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By Deepa Kumar

Barack Obama’s Cairo speech heralds a shift from the Islamophobic rhetoric of the Bush regime, but not from the long-term aims of the U.S. empire.

Predictably, Barak Obama’s speech in Cairo came under hysterical criticism from the right. Sean Hannity screamed that Obama gave “sympathizers of 9/11” a voice on the world stage, Charles Krauthammer derided the apologetic tone, and Sen. James Inhofe called it “un-American.” At the same time, Bill O’Reilly called the speech a “big success,” and David Horowitz wrote that conservatives should support Obama on this.

What explains this strange schizophrenia among conservatives?
At root, Obama’s Cairo speech heralds a decisive shift in the rhetoric of U.S. imperialism. It marks a recognition that the virulent Islamophobic rhetoric of the Bush regime has failed and that it is necessary to begin a process of rebuilding the U.S.’s image in Muslim-majority countries.

But if the speech marked a rhetorical shift, it did not chart new ground in terms of U.S. foreign policy. Instead, it signals the reemergence of liberal imperialism, packaged deftly and skillfully through the person of Barack Hussein Obama.

Sections of the conservative bloc recognize the need for this shift. 9/11 presented the neoconservatives with an alibi to unleash their vision of U.S. foreign policy. They seized this unprecedented opportunity to launch a program that would reshape the Middle East and establish a new Pax Americana. Ideas that were considered off the wall by the Bush Sr. and Clinton administrations, such as the “clash of civilizations” thesis, became dominant.

So all-encompassing were these ideas that even sections of the left accepted the notion that Muslim-majority nations were mired in backwardness and that these nations, as well as domestic Muslim communities, needed to be modernized by an enlightened West (note, for instance, the arguments about bringing democracy to Iraq, banning the hijab under the guise of secularism, etc.). The lack of a principled anti-racist position within the mainstream antiwar movement then had serious consequences for Arabs and Muslims.

It is therefore important that we begin our assessment of Obama’s speech by acknowledging the shift away from Islamophobic rhetoric.
Rejecting the “clash of civilizations” argument, Obama emphasized the shared common history and common aspirations of the East and West. Whereas the “clash” discourse sees the West and the world of Islam as mutually exclusive and polar opposites, Obama emphasized “common principles.” He spoke of “civilization’s debt to Islam” because it “pav[ed] the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment,” and acknowledged the contributions made by Muslims to the development of science, medicine, navigation, architecture, calligraphy, and music.
Obama then took on many of the myths that became commonplace after 9/11. Breaking with the notion that Islam is inherently violent, Obama emphasized, several times, Islam’s history of tolerance. He quoted from the Koran to show that Islam does not accept violence against innocent people and pointed to the tolerance shown by Muslims in Spain during the violent period of the Christian Inquisition.
He observed that Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey, and Pakistan — all Muslim-majority states — had elected women to leadership roles and added that “the struggle for women’s equality continues in many aspects of American life.” He thus cast aside the notion that the enlightened West inherently recognizes women’s rights.

He rejected the widely held view that women who wear the veil are “less equal,” stating that this should be a woman’s choice. And he argued against actions taken by Western nations to dictate what Muslim women should wear, stating: “We cannot disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism.”

Obama subtly acknowledged the U.S.’s double standards. He admitted that the U.S. had acted contrary to its “ideals” by instituting torture. He also noted that one nation should not pick and choose who should have nuclear weapons, a reference to the U.S.’s opposition to Iranian nuclear ambitions and its lack of criticism of Israel’s nuclear arsenal.

He further admitted to the U.S. role in the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953 and to the ways that colonialism and the Cold War thwarted aspirations in other parts of the world. Marking a shift from the traditional one-sided emphasis on Israel’s problems, he described the Palestinians as a dispossessed people.

Yet as significant as these comments are in challenging the racist and Islamophobic rhetoric under the Bush regime, Obama’s policy in the Middle East and South Asia does not signal a break with the policies of previous administrations. While there are minor points of difference with the Bush administration, Obama’s foreign policy stays within the broader framework of US imperial aims in the region.

