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Signs Editorials
Editorial: Signs Economic Commentary for October 30, 2006
Donald Hunt
Signs of the Times
October 30, 2006
Gold closed at 602.30 dollars an ounce on Friday, up 1.2% from $595.00 at the close of the previous Friday. The dollar closed at 0.7848 euros Friday, down 1.0% from 0.7926 for the week. That put the euro at 1.2742 compared to 1.2617 at the end of the Friday before. Gold in euros would be 472.69 euros an ounce, up 0.2% from 471.59 for the week. Oil closed at 60.75 dollars a barrel Friday, up 2.5% from $59.25 at the close of the previous week. Oil in euros would be 47.68 euros a barrel, up 1.5% from 46.96 for the week. The gold/oil ratio closed at 9.91 Friday, down 1.3% from 10.04 at the close of the Friday before. In U.S. stocks, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 12,090.26 Friday, up 0.7% from 12,002.37. The NASDAQ closed at 2,350.62, up 0.3% from 2,342.30 for the week. In U.S. interest rates, the yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note closed at 4.68% down ten basis points from 4.78 for the week.
Oil and gold were up and the dollar was down as investors may have begun to reflect what the situation will be like after the U.S. midterm elections. The perception of many that oil prices have been kept unnaturally low by Bush's friends in the oil industry can only lead to anxiety now that the election is near. Rumors of an attack on Iran after the election, the prospect of renewed oil price increases, and bad housing news cast a pall over even the good economic news these days. Interest rates dropped sharply in the United States as evidence mounted of a coming recession, though few want to use that word. Third quarter economic growth numbers were released last week and they weren't very good:
U.S. Economy Expanded at a 1.6% Annual Rate in Third Quarter
Joe Richter
Oct. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Economic growth in the U.S. cooled to a 1.6 percent annual rate in July through September, the slowest since early 2003, as housing slumped and the trade deficit widened.
The government's first estimate of the quarter's gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services produced in the U.S., shows growth slowed from a 2.6 percent pace in April through June, the Commerce Department reported today in Washington. A measure of inflation watched by the Fed eased.
Homebuilding declined by the most in 15 years, while the trade deficit widened as an acceleration in personal spending increased demand for foreign-made consumer goods. The fallout for the rest of the economy has been limited, economists said, and recent gains in corporate and consumer spending support the Federal Reserve's outlook for "moderate" growth.
"Housing-market woes took a lot out of overall growth, but there are increasing signs that the worst may be behind us," Chris Rupkey, chief financing economist at Bank of Tokyo- Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. in New York, said before the report.
"Consumers continue to spend, and really have the wind at their backs now that gasoline prices have fallen."
Economists expected a 2 percent gain in GDP last quarter, according to the median estimate of 78 estimates in a Bloomberg News survey. Estimates of growth ranged from 1 percent to 3 percent. The Commerce Department's report is the government's first estimate of third-quarter output. It will be revised twice.
Slump in Home Building
Residential housing construction fell at a 17.4 percent annual rate last quarter, the biggest decline since the first quarter of 1991, after shrinking 11.1 percent in the previous three months. The decline in homebuilding subtracted 1.12 percentage points from third-quarter growth, the most in almost 25 years.
The trade deficit widened to $639.9 billion from $624.2 billion in the second quarter. The deficit subtracted 0.58 percentage point from GDP.
Companies added to stockpiles at a $50.7 billion annual rate last quarter after adding to inventories at a $53.7 billion pace in the second three months of the year. The figures subtracted 0.1 percentage point from third-quarter growth.
Ford Motor Co., the second-biggest U.S. automaker, said car and light truck sales dropped 17 percent during the quarter. The Dearborn, Michigan-based company cut third-quarter production by 11 percent, and plans to slash output by 21 percent this quarter.
Peoria, Illinois-based Caterpillar Inc., the world's biggest maker of earthmoving equipment, said last week that dealers started cutting back inventory in the third quarter. Sales of construction equipment such as bulldozers will be less than the company anticipated as home construction slows down, and the company said it expects a "sharp drop" in sales of truck engines.
There is evidence the slowdown in the economy was temporary.
Consumer Spending Rebounds
Consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of the economy, rose 3.1 percent at an annual rate last quarter, compared with a 2.6 percent pace in the previous three months. Rising incomes and lower energy prices helped consumers weather the effects of falling home values, economists said.
The price of unleaded gasoline this month has averaged $2.25 a gallon, down from $2.84 a gallon average in the second quarter and more than $3 in July.
Business Investment
Business fixed investment, which includes spending on commercial construction as well as equipment and software, rose at an 8.6 percent annual rate in the third quarter, after rising at a 4.4 percent rate from April through June. Spending on new equipment and software rose 6.4 percent.
"Growth of both real consumer spending and business fixed investment turned stronger in the third quarter, and substantial declines in fuel prices since August are expected to lead to further acceleration in the current quarter," Robert Mellman, an economist at JP Morgan Chase & Co. in New York, said before the report.
Fed policy makers held interest rates at 5.25 percent for a third straight meeting this week.
The government's personal consumption expenditures index, a measure of prices tied to consumer spending, rose 2.5 percent after a 4 percent rise in the second quarter. The index excluding food and energy, a measure favored by Fed policy makers, rose at a 2.3 percent annual rate after increasing at a 2.7 percent pace.
Optimists seized on the record highs in U.S. stocks and the decision by the Federal Reserve Board to leave interest rates unchanged. Whether the bulls or the bears are right about the next few years depends to a large degree on what happens to housing prices. A "correction" is okay but a crash is not.
Restructuring the U.S. economy - downward
Dr. Kurt Richebächer
October 28, 2006
The deficit country is absorbing more, taking consumption and investment together, than its own production; in this sense, its economy is drawing on savings made for it abroad. In return, it has a permanent obligation to pay interest or profits to the lender. Whether this is a good bargain or not depends on the nature of the use to which the funds are put. If they merely permit an excess of consumption over production, the economy is on the road to ruin.
- Joan Robinson, Collected Economic Papers, Vol. IV, 1973
Finally, the greatest boom in American housing history is going bust. The impact on the economy has only just begun to be felt. Demand for homes is sharply down, while the number of vacant dwellings is ballooning - up more than 40% for existing homes and more than 20% for new homes year over year. At issue now is the severity of the impending bubble aftermath.
It does not seem, though, that there is a lot of worrying around. There appears to be a widespread belief that the U.S. economy is now out of trouble because the Fed decided not to raise interest rates. We presume the following interpretation:
1. This is not just a pause, but the end of all rate hikes.
2. In the absence of an overheating economy, inflation is yesterday's issue.
3. Steady or lower interest rates will boost the stock market.
4. As the Fed no longer tightens, the possibility of a hard landing can be dismissed.
5. Abundant liquidity continues to underpin the markets.
Treating bad economic news as good for the financial markets, Wall Street is running wild with more aggressive speculation. "The world economy is on track to grow at a 5.1% rate this year, but the risk of a severe global slowdown in 2007 is stronger than at any time since the September 2001 terror attacks on the United States," said the International Monetary Fund in a report to finance ministers, mentioning two possible triggers: a sharp slowdown in the U.S. housing market or surging inflationary expectations that would force central banks to raise interest rates.
Taking this forecast into account, the sudden plunge of commodity prices may not be totally surprising. On the other hand, prices of risky assets and mortgage-backed securities have, despite the obvious problems in U.S. housing and consumer finance, held steady. Stock prices of U.S. lenders up to their necks in subprime, interest-only and negative-amortizing mortgages have been rising 5-10% since late August. Since hitting bottom in June, emerging stock markets have rebounded 20%. Developed international markets have risen by 12%, and U.S. stock markets by around 8%. A vertical slide by the yen since May suggests that yen carry trade is back with a vengeance.
Given the growing talk of impending recession in the United States, all this may appear rather surprising. The underlying rationale seems to be the assumption that this recession will be just another soft patch forcing the Fed to what the speculative community likes most: a return to easier money.
There is talk of recession, but definitely no recession scare. Popular perception appears to trust that the U.S. economy will again prove its outstanding resilience and flexibility. And are the balance sheets of private households not in excellent shape, as rising asset valuations have vastly outpaced the rise in liabilities over the years? The possible scary parts of the new development, a deeper recession and a precipitous decline in economic growth, have not yet come to the fore.
Over the past five years of recovery from the 2001 recession, U.S. economic growth has been "asset driven," according to colloquial language. More to the point, protracted sharp rises in house prices served private households as the wand providing them with prodigal borrowing facilities to increase their spending. For years, it was the economy's single motor. The Fed estimates that mortgage equity withdrawals exceeded $700 billion, annualized, in the first half of 2006.
In 2005, the last full year for which data are available, new borrowing by private households amounted to $1,241.4 billion. Now compare this with the following spending and income figures. Disposable personal incomes grew $354.5 billion in current dollars and $93.8 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. Spending increased $530.9 billion in current dollars and $264.1 billion in chained dollars.
We have presented these figures to highlight the paramount importance of the large equity extractions on the part of private households for U.S. economic growth during the U.S. economy's current recovery. Plainly, it prevented a much deeper recession. Absence of any wealth gains could have easily induced private households to do some saving out of current income.
For the consensus, the U.S. economy's shallow recession in 2001 is the most splendid justification of Mr. Greenspan's repeatedly expressed idea that it is better to fight the bubble's aftermath with easy money than to prick it in its prime. This is plainly a gross misjudgment, because America's shallowest recession was followed by five years of the shallowest economic recovery, with unprecedented large and lasting shortfalls in employment, income growth and business fixed investment.
Actually, there have been major changes in the U.S. economy's pattern of employment and resource allocation, but altogether changes for the worse, not for the better. These structural changes are bound to depress U.S. economic growth in the long run.
The striking feature of the housing bubble - distinguishing it diametrically from an equity bubble in this respect - is its extraordinary credit and debt addiction. The reason is that it requires borrowing for two different purposes: first, for driving up house prices; and second, for the cash out of the capital gains. Every single dollar for this purpose has to be borrowed.
Since end-2000, American households have offset their badly lacking income growth with an unprecedented stampede into indebtedness, up so far by $5.3 trillion, or 77%. But as soaring house and stock prices added a total of $15.6 trillion to the asset side of their balance sheets, households miraculously ended up with an unprecedented surge in their net worth from $41.5 trillion to $53.8 trillion in the first quarter of 2006.
Referring to this fact, Fed Chairman Bernanke noted in a speech on June 13 that "U.S. households overall have been managing their personal finances well."
Manifestly, the rapid creation of the housing bubble in 2001 did prevent a deeper recession. But this should raise the further question of how the housing bubble and its financial implications have affected the U.S. economy from a longer perspective. In other words, are they in better or worse shape today than in 2001 to weather the aftermath of the housing bubble? Our answer is categorical: Underlying cyclical and structural conditions have dramatically worsened.
In 2001, the Greenspan Fed could cushion the fallout from the bursting equity bubble with the creation of the housing bubble. This time, manifestly, there is no alternative bubble available to be inflated to cushion the fallout from the housing bubble. Rather, there is a high probability that the popping housing bubble will pull the stock market down with it. That is the first ominous difference between 2001 and today.
The second ominous difference is that the economy and the financial system have accumulated structural imbalances and debts as never before in history. Vastly excessive borrowing for consumption and speculation has turned the U.S. economy into a colossus of debts with a badly impaired capacity of income creation.
And finally, equity and real estate bubbles are very different animals, of which the latter is manifestly the far more dangerous. In its World Economic Outlook of April 2003, the International Monetary Fund published a historical study, titled When Bubbles Burst, and explained differences in the effects between bursting equity and housing bubbles. It stated, in brief, the following:
First, the price corrections during housing price busts averaged 30%, reflecting the lower volatility of housing prices and the lower liquidity in housing markets. Second, housing price crashes lasted about four years, about 1 1/2 years longer than equity price busts. Third, the association between booms and busts was stronger for housing than for equity prices... Fourth, all major bank crises in industrial countries during the postwar period coincided with housing price busts.
The severe cases of bursting housing bubbles badly affecting the banking systems in the late 1980s were in England, the Nordic countries and Switzerland, not to speak of Japan, where, however, commercial real estate played the key role.
The seeming balance between good and bad economic news probably cannot last, as the hyper-complexification of financial markets will lead to instability and wild swings. Here's George Ure:
GBO: Data Suggests Global "Weimarization"
Thursday October 26, 2006
GBO= Global Blow Off and The Fed, as we reported yesterday, didn't budge in their rate quandary - at least for now. As a result, the US dollar is down some this morning - and as the dollar goes down, the effective price of gold goes up - nearly $5 for a while this morning.
This is all indicative of the confusion caused by the most complex financial markets in history. Complexification, as we've called it, results in some very strange things. Last week, I explained how the bundling of nonperforming loans actually drove up the stock market (by securitization of bad debt into asset-backed securities [ABS's]). This week, we can consider the incredibly complex pressures on the dollar. And a phenomena that I'll just call Global Weimarization, named after the most explosive inflation in recorded history. A few to ponder:
- Global Hidden Hyperinflation is here. The dollar should be going down because of the continuously bloating federal spending - wars aren't free. By itself, this would argue for a declining dollar because we're just printing up more paper, but how much isn't clear since the Fed knew this was all coming and hid their M-3 broad monetary measure back in March of this year. Suckers and fools is what they must figure us for. But you know that inflation is running like a forest fire globally, right? Global inflation is immense - mind boggling. In the UK, for example, the rate of inflation is an annualized 14.1%! And Interfax reports today the money supply of Russia is up an amazing 28.2% (measured by the Russian equivalent of M-2) by 28.2% year to date!
- Other data points supportive of the "Global Weimarization" include Israel, where inflation has cooled off (!) to 12% a year, and China where inflation is percolating along at 16.8% year on year (YoY) on their equivalent of M-2.
- Of course, one way for the dollar to hold its own would be for the Fed to pay foreigners more money to hold our paper, but they couldn't do that at yesterday's meeting because of the pending elections. Thus, in December, don't be surprised at a Fed rate hike - which will lead to more pain in the housing industry - because the Fed needs others to buy our paper and a rate hike is an effective discount increase. As Mark Brandly writes for the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the days of 12¢ hamburgers and $600 cars is just a dream when the printing presses are turned on globally.
- Oil is showing some of the effects of the slightly weaker dollar this morning. But, remember that on a utility value basis, oil is worth about the same now as always. It's needed for fuel, plastics, and the rest. But when the dollar drops in purchasing power, the price we pay for oil seems to go up because of the reduced wallop of the underlying dollars. It takes more "weak paper" to buy the same goods.
- And now - this interesting little revelation for you: There's a case to be made that if the dollar drops, at least initially, the stock market could be propelled upward. The reason? There was once a time when stocks were valued based on their ability to produce earnings and dividends (e.g. free cash) to owners. But lately, ownership of stocks has changed fundamentally. Stocks in some ways act like real estate insofar as you're not buying a dividend stream, you're buying a "property" and with that you're buying "market position" and "niche." Further, a stock - even a declining one - has securitization value - so you can roll more layers of debt into play.
Just as domestic inflation in moderation can drive up the price of an asset like an apartment building, so too can inflation (masquerading as the declining value of the dollar) drive up the price of stocks because they are now more valued as assets than free cash flow generators. As long as the future looks secure, there are probably more curious distortions ahead - thanks to derivatives and the whole process of complexification.
...If all of this is too complex for you, consider this: In the Weimar experience, the price of everyday goods and services went up. In the present GBO, fueled by derivatives and debt-piled-on debt, the financial markets where layers of paper feed more layers of paper, we might see a hyperinflation scenario where the bulk of inflation is contained within financial market, debt instruments, and the like.
Oh, by the way, if you or the folks managing your money get this wrong, your life savings could disappear. Stuff happens though, right? I think the von Mises folks call this the "Crackup boom."
The Cryptogon blogger, Kevin, points to manipulation and "plunge control" to explain the continued stability of stock markets:
The Eerie "Bid" in the Equity Markets
This thing is the greatest show on earth. You can calmly explain why these markets can't be viable---list a thousand sources, two thousand, whatever---and then just stand back as you watch the antics in the bigtop get more dangerous and incomprehensible.
Remember my recent ramble about short squeezes:
When so many people get short, it doesn't take much to shake them out of their positions and actually cause a strong (temporary) rally! All They have to do to cause a massive short covering rally is to start buying index futures, in a sustained way, for a few minutes and * boom * it's on. Many shorts will yield to the "unseen hand of the market" and cover their positions. It only takes a couple of hundred million leveraged dollars to touch off one of these moves. I've seen it happen dozens of times. TR and I used to have this radar thing scanning the market, looking for "weird" momentum, among other things. A couple of times, we got alarms on nearly the entire NASDAQ 100 and lots of lower tiered relatives.
Once, TR yelled out, "What the hell happened!?"
I said, "The 'unseen hand of the market' just slapped everyone across the face and said, 'I own this show.'"
The clinical term for this is buy program (or sell program) and if you have a way of visualizing the market, like we did, it's an awe inspiring thing. Most of the time, the market looks mostly like semi-random noise. Sometimes, you get more up trending noise. Sometimes, more down trending noise. Occasionally, though, nearly all of the money goes mostly one way or the other. These are the times when the wizard behind the curtain (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, etc.) starts pulling the big levers
Well, as usual, don't take my tinfoil tainted word for it. I mean, it's all conspiracy theory, right?
Let Raymond James Chief Investment Strategist, Jeff Saut, introduce you to the "mysterious buyers" concept... After he assures you that he's not a conspiracy theorist.
What's the matter, Jeff, tinfoil hat doesn't match your suit and tie?
...It's also worth noting that we're not conspiracy theorists, believing that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and that George W. Bush really did win the election. Yet, there remains an eerie "bid" in the equity markets since those July lows. For example, markets typically rally, then correct by about one-quarter to one-third of that rally's point gain, before beginning another rally phase. After that phase, they again correct by one-quarter to one-third before re-rallying. This, however, has not been the case recently. Indeed, every time it looked like the indices were about to correct, mysterious buyers materialized in the futures markets. Those "buyers" tend to widen the futures premiums so far above the cash markets that it attracts arbitrageurs. The arbs, in turn, short the futures and buy the appropriate baskets of stocks. That operation allows the arbs to "lock in" the spread between the futures price and what they paid for the basket of stocks, assuring them a risk-less profit and, in the process, driving stocks higher.
And,
This show would have already come down if it wasn't for the macroeconomic black ops. Rather than allowing this thing to die, it is being kept in an undead state for as long as possible.
With the debt closing in on $9 trillion, we're already living well within the realm of financial make believe. Could the debt reach $46 trillion or more? There's no purely economic reason why it couldn't. I don't see any difference between $9 trillion and $100 trillion. IT'S ALL FAKE AT THIS POINT.
Here's a list of things that are---unlike "Economics"---very real:
Water scarcity
Energy scarcity
Food scarcity
Raw materials scarcity
Weather cataclysms/global warming
In a word, 'Overshoot'
Any one of those issues could deliver a kill shot to this horror show we call the global economy. And, as I'm sure you already know, they're all starting to impact at the same time. But never mind all of that, just pay attention to "the terrorists." The terrorists! LOOK OUT!!! THE TERRORISTS!!! AHHHHHHH!
The following Associated Press headline alone is scary enough:
GAO Chief Warns Economic Disaster Looms
Matt Crenson, AP National Writer
October 28, 2006
GAO Chief Takes to Road, Warns Economic Disaster Looms Even As Many Candidates Avoid Issue
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- David M. Walker sure talks like he's running for office. "This is about the future of our country, our kids and grandkids," the comptroller general of the United States warns a packed hall at Austin's historic Driskill Hotel. "We the people have to rise up to make sure things get changed."
But Walker doesn't want, or need, your vote this November. He already has a job as head of the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that audits and evaluates the performance of the federal government.
Basically, that makes Walker the nation's accountant-in-chief. And the accountant-in-chief's professional opinion is that the American public needs to tell Washington it's time to steer the nation off the path to financial ruin.
From the hustings and the airwaves this campaign season, America's political class can be heard debating Capitol Hill sex scandals, the wisdom of the war in Iraq and which party is tougher on terror. Democrats and Republicans talk of cutting taxes to make life easier for the American people.
What they don't talk about is a dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows, or at least should. The vast majority of economists and budget analysts agree: The ship of state is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of economic disaster if nothing is done to correct it.
There's a good reason politicians don't like to talk about the nation's long-term fiscal prospects. The subject is short on political theatrics and long on complicated economics, scary graphs and very big numbers. It reveals serious problems and offers no easy solutions. Anybody who wanted to deal with it seriously would have to talk about raising taxes and cutting benefits, nasty nostrums that might doom any candidate who prescribed them.
"There's no sexiness to it," laments Leita Hart-Fanta, an accountant who has just heard Walker's pitch. She suggests recruiting a trusted celebrity -- maybe Oprah -- to sell fiscal responsibility to the American people.
Walker doesn't want to make balancing the federal government's books sexy -- he just wants to make it politically palatable. He has committed to touring the nation through the 2008 elections, talking to anybody who will listen about the fiscal black hole Washington has dug itself, the "demographic tsunami" that will come when the baby boom generation begins retiring and the recklessness of borrowing money from foreign lenders to pay for the operation of the U.S. government.
"He can speak forthrightly and independently because his job is not in jeopardy if he tells the truth," said Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution.
Walker can talk in public about the nation's impending fiscal crisis because he has one of the most secure jobs in Washington. As comptroller general of the United States -- basically, the government's chief accountant -- he is serving a 15-year term that runs through 2013.
This year Walker has spoken to the Union League Club of Chicago and the Rotary Club of Atlanta, the Sons of the American Revolution and the World Future Society. But the backbone of his campaign has been the Fiscal Wake-up Tour, a traveling roadshow of economists and budget analysts who share Walker's concern for the nation's budgetary future.
"You can't solve a problem until the majority of the people believe you have a problem that needs to be solved," Walker says.
Polls suggest that Americans have only a vague sense of their government's long-term fiscal prospects. When pollsters ask Americans to name the most important problem facing America today -- as a CBS News/New York Times poll of 1,131 Americans did in September -- issues such as the war in Iraq, terrorism, jobs and the economy are most frequently mentioned. The deficit doesn't even crack the top 10.
Yet on the rare occasions that pollsters ask directly about the deficit, at least some people appear to recognize it as a problem. In a survey of 807 Americans last year by the Pew Center for the People and the Press, 42 percent of respondents said reducing the deficit should be a top priority; another 38 percent said it was important but a lower priority.
So the majority of the public appears to agree with Walker that the deficit is a serious problem, but only when they're made to think about it. Walker's challenge is to get people not just to think about it, but to pressure politicians to make the hard choices that are needed to keep the situation from spiraling out of control.
To show that the looming fiscal crisis is not a partisan issue, he brings along economists and budget analysts from across the political spectrum. In Austin, he's accompanied by Diane Lim Rogers, a liberal economist from the Brookings Institution, and Alison Acosta Fraser, director of the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
"We all agree on what the choices are and what the numbers are," Fraser says.
Their basic message is this: If the United States government conducts business as usual over the next few decades, a national debt that is already $8.5 trillion could reach $46 trillion or more, adjusted for inflation. That's almost as much as the total net worth of every person in America -- Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and those Google guys included.
A hole that big could paralyze the U.S. economy; according to some projections, just the interest payments on a debt that big would be as much as all the taxes the government collects today.
And every year that nothing is done about it, Walker says, the problem grows by $2 trillion to $3 trillion.
...Why is America so fiscally unprepared for the next century? Like many of its citizens, the United States has spent the last few years racking up debt instead of saving for the future. Foreign lenders -- primarily the central banks of China, Japan and other big U.S. trading partners -- have been eager to lend the government money at low interest rates, making the current $8.5-trillion deficit about as painful as a big balance on a zero-percent credit card.
In her part of the fiscal wake-up tour presentation, Rogers tries to explain why that's a bad thing. For one thing, even when rates are low a bigger deficit means a greater portion of each tax dollar goes to interest payments rather than useful programs. And because foreigners now hold so much of the federal government's debt, those interest payments increasingly go overseas rather than to U.S. investors.
More serious is the possibility that foreign lenders might lose their enthusiasm for lending money to the United States. Because treasury bills are sold at auction, that would mean paying higher interest rates in the future. And it wouldn't just be the government's problem. All interest rates would rise, making mortgages, car payments and student loans costlier, too.
A modest rise in interest rates wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, Rogers said. America's consumers have as much of a borrowing problem as their government does, so higher rates could moderate overconsumption and encourage consumer saving. But a big jump in interest rates could cause economic catastrophe. Some economists even predict the government would resort to printing money to pay off its debt, a risky strategy that could lead to runaway inflation.
Macroeconomic meltdown is probably preventable, says Anjan Thakor, a professor of finance at Washington University in St. Louis. But to keep it at bay, he said, the government is essentially going to have to renegotiate some of the promises it has made to its citizens, probably by some combination of tax increases and benefit cuts.
But there's no way to avoid what Rogers considers the worst result of racking up a big deficit -- the outrage of making our children and grandchildren repay the debts of their elders.
"It's an unfair burden for future generations," she says.
Notice that the establishment "consensus" is that U.S. citizens, who already have the worst benefit package of any wealthy country, must have their benefits cut further to solve the debt problem. Notice that they never suggested that the U.S. might save some money by not attacking any more countries. Military spending has most likely at least doubled during the Bush II years, with all the "supplemental" war spending included. If you include spending on the fascist "homeland security" category, it has probably tripled. What did the citizens ever get for all that money spent? The United States could easily avoid Medicare and Social Security cuts by reducing military spending to $100 billion a year (it is now over $500 billion). That would mean giving up the overseas empire, but it looks like the U.S. will have to give that up anyway. A quick, graceful retreat from world hegemon status would be much better for the United States than going down in a burst of flames. Empires in the fiscal shape the United States is in do not last.
Of course no political leader could do anything like that as things stand now. That's no surprise, but the U.S. empire doesn't even seem to have an establishment with enough foresight to act in it's own and the system's best interest. Or perhaps the establishment no longer has enough power to influence policy. Either the military-industrial-complex beast can no longer be tamed by anyone or there is some other group in control.
Finally, in the "Why am I not surprised?" department:
M.B.A.s: The Biggest Cheaters
Thomas Kostigen
MarketWatch
Graduate business students take their cue from corporate scandals
The corporate scandals that have plagued Wall Street in recent history are setting a fine example for young students looking to make their mark in the business world: They are learning to cheat with the best of them.
Students seeking their masters of business administration degree admit cheating more than any other type of student, from law to liberal arts.
"We have found that graduate students in general are cheating at an alarming rate and business-school students are cheating even more than others," concludes a study by the Academy of Management Learning and Education of 5,300 students in the U.S. and Canada.
Many of these students reportedly believe cheating is an accepted practice in business. More than half (56%) of M.B.A. candidates say they cheated in the past year. For the study, cheating was defined as plagiarizing, copying other students' work and bringing prohibited materials into exams.
"To us that means that business-school faculty and administrators must do something, because doing nothing simply reinforces the belief that high levels of cheating are commonplace and acceptable," say the authors of the academy report, Donald McCabe of Rutgers University, Kenneth Butterfield of Washington State University and Linda Klebe Trevino at Penn State University.
However, what's holding many professors back from taking action on cheaters is the fear of litigation. To that end, the academic world is becoming much more like the business world where those who walk with a heavy legal stick can swat others out of the way; it may be time to impose a whistleblower statute for students and teachers.
Yes, it seems to have come to that. With 54% of graduate engineering students, 50% of students in the physical sciences, 49% of medical and other health-care students, 45% of law students, 43% of graduate students in the arts and 39% of graduate students in the social sciences and humanities readily admitting to cheating, something must be done to correct course.
McCabe notes that many more students probably cheat than admit in the study. He and the others recommend a series of efforts based upon notions of ethical community-building be put into practice at the graduate-school level. The essence of an ethical community is that by doing wrong -- cheating in this case -- all of the stakeholders in the community are harmed, not just the wrongdoer.
Curriculum and education go along with the community-building, so there is greater awareness of actions and ramifications as well.
In the real business world efforts are being made to create greater transparency and show shareholders, for instance, that they are a community of stakeholders with a common vested interest. This should be obvious, but to many investors it isn't. Profit is achieved in a vacuum and the awareness of fellow shareholders (and their actions) is relatively nil.
Shareholder resolutions are items around which bands of investors can unite. But even while resolutions are on the rise only a minority of shareholders bother to vote on them.
In other words, shareholders, much like professors these days, largely choose to look the other way when it comes time to curb abuse. That is until after the fact when all those M.B.A.s get caught cheating in the real world.
Honor code
More has to be done to enforce ethical codes well before the bad act occurs. By then it is too late. Teaching graduate students that ethics matters in business should be a matter of course, not a direction to avoid.
