Daily Kos

Overnight News Digest: Ecuador to U.S. - Get Out, Go Home

by Magnifico

Sun Apr 20, 2008 at 08:58:32 PM PDT

Top Story

  • NYT - Ecuador's Leader Purges Military and Moves to Expel American Base

    Chafing at ties between American intelligence agencies and Ecuadorean military officials, President Rafael Correa is purging the armed forces of top commanders and pressing ahead with plans to cast out more than 100 members of the American military from an air base here in this coastal city.

    Mr. Correa - who this month dismissed his defense minister, army chief of intelligence and commanders of the army, air force and joint chiefs - said that Ecuador's intelligence systems were "totally infiltrated and subjugated to the C.I.A." He accused senior military officials of sharing intelligence with Colombia, the Bush administration's top ally in Latin America...

    The gambit... poses a clear challenge to the United States. For nearly a decade, the base here in Manta has been the most prominent American military outpost in South America and an important facet of the United States' drug-fighting efforts.

USA

  • NYT - Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

    In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded "the gulag of our times" by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

    The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

    To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as "military analysts" whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

    Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

    The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

  • Independent - Pentagon propoganda over torture and Iraq revealed

    The Pentagon and the US media have been exposed for using pre-programmed "military analysts" to win hearts and minds of Americans over the war in Iraq, torture and detentions in Guantanamo Bay.

    Kenneth Allard, an NBC military analyst and teacher at National Defence University, described the propaganda exercise as a "coherent, active," sophisticated information operation."

    "Night and day, I felt we'd been hosed," he said.

    The New York Times revealed that close ties exist between the Bush administration and former senior officers who acted as paid TV analysts on CNN and other channels. The analysts have received private briefings, trips and access to classified intelligence to influence their comments.

    Robert Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, told the newspaper, "It was them (the Bush administration) saying, 'We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you.'"

  • Guardian - Torture victim's records lost at Guantánamo, admits camp general

    The former head of interrogations at Guantánamo Bay found that records of an al-Qaida suspect tortured at the prison camp were mysteriously lost by the US military, according to a new book by one of Britain's top human rights lawyers.

    Retired general Michael Dunlavey, who supervised Guantánamo for eight months in 2002, tried to locate records on Mohammed al-Qahtani, accused by the US of plotting the 9/11 attacks, but found they had disappeared.

    The records on al-Qahtani, who was interrogated for 48 days - "were backed up ... after I left, there was a snafu and all was lost", Dunlavey told Philippe Sands QC, who reports the conversation in his book Torture Team, previewed last week by the Guardian. Snafu stands for Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.

    Saudi-born al-Qahtani was sexually taunted, forced to perform dog tricks and given enemas at Guantánamo.

  • NYT - Ethics Law Isn’t Without Its Loopholes

    The optimistically named Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 was supposed to prevent lobbyists from securing undue influence by taking members of Congress to intimate dinners at fancy restaurants.

    But former Senator John B. Breaux, Democrat of Louisiana, said lobbyists had already come up with a way around the new law. They can make a political contribution to a member of Congress, and then have the member pay for the meal.

    "If we call it a campaign contribution, that makes it legal," Mr. Breaux said. "I can’t buy a $20 breakfast for a senator whom I’ve known for years, but I can give him a $1,000 campaign contribution."

    Starting Monday, Washington lobbyists must file detailed quarterly reports of their activities. In recent weeks, they have been hiring lawyers and going to seminars to decipher the law, passed in response to scandals involving the lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

    But even as they try to figure out what the law requires, lobbyists are working to preserve the access and influence they have in Congress and at federal agencies.

  • WaPo - Researchers Fear Southern Fence Will Endanger Species Further

    The debate over the fence the United States is building along its southern border has focused largely on the project's costs, feasibility and how well it will curb illegal immigration. But one of its most lasting impacts may well be on the animals and vegetation that make this politically fraught landscape their home.

    Some wildlife researchers have grown so concerned about the consequences of bisecting hundreds of miles of rugged habitat that they have talked of engaging in civil disobedience to block the fence's construction.

