You won’t find commentary and language any more hostile to Hugo Chavez than on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Their June 23 piece by Mary Anastasia O’Grady in the Americas column is a clear, jaw-dropping example. It’s practically blood-curdling in its vitriol which calls Hugo Chavez a threat to world peace. The sad part of it is Journal readers believe this stuff and are likely to support any US government efforts to remove the “threat.”

The O’Grady article is about the elections scheduled to take place in the fall for five non-permanent UN Security Council seats to be held in 2007. One of them will be for the Latin American seat now held by Argentina. The two countries vying to fill the opening are Guatemala and Venezuela, and the other countries in the region will vote on which one will get it. You won’t have to think long to guess the one the US supports – its Guatemalan ally, of course. And why not. For over 50 years its succession of military and civilian governments have all followed the dictates of their dominant northern neighbor. In so doing, they all managed to achieve one of the world’s worst human rights records that hasn’t abated even after the 1996 Peace Accords were signed ending a brutal 36 year conflict. Although the country today is nominally a democratic republic, it continues to abuse its people according to documented reports by Amnesty International.
zmag.org

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Cell phone emissions excite the part of the brain cortex nearest to the phone, but it is not clear if these effects are harmful, Italian researchers reported on Monday.

…more than 500 million use a type that emits electromagnetic fields known as Global System for Mobile communications or GSM radio phones. Their possible effects on the brain are controversial and not well understood.
reuters.com

…coal is everywhere in twenty-first-century China. It’s piled up on sidewalks, pressed into bricks and stacked near the back doors of homes, stockpiled into small mountains in the middle of open fields, and carted around behind bicycles and old wheezing locomotives. Plumes of coal smoke rise from rusty stacks on every urban horizon. There is soot on every windowsill and around the collar of every white shirt. Coal is what’s fueling China’s economic boom, and nobody makes any pretense that it isn’t. And as it did in America one hundred years ago, the power of coal will lift China into a better world. It will make the country richer, more civilized, and more remote from the hard facts of life, just like us.

The cost of the rough journey China is undertaking is obvious. More than six thousand workers a year are killed in China’s coal mines. The World Health Organization estimates that in East Asia, a region made up predominantly of China and South Korea, 355,000 people a year die from the effects of urban outdoor air pollution. The first time I visited Jiamusi, a city in China’s industrial north, it was so befouled by coal smoke that I could hardly see across the street. All over China, limestone buildings are dissolving in the acidic air. In Beijing, the ancient outdoor statuary at a 700-year-old Taoist temple I visited was encased in Plexiglas to protect it. And it’s not just the Chinese who are paying for their coal-fired prosperity. Pollution from China’s power plants blows across the Pacific and is inhaled by sunbathers on Malibu beach. Toxic mercury from Chinese coal finds its way into polar bears in the Arctic. Most seriously, the carbon dioxide released by China’s mad burning of coal is helping to destabilize the climate of the entire planet.

All this would be much easier to condemn if the West had not done exactly the same thing during its headlong rush to become rich and prosperous. In fact, we’re still doing it. Although America is a vastly richer country with many more options available to us, our per capita consumption of coal is three times higher than China’s. You can argue that we manage it better-our mines are safer, our power plants are cleaner-but mostly we just hide it better. We hide it so well, in fact, that many Americans think that coal went out with corsets and top hats. Most of us have no idea how central coal is to our everyday lives or what our relationship with this black rock really costs us.
nytimes.com

After 16 years of chaos, the warlords have left and the capital’s streets are quiet.

Mohamed Abdullahi no longer shoves his mobile phone down his trousers when leaving the house. Abdulaziz Mohamed has dismissed the armed men that used to guard his stationery shop. Farh Dir enjoys a restaurant dinner with a childhood friend – the first time he has been out at night in years.

“What has happened in Mogadishu is a miracle,” said Abdi Haji Gobdon, the 62-year-old director of Voice of Peace radio in the Somali capital. “We are still trying to take it all in.”
guardian.co.uk

Well they should enjoy it now because it won’t be for long if the US has anything to say, which it always does.

Tony Blair is to warn it will take “hard work for years to come” to tackle poverty in Africa.

