[click image]Sliming penguins....
Doomed dairy....
Goldstone gives in....
BP drilling in the Gulf....
The war drones on as though it's stopping tomorrow....
Polymer didn't work....
Information that will not land on your synapses....
Worse than Dubya....
Corbett Report....
The banks....
UNSPEAKABLE....
Fidel....
For Phil....
[click image]This policy is what the Nobel Peace Laureate — the first African-American president in history — is now perpetuating in the only nation to liberate itself from slavery. But of course, the most important thing is not the dispossessed in Haiti, nor the innocent people in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan being killed, day after day, by the Laureate's bombs, bullets and assassins. No, the main thing is — he's not John McCain! And we must put aside these trifles, these heaps of corpses, and rally around the prez to "defend our gains and regroup for a progressive counter-offensive in 2012!" The best is yet to come!
[click image]Pro-Gaddafi Forces
We're not killing ordinary people.
We're killing one evil dictator who happens to be
cleverly disguised as thousands of ordinary people.
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[click image]Japan's prime minister insisted Tuesday that the country was on "maximum alert" [country, maybe; nukes industry, definitely not] to bring its nuclear crisis under control, but the spread of radiation raised concerns about the ability of experts to stabilize the crippled reactor complex.
...
"The removal of the contaminated water is the most urgent task now, and hopefully we can adjust the amount of cooling water going in," he said, adding that workers were building sandbag dikes to keep contaminated water from seeping into the soil outside.
The discovery of plutonium, released from fuel rods only when temperatures are extremely high, confirms the severity of the damage, Nishiyama said.
Plutonium is a highly toxic substance which breaks down very slowly, remaining dangerously radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years [which, you will agree, constitutes extreme "very slowly"].
"If you inhale it, it's there and it stays there [for a darn short] forever," said Alan Lockwood, a professor of Neurology and Nuclear Medicine at the University at Buffalo and a member of the board of directors of Physicians for Social Responsibility, an advocacy group. 
[click image]To our son, his excellency, Mr Barack Hussein Obama.
I have said to you before, that even if Libya and the United States of America enter into a war, god forbid, you will always remain a son. Your picture will not be changed.
Al-Qa'eda is an armed organisation, passing through Algeria, Mauritania and Mali. What would you do if you found them controlling American cities with the power of weapons? What would you do, so I can follow your example.
[click image]WCTI-TV in New Bern reports those Marines, assigned to the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) at Camp Lejuene, are "preserving the sanctity of the city [of Ajdubiyah] and the safety of the civilians within it." [report has been updated]
Capt. Timothy Patrick with the 26th MEU told the station: "In Libya right now they are doing exactly what we need them to do. They are doing what they are told, and right now that's protecting Libyan people against Qadhafi forces."
Evidently the Marines' efforts are being successful. The commanding officer of the 26th MEU, Col. Mark Desens, says that following a second round of strikes by AV-8B Harrier jets, the Libyan dictator's forces "are now less capable of threatening the town than before."
According to the report, the 2,200 Marines with the 26th MEU are nearing the end of their deployment in the Mediterranean area and are due to be replaced with Marines from the 22nd MEU out of Camp Lejeune. A March 7 notice from the commanding officer of the 22nd MEU says that unit was being deployed to the Mediterranean Sea earlier than previously planned.A Libyan woman burst into a Tripoli hotel occupied by journalists and tried to tell them of her abuse and rape at the hands of Gaddafi's forces on Saturday. "Look at what Gaddafi's militias did to me," Eman al-Obaidi screamed, showing her bloodied leg and bruised face. 
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[click image]Whether or not you believe that occult elements are at play in this latest round of imperial slaughter and mayhem, what is obvious to all but the most duped and apathetic is that once again we have another war launched by the imperialist powers thinly veiled as a “humanitarian intervention”, dressed up as a mission of peace driven by the use of heavy bombardment and murder, where the truth lies diametrically opposed to the propaganda being pushed by the mainstream media. Nothing is what it seems; the lies and deceptions are as Orwellian as ever. The similarities with Iraq go well beyond the date of the opening salvo — indeed, there are many consistencies between the current attack on Libya and numerous other military interventions and acts of aggression carried out by the US, NATO and their allies in recent years.