Faculty, the authors say, should "engage students in an ongoing dialogue about academic integrity that begins with recruiting, continues in orientation sessions and initiation ceremonies, and continues throughout the program." It may also include initiating an honor code, preferably one that emphasizes the promotion of integrity among students rather than the detection and punishment of dishonesty.
Promote the good not the bad. Yet at the top of those companies most ensnared in ethical scandal sat a chief executive with an M.B.A.
Graduate students in journalism weren't singled out in the study. Interestingly, however, last week Newsweek announced that it is teaming with Kaplan Inc., the education service provider, to offer an online business degree called Kaplan University/Newsweek MBA.
Ethics in journalism meet ethics in business, and Styx be crossed.
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Editorial: The Bastards Nuked Lebanon
The Truth Will Set You Free
October 28, 2006
It wasn't enough for them to kill over a thousand civilians and terrorize over a million. The bastards had to use enriched uranium to make sure that anyone who dared come home afterwards would suffer radiation.
Scientists studying samples of soil thrown up by Israeli bombing in Lebanon have shown high radiation levels, suggesting uranium-based munitions were used, a British newspaper reports.
The samples were taken from two bomb craters in Khiam and At-Tiri and have been sent for further analysis to the Harwell laboratory in Oxfordshire, southern England, for mass spectrometry used by the Ministry of Defence, The Independent said.
The samples thrown up by Israeli heavy or guided bombs showed "elevated radiation signatures," Chris Busby, the British scientific secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, was quoted as saying.
Britain's Ministry of Defence has confirmed the concentration of uranium isotopes in the samples, the newspaper said.
In his initial report, Busby said there were two possible reasons for the contamination.
"The first is that the weapon was some novel small experimental nuclear fission device or experimental weapon (eg. a thermobaric weapon) based on the high temperature of a uranium oxidation flash," it said.
"The second is that the weapon was a bunker-busting conventional uranium penetrator weapon employing enriched uranium rather than depleted uranium," Busby was quoted as saying.
A photograph of the explosion of the first bomb shows large clouds of black smoke that might result from burning uranium, the newspaper said.
The 34-day Israeli offensive against Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon left at least 1,287 people, nearly all civilians, dead and 4,054 wounded, according to an AFP count based on official Lebanese figures.
At least 1,140 civilians -- 30 percent of them children under 12 -- have been killed along with 43 Lebanese army and police troops in the offensive, the state High Relief Committee said.
Read it and weep, world.
There was no need for them to use these weapons, just as there was no need for them to drop cluster bombs just before the truce. The fact that they did both demonstrates without doubt that Israelis are not only the most ruthless people on earth, they are the most INSANE.
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Editorial: Peaceful Bil'in Protestors Attacked by Israeli Soldiers
Palsolidarity.org
30/10/2006
Twelve-year old Ibrahim Ghazi Beit-Ilo was hit in the neck by shrapnel from a live bullet following a peaceful protest march against the Apartheid Wall in Bil'in today. He underwent surgery at the Ramallah goverment hospital and the shrapnel was successfully removed. Another 16 people were injured by shrapnel from exploding tear gas and sound bomb cannisters or were beaten with military truncheons. Two Israeli protestors were arrested.
The, 600 protestors, comprising Palestinians, Israelis and internationals, Palestinian flags flying, marched behind political and religious leaders . Palestinian Legislative Council members Kayes Abu-Leila and Mohib Awad, Israeli MKs Mohammed Barakeh and Dov Hanin, Taysir Tamimi a Muslim religious leader and village leaders marched at the head of the protest from the Bil'in mosque to the massive razor wire fortifications that divide the village from its agricultural lands. When they arrived they were met by fully armed Israeli soldiers in battle dress and border police.
The focus of the protest was a symbolic breach of the wall created by placing two ladders across the first razor wire fence. Using the ladders as a bridge, a group of protestors moved into the next line of wall fortifications. As they crossed they were attacked by tear gas and sound bombs.
The army turned on the massed demonstrators who were chanting "No to the Wall." Soldiers fired tear gas and sound bombs into the crowd, which began to retreat. As the marchers moved back toward the village, soliders penetrated into the village olive groves, gassing the retreating protestors. One gas cannister was fired at the ambulance parked on a hill distant from the wall and soldiers penetrated into the edge of the village where another tear gas cannister was shot into a house, injuring grandmother, Intisar Burnat.
The villagers of Bilin have lost more than 50% of their agricultural lands to the Apartheid Wall. The Israeli government illegally expropriated their lands without compensation. Although the seizure of the lands was done in the name of security, in fact, research has found that corrupt army planners eased the transfer of Bilin's land to a billionaire Russian real estate mogul who belongs to the Lubavitcher Hassidim. Bilin lands are now the site of the illegal settlement of Modin Elit.
Adeeb Abu Rahma -beaten on the leg
Basem Ahmad Issa -rubber bullet in the back.
Zohdiya Ali Alkhatib -teargas
Mohammad Alkhatib -beaten and leg injury
Naser Abu Rahma -shrapnel from a sound bomb in the hand
Ahmad Mohammad Hassan -rubber bullet in the leg
Oz Marinov -hit in the ankle by a sound bomb
Amir Sidi -wounded in the forhead by shrapnel from a sound bomb
R. - foot cut by razor wire
G. and L. - beaten with truncheons
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Editorial: The Politics of Delusion and Crisis Denial
by Rodrigue Tremblay
The New American Empire
October 30, 2006
"Our presence in Iraq exacerbates the difficulties we are facing around the world, and...continuing to fight in Iraq will only make the situation worse."
General Sir Richard Dannatt, British Army Chief
"If people say there has been an energising of the jihadist movement through the protracted war in Iraq- well, that's pretty obvious."
General Peter Cosgrove, former Australian Defence chief
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
H.L. Mencken, American journalist, 1880-1956
On May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush stood on an aircraft carrier off the coast near San Diego, California. In order to take full advantage of the plethora of TV crews present (even the education network PBS was there), his propaganda machine had erected a large sign behind him that said "Mission Accomplished". Bush II had decided that the "major combat operations in Iraq are over." The American politician had invaded another country illegally, and used military force at his own discretion, with the potential of hundreds of thousands of deaths, and he was crowing about it. In fact, even though Bush did not realize it at the time, Iraq could turn out to be to the United States what Afghanistan was to the Soviet Union, from 1979 to 1988, i.e. a colossal failure.
Indeed, more than three years later, Bush's "mission", whatever that means, was far from being "accomplished" and he was stubbornly digging deeper into the hole of a bloody illegal occupation of a foreign country. He even generously admitted to planning to leave the Iraqi mess to his successor. And, lacking any democratic spirit, he announced that American soldiers would not be leaving Iraq, presumably even if the legitimate and "elected" government of Iraq asked them to leave. This reminds one of the captain of the Titanic yelling "full speed ahead" with his ship caught in the middle of a field of icebergs. - A captain who does not change course in the presence of insurmountable obstacles is not 'resolute', he is showing myopic stupidity. More appropriately perhaps, the world is witnessing an "imperialistic" spirit, using words like "democracy" and "freedom" to mascarade a more sinister program. It is because Bush and his neocon advisers are too deeply engaged in the imperial project that they cannot consider changing their disastrous policy in the Middle East.
It is because Bush II is weak and immature that he cannot admit mistakes and cannot face reality. Last August 21 (2006), he said it in so many words: "We're not leaving [Iraq] so long as I'm the president. -That would be a huge mistake." It takes guts to admit a mistake. If Bush II were a real leader and a mature person, he would say: "We went to Iraq thinking we would find weapons of mass destruction. We did not find any. We were misinformed. Therefore, our invasion of Iraq was a mistake. We apologize to the Iraqi people for all the suffering and we will compensate the country of Iraq for the damage that has been wrought upon its people and its economy. Our military occupation will cease as soon as the Iraqi government asks us to leave, and as soon as a United Nations-led mandate of assistance to the Iraqi government can be established."
But, don't hold your breath. Bush II is no Winston Churchill (1874-1965). Churchill said, in 1940:"We failed. We lost. And we are going to have to change our policy." Moreover, Churchill did not initiate a war of aggression, and he knew what war was about when he said: "Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter..." -George W. Bush also could have profited if he had meditated on another Churchill quote, before his March 20 '03 war of aggression against Iraq: "The statesman who yields to war fever...is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events." Churchill could also have told him: "In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might."
Some may say that the reason Bush II is incapable of admitting a mistake is because he is "God-fearing". Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder recently made public his personal apprehensions about the fact that religion seemed to be the driving force behind many of George W. Bush's political decisions. Why, indeed, admit mistakes if you have 'God' on your side?
Meanwhile, the death toll in Iraq is getting to the catastrophic level. It is impossible to obtain a precise figure about Iraqi deaths, considering the dislocations and devastation prevailing in the country, but credible assessments by public health researchers at Johns Hopkins University place the number of deaths directly and indirectly caused by the war at between 426,369 and 793,663. History will record this ill-advised and illegal war as a major man-made catastrophe. We are witnessing war crimes of great proportions. Those who engineered and launched such a war of aggression should be held accountable for the all-too-avoidable disasters they have created. This does not prevent Vice President Dick Cheney, sitting in his Washington D.C. office, to rave and utter such nonsense as "things are going remarkably well [in Iraq]!" -He probably meant things are going well for Halliburton and the other war contractors who are raking in money by the truckloads.
The truth is that, at the end of the day, the American-led invasion of Iraq has produced the very contrary situation it was supposedly intended to bring about, i.e. a reduction of the threat of worldwide Islamist terrorism. In fact, as confirmed by the declassified April 2006 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), the most important report produced by the American intelligence community, the bloody Iraq War has become a primary recruitment vehicle for Islamist terrorists in the Muslim world and has further isolated the United States, not only in the Middle East, but al over the world. -And, what is more, not all Americans are in the dark about the Iraq war. For instance, a recent Zogby poll revealed that about half of the U.S. population is now convinced that the Bush-Cheney administration has politically exploited the 9/11 events to justify an attack against Iraq. So did 'terrorism' have anything to do with this military adventure in the oil-rich Middle East? Of course not. 'Terrorism' was only the propaganda shield behind which the special interests of two big lobbies were dissimulated, i.e. the oil Cartel and the pro-Israel Lobby.
In conclusion, this improvised and whimsical war for unmentionable reasons will turn out to have been an unmitigated and complete disaster. -Pardon the pun, but President George W. Bush is now between Iraq and a hard place. It was a fiasco all too predictable and all too avoidable.
In my book, The New American Empire, I wrote that by attacking "an Arab country without visible provocation, instead of discouraging terrorism, the Bush administration actually encouraged Islamist terrorism against the U.S.- Was the risk worth it? For the [Richard] Perle-led super-lobby, it obviously was. It was even necessary: Iraq had to be completely disarmed and the Middle East had to be transformed into a huge oil-producing colony. The two objectives were interrelated " (p.62 ). As Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz put it succinctly: "The road to Jerusalem goes through Baghdad." Well, this was wishing thinking on the part of a neocon crowd too anxious to take advantage of a dangerously disconnected and willfully ignorant American president. They were aided by the fact that Bush is known to be prone to deny reality and ignore expert advice; he even boasts that he makes government decisions according to his gut feelings. This is truly a clear demonstration of delusion and denial politics.
Rodrigue Tremblay is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Montreal and can be reached at tremblay.rodrigue@yahoo.com He is the author of the book 'The New American Empire'
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Editorial: Feel the love
Dave Neiwert
Orcinus
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Funny that Wolf Blitzer should be "surprised" by Lynne Cheney "sniping" at people's patriotism. Hell, that's what Republicans do as a matter of course.
Not only that, they can't seem to get enough of telling us how much they hate us. And it's not just Michael Savage and Ann Coulter. Take, for instance, this recent offering, headlined:
Friends, neighbors, and countrymen of the Left: I hate your lying guts
It's authored by a fellow named Paul Burgess, who's identified at the end of the piece as "director of foreign-policy speechwriting at the White House from October 2003 to July 2005." A quick Google search also shows that, at a recent PEN salon, he was identified as currently working for Northrop Grumman, a major defense contractor.
What's remarkable about the piece is the mindset it reveals among the White House's defenders, particularly regarding its critics. In the Republican worldview, these people aren't just on the wrong side of policy -- they're actively part of the enemy camp. And it isn't merely a rhetorical expression:
I have also grown to hate certain people of genuine accomplishment like Ted Turner, who, by his own contention, cannot make up his mind which side of the terror war he is on; I hate the executives at CNN, Turner's intellectual progeny, who recently carried water for our enemies by broadcasting their propaganda film portraying their attempts to kill American soldiers in Iraq.
I now hate Howard Dean, the elected leader of the Democrats, who, by repeatedly stating his conviction that we won't win in Iraq, bets his party's future on our nation's defeat.
I hate the Democrats who, in support of this strategy, spout lie after lie: that the president knew in advance there were no WMD in Iraq; that he lied to Congress to gain its support for military action; that he pushed for the democratization of Iraq only after the failure to find WMD; that he was a unilateralist and that the coalition was a fraud; that he shunned diplomacy in favor of war.
These lies, contradicted by reports, commissions, speeches, and public records, are too preposterous to mock, but too pervasive to rebut, especially when ignored by abetting media.
Most detestable are the lies these rogues craft to turn grief into votes by convincing the families of our war dead that their loved ones died in vain. First, knowing what every intelligence agency was sure it knew by early 2003, it would have been criminal negligence had the president not enforced the U.N.'s resolutions and led the coalition into Iraq. Firemen sometimes die in burning buildings looking for victims who are not there. Their deaths are not in vain, either.
Notice the endless straw-man arguments. Who among the mainstream Democrats he detests, for instance, has suggested that those soldiers' deaths were in vain? George W. Bush may have wasted thousands of lives in a misbegotten quagmire of a war undertaken under false pretenses -- all of which now seems largely incontestable -- but that does not mean those deaths were meaningless. If nothing else, they now stand as real-life testimony to the consequences of permitting conservatives anywhere near the reins of power.
Which is what's on the minds of people like Burgess, and his fellow conservatives. The midterm elections are looming and it's looking grim. They're seeing their vaunted ability to "create their own reality" -- the rosy, blinkered reality like he tries to recreate here -- crumbling before their eyes. And their first, and last, resort is hate. Pure and unadulterated, and decidedly eliminationist.
Expect to hear a lot more of this if Democrats win. But we should probably expect to hear more of it if Republicans win, too. After all, this kind of venomous self-righteousness doesn't dissipate easily. If anything, this mindset, gorged on power, seems inclined to follow up on its rhetoric.
Authoritarians with a mandate are truly dangerous. Especially when they've been gorging themselves on hatred for their fellow Americans.
Digby has more. [Hat tip to NickM too.]
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Nightmare on Wall Street
GAO chief warns economic disaster looms
By MATT CRENSON
AP National Writer
October 28, 2006
AUSTIN, Texas - David M. Walker sure talks like he's running for office. "This is about the future of our country, our kids and grandkids," the comptroller general of the United States warns a packed hall at Austin's historic Driskill Hotel. "We the people have to rise up to make sure things get changed."
But Walker doesn't want, or need, your vote this November. He already has a job as head of the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that audits and evaluates the performance of the federal government.
Basically, that makes Walker the nation's accountant-in-chief. And the accountant-in-chief's professional opinion is that the American public needs to tell Washington it's time to steer the nation off the path to financial ruin.
From the hustings and the airwaves this campaign season, America's political class can be heard debating Capitol Hill sex scandals, the wisdom of the war in Iraq and which party is tougher on terror. Democrats and Republicans talk of cutting taxes to make life easier for the American people.
What they don't talk about is a dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows, or at least should. The vast majority of economists and budget analysts agree: The ship of state is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of economic disaster if nothing is done to correct it.
There's a good reason politicians don't like to talk about the nation's long-term fiscal prospects. The subject is short on political theatrics and long on complicated economics, scary graphs and very big numbers. It reveals serious problems and offers no easy solutions. Anybody who wanted to deal with it seriously would have to talk about raising taxes and cutting benefits, nasty nostrums that might doom any candidate who prescribed them.
"There's no sexiness to it," laments Leita Hart-Fanta, an accountant who has just heard Walker's pitch. She suggests recruiting a trusted celebrity - maybe Oprah - to sell fiscal responsibility to the American people.
Walker doesn't want to make balancing the federal government's books sexy - he just wants to make it politically palatable. He has committed to touring the nation through the 2008 elections, talking to anybody who will listen about the fiscal black hole Washington has dug itself, the "demographic tsunami" that will come when the baby boom generation begins retiring and the recklessness of borrowing money from foreign lenders to pay for the operation of the U.S. government.
"He can speak forthrightly and independently because his job is not in jeopardy if he tells the truth," said Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution.
Walker can talk in public about the nation's impending fiscal crisis because he has one of the most secure jobs in Washington. As comptroller general of the United States - basically, the government's chief accountant - he is serving a 15-year term that runs through 2013.
This year Walker has spoken to the Union League Club of Chicago and the Rotary Club of Atlanta, the Sons of the American Revolution and the World Future Society. But the backbone of his campaign has been the Fiscal Wake-up Tour, a traveling roadshow of economists and budget analysts who share Walker's concern for the nation's budgetary future.
"You can't solve a problem until the majority of the people believe you have a problem that needs to be solved," Walker says.
Polls suggest that Americans have only a vague sense of their government's long-term fiscal prospects. When pollsters ask Americans to name the most important problem facing America today - as a CBS News/New York Times poll of 1,131 Americans did in September - issues such as the war in Iraq, terrorism, jobs and the economy are most frequently mentioned. The deficit doesn't even crack the top 10.
Yet on the rare occasions that pollsters ask directly about the deficit, at least some people appear to recognize it as a problem. In a survey of 807 Americans last year by the Pew Center for the People and the Press, 42 percent of respondents said reducing the deficit should be a top priority; another 38 percent said it was important but a lower priority.
So the majority of the public appears to agree with Walker that the deficit is a serious problem, but only when they're made to think about it. Walker's challenge is to get people not just to think about it, but to pressure politicians to make the hard choices that are needed to keep the situation from spiraling out of control.
To show that the looming fiscal crisis is not a partisan issue, he brings along economists and budget analysts from across the political spectrum. In Austin, he's accompanied by Diane Lim Rogers, a liberal economist from the Brookings Institution, and Alison Acosta Fraser, director of the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
"We all agree on what the choices are and what the numbers are," Fraser says.
Their basic message is this: If the United States government conducts business as usual over the next few decades, a national debt that is already $8.5 trillion could reach $46 trillion or more, adjusted for inflation. That's almost as much as the total net worth of every person in America -
Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and those Google guys included.
A hole that big could paralyze the U.S. economy; according to some projections, just the interest payments on a debt that big would be as much as all the taxes the government collects today.
And every year that nothing is done about it, Walker says, the problem grows by $2 trillion to $3 trillion.
People who remember Ross Perot's rants in the 1992 presidential election may think of the federal debt as a problem of the past. But it never really went away after Perot made it an issue, it only took a breather. The federal government actually produced a surplus for a few years during the 1990s, thanks to a booming economy and fiscal restraint imposed by laws that were passed early in the decade. And though the federal debt has grown in dollar terms since 2001, it hasn't grown dramatically relative to the size of the economy.
But that's about to change, thanks to the country's three big entitlement programs - Social Security, Medicaid and especially Medicare. Medicaid and Medicare have grown progressively more expensive as the cost of health care has dramatically outpaced inflation over the past 30 years, a trend that is expected to continue for at least another decade or two.
And with the first baby boomers becoming eligible for Social Security in 2008 and for Medicare in 2011, the expenses of those two programs are about to increase dramatically due to demographic pressures. People are also living longer, which makes any program that provides benefits to retirees more expensive.
Medicare already costs four times as much as it did in 1970, measured as a percentage of the nation's gross domestic product. It currently comprises 13 percent of federal spending; by 2030, the Congressional Budget Office projects it will consume nearly a quarter of the budget.
Economists Jagadeesh Gokhale of the American Enterprise Institute and Kent Smetters of the University of Pennsylvania have an even scarier way of looking at Medicare. Their method calculates the program's long-term fiscal shortfall - the annual difference between its dedicated revenues and costs - over time.
By 2030 they calculate Medicare will be about $5 trillion in the hole, measured in 2004 dollars. By 2080, the fiscal imbalance will have risen to $25 trillion. And when you project the gap out to an infinite time horizon, it reaches $60 trillion.
Medicare so dominates the nation's fiscal future that some economists believe health care reform, rather than budget measures, is the best way to attack the problem.
"Obviously health care is a mess," says Dean Baker, a liberal economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank. "No one's been willing to touch it, but that's what I see as front and center."
Social Security is a much less serious problem. The program currently pays for itself with a 12.4 percent payroll tax, and even produces a surplus that the government raids every year to pay other bills. But Social Security will begin to run deficits during the next century, and ultimately would need an infusion of $8 trillion if the government planned to keep its promises to every beneficiary.
Calculations by Boston University economist Lawrence Kotlikoff indicate that closing those gaps - $8 trillion for Social Security, many times that for Medicare - and paying off the existing deficit would require either an immediate doubling of personal and corporate income taxes, a two-thirds cut in Social Security and Medicare benefits, or some combination of the two.
Why is America so fiscally unprepared for the next century? Like many of its citizens, the United States has spent the last few years racking up debt instead of saving for the future. Foreign lenders - primarily the central banks of China, Japan and other big U.S. trading partners - have been eager to lend the government money at low interest rates, making the current $8.5-trillion deficit about as painful as a big balance on a zero-percent credit card.
In her part of the fiscal wake-up tour presentation, Rogers tries to explain why that's a bad thing. For one thing, even when rates are low a bigger deficit means a greater portion of each tax dollar goes to interest payments rather than useful programs. And because foreigners now hold so much of the federal government's debt, those interest payments increasingly go overseas rather than to U.S. investors.
More serious is the possibility that foreign lenders might lose their enthusiasm for lending money to the United States. Because treasury bills are sold at auction, that would mean paying higher interest rates in the future. And it wouldn't just be the government's problem. All interest rates would rise, making mortgages, car payments and student loans costlier, too.
A modest rise in interest rates wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, Rogers said. America's consumers have as much of a borrowing problem as their government does, so higher rates could moderate overconsumption and encourage consumer saving. But a big jump in interest rates could cause economic catastrophe. Some economists even predict the government would resort to printing money to pay off its debt, a risky strategy that could lead to runaway inflation.
Macroeconomic meltdown is probably preventable, says Anjan Thakor, a professor of finance at Washington University in St. Louis. But to keep it at bay, he said, the government is essentially going to have to renegotiate some of the promises it has made to its citizens, probably by some combination of tax increases and benefit cuts.
But there's no way to avoid what Rogers considers the worst result of racking up a big deficit - the outrage of making our children and grandchildren repay the debts of their elders.
"It's an unfair burden for future generations," she says.
You'd think young people would be riled up over this issue, since they're the ones who will foot the bill when they're out in the working world. But students take more interest in issues like the Iraq war and gay marriage than the federal government's finances, says Emma Vernon, a member of the University of Texas Young Democrats.
"It's not something that can fire people up," she says.
The current political climate doesn't help. Washington tends to keep its fiscal house in better order when one party controls Congress and the other is in the White House, says Sawhill.
"It's kind of a paradoxical result. Your commonsense logic would tell you if one party is in control of everything they should be able to take action," Sawhill says.
But the last six years of Republican rule have produced tax cuts, record spending increases and a Medicare prescription drug plan that has been widely criticized as fiscally unsound. When President Clinton faced a Republican Congress during the 1990s, spending limits and other legislative tools helped produce a surplus.
So maybe a solution is at hand.
"We're likely to have at least partially divided government again," Sawhill said, referring to predictions that the Democrats will capture the House, and possibly the Senate, in next month's elections.
But Walker isn't optimistic that the government will be able to tackle its fiscal challenges so soon.
"Realistically what we hope to accomplish through the fiscal wake-up tour is ensure that any serious candidate for the presidency in 2008 will be forced to deal with the issue," he says. "The best we're going to get in the next couple of years is to slow the bleeding."
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America and the Dollar Illusion
Spiegel
25/10/2006
The dollar is still the world's reserve currency, even though it hasn't deserved this status for a long time. The devaluation of the dollar can't be stopped -- it can only be deferred. The result could be a world economic crisis.
The dollar is still the world's reserve currency, even though it hasn't deserved this status for a long time. The devaluation of the dollar can't be stopped -- it can only be deferred. The result could be a world economic crisis.
The two things investors crave most are high yields and high security. Since you can never have both at the same time, the moods of investors are like an emotional roller coaster. They shift constantly from fear to greed and back -- although major investors, like corporations and states, clearly prefer security over fancy returns. Their fear is stronger than their greed. They'll freely relinquish the really fat profits as long as the stability of their billions is guaranteed. They're afraid of political unrest, they loathe overly dramatic changes in currency value and the mere thought of creeping inflation sends them into a state of panic.
Few countries are able to provide the greatest possible security in the face of these dangers. They include the United States and Switzerland. Indeed, this security is why the dollar isn't just used in trading and investment, but also functions as the world's reserve currency. Almost every country in the world distrusts its own currency to the extent that it prefers to invest the money from its treasury in the United States.
One can almost completely rule out the possibility of political unrest in the United States. Inflation is combated by the Federal Reserve Bank. Given the size of the currency's spread and the quantity of dollars circulating worldwide, speculators have no cause to get overly anxious about the dollar.
Thus, those who have money prefer to keep it in dollars. The United States disposes of a virtual monopoly on the commodity called security. For many investors, purchasing a US government bond is nothing other than a way of preserving their money. In 2005, only 20 percent of all currency reserves in the world were held in euros, whereas more than 60 percent were held in dollars. The introduction of the euro was a considerable success, and one should not downplay it. Nevertheless, the dollar has remained the world's currency anchor. As long as this anchor rests firmly on the ocean floor, stability is guaranteed for the national economies that invest in the dollar.
But if that anchor should tear itself loose and begin to drift freely in the ocean of global finance, the chaos that ensues would result in trouble for more than just exchange rates.
Buying to avoid selling
But why are the same traders who used to purchase products now so mad about dollar bills? Why do they rely on the good called security -- a commodity whose quantity cannot be increased at all? Doesn't every business student learn that the currency of a country is only as stable -- and hence as valuable -- as what the national economy of that country has to offer and produces? Does no one see that the tension between the dream and the reality is increasing and that this tension will snap, leading to suffering for millions?
Of course they see it! Investors can see what is happening. They wonder about it and shake their heads. It even scares them a little, sending chills down their spine. But they keep buying dollars as though possessed. The greater their doubts, the more greedily they order dollars. Indeed, that's exactly what is so crazy about these investors and their behavior: The client isn't just a client. He creates the security he's purchasing by the very act of purchasing it. If he were to stop buying dollars tomorrow, suspicion about the currency would spread and insecurity would grow. Then the dream would end. The dollar would start to falter and all the wealth held in dollars would lose its value. Of course, that's not something investors want to see happen.
The only way to fight a weak dollar is to strengthen it. Many people no longer care whether the US currency still justifies the faith people seem to have in it. The new game, which amounts to playing with fire, works exactly the other way around: The dollar deserves the faith it gets because otherwise it loses that faith. Dollars are bought so they don't have to be sold. The dollar is strong because that's the only thing that can prevent it from growing weak. Reality is ignored because only by ignoring it can the dream come true. Or, to put it still more clearly: Behaving irrationally has become rational behavior.
Everyone knows the danger
Of course, those playing this game know that, in the long term, currencies can't be stronger than the national economies from which they derive. Consumption without production, imports without exports, growth on credit -- these are all things that can't last in this world. Ken Rogoff, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and a man who thinks as clearly as he speaks brashly, recently criticized US economic policy even as he seemed to be praising it: Rogoff said the current boom in the United States is "the best economic recovery money can buy."
But if things have become that obvious, why aren't investors recoiling in fear? Why do foreigners, US presidents of all stripes and even Federal Reserve presidents known for their seriousness allow themselves to get involved in such a risky game, when the risk is that of destroying everything? Why aren't those mechanisms of market regulation functioning that are supposed to represent the advantage of the capitalist system over planned economies?
The answer is terrifyingly simple: Everyone knows how dangerous the game is, but continuing to play it strikes them as less dangerous than quitting. After all, what's to be gained from overreacting? Investors allowed themselves to get caught in the dollar trap years ago, and there's no easy way out. If they start taking their dollar bills and government bonds to the market themselves, they would lose money -- either gradually or all at once. They would like to avoid both scenarios, at least for a time. A president who does no more than recognize the situation as an important issue may lose his position as public discontent looks for a vent. Though the governors of the Federal Reserve Bank are under the strongest obligation to tell the truth, they have let the right moment for effective intervention slip by.