    "This wall is so asinine, and so wrong, I am one of a dozen scientists ready to lay our bodies down in front of tractors," Healy Hamilton, who directs the Center for Biodiversity Research and Information at the California Academy of Sciences, told colleagues at a recent scientific retreat here. "This is one thing we might be able to stop."

Europe

  • NYT - Russians to Shut Reactor That Produces Bomb Fuel

    Russia’s state nuclear energy corporation is expected to switch off a nuclear reactor on Sunday in a closed city in Siberia. The reactor has been producing weapons-grade plutonium for four decades, a senior American nonproliferation official said Saturday.

    The reactor, ADE-4, is one of two in the city of Seversk that have been extraneous remnants of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons program since the cold war. For 15 years, they produced plutonium that the Kremlin neither needed nor wanted.

  • BBC News - Greek farmers clash with migrants

    Fighting has erupted in Southern Greece between strawberry farmers and migrant workers striking for higher pay.

    According to a Greek trades union support the migrants, about 400 were attacked by farmers and what were described as "hired thugs". Three trade unionists were hurt and one farmer was arrested, police say.

    The clashes occurred in an area hit by last year's fires, and where slave labour conditions for fruit pickers have recently been revealed. The fighting took place in the village square of Neo Manolada in the province of Ilia - which produces 90% of Greece's strawberries, and whose agriculture was ruined during the fires.

  • DW-World - Germany's Politicians Wary About Video Surveillance in Homes

    The German government plans to further tighten controversial anti-terror laws. Social Democrats and opposition politicians are concerned.

    Opposition is growing against the government's plans to expand Germany's anti-terror legislation. Top Social Democratic legal expert Klaus-Uwe Benneter called the bill a "collection of barbarities out of all the states' police legislation," in an interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper over the weekend.

    "The last word has not yet been spoken," he warned, saying that the bill would be closely scrutinized.

    The amended anti-terror legislation would allow the Federal Crime Office (BKA) to plant bugs and video cameras and secretly record activities not merely in the homes of terror suspects, but also in those of people they associate with.

  • Reuters - France's Sarkozy fights to regain reform momentum

    French President Nicolas Sarkozy, sinking in the opinion polls and facing growing economic problems, is trying to get his reform agenda back on track after weeks of government infighting and policy confusion.

    With approval ratings at record lows, a fractious cabinet and a worsening economic climate, Sarkozy is counting on a televised address on Thursday to restore momentum.

    Just under a year after his triumphant election in May 2007, the climate has changed starkly for his centre-right government. Discord among ministers, grumbling by rank and file members of parliament and a series of missteps over issues ranging from family benefits to genetically modified crops had made "couac" ("wrong note") the newspapers' favourite word in recent weeks.

  • IHT - An orchestra wearing earplugs?

    They had rehearsed the piece only once, but already the musicians at the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra were suffering. Their ears were ringing. Heads throbbed.

    Tests showed that the average noise level in the orchestra during the piece, "State of Siege," by the composer Dror Feiler, was 97.4 decibels, just below the level of a pneumatic drill and a violation of new European noise-at-work limits. Playing more softly or wearing noise-muffling headphones were rejected as unworkable.

    So instead of having its world premiere April 4, the piece was dropped. "I had no choice," said Trygve Nordwall, the orchestra's manager. "The decision was not made artistically; it was made for the protection of the players." ...

    Across Europe, musicians are being asked to wear decibel-measuring devices and to sit behind see-through anti-noise screens. Companies are altering their repertories. And conductors are reconsidering the definition of "fortissimo."

Africa

  • NYT - Human Wave Flees Violence in Zimbabwe

    In what South Africa’s biggest daily newspaper is calling "Mugabe’s Tsunami," a wave of more than 1,000 people every day who are fleeing Zimbabwe across the Limpopo to escape into South Africa.

    When a shallow, glassy river and a few coils of razor wire are the only things separating one of Africa’s most developed countries from one of its most miserable, the inevitable result is millions of illegal border jumpers. But South African and Zimbabwean human rights groups say that the flow of people into South Africa has been surging in the three weeks since Zimbabwe’s disputed election and during the violent crackdown that followed. One Zimbabwean named Washington, who goes back and forth across the border ferrying Super Sure cake flour and Blazing Beef potato snacks, said the government was now using food as a weapon and channeling much of the United Nations-donated grain to supporters of the ruling party."As we speak," he said, "people are starving."

