Sudan Becomes US Ally in 'War on Terror'

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Sudan's Islamist regime, once shunned by Washington for providing a haven for Osama bin Laden as well as for human rights abuses during decades of civil war, has become an ally in the Bush administration's "war on terror". Only months after the US accused Khartoum of carrying out genocide in Darfur, Sudan has become a crucial intelligence asset to the CIA... News of General Gosh's visit to Washington caused consternation in human rights circles. The general is among 51 Sudanese officials implicated in human rights abuses by the international criminal court. "I quite understand that the war on terrorism means dealing with bad actors, but to fly in one of Sudan's chief committers of what Washington has formally described as genocide is deeply disturbing," said an independent Sudan analyst, Eric Reeves. He noted there had been signs of a slight thaw towards Khartoum for some time - despite the state department's official stance. More.

The Disengaged: Gaza And The Fragmentation Of Palestinian Nationhood

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"It is incumbent upon us to ask ourselves what possible benefits Israel derives for itself by continuing to squeeze the Gaza Strip even after its 'Disengagement Plan.' What does it gain by promoting policies that would make the establishment of a viable Palestinian state impossible?.."

The possible planet imagined last year near the brown dwarf 2M1207A has been confirmed to be orbiting the brown dwarf. It´s mass is about five times that of Jupiter´s and it´s distance from the brown dwarf is 55 times that of Earth´s distance from our sun. This is the first confirmed image of a planet outside our own solar system. More.

Poll: Palestinians view Abu Mazen’s performance as weak

The parable of Putin's visit

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It would be almost superfluous to mention that these words "were received with astonishment and disappointment in Jerusalem" (in the Prime Minister's Office they were even "stunned"). Not that that's surprising, or unusual. Is there any development that is not received in Jerusalem "with astonishment," usually mixed with "disappointment"? Quickly, our friend "fear" joins in: "Fear was expressed in Jerusalem" that the anti-aircraft missiles that Russia will be supplying to Syria will be transferred to terror organizations in the Gaza Strip, and that these organizations will endanger civil aviation. And at the end of the march of "fear," "disappointment" and "astonishment," her majesty, "our main concern," kicked in: "The missiles will slip from the Syrians into the hands of Hezbollah, and then they will infiltrate into Gaza and will be turned into shoulder missiles and will greatly restrict the flights of the Israel Air Force in the skies of the Gaza Strip," in the words of a senior military source.

Is truth a casualty of election?

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Blair is a politician who has a great capacity for self-persuasion before he sets out to convince others. And if it becomes politically necessary he is probably quite capable of convincing himself of the continued existence of the tooth fairy and the Marie Celeste, having just run the possibilities past the Joint Intelligence Committee to ensure they cannot rule out either possibility.

Human Rights Watch says that what happened to the Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib was only the tip of an iceberg.

History lost in dust of war-torn Iraq

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Professional smugglers connected to the international antiquities mafia managed to break some of the sealed doors of the Baghdad Museum storage rooms. They looted priceless artefacts such as the museum's entire collection of cylindrical seals and large numbers of Assyrian ivory carvings. More than 15,000 objects were taken. Many were smuggled out of Iraq and offered for sale. To date, 3,000 have been recovered in Baghdad, some returned by ordinary citizens, others by the police. In addition, more than 1,600 objects have been seized in neighbouring countries, some 300 in Italy and more than 600 in the United States... The picture there is appalling. More than 150 Sumerian cities dating back to the fourth millennium BC - such as Umma, Umm al-Akkareb, Larsa and Tello - lie destroyed, turned into crater-filled landscapes of shredded pottery and broken bricks. If properly excavated, these cities - covering an estimated 20 sq km - could help us learn about the development of the human race. But the looters have destroyed the monuments of their own ancestors, erasing their own history in a tireless search for a cylinder seal, a sculpture or a cuneiform tablet that they can sell to a dealer for a few dollars. It is tough, poorly paid work carried out by jobless Iraqis with no way of earning a better income.

