News Report May 23, 2006

God Save The Internet Three singer/songwriters met at a Los Angeles recovery center for those suffering from internet-related anger issues. How could Congress vote to destroy one of the only good things left in America? This made no sense! How could so few people be enraged? What were people doing to keep network neutrality the law of the land? They realized that they had found kindred spirits in one another and needed to work through their newfound political rage. Their counselor suggested that they could channel their frustration through song, interpretative dance, screaming or simply calling Congress over and over. When they discovered that Michelle was afraid of morons, they decided to just do the singing part. And thus The BroadBand was born.God Save the Internet is their first outing. It will soon be sweeping the nation.

Funds for Iraq run low Time and money are running out on the US-directed reconstruction effort in Iraq. The main conduit for American rebuilding aid - the Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund (IRRF) - is scheduled to close at the end of this year. Almost all the cash Congress has allocated for the fund, some $20 billion in all, has been spent, or will be, in coming months.Yet many important efforts remain unfinished, for reasons ranging from insurgent attacks to incompetence and contractor corruption. More than 75 percent of oil and gas restoration projects are incomplete, as are 50 percent of electrical and 40 percent of water and sanitation projects, according to the April report of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.The bottom line: Iraqis are facing what US officials call a "reconstruction gap" as they assume responsibility for rebuilding. Meeting already-identified needs might require a further $18 billion to $28 billion, according to one estimate.

Viewpoint: Banning Baghdad falafel Recent news reports from the Iraqi capital indicate that radical Islamists are launching a campaign to prohibit the sale of ... falafel. Yes, you heard right, falafel. While this is the sort of news you might expect to hear from a late night stand-up comedian on television, sadly, this is not a joke, and a number of falafel vendors who failed to heed the warnings have paid with their lives. Several vendors of the popular deep-fried chickpea sandwich were told they had just two weeks to change their profession or face death. And indeed, several vendors where shot and killed simply for selling falafel sandwiches. The logic offered by the religious zealots - if there is any - in imposing this inane diktat on the people is that there were no falafels in the time of the Prophet Mohammed. Indeed there were no falafels in ancient Arabia. However, it might be worth pointing out to these same zealots - preferably with much tact - that in the days of the prophet there were no Kalashnikov automatic rifles with which to shoot those who did not follow orders.

Secretive Arms Exports Stoking Conflict and Repression China is fast emerging as one of the world's biggest, most secretive and irresponsible arms exporters, according to a new report issued today by Amnesty International.The report shows how Chinese weapons have helped sustain brutal conflicts, criminal violence and other grave human rights violations in countries such as Sudan, Nepal, Myanmar and South Africa. It also reveals the possible involvement of Western companies in the manufacture of some of these weapons."China describes its approach to arms export licensing as `cautious and responsible`, yet the reality couldn't be further from the truth. China is the only major arms exporting power that has not signed up to any multilateral agreements with criteria to prevent arms exports likely to be used for serious human rights violations," said Helen Hughes, Amnesty International's arms control researcher.China's arms exports, estimated to be in excess of US$1 billion a year, often involve the exchange of weapons for raw materials to fuel the country's rapid economic growth. But it is a trade shrouded in secrecy; Beijing does not publish any information about arms transfers abroad and hasn't submitted any data to the UN Register on Conventional Arms in the last eight years.Amnesty Internationals report, China: Sustaining conflict and human rights abuses, includes several examples of irresponsible Chinese arms exports.

Larry Scott: Dems outraged over closed door meeting at VA Larry Scott of VAWatchdog wrote this week, noting that democrats are outraged that VA Secretary Nicholson held a closed door meeting with Republican congressmen on the VA data theft issue.