  • Independent - Nigerians call for boycott of BA after deportation

    More than 1,000 Nigerians have backed a call to boycott British Airways unless it apologises to 136 passengers who were ordered off a flight to Lagos after they complained about the forced deportation of a man on board.

    A British Airways captain made the extraordinary decision to clear the whole of economy class on an aircraft due to take off from Heathrow in response to concern from travellers that security men were manhandling a man who was pleading not to be removed from the UK.

    The man, who was thought to be about 30, was being held down in his seat by four or five police officers as the other passengers filed on board, and was crying out in broken English that he was afraid he would die if he were sent back to Nigeria.

  • Guardian - Banks meet over 80 billion dollar plan to harness power of Congo river and double Africa's electricity

    Seven African governments and the world's largest banks and construction firms meet in London today to plan the most powerful dam ever conceived - an $80bn (£40bn) hydro power project on the Congo river which, its supporters say, could double the amount of electricity available on the continent.

    G8 and some African governments hope that the Grand Inga dam in the Democratic Republic of Congo will generate twice as much electricity as the world's current largest dam, the Three Gorges in China, and jump start industrial development on the continent, bringing electricity to hundreds of million of people.

    But while governments and banks expect the dam to export electricity as far away as South Africa, Nigeria and Egypt, and even Europe and Israel, environment groups and local people warned that it could bypass the most needy and end up as Africa's most ruinous white elephant, consigning one of the poorest countries to mountainous debts.

Middle East

  • LA Times - More than 50 killed in clashes in Iraq

    The U.S. military in Iraq announced today that at least 59 Shiite militants were killed in clashes over the weekend as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice blamed Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr's militia for violence in Baghdad and the southern port city of Basra.

    Rice, on an unannounced visit to the Iraqi capital, praised the Iraqi government for taking on Sadr's Mahdi Army fighters the day after the cleric warned that continued operations against his militia would spark open warfare. Her trip to Baghdad's high-security Green Zone, where the Iraqi government and the U.S. Embassy are located, was punctuated by at least three rocket attacks from eastern Baghdad, a stronghold of Sadr's. One explosion came just minutes before she unveiled a plaque to U.S. Embassy employees who had died in Iraq.

  • WaPo - Sadr Warns Of 'Open War' If Crackdown Is Not Halted

    Anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr threatened Saturday to launch an all-out war against the U.S.-backed Iraqi government if it continues a widespread crackdown on his followers.

    In a statement brimming with his most bellicose language in months, Sadr said he was issuing a "final warning" to the government to end the campaign against Shiite militias that has cost hundreds of lives since it began last month. If not, Sadr said, he would declare an "open war until liberation."

    A full-blown uprising by Sadr's Mahdi Army militia would be a major setback to the security improvements in Iraq over the past year, credited largely to his cease-fire order last summer. The Mahdi Army, which waged two bloody rebellions against U.S. troops in 2004, has shown in the past how quickly it can gather thousands of fighters.

  • WaPo - Revisiting a War That's Seldom Discussed

    Soon after war unexpectedly broke out on the border between Israel and Lebanon in the summer of 2006, Yariv Mozer, then a 28-year-old Israeli reservist, was called up to the front. With him, he took his rifle and his video camera.

    As rockets rained down from Hezbollah guerrillas and as Israeli tanks furiously shot back into the distant hills, Mozer kept the camera tied around his neck with a shoelace.

    He videotaped as his fellow troops scurried for cover from incoming fire, as ambulances bearing the wounded raced to the hospital, and as disenchantment grew over a misguided battle plan that left the soldiers feeling, as one tells Mozer's camera, like "somebody fooled us."

    The result, a documentary that previewed this month, is offering Israel an unusual chance to remember a war that it would rather forget.

  • Independent - Saudi women appeal for legal freedoms

    students behind a locked door that will remain that way until male guardians come to collect them. Later, in a female-run business, everyone must vacate the premises so a delivery man can drop off a package. In Jeddah, a 40-year-old divorced woman cannot board a plane without the written permission of her 23-year-old son. Elsewhere, a female doctor cannot leave the house at all as her male driver fails to turn up for work. These scenes make up the daily reality for half of the Saudi Kingdom, the only country where women legally belong to men.