Consistent with previous Democratic and Republican presidents going back to 1979, Obama views Iran’s independence from, and resistance to, U.S. dominance in the region as a problem. While he has called for a halt to further settlements in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, he champions a toothless two-state solution that emerged in policy circles in the U.S. in the early 1990s — and he says nothing about dismantling existing Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
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SPACE.com Space.com Staff

A 14-year old German boy was hit in the hand by a pea-sized meteorite that scared the bejeezus out of him and left a scar.
“When it hit me it knocked me flying and then was still going fast enough to bury itself into the road,” Gerrit Blank said in a newspaper account. Astronomers have analyzed the object and conclude it was indeed a natural object from space, The Telegraph reports.

Most meteors vaporize in the atmosphere, creating “shooting stars,” and never reach the ground. The few that do are typically made mostly of metals. Stony space rocks, even if they are big as a car, will usually break apart or explode as they crash through the atmosphere.

There are a handful of reports of homes and cars being struck by meteorites, and many cases of space rocks streaking to the surface and being found later.

But human strikes are rare. There are no known instances of humans being killed by space rocks.

According to a SPACE.com article on the topic a few years, back:
• On November 30, 1954, Alabama housewife Ann Hodges was taking a nap on her couch when she was awakened by a 3-pound (1.4-kilogram) meteor that crashed through the roof of her house, bounced off a piece of furniture and struck her in the hip, causing a large bruise.
• On October 9, 1992, a large fireball was seen streaking over the eastern United States, finally exploding into many pieces. In Peekskill, New York, one of the pieces struck a Chevrolet automobile owned by Michelle Knapp. Knapp was not in the car at the time.
• On June 21, 1994, Jose Martin of Spain was driving with his wife near Madrid when a 3-pound (1.4-kilogram) meteor crashed through his windshield, bent the steering wheel and ended up in the back seat.

In 2004, a 2,000-pound space rock bigger than a refrigerator exploded in the late-night sky over Chicago, producing a large flash and a sound resembling a detonation that woke people up. Fragments rained down on that wild Chicago night, and many were collected by residents in a northern suburb.

Space for more

By PETER MWAURA (Daily Nation)

It is a classical case of the pot calling the kettle black. That is, MPs in Kenya condemning China, as they did in an emotional outburst last week, for the sentencing of five Kenyans to death for drug trafficking and jailing at least 20 others to lengthy terms, ranging from 10 years to life.

Both countries have some of the most primitive punishment regimes for drugs crimes. They belong to a league of some 20 nations where if you are found with even a small amount of narcotics d you are liable to draconian punishment. These include Singapore, Malaysia, Iran, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

In Malaysia a mandatory death penalty is meted out to anyone caught with seven ounces of marijuana or half an ounce of heroin. In Saudi Arabia, drug traffickers get the same punishment as murderers and rapists — public beheading. In Iran, people caught with a few grammes of marijuana can be sentenced to receive up to 70 lashes.
In China, anyone caught trafficking 50 grammes or more of heroin is likely to be sentenced to life imprisonment or death. In Kenya, the situation is not significantly better. The punishment for trafficking hard drugs is life imprisonment and a fine of Sh1 million, or three times the market value of the drug, whichever is greater.

In China, the death sentence is normally pronounced as “death with two years’ probation”, and is generally reduced to life imprisonment at the end of the probation. That makes the sentence, for all practical purposes, the same as that prescribed by the Kenyan law. It is even lighter in the sense that it is not accompanied by a fine.

In Kenya, parliament passed in 1994 the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (Control) Act, which provides for the drastic and unbending punishment with no regard for rehabilitation, age, whether one is a first offender or why one uses drugs or traffics in drugs. Under the heavy-handed law, any person found with cannabis sativa (bhang) is sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. If one is found with any amount hard drugs such as heroin, the sentence is 20 years.
The punishment is even harsher for cultivating any of the prohibited plants, including cannabis. A person is liable to a fine of Sh250,000 or three times the market value of the prohibited plant, whichever is greater, or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 20 years, or to both such fine and imprisonment. He also forfeits the land to the government.