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[click image]There was ample coverage of the loss of a US F-15 fighter jet over Libya Tuesday, and it always came with reassurances that the crew was safe. Less safe, however, were a group of Libyan civilians who came to the aid of one of the crew.
That’s because the civilians who met the plane’s weapons officer and offered him fruit juice while he waited to be rescued were attacked by US Marines during the brief ground incursion meant to rescue the crew. Some of the reports suggest the Marines arrived in a V-22 Osprey attack helicopter and opened fire on the crowd with it.
Six Libyan civilians were shot in the attack, including a young boy who local hospital officials say may lose his leg because of the attack. The weapons officer had been found in a sheep field and was met by the civilians, who were backers of the anti-Gadhafi rebellion.
The incident is news not just for the tragic outcome, but because despite the explicit UN prohibition on “occupation troops” being spun as a broad prohibition on ground troops, US Marines were indeed on the ground, in Libya, in a field full of sheep.
The pilot was initially picked up by rebel soldiers, who the Marines reported treated him “with dignity and respect” before handing him over to the troops. It does not appear there was any incident with regards to him. The Marines have yet to comment on the shootings in the recovery of the weapons officer.
The F-15 was flying out of Italy at the time of the crash, and officials are blaming a system malfunction. It is the first aircraft reported lost since the US and France started the Libyan War on Saturday. An F-15E Strike Eagle costs approximately $31 million.
[click image]What balls! What hubris! What hypocrisy! What happened to America?The BBC World Service is to receive a "significant" sum of money from the US government to help combat the blocking of TV and internet services in countries including Iran and China.We will not let Libya be lost like Palestine, Iraq or Somalia. We are arming the people. If western countries come to Libya they will have to fight house by house. If Libya goes down, Europe goes down. If we are attacked we will fight to the death. Every man and woman. ...
Nor is there any sign that Gaddafi's loyal supporters are preparing to abandon him. "Without Gaddafi," said a mourner, "Libya will be like Somalia. There will be chaos. This is not like Iraq or Afghanistan, where someone else will take power. We don't have a Maliki or a Karzai here."Commanders in Afghanistan are bracing themselves for possible riots and public fury triggered by the publication of "trophy" photographs of US soldiers posing with the dead bodies of defenceless Afghan civilians they killed.Medvedev defended his order to abstain from the vote on the U.N. resolution which Putin vehemently criticised. He also steered clear of chiding the United States, while Putin lambasted Washington.
"The resolution is defective and flawed. It allows everything," Putin told workers at a ballistic missile factory in Votkinsk in central Russia. "It resembles medieval calls for crusades.
Medvedev defended his decision not to use Russia's veto.
"We did not use it for one simple reason: because I do not consider this resolution wrong. Moreover, on the whole I believe this resolution reflects our understanding of what is going on in Libya as well, but not in every way."
The 45-year-old Kremlin chief's comments were widely reported on state television. Putin's crusade comment was quietly dropped from some state television news bulletins after Medvedev's criticism.
Putin, in some of his harshest criticism of the United States since President Barack Obama began a campaign to improve ties, compared the Libya intervention with the invasion of Iraq under President George W. Bush and said it showed Russia was right to spend billions to bolster its military.
Medvedev did not mention the United States and stressed the international nature of diplomatic efforts over Libya.
"We did not use our veto... so to be flapping our wings and saying we did not know what we were doing would be wrong. We did this consciously," he said. "I gave the instructions to the Foreign Ministry, and they were carried out."
[click image, mp3, via Phil]Rupert Murdoch, aside from owning FOX News and the Wall Street Journal has also managed to scoop up a large portion of Britain's newspapers. Well, it ends up Murdoch's papers have been hacking the phones of the liberal politicians and using the info gleaned to chase them out of office, ruin their character, etc. Besides politicians they have been hacking phones of both the rich and the famous...including the Princes of England.
[click image, via The North]Hours after the attacks, sources in Libya have reported that three medical facilities were bombarded. Two were hospitals and one a medical clinic. These were civilian facilities. Al-Tajura Hospital was hit as was Saladin Hospital in Ain Zara. The clinic that was bombed was also located in the vicinity of Tripoli, the Libyan capital. Not only where these civilian structures, but they were also all far away from the combat zone. ...
