Bargaining while buying some trinkets in the Maldivian capital, Male, recently, I heard most unexpected words: "You can keep your dollars."

This tiny nation of 1,200 islands has long accepted U.S. currency out of convenience for visitors and financial sobriety. The dollar tended to do better in global markets than the local monetary unit, the rufiyaa. That may be changing and it's a bad omen for the world's reserve currency.

``My dollars aren't as popular here as they've been in the past,'' says Moyez Mahfouz, 51, who has visited the Maldives from Bahrain with his family once or twice a year for a decade. ``More and more on this trip, I'm being asked for rufiyaa.''

These things start out slowly, and in recent months I have had similar experiences from Mexico to Vietnam. In markets, restaurants, taxis and tourist shops that long accepted dollars, many are opting for local currency. The reason: concerns the dollar plunge that analysts have predicted for years is afoot and that the U.S. is uninterested in halting it.

Richard Hayes Phillips claims to hate politics.

He much prefers being alone in the woods, where he has recently been doing trail work as a volunteer for the Lake George Land Conservancy.

Nonetheless, the 56-year-old scientist, folk singer and former professor has spent months over the last three years investigating what he believes was widespread election fraud in Ohio in the 2004 presidential election.

Phillips testified in two lawsuits related to the election and recently finished a book about his findings, "Witness to a Crime: A Citizen's Audit of an American Election," which Kent State University Press hopes to release in the spring.

"The election was rigged for Bush," Phillips claimed recently at a Bolton Landing diner. "The most glaring discrepancies almost always helped Bush and hurt Kerry."

The General Secretary of the Union of Political Prisoners and Detainees in Iraq, Muhammad Adham al-Hamd declared that the US occupation administration in Iraq relies on systematic rape, torture, and sadistic treatment of Iraqi women prisoners in its prison camps in the country. Al-Hamd said that the enormous crimes being committed against women in the prison camps in occupied Iraq have the support and blessings of the US military, for whom the practices serve as a means to bring psychological pressure on men engaged in the Resistance, in an attempt to break their spirit and fighting will.

Muhammad Adham al-Hamd made the comments in a statement regarding reports that confirmed the presence of large numbers of women in the American-run prison camps – women who are detained solely to be raped and abused in order to bring pressure upon their husbands, brothers, sons or fathers. IRAQ: Child prisoners abused and tortured, say activists

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez has condemned US president's war rhetoric on Iran, saying he belongs in a psychiatric hospital.

"The US President (George W. Bush) made an atomic bomb threat," Chevez said on Thursday, referring to Bush's war rhetoric against Iran.

"In other words, he's threatening a third world war but now with atomic weapons. It's like he should be taken to the psychiatric hospital. I think he's on the edge of the psychiatric hospital," he added.

Last week Bush claimed Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons, adding this may lead to World War III. His remarks drew fierce domestic and international criticism.

Who runs America? Is it the people, our politicians, or the media? We know that "the people" is not the answer, because the people are opposed to the Iraq War, the police state, globalism, a North American Union, the continuing invasion of illegal immigrants, abortion, homosexuality, ad infinitum. But the media could care less what the people want. They label the average American as bigoted, racist and stupid. The politicians follow the lead of the media. Any politician who does not is blacklisted, smeared, and defamed by the media. All who go along with the socialist/fascist agenda of the media become "media darlings" and are promoted to stardom on TV and in newsmagazines and newspapers. So, if the media is king, then who is it that runs the media?

The barely reported highlight of Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Tehran for the Caspian Sea summit last week was a key face-to-face meeting with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A high-level diplomatic source in Tehran tells Asia Times Online that essentially Putin and the Supreme Leader have agreed on a plan to nullify the George W Bush administration's relentless drive towards launching a preemptive attack, perhaps a tactical nuclear strike, against Iran. An American attack on Iran will be viewed by Moscow as an attack on Russia.

In itself, the Putin-Khamenei meeting was extraordinary, because the Supreme Leader rarely receives foreign statesmen for closed talks, even one as crucial as Putin. The Russian president, according to the diplomatic source, told the Supreme Leader he may hold the ultimate solution regarding the endlessly controversial Iranian nuclear dossier. According to IRNA, the Supreme Leader, after stressing that the Iranian civilian nuclear program will continue unabated, said. "We will ponder your words and proposal."

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Sunday said he plans to buy 5,000 Dragunov sniper rifles from Russia to protect the oil-rich nation from a possible U.S. invasion.