Waiting for the signal
Alan Greenspan, the legendary former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, did much to feed the dollar illusion. Whenever skepticism increased, he raised the key interest rate. Any rise in the key interest rate also serves as a sort of risk premium for those who took their chances by investing in the dollar. When doubts about the sustainability of US economic growth were heard, Greenspan set out to dispel them immediately. For a man better known for his mumbling and preference to keep people in the dark about the financial world, he spoke with remarkable precision. "Overall, the household sector seems to be in good shape," he said in October of 2004. If the global financial market's managers worship Greenspan, then it's at least partly because he's given their dream a lease on life of several more years.
His successor has no other option but to do the same thing. He knows that every piece of advice issued by someone in his position will have consequences. If he issues a warning about the skewed state of the economy, the warning itself instantly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even if he chooses a subtle formulation, the financial market will perfectly understand what he's saying. Everyone is waiting for the sign that the trend has reversed. No one is hoping for that sign, but no one can afford to miss it either.
At this point, a legitimate objection could be formulated: namely, that financial markets don't normally obey politicians. So why aren't the markets correcting themselves in this instance as they normally do? Who or what is preventing investors from behaving differently towards the dollar than they behaved towards New Economy stocks?
They're going to do it. The only question is when. Financial investors aren't tax collectors or accountants: Their job isn't that of a meticulous overseer. They love excess, and they regularly cause markets to overheat. After all, speculation is the business they're in, and being in that business involves living with the risk of going too far. Their professional attitude resembles that of race car drivers whose goal is victory and not avoiding accidents at all costs. What remains unclear is just how dramatic the crash will be. Experts have often forecast the effects of a dollar meltdown. If the downward trend were to begin, interest on credit would rise step by step in an attempt to curb devaluation. That way, the dollar crisis would spread from the world of currencies to the real world of factories, businesses and household accounts within days.
Major and minor private investments yield lower returns when interest rates climb. People would start to save, the economy would falter and eventually shrink. The first mass layoffs would arrive soon afterwards. US citizens would have to once more drastically reduce their level of consumption, as unemployment and waves of bankruptcy would shake up the country. Millions of households would become unable to pay back their bank loans. Then real estate prices and share values would begin to drop, having been overpriced for years and used as mortgages for consumer credit. When the real estate bubble bursts, consumption inevitably dwindles even further. The hunger for imports would fade, causing problems for exporting countries as well. It would only be a matter of days before newspapers would once more feature a term that seemed to have disappeared decades ago: world economic crisis.
Steroids for the giant
Last century, the United States already suffered from one deep economic crisis that gradually spread to the rest of the world. The Great Depression lasted 10 years and brought mass unemployment and starvation to the United States. The country's economic power sank by one-third. The crisis virus wrought havoc all over the West. Six million people were unemployed in Germany when the economic fever was at its peak.
Today's investors face a difficult choice, one they're not to be envied for. They can see the relative weakness of the US economy and they're registering the tectonic shifts in the world economy. They know that a great statistical effort is being made to prolong the American dream. For some time now, government statistics have announced sensational productivity leaps for the US economy -- productivity leaps that, strange as it may seem, haven't led to any rise in wages for years. This is in fact genuinely bizarre: Either capitalists are reaping the fruits of increased productivity all by themselves -- which would be a political scandal even in capitalism's heartland -- or the productivity leaps exist only on paper. There is much to suggest that the second hypothesis is correct.
Half the world is impressed by the low levels of unemployment in the United States. The other half knows that these statistics aren't official, but the result of a voluntary telephone survey. Many of those who declare themselves employed are assistants and day workers. Working just one hour a week is enough for one to be classified as "employed." Given that it's considered antisocial to declare yourself unemployed, the US statistics may well say more about American society's dominant norms than about its actual condition.
The US economy's high growth rates aren't to be completely trusted either. They are the result of high public and private debt. In no way do they express an increased output of domestically produced goods and services that the United States has achieved by its own strength. They say more about the successful sales ventures of Asians and Europeans. New loans taken by the US government were responsible for fully one-third of US economic growth in 2001. In 2003 they were responsible for a quarter. The United States is an economic giant on steroids -- doped so its decline in performance doesn't become too apparent.
Trust in God, market style
For capital market investors, reality isn't reality until the majority of investors are convinced it is reality and have begun reacting accordingly. Right now, everyone is watching everyone else closely. Everyone knows the dream of the stable economic superpower has ended, but everyone is keeping his eyes shut just a little longer.
Government bonds and shares don't have any objective value -- nothing you can see, weigh, taste or even eat. Their value is measured by investors' faith that the purchasing power of $1 million will still be $1 million 10 years from now, rather than having been reduced by half. This faith is measured on the markets almost every second -- and the measure used is nothing but the faith of other investors. As long as the faithful outnumber the skeptics, everything works out fine for the dollar (and the world economy). The trouble starts the day the scale begins to tip.
The process is complicated by the fact that investors aren't driven by blind faith alone. In part, it seems, hard facts also push them to extend their credit of trust a little longer. US economic growth -- an impressive figure on paper -- is an important benchmark. When it is high, investors feel reassured in their faith in the power of the US domestic economy to perform well. True, the trade balance deficit has skyrocketed since it first appeared in the mid-1970s. But the economy is growing steadily anyway, as the dreamers note with growing self-confidence. It may not be growing as rapidly as the Chinese economy, but it is growing twice as fast as the European economy.
And yet this benchmark is not as reliable as it seems. The faith investors have in the figure has actually helped create it. After all, the purchasing price of a government bond feeds almost directly into state consumption, just as the purchasing price of a share makes companies more inclined to consume. It also extends the credit basis of millions of private households -- which in turn boosts consumption. In this way, the expectations of investors -- including the expectation that the United States will continue to grow -- transform into certainties almost all by themselves.
In other words, the capital of trust creates the very growth rates it needs in order to justify itself. US economic growth, in fact, is fueled by ever-increasing consumer spending -- puzzling given that American wages are dropping as is industrial output. Still, everyone knows the answer to this riddle. The rise in consumption isn't based on an expansion of production, a rise in wages or even an increase in exports. To a large extent, it's based on the growing debt. But why do banks keep issuing credit? Because they accept the ever-increasing prices of stocks and real estate as a kind of collateral. A closed circuit of miraculous money minting has been created.
Self-delusion
The extent of this self-delusion can be read in the balance sheets of the banks: Almost no one is saving money in the United States today. The US foreign debt grows by about $1.5 billion every weekday and has now reached about $3 trillion. Private household debt, both at home and abroad, has reached $9 trillion -- and 40 percent of these debts has been incurred since 2001. The Americans are enjoying the present at the cost of selling off ever larger chunks of their future. Arguably, the imminent economic crisis is the most thoroughly predicted one in recent history. Rather than refuting the crisis, the current US economic boom merely heralds it.
Biologists have observed similar phenomena in plants contaminated by toxins. Before they wither, they produce one last batch of healthy shoots -- to the point that they can hardly be distinguished from healthy plants. Some speak of a panic bloom.
So who will be the first to destroy the dollar illusion? Aren't all investors bound together by an invisible link, since every attack on the key currency would lead to a loss of value for them, perhaps even destroying a large part of their financial assets? Why should the central banks of Japan or Beijing throw their dollars onto the market? What could make US pension funds wilfully destroy their wealth, held in dollars? What sense would it make to send the United States into a deep crisis when that crisis could drag all the other states along?
The underlying motive is the same as the one that once prompted investors to buy dollars -- fear. This time it is fear that someone else may be faster, fear that the dollar's strength won't last, fear that every day spent waiting may be one day too long. It's fear that the herd instinct of global financial markets will set in and overtake those who can't keep up.
Weaker than they say
These days, the dollar is making a lot of people uncomfortable. One morning many dollar-owners will wake up and look at the facts about the US economy without their rose-colored glasses -- just as private investors woke up one day and took an unflinching look at the New Economy, only to see companies whose market value couldn't be justified by even the most dramatic of profit increases. Some of the revenue forecasts that had been issued far exceeded the total value of the market. The Nasdaq presented the spectacle of a stock market whose added value increased by 1,000 percent in just a few years, when the nominal growth of the US economy during the same period was only 25 percent.
Greed triumphed over fear for a few years -- but then fear came back. The value of high-tech shares plummeted by more than 70 percent in just a few months, and they're still less than half as high as they were then. Even the Dow Jones, a stock market index based on the value of the largest US companies, was devalued by some 40 percent.
Much the same fate is in store for the dollar and for dollar loans. The United States has sold more security than it has to offer. The expectations traded will turn out to be valueless because they can't be met. Just as the New Economy was unable to provide investors with either the growth or the profits that had been predicted for investors, currency traders will one day have to admit that the economy backing the currency they sold is weaker than they claimed.
The crash can be deferred, but not stopped
The dependence of foreign central banks on the dollar will defer its crash, but it won't prevent it. Today's snowdrift will become tomorrow's avalanche. The masses of snow are already accumulating at breathtaking speed. The avalanche could happen tomorrow, in a few months or years from now. Much of what people today think is immortal will be buried by the global currency crisis -- perhaps even the leadership role of the United States.
Incidentally, the commission that former US President Bill Clinton created to investigate the negative balance of trade concluded in clear terms that the government has to do whatever it can to put an end to the growing disparity between imports and exports. It demanded that the public give up its optimism and return to realism, that people start saving again and that the state reduce its imports in order to prevent too hard a crash landing.
None of that has been done. In fact, what is being done is the opposite of everything the experts recommended. Debt is growing, imports are increasing and an optimism now lacking every basis in reality has become official state policy. Lester Thurow, a member of Clinton's commission, draws the sober conclusion that no one will believe the US balance of trade could produce a crisis "until it happens."
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Shtokman Could Signal the End of Stability
By Samuel Charap
The Moscow Times
Monday, October 30, 2006
Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller's announcement earlier this month that the huge Shtokman gas field in the Barents Sea would be developed without the participation of foreign partners, and that its production would be sold exclusively to Europe, sent shock waves through the investment community. The field, estimated to contain up to 4 trillion cubic meters of natural gas and more than 31 million tons of gas condensate, is one of the world's largest undeveloped known deposits.
Negotiations between Gazprom and five Western energy majors -- France's Total, the Norwegian firms Statoil and Hydro and Chevron and ConocoPhillips from the United States -- to determine which would enter into a consortium with the gas monopoly to develop the field had intensified since the short list of pretenders was announced last year. Because of its size, and the fact that it could open the way for Russian gas (in liquefied form) to penetrate the U.S. market, Shtokman was a crucial issue in Russia's foreign relations. It was also the single largest foreign investment project on the table.
Acknowledging that developing the field represents an enormous technical challenge, Gazprom sought out foreign partners with the technology, specialists and experience it lacked. A consortium arrangement would also have spread the economic risks associated with the project. Gazprom will now have to turn to creditors to finance Shtokman's development, which could cost as much as $50 billion by the time the field comes online. One of the U.S. firms could also have offered marketing connections on the downstream side in North America. In return for a minority stake in the development, Gazprom sought equity in the foreign companies.
One can only imagine the look on the faces of the executives at the five firms when the news came across the wires. Instead of informing the companies directly, Miller chose to drop the bombshell in an interview on Russia Today, a Kremlin-funded, English-language television channel that is often ridiculed as a propaganda mouthpiece in the West.
Immediately after the announcement, analysts with technical knowledge of gas-field development stated definitively that Gapzrom was incapable of going it alone unless the timeframe for the project were pushed back by several years and the cost estimate increased by as much as 15 percent. Even then, doubts remain about the feasibility of the project without foreign help. Gazprom has no experience in the development of a relatively remote offshore deposit of this immense size. Miller himself implicitly acknowledged this when he said the company would hire foreign firms as contractors.
It came as no surprise, however, that one of the five majors soon declared its unwillingness to participate in such an arrangement. Analysts expressed doubt that the market for offshore development contractors could in principle meet Gazprom's needs for Shtokman.
In short, there appears to be no economic logic to Gazprom's decision. So the question that arises is: Why? Since no one knows exactly what the foreign firms had put on the table, it is possible that the move was a not-so-subtle bargaining tactic. It could have been a saber-rattling gesture meant to scare the majors into improving their offers, which could well have been below fair value. Following President Vladimir Putin's confirmation at a news conference in Germany of Gazprom's plan to go it alone, however, the decision seems to be final.
This leaves two possibilities, neither of which bode well for Russia's investment climate. Either Gazprom has decided that economic priorities -- getting the field online according to the current timetable and cost estimates and tapping the U.S. market -- are secondary to total state control, or Moscow has allowed this decision to become hostage to the downward spiral in Russia's relations with the West, and with the United States in particular. Indeed, rumors circulated several months before the announcement that the U.S. firms might be excluded from the consortium because of Washington's perceived intransigence in Russia's WTO-accession negotiations. After Miller's announcement these rumors only intensified.
No matter which of the two explanations are closer to the truth -- or even if both factors played a role -- the Shtokman decision is a turning point in Russia's energy policy. Following the Yukos affair, the state established more or less stable rules of the game for cooperation with Western energy concerns. The primary guiding principle was that the national champions, Gazprom and Rosneft, would participate as majority stake-holders in all new development projects and should also be given shares in deals signed in the Yeltsin era that are perceived by the current regime as unfair. Foreign firms were encouraged to take up minority positions in these developments, as the state acknowledged that their expertise and resources were critical for accelerating the projects. Beyond these major caveats, however, the state preached cold-blooded economic pragmatism and rejected the practice of linking the task of making money to petty political concerns.
While this framework would seem to make Russia an unattractive place for foreign companies to do business, investors were relatively content. They are generally more concerned with the stability of the rules of the game, not their restrictiveness.
Many have argued that such ground rules, if they ever existed, were done away with long ago and that Shtokman fits into a pattern with the recent assault on Sakhalin-2. But Gazprom's intention to take a minority stake in the Sakhalin-2 project has been clear for over a year and fits in with the scheme described above. Shell, the majority shareholder in the operating consortium, was given a choice: Either let Gazprom in or face the consequences.
Shtokman, by contrast, was a clean slate. If Gazprom has decided to proceed without bringing in foreign partners based on political motivations, and despite the economic consequences, the rules have changed and we could be entering a new period of instability in the investment climate. Shtokman might signal the end of the paradigm of cooperation between the national champions and foreign firms, and thus the unraveling of Putin's oft-noted pragmatism in dealings with foreign energy majors. As relations between Russia and the West continue to deteriorate, we could see other key decisions subjugated to the political whims of the Kremlin. The investment climate will inevitably suffer as a result.
The lesson from this episode is that political systems in which power is highly concentrated in the executive branch tend to be incapable of long-term credible commitment to policies necessary for the development of market economies. Of course, the total fragmentation of a political system is also not conducive to economic development, either, and this was part of the motivation behind Putin's centralization drive. But the pendulum may now have swung too far in the opposite direction. The previous period of perceived stability in the investment climate could well have been a short-lived phenomenon.
Samuel Charap, a doctoral candidate at St. Antony's College, Oxford University, is currently conducting research in the political science department of the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.
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Bolivia Recovers Total Control of Hydrocarbons
La Paz, Oct 29 (Prensa Latina)
The Bolivian government ratified on Sunday that foreign oil companies accepted the hydrocarbon nationalization conditions announced last May 1, after the 180-day term given to the oil firms for the new contracts´ signing.
In his speech at the Communications Palace, in which the governments in power privatized the Andean country´s natural resources ten years ago, President Evo Morales stated that the recovering of hydrocarbons is part of the change of the neo-liberal model aimed by his government.
"We should tell social movements and all Bolivians that the fight was not in vain. We can say that the mission was fulfilled", stressed Morales.
The Bolivian leader ensured the foreign oil companies that his government will respect all the regulations and they will have juridical security.
In that sense, the president underlined that the contracts are transparent and prove that Bolivian has now partners and not owners of its natural resources.
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Russia, France overtake US as top arms sellers
by Maxim Kniazkov
AFP
Sun Oct 29, 2006
WASHINGTON - The United States has ceded to Russia and France last year its role of the top arms supplier to the developing world as it failed to take full advantage of emerging markets and opportunities created by booming oil prices, according to a new congressional study.
The annual report by the Congressional Research Service showed the US share of the arms transfer market dropped from 35.4 percent to 20.5 percent between 2004 and 2005.
In monetary terms, the value of these deals fell from 9.4 billion dollars to about 6.2 billion.
By contrast, Russia made last year seven billion dollars selling weaponry to Asia, Africa and Latin America, a notable increase from 5.4 billion the year before.
This successful deal making has propelled Russia to the position of the top arms supplier to the developing world, the report said on Sunday.
France rose to second place, inking last year 6.3 billion dollars worth of deals for delivery of military hardware, up from just one billion dollars in agreements in 2004.
Frances success, the study said, was attributable to a 3.5-billion-dollar agreement with India for the sale of six Scorpene diesel attack submarines.
US congressional experts also predicted that an aggressive sales pitch by Paris could eventually collide with key interests of the United States and its allies as France usually pursued its national interests rather than
NATO alliance considerations.
"So the potential exists for policy differences between the United States and major West European supplying states over conventional weapons transfers to specific countries," warned Richard Grimmett, the main author of the report.
Russia's rise to the pinnacle of the world arms business was fueled by its booming trade with two emerging Asian giants -- Indian and China -- as well as Iran, a controversial client whose buying power was nonetheless greatly enhanced by high oil prices.
Last year, Russia agreed to sell India 24 SA-19 air defense systems for 400 million dollars as well as Smerch multiple-launch rocket systems for about 500 million, according to the report.
Moscow will also overhaul an Indian diesel submarine for about 100 million, and to provide India with BrahMos anti-ship missiles.
In addition to fulfilling its long-term sales agreement with China for Su-27 fighter jets, destroyers and submarines, Russia also agreed last year to sell China 30 IL-76TD military transport aircraft and eight aerial refueling tankers for more than one billion dollars, the document said.
New arms deals between Moscow and Beijing also include sales of various military aircraft engines worth more than 1.2 billion dollars.
"These arms acquisitions by China are apparently aimed at enhancing its military projection capabilities in Asia, and its ability to influence events throughout the region," Grimmett noted.
Meanwhile, Iran, fearing airstrikes against its nuclear facilities, is buying from Russia 29 SA-15 Gauntlet air defense systems for over 700 million.
Moscow, the report said, also agreed last year to upgrade Irans Su-24 and Mig-29 aircraft as well as their T-72 main battle tanks.
The US fall to third place was explained by a scarcity of new expensive contracts.
The largest US 2005 deal involved upgrading AH-64A Apache helicopters for the United Arab Emirates for a total of over 740 million dollars.
While noting that China's 2005 arms sales total was a modest 2.1 billion dollars, the report pointed out that Iran and
North Korea were reportedly among clients receiving Chinese missile technology.
The document, therefore, warned that "China can present an obstacle to efforts to stem proliferation of advanced missile systems."
The CRS usually delivers its reports to interested lawmakers rather than the public.
The arms trade study was sent to legislators last week and obtained by AFP late Saturday.
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No climate action may spark economic crisis: report
Reuters
Sat Oct 28, 2006
LONDON - Ignoring climate change could lead to economic upheaval on the scale of the 1930s Depression, underlining the need for urgent action to combat global warming, a British report on the costs of climate change said.
The report by chief British government economist Nicholas Stern, a 27-page summary of which was obtained by Reuters, says the benefits of determined worldwide steps to tackle climate change would greatly outweigh the costs.
The 700-page report, to be published on Monday, said that no matter what we do now the chance "is already almost out of reach" to keep greenhouse gases at a level which scientists say should avoid the worst effects of climate change.
It said the world does not have to choose between tackling climate change and economic growth, contradicting
President Bush who pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol against global warming in part because he said it would cost jobs.
"The evidence gathered by the review leads to a simple conclusion: the benefits of strong, early action considerably outweigh the costs," said the report, prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair and finance minister Gordon Brown.
"Our actions over the coming few decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century," it said.
It precedes U.N. climate talks, starting in Nairobi on November 6, focusing on finding a successor to Kyoto which ends in 2012.
Blair is pushing for a post-Kyoto framework that would include the United States -- the world's biggest producer of greenhouse gases that cause climate change -- as well as major developing countries such as China and India.
Kyoto obliges 35 rich nations to cut emissions of greenhouse gases -- which come mainly from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars -- by some 5 percent from 1990 levels by 2008-12. Many Kyoto nations are above target.
POOR WILL SUFFER MOST
Stern said that, on current trends, average global temperatures will rise by 2-3 degrees centigrade within the next 50 years or so, compared with temperatures in 1750-1850.
If emissions continue to grow, the earth could warm by several more degrees, with severe consequences that would hit poor countries most, the former World Bank chief economist said.
Melting glaciers would initially increase flood risk and then reduce water supplies, eventually threatening one-sixth of the world's population, mainly in the Indian sub-continent, parts of China and the South American Andes, he said.
Declining crop yields, especially in Africa, could leave hundreds of millions unable to produce or buy enough food, he said. Rising sea levels could result in tens to hundreds of millions more people flooded each year.
The report estimates stabilising greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will cost about 1 percent of annual global output by 2050. But if the world does nothing, it could cut global consumption per person by between five and 20 percent.
Stern called for a coordinated international approach to combat climate change, saying the effort must be shared fairly by rich and poor. He suggested rich nations take responsibility for emissions cuts of 60-80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050.
Countering global warming would bring new opportunities to industry, he said, estimating the market for low-carbon energy products could be worth at least $500 billion a year by 2050.
He advocated a doubling of worldwide public spending on research and development into low-carbon technologies and a sharp increase in incentives to encourage people to use them.
Stern said a global carbon price was needed, affixing a clear cost to pollution, and this could be created through tax, trading or regulation.
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Halliburton Motto - Its Cost Plus Baby
By Evelyn Pringle
30 October, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Halliburton's contracts for work in Iraq are what's known as costs plus contracts, meaning that after all the costs for labor, materials and other expenses are added together, the company makes its profit based on a percentage of that total.
It certainly does not take a financial genius to figure out that under the terms of such a contract, a company has every motive in the world to increase the costs of every project to increase profits.
Since the minute Dick Cheney authorized the no-bid contracts for Halliburton, the granddaddy of war profiteering has been ripping off American tax payers left, right and center through the use of these cost plus contracts and another clear-cut profiteering scheme was recently revealed in testimony at a Senate Democratic Policy Committee hearing.
On September 18, 2006, Julie McBride, a former Halliburton employee with the company's Morale, Welfare & Recreation Department (MWR) in Iraq, testified that "the mantra at Halliburton camps goes, 'It's cost plus, baby.'"
Ms McBride was hired as an MWR Coordinator in Camp Fallujah at facilities that organize recreational activities for off-duty troops.
The two MWR facilities that she coordinated were a Fitness Center and an Internet Café. The Fitness Center had gym equipment, pool and ping pong tables, video games, and a large room for movies, fitness classes and dances, and the Internet Café housed telephones, computers, and a library.
At Camp Fallujah, she testified, she became concerned about several Halliburton practices and especially with the procedures used to compile the headcount for the MWR Department.
"Funding for the MWR Department," Ms McBride stated, "was evidently based, in part, on the headcount that Halliburton reported."
She explained that to obtain a headcount, each off-duty soldier who entered the Fitness Center or the Internet Café had to sign in, and that the number of soldiers on the sign in sheet was referred to as the "Boots in the Door" count.
She then testified that she and other MWR employees were directed to utilize a specific methodology to intentionally inflate this head count to run up costs and described how it worked.
"To begin," she told the panel, "each hour, on the hour, Halliburton staff were instructed to record the number of soldiers in each of the five rooms of the Fitness Center, and in the Internet Café library."
"In addition," she said, "each person who used any equipment in the Fitness Center was
required to sign a form."
"This included balls, ping pong paddles, pool cues, board games, video games, etc.," she noted
"Further," she testified, "a record was kept of the number of troops who attended fitness classes or other activities."
At the end of each day, she said, Halliburton instructed MWR Coordinators to prepare a situation report, or "sit rep," to record what was purported to be the MWR head count for the day.
"To inflate that figure," Ms McBride explained, "the Coordinators began by adding together the "Boots in the Door" count, and the hourly totals for each room in the Fitness Center throughout the day and in the library."
"For example," she said, "I was present in Iraq on February 27, 2005, when the "Boots in the Door" count at the MWR facility in Fallujah was about 330."
"The hourly count that day," she noted, "for each room was over 1,300."
"These totals were then combined for a Fitness Center headcount in excess of 1,600," she stated, "or five times the actual number of troops that came into the facility."
On top of that she said, Halliburton would often add the number of troops who attended a fitness class or activity, even though each person had already been counted when he or she came in the door, and counted a second time in the hourly head count.
In addition, she testified, they would often add on the total number of equipment items that were checked out that day and sometimes they would even add the number of towels checked out by the troops.
"One day in February 2005, for example," Ms McBride told the panel, "179 towels were added into the headcount."
On another day in January 2005, she said, they added 240 bottles of water used by the troops that day.
"Sometimes," she testified, "they used a sum total for the headcount that was higher than the "Boots in the Door," hourly room counts, activity count, equipment count, and towels count combined."
After adding together all of the numbers to arrive at a "sum total," she said, Coordinators were instructed to throw away the original "Boots in the Door" figure and the larger total was then designated as the headcount for that day and emailed to Halliburton administrators who compiled the numbers for all of the MWR facilities in Iraq.
"There are many other Halliburton MWR Coordinators who can verify this procedure," she told the committee.
Ms McBride went on to describe how the fraudulent headcounts are used to generate millions of dollars in unearned profits for the company by running up costs. "By inflating the number of users," she said, "Halliburton can rationalize a greater need for facilities, equipment, staffing and administrators than actually exists."
"The additional staffing," she said, "does not benefit the troops, but it does benefit Halliburton."
"Under its contract," Ms McBride points out, "the more facilities, equipment, staff and administrators Halliburton can show a need for, the more profit Halliburton makes."
She said that she also watched Halliburton employees use their control of the MWR and dining facility requisition procedures to requisition many items for their own personal
use, by claiming that the items were for the troops.
"I have personally observed," she said, "cases of soda, stacked on top of each other in Halliburton administrative offices, which Halliburton employees obtained this way."
She pointed out that the employees not only drank soda free but they also generated more undeserved profits for Halliburton by running up the cost of supplies.
"By contrast," she told the committee, "US soldiers who make a quarter as much, or less, must go to the PX to purchase their soda with money from their own pockets."
Ms McBride also described how Halliburton employees exploit requisitions to obtain luxuries that are not afforded to the troops. "One example of this," she said, "was a Super Bowl party, for Halliburton employees only, at taxpayer expense."
According to Ms McBride, Halliburton requisitioned a big screen TV and lots of food for employees and thus, under the cost plus contract, the company even made money off its private Super Bowl party.
Following the party, she said, the Halliburton employees arranged a live television connection for the big screen TV so that they could watch more football games.
She told the committee that many Halliburton employees did not seem to care about the soldiers and often ignored troop requests, or treated them like an annoyance.
"Those same employees," she said, "indulged their own whims at taxpayer expense."
She also described methods used by Halliburton to discourages employees from speaking out about these issues. "It's not easy to stand up to Halliburton," she told the committee.
"After I voiced my concerns about what I believed to be accounting fraud," Ms McBride said, "Halliburton placed me under guard and kept me in seclusion."
She said her property was searched, and she was specifically told that she was not allowed to speak to any member of the US military. "I remained under guard until I was flown out of the country," she said.
In concluding her testimony, Ms McBride expressed her admiration and devotion to the US troops in Iraq as well as her purpose in testifying before the committee.
"During my time at Camp Fallujah," she said, "I came to love the young men and women in the military, who serve our country so well."
"It was an honor for me to help them in any way," she stated.
"I will never forget their kindness," she said, "and their courage has inspired me to speak out now on their behalf."
Democrats have promised to end Halliburton's war profiteering in Iraq as soon as they take control of Congress and hopefully tax payers will hold them to it.
(Evelyn Pringle is a columnist for OpEd News and an investigative journalist focused on exposing corruption in government and corporate America. Email evelyn.pringle@sbcglobal.net)
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Orlando teen accused of stealing bus, driving along transit route, charging fares
16:42:16 EST Oct 29, 2006
Canadian Press
FERN PARK, Fla. (AP) - A 15-year-old boy stole a bus, drove it along a public transit route, picked up passengers and collected fares, authorities said Sunday.
Ritchie Calvin Davis took the bus Saturday from the Central Florida Fairgrounds in Orlando, where it was parked awaiting sale at an auction, a Seminole County sheriff's report said. The bus belongs to the Central Florida Transportation Agency, which runs LYNX public transit services in the Orlando area.
"I drove that bus better than most of the LYNX drivers could," the teen, who is too young to drive legally, told a deputy after he was stopped and arrested. "There isn't a scratch on it. I know how to start it, drive it, lower it, raise it."
Davis had previously been charged for a similar bus theft. Details of that case were unavailable Sunday.
