GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas said Wednesday that U.S. pressure foiled the latest attempt to pay 165,000 government workers by transferring money from abroad directly into their accounts.

Haniyeh also appealed to Arab nations to counter the U.S. moves.

Reflecting frustration over empty coffers, Haniyeh told a news conference that the Hamas-led government has raised money, but so far has not found a way to get it into the Palestinian areas.

Public sector salaries are two months late, largely because Israel and the West have frozen the transfer of funds to the Hamas-led government, branding Hamas a terrorist organization. The Palestinians need $116 million a month to pay salaries.

“We have given alternative suggestions and plans, including what has been reported about sending the lists of the employees to the Arab League to have a direct transfer to their accounts,” Haniyeh said. “We even faced American pressure to prevent the direct transfer.”

Haniyeh appealed to Arab leaders to face up to the Americans “to stop the siege imposed on the Palestinian people and to stop the political blackmail against the government.” He also called on Palestinian bankers to “show the necessary patriotism.”

Banks have been hesitant to handle funds for the Palestinian Authority for fear of U.S. sanctions.
seattlepi.nwsource.com

A Palestinian state of the West Bank and Gaza is no longer on the cards, irrespective of the make-up of the coming Israeli government. Israel instead has created the strategic conditions, including a near Israeli public consensus, for the expulsion of the Palestinians from the West Bank. This is what the wall and the planned retention of Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley and large settlement blocks foretell. Israel will likely let eviction happen by haemorrhage, rather than engineer a 1948-style ethnic cleansing. It may not feel impelled to act soon, waiting for the fall of the Hashemite monarchy, which Israel seems to anticipate and which could only be hastened by the continuous exit of Palestinians from the West Bank to Jordan. Ariel Sharon’s wish for a Palestine state in Jordan thus would be fulfilled. Gaza could dissolve imperceptibly into populous Egypt. Such a momentous “checkmate”, however, is not destiny for the Palestinians. The leadership needs to think beyond the mental checkpoints around Ramallah and devise a new political vision and a commensurate strategy of action.

This vision, I submit, must rest on turning the current demographic fragmentation of the Palestinians into an asset, by redefining their geopolitical space to encompass a state in Greater Palestine, the territory that was Palestine before Winston Churchill in 1922 split it by fiat into Palestine and Transjordan. Today there are approximately eight million Palestinians in that area: 1.2 millions in Israel, 1.15 millions in Gaza, two millions in the West Bank and 3.2 millions in Jordan. In 30 years or so, they will double to 16 million strong. If the last century of strife has taught us anything, it is that they will fight fiercely for a state in which they are equal citizens. At a time when the advocacy of democracy has become a political mantra in the region, it is historically retrograde that the people who constitute the majority in Greater Palestine remain subject to dispossession by Israel and sub-citizens in Jordan.
weekly.ahram.org

A bulldozer menaces a girl with ebony pigtails, who lies in a pool of blood. A boy with an amputated leg balances on a crutch, in a tent city with a Palestinian flag. A dove, dripping blood, perches against blue barbed wire.

Palestinian teenagers painted those images at the request of an Israeli Jewish student at Brandeis University, who said she wanted to use the art to bring the Palestinian viewpoint to campus. But university officials removed the paintings four days into a two-week exhibition in the Brandeis library.

University officials said the paintings depicted only one side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lior Halperin, the student who organized the exhibit, said the university censored an alternative view.

Now, Brandeis is embroiled in a debate about how to portray Palestinian perspectives on a campus where 50 percent of the students are Jewish and where passions about the Middle East run deep. Six to a dozen students at the Waltham university complained about the paintings, which were hung on Wednesday and removed Saturday.

The controversy occurs at a sensitive time for the campus, which has angered some students and Jewish groups with the appointment of a prominent Palestinian scholar and with a partnership with Al-Quds University, an Arab institution.

”This is outrageous,” Halperin said yesterday. ”This an educational institution that is supposed to promote debate and dialogue. Let’s talk about what it is: 12-year-olds from a Palestinian refugee camp. Obviously it’s not going to be about flowers and balloons.”
boston.com

An important wind circulation pattern over the Pacific Ocean has begun to weaken because of global warming caused by human activity, something that could alter climate and the marine food chain in the region, new research suggests.

It’s not clear what climate changes might arise in the area or possibly beyond, but the long-term effect might resemble some aspects of an El Nino event, a study author said.

El Ninos boost rainfall in the southern United States and western South America and bring dry weather or even drought to Indonesia, Malaysia and elsewhere in the western Pacific.

As for the Pacific food chain near the equator, the slowdown might reduce populations of tiny plants and animals up through the fish that eat them, because of reduced nutrition welling up from the deep, said the author, Gabriel Vecchi.
breitbart.com

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A full-time stay-at-home mother would earn $134,121 a year if paid for all her work, an amount similar to a top U.S. ad executive, a marketing director or a judge, according to a study released on Wednesday.

A mother who works outside the home would earn an extra $85,876 annually on top of her actual wages for the work she does at home, according to the study by Waltham, Massachusetts-based compensation experts Salary.com.

To reach the projected pay figures, the survey calculated the earning power of the 10 jobs respondents said most closely comprise a mother’s role — housekeeper, day-care teacher, cook, computer operator, laundry machine operator, janitor, facilities manager, van driver, chief executive and psychologist.
reuters.com

CHICAGO – White, middle-aged Americans Ñ even those who are rich Ñ are far less healthy than their peers in England, according to stunning new research that erases misconceptions and has experts scratching their heads.