According to internal Libyan sources, two French jets were also shot down by the Libyan military near Janzour (Janzur/Zanzur). Another French military jet was shot down by the Libyans near Anjile. People in Benghazi are also fleeing the Libyan city, because of the war. Surt (Sidra) and Misratah have also been attacked by the French, the U.S., the British and their coalition allies.
The U.S. and its allies are now the ones that are creating a real humanitarian disaster. They talk about peace while they arm the Benghazi-based opposition rebels via the Egyptian military junta, which is as much a military client as its so-called civilian predecessor. This is also a violation of the United Nations Security Council resolution that the U.S. and its allies passed, which states that no weapons are to be sent to Libya.
Hillary Clinton was in both Tunisia and Egypt in context of the operations against Libya. Both the regime in Tunis and the military junta in Cairo are overtly and covertly supporting the war against Libya. The autocrats of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have also indictated that they will send military forces to attack Libya.The truth has come to light. Clearly this rebellion does not, and did not, have the massive popular support that we were led to believe. Otherwise, the US would not have had to so blatantly intervene. The Obama regime has made various statements about the evils of Qaddafi (Clinton even saying that he WOULD commit atrocities if left alone), and has -in true Bush fashion- claimed that we are trying to help the people of Libya. This entire situation is beginning to seem like Bush redux. The propaganda and lies are flying fast and furious, and the only people that will truly suffer are the people of Libya (who will, as the innocent victims of Imperialism always do, bear the brunt of the death and destruction the US causes).
The Obama regime has changed its populist slogan "Yes we can!" to the dictatorial "Yes you will!", and we have been caught in the trap again. ...
I would ask the world: Who is the real enemy? Which government is the real rogue government? Which regime should be defeated?The Arab League on Sunday criticized Western military strikes on Libya, a week after urging the United Nations to slap a no-fly zone on the oil-rich North African state.
"What has happened in Libya differs from the goal of imposing a no-fly zone and what we want is the protection of civilians and not bombing other civilians," Arab League secretary general Amr Mussa told reporters.
"From the start we requested only that a no-fly zone be set up to protect Libyan civilians and avert any other developments or additional measures," Mussa added.
[click image]U.S. President is warning Libyan leader that his forces must stop attacking innocent civilians or face military action.The French air force destroyed Libyan tanks and armored vehicles on Saturday, the first shots fired in a U.N.-mandated military intervention to protect civilians from attacks by Muammar Gaddafi's forces.
A French defense ministry official said "a number of tanks and armored vehicles" were destroyed in the region of Benghazi, with initial action focusing on stopping Gaddafi's forces from advancing on the rebels' eastern stronghold.American warplanes, ships and submarines prepared to launch a furious assault on Libya's limited air defenses Saturday, clearing the way for European and other planes to enforce a no-fly zone designed to ground Moammar Gadahfi's air force and cripple his ability to inflict further violence on rebels, U.S. officials said.The U.S. and European nations pounded Moammar Gadhafi's forces and air defenses with cruise missiles and airstrikes Saturday, launching the broadest international military effort since the Iraq war in support of an uprising that had seemed on the verge of defeat. Libyan state TV claimed 48 people had been killed in the attacks....Moscow regrets the attack from a range of European countries on Libya which is being conducted "with reference to the hastily adopted UN Security Council resolution," official spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry Alexander Lukashevich said on Saturday....
China regrets the multinational military strike launched against Libya, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Sunday.
"China has noticed the latest development in Libya and regrets the military strike against Libya," Jiang Yu said, adding that China did not agree with resorting to force in international relations.
[click image]The world is a transitory abode,
not a permanent abode.
And the people in it
are of two sorts:
one who sells his soul
and ruins it,
and one who ransoms his soul
and frees it.
— ḤAḌRAT 'ALĪ
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[click image]REFLECTIONS OF FIDEL
NATO’s inevitable war (Part II) — (Part I)
WHEN Gaddafi, aged just 28 and a colonel in the Libyan army, inspired by his Egyptian colleague Abdel Nasser, overthrew King Idris I in 1969, he implemented important revolutionary measures such as agrarian reform and the nationalization of oil. The growing income was dedicated to economic and social development, particularly educational and health services for the small Libyan population located in a vast desert territory with very little arable land.
An extensive and deep sea of "fossil water" existed beneath that desert. When I heard about an experimental cultivation area I had the impression that, in the future, those aquifers would be more valuable than oil.