Bad laws are like young chicken; they always come home to roost. Foreign minister Moses Wetang’ula has the embarrassingly moral task of convincing the Chinese that they should treat Kenyan drug offenders differently from others such as Ugandans, Zambians, Zimbabweans, Beninese and Nigerians who have also been imprisoned for life or lengthy terms, or executed, for drug trafficking in China.
China, not surprisingly, has so far shown no mercy to Africans caught smuggling drugs in China. On April 23, 2009, for example, Chibuzor Ezekwem, a Nigerian national, was executed for trafficking despite intervention by Nigeria. Mr Wetang’ula is being overly optimistic. He told Parliament last week that he intended to visit China “to see how we can commute the death sentences to life.”

He also wants “to see how we can exchange prisoners so that they can serve sentences in Kenya.” But prison conditions in China are better than in Kenya. Mr Wetang’ula will find the Chinese testy about drugs crimes. The disposition is historical. During the mid-1800s, the use of opium and the Opium Wars fought between Britain and China when the Chinese government tried to stop British merchants from illegally importing opium hugely shaped Chinese history and thinking about drugs.

China is also encircled by narcotic drugs-producing neighbours. Traditionally, the drugs flowed to Western countries. Now they have begun to flow into China, creating many problems for the Chinese. Kenya has no such historical justification for its stringent anti-drugs law.
Daily Nation for more

In Pakistan, refugee children live with the trauma of having witnessed beheadings, yet she still finds much to beguile her.

By Jemima Khan (London Times)

Jemima at a camp for Afghan refugees in Pakistan in 2001

The day I’m leaving for Pakistan a round-robin e-mail pings into my inbox from an address I don’t recognise, Wise Pakistan. The message reads: “It is important you watch this to see what’s coming.”

Ten men are lined up and each one is filmed talking inaudibly to camera. The first man is pinned to the ground by four others. His throat is slit like a goat at Eid and his head held aloft by his hair. The Urdu subtitle reads: “This is what happens to spies.” It’s a Taliban home video — to jaunty music — of serial beheadings. There are plenty of these doing the rounds nowadays.

I’m off to Pakistan for the children’s half-term. They visit their father there every holiday. I lived in Pakistan throughout my twenties. Now it’s a different place — the most dangerous country on Earth, some say — and my friends and family are worried.

For my last four years in Pakistan we lived at the quaintly named House 10, Street 1, E7. Two months ago a bomb exploded 100 yards from the house, killing four people; about 1,500 have been killed this year in terrorist attacks.

It’s hardly a tourist destination these days so I’m surprised to find that the flights are all full. I am an aerophobe; my real fear is getting there. The only direct flight is on PIA, otherwise known as Please Inform Allah. British Airways stopped flying there after the Marriott bomb attack in Islamabad last September.

As I’m packing, my London neighbour, the comedian Patrick Kielty, drops off a parcel containing The Complete Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook with a note pointing out the pages on how to escape when tied up, how to take a bullet and how to survive if you wake up next to someone whose name you don’t remember.
I arrive in Islamabad at 3am on a Sunday. With everything that’s going on in Pakistan these days — violent civil war in the northwest, 2.5m internally displaced people, a separatist uprising in Baluchistan, a hostile neighbour, corruption, recession, inflation, unemployment — I’m surprised anyone has the energy for swine flu paranoia, particularly as Pakistan is strictly a pork-free zone.

Yet before disembarking we are obliged to fill out two forms. Recent proximity to pigs and/or Mexicans will result in an obligatory spell in quarantine. It must be the name of the virus that’s causing alarm. Pakistanis dislike pigs. Until quite recently my children thought the word for pig was “gunda-pig” (dirty pig). The wild boar in Lahore zoo is squished into a cage so minute it can’t scratch its own back and people throw stones at it.

