Month: March 2010

Sunday March 21: Confront Neo Nazis in Lower Mainland

We have received information from Anti Racist Action and other groups that a white pride/neo-nazi group is planning a rally in the Lower Mainland on March 21st, 2010. March 21st is traditionally the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Several different groups and communities have called for a gathering to let them know they are not welcome and to celebrate our diversity to oppose their hatred and bigotry.

Sunday March 21 at 11 am. Assemble at Braid Skytrain Station in New
Westminster.

The information about the white pride rally previously on facebook and websites, appears to no longer be publicly available and thus any current information cannot be confirmed either way. Nonetheless, pull em up now before they take root!

White anti racists/anti fascists especially encouraged to attend. People of colour and Indigenous peoples in particular who would like to attend as a group, No One Is Illegal will have a contingent. Email us at
noii-van@resist.ca

(submitted by SANSAD)

by JAMES COGAN

With still less than 50 percent of the votes counted in the March 7 election in Iraq, initial reports indicate that none of the major political coalitions has won an outright majority in the parliament. Instead, the election has underscored the extent of the ethno-communal divisions that the US occupation has fomented and exploited to control the country.

Turnout in the election is estimated to have been 62 percent, compared with close to 80 percent in the previous ballot in December 2005. Hundreds of thousands of people were turned away from polling stations because their names did not appear on the electoral roll. Three independent Iraqi agencies that monitored the election have reported allegations of police or troops intimidating people into voting for the State of Law coalition headed by current Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

A preliminary result is now expected to be announced on March 18. A final count is not expected until the end of the month.

So far, State of Law, which is dominated by Maliki’s Shiite-based Da’wa Party, appears to have won at least 40 percent of the vote. It is leading the polling in at least seven of Iraq’s 18 provinces, including Baghdad, where 70 of the parliament’s 325 seats are elected. In Basra, the centre of the country’s oil industry and where 24 legislators are elected, Maliki has reportedly won 63 percent of the vote. State of Law has also polled higher than its rivals in the majority Shiite-populated southern provinces of Babil, Najaf, Karbala, Wasit and Muthanna. Combined, these provinces elect 56 members of parliament.

On current trends, State of Law will be the largest faction in the parliament, holding as many as 100 seats. It has not, however, achieved its stated aim of winning broad support among the Sunni Arab population, where the armed resistance to the US occupation had been centred.

World Socialist Web Site for more

via Counter Currents

via Indus Asia Online Journal

LOS ANGELES TIMES (Editorial)

A cellphone application that guides illegal border crossers to water sends the wrong message.

Almost 6,000 migrants have died in the Arizona desert since the mid-1990s, when border enforcement in California was tightened and migration routes shifted east into barren, deadly territory. Today, migrants are 17 times more likely to die while crossing the border than they were in 1998. Despite the difficulty of making a successful crossing, people take the “Devil’s Path” because the mathematics of opportunity have not changed significantly: An immigrant with a job in the United States can earn in one hour what would be a full day’s wages in Mexico.

Various groups have tried to address this dangerous new reality. Borstar, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency’s excellent search-and-rescue program, saves hundreds of people — including 351 since October — as does Mexico’s Grupo Beta, which patrols the Mexican side of the border. And civilian groups such as Border Angels and Humane Borders leave water along the most common routes. These efforts, which skirt the politics of illegal immigration, deserve praise and additional resources.

But aiding desperate migrants who already are in the desert is one proposition, and offering assistance before they begin their trek is another. That’s why the creation of a new cellphone application that uses the global positioning system to guide migrants to caches of water that have been left for them is troubling. The Transborder Migration Tool, developed by three professors at UC San Diego and a colleague at the University of Michigan, will be installed on phones distributed by Mexican nongovernmental organizations and churches to those about to set out.

Los Angeles Times for more

(Submitted by reader)

Civil rights report shows 250% rise in ‘patriot’ groups

by CHRIS MCGREAL

US faces surge in right-wing militias

The US is facing a surge in anti-government extremist groups and armed militias, driven by deepening hostility on the right to Barack Obama, anger over the economy, and the increasing propagation of conspiracy theories by parts of the mass media such as Fox News.

