Last week, as I do every November 22, I reflected again on that day in Dallas forty-one years ago, my second year in college, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. After reading Wayne Madsen’s fine article on the increasing inaccessibility to visitors of the grave of JFK in Arlington National Cemetery in 2004, I pondered once more not only the unresolved and unanswered questions of November 22, 1963, but the lingering, lethal legacy of that moment in history which is now being visited upon America in the twenty-first century. As an historian, I am frequently confronted with the agonizing consequences of human history, including humanity’s sins of omission.

I do not wish to re-hash the details of the assassination. Any astute researcher who is not serving the interests of the Central Intelligence Agency is forced to conclude that the murder of JFK was a complicated and meticulously organized coup which guaranteed the unscathed longevity of the military industrial complex and the political pre-eminence of the CIA for decades thereafter. My generation was never sufficiently committed to solving the crime of the assassination. It was much easier for us to protest the Vietnam War, revel in the counterculture we were creating, and convince ourselves that the JFK assassination was only one piece of the pie and that the revolution we thought we were creating would inevitably reveal all of its mysteries.

But the revolution didn’t happen, and wounds to the psyche, whether individual or collective, do not simply vanish. As a nation, we paid, and are still paying a price, for the crime for which we refused to demand justice. What is more, we have repeated history by passively submitting to yet another “Warren Commission” (the 9-11 Commission), as yet another coup d’etat, the U.S. government-orchestrated atrocities of September 11, 2001, fade into distant memory. As Mike Ruppert reminded his audience in his Portland State University lecture of 2001 regarding the Kennedy assassination and the 9-11 hoax, “the bills are coming due, and now it’s your turn to pay.”

The Bush coup of shamelessly rigged elections in November, 2000 paved the way for illegal mid-term “elections” throughout the country in 2002 and the most recent chapter in the overthrow of the American republic, the psuedo-election of 2004. These events ended democratic elections in the United States and guaranteed that within the next decade we will see the neocon agenda and all its horrors unleashed on the world and on the American people. It will be anything but a pretty picture.

The majority of responses to my articles contain some plea for a solution:

“What can we do?” goes the plaintive wail. While I am willing to offer suggestions, I have come to believe that the most important and useful one at this point would be: “Become willing to suffer.” Now, before you toss this article and pull the covers over your head, please hear me out. You will suffer in the next few years, whether you are willing or not, but your resistance to it can only exacerbate your misery.

I enjoy conversing with individuals not born in the United States. Their perspective is truly refreshing because almost without exception, their countries of origin have at some time experienced war, famine, revolution, corruption, or abject poverty. They have no Declaration of Independence that entitles them to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Consequently, they are much more open to hearing “bad news” and have fewer questions about how to “fix” it.

I hasten to add that Jefferson’s original phrase in the Declaration was “life, liberty and the pursuit of property.” Let us not forget that the profits from a capitalist land-conquering, land-holding system, not happiness, was the original intent of our founding fathers. Like the founders, the ruling elite of our day find “happiness” in ownership—hence Bush’s Orwellian “ownership society.”

Americans, even so-called Progressives it seems, appear to be fixated in an eternal adolescence that wants to repair adversity as quickly as possible without living it, or God forbid, learning from it. One facet of maturity is the awareness that the challenges of human existence are rarely simplistic, usually fraught with complexity, and typically last much longer than we ever dreamed we could endure them. As a result, we inwardly (or outwardly) roll our eyes at the adolescents in our lives who insist on taking the path of least resistance as quickly as possible. Yet, like adolescents, we refuse to face the reality that clean, fair, democratic elections no longer exist in our country, if they ever did. Like puerile MTV viewers, we demand that the right politician, the right book, the right motivational speaker, the right spiritual teacher, the right journalist tell us what to do and make it “all better” so that we can avoid suffering. We lament that the uninformed populace around us doesn’t want to hear any bad news, but the real truth is, neither do we.

One of the hallmarks of adulthood versus adolescence is the awareness that mistakes have consequences. Recently, a foreign-born friend of mine asked why the American people believe that they have the right to expand, exploit, rape, pillage, murder and conquer every area of the planet. I could only answer by explaining the history of the United States—an epic saga of what my friend had just verbalized. Indeed, the bills are coming due, and unfortunately, it is now time for us to pay.

During the next four years, the Bush Administration plans to screen all Americans for mental illness. The intent of the Bush mental health screening plan is not to legitimately diagnose and treat mental illness but rather determine who needs to be labeled “mentally unstable” or “subversive” and who needs to be medicated by the pharmaceutical industry from which the administration has added handsomely to its campaign coffers. Moreover, if the administration had the slightest interest in alleviating mental illness, it would have to begin with Lunatic In Chief, George W. Tragically, the nation is as mentally ill as its president, not only because the population has been entranced by the psuedo-Christian fascist paranoia of the religious right, but because overwhelmingly, most of us are pathologically “addicted to happiness.”

As the psychologist Carl Jung noted “the foundation of all mental illness is the avoidance of legitimate suffering.”

Before anyone calls me a masochist, please hear me out. We live in a painful, uncertain, dangerous, heartless world. I hear the reader saying: “I have already suffered and hold many badges of courage or at the very least, survival, and I really don’t want to surrender to further suffering because I have had quite enough, thank you very much.” But let us also remember that as Americans, we do not have the perspective on suffering that most other citizens of the world have, nor will we until we experience similar adversities.