    After more than a decade of lobbying, the New York-based group Human Rights Watch (HRW) has finally been granted access to Saudi Arabia, where it has uncovered a disturbing picture of women forced to live as children, denied basic rights and confined to a suffocating dependency on men.

South Asia

  • WaPo - U.S.-Trained Commandos Force Plays Growing Role in Fighting Insurgents in Afghanistan

    The creation of a 4,000-strong Afghan commando force marks a major evolution for U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan. After small teams of Green Berets spearheaded the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001, they took the lead in combat, with the disparate Afghan militia forces they trained and paid playing a supporting role. Today, by contrast, the Special Forces advisers are putting the Afghan commandos in the lead -- coaching a self-reliant force that U.S. commanders say has emerged as a key tool against insurgents.

    Three of six planned Afghan army commando battalions -- with 640 commandos each -- have begun operations over the past five months. U.S. commanders say hurdles remain, from basic logistical issues such as teaching the commandos to conserve water to the larger challenge of ensuring that they are well integrated into the regular Afghan army. Still, the program is a bright spot in the broader effort to train Afghan security forces, a crucial aspect of the NATO and U.S.-led strategy to stabilize Afghanistan -- one that is slowed by a shortage of thousands of trainers and recruits as well as equipment problems.

    The new approach also offers the prospect of relief for the Special Forces, strained by years of deployments in Afghanistan, commanders say. At any one time, more than 2,000 Special Forces soldiers and support personnel are on the ground, many operating in 12-man teams partnered with Afghan forces in the country's most troubled districts.

  • LA Times - In the Himalayas, a climate-change calamity builds

    High in the Himalayas, above this peaceful valley where farmers till a patchwork of emerald-green fields, an icy lake fed by melting glaciers waits to become a "tsunami from the sky."

    The lake is swollen dangerously past normal levels, thanks to the global warming that is causing the glaciers to retreat at record speed. But no one knows when the tipping point will come and the lake can take no more, bursting its banks and sending torrents of water crashing into the valley below...

    Like many poor countries, isolated Bhutan is paying for the environmental damage wreaked by the developed world and the expanding economies of nations such as China and India, whose fossil-fuel consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions are pushing global temperatures relentlessly upward.

    But the added, perhaps more bitter, irony here is that Bhutan probably has done more to safeguard its environment than almost any other country.

  • NYT - Pakistani Parliament Will Consider Reinstating Judges Dismissed by Musharraf

    Pakistan’s new government plans to present a resolution in Parliament calling for judges fired by President Pervez Musharraf when he imposed emergency rule in November to be restored to power, party and government officials said Sunday. It would be the first major legislative challenge to Mr. Musharraf by the new government.

    Khawaja Muhammad Asif, the petroleum minister and a member of Parliament for the faction of the Pakistan Muslim League party led by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, said the resolution would be presented by Friday. On Sunday evening, he said that coalition government leaders would meet Monday to complete it.

    The resolution would call for the reinstatement of about 60 judges to the Supreme Court and provincial high courts. The issue has become a matter of immense public anticipation in Pakistan, not least because the reinstatement of the judges, including the return as chief justice of Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, could threaten Mr. Musharraf’s legitimacy and political survival.

  • NYT - U.S. Military Seeks to Widen Pakistan Raids

    American commanders in Afghanistan have in recent months urged a widening of the war that could include American attacks on indigenous Pakistani militants in the tribal areas inside Pakistan, according to United States officials.

    The requests have been rebuffed for now, the officials said, after deliberations in Washington among senior Bush administration officials who fear that attacking Pakistani radicals may anger Pakistan’s new government, which is negotiating with the militants, and destabilize an already fragile security situation.

    American commanders would prefer that Pakistani forces attack the militants, but Pakistani military operations in the tribal areas have slowed recently to avoid upsetting the negotiations.