The self-styled socialist revolutionary and open critic of Washington has bolstered the OPEC nation's weaponry by buying planes, helicopters and assault rifles from Russia to prepare for a guerrilla-style resistance to a foreign invader.

"I'm going to buy 5,000 Dragunov rifles from Russia ... with telescopic sight, the best in the world, with infrared night-view," Chavez said during his weekly Sunday broadcast held on a beach along Venezuela's eastern coast.

Think of this as part two of Recherche du trillions perdu, my Online Journal article on Dov Zakheim, former Bush appointee as Pentagon Comptroller from May 4, 2001 to March 10, 2004. At that time he was unable to explain the disappearance of $1 trillion dollars. Actually, nearly three years earlier, Donald Rumsfeld announced on September 10, 2001 that an audit discovered $2.3 trillion was also missing from the Pentagon books. That story, as I mentioned, was buried under 9-11’s rubble. The two sums disappeared on Zakheim’s watch. Yet on May 6, 2004, Zakheim took a lucrative position at Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the most prestigious strategy consulting firms in the world. One of its clients then was Blessed Relief, a charity said to be a front for Osama bin Laden. Booz, Allen & Hamilton then also worked closely with DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is the research arm of the Department of Defense. So the dark card was shifted to another part of the deck.

What is the most outrageous piece of news that isn’t being discussed? I would venture to say it is the strange tale of Dov Zakheim and the missing trillions. I hear all kinds of numbers. I hear 2.3 trillion from Rumsfield and I hear about one trillion that Zakheim can’t explain. Still, you’ll need to check the dates of Zakheim’s days in the saddle as Pentagon Comptroller and then you can wonder to your hearts content. There’s no doubt the money is gone and there’s no doubt about who should know where it went but…what do I know? I know one trillion dollars is a lot of money. Isn’t one trillion dollars a million million? Zounds!!! Has the cost of the entire Iraqi incursion come to a trillion dollars yet? It certainly isn’t anywhere near 2.3 trillion. Why isn’t this under discussion? Is it just too big a thing, too enormous to comprehend, that our minds go blank when we think about it? Hmmm…

Weapons inspector David Kelly was the decent man apparently hounded to suicide after exposing Tony Blair's lies on Iraq. But the crusading MP Norman Baker felt sure there was something more to his death - and gave up his front-bench role to investigate the case. In the Mail he revealed extraordinary evidence that he believes proves Kelly did not take his own life and was instead murdered by Iraqi dissidents. Here, he reveals how the murder may have been carried out... While investigating the death of Dr David Kelly I have made many strange discoveries, not least some disturbing parallels with the case of a young American journalist named Danny Casolaro. Mr Casolaro made himself deeply unpopular with elements in the murky world of U.S. defence by probing too deeply into their activities. One morning in August 1991, he was found dead in a hotel room near Harpers Ferry in Virginia. He was in the bath, naked, with his wrist slashed. There were no signs of bruising or other marks on the body and the police concluded that he had committed suicide. But this was totally false according to Dr Christopher Green, who was the CIA's chief forensic pathologist for decades. Dr Green participated in Casolaro's autopsy and last year he told veteran White House reporter Sterling Seagrave that the young journalist had been killed before being stripped, put in a full bath, and his left wrist cut in precisely the same manner as Dr Kelly's. And as with Dr Kelly, there was remarkably little blood, bar a small amount smeared on the edge of the tub, suggesting that the wrist wound had been inflicted after the heart had stopped pumping. This compelling demonstration of how effectively a murder can be disguised as suicide drove me on in my search for the truth about Dr Kelly, who was found dead in an Oxfordshire wood on July 18, 2003, having apparently taken his own life.

Why I know weapons expert Dr David Kelly was murdered, by the MP who spent a year investigating his death. For Tony Blair it was a glorious day. He was in the United States being feted by the U.S. Congress and President Bush. Their adulation was such that he was being offered the rare honour of a Congressional Gold Medal. Naturally enough, Bush and his administration were hugely grateful for Blair's decision to join the United States in its invasion of Iraq. That invasion was supposed to lead to the discovery and disposal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and make the world a safer place. But as Blair was lapping up the grateful plaudits from the U.S. Congress on July 17, 2003, the man who had done more than almost any other individual on earth to contain the threat from WMD lay dead in the woods at Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire.