Passengers and deputies noted Davis drove the bus at normal speeds and made all the appropriate stops on the route. One passenger, suspicious of the youthful looks of the driver, called 911.
The bus had two passengers when deputies stopped it in Fern Park, about 20 kilometres north of the fairgrounds. Authorities believe Davis picked up a total of three passengers and collected only a few dollars.
He was charged with grand theft auto and driving without a license. A court hearing was scheduled Tuesday to determine whether he will be charged as an adult.
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Political Ponerology
U.S. Investigates Voting Machines' Venezuela Ties
By TIM GOLDEN
The New York Times
October 29, 2006
The federal government is investigating the takeover last year of a leading American manufacturer of electronic voting systems by a small software company that has been linked to the leftist Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chávez.
The inquiry is focusing on the Venezuelan owners of the software company, the Smartmatic Corporation, and is trying to determine whether the government in Caracas has any control or influence over the firm's operations, government officials and others familiar with the investigation said.
The inquiry on the eve of the midterm elections is being conducted by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or Cfius, the same panel of 12 government agencies that reviewed the abortive attempt by a company in Dubai to take over operations at six American ports earlier this year.
The committee's formal inquiry into Smartmatic and its subsidiary, Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, Calif., was first reported Saturday in The Miami Herald.
Officials of both Smartmatic and the Venezuelan government strongly denied yesterday that President Chávez's administration, which has been bitterly at odds with Washington, has any role in Smartmatic.
"The government of Venezuela doesn't have anything to do with the company aside from contracting it for our electoral process," the Venezuelan ambassador in Washington, Bernardo Alvarez, said last night.
Smartmatic was a little-known firm with no experience in voting technology before it was chosen by the Venezuelan authorities to replace the country's elections machinery ahead of a contentious referendum that confirmed Mr. Chávez as president in August 2004.
Seven months before that voting contract was awarded, a Venezuelan government financing agency invested more than $200,000 into a smaller technology company, owned by some of the same people as Smartmatic, that joined with Smartmatic as a minor partner in the bid.
In return, the government agency was given a 28 percent stake in the smaller company and a seat on its board, which was occupied by a senior government official who had previously advised Mr. Chávez on elections technology. But Venezuelan officials later insisted that the money was merely a small-business loan and that it was repaid before the referendum.
With a windfall of some $120 million from its first three contracts with Venezuela, Smartmatic then bought the much larger and more established Sequoia Voting Systems, which now has voting equipment installed in 17 states and the District of Columbia.
Since its takeover by Smartmatic in March 2005, Sequoia has worked aggressively to market its voting machines in Latin America and other developing countries. "The goal is to create the world's leader in electronic voting solutions," said Mitch Stoller, a company spokesman.
But the role of the young Venezuelan engineers who founded Smartmatic has become less visible in public documents as the company has been restructured into an elaborate web of offshore companies and foreign trusts.
"The government should know who owns our voting machines; that is a national security concern," said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, who asked the Bush administration in May to review the Sequoia takeover.
"There seems to have been an obvious effort to obscure the ownership of the company," Ms. Maloney said of Smartmatic in a telephone interview yesterday. "The Cfius process, if it is moving forward, can determine that."
The concern over Smartmatic's purchase of Sequoia comes amid rising unease about the security of touch-screen voting machines and other electronic elections systems.
Government officials familiar with the Smartmatic inquiry said they doubted that even if the Chávez government was some kind of secret partner in the company, it would try to influence elections in the United States. But some of them speculated that the purchase of Sequoia could help Smartmatic sell its products in Latin America and other developing countries, where safeguards against fraud are weaker.
A spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, which oversees the foreign investment committee, said she could not comment on whether the panel was conducting a formal investigation.
"Cfius has been in contact with the company," said the spokeswoman, Brookly McLaughlin, citing discussions that were first disclosed in July. "It is important that the process is conducted in a professional and nonpolitical manner."
The committee has wide authority to review foreign investments in the United States that might have national security implications. In practice, though, it has focused mainly on foreign acquisitions of defense companies and other investments in traditional security realms.
Since the political furor over the Dubai ports deal, members of Congress from both parties have sought to widen the purview of such reviews to incorporate other emerging national security concerns.
In late July, the House and the Senate overwhelmingly approved legislation to expand the committee's scope, give a greater role to the office of the director of national intelligence and strengthen Congressional oversight of the review process.
But the Bush administration opposed major changes, and Congressional leaders did not act to reconcile the two bills before Congress adjourned.
Foreigners seeking to buy American companies in areas like defense manufacturing typically seek the committee's review themselves before going ahead with a purchase. Legal experts said it would be highly unusual for the panel to investigate a transaction like the Sequoia takeover, and even more unusual for the panel to try to nullify the transaction so long after it was completed.
It is unclear, moreover, what the government would need to uncover about the Sequoia sale to take such an action.
The investment committee's review typically involves an initial 30-day examination of any transactions that might pose a threat to national security, including a collective assessment from the intelligence community. Should concerns remain, one of the agencies involved can request an additional and more rigorous 45-day investigation.
In the case of the ports deal, the transaction was approved by the investment committee. But the Dubai company later abandoned the deal, agreeing to sell out to an American company after a barrage of criticism by legislators from both parties who said the administration had not adequately reviewed the deal or informed Congress about its implications.
The concerns about possible ties between the owners of Smartmatic and the Chávez government have been well known to United States foreign-policy officials since before the 2004 recall election in which Mr. Chávez, a strong ally of President Fidel Castro of Cuba, won by an official margin of nearly 20 percent.
Opposition leaders asserted that the balloting had been rigged. But a statistical analysis of the distribution of the vote by American experts in electronic voting security showed that the result did not fit the pattern of irregularities that the opposition had claimed.
At the same time, the official audit of the vote by the Venezuelan election authorities was badly flawed, one of the American experts said. "They did it all wrong," one of the authors of the study, Avi Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, said in an interview.
Opposition members of Venezuela's electoral council had also protested that they were excluded from the bidding process in which Smartmatic and a smaller company, the Bizta Corporation, were selected to replace a $120 million system that had been built by Election Systems and Software of Omaha.
Smartmatic was then a fledgling technology start-up. Its registered address was the Boca Raton, Fla., home of the father of one of the two young Venezuelan engineers who were its principal officers, Antonio Mugica and Alfredo Anzola, and it had a one-room office with a single secretary.
The company claimed to have only two going ventures, small contracts for secure communications software that a Smartmatic spokesman said had a total value of about $2 million.
At that point, Bizta amounted to even less. Company documents, first reported in 2004 by The Herald, showed the firm to be virtually dormant until it received the $200,000 investment from a fund controlled by the Venezuelan Finance Ministry, which took a 28 percent stake in return.
Weeks before Bizta and Smartmatic won the referendum contract, the government also placed a senior official of the Science Ministry, Omar Montilla, on Bizta's board, alongside Mr. Mugica and Mr. Anzola. Mr. Montilla, The Herald reported, had acted as an adviser to Mr. Chávez on elections technology.
More recent corporate documents show that before and after Smartmatic's purchase of Sequoia from a British-owned firm, the company was reorganized in an array of holding companies based in Delaware (Smartmatic International), the Netherlands (Smartmatic International Holding, B.V.), and Curaçao (Smartmatic International Group, N.V.). The firm's ownership was further shielded in two Curaçao trusts.
Mr. Stoller, the Smartmatic spokesman, said that the reorganization was done simply to help expand the company's international operations, and that it had not tried to hide its ownership, which he said was more than 75 percent in the hands of Mr. Mugica and his family.
"No foreign government or entity, including Venezuela, has ever held any stake in Smartmatic," Mr. Stoller said. "Smartmatic has always been a privately held company, and despite that, we've been fully transparent about the ownership of the corporation."
Mr. Stoller emphasized that Bizta was a separate company and said the shares the Venezuelan government received in it were "the guarantee for a loan."
Mr. Stoller also described concerns about the security of Sequoia's electronic systems as unfounded, given their certification by federal and state election agencies.
But after a municipal primary election in Chicago in March, Sequoia voting machines were blamed for a series of delays and irregularities. Smartmatic's new president, Jack A. Blaine, acknowledged in a public hearing that Smartmatic workers had been flown up from Venezuela to help with the vote.
Some problems with the election were later blamed on a software component, which transmits the voting results to a central computer, that was developed in Venezuela.
Comment: Ooooh, so the vote rigging in the last elections was Venezuela's fault! Just like Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that he was planning on launching against the United States...
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US Interference in Venezuelan Elections Ongoing
Saturday, Oct 28, 2006By: Joel Wendland - Political Affairs
In 2004, President Bush tried to impress likely voters who frowned on his long vacations by insisting that he was "working hard." Since then, it has become perfectly obvious that his work ethic has fallen short on key issues from relief after Hurricane Katrina and producing desired results in the "war on terror," to putting forward viable solutions to the US health care crisis or boosting the stagnating economy.
There has been one issue, however, on which the Bush administration has worked diligently: a long and expensive effort to unseat democratically elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. As the December 3rd Venezuelan national elections approach, in which President Chávez is standing for reelection, the Bush administration, in violation of US and Venezuelan law, is providing financial, diplomatic, and strategic support for Chávez's opponents.
Bush's timeworn hostility for President Chávez is well known. Top secret US government documents released through Freedom of Information Act requests show that the administration's anti-Chávez operations may even pre-date the September 11th terrorist attacks and the launch of the "war on terror." According to human rights and international law expert writer Eva Golinger, leaders of the infamous April 2002 coup met with top Bush administration officials at least six months prior.
Golinger, who spoke with Political Affairs from Caracas by telephone, authored the 2005 book The Chávez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela. Translated into several languages and sold all over the world, The Chávez Code comprehensively revealed the role of the US government, through its military entities, diplomatic channels, and through funding agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), in helping to plan and execute the coup. Through its role in meeting with coup leader Pedro Carmona, provision of military equipment, and diplomatic pressure on regional governments to accept the coup as legitimate, the Bush administration played a decisive, multifaceted role in those illegal activities.
Documents Golinger unearthed during the investigation for her book showed that the CIA knew the exact details of the coup plan: stage a mass demonstration of political opponents of the administration, use sections of the Caracas police loyal to the opposition to provoke violence by shooting at the crowds, blame President Chávez for the violence, have military detachments with ties to the US military kidnap him, and then claim he had resigned. US government documents show, Golinger points out, that "part of the conspiracy was convincing the public, the media, and other governments that Chávez was responsible and therefore the coup was justified."
Once this plan was implemented, Carmona seized dictatorial power and by decree dissolved all of Venezuela's democratic institutions.
Immediately, Venezuelans rejected Carmona and demanded the release of President Chávez. His supporters organized huge demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of people. Chavistas in the military found where he was being held and rescued him. In the days following the coup there was an enormous outpouring of support for Chávez that is impossible to imagine for any US politican.
Once the coup failed and Carmona was turned out, opposition political parties and groups, flush with US funds, planned and carried out an "economic sabotage," as Golinger describes it, that nearly crippled Venezuela's oil industry. In the Venezuelan and US press, they claimed that workers were protesting President Chávez by refusing to go to work. Venezuela's right-wing opposition, with the support of US taxpayer money, Bush strategists, and a little-known corporation with strong ties to the Pentagon, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), ironically labeled their action a "strike."
In truth, the managers who ran Venezuela's oil industry closed down the plants and refineries, locked the workers out, and even destroyed or damaged vital equipment. SAIC technicians, who, according to Golinger, provided and operated the information technology used by Venezuela's state-owned oil company, PDVSA, aided the sabotage by shutting down computer systems that operated the plants or changing the code to disable them.
"That was actually the area the sabotage took place," Golinger reports. "It was a US company which forms part of the military industrial complex - anyone can look it up - they were the ones leading the sabotage efforts."
The sabotage failed as ordinary workers stood up for the government they had chosen and forced the plants to re-open. In both cases - the coup and the sabotage - the main leaders were only in rare cases held to account for their crimes. Many fled the country, some to the US where they were welcomed by their patrons in the Bush administration.
After the lockout and sabotage failed in January of 2003, the opposition and the US government turned to even more insidious and dangerous capers, Golinger states. In 2003, Venezuelan authorities uncovered a plot to assassinate President Chávez "involving paramilitaries coming over from Colombia" who had ties "to US Special Forces working in Colombia under Plan Colombia," Golinger says.
Under the pretense of controlling drug trafficking, US military personnel "had been using Colombian paramilitaries to conduct command and control operations for some time." According to Golinger's evidence, Colombian armed groups infiltrated all the way to "the metropolitan area of Caracas, not just the border." In all, some 100 Colombian paramilitaries were detained, many of whom were simply deported back to Colombia, while others were tried and imprisoned for their roles in the plot. Golinger points out that "high-level functionaries in the Colombian government, including President Uribe" admitted to this plot stating that "the paramilitaries and unfortunately some members of Colombia's intelligence" had been involved.
When these and other terrorist attacks failed to achieve the desired result, opposition groups turned their efforts to a legal mechanism for recalling a president. Ironically, this provision of the Venezuelan Constitution had been authored by a Constituent Assembly called by President Chávez. After a series of illegal attempts to force Chávez out of office, the US-backed political opposition sought to remove him through a procedure adopted by the overwhelming majority of Venezuelans.
For this, the opposition parties again sought and received massive financial and technical aid from the Bush administration and forced a referendum on Chávez's presidency in the summer of 2004. Despite the gobs of cash supposedly provided to "pro-democracy" groups, which in the case of Venezuela always happened to be linked with or supportive of the opposition, the recall campaign failed. Chávez received the highest number of votes any Venezuelan presidential candidate has ever received in an election judged to be fair and free by a consensus of international observers, including a team headed by former US President Jimmy Carter.
After a string of failures dating back to at least late 2001, it became clear that, in Golinger's words, "the US government underestimated the popularity the Chávez government has but also the strength of the Venezuelan people to resist these types of sabotage and destabilization efforts."
But habitual failure does not seem to deter the Bush administration. In this case, failure has only caused it to sharpen its open hostility towards Venezuela. Again, the money is flowing through the NED and USAID to Chávez's opponents. According to Golinger, who is about to publish a second book called Bush v. Chávez: Washington's War on Venezuela, which documents US interference since 2005, the Bush administration is "increasing that interference by providing funding, training, guidance, and other contacts, and other strategically important ways to support the opposition's presidential campaign here."
This time Chávez's opponent is Manuel Rosales, who unabashedly signed the Carmona decree in April 2002 dissolving the very democratic institutions he now wants to govern. Rosales's shady credentials, however, are more insidious than just ties to Carmona and the coup. According to Golinger, vice presidential candidate Julio Borges is meeting with administration officials later this month in Washington and will be speaking at a forum titled "Can Venezuela Be Saved?" held at the ultra-right American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
According to AEI's website, the event will be hosted by Roger Noriega, a fellow at AEI and former State Department official, whose deep dislike for Venezuela's popular president is unmistakably personal. Noriega happens to have been the one who deliberately lied to the US media about Chávez's phony resignation during the 2002 coup. (Noriega's media ploy, though subsequent White House press statements backed him up, reportedly angered then Secretary of State Colin Powell because Powell himself didn't believe that Chávez had resigned.) Noriega is also tied to organizations like USAID and the International Republican Institute which have funneled millions of US taxpayer dollars - in an era of record budget deficits - to political parties that oppose President Chávez. Presumably, Borges will be collecting a fat campaign check signed by the US taxpayer.
Aside from tens of millions of US taxpayer dollars financing Chávez's opponents, Golinger also points out that this time around the US role in the campaign amounts to "psychological warfare within Venezuela, but also in the international arena, and in the United States." The goal is "to make people think that Venezuela is a failed or failing state with a dictator, which is how the US government refers to him."
In addition to numerous personal attacks on President Chávez, the Bush administration has intensified its diplomatic maneuvers against Venezuela. One recent example is Bush's claim that Venezuela has failed to participate adequately in US-led anti-trafficking-in-persons efforts. As a result Bush unilaterally imposed economic sanctions on Venezuela. Golinger describes Bush's charges as "complete fantasy and fiction, because Venezuela has actually improved their trafficking in persons efforts."
In a related matter not raised by Golinger in this interview, the White House also has accused Venezuela of failing to combat the illegal drug trade and pointed to Venezuela's expulsion of Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) personnel in 2005 as evidence. This claim, however, was contradicted by State Department findings quietly released almost simultaneously that show Venezuela's own anti-drug operations have produced better results without assistance from the DEA. The Venezuelan government says that it sent the DEA officials home under suspicion of abusing their privileged status.
US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld also recently accused Venezuela of launching an arms race by purchasing new military equipment. According to Golinger, "just because Venezuela is finally buying some equipment and rifles to replace ones that are more than four decades old, does not imply they are starting an arms race." The administration's charges are belied by the fact that "Venezuela is not even on the list of the top five countries in this hemisphere in military budgets." With close to $500 billion spent annually on the military, the US is first, followed by "Brazil with about $13 billion, then Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and Argentina," Golinger asserts.
"Yet, Rumsfeld continues to make such declarations to international media, and it gets into the papers in the United States and other countries. The idea, of course, is to provide a perception that Venezuela is a danger," she adds. It is part of the Bush administration's "ongoing campaign to discredit and to isolate Venezuela from other nations in the region but also around the world."
Though diplomatically this campaign has failed, Golinger regards it as another level of interference in Venezuela's election. Bush and Rumsfeld's accusations, as unmerited as they may be, are repeated throughout the US and Venezuelan media. The point of the Bush administration's accusations is not to prove necessarily that Venezuela poses a real danger, says Golinger, but to convince portions of the Venezuelan population that maybe they would be better off with a president that does not provoke such responses from the US government. Indeed, statements from the US government have been carefully coordinated with opposition political campaigns, which have consistently played on fears of the people Venezuela about these issues.
Despite this level of interference, President Chávez maintains a wide lead in public opinion polls (+/- 25 points) and his supporters expect to turn out voters in record numbers again.
It is time for US taxpayers to call for an end to wasting money on these schemes. People who are honest about supporting real democracy should insist on building bridges and friendship with Venezuela rather than provoking hostility and prolonging ill will.
Let's face it, telling the truth about other governments and building democracy are among the Bush administration's weakest points. The US government should respect the choices of the Venezuelan people and their right to determine their own destiny - just as we expect other countries to respect ours. Can you imagine the uproar if another government chose to influence the US elections by secretly pumping millions of dollars to one of the parties or candidates? Imagine how angry you might feel if that government then had the nerve to turn around and claim they were "promoting democracy."
Let's tell our leaders to set aside political differences and personal grudges and work together with Venezuela for peace and friendship.
Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs magazine
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Cuban Prez Proves False Rumors on His Health
Havana Oct 29 (Prensa Latina)
Giving the lie to rumors about his health and even death, Cuban President Fidel Castro appeared on a televised video Saturday, holding the day´s daily paper and demonstrating he is recovering well from his surgery in July.
Now, when our enemies have prematurely declared me dead or dying, it gives me pleasure to send this small film to my countrymen and friends, the statesman said, introducing the film shown on the Roundtable broadcast.
On July 31 Fidel Castro temporarily delegated his duties as leader of the country to First Vice President Raul Castro and informed the Cuban people on the state of his health.
Since then millions of Cubans have shown their support of the Revolution in events at work and in letters to the editor of Cuban media.
The country has remained normal, although it has taken precautions against any US aggression, and continued constructing its singular social model.
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GOP, Democratic leaders spar on Rumsfeld
By NEDRA PICKLER
Associated Press
October 29, 2006
WASHINGTON - The No. 2 leader in the House on Sunday said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is "the best thing that's happened to the Pentagon in 25 years," sparking a debate with Democrats who said the comments show why the GOP should be voted out of power.
Rumsfeld's leadership of the bloody mission in Iraq has become a divisive issue in the Nov. 7 elections. Many Democrats and a few Republicans are calling for his resignation, but President Bush repeatedly has defended him. So did House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, during an appearance Sunday on ABC's "This Week."
"I think Donald Rumsfeld is the best thing that's happened to the Pentagon in 25 years," Boehner said. "This Pentagon and our military needs a transformation. And I think Donald Rumsfeld's the only man in America who knows where the bodies are buried at the Pentagon, has enough experience to help transform that institution."
Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said voters will have their chance to show if they agree with Boehner on Election Day.
"It's true President Bush may not be on the ballot, but people like Boehner and people who support Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush, they're on the ballot," Rangel said on CNN's "Late Edition."
"And that's why we only get two years. You don't have to wait to get the president. This is a referendum on the war and the incompetency of the Bush administration."
Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel, head of the Democratic effort to win control of the House, quickly e-mailed a statement to reporters objecting to Boehner's comments and including quotes from seven military leaders criticizing the defense secretary.
"Congressman Boehner's defense of Donald Rumsfeld makes it crystal clear that we need change in Washington from the rubber stamp Republican Congress and their blind adherence to President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld's stay the course policy in Iraq," Emanuel's e-mail said.
Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, appearing with Rangel on CNN, said she has confidence in Rumsfeld.
"I think it's a shame to take this complex issue of winning the international war on terror and putting it at the level of whether you like or not like Donald Rumsfeld, and whether you like or don't like President Bush's personalities and the statements that he's made," she said.
Another Republican, Maryland Senate candidate Michael Steele, declined to back the Pentagon chief.
"He wouldn't be my secretary of defense," Steele said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "And ultimately, that's going to be a decision that the president of the United States makes."
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UK politician admits political parties manipulate elected representatives and force MPs to be dishonest
21/10/2006
Guardian
- Parting shot at 'arrogant, error-prone government'
- Maverick MP hopes to remain party member
Clare Short's 23-year parliamentary career reached its apparently inevitable denouement yesterday when she resigned the Labour whip, denouncing Tony Blair's "half-truths" and his "arrogant, error-prone government".
She said she wanted to use her remaining years in parliament as an independent MP, free to campaign for a hung parliament, a check on the executive and an end to presidential government.
Ms Short may now be expelled from the party, although she said she wanted to remain a party member. She had been repeatedly warned that her support for a hung parliament meant she was opposed to the election of some Labour MPs.
Her resignation yesterday came as she faced the risk of formal censure by Labour's chief whip, Jacqui Smith, over her support for a hung parliament and her failure to attend key Commons votes.
Plans to ask the national executive to expel Ms Short from the party were shelved just before the Labour conference for fear they would overshadow what was likely to be an anyway highly charged gathering.
Ms Short said she had decided to leave the parliamentary party after being constantly "threatened" by the chief whip. "This is a sad, big thing for me. I just want to be free to say what I think to be true. I can't go on being rebuked every week by the chief whip," she said.
Her resignation led to a bout of recriminations yesterday, with the whips' office accusing her of leaking the news to the media, and Ms Short blaming the whips' office.
It is possible the news leaked after the Liberal Democrats tried to persuade her to follow the leftwing former Labour MP Brian Sedgemore and join them. She said pointedly in her resignation letter that she would remain a social democrat.
Her increasingly strident attacks on the government, and allegations of lying by colleagues, lost her support across the parliamentary party, even though she is admired for her personal warmth and record as international development secretary.
Her former ministerial colleague Lord Foulkes described her resignation of the Labour whip as "the equivalent of the final chapter of a modern Greek tragedy", adding: "Her career had been going down and down and down for months and months."
He said her fortunes turned when she voted for the Iraq war and subsequently resigned from the cabinet in May 2003. She had openly voiced her criticisms of the war, but Mr Blair persuaded her that she had a vital role to play as international development secretary in the reconstruction of Iraq. He also insisted he was using his influence to persuade the US to resolve the Palestinian issue.
Lord Foulkes said Mr Blair had given her a uniquely free rein and twice saved Ms Short from deselection by her constituency.
The anti-war MP Peter Kilfoyle described her decision to resign the Labour whip as a mistake, saying: "It is better always fight your corner from within."
Ms Short enjoyed a sometimes impish love-hate relationship with Mr Blair in the first term of the Labour government, but gradually her disillusionment tipped over into contempt and finally near hatred.
Unlike Robin Cook, who resigned as House of Commons leader before the war started, she openly accused Mr Blair of lying over the Iraq war in an attempt to win public backing.
In her autobiography, An Honourable Deception, she rejected the findings of the Butler inquiry that the prime minister acted in good faith over the war: "I am afraid it is clear that the prime minister did knowingly mislead." She also claimed that the then head of the civil service, Lord Turnbull, told her that Mr Blair had committed himself irrevocably in August 2002 to go to war as an ally of the US.
Like former home secretary David Blunkett in his memoirs published this month, she claimed that Gordon Brown supported the war only because he feared that otherwise he would be sacked as chancellor.
Ms Short was first elected MP for Birmingham Ladywood in 1983. She came to prominence with a campaign against the Sun newspaper's page three girls and her bill to ban them. In 1996 she stunned Westminster when she was reunited with her son Toby, who she had given up for adoption when she was 18.
Recently she expressed her opposition to the replacement of Trident, Blairite reform of the public services and what she described as government by diktat. She also campaigned for a law requiring a Commons vote before British troops go to war, and backed calls to impeach Mr Blair over the war. During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon this year she accused the government of being complicit in war crimes.
As international development secretary, she fought to increase vastly the department's funding and in particular boosted aid for Africa.
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No charges for Forest Gate victim
BBC
27/10/2006
Mr Koyair and Mr Kahar were released without charge
The Crown Prosecution Service has advised police not to bring child pornography charges against a man shot during a terror raid in Forest Gate.
Mohammed Abdul Kahar, 23, was shot in the shoulder by police at his east London home on 2 June.
He and his brother Abul Koyair, 20, were later released without charge.
Mr Kahar was subsequently arrested on suspicion of making pornographic pictures of children, which his solicitor said he "strenuously denied".
Police said computer and electrical equipment had been seized during the search of Mr Kahar's house and passed to the Child Abuse Investigation Command for further examination.
On Friday a Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) spokesman said 44 indecent images of children had been found in the memories of a Dell computer, an external computer hard-drive and various mobile phones.
Of the total, 23 had been "embedded" images - which could have been inadvertently downloaded on the back of other computer files - and 21, on the external hard-drive and a Nokia 3G mobile, had been "deleted".
The spokesman said: "To transfer to the phone, the suspect would have to have specialist knowledge.
"There was no evidence that Mr Kahar had possession of, or access to, equipment or the technical knowledge to do so."
Comment: This story references the two brothers whose house in Forest Gate UK was the subject of a dawn raid by 250 heavily armed UK police earlier this year, one of whom was shot on the stairs of his home, apparently on suspicion of the combined crimes of being Muslim and a UK citizen. In the aftermath, the real reason for the raid became apparent - patsies were needed for the phony "war on Islamic terror":
The story went as follows:
Kahar told a press conference that he was woken at 4:00 a.m. by the screams of his younger brother. "I could hear him screaming, so I got out of bed. I just had my boxer shorts on and a T-shirt. It was dark and I assumed a robbery was happening. As I made the first step down the stairs, my brother was still screaming and I turned round to look at the stairs."
Even at this point, family members did not know that the armed men in their home were police. Kahar recounted how, right up until the moment he was dragged into a waiting police van, he believed his family was being targeted by burglars, intent on murder.
Kahar explained how an armed man "looked at me straight away and shot. As soon as I turned the steps and we both had eye contact he shot me."
"As soon as I turned round, I saw an orange spark and a big bang," he said-the sound of a gunshot.
The force of the bullet, which hit him in the chest, propelled Kahar against the wall. Describing how he slumped to the ground, he went on, "I looked at the right of my chest and saw blood was coming down and I saw a hole in my chest. I knew I had been shot."
As he lay wounded on the floor, a police officer struck him in the face with a gun. He begged, "Please, I can't breathe," but "they just kicked me in the face and kept saying 'Shut the f*** up.' I thought they were going to shoot me again or my brother. I feel ashamed for asking them to spare my life."
He went on, "One of the officers grabbed my left foot and dragged me down the stairs, my head was banging on the stairs."
When he was outside the house, Kahar continued, "I heard them bringing my mum out. She was screaming and crying. I just thought, 'One by one they're going to kill us.' I was just shouting 'I ain't done nothing.' I was worrying about my brothers, everyone. At that time, I thought I was going to die and thinking of everything at the last minute."
Koyair backed up his brother's account. Explaining how he was woken by the sound of shattering glass, he described running into the passage just slightly behind his brother when he heard a loud bang and saw a bright flash.
"It was like a dream at first," Koyair said, "But I realised it was not a dream and my own brother had been shot for no reason. They tried to murder my brother."
"After that I saw the officers hitting my brother," Koyair explained, before he was also arrested and taken to Paddington Green high security prison.
During the press conference, Kahar described how Prime Minister Tony Blair's defence of the raid on his home was "the most hurtful thing." Blair had said he supported the police action, "101 percent."
"He said he was 101 percent for the raid," Kahar said, "101 percent for the hole in my chest.
"I'm the same age as his son-I'm as innocent as his son," he said.