Sometimes you can go too far when portraying yourself humble and modest, like the new pope Benedict IX has done:

``As the trend in the ballots slowly made me realize that - in a manner of speaking the guillotine would fall on me - I started to feel quite dizzy,'' a smiling Benedict said, clearly joking. ``I thought that I had done my life's work and could now hope to live out my days in peace. I told the Lord with deep conviction, 'Don't do this to me.''' He recalled saying to God in his prayers: ``You have younger, better, more enthusiastic and energetic candidates.'' ``Evidently, this time He didn't listen to me,'' Benedict said.

Holier than thou
In the age of fame and media scrutiny the new Pope must be without sin

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It's an article of faith in the media that John Paul II died as the most famous pope there had ever been. But a fresher cause for reflection is that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, at the moment of appointment, was already more recognisable than any previous new pontiff. Usually, the new man is largely unknown to both the media and the crowd in St Peter's Square, but on this occasion background television packages on the German were ready to roll as soon as his name was announced and the face on the balcony was already familiar to international TV audiences... The German cleric's elevation has been generally interpreted as the triumph of conservative over liberal forces within the college of cardinals. But an alternative view is that the princes of the church were playing Pope Idol. Dizzied by the celebrity achieved by John Paul II, they voted for the most famous among their number: a man who, because the last pope was the first to die and be mourned in a time of live 24-hour news, had, quite improbably for a backstage Vatican theologian, become a television face.

Checkpoint for ever?

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This is happening to me more and more these days as my daily travels bring some of the concrete (literal as well as figurative) changes on the ground become clear to the eye. Traveling in the north West Bank on the road between Jericho and Tiberias one is struck with the changes happening near the former green line. The structures being built are looking more and more like a border. The problem is that the location of this new 'border' is a few kilometers inside the Palestinian area. There was a check point at the former green line and now the checkpoint has been moved inside the West Bank in parallel to the newly built structure. I have yet to hear any serious complaint about the placement of this new location deep into Palestinian lands. I am not sure whether the reason is simply lack of knowing or the fact that the Palestinian leaderships' agenda is so crowded with critical issues that some of these issues seem to fall between the cracks.

By stealing a few square kilometer there and another here and eventually - as Israel´s current plan goes - 8% of the West Bank, displacing at least 50 000 Palestinians and leaving 150 000 marooned in occupied East Jerusalem, Israel gets little in the way of plunder and much in the way of hate and future bloodshed. So little shouldn´t be the cause of so much current and future suffering.

Corpses keep coming from Iraq's river of death

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The shocking images come from Iraq's new killing fields - the small town of Madain, just 32km from Baghdad. In other times the massacre might have prompted calls for international intervention. But there are already 150,000 US and British troops in Iraq and this was done under their noses... Madain has had no police force since a mob of criminals and insurgents burned down the police station last year. The police fled. Sunni guerillas quickly took over, running the town as their own criminal fiefdom and randomly killing Shia residents, whom they considered infidels and US sympathisers. Then they launched an all-out attempt to purge the town of its Shia.

Survey of 244 glaciers in the Antarctic Peninsula during the last 50 or so years(on average the data starts from 1953), shows 87% of them in retreat. The biggest losses have come during the last 5 years. The glaciers are retreating on average 50 meters a year. Global warming - the average temperature on the area has risen by 2 degrees Celsius during the last half century - seems to be the main culprit, but shifting ocean currents maybe also a factor. Nature. BBC.

Pope Benedict XVI’s political resume: theocracy and social reaction

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The selection of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as the new pope is a clear sign that the Vatican will seek to use its influence to promote the most reactionary political forces within the ruling elites of countries around the world, particularly in Europe. Ratzinger’s long record as enforcer of Church doctrine and chief adviser to Pope John Paul II strongly indicates that as Pope Benedict XVI, he will aggressively intervene into political affairs, using issues such as abortion and homosexuality to foster the development of a social base for right-wing parties and policies. The new pope has close ties to ultra-conservative factions within the Catholic Church, such as Opus Dei, which are openly hostile to the core democratic principle of the separation of church and state, and seek to elevate the Church over civil authority. Such theocratic tendencies are increasingly being embraced by parties on the right as part of their ideological arsenal for attacking all of the social and democratic gains achieved in the course of the twentieth century.