Asia-Pacific

  • NYT - Protests of the West Spread in China

    Nationwide demonstrations against a French supermarket chain spread on Sunday as thousands of people protested what they said was France’s sympathy for pro-Tibetan agitators. The protesters have also been singling out Western news outlets, especially CNN, for what they said was biased coverage of unrest in Tibet.

    In a sign that the government was still allowing anti-foreign sentiment to spill over into rare street demonstrations, thousands of people rallied on Sunday in front of Carrefour markets in six cities, including two, Harbin and Jinan, where there had not been protests earlier. Demonstrators carried banners saying, "Oppose Tibet Independence" and "Condemn CNN," according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

    The rallies are the largest public outpouring of nationalistic fury since 2005, when tens of thousands of people took to the streets to denounce Japanese textbooks that omitted any mention of Japan’s wartime atrocities in China.

  • Reuters - China launches education drive in Lhasa, warns citizens

    China's Communist Party has launched a two-month political education campaign in Tibet's restive capital Lhasa to attack pro-independence sentiment and support for the Dalai Lama...

    In a bid to reinforce control over Lhasa, Party authorities have launched an education drive focused on officials and Party members, the official Tibet Daily reported on Monday.

    The campaign to "fight separatism, protect stability and promote development" would focus on "unifying the thinking and cohesive strength of officials and the masses, deepening the struggle against separatism, and counter-attacking the separatist plots of the Dalai clique," said the paper.

  • Canadian Press - Bomb explodes near busy market in southern Thailand, wounding 13 people

    A bomb exploded Sunday near a busy market in Thailand's insurgency-wrecked south, wounding 13 people, police said.

    Suspected Muslim insurgents planted the homemade bomb in a metal garbage can in front of a security checkpoint near an outdoor market in Yala province's downtown area, police Lt. Gen. Adul Sangsingkaew said.

    The blast wounded 13 people, including two police officials and a four-year-old Muslim boy, Adul said, adding that the number of suspected insurgents involved in the attack remained unclear.

  • BBC News - Indonesians demand ban on minority Muslim sect

    About 2,000 people have gathered in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, to protest against a minority Muslim sect, the Ahmadiyya community.

    Speakers outside the presidential palace demanded the group be banned. That was what a government panel recommended last week, saying the Ahmadiyya's beliefs went against Islam as practised in Indonesia. But the Ahmadiyya argue that, like other minorities, they are protected under the Indonesian constitution.

    The Ahmadis believe their own founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who died in 1908 in India, was a prophet. That contradicts the belief of most Muslims, who think the Prophet Muhammad was the last prophet. The Ahmadiyya face persecution in many countries.

  • Canadian Press - Malaysia plans new 'rice bowl' policy amid fears of food shortages

    Malaysia's prime minister has announced plans to increase food security by growing rice on a massive scale in a state on Borneo island amid fears of shortages caused by the global food crisis.

    The US$1.29 billion allocated for the plan will also be used to increase cultivation of fruits and vegetables, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi announced.

    Abdullah's announcement Saturday came weeks after his government took a massive beating in general elections because of public dissatisfaction over social and political issues. However, anger over rising prices of food and fuel also contributed to his government's unpopularity.

  • AFP - Japan and South Korea resume summits after chill

    South Korea's new President Lee Myung-Bak on Monday opened talks in Japan, marking a resumption of mutual visits between the neighbouring countries after a long chill.

    Lee, on the second leg of his first foreign trip that also took him to the United States, started a summit with Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda that was expected to focus on North Korea's nuclear drive, Japanese officials said. Lee's predecessor Roh Moo-Hyun visited Japan in December 2004 under an agreement between the two nations for "shuttle diplomacy" of two summits a year, one in each country.

    But Roh cancelled another trip a year later after then Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi visited a controversial war shrine.

  • Guardian - Australian ideas summit renews call for republic

    Pushing ahead with plans to become a republic, having a declaration of Aboriginal rights written into the constitution and an opt-out system for organ donations were among the ideas put forward by leading Australians at a summit in Canberra at the weekend.

    Some 1,002 delegates, described by the prime minister, Kevin Rudd, as Australia's best and brightest minds, produced the mixed bag of policy proposals during a two-day brainstorming session designed to map out the country's future.