In the hours and days following the raid on their home, the media claimed that Kahar had been shot in the shoulder after he had struggled with officers. The wound was said to be superficial and not life threatening. Others, apparently quoting police sources, said there was no evidence to suggest officers were responsible for Kahar's wound, whilst the News of the World claimed that he had been shot by his brother during a scuffle with a police officer. When the brothers were released without charge, the story changed again. This time a police officer had "accidentally" discharged his gun as a result of wearing thick gloves.
When these lies were exposed, Kahar was charged with child-pornography offenses in August this year. Now those charges have been dismissed.
All of which makes us wonder how those images got onto Kahar's phone if he himself lacked the know-how to do so.
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New Party Says Kremlin Knows Best
By Nabi Abdullaev
The Moscow Times
Monday, October 30, 2006
Russia over the weekend became possibly the first country in history with a two-party system in which both parties share the same overriding principle -- that the executive is always right.
With the merger Saturday of the Party of Life, the Rodina party and the Party of Pensioners, the system appears in place.
The new party, Just Russia: Motherland, Pensioners, Life, is to play the role of the center-left opposition. Its rival is to be the established, center-right United Russia.
"If United Russia is the party of power, we will become the party of the people," said Federation Council Chairman Sergei Mironov, who was elected Just Russia's leader Saturday.
"We will follow the course of President Vladimir Putin and will not allow anyone to veer from it after Putin leaves his post in 2008," Mironov said.
Mironov's comments came at a convention creating Just Russia.
At separate simultaneous conventions in Moscow, delegates from the Party of Life and the Party of Pensioners voted to strip their groups of party status, enabling members to apply for membership in Rodina.
Delegates at the conventions then voted to change Rodina's name to Just Russia. Rodina was selected as the core group of the new coalition party because it is the only one of the trio with seats in the State Duma, Rodina leader Alexander Babakov said.
Also on Saturday, Babakov was elected secretary of Just Russia's presidium, and Igor Zotov, leader of the Party of Pensioners, became secretary of its political council.
Despite varying widely in size, the parties were allotted equal shares of seats on the new party's governing panels.
Putin sent congratulations, saying the creation of Just Russia was "proof of a growing creative potential in Russian society."
The new party will hold a convention early next year to adopt a charter, and it will be registered soon after, giving Just Russia enough time to compete in regional legislature elections in March, Mironov said.
Using rhetoric similar to that of the Communist Party, Mironov said Just Russia sought to siphon votes away from the Communists by defending "the interests of working people." Fair hourly wages, pension reform and a more equitable distribution of the wealth derived from natural resources top the party's agenda, he said.
Mironov also decried United Russia's monopoly, as he sees it, of the nation's political, economic and "administrative" resources.
Noting that Rodina and the Party of Life were Kremlin concoctions, Vladimir Pribylovsky, an analyst with the Panorama think tank, said the new party would play a dual role in Russian politics. "It's the party of the president's left foot complementing the right foot of United Russia," he said. "It is also a party of the opposition of the master's maid to the master's butler."
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Trans-gender Politicians (says it all)
UK Guardian
30/10/2006
When does a man not deserve to be treated as a woman? This question will weigh heavily on Italian politics this morning as the speaker of the lower house of the Rome parliament prepares to rule on the sanitary arrangements for its most singular member.
Wladimiro Guadagno, who prefers to go by his former stage name of Vladimir Luxuria, describes himself as "trans-gender" and, while never having had a sex change operation, he dresses and behaves entirely as a woman. Since being elected to parliament in April, the actor-singer-turned-politician has been using the ladies' loos.
But last Friday, the sight of Mr Guadagno adjusting his skirt and preparing to freshen his lipstick proved too much for one of Silvio Berlusconi's supporters. Elisabetta Gardini said afterwards she felt as if she had been the victim of a "sex attack".
Ms Gardini, herself an ex-actress, made a formal complaint to the Chamber of Deputies' house affairs committee. Peacemakers suggested that a third loo might be created for Mr Guadagno and his assistant, who is of a similar sexual orientation. But the spokesman for a Christian Democrat party that supports the centre-left government was adamant that "there are only two genders-male and female".
After a heated session the house affairs committee adroitly dodged the issue by saying that an MP's choice of loo was a personal one. The question has been taken up by the speaker's office who have promised a decision early this week.
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Gaia Gets Even
Sea change: why global warming could leave Britain feeling the cold
Friday October 27, 2006
The Guardian
- No new ice age yet, but Gulf Stream is weakening
- Atlantic current came to halt for 10 days in 2004
Scientists have uncovered more evidence for a dramatic weakening in the vast ocean current that gives Britain its relatively balmy climate by dragging warm water northwards from the tropics. The slowdown, which climate modellers have predicted will follow global warming, has been confirmed by the most detailed study yet of ocean flow in the Atlantic.
Most alarmingly, the data reveal that a part of the current, which is usually 60 times more powerful than the Amazon river, came to a temporary halt during November 2004.
The nightmare scenario of a shutdown in the meridional ocean current which drives the Gulf stream was dramatically portrayed in The Day After Tomorrow. The climate disaster film had Europe and North America plunged into a new ice age practically overnight.
Although no scientist thinks the switch-off could happen that quickly, they do agree that even a weakening of the current over a few decades would have profound consequences.
Warm water brought to Europe's shores raises the temperature by as much as 10C in some places and without it the continent would be much colder and drier.
Researchers are not sure yet what to make of the 10-day hiatus. "We'd never seen anything like that before and we don't understand it. We didn't know it could happen," said Harry Bryden, at the National Oceanography Centre, in Southampton, who presented the findings to a conference in Birmingham on rapid climate change.
Is it the first sign that the current is stuttering to a halt? "I want to know more before I say that," Professor Bryden said.
Lloyd Keigwin, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts, in the US, described the temporary shutdown as "the most abrupt change in the whole [climate] record".
He added: "It only lasted 10 days. But suppose it lasted 30 or 60 days, when do you ring up the prime minister and say let's start stockpiling fuel? How can we rule out a longer one next year?"
Prof Bryden's group stunned climate researchers last year with data suggesting that the flow rate of the Atlantic circulation had dropped by about 6m tonnes of water a second from 1957 to 1998. If the current remained that weak, he predicted, it would lead to a 1C drop in the UK in the next decade. A complete shutdown would lead to a 4C-6C cooling over 20 years.
The study prompted the UK's Natural Environment Research Council to set up an array of 16 submerged stations spread across the Atlantic, from Florida to north Africa, to measure flow rate and other variables at different depths. Data from these stations confirmed the slowdown in 1998 was not a "freak observation"- although the current does seem to have picked up slightly since.
Comment: Did you catch that marvelous example of modern scientific thought? While admitting that one of the largest ocean currents came to a complete halt for 10 days in 2004, an event which they didn't know could happen, they are confident to make categoric statements about what can and cannot happen as regards the rapidity of glacial rebound! Do you see a disconnect there? Then again, we should remember that the job of many scientists is to cover up uncomfortable facts and to make sure that the population are not unduly alarmed about serious risks to their lives.
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Storm blacks out parts of Northeast
AP
October 29, 2006
NEW YORK - Thousands of homes and businesses had no electricity Sunday from Maryland to Maine as a storm system blasted the region with wind gusting to more than 50 mph, knocking over trees and a tall construction crane.
Gusts as high as 70 mph were possible Sunday in parts of northern New York state, the National Weather Service said.
Search parties in New Hampshire were hampered by the wind and rough water as they looked for a man who fell off a cruise ship on Lake Winnipesaukee during the storm late Saturday. One man drowned in New Hampshire when his kayak overturned on a river that was running fast because of the storm's heavy rainfall, state officials said.
In hard-hit Maine, a 165-foot crane with a wrecking ball attached toppled in one of the most populous neighborhoods of Portland, falling on three houses. No injuries were reported.
The wrecking ball narrowly missed a car. "The first thing I saw was the ball coming down really fast about 10 feet from us. It hit the roadway, and the rest of the crane just fell on the buildings in front of us," said Colleen Mowatt, 48, of Gorham, Maine, whose boyfriend hit the brakes in the nick of time.
Utilities in Maine reported 44,000 customers still in the dark at midday Sunday, and said wind gusting to 50 mph was causing new outages even as crews tried to restore service.
New Jersey's Newark Liberty International Airport, one of three major airports for the New York City region, had wind-caused delays of up to 1 1/2 hours, mostly for incoming flights, said spokesman Tony Ciavolella.
New York City's Central Park measured 2.54 inches of rain from the storm Saturday.
Power outages elsewhere across the region still affected more than two dozen communities Sunday across New Hampshire, 9,500 homes and businesses in Massachusetts, 1,500 customers in Rhode Island, 2,900 in Maryland, 2,000 in New Jersey, 4,700 on New York's Long Island and 11,000 in upstate New York, state and utility officials said.
The weather observatory atop New Hampshire's 6,288-foot Mount Washington, famous for severe weather at almost any time of the year, reported sustained wind of 100 mph and a gust to 114 mph. A 1934 gust to 231 mph atop the mountain remains a world record. The peak also got 11 inches of snow during the night for an October total of 39 inches.
The storm produced heavy "lake effect" snowfall in parts of New York state downwind from Lake Ontario, including 9 inches at Old Forge, the weather service said. A winter storm warning was in effect for the area Sunday with as much as 18 inches of snow possible at higher elevations.
The wind, rain and snow were produced by a stronger-than-normal low pressure system that passed through Pennsylvania and New York on its way to southeastern Canada, the weather service said.
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Storm cuts power to thousands
Last Updated: Sunday, October 29, 2006 | 9:58 PM ET
CBC News
A storm that blew in from the United States left about 49,000 Quebecers and 30,000 Ontario residents without power on Sunday.
High winds felled lines in a broad band across central Ontario, while in Quebec, the Laurentians region, north of Montreal, and the Gaspé were particularly hard hit. Outages were reported across the province, including in Montreal and in Quebec City.
About 1,000 homes in Toronto lost power, but service was restored by early Sunday evening, a Toronto Hydro spokeswoman said.
Hydro One, the Ontario power distributor, said the worst-hit areas include Georgian Bay, Bracebridge, Huntsville, and North Bay-Nippissing.
Hydro-Quebec was not able to predict when power will be restored. A spokesman for Hydro One said most customers would be able to throw the switch by Sunday night, but some would have to wait until Monday.
Winds gusting to 100 kilometres an hour knocked lines down.
The same storm system pummelled the Atlantic provinces, causing power outages in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and forced ferry cancellations in Newfoundland.
On Saturday, high winds had knocked out electricity to hundreds of thousands of people in the states of Maine, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland and New York.
Atlantic Canada in path
"A wide swath of a low pressure system is moving to the northeast and will sweep across Atlantic Canada in the next 24 hours," CBC meteorologist Teresa Fisico said on Sunday afternoon.
The Marine Atlantic ferry service warned passengers to call ahead to check for cancellations and other schedule changes, as ferry service has already been affected in Newfoundland around Port aux Basques and Bay L'Argent.
High wind warnings were in effect for the southern and western shores of Newfoundland, with some areas told to expect gusts of 140 km/h. The provincial Transportation Department warned motorists to avoid those areas if they could.
Small outages hit N.B., N.S.
Strong winds left more than 3,000 customers of the New Brunswick Power Corporation without electricity. The outages were mostly in the Kennebecasis Valley near the southern New Brunswick city of Saint John. Crews said it should only take three or four hours to restore service.
There were also a few scattered outages in the south end of Halifax, which were later repaired.
Gusts up to 100 km/h were forecast for most of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
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Typhoon makes landfall in Philippines
By PAUL ALEXANDER
Associated Press
Sun Oct 29, 2006
MANILA, Philippines - Typhoon Cimaron blasted roofs off homes as it made landfall late Sunday in the northern Philippines, with officials saying it may be one of the most powerful storms to ever hit the country. The president called for prayers, and hospitals and troops prepared for the worst.
With winds gusting up to 143 mph, Cimaron - named after a Philippine wild ox - roared across an impoverished mountainous area home to some 1.7 million people.
"This is probably one of the strongest typhoons ever to hit the country," Health Secretary Francisco Duqueso said at a news conference aired on Manila radio stations. "We need to be very careful and we need to instruct our people to make sure that all necessary precautions are being taken."
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo ordered schools and government offices closed in the affected area and suspended bus services in the region.
"Let us pray," she said in a national radio address.
Although the storm did not appear to be drenching the mudslide-prone area as badly as feared, rising rivers made some bridges impassable. Officials said water would be released from two major dams to prevent them from overflowing.
Hours before Cimaron made landfall, Isabela province was placed under the highest of a four-step warning system to advise residents to abandon vulnerable coasts and mountains.
"The wind is really blowing strong. Trees are swaying and I can hear tin roof sheets banging about. Large areas are without light. We're expecting the worst," Armand Araneta, a provincial Office of Civil Defense officer, told The Associated Press by phone from Isabela.
Arroyo, who is visiting China, urged authorities and residents in four northern provinces to brace for the worst from the 16th typhoon to hit the country this year.
"I appeal to you not to venture out," Arroyo said in her radio address.
The typhoon threatened commemorations for All Saints' Day on Wednesday, a public holiday when millions travel to cemeteries to remember their dead, some leaving days in advance for outlying provinces. Officials warned people to cancel trips to threatened areas.
"We know in our culture that we should visit our dead, but this is not an ordinary typhoon, it's a super typhoon," a government official, Graciano Yumul, warned.
Forecasters said the storm was expected to weaken while traveling over land, but still should maintain typhoon strength as it emerges into the South China Sea.
The last time a typhoon this strong struck the Philippines was in December 2004, although in that case, the storm was deflected by a mountain range and casualties were minimal.
Last month, Typhoon Xangsane left 230 people dead and missing as it ripped through Manila and neighboring provinces.
About 20 typhoon and tropical storms lash the country each year.
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Eight killed by storms in Syria and Lebanon
AFP
Sun Oct 29, 2006
DAMASCUS - Six Syrians and two Lebanese have died after torrential downpours hit both countries in the past two days, media and police sources said.
The official Syrian news agency SANA said six people, two of them firemen, had drowned in the northeast in the past two days, while police in Lebanon reported two deaths in the north of the country.
Three victims' bodies were recovered and searches were continuing for the three others, SANA said on Sunday.
Police in Lebanon said a four-year-old boy and a shepherd, 16, died on Saturday.
The boy drowned after being swept away by floodwaters in an irrigation channel, and the shepherd was killed by a bolt of lightning.
Lebanese weather forecasters said they expected further heavy rainfall until Wednesday, and also snowfall above 1,800 metres (5,940 feet).
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Heavy rains kill at least 17 in Somali capital
by Mustafa Haji Abdinur
AFP
Sun Oct 29, 2006
MOGADISHU - Torrential rains have killed at least 17 people in the Somali capital overnight, bringing the death toll to 27 as a result of floods across the shattered African nation in the past week, officials and witnesses said.
They said the victims, mainly children and the elderly, died after their mud-walled houses collapsed under heavy rain that pummelled several Mogadishu districts late Saturday, leaving hundreds homeless and destroying property of unknown value.
Medics said relatives recovered more bodies from the the drenched debris after the overnight downpour.
"The death toll has now reached 17. Some people have been recovered from houses that collapsed last night," said Abdullahi Sheikh Ali, nurse in the capital's Arafat hospital on Sunday.
A pharmacist who treated injured victims said that a woman and one child were killed in the city's northern Suuq-Bacad district while five children were found dead inside a collapsed house in a nearby neighbourhood.
"It was a tragedy," said pharmacist Omar Mohamed Ali. "I treated four family members but the mother and a three-year-old child had died by the time I arrived at the scene."
"The rain was so heavy and their house was old and collapsed," he added.
The bodies of five children were recoved from another house in Wardhigley district south of Mogadishu.
Abdulahi Shirwa Nur, a relative of the dead children, told AFP the walls of the house had caved in.
A neighbour, Amino Abduweli Rage, said: "It was about 8:30 pm (1730 GMT) when I was awoken by people shouting 'help.' I rushed to the scene and found people digging a collapsed part of a house and they recovered bodies of five children."
Three of the casualties were among the elderly living in a displaced people's camp in northern Mogadishu.
"In this camp, three people were drowned. All of them were elder people," said Sheikh Nur Hilowle, the chairman of the camp. Mogadishu is home to at least 250,000 people displaced by the conflict that has raged across the Horn of Africa nation for the past 15 years.
Residents said that at least 61 houses were destroyed by the heavy seven-hour downpour.
In August, thousands of Mogadishu residents were forced to flee to higher ground by flooding which destroyed dozens of makeshift homes.
Last week, heavy rains also killed at least 10 people in the country's southern Gedo region, which was recently hit by a scorching drought that put millions on people on the verge of starvation.
The latest deaths came amid heightened tension between increasingly powerful Somali Islamists and the fragile government over territorial control. Several bouts of fighting has forced thousands to flee into neighbouring Kenya from the southern region.
Humanitarian workers fear that the health of the displaced civilians would be affected since host aid agencies, including the United Nations, have pulled out of the country owing to deteroriating security.
Somalia, a nation of about 10 million, has lacked any disaster response mechanism since the country plunged into bloodletting after the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.
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Swans deliver a climate change warning
By Cahal Milmo
The Independent
28 October 2006
For decades, the arrival of the first V-shaped flights of Bewick's swans in Britain's wetlands after a 2,000-mile journey from Siberia heralded the arrival of winter.
This year, a dramatic decline in numbers of the distinctive yellow-billed swans skidding into their winter feeding grounds could be the harbinger of a more dramatic shift in weather patterns: global warming.
Ornithologists at the main reserves that host the birds, the smallest of Britain's swans, said only a handful had appeared on lakes and water courses. Normally, there would be several hundred.
The latest arrival in a decade of Britain's seasonal influx of 8,000 Bewick's swans throws into sharp relief the debate on the effects of climate change as it enters a crucial week. As the Government's forthcoming Climate Bill is finalised, Sir Nicholas Stern, a former World Bank economist, is expected to warn in a report on Monday that failure to tackle global warming will provoke a recession deeper than the Great Depression.
But far from Westminster, the potential ecological impact of the same phenomenon was being noted in the absence of the high-pitched honking call of Bewick's swans on reservoirs and wetlands from the Ouse to the Severn estuary. The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) said its first three birds had arrived at its Slimbridge reserve in Glouc-estershire, only on Thursday, the latest arrival since 1995.
In Welney, Cambridgeshire, where there are normally 100 Bewick's by the end of October as the vanguard for a winter population of 1,000; a solitary male was this week the sole representative. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said that two of its reserves in East Anglia which host the bulk of the British population - the Ouse Washes and Nene Washes - were also devoid of Bewick's. Experts said that the slow arrival was due to warmer than usual conditions on the continent, in particular the birds' other main wintering grounds in the Netherlands, and an absence of the north-east winds that aid their migration from the Arctic tundra of northern Russia.
The disruption to the swans' migration pattern fits into an emerging pattern of fluctuating numbers of bird species and population movements blamed on climate change. Redwings, another winter visitor to the British Isles, started arriving from Scandinavia only this week. Normally, they come in early September.
Other species which normally leave Europe for the winter, such as the blackcap, are now staying through the year. The WWT and other bird conservation groups said that it would take weeks to assess whether the late arrival of the Bewick's, named after the 18th-century English engraver and ornithologist Thomas Bewick, would affect the overall numbers wintering in Britain.
Since reaching a peak of about 9,000 in 1992, numbers of the swans have fallen by about 5 per cent. In 2004, numbers of wintering ducks, geese, swans and wading birds fell to the lowest level for a decade.
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Dinosaurs 'lived for 300,000 years after Mexican meteor strike'
JOHN VON RADOWITZ
Mon 30 Oct 2006
The Scotsman
DINOSAURS were killed off by a meteor that hit the Earth 300,000 years after the one blamed for their extinction, a scientist has claimed.
Dr Gerta Keller, from Princeton University, New Jersey, insists the Chicxulub impact off the coast of Mexico 65 million years ago could not on its own have wiped out the dinosaurs.
Evidence of the crater left by the giant asteroid or comet has been found under the sea off the coast of Yucatan.
But according to Dr Keller, Chicxulub was only the warm-up for a much larger impact more than a quarter of a million years later. It was this meteor which left a tell-tale layer of extraterrestrial iridium in rocks around the Earth, not the earlier one, she says.
However, no-one has yet found the crater from the "final straw" impact which ended the age of reptiles in one of the largest ever mass extinctions.
"There is some evidence that it may have hit in India," said Dr Keller.
The crater, named Shiva by one expert, is estimated to measure 310 miles in diameter. However, there is little proof of its existence.
Dr Keller said marine microfossils in sediments drilled from the ocean floor showed that Chicxulub hit Earth 300,000 years before the mass extinction it was supposed to have caused.
The small marine animals that produced the microfossils escaped virtually unscathed.
The Chicxulub impact combined with the Deccan-flood basalt eruptions in India - a long period of intense volcanic activity - to nudge species towards the brink, said Dr Keller.
Vast amounts of greenhouse gas were pumped into the atmosphere by the Deccan volcanism over a period of more than a million years. By the time Chicxulub struck, land temperatures were 7-8C warmer than they had been 20,000 earlier.
Weakened by these events, species were finally killed off by the second impact.
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Zionism in Action
Palestinian Children Facing Unbearable Conditions In Israeli Prisons
IMEMC & Agencies
29 October 2006
Palestinian child detainees held by Israel are facing harsh and unbearable conditions. They are subjected to living conditions that lack the basic rights guaranteed by the International Law and the law regarding the rights of children.
Ahmad Amran Al Sinnawi, 17, was freed on July 7, 2006, he was taken prison on March 7, 2005 after the army claimed that he is a member of Fateh movement, and charged him of attacking soldiers.
He said that the soldiers harass the under age detainees, and threaten them of rape during interrogation. The under-age detainees are also threatened of being barred from their visitation rights.
Al Sinnawi added that he was forced to undress and was kept outside, under the rain and cold weather, before he was attacked, severely beaten and chained.
He added that soldiers also tied his legs to a wooden log and repeatedly hit him on his feet and legs, and that he was badly bleeding and bruised.
"After this incident, I was sent to the interrogation room in Maali Adumin military camp, and there the beating and torture increased", Al sinnawi said, "they tortured me without mercy, I was bleeding from my nose, head, and feet, they also threatened that they will arrest by father and brothers".
Al Sinnawi also said that child detainees are held in room with adults imprisoned for criminal offenses, and that they are barred from continuing their education, and the basic rights guaranteed by the international law.
He called on the international Human Rights Organizations to visit the Israeli prisons and interrogation facilities to observe the harsh living condition the detainees face on daily basis.
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Palestinian resident killed by Israeli military fire in the Gaza Strip
IMEMC & Agencies
Sunday, 29 October 2006
Palestinian medical and security sources reported on Sunday that one resident was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers stationed at the Gaza International Airport, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip.
The resident was identified as Mousa Abu Sneina, 30. He suffered several rounds of live ammunition and died instantly.
The army occupied the airport and used it as a military base four months ago after fighters of three factions carried a cross border raid and abducted the Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit on June 25. Two Israeli soldiers and two fighters were killed in the attack.
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Palestinian students the latest victims of the Israeli arrest campaign
Palestine News Network
29 October 2006
The ongoing arrest campaign being carried out by Israeli forces is striking all segments of the Palestinian population. No one has immunity. The latest development in this campaign is the arrest of Palestinian students returning to their universities in neighboring Arab countries after spending the holidays with their families in the West Bank. The students have been detained or arrested on the King Hussein Bridge, which connects the West Bank to Jordan.
Qalqilia resident 20 year old Mahmoud Hassan Naji was recently released after being arrested at King Hussein Bridge while on his way to Jordan, where he is an undergraduate student. Naji, who was held in detention for more than twenty days, told PNN, "I am afraid that I will not be able to visit my family any more this year for fear of being arrested again."
Another victim of Israeli arbitrary arrest is Qalqilia resident Dr. Youssef Shanti. Dr. Shanti was arrested during his return to Qalqilia after graduating from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Jordan. Dr. Shanti's family told PNN, "He was returning to the West Bank to work in the Palesinian hospital system. The lawyer told us that the Israeli investigation is revolving around issues that have nothing to do with security." They continued, "It seems that aim of this arrest campaign is to sabotage the education of Palestinian young people."
While some Palestinian students face fear of arrest, others have been banned from travelling altogether. Many promising students accepted to Jordanian and other Arab universities have had to postpone their enrollment until Israeli authorities allow them to travel.
Palestinian sources report that as many as 720 Palestinian students, many of whom attend universities outside Palestine, are currently being held in Israeli custody.
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Israel plans to expand military offensive in Gaza
30/10/2006
AP
Israel plans to expand its military offensive in the Gaza Strip and will decide in the coming days what kind of operation to carry out, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a parliamentary committee today.
The operation will not entrench Israel in the coastal area, Olmert was quoted as saying by Limor Livnat, a politician who took part in the committee meeting.
Olmert gave no other details to the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, Livnat said.
Israel has been operating in the Gaza Strip since late June, when militants with ties to the ruling Hamas group carried out a cross-border raid on a military outpost in Israel, killing two soldiers and capturing a third.
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Olmert apologizes for shooting incident with German forces
www.chinaview.cn 2006-10-30 07:56:23
JERUSALEM, Oct. 29 (Xinhua) -- Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert Sunday apologized for misunderstandings in a shooting incident last week between Israeli jets and the German naval forces off the shore of Lebanon.
According to a statement issued by the Prime Minister's office, Olmert met with a senior German parliamentary delegation during which he explained the nature of the event and apologized for the misunderstandings.
Olmert also spoke with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday evening, expressing his regret over the recent incident, the statement said.
Last week, German Media reported that two Israeli F-16aircrafts fired two shots when a German helicopter took off from its carrier docking off the Lebanese coast.
An Israel Defense Forces spokeswoman then denied the report. Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz also dismissed the reports as completely untrue.
Germany assumed command of a UN naval force off Lebanon about two weeks ago and has sent eight ships and 1,000 service personnel to join the UN peacekeeping mission in the region. The naval force is charged with preventing weapons smuggling and helping maintain a ceasefire between Israel and the Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas.
The 34-day conflict between Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah ended on Aug. 14 under UN Security Council Resolution 1701 which authorizes an expansion of UN peacekeeping forces to 15,000 troops to help the Lebanese government take control of the southern territories.
Comment: The scenario is so typical of the Israelis. They do something that should be condemned by the international community, and then, when reports come out, they deny it. Only in this case, because the action was against Germany, they have to finally admit their fault and apologise. Of course, the crimes against the Palestinians never get such admittals. Israel just denies, denies, denies.
And they get away with it.
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Fatah agrees to end clashes with Hamas in Gaza
www.chinaview.cn 2006-10-30 10:05:20
GAZA, Oct. 29 (Xinhua) -- Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement announced on Sunday that it will abide by an agreement with the ruling Hamas to end their clashes in Gaza Strip.
Unity is the strip of salvation and the title of struggle...It should be applied on the ground among all the Palestinians," said Fatah movement's pamphlet.
On Friday night, leaders of the two rival sects agreed to halt the ongoing street fighting between their gunmen in Gaza Strip.
Fatah movement said it was satisfied with the truce agreement, which also included the content to protect the public buildings and to beef up police and security forces to restore order.
Violence had mounted between Hamas and once-ruling Fatah in the Gaza Strip since Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections in January 25.
Situation worsened after Hamas decided to form an auxiliary force and deployed it Gaza Strip. More than 20 Palestinians were killed and dozens injured since the force was formed in early April.
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Egypt moves 5,000 troops near Gaza border
By Yusri Mohamed
Reuters
Sat Oct 28, 2006
ISMAILIA, Egypt - Egypt moved 5,000 more security forces near the Gaza Strip border on Saturday after an Israeli report said Israel may bomb tunnels used for smuggling weapons into Palestinian territories, an Egyptian official said.
"They requested reinforcements after the Israeli report and also citing fears of Palestinian militants breaching the border wall between the Gaza Strip and Egypt," the official told Reuters in Cairo.
The 5,000 Egyptians were members of the police's central security force. They joined about 750 border guards already deployed along the area known as the Philadelphi Corridor, fearing the possible operation's impact on civilians living on the Egyptian side of the border.
The Israeli daily newspaper Maariv reported on Friday that precision-guided weapons would be used to penetrate deep underground in the hope of destroying the tunnel network that the Jewish state says riddles the area, which is 14 km (8.6 miles) long and approximately 100 metres (330 feet) wide.
The decision to use "smart" bombs may be a substitute to reoccupying the entire region, the newspaper said. Israel says it has been unable to control weapons smuggling into Gaza since it withdrew its forces from the coastal strip last year.
"We are following the situation with extreme concern and we have not received any warnings from the Israeli side about this operation," one Egyptian official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The Israeli army declined to comment on the report.
