Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent newspaper, and more than 30 years of reporting from the region makes him one of the most acute observers of the Arab world. He joins Lateline from Beirut to discuss the implications of the Zarqawi video.
informationclearinghouse.info

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BAGHDAD (Reuters) – It doesn’t cost a lot to set up your own death squad in Iraq. Military uniforms, guns and even police vehicles are easily available to all comers in the markets of Baghdad.

In a city where gangs of men dressed as police have killed dozens of people and stolen tens of thousands of dollars, anyone with a modest amount of cash can set up their own fake squad.
news.yahoo.com

…AMY GOODMAN: And the Niger Delta, we talked about it in our first part of the interview, but the level of militancy, the anger at the oil companies coming into the Niger Delta, this organization called MEND, Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, can you tell us who they are?

WOLE SOYINKA: They’re very young, mostly, very highly motivated people who, however, have links with some of the elders, the progressive elders in the region, in Bayelsa, for instance, in Ijaw region, many belong to the Ijaw ethnic group, and from all indications, they’re very articulate. The ones whom IÕve spoken to asked me to intervene in a number of ways in Nigeria, very articulate, and at the same time, they’re reluctant rebels. Take, for instance, an email which one of them sent to me, said, ÒProf, listen. We are people who would rather be with our families raising our children, sending them to school. WeÕre not happy sort of carrying out operations in the creeks. We want to be home. We want all this to be over so we can return to our families, but what future do our children have? There are no schools, there are no clinics. All the wealth in this region is going to Abuja, is going to sustain the rest of the nation, so it’s about time that we took a stand. We want you to understand this.Ó This is the kind of language which they use. It’s not bravado; itÕs not crude, thuggish kind of people, at least the ones whom IÕve spoken to.
democracynow.org

Militants reject Niger Delta help
Nigerian militants in the southern Delta region have rejected plans announced by President Olusegun Obasanjo to develop their region.
The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta also renewed its threat to continue oil installation attacks.

It said the offer of thousands more jobs and a new motorway did not address their demands for more local control of oil wealth and demilitarisation.

Mend have kidnapped foreign oil workers and warned them to leave the Delta.

In a statement, Mend said the government was trying to remedy 50 years of injustice with the promise of menial jobs.

“We do not need any further mismanagement of the fast diminishing resources of our land by the award of bogus contracts intended to channel the wealth of the Niger Delta back to the hands of those who have looted … all these years,” it said.

Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez says his country is withdrawing from the South American trade bloc, the Andean Community of Nations.
He told a summit in Paraguay that Venezuela was leaving because recent trade deals between Peru, Colombia and the US had killed off the community.

He has accused fellow members of being overly aligned with the US.

He has vowed to create economic and political unity in South America without the help of Washington.

‘Fatal wound’

Mr Chavez has maintained a war of words with Washington, and argued that free trade deals are unfair to developing nations.

On Wednesday the Venezuelan leader told reporters at the summit in Asuncion that the Andean Community of Nations – made up of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru – was “fatally wounded” and only served international elites.

Venezuela, however, is on track to becoming a full member of Mercosur, another South American trade bloc whose member governments are mostly left-wing.
bbc.co.uk

New Chile president wants to ease tensions with neighbors
SANTIAGO, Chile – (AP) — Chile is prepared to restore diplomatic relations with Bolivia and sign a free trade accord with Peru regardless of who wins that country’s presidential election, the foreign minister said in comments published Sunday.

The 5-week-old government of Chilean President Michelle Bachelet also will work to promote regional integration in South America, Foreign Minister Alejandro Foxley told the Santiago newspaper El Mercurio.

Chile has historically had strained relations with the two countries, having defeated a Peru-Bolivia alliance in two wars in the 1800s.

Since 1978, Chile has not had diplomatic relations with landlocked Bolivia, which lost its Pacific coast to Chile in the second of those wars and has been seeking to recover it ever since.

Chile and Peru have squabbled often, including with wars over a swath of mineral-rich coast and in heated rivalries over soccer matches and even the origins of a grape brandy both claim as their national drink.

Foxley said the Bachelet administration hopes to ease tensions with its neighbors.

”We are prepared to sit to negotiate and sign a free trade accord (with Peru) the first Monday after the election, never mind who gets elected,” Foxley said, referring to Peru’s presidential election that is headed to a runoff after no candidate won a majority on April 9.

The comment appeared to dismiss concerns expressed by some local politicians that a victory by Ollanta Humala — a nationalist ex-army officer who led all candidates in the first round and is seen by many here as anti-Chilean — would damage relations between Chile and Peru.

Humala has said he would change rules governing Chilean investment in Peru, especially in ”strategic sectors” such as air traffic and port administration.

”What candidates say in an election campaign often changes when one has the responsibility of governing a country,” Foxley said.