Our children are unlikely to demand an end to a perpetual war on terrorism until they hold draft cards in their wallets which have been sucked dry by that war’s astronomical debt. We may never cherish our communities until we and our neighbors have to depend on each other for food and basic necessities of life. The preciousness of our resources will not be fully appreciated until they disappear or become very difficult to acquire.

People often ask me if I plan to leave the country. My answer: “There’s nowhere to go.” Within the next decade we are likely to see a nuclear exchange, a dirty bomb exploded in the U.S. as well as in other parts of the world, the return of the draft, the criminalization of abortion and women who have them, the suspension of the Constitution, a full-blown police state, the end of health care entirely except for the very wealthy, and an economic catastrophe in America that will make 1929 look like a cornucopia of abundance. Add to this every form of pollution humankind has created within the past century, the end of clean air and water, and intolerable climate changes resulting from global warming.

I noticed on November 3, 2004 that we were no longer living merely in the territory of political solutions or issues of social justice, but had crossed a watershed moment in history into the landscape of collective anguish that might test our mettle as a people and as individuals like nothing Americans have previously experienced.

Throughout history, citizens of nations in torment have responded in a variety of ways. Some quite naturally want to die and escape the pain. Others prefer to “fiddle” as long as possible while Rome burns. Others join resistance movements or become healers or teachers.

Surely by now, some reader is screaming: “But where is the hope?”

I can’t answer that question at this moment. That is to say, I can’t give you hope. Hope is something we all must construct in the laboratory of our own suffering.

What I do know is that as Americans, we are “hooked on hope” but generally unwilling to confront the suffering that allows us to find hope. Genuine hope is never found when we feel comfortable, affluent, safe, and secure. Ask Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, or Rosa Parks.

Perhaps the poet, T.S. Eliot,said it best:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;
wait without love For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting, Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought; So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

As we enter the dark time of year, and perhaps one of the darkest times in modern history, we celebrate in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the coming of the light. Darkness has never been able to unequivocally obliterate it. All great traditions and spiritual teachers declare that human existence is largely comprised of adversity interspersed with moments of light, beauty, and joy.

They have also admonished us to remember that without suffering, there will never be transformation. The days of simply applying bandaids to America’s deplorably corrupt and unjust political, economic, and social institutions are over.

It appears that nothing less than total transformation is being demanded of us.

My wish for every American in 2005 is that we recover from our addiction to happiness—our refusal to hear, ponder, and struggle with “bad news”, and with informed, illumined minds and hearts, allow the darkness to be our teacher.

That very “un-American” path may be our only hope for creating a new world

Comment: The above article contains some very important points. The idea of "conscious suffering" is not one that many will have heard of before, yet it is central to the very nature of our existence as conscious human beings.

Life is essentially one big "school". We are here not to find untarnished "bliss", but rather to learn. As is evidenced by the dire current state of our world, there is a vast and widening gulf between what the average person believes and what actually IS. We were all born ignorant of the truth of why we are here and what "here" is all about.

During the course of our lives (or lifetimes if you prefer) we are continually presented with opportunities to learn truth over lies, objectivity over subjectivity. Most of us spend our time ignoring and attempting to shut out "what is" in favor of creating our own little subjective "universe" within which we dwell. Up until now, such "bubbles of reality" were maintainable. Thankfully, this is no longer possible.

The time is fast approaching when the contrast between what most believe to be "reality" and actual Reality will be so great that bridging the gap will no longer be feasible. Reality is set to intrude into all our lives in a harsh and merciless way. Naturally, and as the above article states, this will involve a lot of suffering, as our dearly beloved beliefs and "sacred cows" are thrown to the ground. To attempt to hold on to these will result in nothing short of our individual and collective undoing. It is time to face facts, to recognise the truth that Reality is and never was what we thought it to be, to relinquish our death grip on our illusions and implacably face "what is".

For all of you wondering just what it is you can do, consider the fact that your government has gone to great lengths to create and perpetuate the illusory perception of reality within which we are all currently entrapped. From this we can deduce that the last thing that our "elected" leaders wish to see is a collective popular throwing off of this mantle of deception and and embracing of the harsh and hostile truth of our world and those who sit in governance over it. This then is what you can Do.

Take conscious and concerted steps to resist the efforts to play down just how bad our predicament really is. As you do so, you will notice that these efforts take the form of a two-pronged attack. One mode of attack comes from the forces in the world "out there" as embodied by our government and media as they attempt to shape and mould our perception. The other, and perhaps more complex mode of attack, comes from forces within each of us individually and is represented by our tendency to excuse, diffuse and generally avoid having to sit and "burn" in the "fire" that is recognition and acceptance of the objective reality of our world.

JERUSALEM - The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) took President George W. Bush to task Thursday for stating the establishment of a genuine “Palestinian” democracy should be the focus of peace efforts, while appearing to sideline the need to eliminate anti-Jewish terror.

“As we negotiate the details of peace, we must look to the heart of the matter, which is the need for a Palestinian democracy,” Bush told reporters after meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin. [...]

“Our destination is clear:two states, Israel and Palestine, living side-by-side in peace and security. And that destination can be reached by only one path, the path of democracy and reform and the rule of law,” he said. [...]