An Israeli military source said later on Saturday: "Anything that will take place along the Philadelphi Corridor will be reported to the Egyptian authorities in advance."
DENIAL
A Palestinian security official in Gaza denied reports of further Egyptian forces being deployed along the border line itself.
The official said after consultations with Egyptian counterparts, the number of border police remained at 750.
Israel started to target underground passages in the area after Palestinian militants tunnelled into Israel and captured one of its soldiers in a raid on June 25. The operation also sparked an expanded Israeli military offensive that killed more than 250 Palestinians, about half of them civilians.
Maariv reported the air force was given the green light to drop bombs after a similar campaign successfully destroyed tunnels along the northern Gaza border with Israel.
Egyptian security and border officials said the possible Israeli operation could threaten around 20,000 civilians who live close to the border.
"There are schools, banks, markets and residential buildings close to the border with Gaza, which makes the use of such bombs more dangerous," one official said.
Several Egyptian civilians were killed and many wounded from cross-border bomb shrapnel during Israeli attacks on the Palestinian border town of Rafah before the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
Egyptian police recently seized 195 crates of automatic weapons and ammunition meant to be smuggled across the border and the Israeli army said its troops discovered 15 tunnels along the border during the past week.
Israel estimates that tons of munitions, including advanced shoulder-fire missiles, have been smuggled into Gaza through the tunnels, though they have presented scarce evidence that Gaza militants use such weaponry.
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Egypt confirms exiled Hamas leader to visit Cairo
www.chinaview.cn 2006-10-29 23:32:51
CAIRO, Oct. 29 (Xinhua) -- A senior Egyptian official on Sunday confirmed to Xinhua that the exiled leader of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) Khaled Meshaal would visit Egypt, but without giving an exact date.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Meshaal, now in exile in Syria, would visit Cairo to discuss with Egyptian officials on the issues of prisoners' swap and the situation in the Palestinian territories, as well as setting up a Palestinian national unity government.
He told Xinhua that Egypt would try to persuade Meshaal to help set up a Palestinian national unity government between the ruling Hamas and the Fatah movement led by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
In the meantime, Egypt would invite Hamas and Fatah leaders to Cairo to hold "serious talks" about the establishment of a unity government if Meshaal agreed to help, according to the official.
Meshaal would have visited Cairo several days earlier, said the source, saying that Meshaal may come to Cairo in four or five days if everything goes right.
Egyptian Presidential spokesman Suleiman Awwad told a press conference here that Egypt had invited Meshaal for a visit had done its best to broker negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel on the prisoner swap deal and help major Palestinian political factions to set up a unity government.
The Egyptian official's confirmation came one day after Palestinian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of High Education Nasser El-dein al-Sha'er, also a Hamas member, informed that Meshaal would visit Egypt.
Egypt's official news agency MENA reported, citing well-informed Palestinian sources, that Hamas planned to agree with the formation of a coalition government, which it preferred to last only for a specific period of one year before holding legislative and presidential elections.
Hamas has been at loggerheads with Fatah led by Abbas in the last several months, especially in the last several weeks after talks between Abbas and Hamas leaders over forming a national unity government deadlocked due to Hamas' refusal to recognize Israel.
As for the prisoner swap, the deal for the release of Shalit was almost ready and a new formula of the deal had been sent to Israel lately for study.
So far, Egyptian officials have been actively coordinating a prisoners' swap, which involved Israeli soldier Shalit, who was kidnapped and held hostage by Palestinian militants in Gaza since June, and the Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.
Earlier, Israeli Minister of Infrastructure Benyamin Ben-Eliezer had said during his visit in Cairo on Oct. 19, that an Egypt-brokered swap deal between Israel and the Palestinians was vetoed by Meshaal.
Egypt, the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel, maintains good relations with both Israel and the Palestinians, and has long been playing a mediating role between the Palestinians and Israel.
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Muslims, "Mishaps", and Militarism
France to hold emergency meeting after woman burnt in attack
by Marc Burleigh
AFP
October 29, 2006
PARIS - The French government is to hold an emergency meeting on boosting transport security after an arson attack on a bus left a woman on the verge of death, the prime minister's office said.
The attack by youths in the southern city of Marseille was the worst incident in an upsurge of urban violence during the weekend coinciding with the first anniversary of the riots that shook France last year.
Bus drivers in the city refused to return to work Sunday until security was reinforced, prompting Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy to double the number of riot police in Marseille to more than 3,000.
Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin called a meeting for 10:00 am (0900 GMT) on Monday with Sarkozy and other officials to discuss security on public transport, his office said.
The woman, a student identified as Mama Galledou, was on the bus with some 10 other passengers when it was forcibly boarded by at least three teenagers wearing hoods. They doused the inside of the vehicle with flammable liquid and set it on fire before running away.
Although the driver and other passengers escaped in time, the woman was unable to do so and suffered burns to 70 percent of her body.
French President Jacques Chirac on Sunday expressed his "horror" at the attack.
In a telephone call to the family of the 26-year-old woman, Chirac spoke of his "horror at this despicable act" and vowed that everything would be done to bring the perpetrators to justice, his office said.
Other politicians also expressed their shock, with the opposition Socialist party quick to cast it as evidence of what it said was Sarkozy's failure to improve security in dangerous neighbourhoods.
The Socialists' leading contender for next year's presidential race, Segolene Royal, expressed "horror and consternation", describing the young people's actions as "urban guerilla war", while also blasting Sarkozy for his "failure".
A spokesman at the Marseille hospital told AFP the victim was in a "very worrying" state between life and death.
Elsewhere in France, other vehicles were torched, including another bus in a poor suburb west of Paris, but no other serious casualties were reported.
There were overnight skirmishes with police, who said 46 people were arrested, most of them in the Paris area, and two officers were slightly hurt. The incidents followed earlier violence and bus attacks on Friday.
In the western Paris suburb of Trappes, a gang beat up a bus driver and forced his passengers to get out before they set the vehicle alight, destroying it. Police and youths also clashed in the northeastern city of Reims and in Toulouse in the southwest overnight Saturday.
In the northern city of Lille, 25 cars belonging to the electricity company EDF were torched in their compound, and dozens of other private vehicles were burned in other areas.
The central police service nevertheless said Saturday night was "relatively calm" nationwide.
The violence recalled the riots that raged in mostly poor suburbs around the country last year -- the worst incident of civil strife in France in four decades.
Gangs of youths -- most of them from families of African and Arab origin -- torched more than 10,000 cars and firebombed 300 buildings in around 275 towns.
Social alienation, high unemployment, racial discrimination and tensions over integrating France's sizeable Muslim community were all cited as reasons for the riots.
Fears that the still-tense suburbs could explode again this year prompted the government to draft 4,000 extra police into areas outside Paris on the weekend.
Transport Minister Dominique Perben will also attend Monday's security meeting in Paris, along with top transport officials including heads of the SNCF national rail company, and the Paris regional rail service.
Officials in Marseille emphasised that the bus attack in their city was an isolated act and not indicative of more widespread violence.
The public transport authority in Marseille said services would be back to normal there on Monday.
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Australian imam's remarks on women ignite immigration debate
by Malcolm Burgess
AFP
Sat Oct 28, 2006
SYDNEY - Outrage over remarks about women by Australia's top Muslim cleric has reignited debate over the merits of forcing immigrants to accept their adopted country's values -- and just what those values are.
Prime Minister John Howard described a sermon by Sheik Taj Aldin al-Hilali, in which he compared immodestly-dressed women to "uncovered meat" inviting sexual attack, as "quite out of touch with contemporary values in Australia".
Hilali's remarks have served to strengthen Howard's hand as he pushes for a controversial citizenship test in which immigrants will be required to sign a pledge of allegiance to Australian values.
Howard said last month when he announced plans for the test that these values include democracy, the rule of law and the equality of men and women.
The prime minister denied that the move was aimed particularly at Muslims, but he has also expressed fears that Muslims who do not integrate fully into Australian society could launch terror attacks in the country.
Several leaders among Australia's 300,000 Muslims moved swiftly to distance themselves from Hilali's remarks last week, making it clear they feared a backlash from non-Muslims.
An editorial in Sunday's mass-circulation Sun-Herald newspaper supported their concerns, saying: "Al-Hilali has made too many outrageous, inflammatory statements for this one to be forgiven."
The paper, noting the "tension between the Muslim community and the rest of Australia", joined widespread calls for Hilali, who has the title Mufti of Australia, to be sacked.
Muslim Council of New South Wales chairman Neil Kadomi, who supports moves to depose Hilali, told AFP that Islam did not contradict Australian values.
"Islam stands for racial harmony, working for a living, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and racial equality and gender equality," he said.
"When every politician wants to score a point he picks on the Muslim community," he said. "It's unfair. Why pick on Muslims -- why not Jews, Christians?"
The government's drive for a citizenship test has also been criticised as affecting more than just the Muslim community, threatening a multicultural society forged by centuries of immigration.
"It's undermining and insulting to all Australians to have the charge being led by a prime minister who has never been noted for his acceptance of multiculturalism," said Edna McGill of the Ethnic Council of New South Wales.
For two centuries Australia had benefited from successive waves of immigrants, said McGill, an Australian of Scottish heritage.
"To say suddenly we don't want those people unless they make some formal commitment to conform to what politicians say they should be doing is ridiculous."
Howard's plans simply failed to reflect a society that was much more diverse and inclusive than he portrayed, McGill said, adding that not everybody in Australia had to worship sport.
This touches an issue that has provided endless material for satirists and cartoonists here -- what exactly are "Australian values".
Many have suggested that a love of booze, bikinis and barbecues would have to feature on the list.
A cartoon in The Sydney Morning Herald showed immigration officials timing how long it took prospective settlers to down a six-pack of beers, with worried looking Muslim men and women waiting in line.
The paper also reported that Howard had not ruled out the possibility of his major sporting passion, cricket, being included in the test.
Under the headline "Cricket is NOT an insect. Go Home", the paper quoted Howard as saying that to understand Australia's history it might be necessary to have some knowledge of the arcane game.
Comedian Dave Hughes said in the Sun-Herald magazine a week before the latest row erupted: "All new Australians should have to have respect for girls in bikinis. They should have to cherish them
"Their only god is to be sport. It can be any sport they like as long as they are fanatical about it."
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Jet with 104 aboard crashes in Nigeria
By BASHIR ADIGUN
Associated Press
October 29, 2006
ABUJA, Nigeria - A Nigerian airliner carrying 104 people, including the man regarded as a spiritual leader of Nigeria's Sunni Muslims, crashed in a storm Sunday after taking off from the airport in Abuja. Most of those on board were feared dead, but at least six people survived.
The Sunni leader was among those killed in the third passenger jet crash in Nigeria in less than a year.
Debris from the shattered plane, body parts and personal belongings of passengers were strewn over a wooded area the size of a soccer field where the plane went down, about two miles from the end of the runway at the airport in the capital of the oil-rich West African nation.
Smoke rose from the plane's mangled and smoldering fuselage as rescue workers pulled out burned corpses. About 50 bodies were gathered in a corner of the site. The tail of the plane was hanging from a tree.
Sam Adurogboye, an Aviation Ministry spokesman, said the 23-year-old Boeing 737-2B7 crashed just one minute after takeoff. He said the cause of the crash was unknown.
Witnesses said it was raining around the time the aircraft took off. Rains subsided later, but skies remained overcast.
Adurogboye said the plane was carrying 104 passengers and crew members, and he knew of six survivors. "Obviously the rest are feared dead," he said.
Emergency workers recovered the last of the bodies about six hours after the crash.
The aircraft, owned by the private Nigerian airline Aviation Development Co., was headed to the northwest city of Sokoto, about 500 miles northwest of Abuja, state radio said.
In a radio announcement, the Sokoto state government said the sultan of Sokoto, Muhammadu Maccido, died in the crash. Maccido was the head of the National Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, which determines when Muslim fasts should begin and end and decides policy issues for Nigeria's overwhelmingly Sunni Muslims.
Mustapha Shehu, spokesman for the Sokoto state government, said the sultan's son, Muhammed Maccido, a senator, also was on the flight, along with Abdulrahman Shehu Shagari, son of former Nigerian President Shehu Shagari, who was in office between 1979 and 1983.
About half of Nigeria's 130 million people are Muslims. The country is the most populous in Africa and the continent's leading oil exporter.
At the airport in Abuja, security officials tried to contain a crush of people seeking information about friends or family aboard the plane.
President Olusegun Obasanjo ordered an immediate investigation into the cause of the crash, his spokeswoman Remi Oyo said in a statement.
Oyo said Obasanjo was "deeply and profoundly shocked and saddened ... he offers condolences for all Nigerians, especially family, friends and associates of those who may have been on board."
The Nigerian airline ADC last suffered a crash in November 1996, when one of its jets plunged into a lagoon outside Nigeria's main city, Lagos, killing all 143 aboard.
Last year, two planes flying domestic routes crashed within seven weeks of each other, killing 224 people.
Nigeria's air industry is notoriously unsafe. On Oct. 22, 2005, a Boeing 737-200 plane belonging to Bellview airlines crashed soon after takeoff from the country's main city of Lagos, killing all 117 people aboard. On Dec. 10, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9 plane operated by Sosoliso Airlines crashed while approaching the oil city of Port Harcourt, killing 107 people, most of them schoolchildren going home for Christmas.
Earlier this month, authorities released a report blaming the Sosoliso crash on bad weather and pilot error. The investigation of the Bellview crash is still continuing.
After last year's air crashes, Obasanjo vowed to overhaul Nigeria's airline industry, blaming some of the industry's problems on corruption. Airlines were subjected to checks for air-worthiness and some planes were grounded.
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Sultan among 100 dead in Nigeria air crash
Monday October 30, 2006
The Guardian
Ninety-nine people, including the head of Nigeria's Muslims, died yesterday when a plane crashed shortly after takeoff from the capital, Abuja.
ADC Airlines said 106 people were on board the flight to the northern city of Sokoto when it ploughed into a field about a mile from the runway, and that seven people had survived.
"The plane crash ... led to the death of our beloved Sultan ... among about 100 people," the governor of Sokoto state, Attahiru Bafarawa, told reporters.
He declared six days of mourning for Sultan Ibrahim Muhammadu Maccido, who leads an estimated 70 million Muslims. Sultan Maccido, who was also the most senior traditional ruler of northern Nigeria, was instrumental in quelling religious bloodshed in the central state of Plateau in 2004.
Of the seven survivors who were taken to hospital; six were in stable condition and one was in intensive care, Abuja's National hospital said. State radio said the weather was bad as the plane took off. Only its tail, an engine, and part of a wing were still recognisable at the crash site, which was littered with smouldering fires, boxes and bags.
The office of the president, Olusegun Obasanjo, issued a statement calling for a full investigation into what is the fourth major air crash in Nigeria in just over a year. Reuters
Comment: What's that? A Muslim leader who was instrumental in quelling religious bloodshed?? We can't have that. Someone should take that guy out. Oh yes, someone already did it seems.
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'Lula' easily wins Brazilian presidential vote
Last Updated: Sunday, October 29, 2006 | 6:57 PM ET
CBC News
Brazil's millions of poor turned out Sunday to give leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva a resounding win in his campaign for a second term as president.
Silva, nicknamed Lula, had more than 60 per cent of the votes with most of the polls closed in the runoff vote. He beat centre-right challenger Geraldo Alckmin, a former state governor.
Silva had raised spending on social programs without hiking taxes, cementing the support of the poor. A family allowance program that provides payments to 11 million poor families, provided the children stay in school and are vaccinated, was very popular.
In the campaign, he said he would reduce the gap between rich and poor and focus on education.
Alckmin highlighted election corruption scandals at Silva's Workers Party, but Silva was not implicated personally.
Alckmin did very well in the first round on Oct. 1, when he forced the runoff election Sunday by taking enough votes to prevent Silva from getting the 50 per cent plus one necessary to win.
Silva voted in an industrial area of Sao Paulo where he had lived when he was a union leader. Alckmin voted in a well-off neighbourhood.
Voters also cast ballots for governor in the 10 states where runoff votes were necessary.
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Sunday, October 29th: The Federal Invasion of Oaxaca City
by Jake (trenchesfullofpoets@riseup.net)
Today, thousands of riot police from the Federal Preventative Police (PFP), armed with shields, batons, and automatic weapons, began the invasion of Oaxaca City, the capital of Oaxaca state, Mexico. The federal forces, under the cover of snipers in helicopters, are using light tanks, water cannons, and bulldozers to slowly remove the hundreds of barricades that have blocked the streets of Oaxaca City since the police were run out of town in June by protesters demanding the resignation of the state governor, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz.
According to APPO's website, more than 30,000 Oaxaca residents and APPO members have been in the streets all day, peacefully resisting the invasion, keeping the federal forces surrounded as they march through the city to prevent violent police attacks. The protesters who have vowed to be non-violent, have been carrying white flags and roses, and bringing food to members of the PFP who have been under-nourished with some officers even fainting.
There are, however, countless reports of police brutality coming from the streets. The PFP are entering homes and arresting random citizens, as well as the leaders of the APPO. They are using teargas released from helicopters, water cannons, and water mixed with an unidentified chemical that burns the skin to try and break the people's will. For most of the day, the people of Oaxaca resisted completely peacefully, lying down in the path of the PFP, and continually getting driven back by violence and brutality.
Then at 2:30, (Oaxaca time) at least 1000 people stood up to the advance of 300 PFP officers in 20 buses crawling towards the center zocalo, which protesters have occupied and used as a public meeting space since May. Protesters punctured tires of 2 of the vehicles and smashed the windows with rocks, forcing the outnumbered police to retreat.
Thousands of valiant members of the Popular Assemblies of the People of Oaxaca, an open, public and directly democratic decision-making body that has been in control of the state of Oaxaca, Mexico since June, have succeeded in preventing hundreds of PFP from seizing the center zocalo of Oaxaca's capital, Oaxaca city. As of 4:55, Oaxaca time, according to El Universal, the police, who had invaded and occupied the zocalo with 4 stolen buses, have been driven 4 blocks out of the center. Protesters have popped the buses' tires and are using them to blockade the zocalo.
According to an APPO update, at 5:00, the PFP using helicopters kidnapped a 36-year-old man, and many others including women and children, beating them widely in Love Park, which is 7 blocks from the center of the city. At 5:09 pm, Oaxaca time, the PFP shot a man at point blank. According to the APPO's website, he was one of tens of thousands guarding the bridge to the Technological Institute, which is under police siege.
The people of Oaxaca are focusing their defenses on two strategic locations, the center zocalo and, more importantly, the only remaining APPO occupied radio station, Radio Universidad, both of which are under attack from the PFP.
Federal forces have had Oaxaca City, a strong-hold for the new movement of the Popular Assemblies, completely surrounded since Friday when right-wing paramilitaries in plainclothes attacked unarmed people at a couple of the barricades. The attacks killed 4- NYC Indymedia journalist Brad Will, and Oaxaca residents Emilio Alonso Fabián, Eudocia Olivera Díaz, and Esteban Zurita López-and injured 11. The paramilitaries have been identified as members of Ulises Ruiz Ortiz's PRI party: two members of Santa Lucia's city council, two of that town's police officers and a former justice of the peace from another town.
Vicente Fox, outgoing Mexican President who has long vowed to "restore order" to Oaxaca before he steps down on December 1st, used the PRI's cowardly violence as an excuse to invade Oaxaca and repress the directly-democratic APPO. Even if he succeeds in this repression, however, he will only bolster the resolve of the movement for Popular Assemblies, which is looking to take decision-making power from the hands of politicians and bring it back to the people in the form of public, open, direct democracy (popular assemblies). Right now, a third of the Mexican states have built their own popular assemblies, many of which have mobilized today in support of the people's struggle in Oaxaca.
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For Your Health
Britons 'could be microchipped like dogs in a decade'
Daily Mail.co.uk
October 30, 2006
Human beings may be forced to be 'microchipped' like pet dogs, a shocking official report into the rise of the Big Brother state has warned.
The microchips - which are implanted under the skin - allow the wearer's movements to be tracked and store personal information about them.
They could be used by companies who want to keep tabs on an employee's movements or by Governments who want a foolproof way of identifying their citizens - and storing information about them.
The prospect of 'chip-citizens' - with its terrifying echoes of George Orwell's 'Big Brother' police state in the book 1984 - was raised in an official report for Britain's Information Commissioner Richard Thomas into the spread of surveillance technology.
The report, drawn up by a team of respected academics, claims that Britain is a world-leader in the use of surveillance technology and its citizens the most spied-upon in the free world.
It paints a frightening picture of what Britain might be like in ten years time unless steps are taken to regulate the use of CCTV and other spy technologies.
The reports editors Dr David Murakami Wood, managing editor of the journal Surveillance and Society and Dr Kirstie Ball, an Open University lecturer in Organisation Studies, claim that by 2016 our almost every movement, purchase and communication could be monitored by a complex network of interlinking surveillance technologies.
The most contentious prediction is the spread in the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology.
The RFID chips - which can be detected and read by radio waves - are already used in new UK passports and are also used the Oyster card system to access the London Transport network.
For the past six years European countries have been using RFID chips to identify pet animals.
Already used in America
However, its use in humans has already been trialled in America, where the chips were implanted in 70 mentally-ill elderly people in order to track their movements.
And earlier this year a security company in Ohio chipped two of its employees to allow them to enter a secure area. The glass-encased chips were planted in the recipients' upper right arms and 'read' by a device similar to a credit card reader.
In their Report on the Surveillance Society, the authors now warn: "The call for everyone to be implanted is now being seriously debated."
The authors also highlight the Government's huge enthusiasm for CCTV, pointing out that during the 1990s the Home Office spent 78 per cent of its crime prevention budget - a total of £500 million - on installing the cameras.
There are now 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain and the average Briton is caught on camera an astonishing 300 times every day.
This huge enthusiasm comes despite official Home Office statistics showing that CCTV cameras have 'little effect on crime levels'.
They write: "The surveillance society has come about us without us realising", adding: "Some of it is essential for providing the services we need: health, benefits, education. Some of it is more questionable. Some of it may be unjustified, intrusive and oppressive."
Yesterday Information Commissioner Richard Thomas, whose office is investigating the Post Office, HSBC, NatWest and the Royal Bank of Scotland over claims they dumped sensitive customer details in the street, said: "Many of these schemes are public sector driven, and the individual has no choice over whether or not to take part."
"People are being scrutinised and having their lives tracked, and are not even aware of it."
He has also voiced his concern about the consequences of companies, or Government agencies, building up too much personal information about someone.
He said: "It can stigmatise people. I have worries about technology being used to identify classes of people who present some kind of risk to society. And I think there are real anxieties about that."
Yesterday a spokesman for civil liberties campaigners Liberty said: "We have got nothing about these surveillance technologies in themselves, but it is their potential uses about which there are legitimate fears. Unless their uses are regulated properly, people really could find themselves living in a surveillance society.
"There is a rather scary underlying feeling that people may worry that these microchips are less about being a human being than becoming a barcoded product."
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GlaxoSmithKline talking to UK govt about bird flu vaccine - report
Monday, 30th October 2006 07:01
LONDON (AFX) - Drugs group GlaxoSmithKline PLC is talking to the UK government about a countrywide vaccination against an outbreak of pandemic bird flu, according to the Times
Chief executive Jean-Pierre Garnier is understood to have met Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown this month, the newspaper reported.
Among other issues, they talked about the possibility of stockpiling tens of millions of doses of a new vaccine that Glaxo has developed to combat the H5N1 strain of bird flu.
Glaxo has reached similar deals with Switzerland and Singapore and is close to signing a contract with France, the Times claimed.
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Child Abuse: As American As Apple Pie
By Lucinda Marshall
30 October, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Lost in the homophobic political and media posturing over the Mark Foley incident is the reality that there is a global pandemic of sexual and non-sexual child abuse. The scandalous thing about the Mark Foley incident isn't that he is gay. It isn't about pedophilia either, because the roots of that word come from a Greek word meaning to love children, and there is nothing loving about sexually abusing children. What is truly scandalous is that we live in a society where not only is such behavior condoned in the hallowed halls of Congress, but in every corner of both this country and the entire world.
In 2002, 150 million girls and 73 million boys were sexually assaulted. Two million children were forced into working in prostitution and pornography and over one million children were actually bought and sold, according to the U.N.
The global atrocity of child abuse however, goes far beyond sexual assault.
53,000 children were murdered in 2002, 2893 of those murders were here in the U.S. 220 million children are economically exploited every year, half of them working in dangerous situations such as mines and 5 million children live in slavery. In Bangladesh, contractors providing clothing for Hanes, Wal-Mart and J.C. Penney employ children less than 11 years of age, making them work shifts as long as 20 hours according to the National Labor Committee. The children are paid 6.5 cents an hour.
300,000 children around the world are pressed into military service every year. While there seems to be plenty of money for military recruiting in the U.S. (the Pentagon spends $4 billion dollars a year on it), the Bush Administration provided $9.4 billion dollars less in funding than promised for the educational programs mandated by the same No Child Left Behind Act that allows recruiters access to schools.
More than one million children are imprisoned worldwide, 100,000 of them in the U.S. The U.S. is one of only four countries that sentences children to life without parole, and along with Somalia is one of only two nations in the world that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
16,000 children die of hunger-related causes every day and more than half a million children under the age of 15 died of AIDS in 2005. According to the Census Bureau, there are 8,310,000 children in America without health insurance. The U.S. ranks 28th in the world in infant mortality. There are 9 million children between the ages of 6-19 in this country alone who are
obese. And the Washington Post reports that,
"In 2002, about 6 percent of all boys and girls were taking antidepressants, triple the rate in the period 1994-96. And about 14 percent of boys -- nearly one in seven -- were on stimulant drugs in 2002, double the number in 1994-96."
In the context of the real enormity of child abuse both in this country and in the world as a whole, it is hardly surprising that we allow the moral of the Foley story to be mis-framed as the sexual proclivities of one man, rather than a symptom of a much larger crime. If we truly valued families and the lives of children, these are the issues we would address.
Lucinda Marshall is a feminist artist, writer and activist. She is the Founder of the Feminist Peace Network, www.feministpeacenetwork.org. Her work has been published in numerous publications in the U.S. and abroad including, Counterpunch, Alternet, Dissident Voice, Off Our Backs, The Progressive, Countercurrents, Z Magazine , Common Dreams and Information Clearinghouse. She blogs at WIMN Online.
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Poll Finds Nearly Half of Americans Favor Banning Cigarettes
Drug War Chronicle
Issue #459
10/27/06
A Zogby survey of likely voters has found that 45% would support making cigarettes illegal within the next five to 10 years. Currently, cigarettes are not illegal anywhere in the United States (except some jails and prisons, where they are considered contraband), although moves to restrict smoking and tax tobacco products are winning broad acceptance.
According to the survey, which was commissioned by the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) and conducted in July, banning cigarettes is supported by senior citizens (51%), conservatives (51%), born-again Christians (52%), and adults with less than high-school education (55%). But strikingly -- and a sign of looming trouble for anti-prohibitionists -- the age group that most strongly supports making cigarettes illegal is young people. Among 18-to-29-year-olds, support for cigarette prohibition stood at 57%.
Still, a slim majority (52%) opposes prohibiting cigarettes. Opposition to a ban is strongest among 50-to-64-year-olds, independent voters, liberals, moderates, college graduates, people with some college education, men, and residents of rural areas and the South. Among these subgroups, roughly 60% oppose a ban.
At a Thursday news conference in New York, DPA executive director Ethan Nadelmann warned that criminalizing cigarettes would have disastrous consequences. "If cigarettes were illegal, we would risk the prohibition-style shootouts and violence that characterized the Al Capone era," Nadelmann said. "Millions of our fellow Americans -- our friends and families -- would be considered criminals. We already have too many people with addiction problems serving long prison sentences. The last thing we need is to ruin many more lives with another ineffective prohibition strategy."
Nadelmann was joined by Allen Rosenfield, dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, who called for a public health approach to tobacco. "I am surprised by the numbers of people supportive of making cigarettes illegal and am totally supportive of the statements of the Drug Policy Alliance," he said. "From a public health perspective the focus should be on prevention through expanded public education campaigns, such as the very effective campaigns run by the American Legacy Foundation, taxes on cigarettes, banning sales to teenagers and bans on indoor smoking at restaurants and bars. But making cigarettes illegal would be a huge mistake."
Also addressing the press conference -- via cell phone from the snowbound Denver airport -- was former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper, now a prominent member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). "Outlaw cigarettes? Tobacco smokers run huge health risks, and the costs to taxpayers are substantial. But, as a non-smoker, and a 34-year veteran of law enforcement, I can't imagine a more dangerous, short-sighted law," said Stamper. "We've cut cigarette smoking in half, the result of education, taxation, and regulation -- without putting a single cigarette smoker in jail. We're on the right track, let's not get derailed."