Aribert Heim, one of the most wanted Nazi war criminals still thought to be at liberty, was hunted down and killed by a Jewish death squad in 1982, a new book claims. Danny Baz, a retired colonel in the Israeli air force, claims in a book published in France this week that the Austrian death camp doctor was tracked down in the United States by a Jewish search-and-destroy squad called "The Owl" and shot dead. The group's members, which included Mr Baz, are said to have been veterans of the Israeli and American militaries. Heim is known as the Butcher of Mauthausen after carrying out medical experiments on concentration camp inmates in the Austrian death camp. He removed human organs without anaesthetic to see how long victims lived. But after the Second World War he served only two years in jail before resuming work as a gynecologist in Baden-Baden. Alerted of his imminent arrest, Heim disappeared in 1962 and has never been seen since - though there have been alleged sightings over the years in Egypt, Uruguay, Chile and more recently in Spain. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre has placed him second on its list of targets under "Operation Last Chance" - a final effort to track Nazi criminals before old age takes them - and in July Austria offered £35,000 for information leading to his capture.

Un fascinant document à paraître le 16 octobre raconte la traque d'un des derniers grands criminels nazis. En avant-première, rencontre avec Danny Baz, qui fut un des acteurs de l'opération. «Je mange, bois, respire Aribert Heim.» L'homme qui a écrit cette phrase est de passage à Paris. Il arrive de Kinshasa. L'Afrique noire semble le fasciner. Là-dessus, on n'en saura pas plus. Petites lunettes cerclées de fer blanc, cheveux courts poivre et sel, le regard un peu torve, conséquence d'une blessure à l'oeil droit, signe extérieur du baroudeur, il doit avoir une petite cinquantaine. Cet homme s'appelle Danny Baz. Ça ne vous dit rien. C'est normal. Lorsque vous lirez son livre *, vous ne l'oublierez plus. Ne cherchez pas à voir son visage : il n'y aura pas de photos de lui dans la presse. L'homme ne veut pas apparaître. Pas envie d'être la victime d'un néonazi surexcité qui le reconnaîtrait. On ne sait jamais.

About a month ago, I received a five-minute long thermal imaging video from a well-placed source, who chooses to remain anonymous. I made copies for a few key people and solicited their interpretation of what we were looking at. What we concluded, in fact, is that this extraordinary video has the potential to break the TWA Flight 800 case wide open. The video had been shot from a U.S. Navy P-3 Orion that had been flying almost directly above TWA Flight 800 when it exploded off the coast of Long Island on the night of July 17, 1996. For the record, the P-3 is a long-range, antisubmarine warfare patrol aircraft with advanced submarine detection and avionics equipment.

Modern economists are obsessed with the idea of "growth" - credit growth, money growth, economic growth - the list goes on. But the questions we must ask are: Is this growth sustainable? Is the whole concept of economic growth based on credit valid? Has it ever worked in the past? What I intend to do is to illustrate an historical cycle which occurred in the major financial centres which were based on, or extensively relied on, "paper" money. In other words, they relies on credit. I will concentrate on certain European economies and focus on the pattern running from Genoa to Amsterdam to London to New York. To illustrate two different types of economy which fall outside this pattern, I will refer to Venice of the fifteenth century and the Ottoman Empire prior to 1800 to illustrate prosperity without the extensive use of credit. This talk will concentrate on "currency", for as Lord Keynes pointed out: "There is no subtler or surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency." So the nature of currency is crucial. Now, before leaping off into history, I will first touch on money and its function, and explain some of the transactions to which we will refer in the course of this essay.

Extrapolating freely from the documented history of blowback, Johnson speculates that we have already entered the "last days" of the Republic. America's post-World War II "imperialism," he predicts, will soon put an end to self-government in the United States: "I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in the end produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent." The destruction of the American Republic may even illustrate a profound historical regularity, he implies: "Over any fairly lengthy period of time, successful imperialism requires that a domestic republic or a domestic democracy change into a domestic tyranny." He even thinks that the American military is now "ripe" for "a Julius Caesar"--that is, for "a revolutionary, military populist with little interest in republican niceties so long as some form of emperorship lies at the end of his rocky path."

Johnson's conviction that imperialism tends to transform democracies into autocracies is based largely on his study of ancient Rome. He argues that the basic dynamics of Rome's imperial adventures and annexation of conquered territory ushered in the collapse of the Roman Republic. As sporadic and regional military campaigns were replaced by continuous and distant ones, Rome's citizen army had to be replaced by a standing army. Loyal not to political classes in Rome but to their commanders in the field, the professionalized Roman legions made it possible for Caesar to initiate the dismantling of the Republic brought to a conclusion by his grand-nephew Augustus.