Scientists Urge G8 Not to Ignore Global WarmingWorld leaders must not allow concern for energy security to distract them from taking promised action on global warming, top world scientists said on Wednesday. Climate change solutions agreed at the G8 summit in Scotland a year ago risked being pushed off the agenda at next month's G8 summit in Russia by worries about security of energy supply, they said. "One year on from the UK Gleneagles Summit, where the G8 committed to taking action on climate change, this crucial issue must not be allowed to fall by the wayside," said Martin Rees, president of the UK's Royal Society. Rees is a signatory to the statement from the science academies of the G8 and China, Brazil, India and South Africa. "The G8 must demonstrate that this was a serious pledge by integrating climate concerns with their discussions regarding security of supply," he said.

Save Darfur A video from the Darfur Rally. Also, Senator Obama and Al Sharpton

World Cup Statistics As the World Cup gets underway, no red cards are being handed out for the many women and girls being stalked, raped, sexually abused and harassed, trafficked for sexual exploitation, beaten or killed.

Paper: Rumsfeld expels US media from Guantanamo Bay The United States military has ordered all independent media off the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base following the suicides of three detainees, RAW STORY has learned.Writing for the Miami Herald, journalist Carol Rosenberg stated Wednesday morning that the military had "ordered all independent news media off the base by 10 a.m. Wednesday, and had arranged a flight to Miami to expedite their departure."

The Latest Cover-Up Fast-forward to November 19, 2005, al-Haditha, Anbar Province, Iraq. Shortly after a U.S. Marine was killed by an IED in this western Iraqi town that day, it is alleged that other Marines in his unit entered two homes in that village where they then went on a killing spree resulting in the deaths of 24, unarmed Iraqi civilians, with the youngest victim being just two years old. The Marines initially reported that “only” 15 civilians had died in the incident, but only as a result of the IED that killed the Marine. When that didn’t fly, they amended their report to say that what they actually meant was that the Iraqis had died in a gun battle with Marines directly after the IED explosion. As their noses grew even longer, the lying, CYA group of protect-my-job-at-all-costs crew of senior commissioned Marine Corps officers, were finally forced to admit that there may actually be some serious wrong doing involved here.

Videotapes and liberator's justice in Haditha Just a week ago, the Bush administration was bracing itself for the worst. After six months of covering up the Haditha massacre, the time had come to face another public audit of the conduct of American occupation forces in Iraq. Once again, as in Abu Ghraib, the real culprit was a camera. American eyes are not supposed to see this sort of thing lest it disturb their inner harmony. The folks back home live under the comfortable illusion that their armed forces are busy fighting the 'bad guys,' promoting democracy, setting up school playgrounds and passing out candy to street urchins. Don't expect the average American to dwell - let alone show empathy - for the traumatized Iraqi survivors in Haditha. Just because the majority of Americans are now against the invasion doesn't mean that they're paying attention to the details. In this most sanitized of wars, they rarely get a look at their own dead and wounded. For most, the whole sordid Iraqi affair is no more than background noise. Half of them still can't place Iraq on the map and there is a significant minority that still believes that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

Murtha Fights Back

War on terror called failure Washington is failing to make progress in the global war on terror and the next 9/11-style attack is not a question of if, but when. That is the scathing conclusion of a survey of 100 leading American foreign-policy analysts. In its first "Terrorism Index," released yesterday, the influential journal Foreign Affairs found surprising consensus among the bipartisan experts. Some 86 per cent of them said the world has grown more, not less, dangerous, despite President George W. Bush's claims that the U.S. is winning the war on terror. The main reasons for the decline in security, they said, were the war in Iraq, the detention of terror suspects in Guantanamo Bay, U.S. policy towards Iran and U.S. energy policy. The survey's participants included an ex-secretary of state and former heads of the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, along with prominent members of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. The majority served in previous administrations or in senior military ranks.