Religious faith, preached with the fervor that characterizes Muslim nations, in part helped to compensate for the strong tribal tendency which still survives in that Arab country.
Libyan revolutionaries devised and implemented their own ideas in relation to legal and political institutions, which Cuba, as a principle, respected.
We totally abstained from expressing any opinions concerning the concepts of the Libyan leadership.
We can clearly see that the fundamental concern of the United States and NATO is not Libya, but the revolutionary wave unleashed in the Arab world, which they wish to prevent at all costs.
It is an irrefutable fact that relations between the United States and its NATO allies in recent years were excellent until the rebellion in Egypt and in Tunisia arose.
In high-level meetings between Libya and NATO leaders, none of the latter had any problems with Gaddafi. The country was a secure source of high-quality oil, gas and even potassium supplies. The problems which arose between them in the early decades had been overcome.
Strategic sectors such as oil pumping and transportation were opened up to foreign investment.
Privatizations were extended to many public enterprises. The International Monetary Fund exercised its beatific role in the implementation of those operations.
Logically, Aznar was fulsome in his praise of Gaddafi and after him, Blair, Berlusconi, Sarkozy, Zapatero and even my friend the King of Spain, paraded past the sardonic regard of the Libyan leader. They were happy.
Although it might seem that I am mocking that is not the case; I am simply asking myself why they now want to take Gaddafi before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
They are accusing him 24 hours a day of firing on unarmed citizens who were protesting. Why did they not explain to the world that the weapons and, above all, the sophisticated machinery of repression possessed by Libya, was supplied by the United States, Britain and other illustrious hosts of Gaddafi?
I strongly oppose the cynicism and lies currently being used to justify the invasion and occupation of Libya.
The last time that I visited Gaddafi was in May 2001, 15 years after Reagan attacked his very modest residence, where he took me to see what was left of it. It received a direct hit from the aircraft and was considerably destroyed; his little daughter three years of age died in the attack: she was murdered by Ronald Reagan. There was no prior agreement on the part of NATO, the Human Rights Committee, or the Security Council.
My previous visit had taken place in 1977, eight years after the beginning of the revolutionary process in Libya. I visited Tripoli; I took part in the General People’s Congress in Sebha; I toured the first agricultural experiments with water pumped from the vast sea of fossil waters; I visited Benghazi, I was the object of a warm reception. It was a legendary country which had been the scenario of historic battles in World War II. It did not as yet have six million inhabitants, nor were its enormous volumes of oil and fossil waters known. The former Portuguese colonies in Africa had already been liberated.
We had fought for 15 years in Angola against mercenary armies organized along tribal lines by the United States, the Mobutu government, and the well-equipped and trained racist apartheid army. This army, following U.S. instructions, as is now known, invaded Angola in 1975 in order to prevent its independence, reaching the outskirts of Luanda with its motorized forces. A number of Cuban instructors died in that brutal invasion. Resources were sent with all urgency.
Expelled from that country by Cuban internationalists and Angolan troops to the border of South African occupied Namibia, the racists were given the mission of eliminating the revolutionary process in Angola.
With the support of the United States and Israel they developed nuclear weapons. They already possessed them when the Cuban and Angolan troops defeated their land and air forces in Cuito Cuanavale and, defying the risk – using conventional tactics and means – advanced toward the border with Namibia, where the apartheid troops were attempting to resist. Twice in their history our forces have been at risk of attack by those kinds of weapons: in October of 1962 and in southern Angola, but on that second occasion, not even deploying those nuclear weapons that South Africa possessed could they have prevented the defeat which marked the end of the odious system. Those events took place under the government of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Piet Botha in South Africa.
There is no talk of that and the hundreds of thousands of lives which the imperialist adventure cost.
I regret having to recall those events when another great risk is hovering over the Arab peoples, because they are not resigned to continue being the victims of plunder and oppression.
The Revolution in the Arab world so much feared by the United States and NATO is that of those who lack all rights in the face of those who flaunt all privileges, and thus is destined to be more profound than the one unleashed in Europe in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille.
Not even Louis XIV, when he proclaimed that he was the state, possessed the privileges of King Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz of Saudi Arabia and far less the vast wealth that lies below the surface of that almost desert country, where yankee transnationals determine the pumping and thus the price of oil in the world.