"Roman history suggests that the short, happy life of the American republic may be coming to its end," Johnson writes, adding that "Bush has unleashed a political crisis comparable to the one Julius Caesar posed for the Roman constitution," threatening to subvert the traditional constitutional order and put dictatorship in its place.

Through startling interviews with perpetrators, witnesses and victims, GHOSTS OF ABU GHRAIB examines and contextualizes the abuses that occurred in the fall of 2003 at the notorious Iraqi prison abuses documented in photographs that are etched in our national consciousness. The film probes the psychology of how typical American men and women came to commit these atrocious acts and, on a parallel track, explores the policy decisions that eroded our compliance with the Geneva Conventions and contributed to making the abuse a reality. Ultimately, the film asks what these events say about America, our government, our military and our human nature.

[The] following is the transcript of the conversation between George W. Bush and José Marìa Aznar in Crawford, Texas, on February 22, 2003. It is an English translation of the text published in El Paìs on September 26, 2007. President Bush: Saddam Hussein won't change and he'll continue playing games. The time has come to get rid of him. That's it. As for me, I'll try from now on to use a rhetoric that's as subtle as can be while we're seeking approval of the resolution. If anyone vetoes [Russia, China, and France together with the US and the UK have veto power in the Security Council, being permanent members], we'll go. Saddam Hussein isn't disarming. We have to catch him right now. Until now we've shown an incredible amount of patience. There are two weeks left. In two weeks we'll be militarily ready. I think we'll get the second resolution. In the Security Council we have the three Africans [Cameroon, Angola, and Guinea], the Chileans, the Mexicans. I'll talk to all of them, also Putin, naturally. We'll be in Baghdad by the end of March. There's a 15 percent chance that at that point Saddam Hussein will be dead or will have fled. But those possibilities don't exist until we've shown our resolve.

Simultaneously, Russia and America Conduct Major War Games. There has been a virtual media blackout on the conduct of major military exercises by both Russia and the US. Reminiscent of the Cold War, Russia and America are conducting major war games simultaneously. The Russian Air Force will be conducting major military exercises over a large part of its territory from the 16th to the 30th of October. These Russian exercises coincide chronologically with the conduct of major US sponsored war games under Vigilant Shield 08, which are slated to take place from the 15th to the 20th of October. VS-08 was preceded by major naval exercises under Pacific Shield 07 hosted by Japan, involving the participation of Australia, France, New Zealand, Singapore, the UK, and the US. President Vladimir Putin announced in August that Russia would be resuming long-range bomber flights over the Pacific, Atlantic and Arctic oceans for the first time since the breakup of the Soviet Union. (Associated Press, October 1, 2007). Moscow's resolve was in response to US-NATO threats directed against Russia including the militarization of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The US exercise code named Vigilant Shield 2008 (VS-08) is casually presented as an "anti-terrorist drill". While under the joint auspices of the Pentagon and the Department of Defense, US Northern Command in liaison with NORAD is in charge of the operation. VS-08 includes a massive deployment of the US Air Force and Canada's Air Force. It resembles a war-time scenario with the deployment of bombers and fighter jets over the entire North American continent extending into the Arctic.

NATO and Russia have reached a historic agreement to combat common security threats in the post-September 11 era. The deal, establishing a joint council of the 19 NATO nations and Russia, was announced by NATO foreign ministers after meeting with their Russian counterpart Igor Ivanov. NATO Secretary-General George Robertson announced the deal. He said: "It is impossible to overstate the importance of this recognition, that NATO and Russia must stand side by side in defence of common values and interests in the face of the challenges of the new century." With the pact arising from Russian President Vladimir Putin's support for the West since the September 11 terror attacks, Russia took another significant step toward its former enemies, after agreeing Monday with Washington to shrink their nuclear arsenals. Capping an ambitious reform agenda to prepare for a summit in Prague in November, the ministers reviewed the alliance's plans to invite new members from eastern Europe, agreed to modernize NATO's military capabilities to respond to evolving threats and establish new relations with Ukraine and other former Soviet republics.

Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) reached a breakthrough agreement on May 14, 1997, calling for a new era of cooperation between the former archenemies. The historic accord, which was formally ratified by Russia and NATO's 16 member nations at a May 27 ceremony in Paris, France, appeared to clear the way for NATO's expansion into Central and Eastern Europe. In July 1997 NATO is expected to invite the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland to become NATO members. The agreement followed months of diplomacy intended to soften Russian opposition to NATO enlargement. Russia has repeatedly protested that NATO's expansion into the territory of states that were once allied with the Warsaw Pact—a defunct military alliance of East European Communist nations and the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)—was provocative and threatened Russian security.