The Southern Poverty Law Centre, the US’s most prominent civil rights group focused on hate organisations, said in a report that extremist “patriot” groups “came roaring back to life” last year as their number jumped nearly 250% to more than 500 with deepening ties to conservative mainstream politics.

The SPLC report, called Rage on the Right, said the rise in extremist groups was “a cause for grave concern” given their propensity to use violence during their heyday in the 90s, most notably with the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people. It added that the issues driving support for such groups were increasingly populist and that “signs of growing radicalisation are everywhere”.

“Patriot groups have been fuelled by anger over the changing demographics of the country, the soaring public debt, the troubled economy and an array of initiatives by President Obama that have been branded “socialist” or even “fascist” by his political opponents,” the report said.

Guardian for more

MALALAI JOYA talks to HUMA

Interview with the young Afghan deputy thrown out of Parliament for having exposed foreign interference in her country.

Malalai Joya is an angry woman. She’s angry about the war being carried out by the international coalition in her country, Afghanistan, angry about the UN bombs that are killing civilians in their villages, angry about calls for reconciliation with the Taliban and the war lords. “Stop the massacres in my country. Withdraw your foreign troops so we can stop Talibanization,” is what the young Afghan deputy tells Western public opinion.

Huma: The conference in London, which took place at the end of January, formalized negotiations with the Taliban. What could happen next?

Malalai Joya: Millions of dollars have been promised to the Karzai regime so that insurgents will lay down their arms: at the same time millions of Afghans are dying in poverty. This will lead to the Taliban being rehabilitated, they will take control of the Loya Jirga, the meeting of the elders and the tribal leaders which is to be held soon. Can we really expect to establish democracy with such reactionaries? The Taliban aren’t the only fundamentalists. When the USA and their allies overthrew Mullah Omar’s regime, they replaced him with the war lords and the Northern Alliance who were led by Massoud. This group resembles the Taliban in its way of thinking. Over the past few years there’s been a series of laws and judicial decisions that are scandalous. Under the pretext of national reconciliation, immunity was extended to the war lords and other known war criminals, many of whom sit in Parliament. These war lords are highly placed, they’re in the Parliament, in ministries, the judiciary and they are all corrupt. And now the UN itself is crossing off the names of the ex-Taliban leaders from their black list. Is this the way to build the future of a people? Unless you want to persuade them that the Coca-Cola plant inaugurated by Karzai in the suburbs of Kabul, in our impoverished country where water is a precious resource, should serve as an emblem of the benefits of Western progress.

Counter Currents for more

by KEANE BHATT

For decades, Noam Chomsky has been an analyst and activist working in support of the Haitian people. In addition to his revolutionary linguistics career at MIT, he has written, lectured and protested against injustice for 40 years. He is co-author, along with Paul Farmer and Amy Goodman of Getting Haiti Right This Time: The U.S. and the Coup. His analysis “The Tragedy of Haiti” from his 1993 book Year 501: The Conquest Continues is available for free online. This interview was conducted in late February 2010 by phone and email. The interviewer thanks Peter Hallward for his kind assistance. This was first published in ¡Reclama! magazine.

Keane Bhatt: Recently you signed a letter to the Guardian protesting the militarization of emergency relief. It criticized a prioritization of security and military control to the detriment of rescue and relief.

Noam Chomsky: I think there was an overemphasis in the early stage on militarization rather than directly providing relief. I don’t think it has any long-term significance…the United States has comparative advantage in military force. It tends to react to anything at first with military force, that’s what it’s good at. And I think they overdid it. There was more military force than was necessary; some of the doctors that were in Haiti, including those from Partners in Health who have been there for a long time, felt that there was an element of racism in believing that Haitians were going to riot and they had to be controlled and so on, but there was very little indication of that; it was very calm and quiet. The emphasis on militarization did probably delay somewhat the provision of relief. I went along with the general thrust of the petition that there was too much militarization.

Upside Down World for more

by ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Nothing more easily elicits roars of assent across a good slice of the political spectrum than the hoarse alarums that wave after wave of brown-skinned illegals continually flood across the border, plunging neighborhoods and whole cities into an inferno of crime, over-whelming cops and prosecutors, clogging the justice system, cramming the prisons.