When the Libyan crisis began, extraction in Saudi Arabia rose to one million barrels a day at minimum cost and, in consequence, by that concept alone, the income of that country and those who control it has risen to one billon dollars a day.
No one should imagine that the Saudi people are swimming in money. There are moving accounts of the living conditions of many construction workers and those in other sectors obliged to work 13 to 14 hours a day for paltry wages.
Shocked by the revolutionary wave which is shaking the prevalent system of plunder, in the wake of what took place with workers in Egypt and Tunisia, but also unemployed youth in Jordan, the occupied territories of Palestine, Yemen and even Bahrain and the Arab Emirates with higher per capita income, the upper echelons of the Saudi hierarchy has been impacted by the events.
As opposed to other times, today the Arab peoples receive almost instantaneous information on events, albeit exceptionally manipulated.
The worst thing for the status quo of the privileged sectors is that those persistent events are coinciding with a considerable increase in food prices and the devastating impact of climate change, while the United States, the largest producer of corn in the world, is wasting 40% of that product and a significant part of soy production on biofuels to feed automobiles. Lester Brown, the best informed American ecologist in the world on agricultural products, can surely give us an idea of the current food situation.
The Bolivarian president, Hugo Chávez, is making a valiant effort to find a solution without NATO intervention in Libya. The chances of his attaining that objective would improve if he can achieve the feat of creating a broad movement of opinion before and not after the intervention takes place, and the peoples do not have to see the atrocious experience of Iraq repeated in other countries.
End of Reflection.
[click images]In contrast with what is happening in Egypt and Tunisia, Libya occupies the first spot on the Human Development Index for Africa and it has the highest life expectancy on the continent. Education and health receive special attention from the State. The cultural level of its population is without a doubt the highest. Its problems are of a different sort. The population wasn’t lacking food and essential social services. The country needed an abundant foreign labour force to carry out ambitious plans for production and social development.
For that reason, it provided jobs for hundreds of thousands of workers from Egypt, Tunisia, China and other countries. It had enormous incomes and reserves in convertible currencies deposited in the banks of the wealthy countries from which they acquired consumer goods and even sophisticated weapons that were supplied exactly by the same countries that today want to invade it in the name of human rights.
The colossal campaign of lies, unleashed by the mass media, resulted in great confusion in world public opinion. Some time will go by before we can reconstruct what has really happened in Libya, and we can separate the true facts from the false ones that have been spread.
[click image]How was Libya doing under the rule of Gaddafi? How bad did the people have it? Were they oppressed as we now commonly accept as fact? Let us look at the facts for a moment.
Before the chaos erupted, Libya had a lower incarceration rate than the Czech republic. It ranked 61st. Libya had the lowest infant mortality rate of all of Africa. Libya had the highest life expectancy of all of Africa. Less than 5% of the population was undernourished. In response to the rising food prices around the world, the government of Libya abolished ALL taxes on food.
People in Libya were rich. Libya had the highest gross domestic product (GDP) at purchasing power parity (PPP) per capita of all of Africa. The government took care to ensure that everyone in the country shared in the wealth. Libya had the highest Human Development Index of any country on the continent. The wealth was distributed equally. In Libya, a lower percentage of people lived below the poverty line than in the Netherlands.
How does Libya get so rich? The answer is oil. The country has a lot of oil, and does not allow foreign corporations to steal the resources while the population starves, unlike countries like Nigeria, a country that is basically run by Shell.President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's 34-year-old car has been sold for nearly $2.5 million at an auction to raise money for a low-income housing project.
ISNA's report Tuesday doesn't identify the buyer, but quotes the individual's lawyer, Mamoud Isari, as saying the buyer plans to build a museum and exhibit the car.
The 1977 white Peugeot sedan was put up for auction in January in a move by the president to [help] fulfill a campaign promise to put a roof over the head of every Iranian.
No one has to "marry" anyone else politically; no one has to embrace every tenet or belief that an anti-imperialist ally might hold. You simply have to say: "All of us, regardless of our other views, believe this truth to be self-evident: dismantling the empire will bring immediate and enormous benefits to our nation and to the world."
If in your travels you meet the Buddha, throw him through your tv set.
—Davis Fleetwood
I've found that culture, however useful and important, is neither the foundation nor the ceiling of human experience, even if it is commonly used for walls.
I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family. So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States. —Hillary Clinton