Sanctions enforced by the UN on Iraq since the Gulf War have killed more people than the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, including over half a million children - many of whom weren't even born when the Gulf War began. On 2 August 1990 the Iraqi army invaded its southern neighbour, Kuwait. Four days later the United Nations responded by imposing a complete trade embargo on Iraq. In the ten years since Iraq has continued to be the subject of sanctions that affect almost every aspect of life for the average woman, man and child. With imports of food and medicine severely restricted, malnutrition and disease is now endemic in what was once one of the healthiest countries in the world. A 1999 Unicef report calculated that more than half a million children had died as a direct result of sanctions. On average 200 hundred Iraqi children are dying every day. In September 1998, Denis Halliday head of the UN humanitarian programme in Iraq resigned claiming he could no longer administer 'an immoral and illegal' policy. His successor, Hans von Sponeck also later resigned, along with the head of the World Food Programme. Meanwhile US and UK politicians insist that the sanctions regime is necessary to contain the threat of Saddam Hussein. When asked on US television whether the death of 500,000 Iraqi children as a result of sanctions was justified Madelaine Albright replied "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it." On 6 March 2000 the film 'Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq' was broadcast on British television. It was written and presented by John Pilger and produced and directed by Alan Lowery. JohnPilger.com

You are aware that we have come form Serbia, from Kosovo and Metohija, the Serbian Jerusalem, the cradle of Serbian spirituality, Serbian culture and Serbian statehood. There - where our roots lie, where the spiritual identity of the people was created, where numerous sacred sites are located (1300 churches and monasteries), built and erected over the course of almost a millennium – today, mostly as a result of the operations undertaken by NATO, we find ourselves in grave danger of the last traces of our existence being obliterated. How did this come to be? Is this possible at the beginning of the 21st century? Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is possible. It is possible thanks precisely to the operations of NATO under the conductor’s baton of Washington and Brussels. NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the clasp that binds Europe and North America, was established in 1949 with a mission to guarantee the freedom and security of all its member states by political and military means. A noble purpose, indeed: worthy of all praise. Unfortunately, that purpose has been abandoned, namely, since the end of the Cold War in the 90s (the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union), NATO, in order to justify its existence, is in search of a new purpose and establishing different priorities.

Under new rules proposed by the Transport Security Administration (TSA) (pdf), all airline passengers would need advance permission before flying into, through, or over the United States regardless of citizenship or the airline's national origin.

Currently, the Advanced Passenger Information System, operated by the Customs and Border Patrol, requires airlines to forward a list of passenger information no later than 15 minutes before flights from the US take off (international flights bound for the US have until 15 minutes after take-off). Planes are diverted if a passenger on board is on the no-fly list.

The new rules mean this information must be submitted 72 hours before departure. The TSA held a public hearing in Washington DC on 20 September, which heard comments from both privacy advocates and airline industry representatives from Qantas, the Regional Airline Association, IATA, and the American Society of Travel Agents. The privacy advocates came from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Identity Project. All were negative.

The proposals should be withdrawn entirely, argued Edward Hasbrouck, author of The Practical Nomad and the leading expert on travel data privacy. "Obscured by the euphemistic language of 'screening' is the fact that travellers would be required to get permission before they can travel."

La Revolución Cubana, durante casi media centuria, ha tenido que enfrentar crecientes obstáculos que se interponen al mejor desenvolvimiento del país, a causa del más inhumano bloqueo impuesto por el imperialismo de Estados Unidos de América (EE.UU.). En rigor, se trata de un sistema de agresiones socio-económicas, ideo-políticas y militares —incluyendo medidas de carácter internacional—, todo lo cual ha devenido escenario sin parangón en la Historia escrita. Un breve recuento conduce a observar cómo la pasada década, tras el derrumbe del Socialismo que lideró la ex Unión Soviética, se apostó a que el proceso revolucionario cubano sería la próxima víctima. Fueron los tiempos en que Bush I —el padre del actual inquilino de la Casa Blanca— estaba seguro de que tendría el placer de ser el primer presidente en visitar la Cuba post-Castro. El momento era oportuno para arreciar el engendro imperial. En ese contexto, en plena campaña electoral, ante una maniobra de su contrincante Clinton en torno a un proyecto anticubano, en 1992 papá Bush aprobó la Ley Torricelli, precisamente en la “república bananera” de Miami, derivándose una triple lectura: primera, había que aprovechar la influencia de la terrorista mafia gusano-yanqui radicada en La Florida con vistas a las elecciones presidenciales; segunda, se incrementaría la ascendencia de dicha mafia sobre el futuro mandatario de EE.UU.; y tercera, en consecuencia, serían mayores las agresiones imperiales contra Cuba.