    The most popular suggestion was for the country to fast-track plans to sever its constitutional ties with Britain. Under plans put forward to the summit, Australians would vote in two years' time on whether to replace the Queen as head of state. Australia last held a referendum on the subject in 1999.

  • SMH - British nuclear test photos challenge official findings

    Ken Palmer and Michael Rowe remember being on HMAS Murchison as naive 18-year-old national servicemen almost 60 years ago, while it was patrolling the West Australian coast near the Monte Bello Islands.

    The day was October 3, 1952, and they were ordered on deck, wearing what Mr Rowe remembers as "standard navy uniform" - shorts, thongs and no shirt - to witness Britain's first detonation of an atomic bomb.

    Since then, the Department of Defence has told them they were never on the Murchison and, lately, that the ship was too far away to be affected by the blast.

    When health care assistance was awarded in 2006 to all participants in the British atomic bomb tests, Mr Palmer and Mr Rowe were told they did not qualify because they were not at the site of the blast.

    Now they and nine other members of the ship's crew are ready to lobby the Government with evidence of their claim: previously unpublished photographs taken by Mr Rowe from the decks on the day of the explosion, showing the bomb's mushroom cloud.

Americas

  • NYT - Cleric Wins Paraguay’s Presidency, Ending a Party’s 62-Year Rule

    A former Roman Catholic bishop and self-styled champion of the poor on Sunday broke the 62-year grip on the presidency by the ruling party here, the longest-serving political party in the world.

    The former bishop, Fernando Lugo, who resigned from the church two years ago to run, was leading with 41 percent of the vote, over Blanca Ovelar de Duarte, with 31 percent, with 92 percent of the votes counted, according to unofficial results. Shortly before 9 p.m., Mrs. Ovelar, the candidate for the National Republican Association, known as the Colorado Party, conceded defeat.

    Mr. Lugo, 56, will be the first Paraguayan president since 1946 not to be from the Colorado Party. "Today we’ve written a new chapter in our nation’s political history," he said late Sunday.

    No other country had had a political party with a longer hold on the presidency than the Colorados, as they are called, not even the Kim family’s Communist dynasty in North Korea.

  • El Nuevo Herald - Ex-Colombian congresswoman says she was bribed
    A former Colombian congresswoman says she was offered special benefits to vote in favor of a reform to help President Alvaro Uribe's reelection bid.

    A former Colombian congresswoman whose vote was key to approving a constitutional reform that cleared the way for President Alvaro Uribe's reelection bid in 2006 claims she was offered certain benefits for her ballot, in apparent violation of Colombian law.

    Yidis Medina said in a previously unseen 2004 video that Uribe, then-Interior Minister Sabas Pretelt and Alberto Velásquez, then secretary general of the presidency, offered her ''whatever she wanted'' in exchange for her vote favoring the reelection.

    According to Medina, 17 other congressional representatives were also approached with similar offers.

    The granting of special benefits to congressional representatives in exchange for votes has been standard practice throughout the history of the Colombian Congress.

    But a 2003 constitutional amendment backed by Uribe outlawed the practice.

  • Independent - Five Chilean officers indicted for killing of British priest in 1973

    Five high-ranking retired navy officers were accused today of abducting, torturing and killing a British priest and other dissidents on floating detention centres in the days following Chile's 1973 military coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power.

    Fr Michael Woodward, who held British and Chilean citizenship, was seized by security forces in the port city of Valparaiso on 16 September 1973, five days after the coup. Fr Woodward, 42, was allegedly tortured with other detainees on at least two navy ships used as detention centres and died six days later.

    He was buried in a mass grave, and his family was provided with a certificate saying he died of cardio-respiratory problems. But prosecutors believe he died from injuries sustained under torture.

    Judge Eliana Quezada said she had indicted retired Admirals Sergio Barros, Guillermo Aldoney and Adolfo Walbaum and retired navy Captains Sergio Barra and Ricardo Riesgo for the kidnapping and torture of Fr Woodward and other members of left-wing groups.