Responding to Bush’s remarks, ZOA President Morton Klein stated:

“Democracy is not the heart of the problem; the heart of the problem is Palestinian Arab terrorism, the Palestinian Arabs' commitment to the destruction of Israel, and the Palestinian Authority's promotion of an entire culture of anti-Jewish hatred and violence in its official media, schools, and mosques.” [...]

Comment: Clearly the only thing that the Palestinians ever wanted was a state that they could call their own. With the years of murder and oppression by Israel however, the only thing that the Palestinians now want is to be allowed to live under their own rule, free from the threat of having their children's heads blown open by an IDF sniper bullet. Yet we see that rabid sectarian "Zionist" organizations like the ZOA and the ADL will not even allow them that.

While the ZOA accuses the Palestinians of desiring nothing less than the "destruction of Israel", the truth is that such groups are determined to ensure that Palestinian hopes for an independent state in historic Palestine will never be realised.

By asserting that the heart of the problem is "Palestinian Arab terrorism", the ZOA and other such groups merely echo the sentiments of Sharon and the Zionist Neocons that control the Bush administration and ensure that the fact that Israel is the major cause of "terrorism" in the Middle East never gets discussed openly.

The situation is rather like a man beating a child with a stick. Each time that the child is struck, he naturally attempts to defend himself. The man then claims that the fact that the child is defending himself means that his intentions are not honorable and that he is in fact intent on violence.

The only evidence of the child's peaceful intentions that the man will ever accept is when the child stops attempting to defend itself when being beaten - which of course is not likely to happen until the child is either unconscious or dead.

However, even if the child were to realise that he could stop the beatings by ceasing to respond to them, given that the man has a vested interest in beating the child, it is very likely that, in such a situation, the man would falsely claim that the child struck him, as an excuse to continue the beatings and therefore his position of dominance.

Substitute Sharon, the various Israeli lobby groups, most European leaders, the UN and last but not least the Washington Necons for the man, and the Palestinian people for the child, and you get an idea of the current state of affairs vis a vis Israel and Palestine

[...] Yousef, in an interview with The Associated Press, said that if Israel removed settlements from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Hamas could acknowledge Israel's right to exist in peace and security.

He said he envisions a truce in which Israel and a Palestinian state "live side-by-side in peace and security for a certain period."

"For us a truce means that two warring parties live side-by-side in peace and security for a certain period and this period is eligible for renewal," Yousef said. "That means Hamas accepts that the other party will live in security and peace."

However, on Saturday Yousef retracted his statement, saying it was premature to talk about a truce at this stage. "It's too early to talk about a cease-fire," he explained. "We must focus now on reorganizing the Palestinian home. This should be the top priority."

Zahar too did not rule out the possibility of a conditioned truce with Israel.

"Israel is responsible for all the violence in the area, and we are in a position of self-defense," he said after meeting in Gaza City with PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday night.

"If the Israelis stop their aggression against the Palestinian people, I think that through negotiations we can reach a final agreement."

Comment: So we understand now the reality of the situation. Palestinians want the Israelis to stop killing them, to remove the illegal settler villages and to demilitarise the Palestinian territories. Israel will not do this. Why? Because they claim there is a "terrorist threat". Where does the terrorist threat come from? The fact that the IDF is arbitrarily killing Palestinian civilians, the fact that Sharon is allowing continued pillaging of Palestinian land by Jewish settlers, and the fact that the tiny parcels of land that have been ceded to the Palestinians are totally controlled by the Israeli military.

Conclusion? Sharon does not want peace and will use every trick in the book to maintain the "terrorist threat" so that he can continue to butcher and murder at will. It's simple when you are an amoral psychopath.

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) - Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia condemned continuing Israeli military raids, saying Saturday that they are hampering efforts to restart the peace process.

Hopes have been high that the peace process, stalled by four years of violence, would take off following Palestinian presidential elections on Jan. 9 to replace Yasser Arafat.

On Saturday morning, Israeli troops raided the West Bank city of Tulkarem, arresting a senior Hamas militant, the army and witnesses said.

The raid comes a day after Israeli troops shot and killed an Islamic Jihad militant during a similar raid.

"Unfortunately, Israel continues with its assassinations," Qureia said at the weekly Palestinian cabinet meeting. "It is therefore sending a clear message that it does not want to give a chance for things to quiet down and bring the (peace) process back on track," he said.

"At a time when we are moving towards democracy, unfortunately . . . Israel continues with its assassinations," Qureia said, calling on the international community to pressure Israel to end the raids.

Since Arafat's death last month, both Israel and the Palestinians have scaled down the violence and Israel has promised to redeploy its troops from Palestinian towns to allow the elections to take place.

However, Israeli officials rejected Qureia's comments, saying that while Israel has promised not to initiate any new military offensives, it would continue to go after Palestinians it believes are planning attacks.

"These raids were carried out based on specific intelligence that these men were planning on carrying out suicide bombings," a senior official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

In Saturday's raid, troops surrounded a building in Tulkarem, forcing all the residents to leave and firing in the air before the Hamas militant, Rami Tayah, 26, and another man surrendered to the soldiers, witnesses said. [...]

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 3 - Heavily armed insurgents launched attacks here and in the northern city of Mosul on Friday morning, striking at police stations, military bases and a Shiite mosque. At least 27 Iraqi civilians and policemen and dozens of insurgents were killed.