Stamper warned that cigarette prohibition could lead to a repeat of the crime and violence associated with alcohol Prohibition and current drug prohibition. "We would see the creation of a criminal underclass with unprecedented levels of violence and innocent people caught in the crossfire, the same as we are experiencing with the drug war," he said. "We believe cigarette prohibition would escalate tensions in our society to almost unimaginable levels. Cigarette prohibition would lead to an increase in death, disease, crime, and addiction, just as with other prohibited drugs."
As a result of decades-long public education campaigns, cigarette smoking has been declining steadily in the United States and is now concentrated among the poorer, least educated, and minority populations, which, Rosenfield warned, may make it easier to impose a prohibition on smoking. "As with illicit drugs, it would be primarily low-income minority people in jail," he said. "We should forbid companies from marketing tobacco, the outlawing of sales to minors should continue, but the focus should be on education and regulation, not making smoking illegal."
When asked by Drug War Chronicle if trumpeting the fact that there is strong support for cigarette prohibition wasn't playing into the hands of prohibitionists, Nadelmann acknowledged such concerns, but said they were outweighed by the need to take preemptive action to nip any such moves in the bud. "We debated this question inside DPA before we went public," he said. "If we surface this, would it aid those who favor criminalization? We decided we are on a real slippery slope, and if we didn't do this now, in two or three years the numbers could be even higher, so we thought it was important to raise the alarm now, while the majority still oppose prohibiting cigarettes. We need to start making the case that the logical end of a public health campaign is not prohibition."
DPA is preparing to launch an educational campaign for politicians and the public about the unintended consequences that could result from a new prohibition on cigarettes, Nadelmann added. "Public health officials, law enforcement and treatment providers should speak out loudly and clearly against cigarette prohibition," he said. "We can't allow hysteria to overwhelm rational responses to the legitimate concerns about the harms of cigarettes. We can't afford to repeat the same mistakes we have made with other harmful substances."
Well, smokers, smoke 'em if you've got 'em, because if this poll is any indication, you may not have 'em for long -- unless you're willing to resort to the black market.
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Caffeine-stoked energy drinks worry Docs
By CARLA K. JOHNSON
Associated Press
October 29, 2006
CHICAGO - More than 500 new energy drinks launched worldwide this year, and coffee fans are probably too old to understand why.
Energy drinks aren't merely popular with young people. They attract fan mail on their own MySpace pages. They spawn urban legends. They get reviewed by bloggers. And they taste like carbonated cough syrup.
Vying for the dollars of teenagers with promises of weight loss, increased endurance and legal highs, the new products join top-sellers Red Bull, Monster and Rockstar to make up a $3.4 billion-a-year industry that grew by 80 percent last year.
Thirty-one percent of U.S. teenagers say they drink energy drinks, according to Simmons Research. That represents 7.6 million teens, a jump of almost 3 million in three years.
Nutritionists warn that the drinks, laden with caffeine and sugar, can hook kids on an unhealthy jolt-and-crash cycle. The caffeine comes from multiple sources, making it hard to tell how much the drinks contain. Some have B vitamins, which when taken in megadoses can cause rapid heartbeat, and numbness and tingling in the hands and feet.
But the biggest worry is how some teens use the drinks. Some report downing several cans in a row to get a buzz, and a new study found a surprising number of poison-center calls from young people getting sick from too much caffeine.
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"Wow, this drink is some serious stuff. I mean about half the bottle is the warning label, and it is serious, this drink is INSANE. It says that you should not drink it unless you are over 18, which I would say is a good warning." - From a review of an energy drink by Dan Mayer on his Web site, http://www.bandddesigns.com/energy.
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Danger only adds to the appeal, said Bryan Greenberg, a marketing consultant and an assistant professor of marketing at Elizabethtown College.
"Young people need to break away from the bonds of adults and what society thinks is right," he said. They've grown up watching their parents drink Starbucks coffee, and want their own version. Heart palpitations aren't likely to scare them off.
Most brands target male teens and 20-somethings. Industry leader Red Bull, the first energy drink on the market, is now the "big arena band" of the bunch "teetering on the edge of becoming too big and too corporate," Greenberg said.
"Monster is more of a hard rocker, maybe with a little punk thrown in, much more hardcore," he said. "Rockstar is the more mainstream, glam rock band that's more about partying then playing."
(Monster is produced by Corona, Calif.-based Hansen Natural Corp., and Rockstar, distributed by Coca-Cola Co., is made by Las Vegas-based Rockstar Inc.)
Greenberg said the fierce competition among hundreds of new drinks, with Austria-based Red Bull guarding the biggest market share, leads to a "ratcheting up" of taboo names as companies try to break out from the crowd.
Cocaine Energy Drink, which launched in September and now sells in convenience stores and nightclubs in six states, is the latest example, following a twisted logic set by drinks named Pimpjuice and Bawls.
Hannah Kirby of the Las Vegas company behind Cocaine Energy Drink said Greenberg has it right. Kirby and her husband, Redux Beverage founder James Kirby, wanted to call their drink by the ho-hum name Reboot. That name was taken, so they decided to get provocative.
They're getting the attention they craved, along with some canceled orders. Following complaints from parents, convenience store operator 7-Eleven Inc. recently told franchises to pull the drink from its shelves.
"We knew we would get noticed against a thousand other energy drinks," she said. "We knew kids would find it cool, but we also wanted to stress the idea that it's an energy drink, you don't need drugs." Their slogan is "The Legal Alternative."
The Kirbys are parents of an 18-year-old son, Kirby said. The boy grew up hearing he shouldn't drink energy drinks on a school night.
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"Cocaine looks so freaking tight. I NEED THIS STUFF. Next weekend, me and 3 friends are going to take a 6 hour roadtrip to NYC just to get our hands on this stuff." - From a comment on the MySpace page of Cocaine Energy Drink.
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Red Bull founder Dietrich Mateschitz based his product on tonics sold in Asia. He started selling Red Bull in 1987 in Austria, his native country, and today 2.5 billion cans are sold a year in more than 130 nations. The industry leader grabbed more than 37 percent of the U.S. market last year, according to Beverage Digest.
Rumors have swirled around Red Bull for years. Contrary to hearsay, the ingredient taurine (an amino acid important in making bile to aid digestion) is not made from bull urine, and Mateschitz did not learn about Red Bull from rickshaw drivers in Thailand. The urban legends-debunking Web site http://www.snopes.com has a page devoted to exposing the false claim that Red Bull contains a banned substance linked to brain tumors.
No evidence was ever found that sudden deaths in Ireland and Sweden were caused by people drinking Red Bull. But it's true that the Swedish government studied energy drinks and recommended they not be used to quench thirst or replenish liquid when exercising. And they should not be mixed with alcohol.
Too late. Anheuser-Busch and Miller Brewing now produce several "energy beers" - beer containing caffeine. And Red Bull and vodka - mixed up by bartenders who call it a Friday Flattener or a Dirty Pompadour - has been popular for a decade. On Red Bull's MySpace page, the product's 11,000 "friends" include alcohol products, which also have their own MySpace pages.
A Brazilian study found college students didn't feel as drunk as they actually were after drinking vodka and Red Bull. Their perception of their coordination and reaction time didn't match objective tests.
The potential for accidents and alcohol poisoning worries Dr. Sandra Braganza, a pediatrician and nutrition expert at the Children's Hospital at Montefiore in New York. As she prepared to write an article about energy drinks for a pediatrics journal, she was surprised how little published research she could find on them.
"The truth is, we don't know what kind of effects these ingredients can have," Braganza said of taurine, glucuronolactone and guarana. "We have to start doing more studies on this."
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"How much of your favorite energy drink or soda would it take to kill you? Take this quick test and find out." - From a "Death by Caffeine" calculator on the Web site, http://www.energyfiend.com. Fill in your weight and click the button marked "Kill Me."
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Earlier this month, a new study found a surprising number of caffeine overdose reports to a Chicago poison control center. These involved young people taking alertness pills such as NoDoz or energy drinks, sometimes mixed with alcohol or other drugs. During three years of reports to the center, the researchers found 265 cases of caffeine abuse. Twelve percent of those required a trip to the hospital. The average age of the caffeine user was 21.
"Young people are taking caffeine to stay awake, or perhaps to get high, and many of them are ending up in the emergency department," said Dr. Danielle McCarthy of Northwestern University, who conducted the study. "Caffeine is a drug and should be treated with caution, as any drug is."
How much caffeine do energy drinks contain? A University of Florida study found that some products, although served in cans two-thirds the size of a standard can of Coke, contain two to four times the amount of caffeine as that Coke. Energy drinks are unregulated in the United States, but the authors of the University of Florida paper suggest warning labels for them.
And now energy drinks are moving toward bigger cans with some products raising the caffeine content to gain a competitive edge, said John Sicher of Beverage Digest. The biggest, so far, is 24 ounces.
Parents should think twice before sending their children out the door with an energy drink, said Molly Morgan, a dietitian in upstate New York who consults with schools and talks to students, parents and coaches about energy drinks.
"My message to parents is moderation," Morgan said. "That means one can a day or less, and view it as a treat, not part of a daily routine."
Full of sugar and caffeine, energy drinks share the same health problems as soft drinks, she said. But some parents and coaches have bought the message that the drinks can enhance kids' performance in sports and increase concentration in school.
The evidence is weak, involving tiny studies. British research by a scientist who has since received funding from Red Bull found that among 36 volunteers, those who drank the product improved aerobic endurance and recalled numbers better. A British study of 42 people found Red Bull had no effect on memory, but did improve attention and verbal reasoning.
A University of Wisconsin study of 14 students found that two energy drink ingredients, caffeine and taurine, didn't improve short-term memory but led to slower heart rates and higher blood pressure. Since some energy drink ingredients generally speed up heart rates, the researchers could only speculate on the cause.
Carol Ann Rinzler, author of "Nutrition for Dummies," examined the labels of the top three energy drinks.
"The labels simply don't deliver all the facts," she said. "For example, while all list caffeine as an ingredient, and most tell you exactly how much caffeine is in the drink, they also list guarana, a caffeine source, as a separate ingredient but don't tell how much caffeine one gets from the guarana."
Rinzler said energy drinks also deliver a huge hit of sugar.
"Drink more than one and you get lots of sugar - 14 teaspoons in two cans, 21 teaspoons in three," she said. Add in megadoses of some vitamins; unnecessary nutrients (taurine) and more caffeine than plain sodas and you get "a fast up-and-down sugar high and a really rough caffeine buzz," she said. "And drinking two or three cans a day for a period of weeks or months might trigger some side effects from the vitamin megadoses."
New brands are appearing at the rate of almost one per day, making it difficult for Denver blogger Dan Mayer to keep up. As a hobby, Mayer reviews each new energy drink he can find. His is not the only energy drink review site, but it's one of the most popular.
"I've reviewed a little over 200 now. For most of these, the companies contact me. I'll find something new at 7-Eleven once in a while, but that's kind of rare," he said.
When Mayer meets an energy drink he doesn't like, his words can sting: "This is the kind of drink that was created by a bunch of rich fat people that have never had an energy drink in their life and really don't understand why this fad is around, they just know they want to be a part of the profit from it."
A Los Angeles company has asked him to design a new drink, but Mayer hasn't quit his day job yet. Pressed to explain the appeal of energy drinks, the 24-year-old spokesman for the buzzed generation said: "It's Starbucks for kids. With the tons of caffeine they put into these things, it gives you a little legal form of speed essentially."
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KFC to use less harmful oil to cook chickens
www.chinaview.cn 2006-10-30 15:53:03
BEIJING, Oct. 30 (Xinhuanet) -- KFC Corp. will cook its Kentucky fried chicken in oil with less harmful fat, amid concerns that New York City is trying to ban artery-clogging trans fat in the city's eateries.
According to media reports, the fast food chain on Monday will unveil plans to switch to a new soybean oil from a partially hydrogenated oil by April and eliminate the artery-clogging trans fats in its fried chicken sold in the U.S.
Monday's news comes the same day the New York City Board of Health is to host a first public hearing to consider a citywide ban on the sale of restaurant food made with trans fats.
The NYC proposal has eateries scrambling for ways to get the substance out of their food. KFC, after hearing the news, said in a statement Oct. 26 that it plans to make an announcement in New York Monday about a "significant change" at its 5,500 U.S. restaurants.
Trans fats are so common now that Americans eat 4.7 pounds of trans fat per year on average per person, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
In June, a Maryland doctor sued the company, seeking 74,000 U.S. dollars for each customer who wasn't warned about trans fats.
Wendy's International Inc., the third-largest U.S. hamburger chain, became the first national chain to stop cooking with the fats in August. McDonald's Corp. and Walt Disney Co. also have reduced the use of the harmful fats.
Comment: KFC is switching to a "less harmful oil"?
Uh, shouldn't that be "not harmful at all"???
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Bush's Wars
U.S. troop death toll in Iraq for October hits 100
Mon Oct 30, 2006 8:38 AM GMTBy Ibon Villelabeitia
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The U.S. military death toll in Iraq for October climbed to 100 on Monday, a week before U.S. elections in which President George W. Bush's Republicans could lose control of Congress over his policies in Iraq.
A bomb blast killed 28 people and wounded 60 on Monday in a square in the Shi'ite Muslim Sadr City district in Baghdad where labourers were gathering to wait for job offers, Interior Ministry sources said.
The U.S. military said a Marine was killed in combat in western Anbar province on Sunday, bringing the death toll for the month to 100. October was already the deadliest month since January 2005 when 107 U.S. troops were killed. The highest monthly toll was in November 2004 when 137 deaths were recorded.
Since the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein, a total of 2,813 U.S. troops have been killed.
Opinion polls show growing numbers of U.S. voters want to see the 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq starting to come home.
Bush's Republican Party faces possible loss of control of Congress in November 7 elections, with opinion polls showing dismay over his policy on Iraq could be a critical factor in voter intentions.
POOR LABOURERS
Monday's bombing in Baghdad occurred as Shi'ite labourers were lining up for day jobs in a square in Sadr City, a stronghold of radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who heads the powerful Mehdi Army militia.
The blast tore through food stalls and shops. Scattered clothes and twisted metal lay amid debris and pools of blood.
"They were poor labourers bringing a daily living to their family. Let's have Maliki hear that," an angry witness said.
There were conflicting reports as to whether the blast was caused by a bomb hidden inside a garbage can or by a mortar.
Sunni Arab insurgents battling U.S. forces and the Shi'ite- led government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki have in the past struck Sadr City with bombs and mortar shells.
Maliki and his U.S. backers have been struggling to bring stability to Iraq more than three years after the U.S.-led invasion. Sectarian violence kills about 100 people a day and political wrangling is hampering reforms.
Maliki and Bush agreed at the weekend to accelerate efforts to build up Iraqi security forces after days of public tension between the two leaders.
Bush, aiming to calm an increasingly impatient America over the war in Iraq, reminded Maliki last week that his patience was "not unlimited" and his support for the prime minister conditional on him making "tough decisions".
Washington is anxious for Maliki, a Shi'ite Islamist, to crack down on Shi'ite militia death squads blamed for much of the killing that is pushing Iraq towards a sectarian civil war.
After days of public wrangling that raised new questions about Iraq policy before next month's U.S. midterm elections, Maliki and the U.S. ambassador declared common goals on Friday and said Baghdad had "timelines" for political developments.
Building effective Iraqi security forces is a key plank in Bush's plans for an eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops.
Maliki told Reuters on Thursday he could get violence under control in six months if the U.S. military gave his forces more weapons and responsibility.
A top U.S. general said last week it could take 12 or 18 months for Iraqi forces to be ready to take responsibility for the whole country.
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15 Iraq policemen kidnapped, then killed
By SINAN SALAHEDDIN
Associated Press
October 29, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Gunmen killed 15 policemen working as instructors at the local police academy and two translators in the southern city of Basra, police said. The men were forced off a bus on the city's outskirts Sunday afternoon and their bodies were found hours later dumped in several locations, police said.
Basra is about 80 percent Shiite, Iraq's majority sect that makes up the bulk of the police and security forces nationwide, especially in the predominantly Shiite south. Most of the murdered policemen were believed to have been Shiite.
Gunmen also attacked an Iraqi government convoy and wounded a bodyguard of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, but the leader was not in the procession, officials said Sunday as violence rose in Baghdad after a post-Ramadan lull.
A mortar attack elsewhere in the capital killed four Iraqis and wounded four, while other gun assaults left two policemen and a civilian dead and two officers wounded. A kidnapped state television host and his driver also were found slain.
North of Baghdad, gunmen ambushed a convoy of Sunni pilgrims bound for Islam's holy city of Mecca and killed at least one person, with attacks across Iraq causing a total of at least 15 deaths. The bodies of 23 people also were found, most believed to be the victims of sectarian reprisal killings.
The U.S. military said its troops foiled an ambush near Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad, early Sunday, killing 17 suspected insurgents with gunfire and aerial attacks. No U.S. or Iraqi soldiers died in the fighting, the military said in a statement.
Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh did not release the name of al-Maliki's bodyguard or give his condition, but said the prime minister was not in the convoy hit by gunfire in the volatile capital's southeastern al-Rashad neighborhood. He gave no other details on the attack.
Al-Maliki enjoys the support of the main Shiite parties that operate militias blamed for much of the recent violence in the capital, but Sunni insurgents and extremists from al-Qaida in Iraq consider him and his U.S.-backed government a primary target.
Baghdad had enjoyed a respite in recent days from bombings, shootings and torture killings that spiked during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, but bloodshed resumed Saturday. Violence this month has killed 98 U.S. servicemen, making October the fourth deadliest month for American troops since the war began.
Saddam Hussein's chief lawyer said Sunday that he sent a letter to President Bush warning of civil war in Iraq and chaos spreading through the Mideast if the ex-president is sentenced to death in his trial stemming from an anti-Shiite crackdown in the 1980s.
"I warned him against the death penalty and against any other decision that would inflame a civil war in Iraq and send fire throughout the region," Khalil al-Dulaimi said.
"Any foolish American decision will further complicate things and will pose a serious threat to U.S. interests in the region," he said.
Hearings in Saddam's second trial, on charges of genocide against the Kurds, are to resume Monday.
Thousands of people rallied peacefully in Baghdad's sprawling Shiite slum of Sadr City to protest a six-day-old security operation that has closed off routes into the area.
"We have taken to the streets in a peaceful demonstration to demand the lifting the siege clamped on this oppressed city," said Sheikh Hayder al-Saadi, a supporter of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army militia dominates the district.
High winds, meanwhile, swept across much of central Iraq, triggering a huge sandstorm that kept people off the streets in the Euphrates River city of Samawah, about 230 miles southeast of Baghdad.
There were no reports of fresh exchanges between American authorities and al-Maliki, who on four occasions last week challenged U.S. handling of the war.
Al-Maliki, whose Shiite-dominated government is backed by U.S. troops, had been angered by an announcement from the U.S. ambassador Tuesday that the Iraqi leader agreed to a U.S. plan to set timelines for progress in quelling violence in Iraq.
After a hastily arranged video conference with Bush on Saturday, al-Maliki said the U.S. president promised to move swiftly to turn over full control of the Iraqi army to the Baghdad government.
It wasn't clear whether al-Maliki's tough stance was a matter of conviction or a bid to bolster support among his followers by appearing strong and independent. However, Hassan al-Suneid, a close aide, later said the prime minister was intentionally playing on U.S. voter displeasure with the war to strengthen his hand with Washington.
Following Saturday's talks, White House spokesman Tony Snow said al-Maliki is "not America's man in Iraq. The United States is there in a role to assist him. He's the prime minister - he's the leader of the Iraqi people."
Snow denied there was any rift between the United States and Iraq and said Bush had full confidence in al-Maliki.
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Lawyer: More violence if Saddam sentenced to death
www.chinaview.cn 2006-10-30 17:07:39
BEIJING, Oct. 30 (Xinhuanet) -- Saddam Hussein's chief lawyer warned U.S. President George W. Bush that there will be violence in Iraq and the Mideast if the former president is sentenced to death for genocide charges, according to media reports Monday.
Leading Iraqi attorney Khalil al-Dulaimi warned Sunday in a letter to Bush that a verdict by the Iraqi High Tribunal against Saddam and seven co-defendents over the killing of 148 Shiite villagers in the Iraqi village of Dujail could plunge Iraq and the region into violence.
"This decision will set ablaze anew the country and plunge the entire region into the unknown..." said he.
A verdict in Saddam's first trial is expected Nov. 5. The defendants face possible execution if found guilty.
Dulaimi said the verdict due by the court was timed to coincide with US Congressional elections.
"There is an unfair decision that has already been taken by the court to eliminate President Saddam Hussein in time with the U.S. Congressional elections, through which the U.S. administration seeks to safeguard its position," he said.
In the letter, the lawyer also warned Bush: "You will risk your troops who have lost control over Iraq and you will place in danger your interests and the security of the region."
Dulaimi urged Bush to set free Saddam and put an end to the trial which he described again as illegal and a farce, adding that he would break a monthlong boycott and attend proceedings Monday when Saddam's second trial resumes on separate charges of genocide against the Kurds.
In a separate letter by Saddam himself, addressed to the court's presiding judge, the ousted president also called for the verdict against him not to be pronounced on Nov. 5, just two days before the U.S. midterm elections.
Saddam warned that such timing would reinforce Bush's Republican party in the elections. "The propaganda machine will seek to show that Bush has achieved his strategic goal" in Iraq, he was quoted as saying by media reports.
Meanwhile, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, denied speculation that the timing of the verdict was set to coincide with midterm elections in the United States.
"That decision was made by the Iraqi judges," he told CNN on Sunday when asked about the verdict being scheduled two days ahead of the elections.
Saddam's defense team began boycotting the trial Sept. 24 after the dismissal of the chief judge, who had been criticized as being too soft on Saddam.
The lawyers said later they also were protesting the five-judge court's refusal to give them more time to review some 10,000 documents in the trial.
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Blair facing two-front attack on Iraq, Afghanistan policies
AFP
Sun Oct 29, 2006
LONDON - British Prime Minister Tony Blair's military policies are being attacked on two fronts as a leaked memo linked them with terrorism at home and his favorite general called the Afghanistan war "cuckoo".
Leaked cabinet documents published in The Sunday Telegraph apparently acknowledge that Britain's troop deployments in both Iraq and Afghanistan have fueled terrorism in Britain.
Presented to a cabinet committee on security earlier this month and circulated among ministers and security chiefs, the papers say that actions overseas must in future be designed to reduce the threat of terrorism.
Their contents undermine Blair's denials that Britain's actions in Iraq and Afghanistan trigger terrorist attacks against Britain. Four British Muslim suicide bombers killed themselves and 52 London commuters in July last year.
The documents say demand a "significant reduction in the number and intensity of the regional conflicts that fuel terror activity" and set out a list of perfect scenarios in a series of trouble spots 10 years from now.
They call for stability for Iraq and Afghanistan,
Israel to live in "peaceful coexistence" with its Arab neighbors and Iran to be devoid of nuclear weapons.
They also say that there should be "no new failed states, dictatorships or wars" in the Middle East and South Asia.
"If all or most of the above were in place, threats from other sources of Islamic terrorism (eg Indonesia, Philippines, Nigeria) would be manageable or on the way to resolution," they conclude.
"Any remaining deployments of the British armed forces should be seen as contributing to international stability and security."
Blair's office declined to comment on the leaked documents, but said: "We recognise that people have used Iraq as an excuse for terrorist activity but clearly plenty of terrorist activity against the UK and its citizens has pre-dated that.
In an interview in The Observer weekly, meanwhile, General Charles Guthrie, a former chief of the defense staff, described the deployment of soldiers in Afghanistan as "cuckoo."
"Anyone who thought this was going to be a picnic in Afghanistan ....to launch the British army in with the numbers there are, while we're still going in Iraq, is cuckoo," he told The Observer.
Lord Guthrie, who was one of Blair's most trusted commanders before he quit in 2001, also cast doubt on Blair's claim that he would produce all the extra helicopters and other resources the army needed.
Guthrie's comments follow those of General Sir Richard Dannatt, the chief of the General Staff, who called this month for troops to be withdrawn from Iraq "sometime soon" because they were contributing to Britain's security problems.
Dannatt later toned down his remarks.
Meanwhile, The Independent on Sunday reported that the British army is so stretched from having to fight on two fronts that 40 percent of army divisions report they are suffering from "serious or critical" problems.
Manning shortages mean that soldiers are having to go on tours of duty before they are properly rested or trained, according to the weekly, citing a Ministry of Defence briefing document.
Members of parliament who have seen the official memo say the problem is threatening the army's ability to fight insurgents in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The MoD insists that the military is simply "stretched" and still able to fulfil its orders, the weekly said.
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Afghanistan war is 'cuckoo', says Blair's favourite general
UK Guardian
29 October 2006
Tony Blair's most trusted military commander yesterday branded as 'cuckoo' the way Britain's overstretched army was sent into Afghanistan.
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British to evacuate consulate in Basra after mortar attacks
By Thomas Harding in Basra
Last Updated: 8:56am GMT 30/10/2006
The British consulate in Basra will evacuate its heavily defended building in the next 24 hours over concerns for the safety of its staff.
Despite a large British military presence at the headquarters in Basra Palace, a private security assessment has advised the consul general and her staff to leave the building after experiencing regular mortar attacks in the last two months.
The move will be seen as a huge blow to progress in Iraq and has infuriated senior military commanders. They say it sends a message to the insurgents that they are winning the battle in pushing the British out of the southern Iraqi capital, where several British soldiers have died and dozens have been injured.
The evacuation also comes halfway through Operation Sinbad, which has experienced some success in restoring control in Basra. The operation ends early next year but Basra will need massive investment by the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development to build on its successes.
Without the British officials' presence the stability of the city's fragile economy and political infrastructure could unravel, paving the way for Iranian-influenced militias to take control. There are about 200 staff at the impressive consulate building - formerly one of Saddam's palaces - including a team of bodyguards and ex-Gurkha guards. There were 12 full-time staff, some hand-picked by Tony Blair.
A handful have already left by helicopter and the rest are expected to go this week, some of them to Basra air station eight miles outside the city and the rest back to Britain. A skeleton staff will continue to man the building until it is deemed safe enough for the rest to return. A Foreign Office spokesman insisted last night that its officials were "not bailing out".
"This is a temporary measure as a response to increased mortar attacks," the spokesman said. "Core staff will remain at Basra Palace and the consulate will continue to maintain a full range of activities."
The Foreign Office and Dfid operation in southern Iraq has been criticised for the poor handling of economic and political regeneration in the area.
While £14 million has been spent on refurbishing the consulate, including a new portico, hardened roof defences and swimming pool, it has spent just £12.5 million on reconstruction that included repainting a tower in the city.
The palace, which is surrounded by a 30ft blast wall and graced with manicured lawns, is in the same fortified compound as 800 British infantry.
Major Charlie Burbridge, the British military spokesman in Basra, said: "We believe very strongly that the Foreign Office and other agencies are critical to the long term solution in Iraq. We have worked closely in our shared endeavour and will continue to do so."
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Feel Safer Now?
Breakthrough Could Lead To New Warhead Technologies
by Erin Crawley
Arlington VA (SPX) Oct 30, 2006
An Air Force Research Laboratory Munitions Directorate science and engineering team has made a significant breakthrough in its hypersonic computational research, which could lead to new warhead technologies. Funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research here, the team is studying the aerodynamic characteristics of projectiles that deform at hypersonic speeds at sea level conditions, which is a high-speed flight regime not commonly studied.
Dr. Kirk Vanden, technical advisor for the computational mechanics branch, Air Force Research Laboratory Munitions Directorate, is the lead principal investigator on the project.
One of the goals of the research is to advance warhead technology and the team is getting closer to this goal.
Recently, the team determined the level of chemistry modeling needed to model hypersonic flows at sea level conditions.
Because hypersonic vehicles normally fly at very high altitudes the research team had to answer some fundamentally new questions about hypersonic flight at sea-level conditions before proceeding with their broader research goals.
Vanden's team was awarded the grant to study hypersonic and unsteady flow science issues for explosively-formed penetrator warheads. Hypersonic speed is equal to or greater than five times the speed of sound.
Vanden's work mostly concentrates on studying flows at speeds of around Mach 6, using highly advanced computational fluid dynamics codes.
Dr. John D. Schmisseur, an Air Force Office of Scientific Research program manager, oversees office's boundary layers and hypersonics grant portfolio, which includes this research grant to Vanden. Schmisseur believes Vanden's work is truly cutting-edge.
"This is an exciting new application of nontraditional hypersonic computational analysis," Schmisseur said."We are really excited about Kirk applying these new tools to his problem."
"If we do that, we'll be able to hopefully revolutionize some of the analysis tools to help develop new warhead technologies for the warfighter," he noted.
Although Vanden's work in this arena is not ready for the application stage yet, Schmisseur said Vanden has a solid reputation for taking basic research to the next level.