I’m staying with Imran, my ex-husband, and our children in the house I helped to design but which we never lived in together. It’s on top of a hill outside Islamabad. The courtyard fountain is a reminder of the insanity of political life in Pakistan, even on the periphery. It’s covered in the exquisite blue and white Multani tiles that almost landed me in jail in 1999. I bought them as a present for my mother but, before they reached the port to be shipped to England, they were impounded and I was charged with smuggling antiques (they weren’t, according to Bonhams and other experts here), a non-bailable offence.

I was pregnant and scarpered to England until there was a military coup six months later by the then friendly dictator, General Musharraf. The case was dropped, the tiles were released and I returned to Pakistan with an extra child in tow.

Had I been an aspiring politician, I’d have stayed put in Pakistan. A spell in jail is a prerequisite for anyone wanting to be taken seriously in politics. My ex-husband, who heads a political party, was jailed two years ago for treason and his popularity soared, according to Gallup polls. I should have considered this when campaigning vigorously for his release.
London Times for more

By Luis Arce (World Socialist web Site)

The demonstration in Lima passes by police

A wave of mass demonstrations and marches swept across the whole of Peru Thursday in popular repudiation of the government’s massacre of Amazon Indians last week.

Indigenous people from the Amazon region, miners, Andean peasants, urban workers, including major contingents of teachers, construction workers and other sectors, were joined by university and high school students in what constituted the largest action yet against discredited three-year-old government of APRA party President Alan García.
The protests were met with police violence in various cities, including the capital of Lima.

The day of mass action expressed the outrage of masses of Peruvians over the García government’s ordering of a violent police attack June 5 against Amazon Indians who had been blockading the Fernando Belaúnde Terry highway near the northern city of Bagua. The violence left scores of people dead and hundreds wounded.

The official figures put out by the government claim that 24 police and only nine Indians were killed in the confrontation. Hospitals and religious organizations in the area, however, have reported a far higher civilian death toll, and eyewitnesses told of police burning the bodies of slain protesters and placing them in black bags and dumping them in the river. Many people remain missing. Some of the bodies that were recovered showed signs of being burned and repeatedly shot in the face after they were killed.

The demonstrators Thursday also demanded the repeal of two decrees—1090 y 1064—which set the terms for opening up the Peruvian Amazon for the exploitation of energy and mineral resources, as well as logging by transnational corporations. Marchers also called for the resignations of President Alan García, Prime Minister Yehude Simon and other members of his cabinet.

In an attempt to quell the growing popular dismay and anger over the Bagua massacre, the Peruvian Congress decided to suspend the decrees for an indefinite period. The demonstrators rejected this maneuver, demanding the outright repeal of the measures, which critics have charged are unconstitutional, because they violate regulations established by the International Labor Organization and were adopted without consultation with the indigenous people of the region.

Substantiating this claim, Peru’s Constitutional Court has accepted a case brought by the Public Defender’s Office charging that Decree 1064 is unconstitutional.

The APRA government is adamantly opposed to the repeal of the decrees, because they represent an integral part of the Free Trade Agreement signed with Washington. President García fears that the US could declare the treaty null and void, which would represent a debacle for the government’s right-wing economic policy.
In Lima more than 20,000 people began a peaceful march from the Plaza Dos de Mayo towards the congress and the government palace, the president’s residence. Among the march’s organizers were the General Confederation of Workers of Peru (CGTP), Sutep (the teachers union), student organizations and various left parties.
One of the Lima demonstrators sent the following description to the WSWS:

“At 2 pm, I arrived at Avenida Colmena at the corner of Tacna, which was heavily guarded by police. Suddenly, from Avenida Colmena, I heard the teachers of Sutep arriving.
WSWS for more

(Asahi Shimbun)

I was reminded of “Yomu Kusuri” (Medicine one reads), a column by Junichiro Uemae that ran in the weekly Shukan Bunshun magazine, while I was turning the pages of a pocket edition of a book of candid comments by young children. The kids’ comments originally appeared in the “Anone” (You know what) column of the vernacular Asahi Shimbun. Here are a few from the book, meant as mild tonics to help readers feeling the strain of adulthood.

