The 2,200-square-foot house promises three spacious bedrooms and two- and-a-half baths _ a bargain at $175,000. Except for the fact that the home, located in one of this city’s previously elegant neighborhoods, has been gutted to the studs and has no drywall, no wallboard, no fixtures.

“Home was flooded by Katrina,” reads the advertisement posted by the listing agent at one of the city’s largest real estate firms. “Ready to turn into your dream home.”

The pitch is less far-fetched than it may seem: Although vast swaths of this hurricane-battered city are still without electricity and basic services, residential real estate sales are at a fever pitch, a shining spot in an otherwise struggling economy.

For the first quarter of the year, sales of single-family homes in the greater New Orleans area zoomed to $826 million, a jump of 60 percent over the first quarter of 2005, when sales totaled $517 million, according to New Orleans Metropolitan Association of Realtors; 3,829 residential units were sold, 960 more than the same period in 2005.

Experts say there’s nothing to be surprised about: One of the ironies of natural disasters is they’re often good for real estate. It’s a pattern real estate professionals witnessed in Florida after Hurricane Andrew and in Los Angeles in the aftermath of the Northridge earthquake.

“To use a terrible analogy, it’s like watching ‘Gone with the Wind’ for the fifth time,” said Arthur Sterbcow, president of Latter & Blum Inc., the 90-year-old real estate firm based in New Orleans. “It’s completely predictable. The market reacts the same way each time. It’s like watching a football game and having the play book in your hands.”
breitbart.com

…Given this history, why should we be surprised that in Baghdad, such figures as former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority L. Paul Bremer III, former Ambassador John Negroponte, and present Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, as well as a continuously changing cohort of American major-generals fresh from power-point lectures at the American Enterprise Institute, should have produced chaos and probable civil war? None of them has any qualifications at all for trying to “introduce democracy” or American-style capitalism in a highly nationalistic Muslim nation, and even if they did, they could not escape the onus of having terrorized the country through the use of unrestricted military force.

Bremer is a former assistant and employee of Henry Kissinger and General Alexander Haig. Negroponte was American ambassador to Honduras, 1981-85, when it had the world’s largest CIA station and actively participated in the dirty war to suppress Nicaraguan democracy. Khalilzad, the most prominent official of Afghan ancestry in the Bush administration, is a member of the Project for a New American Century, the neocon pressure group that lobbied for a war of aggression against Iraq. The role of the American military in our war there has been an unmitigated disaster on every front, including the deployment of undisciplined, brutal troops at places like the Abu Ghraib prison. All the United States has achieved is to guarantee that Iraqis will hate us for years to come. The situation in Iraq today is worse than it was in Japan or Korea and comparable to our tenure in Vietnam. Perhaps it is worth reconsidering what exactly we are so intent on exporting to the world.
globalresearch.ca

General Michael V. Hayden is favourite to step up to take the head position at the CIA after the resignation of Porter J Goss who stepped down in advance of the revelations that he and a top aide may have attended Watergate poker parties where bribes and hookers were provided to corrupt congressmen.

Hayden is National Intelligence Director John Negroponte’s senior deputy.

“Such a move would bring further power to Mr Negroponte, a rising star of the administration.” reports the London Independent.

Negroponte’s job is to coordinate the work of 16 different intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the giant National Security Agency, which eavesdrops on international communications, as well as the Energy Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The role was created immediately after 9/11 and ties in with the Defense Department’s Total Information Awareness Program, which seeks to gather a “lifetime paper trail” of all citizens and centralize the information on a giant database.

The co-ordination of all intelligence gathering services by Negroponte is the first step of this nightmarish Orwellian program. The excuse for all this is of course the war on terror.
prisonplanet.com

The Spy Master Cracks the Whip
How John Negroponte won control of the CIA, and what he plans next to consolidate rival agencies and his power.

CIA Nominee Hayden Linked to MZM
Hayden, President Bush’s pick to replace Porter Goss as head of the CIA, contracted with MZM Inc. for the services of Lt. Gen. James C. King, then a senior vice president of the company, the sources say. MZM was owned and operated by Mitchell Wade, who has admitted to bribing former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham with $1.4 million in money and gifts. Wade has also reportedly told investigators he helped arrange for prostitutes to entertain the disgraced lawmaker, and he continues to cooperate with a federal inquiry into the matter.