"The key part about Kirk's research is that he's really building the bridge between our basic research programs and actual tools for application that will benefit the warfighter," Schmisseur explained. "He's a great transitioner of our technology and science."
Vanden's research could lead to increasing the capability of existing warheads.
"Without going into specifics, this research already has a use in mind," Vanden said. "We already have things in place with people who are doing the warhead work, so it is not something that we 'hope' to use someday, it is something that the warhead designers in my directorate have already given me problems to work on."
"We are now trying to develop the capability to go look at those problems," he concluded.
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'Star Wars' becomes reality as US unveils laser-equipped 747
UK Independent
30 October 2006
Remember Ronald Reagan's Star Wars programme? The futuristic and frightening plan to build laser guns that could shoot down enemy missiles? Well, it's about to start becoming a reality.
On Friday, the US Missile Defense Agency rolled out an airborne laser aircraft, the latest development in a missile-defence system that was once ridiculed as a Star Wars-style fantasy.
In a ceremony at Boeing's integrated defence systems facility in Wichita, the agency announced it was ready to flight test systems on the ABL aircraft, a modified Boeing 747-400F designed to destroy enemy missiles.
Its director, General Henry "Trey" Obering III,evoked the Jedi Knights vs Evil Empire saga. "I believe we are building the forces of good to beat the forces of evil ... We are giving the American people their first light sabre."
He added: "This is not the prettiest aircraft I have seen. It is not supposed to be pretty. It is supposed to be mean."
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Report: Israel used uranium-based warheads in Lebanon war
Meron Rapoport, Haaretz Correspondent and Haaretz Service
October 28, 2006
Studies carried out by a European Union-affiliated organization suggest the Israel Air Force used experimental missiles employing uranium against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, the British newspaper The Independent reported on its website on Saturday.
According to the British Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, Doctor Chris Busby, tests carried out on soil taken from craters where Israeli missiles impacted showed 'elevated radiation signatures.'
Busby's report concluded that such results could be caused either by bunker-busting conventional bombs using uranium or a new kind of weapon bearing a "novel small experimental nuclear fission device or other experimental weapon (eg, a thermobaric weapon) based on the high temperature of a uranium oxidation flash."
An Italian television report aired last week made a similar claim, raising the possibility that Israel had used a weapon in the Gaza Strip in recent months, causing especially serious physical injuries, such as amputated limbs and severe burns.
The report claimed the weapon is similar to one developed by the U.S. military, known as DIME, which causes a powerful and lethal blast, but only within a relatively small radius.
The Italian report is based on the eyewitness accounts of medical doctors in the Strip, as well as tests carried out in an Italian laboratory. The investigative team is the same one that exposed, several months ago, the use by U.S. forces in Iraq of phosphorous bombs, against Iraqi rebels in Faluja.
Israel Air Force Maj.-Gen (res.) Yitzhak Ben-Israel, formerly head of the IDF's weapons-development program, told the Italian reporters that "one of the ideas [behind the weapon] is to allow those targeted to be hit without causing damage to bystanders or other persons."
The investigation, by Rai24news, follows reports by Gaza-based doctors of inexplicably serious injuries. The doctors reported an exceptionally large number of wounded who lost legs, of completely burned bodies and injuries unaccompanied by metal shrapnel. Some of the doctors also claimed that they removed particles from wounds that could not be seen in an x-ray machine.
According to those who testified, the wounded were hit by munitions launched from drones, most of them in July.
Dr. Habas al-Wahid, head of the emergency room at the Shuhada al-Aqsa hospital, in Deir el-Balah, told the reporters that the legs of the injured were sliced from their bodies "as if a saw was used to cut through the bone." There were signs of heat and burns near the point of the amputation, but no signs that the dismemberment was caused by metal fragments.
Dr. Juma Saka, of Shifa Hospital, in Gaza City, said the doctors found small entry wounds on the bodies of the wounded and the dead. According to Saka, a powder was found on the victims' bodies and in their internal organs.
"The powder was like microscopic shrapnel, and these are what likely caused the injuries," Saka said.
The Italian investigative team raised the possibility that the IDF is making use of a weapon similar in character to DIME - Dense Inert Metal Explosive - developed for the U.S. military. According to the official website of a U.S. air force laboratory, it is a "focused lethality" weapon, which aims to accurately destroy the target while causing minimum damage to the surrounding.
According to the site, the projectile comprises a carbon-fiber casing filled with tungsten powder and explosives. In the explosion, tungsten particles - a metal capable of conducting very high temperatures - spread over a radius of four meters and cause death.
According to the U.S.-based website Defense-Tech, "the result is an incredibly destructive blast in a small area" and "the destructive power of the mixture causes far more damage than pure explosive." It adds that "the impact of the micro-shrapnel seems to cause a similar but more powerful effect than a shockwave."
The weapon is supposed to still be in the testing phase and has not been used on the battlefield.
The Italian reporters sent samples of the particles found in wounds of injured in the Gaza Strip to a laboratory at the University of Parma. Dr. Carmela Vaccaio said that in analyzing the samples, she found "a very high concentration of carbon and the presence of unusual materials," such as copper, aluminum and tungsten. Dr. Vaccaio says these findings "could be in line with the hypothesis" that the weapon in question is DIME.
On the matter of DIME, Ben-Israel told the Italian reporters that "this is a technology that allows the striking of very small targets."
The report says that the weapon is not banned by international law, especially since it has not been officially tested.
It is believed that the weapon is highly carcinogenic and harmful to the environment.
The non-governmental organization Physicians for Human Rights has written to Defense Minister Amir Peretz requesting explanations for the aforementioned injuries to Palestinians. Amos Gilad, a senior adviser to the minister, is supposed to meet with the group on the matter in the near future.
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Mystery Of Israel's Secret Uranium Bomb
By Robert Fisk
30 October, 2006
The Independent
Did Israel use a secret new uranium-based weapon in southern Lebanon this summer in the 34-day assault that cost more than 1,300 Lebanese lives, most of them civilians?
We know that the Israelis used American "bunker-buster" bombs on Hizbollah's Beirut headquarters. We know that they drenched southern Lebanon with cluster bombs in the last 72 hours of the war, leaving tens of thousands of bomblets which are still killing Lebanese civilians every week. And we now know - after it first categorically denied using such munitions - that the Israeli army also used phosphorous bombs, weapons which are supposed to be restricted under the third protocol of the Geneva Conventions, which neither Israel nor the United States have signed.
But scientific evidence gathered from at least two bomb craters in Khiam and At-Tiri, the scene of fierce fighting between Hizbollah guerrillas and Israeli troops last July and August, suggests that uranium-based munitions may now also be included in Israel's weapons inventory - and were used against targets in Lebanon. According to Dr Chris Busby, the British Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, two soil samples thrown up by Israeli heavy or guided bombs showed "elevated radiation signatures". Both have been forwarded for further examination to the Harwell laboratory in Oxfordshire for mass spectrometry - used by the Ministry of Defence - which has confirmed the concentration of uranium isotopes in the samples.
Dr Busby's initial report states that there are two possible reasons for the contamination. "The first is that the weapon was some novel small experimental nuclear fission device or other experimental weapon (eg, a thermobaric weapon) based on the high temperature of a uranium oxidation flash ... The second is that the weapon was a bunker-busting conventional uranium penetrator weapon employing enriched uranium rather than depleted uranium." A photograph of the explosion of the first bomb shows large clouds of black smoke that might result from burning uranium.
Enriched uranium is produced from natural uranium ore and is used as fuel for nuclear reactors. A waste productof the enrichment process is depleted uranium, it is an extremely hard metal used in anti-tank missiles for penetrating armour. Depleted uranium is less radioactive than natural uranium, which is less radioactive than enriched uranium.
Israel has a poor reputation for telling the truth about its use of weapons in Lebanon. In 1982, it denied using phosphorous munitions on civilian areas - until journalists discovered dying and dead civilians whose wounds caught fire when exposed to air.
I saw two dead babies who, when taken from a mortuary drawer in West Beirut during the Israeli siege of the city, suddenly burst back into flames. Israel officially denied using phosphorous again in Lebanon during the summer - except for "marking" targets - even after civilians were photographed in Lebanese hospitals with burn wounds consistent with phosphorous munitions.
Then on Sunday, Israel suddenly admitted that it had not been telling the truth. Jacob Edery, the Israeli minister in charge of government-parliament relations, confirmed that phosphorous shells were used in direct attacks against Hizbollah, adding that "according to international law, the use of phosphorous munitions is authorised and the (Israeli) army keeps to the rules of international norms".
Asked by The Independent if the Israeli army had been using uranium-based munitions in Lebanon this summer, Mark Regev, the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, said: "Israel does not use any weaponry which is not authorised by international law or international conventions." This, however, begs more questions than it answers. Much international law does not cover modern uranium weapons because they were not invented when humanitarian rules such as the Geneva Conventions were drawn up and because Western governments still refuse to believe that their use can cause long-term damage to the health of thousands of civilians living in the area of the explosions.
American and British forces used hundreds of tons of depleted uranium (DU) shells in Iraq in 1991 - their hardened penetrator warheads manufactured from the waste products of the nuclear industry - and five years later, a plague of cancers emerged across the south of Iraq.
Initial US military assessments warned of grave consequences for public health if such weapons were used against armoured vehicles. But the US administration and the British government later went out of their way to belittle these claims. Yet the cancers continued to spread amid reports that civilians in Bosnia - where DU was also used by Nato aircraft - were suffering new forms of cancer. DU shells were again used in the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq but it is too early to register any health effects.
"When a uranium penetrator hits a hard target, the particles of the explosion are very long-lived in the environment," Dr Busby said yesterday. "They spread over long distances. They can be inhaled into the lungs. The military really seem to believe that this stuff is not as dangerous as it is." Yet why would Israel use such a weapon when its targets - in the case of Khiam, for example - were only two miles from the Israeli border? The dust ignited by DU munitions can be blown across international borders, just as the chlorine gas used in attacks by both sides in the First World War often blew back on its perpetrators.
Chris Bellamy, the professor of military science and doctrine at Cranfield University, who has reviewed the Busby report, said: "At worst it's some sort of experimental weapon with an enriched uranium component the purpose of which we don't yet know. At best - if you can say that - it shows a remarkably cavalier attitude to the use of nuclear waste products."
The soil sample from Khiam - site of a notorious torture prison when Israel occupied southern Lebanon between 1978 and 2000, and a frontline Hizbollah stronghold in the summer war - was a piece of impacted red earth from an explosion; the isotope ratio was 108, indicative of the presence of enriched uranium. "The health effects on local civilian populations following the use of large uranium penetrators and the large amounts of respirable uranium oxide particles in the atmosphere," the Busby report says, "are likely to be significant ... we recommend that the area is examined for further traces of these weapons with a view to clean up."
This summer's Lebanon war began after Hizbollah guerrillas crossed the Lebanese frontier into Israel, captured two Israeli soldiers and killed three others, prompting Israel to unleash a massive bombardment of Lebanon's villages, cities, bridges and civilian infrastructure. Human rights groups have said that Israel committed war crimes when it attacked civilians, but that Hizbollah was also guilty of such crimes because it fired missiles into Israel which were also filled with ball-bearings, turning their rockets into primitive one-time-only cluster bombs.
Many Lebanese, however, long ago concluded that the latest Lebanon war was a weapons testing ground for the Americans and Iranians, who respectively supply Israel and Hizbollah with munitions. Just as Israel used hitherto-unproven US missiles in its attacks, so the Iranians were able to test-fire a rocket which hit an Israeli corvette off the Lebanese coast, killing four Israeli sailors and almost sinking the vessel after it suffered a 15-hour on-board fire.
What the weapons manufacturers make of the latest scientific findings of potential uranium weapons use in southern Lebanon is not yet known. Nor is their effect on civilians.
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Israelis put nuclear bunkers in gardens
Uzi Mahnaimi
The Sunday Times
October 29, 2006
AMID mounting fears that Iran is planning to obliterate their country, wealthy Israelis are shelling out on underground nuclear shelters in the gardens of their luxury homes.
The shelters, which cost at least £60,000 for a bargain-basement version, are built to withstand radioactive fallout, have fortified walls and doors and generate their own electricity and decontaminated air. Defence experts estimate that hundreds of such bunkers, many fitted with all modern conveniences such as bedrooms, kitchens and bathrooms, have already been built in private homes across the country and demand is soaring.
Zaki Rakib, a wealthy businessman, built a shelter for himself and his family under his large villa overlooking the Mediterranean in Herzliya, an exclusive garden suburb north of Tel Aviv.
"The shelter looks like a regular flat," he said. "It is 2,000 square feet, with a living room, two bedrooms, kitchen, self-powered electricity."
Rakib's post-nuclear pad, which can accommodate more than 25 people for two weeks, cost about £250,000. "The difference between an atomic shelter and a regular one is in the technical components: the thickness of the walls and a special system to block radioactive fallout," he said.
Leading the stampede to the nuclear bunker is Shari Arison, the country's wealthiest woman, estimated to be worth about £2.7 billion. The Israeli media have reported that she has already made preparations for Armageddon by building two sophisticated underground structures. One is at her home in Tel Aviv, the other in the garden of her holiday villa in Bnei Zion village.
Firms specialising in the manufacture of such shelters are booming. Ahim Torati is a company producing parts for atomic shelters. "We supply components for decontaminated air, fortified doors and walls," said Menahem Torati, its owner.
"If in a regular shelter the door should withstand a five-ton blast, the door of an atomic shelter should absorb 250-270 tons."
Seeking to allay public fears, the government insists that the population has little to fear. "We are aware of all these panicky people building atomic shelters. They're wasting their money," said a security source.
"Israel will not allow Iran to build an atomic bomb, and even if it did, the Iranians know very well that we'll bomb them back to the Stone Age before they've launched a single missile."
However, the government is quietly updating its preparations for a possible nuclear strike. Ephraim Sneh, the deputy defence minister, confirmed that a £300m nuclear shelter is being constructed in the Jerusalem hills for the Israeli war cabinet. "This will be a command and control centre that will be able to run the state of Israel during a war, even after a nuclear strike," he said.
Israelis are used to coping with the threat of war, but until recently the civilian population has been largely unaffected by conflicts beyond the country's borders. The 34-day invasion of Lebanon last summer, however, brought war closer to home. Up to 250 Hezbollah missiles rained down on Israel every day. Millions of terrified Israelis spent the hottest weeks of the summer in shelters.
Iran's increasingly bellicose rhetoric is fuelling fears that the next war could bring even more devastation. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has stated that Israel should be "wiped off the map". As well as developing nuclear technology, Tehran boasts long-range ballistic missiles capable of hitting any target in Israel.
Many Israelis no longer trust their government to protect them. One man building a £60,000 nuclear shelter in his Tel Aviv garden said: "After the Lebanon war, I concluded that I have to protect my family, as I'm not sure the state will be able to do it."
While the well-off are calling in the builders, nearly one third of the country's population have no protection even against conventional weapons. "If Tel Aviv were attacked today, you can expect thousands of casualties," predicted one security expert. AMID mounting fears that Iran is planning to obliterate their country, wealthy Israelis are shelling out on underground nuclear shelters in the gardens of their luxury homes.
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US Weapons to Iraqis Can't Be Accounted For
Monday October 30, 2006
Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Thousands of weapons the United States has provided to Iraqi security forces cannot be accounted for and spare parts and repair manuals are unavailable for many others, a new report to Congress says.
The report, prepared at the request of the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. John Warner, R-Va., also found that major challenges remain that put at risk the Defense Department's goal of strengthening Iraqi security forces by transferring all logistics operations to the defense ministry by the end of 2007.
A spokesman for Warner said the senator read the report over the weekend in preparation for a meeting Tuesday with Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.
Warner, who requested the report in May, "believes it is essential that Congress and the American people continue to be kept informed by the inspector general on the equipping and logistical capabilities of the Iraqi army and security forces, since these represent an important component of overall readiness,'' said Warner spokesman John Ullyot.
The inspector general's office released its report Sunday in a series of three audits finding that:
-Nearly one of every 25 weapons the military bought for Iraqi security forces is missing. Many others cannot be repaired because parts or technical manuals are lacking.
-"Significant challenges remain that put at risk'' the U.S. military's goal of strengthening Iraqi security forces by transferring all logistics operations to the defense ministry by the end of 2007.
-"The unstable security environment in Iraq touches every aspect'' of the Provincial Reconstruction Team program, in which U.S. government experts help Iraqis develop regional governmental institutions.
The Pentagon cannot account for 14,030 weapons - almost 4 percent of the semiautomatic pistols, assault rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and other weapons it began supplying to Iraq since the end of 2003.
The missing weapons will not be tracked easily: The Defense Department registered the serial numbers of only about 10,000 of the 370,251 weapons it provided - less than 3 percent.
Missing from the Defense Department's inventory books were 13,180 semiautomatic pistols, 751 assault rifles and 99 machine guns.
The audit on logistics capabilities said there is a "significant risk'' that the Iraqi interior ministry "will not be capable of assuming and sustaining logistics support for the Iraqi local and national police forces in the near term.'' That support includes equipment maintenance, transportation of people and gear and health resources for soldiers and police.
The audit on Provincial Reconstruction Teams said that, because of security issues, they "have varying degrees of ability to carry out their missions.'' Auditors reviewed nine teams and four satellite offices and found "4 were generally able, 4 were somewhat able, 3 were less able and 2 were generally unable'' to accomplish their goals.
Comment: It's not that these weapons cannot be accounted for, but rather that US authorities are reluctant to account for them due to the negative fallout that would result from the general public knowing where they are and for what, exactly, they are being used.
To put it simply:
As recently reported, approximately 655,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the US invasion of Iraq. Of those, somewhere in the region of 50%, were killed by US forces and 50% killed by "unknown forces" or 327,500 each. So we have 14,030 unaccounted for guns, and 327,500 dad Iraqi civilians whose deaths are also unaccounted for. Put the two together and we get 23 dead Iraqis per 'unaccounted for' gun.
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Target: Iran
'Praise Bush and the Iraq war'
Scotsman
29/10/20006
'Praise Bush and the Iraq war'
CHRIS STEPHEN IN SAN ANTONIO
THE lights were down in the giant amphitheatre of Cornerstone Church, Texas, as last weekend's Feast of the Tabernacles got into full swing. An orchestra, backed by a several hundred-strong choir, is belting out biblical hymns. Centre stage, two camouflaged figures embrace, one dressed as an Israeli soldier complete with machine gun, the other his US army counterpart.
George Bush may be facing defeat in the upcoming mid-term elections from an electorate alarmed by Middle East wars and ballooning federal spending, but one corner of the country remains firmly behind him - the Christian right.
Fully one quarter of Americans describe themselves as Evangelical Christians, and their support for the president remains rock solid.
Cornerstone Church, a vast squat white temple in San Antonio, is rapidly becoming the movement's epicentre, thanks to the charismatic founder, Pastor John Hagee, the rising star of America's TV evangelists. For these evangelists, the war in Iraq is not a disaster, but the beginning of the fulfilment of biblical prophecies that culminate, possibly very soon, in a mighty struggle between good and evil at Armageddon.
This belief lies at the core of the teachings of the bespectacled pastor, who argues that Christians and Jews must make common cause against forces of darkness he identifies as Arabs, Russians and even a future president of the EU. Christians who fail in their duty will be "left behind" when the obedient are summoned to heaven.
"Listen up, president of Iran," booms the pastor. "We are going to be your worst nightmare, Mr Ahmadinejad. The pharaoh threatened Israel, he ended up fish-food in the sea. When you say Israel is going to disappear in a sudden storm you may be predicting the way you disappear."
The 5,000-seater church, patriotically decked out in red carpet, white walls and blue seats, is packed and the crowd are immediately on their feet, arms raised, shouting hallelujah.
While mainstream churches across the land struggle to attract congregations, Cornerstone and hundreds more so-called Mega Churches are packed week after week, forming the last remaining bastion of support for the troubled Bush presidency.
Hagee set up his church 28 years ago and sits through services on a throne, in suit and tie, facing his son, Mathew, who he has appointed as his deputy.
"When you get the sin out of your life you get happy," he tells the congregation. "What we are doing is righteous."
By taking the bible as literal truth, these evangelists argue that Israel can do no wrong because their enemies are, by definition, forces of darkness who can be disposed of.
His stance has brought the pastor powerful friends, among them disgraced former House of Congress majority leader Tom Delay and ex-CIA chief James Woolsey.
Hagee is rapidly taking the place as top TV preacher from fellow Evangelist Pat Robertson, who has lost support after angering Bush by using one of his sermons to call for the assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. "Pastor Hagee is experienced, charismatic and efficient, and his message is simple," says writer Victoria Clark, who is researching a history of Christian Zionists. "Hagee preaches that if Americans want God to bless America then Americans had better bless the Jews."
Yet despite the fervour, clouds are appearing on the horizon. Bush, the country's first Born Again president, is in deep trouble. In a fortnight's time, barring a miracle God seems disinclined to grant, the Republicans will lose one, possibly both, houses of Congress, blunting their foreign policy and the cause of the Christian Right.
Meanwhile, mainstream churches worry about the absence in the pastor's fiery sermons of more traditional Christian fare such as forgiveness. And liberal American Jews accuse the pastor of ignoring divisions raging within Israel about how to treat its Arab neighbours.
But none of this can shake the devotion of Pastor Hagee's flock, whose hefty donations have given him a reported personal income in excess of a million dollars a year.
One devotee, tourist office supervisor Liz Andrews, grew tearful as she said: "I hope America stands by them [Israel] because I think that if Americans don't, something bad will happen to us. I don't want to be one of the ones left behind. I don't want to endure what's going to happen."
Another follower, teacher Patrick Hewitt, said the pastor will shortly post instructions, on his website on how parishioners should cast their ballots for the mid-term elections. "I'm going to vote the way he tells me," he said.
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9/11 only "make-believe," Iranian government official says
German Press Agency
October 27, 2006
Tehran- An Iranian government official on Friday accused the US of orchestrating the attacks of September 11, 2001, saying New York's World Trade Center towers were actually blown up by a bomb rather than planes hijacked by terrorists. "What we watched on the TVs regarding the slamming of two planes into the New York Twin Towers, was in fact a make-believe scene," Deputy Culture Minister Mohammad-Hadi Homayoun was quoted by state news agency IRNA as saying, in an address to the Iran-Russia Dialogue among Civilizations Conference in Moscow.
"The sky-scrapers were destroyed through bomb explosions and afterwards the massive US media propaganda and the crusade issue began," the minister said, making reference to the controversial remarks by US President George W Bush outlining a "crusade" against terrorism following the September 11 attacks
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Flashback: Iran says U.S., Israel ordered September 11 attacks
Iran Focus
September 6, 2006
The Supreme Commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps accused the Bush Administration and the Israeli security service Mossad of ordering the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, DC.
"The events of September 11 were ordered by U.S. [officials] and Mossad so that they could carry out their strategy of pre-emption and warmongering and unipolarisation in order to dominate the Middle East", Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi told military commanders on Tuesday. His comments were reported by the state-run news agency ISNA.
General Safavi said that Iran was the leading force of the "Islamic world". "The geographic heart of the Islamic world is in Mecca and Medina. But, the political heart of the Islamic world is in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] is the flag-bearer of the front of Islamic awakening and the fronts of the awakening of third world nations", he said.
He said that Washington had been defeated in its strategy of "attacking Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon" and creating a new order in the Middle East.
"The U.S.'s neo-conservative strategy was to dominate the vast energy resources of the Persian Gulf in order to be able to control Europe, China, and India and drive the world to a unipolar state. Therefore, it planned to change undesirable regimes such as those of Iraq, Sudan, Syria, and Afghanistan".
The IRGC general said that the Lebanese militia Hezbollah had defeated Israel during their recent war. "After many years, the political and military image and hollow might of the Zionist regime was broken and the real power of Hezbollah fighters was proven. Thus, Hezbollah defeated Israel".
He described Washington and Tel Aviv as two "inter-continental threats" against Tehran. "The U.S. must be livid at Iran because of its disgraceful defeats in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon. Regarding [Iran's] nuclear dossier, it might try to create circumstances so that slowly but surely economic and political pressure is applied against Iran by the [United Nations] Security Council".
He accused Washington of plotting a "cultural" attack on Tehran by setting up new radio and television stations broadcasting into Iran, supporting dissident groups, and stepping up intelligence operations. "Therefore, the armed forces must be completely prepared in order to combat any forms of foreign and domestic threats", he said.
He charged that Britain and the U.S. were stirring ethnic and religious divisions in Iran, in particular in the provinces close to the country's frontiers.
The IRGC's primary task is to export the Islamic revolution to Jerusalem via Baghdad.
Hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is one of many officials who stem from the IRGC.
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A stalemate in Iran may trigger sanctions: Chirac
WUHAN, China, Oct 27, 2006 (AFP)
French President Jacques Chirac said Friday that if a stalemate develops in the dialogue with Iran over its nuclear program then sanctions should be imposed.
"I hope that we can find a solution (to the Iranian nuclear issue) through dialogue," Chirac said in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.
"If it goes on and appears that the dialogue will not end, then it is probably necessary to find calibrated, adaptable, temporary and reversible sanctions that will be imposed to show Iran that the entire international community does not understand their position and is hostile to it."
Chirac's statements followed reports from Iran that scientists had begun feeding gas into a second cascade of centrifuges to enrich uranium, defying UN threats of sanctions over Iran's nuclear program.
"The second cascade was set up two weeks ago and this week gas was injected in them," an unidentified official told the ISNA news agency in Tehran. "We have the product of the second cascade."
Iran on Wednesday confirmed it had installed new equipment to step up uranium enrichment and said it would imminently start pumping gas into the equipment.
The announcement came as six major powers huddled behind closed doors in New York to review a draft UN Security Council resolution mandating sanctions against Iran over its refusal to halt its sensitive nuclear fuel work, which the West fears could be diverted to make a nuclear bomb.
Chirac, who was in China on the third day of a four-day visit, said that he had "never been a great believer in sanctions" and that he "has never been convinced of their effectiveness."
But "in this particular case, it is obvious and the entire international community recognizes this, notably China, but also Russia, the Europeans and the United States that the ambitions clearly signalled by Iran are not compatible with the idea we are making concerning non-proliferation."
A top Iranian cleric, who preached Tehran's Friday sermon defied the UN over probable sanctions, calling again for a return to negotiations.
"If you want to go ahead with the sanctions, go ahead," said Ahmad Khatami in a challenging tone.
"You have imposed sanctions on us for the past 27 years. What did you gain? It was with these sanctions that Iranian youth reached nuclear energy and self sufficiency."
In New York, the talks at Britain's UN mission brought together ambassadors from the UN Security Council's five veto-wielding members - Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States - as well as from Germany.
The focus was on the resolution crafted by Britain, France and Germany in consultations with Washington to penalize Tehran for failing to heed UN demands that it freeze its uranium enrichment activities, which the West fears could lead to Iran building a nuclear warhead.
On Thursday in Beijing, a joint communiqué released by Chinese President Hu Jintao and Chirac called on Iran to heed UN mandates over its nuclear program and abide by an earlier Security Council resolution to abandon its uranium enrichment program or face sanctions.
"The two sides call for respect of Security Council resolution 1696 and agree to pursue their joint efforts for a resolution of the nuclear issue to maintain a close permanent contact on this matter," the statement said.
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Iran calls "6+2" model best way to defend Gulf region's security
www.chinaview.cn 2006-10-29 23:26:43
TEHRAN, Oct. 29 (Xinhua) -- Iran said on Sunday that a security cooperation treaty among the six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) plus Iran and Iraq would be the best way to maintain security in the Gulf region, the official IRNA news agency reported.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad-Ali Hosseini made the remarks when asked at a weekly press briefing to comment upon the military maneuvers by the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Australia and Bahrain in the Gulf.
On Sunday, the U.S. Navy said that vessels from six countries began a naval training exercise off the Iranian coast in the Persian Gulf aimed at blocking smuggling of nuclear weapons and arms proliferation.
"The GCC states plus Iran and Iraq can very well hold a meeting to agree on a security arrangement that will meet the interests of their nations," Hosseini said.
Founded in 1981, the GCC is a regional political and economic alliance grouping Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
"Regional countries should agree on the security cooperation they want among themselves so foreigners will not have the excuse to stay in the region," Hosseini said.
The Iranian official added that regional states themselves can best guarantee the security of the Gulf region.
"The United States goes after the policy of adventurism and creates tensions in the region," Hosseini said, adding that "Iran's response will be rational and wise."
Asked whether Iran had protested over the planned maneuvers or possible inspection of Iranian ships, he said the six countries had announced that their joint maneuvers would not be against Iran. "No issue has been raised regarding possible inspection of Iranian ships," he added.
The maneuvers are being held under the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) proposed by U.S. President George W. Bush in May, 2003. Bahrain's participation marks the first time a Gulf nation joins a PSI exercise.
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