In Baghdad, several dozen black-clad militants stormed a police station just after dawn, killing a dozen officers, police officials said. Almost simultaneously, a powerful car bomb detonated outside a Shiite mosque in the capital's Adhamiya neighborhood, killing 15 Iraqi civilians and wounding 18, mostly worshipers leaving the mosque.

In Mosul, insurgents struck at least three police stations, hit American bases with mortars and staged elaborate ambushes involving synchronized explosions of remote-controlled bombs. At least 22 insurgents were killed, while 7 American soldiers suffered minor wounds, according to American commanders.

The violence, coinciding with several smaller-scale attacks throughout the country, demonstrated the continued power of the insurgency here and the ferocity of the militants' campaign against the fledgling Iraqi security forces as the January elections approach.

Shortly after the police station attack, an Islamist Web site posted a message from the network of the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi claiming responsibility. The statement was impossible to verify. But it suggested that Mr. Zarqawi, who claimed responsibility last week for attacks in Mosul that left 17 Iraqi national guardsmen and an American soldier dead, may still be capable of planning attacks here.

American military officials have said that Mr. Zarqawi appears to be setting up new cells in the wake of the American-led offensive in Falluja last month, but that he has lost the ability to communicate effectively with cellphones and messengers.

The Baghdad attacks began shortly after dawn, when several dozen men armed with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns stormed a police station in the southern Baghdad neighborhood of Seydiya, destroying several police cars and freeing about 50 prisoners, the police said.

The police inside the compound held off the attackers at first, but soon ran out of ammunition, survivors and witnesses said. They called for reinforcements, but when the new officers arrived, the guerrillas entered the compound with them. The insurgents, shouting "God is great!" in Arabic, quickly took over the station and pursued six fleeing officers to the roof, where they shot them all execution-style, with one bullet to the head.

Shortly afterward, the car bomb detonated outside the mosque. Witnesses described two explosions, one that damaged the mosque but killed no one at about 6:15 a.m., and a second, larger one 20 minutes later, just as worshipers were trying to help put out the flames.

After the blast, human remains and metal shards lay scattered in the alleyway by the mosque's shattered front gate, and the air was filled with the cries of friends and relatives of the dead. Several cars and neighboring buildings were engulfed with flames, and it took firefighters nearly two hours to put them out.

In Mosul, United States officials had received intelligence that a major attack was being planned. Insurgents there had largely avoided direct confrontations with the Americans since the uprising three weeks ago, when more than 100 guerrillas were killed.

After the attacks began late in the morning, American troops shut down three of the five bridges over the Tigris River and sealed off much of western Mosul, as insurgents roamed the streets. Overhead, fighter jets and Apache attack helicopters swooped in.

The Mosul attacks appeared to have been planned well in advance, according to American commanders. "The terrorists told the civilians they were going to attack the Americans and to stay indoors," said Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla, the commander of the First Battalion of the 24th Infantry, which controls much of western Mosul. Shops near the biggest ambush closed just before the attack, the commanders said.

CAIRO, Egypt - A former military spokesman in Iraq said Saturday new pictures showing apparent abuse of Iraqi prisoners were the acts of an isolated few but will be used by some to try to tarnish the entire U.S. military.

Gen. Mark Kimmitt, now based in Qatar, spoke on the pan-Arab television network a day after the U.S. military launched a criminal investigation into photographs that appear to show Navy SEALs in Iraq sitting on hooded and handcuffed detainees.

Other photos show what appear to be bloodied prisoners, one with a gun to his head.

The photos, found by an Associated Press reporter, were among hundreds in an album posted on a commercial photo-sharing Web site by a woman who said her husband brought them from Iraq after his tour of duty.

Some of the photos have date stamps suggesting they were taken in May 2003, which could make them the earliest evidence of possible abuse of prisoners in Iraq. The far more brutal practices photographed in Abu Ghraib prison occurred months later. [...]

Kimmitt, the spokesman in Iraq at the time of the Abu Ghraib scandal , said he believes the photos show the acts of an isolated few.

After months of investigation, Kimmitt said the number of U.S. military troops involved in acts of abuse has been found to be very limited.

Asked by al-Jazeera if such pictures are a problem, Kimmitt said they are certainly a "tool" and some will try to use them to show the U.S. military in a negative light. [...]

SAN DIEGO (AP) -- James Goldsborough, a columnist at the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper who frequently criticized President George W. Bush's administration, has quit after the publisher spiked one of his columns.

Goldsborough, 66, said Thursday publisher David Copley pulled a column in which he sought to explain why Jewish voters overwhelmingly supported Democrat John Kerry over Bush, despite the administration's pro-Israel policies.

Harold Fuson, vice-president and general counsel for The Copley Press Inc., which publishes the Union-Tribune, said Copley spiked the column because he thought it might offend some readers.

But Goldsborough, a columnist at the newspaper for 12 years and one-time Paris bureau chief for Newsweek magazine, said he believes the right-leaning Union-Tribune was targeting moderates like himself and another columnist who was fired in April.

"There's just an effort here to control what columnists say and you can't do that. That's what columnists do."

"They're independent voices. And you might as well not have columnists if you're just going to bend their views to fit some editorial position," he said.

Goldsborough's resignation, effective Dec. 10, follows the dismissal of columnist Neil Morgan, who spent 54 years with the newspaper and its predecessor.