  • NYT - With Guns and Fines, Brazil Takes On Loggers

    Operation Arc of Fire [is] the Brazilian government’s tough campaign to deter illegal destruction of the Amazon forest. It is intended to send a message that the government is serious about protecting the world’s largest remaining rain forest, but so far it has stirred controversy for its militaristic approach to saving trees, and the initial results have been less than promising.

    The operation began in February after new satellite data showed that deforestation had spiked in the second half of 2007 after three consecutive years of declines. The new data rattled the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which has been trying to play a bigger role in discussions about global climate change amid mounting scientific evidence that some 20 percent of annual global greenhouse emissions come from the clearing of tropical forests, including the burning, decay and decomposition of the land.

    The government says it will now spend $118 million over at least the next year to crack down on illegal loggers.

  • MercoPress - Argentina; Smoke cloud engulfs Buenos Aires for 5th day

    President Cristina Fernandez surveyed more than 200 raging brush fires by air, vowing to prosecute anyone who lit the blazes that have sent smoke billowing across the capital, clouding highways and grounding jetliners.

    People must be held responsible for this," Fernandez said after riding in a helicopter Saturday over cattle ranches and farms north of Buenos Aires, where hundreds of firefighters worked with the army to extinguish the fast-moving flames.

  • CBC News - Canada's military suicide rate doubled in a year, documents show

    The suicide rate among Canada's soldiers doubled from 2006 to 2007, rising to a rate triple that of the general population, according to data obtained through access to information requests.

    Last year, the number of suicides among regular and reserve members of the Canadian Forces rose to 36, the highest in more than a decade, military police records obtained by Maj. Michel Sartori show. Sartori, a Laval University doctoral student, has been gathering information about military suicides for years. It's the subject of his thesis and a topic close to his heart, since five of his colleagues killed themselves after a tour of duty in Yugoslavia in 1994.

    He believes the rise is linked to the intensification of Canada's mission in Afghanistan when soldiers moved into the volatile southern region in 2006.

  • Globe and Mail - RCMP targeted alleged Tory spending scheme

    The RCMP raid on Conservative headquarters last week was initiated to obtain information related to an alleged scheme to exceed spending limits during the 2006 federal election, documents released yesterday confirm.

    Ronald Lamothe, the assistant chief investigator of the Office of the Commissioner of Canada Elections, was looking for correspondence, e-mails, invoices and advertising scripts, he said in an affidavit.

    He also said in the affidavit – that was given by the Conservative Party to select news media – he wanted information related to the broadcast of ads, as well as the computers used to store and create the material.

  • WaPo - From Mexico, Drug Violence Spills Into U.S.

    As President Bush meets this week with Mexican President Felipe Calderón in New Orleans, the repercussions of Mexico's battle with drug cartels are increasingly gushing into the United States, giving rise to thorny new problems for Mexican and U.S. officials, as well as the millions of people who live along the border.

    A U.S. Border Patrol agent was killed in January while chasing suspected traffickers fleeing back to Mexico, AK-47 bullets have been found a half-mile inside U.S. territory after shootouts in Mexican border towns, and wounded Mexican police have been taken to the United States for treatment at heavily guarded hospitals.

    Here in Puerto Palomas, a wind-swept desert town south of Columbus, N.M., spillover from Mexico's drug war is measured in bullet-pocked bodies. In the past year, at least 10 gunshot victims have been dumped at the border checkpoint -- taken there by friends or colleagues who believed their only hope of survival lay across the border.

    In the calculus of U.S.-Mexican border relations, the living were rushed to medical treatment -- sometimes with law enforcement escorts -- but the dead were not allowed across. Either way, the fallout from Mexico's drug war was being dropped at the doorstep of the United States.

  • LA Times - Migrants send less money back to Mexico

    The U.S. economic downturn and tightened border controls have begun to alter the rhythms of undocumented migrants who used to move back and forth with regularity, which has crimped the flow of money sent home to Mexico, one of the nation's main sources of foreign income...

    Spring is when many Mexican migrants head north in hopes of beating the intense desert heat along the border for summertime jobs in construction, landscaping and farming. But the U.S. housing downturn has dried up much of the building-related labor market, and a striking number of workers here say that, for now, they are unwilling to accept the physical and legal risks and fast-rising smugglers' fees to reach an iffy job situation on the U.S. side.

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