Sudan: Divide and Destroy in Darfur Khartoum's divide and destroy strategy will continue to splinter Darfur along ethnic lines, use proxies like the Janjaweed and dissident rebels to sow intercommunal conflict, and buy off politicians to keep Darfur from developing as a region. This is the same tactic the ruling party is pursuing in post-conflict southern Sudan: maintain a strong center that controls security and most of the oil revenue and leave peripheral areas weak, divided and underdeveloped, unable to mount an effective challenge, whether armed or electoral. The Darfur Peace Agreement suffers from the same systemic flaw as the deal brokered for southern Sudan, the ironically named Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Neither deal is in fact comprehensive, but instead address Sudan's problems region by region, just as the ruling party's divide and destroy strategy requires. Despite all having the same grievances, southerners, westerners and easterners are all left to fight over scraps, while the real power in the center remains largely intact in the hands of the ruling National Congress Party. Left unchecked, ruling party officials will continue to use militias to destabilize parts of the country prone to opposition, and will continue to support rebels in neighboring countries deemed unfriendly, as they do now in Chad, Uganda and Eritrea.

‘Tens of Thousands’ of Somalians Demonstrate Against U.S. Support for Militias Last month, the Washington Post reported the Bush administration was “secretly supporting secular warlords” in Somalia “who have been waging fierce battles against Islamic groups for control of the capital, Mogadishu.” Some of these warlords reportedly “fought against the United States in 1993 during street battles that culminated in an attack that downed two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters and left 18 Army Rangers dead.”
U.S. support for these militias upset the Somali prime minister, who said, “We would prefer that the U.S. work with the transitional government and not with criminals. … This is a dangerous game. Somalia is not a stable place and we want the U.S. in Somalia. But in a more constructive way.”

Graphic photographs show bodies of civilians killed in Ishaqi, Iraq Photographs taken by Agence France Presse but not distributed by major US media outlets show the bodies of Iraqi civilians killed in March in a home in Ishaqi, Iraq. Those photographs -- may of which are graphic and show the decaying bodies of children, some of them babies -- are displayed below.

Conservative Lawmakers Shaft Mine Safety ::: 31 coal miners have died on job this year, compared with 22 deaths in all of 2005. The House is set to take up the Senate-passed mine safety bill, but conservative lawmakers are resisting inserting three amendments offered by Rep. George Miller (D-CA) that would strengthen workplace safety for miners.

Dissident Darfur rebels say they will sign AU peace deal Dissident Darfur rebels said on Friday that they would sign an African Union (AU)-mediated peace deal for the troubled western Sudanese region and urged holdouts to join them. Despite missing a Wednesday midnight deadline to agree to the pact or face possible sanctions, they said that the AU was preparing an annex to the May 5 accord for them, and hopefully other groups, to ink in the coming days. The rebels who claim to represent splinter factions of the two groups - a wing of the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) - that have thus far rejected the deal, said that they were only interested in peace. "We are all Darfurians, so we are calling on all the rebel leaders to come and join the peace process to stop the suffering," Abdul Majid Hassan of the JEM-Aburisha faction told reporters at AU headquarters in Addis Ababa.

A defiant Chertoff won't budge Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was defiant yesterday despite a blistering onslaught of criticism over his order to slash New York City's counterterrorism cash almost in half.
"I will tell you that when people threaten me or yell at me, that's not going to make me change my mind," Chertoff told the Daily News. The attacks on Chertoff for cutting federal grants to New York City by 40% this year were led by fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill who preside over committees overseeing Chertoff's cabinet agency. He insisted that pressure from GOP leaders and the entire New York delegation won't sway him to restore $80 million cut from the high-threat urban area security grants awarded to the city this year.

Was the 2004 Election Stolen? But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)

Feds to NY: Drop Dead Reaction to the news that the federal Department of Homeland Security will reduce anti-terrorist funds to New York City by 40 percent this year has provoked unsurprising outrage by local public officials and press. An editorial in the Daily News (which paraphrases its most famous headline in its news article, Feds To City: Drop Dead) calls for Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to be fired, and both it and an editorial in the New York Post ridicule the reasons for the reduction, including the alleged lack of “national monuments and icons” in the city.