Lou Dobbs is pondering a political run powered by a thousand pop-eyed commentaries catering to this fear. “A third of the prison population in this country is estimated to be illegal aliens,” he shouts. Glenn Beck screams about “an illegal alien crime wave.” The panic is by no means confined to the nutball right. Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, launching his commendable plan for a National Criminal Justice Commission last year, invoked the specter of organized Mexican gangs that supposedly threaten “hundreds” of American cities. “There are an estimated 1 million gang members in the United States, many of them foreign-based,” Webb wrote. “Every American neighborhood is vulnerable. Gangs commit 80% of the crime in some locations. Mexican cartels, which are military-capable, have operations in 230+ U.S. cities.”

It’s all nonsense. There’s no crime wave swollen by brown gangbangers to city-destroying proportions. If you want a lucid walk through the data you can turn to … The American Conservative, whose March issue features a cover story by the magazine’s publisher, Ron Unz. There’s a photo of a tattooed gangbanger, and the title -“HisPANIC,” then the subtitle: “The Myth of Immigrant Crime.”

Yes, this is the magazine co-founded by Pat Buchanan, whose physical form I last clapped eyes on at the Republican convention in the Houston Astrodome in 1992, roaring to a climactic fist-shake against the black and brown hordes who had recently rioted in Los Angeles: “We must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country!”

Counterpunch for more

SF parliament member addressed Turkish politicians in Kurdish, urging more economic reforms for the eastern part of the Euro-Asian country

MP Özlem Sara Cekic of the Socialist People’s Party travelled to Ankara this week with the aim of challenging Turkey’s political leaders on the issues of Kurdistan and women’s rights.

Cekic was a guest speaker on Tuesday for a conference in connection with International Women’s Rights Day at the headquarters of government-leading party AKP. She was also scheduled to meet with Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday.

In addition to raising criticism of the Turkish government’s record with regard to the nation’s Kurdish population and women’s rights, she held her speech in Kurdish – a language spoken by around 18 percent of the Turkish population but not recognised as an official one.

Cekic, whose family originally hails from Ankara, told Turkish newspaper Today’s Zaman that Turkey has come a long way in its treatment of the Kurds.

She also addressed the country’s high unemployment, widespread poverty and the lack of education among the general population, adding the country’s ongoing battle with internal terrorism is an economic one.

‘If we want to solve the terror problem then we should bring education and jobs to the east. When we eliminate the poverty then there will be no reason for people to take up arms and fight from the mountaintops,’ she told Today’s Zaman.

Copenhagen Post for more

A study with young ro­dents shows re­peat­ed an­es­the­sia wipes out mem­o­ry-forming brain cells, sci­en­tists say.

The re­sults sug­gest chil­dren may al­so suf­fer learn­ing and mem­o­ry im­pair­ments after re­peat­edly be­ing put out of con­scious­ness to un­dergo surg­eries, ac­cord­ing to the re­search­ers. But plen­ty of ex­er­cise may help un­do the dam­age, they not­ed.

Adult an­i­mals weren’t found to suf­fer long-term im­pair­ment from an­es­the­sia.

The stu­dy, from the Uni­vers­ity of Goth­en­burg, Swe­den, is pub­lished in the Jour­nal of Cer­e­bral Blood Flow & Me­tab­o­lism.

Anes­thet­ics are typ­ic­ally ad­min­is­tered to pa­tients by in­hala­t­ion, in­jec­tion or both be­fore sig­nifi­cant sur­geries. Pa­tients then fall asleep, re­lax their mus­cles and feel no pain. Of­ten sev­er­al dif­fer­ent drugs are giv­en at once; they take about 15 to 20 sec­onds to work, de­pend­ing on when the an­es­thet­ic reaches the brain.

“Pe­di­atric anes­thetists have long sus­pected that chil­dren who are anes­thetised re­peat­edly over the course of just a few years may suf­fer from im­paired mem­o­ry and learn­ing,” said Goth­en­burg re­search­er Klas Blom­gren.

His re­search team ac­ci­den­tally disco­vered a link be­tween re­peat­ed an­es­the­sia and loss of key stem cells that ma­ture in­to mem­o­ry-forming cells. The group was stu­dying what hap­pens to stem cells ex­posed to strong mag­net­ic fields, as dur­ing a brain scan.

World Science for more