Morgan, also a moderate, said he believed he was forced out for angering a senior newspaper executive who shared information with him about "a prominent San Diegan." Morgan said the executive accused him of lying to other managers about their conversation.

Fuson said there was no connection between the departures.

President Bush sought to stem a near-rebellion by members of his own party in Congress yesterday by describing a sweeping intelligence-overhaul bill they oppose as an effort "to do everything necessary to confront and defeat the terrorist threat" and calling for its passage during a brief Congressional session this week.

The president's remarks in his weekly radio address came a day after a powerful Senate Republican, John W. Warner of Virginia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, expressed doubts about the bill, which would enact the major recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission and create a cabinet-level director of national intelligence.

Mr. Warner, the first member of the Senate from either party to raise such concerns publicly since the final bill was hammered out last month, said he wanted to resolve issues in the legislation that "may impact the time-tested chain of command" within the Defense Department.

His comments echo those of a group of House Republicans who blocked a vote on the bill last month.

Under the bill, the Pentagon, which is now believed to control about 80 percent of the government's estimated $40 billion intelligence budget, would have to cede some authority to a new national intelligence director, resulting in a similar loss of oversight authority for the Senate committee led by Mr. Warner, as well as the Armed Services Committee in the House.

Congressional officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity given the delicate nature of the discussions, said the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card, and Vice President Dick Cheney were involved in talks to appease the bill's opponents on Capitol Hill. One option may be to rewrite the legislation to provide additional guarantees to the Defense Department over its control of three large spy agencies that now reside within the Pentagon but provide intelligence to agencies outside the Defense Department.

The largest of the three is the National Security Agency, which is responsible for electronic surveillance in foreign countries. [...]

WASHINGTON - President Bush played down on Saturday a stark warning from his resigning health chief that the nation's food supply is largely unprotected from terror attack.

Bush said that the government is doing what it can to safeguard the public from threats, but much work remains.

"We're a large country, with all kinds of avenues where somebody could inflict harm," said Bush, asked about the issue after an Oval Office meeting with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. "We've made a lot of progress in protecting our country, and there's more work to be done, and this administration is committed to doing it."

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson said in a speech Friday announcing his coming departure from the Bush Cabinet that he worries "every single night" about a possible terror attack on the food supply.

Despite dramatic increases in inspections of food imports, only "a very minute amount" of food is tested at ports and airports, Thompson said.

"For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do," Thompson said. "We are importing a lot of food from the Middle East, and it would be easy to tamper with that."

Asked to respond to Thompson's comments, Bush neither criticized them nor implied that the food supply is safer than Thompson asserted. [...]

DUBAI (AFP) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has lashed out at the United States, accusing Washington of unleashing "real terrorism" in Iraq, during an interview broadcast on Al-Jazeera television late yesterday.

"We have always rejected the American way of fighting terrorism, because it is an even greater terrorism," he said in the interview shortly after completing a whirlwind tour of the Middle East.

"These bombs that kill children, women, innocent men, whole families are real. It is a more horrible terrorism. I have no hesitation in calling the Iraq invasion an act of agression.

"It is not a war on terrorism, it is terrorism itself," Chavez said.
Washington accuses Chavez of harbouring sympathies for Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

NEW DELHI - Russian President Vladimir Putin sharply criticized the United States on Friday, accusing it of a double-standard in fighting terrorism and questioning whether any election in Iraq can be democratic when fighting is raging in the country.

Putin, who has been angered by U.S. and European denunciations of the Ukraine election as rigged unacceptable, began a three-day visit to the Cold-War era ally with continued criticism of Washington, saying it seeks a "dictatorship of international affairs."

"Even if dictatorship is wrapped up in a beautiful package of pseuo-democratic phraseology, it will not be in a position to solve systemic problems," Russia's Itar-Tass news agency quoted him as saying in a speech Friday night in New Delhi.

Putin, who has been critical of the United States for going to war without international approval, warned that the fighting in Iraq was threatening the possibility of a democratic vote slated for Jan. 30.

"All this will definitely call in question the possibility of holding honest and democratic elections in Iraq early next year," he said.

Putin and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed a joint declaration that called for ending "political expediency" in the global fight against terrorism. The declaration made no reference to any country.

But in an interview in a Hindu newspaper, Putin said the United States and European nations practiced double standards by allowing into their countries some Chechen rebels whom Moscow considers to be terrorists.

Comment: We agree, but Putin is in no position to throw around accusations of dictatorial tendencies. The simple truth is that this planet and its main resource - 6 billion people - are currently in the position of an impala surrounded by a half dozen slathering hyenas. To make matters worse, the impala is staring blankly at the hyenas wondering what they want.

NEW DELHI - Russian President Vladimir Putin rejected a key recommendation of a United Nations panel on expanding the Security Council, saying Saturday that any reform would be one-sided if new members did not have veto power.

Putin also backed India's aims to become a permanent member.

A high-level U.N. panel called Wednesday for expanding the 15-nation Security Council as part of a sweeping revamp of the world body. The panel presented two options: adding six new permanent members or creating a new tier of eight semi-permanent members — two each from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas.

However, panel members agreed that only the current five permanent members — the post-World War II powers the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France — should retain veto power.

Putin disagreed.