The minister also said the Bachelet government hopes to restore diplomatic relations with Bolivia.

”We are going to deploy all our energy to develop an agenda with Bolivia without exclusions,” he said.

In the book “Fidel Castro, a two-voiced biography,” published by the Debate Publishing House, the Cuban president told Ignacio Ramonet information not previously released about the events of April 2002 in Venezuela.

Castro states that he phoned Miraflores Palace before Chavez surrendered and told him: “Don’t kill yourself, Hugo. Don’t do like Allende, who was a man alone. You have most of the Army on your side. Don’t quit, don’t resign.”

Later, Fidel directed Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perrez Roque, to fly to Caracas in one of two planes to pick up Chavez and fly him to safety.

Castro contacted “a general who sided with [Chavez]” to tell him that the world knew the president had not resigned and to ask the general to send troops to rescue the president.

Fidel Castro, who delivers so many speeches, has granted very few interviews. Only four long conversations with him have been published in the past 50 years. The fifth such interview, with the editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, Ignacio Ramonet, has become the book “Fidel Castro, a two-voiced biography,” a summary of the life and thoughts of the Cuban chief of state, distilled from 100 hours of conversation. The first interview was held in late January 2003; the final one, in December 2005.

Published in these pages is an excerpt from the interview in which Castro talks about the Venezuelan conflict that occurred on April 11, 2002. As the Comandante says, he will remain in office “as long as the National Assembly, in the name of the Cuba people, wishes.” The book, soon to appear, is published by the Debate Publishing House.
zmag.org

Venezuela, Cuba likely to get U.N. spots
WASHINGTON – The Bush administration is battling to stop Venezuela and Cuba from gaining seats in important U.N. posts in a confrontation that has many Latin American nations caught in the middle, diplomats and analysts say.

Most observers believe Washington faces an uphill battle to keep Venezuela out of the Security Council and Cuba out of a newly created U.N. Human Rights Council.

BAIDOA, Somalia – Somalia has granted the U.S. Navy permission to patrol its coastal waters in an effort to combat piracy off the lawless Horn of Africa nation, the prime minister said.

Ali Mohamed Gedi told lawmakers Sunday the United States also would help the transitional government set up a coast guard to secure the 11,880-mile coastline.

The agreement was reached during talks with the U.S. ambassador in Kenya, Gedi said. U.S. Embassy officials were not immediately available for comment.
news.yahoo.com

The budget next year for National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte’s office and the several agencies attached to it may be near $1 billion or more, according to language buried in the report of the House intelligence committee on the fiscal 2007 intelligence authorization bill.

The exact budget total for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is classified, but the report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence contains a figure by the Congressional Budget Office of $990 million for the intelligence community management account that provides the principal funding for the ODNI.

Negroponte will use that money to coordinate intelligence programs, prepare budgets for the 16 agencies within the intelligence community and pay for the National Counterterrorism Center and other agencies absorbed into the ODNI. In comparison, spending for the intelligence community management account, when it served the former CIA director in his role of director of central intelligence, was less than $200 million a year.

Members of Congress who wrote the legislation creating the DNI had expected it to be a lean management organization with a staff of about 750. At a recent news conference, DNI officials said their staff, including all agencies, totals 1,539 people.

The proposed budget, which is about one-third the size of all CIA funding in years before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, is far larger than expected. DNI officials recently attributed the growth to their absorbing of existing agencies and unfunded tasks.
washingtonpost.com

The New York Times recently reported that–for the first time–a full-time worker earning minimum wage cannot afford a one-bedroom apartment anywhere in America at market rates. That means more and more people like Michelle Kennedy–a former Senate page and author of Without a Net: Middle Class and Homeless (With Kids) in America–are finding themselves homeless and living out of their cars.

At a town hall meeting in Ohio on April 2, Representative Sherrod Brown, a staunch advocate for social and economic rights (he and Bernie Sanders are the two best candidates running for Senate in 2006) railed against the economic hardship brought on by stagnant wages: “It is unacceptable that someone can work full-time–and work hard–and not be able to lift their family out of poverty.” He blasted a system where a full-time minimum-wage worker earns $10,500 a year, while “last year the CEO of Wal-Mart earned $3,500 an hour. The CEO of Halliburton earned about $8,300 an hour. And the CEO of ExxonMobil earned about $13,700 an hour.”
thenation.com

Despite the refusal of the official Hamas representatives to condemn Monday’s terror attack in Tel Aviv – the Hamas spokesman in Gaza, Sami Abu Zuhri, called it “a legitimate act of self-defense” and said Israel must take responsibility for its policy of “aggressive occupation” the timing of the attack is not convenient for the movement.

Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and Palestinian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahar are investing a lot into extricating the Palestinian Authority from its financial troubles and international isolation. Its image as a terror government damages these efforts.
haaretz.com

From the Union of Concerned Scientists
ucsusa.org