Christian Europe RIP
The new Pope will hasten the decline of the old continent's formative faith

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Atheists should welcome the election of Pope Benedict XVI. For this aged, scholarly, conservative, uncharismatic Bavarian theologian will surely hasten precisely the de-Christianisation of Europe that he aims to reverse. At the end of his papacy, Europe may again be as un-Christian as it was when St Benedict, one of the patron saints of Europe, founded his pioneering monastic order, the Benedictines, 15 centuries ago. Christian Europe: from Benedict to Benedict. RIP.

From “grand inquisitor” to pope: Benedict XVI to head crusade vs. secularism, democracy

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With the selection of Josef Ratzinger as the new pope, the Roman Catholic hierarchy has placed at its head a hard-line enforcer of Church dogma, and one of the Vatican’s fiercest opponents of not only Marxism, but liberalism, secularism, science and virtually all things modern.

I think that Benedict XVI is really a compromise candidate; his election made possible to postpone - maybe for a few years - the necessary, but extremely hard job of tackling the problems that the Catholic Church is facing and choosing the way it will take in the future. The cardinals chose status quo for this time; next time the situation will be even more critical.

One wouldn´t be totally surprised if there would be a some kind of split in the Catholic Church in the coming decades. After all, they were a quite common feature in the Church during large part of it´s history. We could end seeing competing conservative and liberal cardinals electing competing popes. Not likely, but the world has seen been bigger surprises in the past few decades.

It has been claimed that one of the mistakes of the Catholic Church in the late Middle Age and during Renaissance was to elect lawyers instead of theologians as popes. They knew and protected the office and powers of the popes against Church Councils and laymen, but spiritual matters tended to get too little of their attention. It maybe that the election of learned theologians as popes instead of more feet-in-the-ground men will be seen as a mistake in the future. Benedict XVI may know everything about Catholic doctrine and be an efficient leader of the Vatican burocracy, but the way he faces the more down-to-earth matters will decide the success of his reign, and if he wants to be remembered as a succesful pope, he may have to be less than totally succesful protector of orthodoxy, and make compromises. After all, today´s popes can´t force people to be members of the Catholic Church - the luxury that most of their predecessors had - they have to make people want to be members of the Catholic Church.

Washington Post glorifies US military “ruthlessness” in Iraq

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A disturbing article by Washington Post journalist Steve Fainaru, published on April 13, serves to both justify and promote a colonial and homicidal mentality among American troops fighting in Iraq... The latest article is an indication that the Washington Post considers the collective punishment meted out against the people of Fallujah to be the model for counter-insurgency operations in cities and towns across Iraq. To do so, it needs men like Ruiz, who have been so brutalised by the desperate conditions of life in the US and their experiences in the American military that they approach killing another human being without feeling the slightest moral or political qualms.

The last pope from Europe

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So, the papacy has left Italy, probably forever. The election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI looks very much like the continuation of John Paul II's papacy by other means. It is not Italian, and not in the least bit liberal... But perhaps the lesson of the new pope's election is that if the church has to choose between its authoritarian character and compromise with the rich and secular parts of the world, it will move over further to the places which are neither. It seems impossible that the next pope will be European.

First part of the Axum obelisk arrives back to Ethiopia from Italy.

The battle for the `fingernails'

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While all the attention is focused on the highly publicized evacuation of the settlers from Gush Katif, the real battle for Israel's borders is taking place in the West Bank. It could be years before the eastern border with the Palestinians is finally settled, but meanwhile, the bulldozers and builders are at work - as has been the custom of Israeli greed for the last 38 years of occupation - in an attempt to "create facts on the ground" against all logic and against the long-term interests of the State of Israel... The "fingernails" plan is meant to delay as much as possible any future discussion of the settlements in the Ariel bloc. All the harassment of the Palestinians in this interim period, harming their source of livelihood, their lands, homes and freedom of movement, will only sow more hatred. Ultimately, no separation fence route will be able to defend Israel from that hatred.