Speaking almost a year after the global series of Live 8 concerts, the prime minister will announce he has enlisted the concert organiser Bob Geldof, the Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, to a new body, the Africa Progress Panel, to monitor the progress of pledges made at last summer’s Gleneagles G8 summit.
guardian.co.uk

The ‘progress’ of Africa will of course be determined by the West…

Drug companies are accused today of endangering public health through widescale marketing malpractices, ranging from covertly attempting to persuade consumers that they are ill to bribing doctors and misrepresenting the results of safety and efficacy tests on their products.
guardian.co.uk

JERUSALEM (AP) – Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Monday said he has ordered the army to prepare a “broad” military operation against militants in the Gaza Strip following the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier.

“It should be clear that there will be no immunity to those who are holding him,” Olmert said in a speech at a business conference in Jerusalem.

Olmert also said he holds the entire Palestinian leadership for the safety of the soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit.

Shalit was seized in a cross-border raid early Sunday. Two Israeli soldiers were also killed in the attack.
guardian.co.uk

Missing the Point and the Target in Gaza
…Onlookers in the West should not be surprised by the recent Israeli assault. Although the initial coverage of the killing of the family members picnicking on a Gaza beach two weeks ago was PR disaster for the Israeli military and government„both tried to spin the bad press and cover up the situation. While the first proclamation by the Israeli government was an apology for the killings, the Israel Occupation Force (IOF) backed off from the initial account attributing blame to the Israeli Air Force. The IOF, after an ñinvestigationî that concealed the evidence it was using, said that the deaths were caused by a mine planted by Hamas. The mine theory was passed off to the media as fact, without any evidence to back up the claim. The IOF finally admitted that the deaths could have been caused by an old Israeli shell that was at the beach site. Palestinian medics, human rights groups and bystanders at the site corroborated the initial evidence„that the deaths were caused by an Israeli shell. Nonetheless, every major US media outlet covered the story, including CNN, The New York Times and most of the other outlets that ñforgotî to cover the latest liquidation of Palestinian civilians.

Historically, Israel (including Labor, Likud and Kadima) has instituted a method of slow ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. This strategy, however, was only effective when combined with the appearance of Israel having the moral upper hand. A PR victory would ensure the notion that Israel acted in self-defense. This methodology continues today. Americans should know better than anyone else that the truth rarely matters (i.e. weapons of mass destruction in Iraq); rather it is how an event is presented or spun. Over the last five years, nearly 4,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces while more than 30,000 have been injured„the majority of them being unarmed civilians. Israel has known for sometime that it can continue its policies under the radar as long as the attacks do not become ñnewsworthy.î Tanya Reinhart addressed this issue in her book Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948, in which she stated,

ñThe reason for this strategy is clear: Massive numbers of Palestinians killed every day cannot go unnoticed by even the most cooperative Western Media and governments. [Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Barak was explicit about this. ïThe prime minister said that were there not 140 Palestinian casualties at this point, but rather 400 or 1,000, thisƒwould perhaps damage Israel a great deal.Í1 Apparently, he believed that with a stable average of five casualties a day, Israel could continue undamaged in the media, as, in fact, it has.î

Anti-terrorist police have been ordered to revamp security procedures after a bag containing details of bomb plots and suspects identified for surveillance was lost in the street.

The Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, has imposed strict new rules on the carrying of sensitive material after files were accidentally lost in a rucksack in south-east London. Sources yesterday told the Guardian the files held important information and that anti-terrorist officers were desperate to get them back before they fell into the wrong hands.
guardian.co.uk

A look at 16 deaths of American troops reported by the U.S. military in the past week in Iraq:
thestate.com

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica – Costa Rica wants its name erased from the list of countries supporting the invasion of Iraq. But the United States says that’s not possible.

The Costa Rican government initially supported the invasion, but public sentiment was never strong and polls show now that most Costa Ricans oppose the war.

Opponents of the fighting took the name issue to the country’s Supreme Court, which ruled the references to support should be removed.

While the U.S. government removed the Central American nation from the list of the so-called “coalition of the willing” in 2004, it still appears in archive documents and on related Internet Web sites that haven’t been updated.

“We are insisting through diplomatic routes that it be clarified our country was removed” from the list, Costa Rican Foreign Relations Minister Bruno Stagno told Radio Eco Thursday.

Stagno asked the U.S. government in May to ensure that the country’s name was erased from all lists, but said the State Department told him on June 19 saying that wasn’t possible.
thestate.com