King has not been implicated in the growing scandal around Wade’s illegal activities. However, federal records show he contributed to some of Wade’s favored lawmakers, including $6000 to Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) and $4000 to Rep. Katherine Harris (R-FL).

Before joining MZM in December 2001, King served under Hayden as the NSA’s associate deputy director for operations, and as head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.

ATHENS – A double anger erupted out of the European Social Forum on to the streets of Athens Saturday. Anti-globalization protesters attacked police and multinational targets, alongside local groups protesting injustice to immigrants.

The two came together naturally at the European Social Forum (ESF) that began Thursday. ESF participants had planned a large demonstration through Athens for Saturday afternoon. The police were expecting trouble, but were still caught off guard.

The center of Athens was cordoned off all afternoon by heavy police contingents. Government buildings and the embassies of the United States and Britain were under visibly heavy protection.

It was a small group from the demonstration, believed to be the Anarchists. The police said at the end of the day that two of their vehicles were damaged by petrol bombs. Petrol bombs also damaged a Citibank building, the police said.

The attacks had clearly been planned beforehand. Other groups emerged from the side streets on Ermou street, the most fashionable shopping center in Athens. They attacked stores, particularly those of multinational chains such as McDonald’s and Lacoste. Several glass panes were smashed along the street in hit and run attacks.

Anti-globalization anarchists picked their predictable targets, but the demonstrators’ anger was clearly fueled by the government’s anti- immigration policies that keep close to a million people in a population of 10 million without rights and without status.
commondreams.org

The World Bank warned donors on Sunday that the financial crisis gripping the Palestinian Authority since Hamas won election was deeper than it first thought and could render the West Bank and Gaza ungovernable.
haaretz.com

‘Ungovernable’ by the Palestinians, anyway. Now we see the set-up that was the ‘Palestinian Authority’: the West pulls the strings and now they can choke Palestine to death.

The Knesset will mark a special day dedicated to Theodor Herzl on Monday evening, in accordance with a law passed two years ago. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said during a speech that “we must ensure that there will be a proven Jewish majority in the State of Israel, otherwise the term Jewish state becomes empty of meaning. The obligation of the national leadership is to be responsible to the vision of Herzl and to ensure a Jewish majority in the State.”
ynetnews.com

A militia group with immense power in Iraq has issued names of 461 intellectuals which it says it has ordered its armed men to assassinate.

The name list is distributed across the country and copies are not hard to obtain in Baghdad.

Several Iraq-related websites have issued the names.

The list includes some of the brightest Iraqi authors, journalists, doctors and scientists.

Azzaman obtained the list from the Iraqi Writers Union which declined to reveal the name of the factional group calling for the killing of the 461 intellectuals, citing security concerns.

…’The list is part of an organized, foreign-backed campaign to terrorize Iraqi brains,’ a source at the union said.
azzaman.com

Jack Straw’s fate was sealed in a phone call from the White House to Tony Blair last month, according to the former foreign secretary’s friends.

They say President George Bush was furious that Mr Straw said it was “nuts” to use nuclear weapons against Iran, an option reported to be under active consideration in Washington.

Downing Street had already warned Mr Straw repeatedly to tone down his complete rejection of the military route as “inconceivable”, insisting it was important to keep all options on the table.
prisonplanet.com

…A bruising battle looms in New York at a dinner of foreign ministers of the five UN Security Council veto-holding members, plus Germany, over UN plans to compel Iran to abandon uranium enrichment. The high-stakes talks at the Waldorf hotel will be the first official duty for Margaret Beckett, who replaced Jack Straw as Foreign Secretary on Friday, and could result in an embarrassing climb-down for Britain.
independent.co.uk

…”The Taliban and Al-Qaida are everywhere,” a shopkeeper, Haji Saifullah, told the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, as he strolled through Tirin KotŐs bazaar to talk to people. “It is all right in the city, but if you go outside the city, they are everywhere and the people have to support them. They have no choice.”
paktribune.com