Americans had higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, strokes, lung disease and cancer Ñ findings that held true no matter what income or education level.

Those dismal results are despite the fact that U.S. health care spending is double what England spends on each of its citizens.

“Everybody should be discussing it: Why isn’t the richest country in the world the healthiest country in the world?”
news.yahoo.com

Gee, I wonder.

The oil rich despots of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Kazakhstan use the oil wealth of their people to enrich themselves and their ruling elites, set up Swiss bank accounts and in the case of the Royal Saud Family, finance terrorism. Democratic activists and thinkers are persecuted.

Such regimes, which strip the wealth of their countries for personal gain, are emulated in many countries and supported by the G8 as valuable allies.

In oil rich Venezuela, however, democratically elected President Hugo Chavez and his government are not following the above model. Instead VenezuelaÍs vast oil wealth, under Chavez, is being used for massive poverty eradication programmes to provide health, education, housing and employment to the poorest . Its leaders do not siphon off wealth to offshore banks.

You would think ( wouldnÍt you?) that the United States with its proclaimed mission of bringing democracy and its benefits to all and fighting corruption would be applauding President Chavez and holding him up as an exemplar for the despotic regimes whose oil and other mineral wealth goes into their own back pockets while the cesspools for terrorism continue to expand.

But no…
scoop.co.nz

Bolivia is to hold talks with Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela on Thursday to discuss its move to extend state control over its natural gas assets.

Bolivian leader Evo Morales has said private energy companies must review contracts and sell their controlling stakes in energy to his government.

The move has alarmed Brazil and other key foreign investors in Bolivian gas.

With Brazil relying on Bolivia for half its gas, stakes will be high when the leaders meet, a BBC correspondent says.

The meeting was arranged after a conversation between Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva and his Argentine counterpart, Nestor Kirchner, the Associated Press news agency reports.

Argentina is the second biggest consumer, after Brazil, of Bolivian natural gas.

Along with Presidents Lula, Kirchner and Morales, the Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez – a major ally of Bolivia – will also attend the summit, which is to be held in Argentina.
bbc.co.uk

SALAMANCA, MEXICO ?He seems nervous waving to crowds, uncomfortable when supporters chant his name. “Uncharismatic” is what he’s usually called. But now Felipe de Jesus Calderon Hinojosa is the man to beat in Mexico’s July 2 elections.

The young, at 43, lawyer and economist was far behind when the campaign season took off last fall. To begin with, President Vicente Fox, barred constitutionally from running for a second term, backed a different candidate to lead his center-right National Action Party (PAN). More critically, there was the seemingly unstoppable rise of populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the candidate for the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), who is as charismatic and dynamic as Calderon is ho-hum.

But that was then. Calderon compares himself to a racehorse from a well-known Mexican ballad that – slow and steady – ends up winning the big race.

The self-appointed local Seabiscuit, Calderon surprised everyone by winning his party’s primary in October, and has been closing the gap between himself and former Mexico City mayor Lopez Obrador ever since.

“I was not the favorite at first, but I have gained ground and come from behind just like the racehorse. Now I am going to win,” he says, speaking to the Monitor in his campaign bus.

“Things really took off at the end of March. That is when we made some strategic changes,” explains Calderon. The PAN logo was switched, the staff was reshuffled, and the stump speech was revamped. But the most effective strategic decision was probably to “go negative” and air controversial television commercials portraying Lopez Obrador as a demagogue in the style of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. “We decided to … show Mexicans who Obrador really is,” says Calderon.
csmonitor.com

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined on the telephone by David Bacon, veteran labor journalist who writes for a number of publications, including The Nation and The Progressive. He’s also a programmer on Pacifica station KPFA in Berkeley, author of a number of books, including The Children of NAFTA. His new book will be called Communities Without Borders. He was in Los Angeles yesterday. Our guest in studio are Javier Rodriguez in Los Angeles and Justino Rodriguez here in New York. David Bacon, thank you for joining us. Can you link what we’re seeing in this country, millions of people on the streets in this latest May Day protest, to the greater story of the trade agreements in the Americas?

DAVID BACON: Sure, Amy. In fact, I think a lot of the people in the two huge marches here in Los Angeles did that themselves. For the first time, I saw lots of people carrying signs that said “no guest worker programs,” and this is, I think, different and something that went beyond what we’ve seen before, because, really we’ve been told now by Congress for quite a while that the only alternative to the odious Sensenbrenner bill, which would criminalize 12 million people is to allow Congress, the Senate specifically, to pass enormous guest worker programs and, in fact, force people who are here without papers to become guest workers as the price of legalization. And there were many, many people, including speakers up on stage also condemning this idea.

Really, what’s going on here is that the trade agreements, like NAFTA, and this neo-liberal free trade regime is displacing enormous numbers of people around the world so that worldwide there are about 170 million people living outside the countries in which they were born, and overwhelmingly this is due to the kind of enforced poverty that this free trade regime is producing.

But what is really kind of new here is that the corporate elite, large corporations, are now seeing this flow of people as something that can be used as a whole new source of profit, so that we see proposals for programs, like guest worker programs, in a number of different countries. In Britain, for instance, this is called ‘managed migration,’ and we see the same thing in Europe and, in fact, at the W.T.O. negotiations in Hong Kong, there was a formal proposal introduced called Mode 4, which essentially would set up a huge new international guest worker program. So migration has always been part of the free trade regime, because of the fact that the imposition of this regime displaces people, but now it’s becoming even more a part of this regime, because really in a sense the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, financial institutions, large corporations see migration itself as being something that they can turn into a profit.
democracynow.org