"If we go to the enlargement of the permanent seats of the Security Council, I am convinced that they should have the veto power," Putin was quoted as saying by Associated Press Television News. "Otherwise, it will be a one-sided reform of the United Nations."

The panel was commissioned by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan after last year's bitter divisions over the U.S.-led war in Iraq. The United States had to abandon an attempt to get U.N. approval because of sharp opposition from France, Germany, Russia and other council members.

A possible council expansion has been on the U.N. agenda for more than a decade. But expansion faces major obstacles, including decisions on how large it should be, which countries should be permanent and which countries should have veto power.

Putin said if there was no veto for the new members, all vetoes would have to go.

"If we agree that future permanent members should not have veto power, the next step would be the abolition of veto power," he said. "But the veto power is an efficient instrument of international relations."

Brazil, Germany, India and Japan have joined forces to lobby for permanent seats.

In meetings with Indian officials, Putin "felt that India as a new member should have the full rights of permanent membership, including the right of veto," India's foreign ministry said in a statement. "If India achieves a permanent seat in the Security Council, it cannot be a permanent member of a second rank."

ATLANTA — Robert Henderson is looking for stability in one of the most unstable places on earth.

The 39-year-old Army veteran was tired of being homeless on the streets of Atlanta for the past two years, so he decided to return to the military and signed up for the Georgia National Guard. Now Spc. Henderson of the 1st Battalion, 118th Field Artillery, is preparing for deployment to Iraq next year.

Henderson, who reported for duty at Fort Stewart on Friday, said the decision was a natural one after serving four years in the Army shortly before the first Iraq war.

"I was looking for a job. I was tired of doing the hustle and bustle," he said. "I was tired of going out there and going for interviews, and it just hit me."

After losing a temporary clerical position at the Small Business Administration two years ago, Henderson was forced onto the streets while working a number of odd jobs, such as picking up trash on Atlanta streets and cleaning bathrooms at Turner Field. He said he caught his best sleep on early morning MARTA trains but more often slept in the woods of Washington Park and ironed shirts for job interviews on its picnic benches.

Comment: The above should serve as a salient reminder to all Americans of what awaits them. All of the signs indicate that an economic crash is coming to the US. As we all know, the phony "war on terror" has been billed as "indefinite". Like the man in the above story, the military will be the "natural" choice when faced with life on the streets as an alternative.

Does anyone feel like they have been setup?

Forget any ideas of moving in with friends or family. A collapsed economy does not only mean no jobs. It means massive inflation and basic commodities like food being too expensive for the average household to afford. The only group that will remain untouched will be those who have, for many years, now been amassing wealth and possessions into their own hands as a way to plan for the events that are soon to unfold.

(AgapePress) - The head of the Christian Medical and Dental Associations says crossing humans with animals is a path science should not travel. However, a number of these human-animal hybrids, known as chimeras, have already been created.

In biological research, chimeras can be artificially produced by mixing cells from two different organisms, often of different species. For instance, in 1984 a chimeric "geep" was produced by combining embryos from a goat and a sheep. And in another case, a chicken with a quail's brain was created by grafting portions of a quail embryo into a chicken embryo (Wikipedia.com).

But this investigative research took a sinister leap in August of 2003, when researchers at Shanghai Second Medical University in China reported their "successful" creation of the first human-animal chimeric embryos, accomplished by fusing bio-material from a human being and a rabbit. The embryos were allowed to develop in the laboratory for several days before they were destroyed in order to harvest their stem cells.

Dr. David Stevens of the Christian Medical and Dental Associations (CMDA) says the idea of the chimera is not a new one, but it is currently being pushed with new emphasis by proponents of embryonic stem cell research. The reasons given for such explorations, he points out, can often sound harmless and even beneficial.

For instance, Stevens says, "The reason that Dolly [the sheep] was made by cloning was the hope that she was going to be able to secrete human breast milk. They were actually inserting a gene into her genetic makeup which caused her to secrete not sheep milk but human milk so they could give it to premature infants."

The researchers' intention in cloning Dolly, the Christian doctor says, was to create one sheep that had this capability, and then "to clone a whole herd of sheep to produce human breast milk" for infants in need of supplemental nourishment.

While this might sound like a good use for the technology, Stevens says scientists today are continuing to push the envelope, wanting to go ever further in their experiments. Scientists have developed pigs with human blood in their veins and mice with human brain cells; and some, he warns, are seeking to change the nature of animals outright and see how human-like they can be made.

Comment: The "new atlantis" has indeed arrived.

AUTHORITIES searched an Air France airliner at Los Angeles International Airport early today for explosives that disappeared during a French police training exercise at an airport outside Paris, officials said.

No explosives were found on Flight 70, which arrived late yesterday after a flight from Charles de Gaulle Airport.

Three other airliners that had left Charles de Gaulle were searched at New York City's John F Kennedy International, said Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman Nora Brewer.

French military police had been using the explosive material to train dogs to detect bombs, but they lost track of a piece of luggage containing an unspecified type and amount of explosive, authorities said.

The 362 passengers and crew members on Flight 70 were evacuated and screened.

MADRID : Five explosions rocked Madrid on Friday after a bomb warning from an anonymous telephone caller claiming to represent the Basque separatist movement ETA, police said.

They said the explosions were of low intensity and caused little damage.

Spanish radio reported that no one was injured.

The caller to the Basque newspaper Gara said the bombs were placed in gas service stations and would explode at 6:30 pm (1730 GMT). Police evacuated the areas.