‘We Remember’ : A Poem written In Honor of the Victims of Murambatsvina May 2005 we remember2005 May we remember May 2005 we reflect We remember the razing and ravaging of homes We reminisce on how poverty was criminalized We reflect on how the poor were brutalized Displaced, dislocated, dislodged, dismembered Destroyed, devastated, damaged, defaced Dehumanized, demonized, deflowered, demoralized All because of “madisnyongoro”

Patriot Guard Riders- Thank you for standing up and protecting the fallen. Funerals are no place for protests, especially ones where gay-bashers hold up offensive signs.

Who Killed the Elecrtic Car?

Kabul Riot Growing Massive I'm not sure what the US traditional news is reporting within the US on the riot in Afghanistan other than its cause was a traffic accident when a US vehicle lost its brakes. Over here we are getting more news.After the accident, US soldiers opened fire into the crowd killing at least 5 people and injuring 60 others. According to Al Jazeera and other papers the protesters have burst into the building of the Parliament in the capital. The US embassy in Kabul has been evacuated. Gunfire has broken out throughout the city, and two police cars and a checkpoint have been torched. And this is our success story.

Fox News: ‘Al Gore’s Global Warming Movie: Could It Destroy Our Economy?’ This weekend on Fox News, host David Asman asked his guests to discuss the following question: “If people buy into [Al Gore’s] global warming hysteria, will it put him in the White House and our economy on the skids?” Steve Forbes answered yes, and called Gore’s new movie “a real recipe for more socialist regulation."

Gore's Film Smeared by Exxon Loyalist Sterling Burnett, a man who works for an organization which takes huge amounts of money from Exxon Mobile went on "Dayside" today to smear Al Gore. These people are beyond shameless. He compared Gore and his new film, "An Inconvenient Truth" to the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

O'Reilly And Malkin Misinterpret California Bill About Gays In School Curriculum A California Bill requiring inclusion of contributions made by Gay,transgender and transexual people in history textbooks passed a Senate Education Committee hearing . Michelle Malkin and Kirsten Powers were on hand to discuss the law with O'Reilly and all three did their part to confuse viewers by distorting the facts surrounding the law. 5/8/06. Malkin called the Bill radical and dangerous claiming that teachers would not be allowed to say anything negative about any historical figure if they were gay. O'Reilly carried it to his usual extreme asking, " Teachers can't say anything about Jeffrey Dahmer? He's a gay cannibal!" Then he called it " a form of Fascism". Malkin claimed that students and parents were holding protests to keep it from passing into law.

Iraq is disintegrating as ethnic cleansing takes hold Across central Iraq, there is an exodus of people fleeing for their lives as sectarian assassins and death squads hunt them down. At ground level, Iraq is disintegrating as ethnic cleansing takes hold on a massive scale.

Egyptian authorities go after bloggers As internationally acclaimed blogger Alaa, of www.manalaa.net, sits in prison waiting to be released, bloggers in Egypt have begun a new campaign to educate Egyptians and the entire world on the situation facing Egyptian bloggers. "Blogs reflect who we are as people and as we get more active it shows in our blogs." Manal, the other half of manalaa.net and Alaa's wife, tells the Middle East Times. "Lots of bloggers find freedom of expression attainable with blogs," she adds.

Governments Have Failed to Stop Overfishing, Study Shows Governments worldwide have failed to prevent overfishing in the oceans, where a proliferation of bottom-trawling threatens to wipe out deep sea species, conservation groups WWF and Traffic said on Friday. The environmentalists said the existing system of regional fisheries regulation, meant to control the depletion of ocean life, had responded slowly to new threats and done little to enforce fishing quotas or rebuild vulnerable stocks. Their report, released ahead of a New York meeting on the United Nations Fish Stocks Agreement, argued that controls needed to be reinforced to prevent further damage to marine ecosystems and future food supplies.