customers with low prices and create the biggest drug epidemic in the country for 20 years.

Some campaigners are worried there will be a rash of drug-related deaths because the heroin heading for the UK is likely to be stronger and more pure than many users are accustomed to.

“The heroin is heading our way and we have to be prepared for it,” warned Tom Wood, former deputy chief constable at Lothian and Borders Police and now chairman of the Edinburgh Drugs and Alcohol Action Team.

“It will be getting cheaper. If enough comes in, then supply will outstrip demand.

“The bigger concern is that it will become more powerful. We’re talking about extra strong, pure heroin. If it is pure it will be more dangerous.”
independent.co.uk