COATICOOK, Que. (CP) - Quebec provincial police said Friday they were investigating damage to a hydro tower that sends energy to the United States.

Const. Louis-Philippe Ruel said police were awaiting the results of tests on material found near the tower and didn't know whether it was explosive. A bomb squad from Montreal was called to the site near Coaticook in the Eastern Townships. Ruel wouldn't say what type of damage was done to the tower.

Marie Archambault, spokeswoman for Hydro-Quebec, said a hunter driving an all-terrain vehicle noticed the damage.

She said the tower sends electricity from James Bay to the Boston area, adding there was no disruption in service.

BEIJING : A man forced his way into a northeast China primary school and slashed 12 young children before cutting his own throat.

The man, whose identity is unknown, stormed into the Central Primary School in Mingcheng township in Jilin province at 9:20 am and targeted a class of grade one pupils, mostly aged about six or seven.

Of the injured, five were boys and seven girls. They were rushed to hospital where four were reported to be seriously hurt with head, ear and back injuries.

"It happened around 9:20 this morning. A man aged about 30 entered the school but not through the front gate," an official surnamed Fu at the Panshi city education committee told AFP on Friday.

"He rushed into a classroom and used a kitchen knife and injured 12 students. He was caught by the teachers and then the police arrived," Fu said, adding that 30 students were in the class at the time.

"He was mentally ill," Fu said. "The local police are investigating this case and have reported it to provincial authorities."

Police confirmed a man had been detained but refused to provide more details.

The state Xinhua news agency said the man, a resident of Mingcheng township, cut his own throat after attacking the children and was rushed to hospital. His condition was not immediately known.

Xinhua said he had a history of mental problems and 10 years ago attacked someone with an axe. [...]

COLUMBIA, S.C. - Authorities say three years ago, Christopher Pittman, then 12, shot his grandparents as they slept because they had scolded him for fighting. But Christopher's father, Joe Pittman, thinks his son killed because his sense of right and wrong was clouded by the anti-depressant Zoloft.

Joe Pittman spoke out against the drug in a Food and Drug Administration hearing early this year. The boy, who had threatened suicide, was put on the drug three weeks before the slayings, and his dose was doubled just two days earlier.

Joe Pittman's hands shook as he read his son's confession to a roomful of strangers during the hearing.

"I took everything out on my grandparents, who I loved so very much," wrote then-12-year-old Christopher Pittman. "When I was lying in my bed that night, I couldn't sleep because my voice in my head kept echoing through my mind, telling me to kill them."

But prosecutors and police say Christopher's actions during and after the November 2001 slayings show he clearly knew what he was doing was wrong.

The boy waited until his grandparents were sleeping and took a pump-action shotgun from a gun cabinet. He crept into the couple's dark bedroom, first shooting 66-year-old Joe Frank Pittman in his open mouth, then firing into the back of 62-year-old Joy Pittman's head.

Christopher then set the house on fire and drove off in the family car. When he got stuck on a dirt road 20 miles away, he told hunters he was kidnapped by a man who killed his grandparents, set the fire, drove him into the woods and ran away.

Christopher was living with his father's parents in hopes of turning his life around. He told defense experts he felt abandoned by his mother and his relationship with his father was rocky. No one answered phone calls to Joe Pittman's home.

A month before the slayings, Christopher was hospitalized in Florida, where his father lives, after he threatened to kill himself. The boy was prescribed the anti-depressant Paxil, but another doctor soon put him on Zoloft instead.

Pittman decided to send the boy to live with his grandparents in Chester County, a rural area between Columbia and Charlotte, N.C. [...]

Karen Menzies, one of Christopher's lawyers and an attorney specializing in lawsuits against anti-depressant makers, said medical research is available to support the Zoloft defense.

In the three years the teen has spent in jail awaiting trial, the FDA has become increasingly wary of doctors prescribing Zoloft and other antidepressants for children.

In October, the agency ordered the drugs to carry "black box" warnings — the government's strongest warning short of a ban — about increasing the risk of suicidal behavior in children.

"The science has been out there for a while. The prescription drug companies have been able to hide it," Menzies said.

On the other side is Pfizer Inc., the maker of Zoloft, which has aided the prosecution, according to Solicitor John Justice, who has since taken himself off the case for health reasons. [...]

In April, a Santa Cruz, Calif., jury acquitted a man of attempted murder after he beat his friend, then blamed the episode on Zoloft.

National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers spokesman Jack King said the "Zoloft-made-me-do-it" defense likely means that the Pittman case will come down to defense vs. prosecution experts. [...]

Chester County Sheriff Robbie Benson said interviews with Christopher left him shaken because he could not believe the lack of remorse. "This was cold-blooded."

Menzies said those observations might help her case.

"The boy was still suffering from the side-effects of this medication after the incident," she said. "I think we see a different Christopher now."

Bhubaneswar, : Climatic changes triggered by fossil fuel related carbon emission is one of the reasons for recurring natural calamities in Orissa that have claimed tens of thousands of lives, says a study.

This is the conclusion of Greenpeace, a global NGO campaigning against environmental degradation that sent teams to the coastal districts of Kendrapara, Jagatsinghpura and Puri between Oct 25 and Nov 6.

"The three districts are known for regular cyclones and sea surges," the energy campaigner of Greenpeace India, Srinivas Krishnaswamy, told IANS.