Most adults would smile at twins dressed in matching outfits. But that is not how the children react. “Which one of them is real?” asked 4-year-old Ayane.

The world is full of mysteries. Watching her grandmother put eggplants into rice-bran paste to make nuka pickles, 4-year-old Eri asked: “Why are you hiding them?”

Children are honest to the extent of cruelty. In many cases, mothers are victims of their innocent zingers. Tomohiro, 4, who watched as his mother drove their car for a long while with a nervous look on her face, observed: “You’re driving with the eyes of a monster.”

Watching his mother apply makeup, 3-year-old Yuki asked: “Are you repairing your eyebrows?”

Two-year-old Sho, who exclaimed, “Yabai!” (oh no!) when he stepped on a scale, was apparently imitating his mom.

Some children make strange remarks that are beyond comprehension. While washing her hair by herself, 6-year-old Kyoko uttered: “My little sister will always be my little sister!”

“This marks the end of my day,” said a satisfied 5-year-old Akio while biting into a mini-ice bar after his evening bath. To the boy, perhaps that frozen treat was like the nightcap that some people sip to unwind at the end of the day.

When a friend’s balloon flew up into the sky, a mother said it was only natural to feel sorry for the balloon, but her 4-year-old daughter Kyoka said: “But the clouds will be happy.”

That girl’s upside-down view of things shares something in common with the poems of Misuzu Kaneko (1903-1930). After her daughter was not allowed to enter an authorized day care center, the mother broke down and cried. When 4-year-old Yae saw her mother’s tears, she said: “When you want others to accept you, all you have to do is say so aloud and they will let you in.” That comment brings tears to the eyes.
Four-year-old Eri clutched the billowing curtains at a window and exclaimed: “I’ve caught the wind!”

Asahi Shimbun for more

By Gila Benmayor (Hurriyet)

According to 2009 data, the number of women in Turkey subjected to violence by their husbands stands at approximately 40 percent. What Turkey’s leaders do not understand is that the state is not taking adequate measures to protect women, and laws are not implemented properly, so there are many loopholes in them.

Hurriyet for more

By JOHN MARKOFF (New York Times)

Consider it one small step — or a roll, actually — for a robot, one not giant, but significant step for robotics.

Ken Conley/Willow Garage
POWERING UP A prototype of Willow Garage’s PR2 robot recharging itself at the company’s headquarters.

Willow Garage, a Silicon Valley robotics research group, said that its experimental PR2 robot, which has wheels and can travel at speeds up to a mile and a quarter per hour, was able to open and pass through 10 doors and plug itself into 10 standard wall sockets in less than an hour. In a different test, the same robot completed a marathon in the company’s office, traveling 26.2 miles. PR2 will not compete with humans yet; it took more than four days.

For the person who wants to buy a fully functioning robot butler, this may not seem so impressive. But for roboticists and a new generation of technologists in Silicon Valley, this is a significant achievement, a step along the way to the personal robot industry.

Willow Garage was founded by Scott Hassan, one of the designers of the original Google search engine. The company’s name is a reference to a small garage on Willow Road in Menlo Park, Calif., which was Google’s first office. The company is trying to develop a new generation of robotic personal assistants. Roboticists here and at other companies envision creating something on the scale of the personal computer industry, with mechanical personal assistants taking over a lot of drudgery, from cleaning up to fetching a beer from the refrigerator.

This is not a new hope, nor is it the first time that robots have tried to open doors, navigate rooms and recharge themselves. The Beast, a robot built at Johns Hopkins University in the mid-1960s, was able to locate standard wall sockets to refuel. And devices like the inexpensive iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaner can locate and dock with a specially designed charging station.

But roboticists said that the Willow Garage robot was the first to integrate the ability to do a number of operations in a real-world environment.

Personal Robot