The team traced the damage caused by the super-cyclone followed by floods in 2001 and 2002. Villagers told the team that temperatures in their areas had been going up every year.

"Due to sand and saline ingress, there is an overall reduction in agricultural productivity and the bulk of the land is no longer fit for cultivation," Krishnaswamy said.

"As a result there is a change in the diet patterns of the residents and they now depend mainly on fish for food," he said.

Krishnaswamy said it has been estimated that Orissa's industries and coal-fired power plants would be emitting 164 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent annually by the year 2005.

This is the equivalent of about three percent of the projected growth in man-made greenhouse gases anticipated globally over the next decade.

In addition, industries would release toxic and potent global warming agents equivalent to eight million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.

As these chemicals were long lasting, they would contribute to a "perpetual change" in the earth's atmosphere, he warned.

In one of the worst natural disasters in Orissa, more then 10,000 people died in a super cyclone in 1999.

An earthquake measuring 4.8 on the Richter scale has struck southwest New Zealand, but officials say there are no reports of damage.

The New Zealand Earthquake Commission says the quake was recorded about 30 kilometres southwest of Haast, at a depth of nine kilometres.

Seismologists warn New Zealand could experience a series of strong aftershocks following a 7.3 earthquake off the southwest coast last week.

Philippines - AN EARTHQUAKE measuring 2.7 on the Richter scale shook Mindoro and Batangas provinces Friday morning, government seismologists said.

There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage to property as the quake was barely noticed in Manila and surrounding suburbs.

The quake took place at about 10:38 a.m. with its possible source from the Lubang fault.

FORT COLLINS, Colorado (AP) - Hurricane forecasters are predicting an above-average Atlantic hurricane season again next year after one of the most destructive seasons on record.

"We believe that 2005 will continue the trend of enhanced major hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin that we have seen over the past 10 years," Colorado State University forecaster William Gray said yesterday.

Gray's forecast team predicts there will be 11 named storms, with six reaching hurricane status. Of the six, three will likely develop into major hurricanes with sustained winds of 111 mph (178 kph) or greater. There is a 69 per cent chance of at least one of the major hurricanes striking the US mainland, Gray said.

The long-term year average for storms is 9.6 per season, with six becoming hurricanes and 2.3 becoming intense hurricanes.

The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30. This year, there were 15 named storms in the Atlantic region, including nine hurricanes, six of them major. Florida was hit by four hurricanes in August and September, a barrage unparalleled in history going back 130 years, forecasters said. [...]

JOHANNESBURG - A freak storm, described by some as a "a mini-tornado", caused havoc at Johannesburg International Airport last night.

Eight aircraft were sent slewing sideways across the apron tarmac when wind and heavy rain struck at 5.15pm.

Sapa reported minor injuries to crew and ground staff while aircraft belonging to SAA, Nationwide and Comair were rendered unserviceable.

Flight SA 479, a Boeing 737-800 weighing 55 tons, due to depart for East London at 5.50pm, was thrown 10 metres sideways by the wind, which was accompanied by torrential rain, lightning and hail that roared in across the runway from the East Rand.

The aircraft was being refuelled and the hose severed when the aircraft swung sideways. The passenger gangway was cast aside and smashed into the port engine.

No break in the drought gripping this region is expected through February, but the next three months are typically not the time of year when enough moisture falls to break a drought anyway, state climatologist Dennis Todey said.

The National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center calls for drought conditions to persist through February in the northern Rockies region, including western South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, eastern Wyoming and most of Montana. Both the drier time of the year and recent below-normal snowpack are factors in the continued drought forecast, according to the NWS. [...]

(Australia) - THE drought across the Murray-Darling Basin is the worst since records began, with authorities characterising the effect on river communities and the environment as "unprecedented".

The conditions are more severe than the three previous big drys; the Federation drought from 1895-1903, in the 1940s and the mid-1960s.

Murray-Darling Basin Commission chief executive Wendy Craik said the past three years had the lowest inflows into Menindee Lakes on the lower Darling River in NSW on record.

"And when you consider the fact that water extractions now are higher than they were in those periods, the impact on communities, in irrigators and the environment, has obviously been greater," Dr Craik said.

She said the resulting downturn in farm production was flowing through the processing and infrastructure industries in communities along the river.

Salinity in Lake Alexandrina and Lake Albert, near the mouth of the Murray in South Australia, had reached extreme levels and was expected to worsen.

The commission also found a widespread decline in the health of redgums lining the river from Euston to the Murray mouth and an increased incidence of dead fish, associated with low flows and drought. [...]

AN American woman's effort to assuage her six-year-old son's fears of his grandfather's ghost by selling it on eBay has drawn more than 34 bids with a top offer of $US78 ($A100).

Mary Anderson said she placed her father's "ghost" on the online auction site after her son, Collin, said he was afraid the ghost would return someday.

Anderson said Collin has avoided going anywhere in the house alone since his grandfather died last year.

In a description titled "This isn't a joke", Anderson told Collin's story on eBay: "I always thought it was just normal kid fears until a few months ago he told me why he was so scared. He told me 'Grandpa died here, and he was mean. His ghost is still around here!'"

Lest the boy's fears scare off potential bidders, Anderson added: "My dad was the sweetest most caring man you'd ever meet." [...]