For 15 consecutive years, the general assembly of the United Nations has voted in favor of lifting the economic sanctions that seriously harm the Cuban people, especially the most vulnerable sectors. The international community is unanimous on this issue, with the majority continually increasing. In 2006, 183 countries condemned the cruel and illegal state of siege that Washington imposes on Cuba. In vain. As if deaf, the U.S. government persists in applying an inhumane, anachronistic and ineffectual policy that has been in place since July 1960. [1] The sanctions have cost the Cuban economy more than $89,000 million since then. In 2006 Cuba lost nearly $4,000 million as a direct consequence of this brutal policy. Not only can the Caribbean island not export any product to the U.S., nor import anything, but it does not even have the authorization to establish commercial dealings with U.S. companies located in other countries, which is in flagrant violation of international law. Cuba cannot obtain credits of any kind from international financial institutions and are prohibited from using the U.S. dollar in its transactions with the rest of the world. [2]

Last month, Maine became the first state to pass legislation declining participation in the national ID system mandated by the Real ID Act of 2005. State-level legislation either repudiating Real ID, asking Congress to repeal its worst privacy-violating provisions, or asking for a delay while states study the issue, exists in various stages (sometimes passed by one House but not the other), or is being considered, in other states: as of this writing, the list consists of Arizona, Georgia, Hawaii, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, Vermont, Washington State, and Wyoming. In other words, a state-led rebellion against Real ID is brewing. Let’s review the relevant history.

La Higuera, el pueblo donde murió el líder revolucionario, es el centro del proyecto. Luego del hallazgo en 1997 de los restos del guerrillero, enterrado secretamente en una fosa cerca de Vallegrande (700 kilómetros al sureste de La Paz), las autoridades bolivianas crearon la 'Ruta del Che', un circuito que sigue los viajes que Guevara hizo por la selva. "La idea es difundir el pensamiento del 'Che' a través de un turismo ordenado y respetuoso de los pobladores", dice Edil Peña Rojas, presidente de los guías de la Ruta del Che y miembro de la Fundación del Che, que mantiene en Vallegrande su patrimonio revolucionario. El circuito, que parte de Santa Cruz, segunda ciudad boliviana, atraviesa varias decenas de kilómetros de selva. Unos 2.000 turistas de todos los continentes llegan a esta región montañosa, especialmente en octubre, para asistir a las conmemoraciones que se organizan por la muerte del guerrillero argentino.

Forty years ago, Che Guevara was killed in Bolivia by the Bolivian army helped by the CIA. Today situation is Bolivia and rest of Latin America is changing fast. It is becoming clear every day that the leftist trend is becoming dominant in the area. Today Bolivia, under the leadership of President Evo Morales has become the leading center of leftism and opposition to the hegemonic American policies. Venezuela, under the leadership of President Hugo Chavez has also emerged as a similar center. Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez paid homage to Che Guevara. Hugo Chavez called him “ infinite revolutionary”. Evo Morales also described him as a great and dedicated revolutionary. Raul Castro, brother of Fidel Castro also participated in the event to remember Che Guevara in the Cuban town of Santa Clara, where he once fought as revolutionary. Che Guevara was a medical doctor and was born in Argentina. He fought along with Fidel Castro, in the Cuban revolutionary war. He is still remembered as a great revolutionary in Cuba. Every Friday, the school children dressed in red and white recite that they want to become like Che Guevara. To them he is a great personality who represents honesty, courage and internationalism. (Ben © Heine)

The 40th anniversary of the death of Che Guevara elicited considerable media attention, mostly about his iconic image captured on T-shirts throughout the world. There were the standard snarky asides that many young people wearing those T-shirts have scant notion of who Che was, but the journalists reporting the story seemed equally ignorant. Little was reported about Che's life and what led him to shun the comforts of a physician's lifestyle in Argentina to fight as a revolutionary in the rugged terrains of Cuba, the Congo and finally in Bolivia - or why someone who claimed to be obsessed with helping the world's poor was executed, gangland style, on the order of a CIA agent. One exception was the BBC, which bothered to send a reporter to Florida to interview Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban-born CIA agent who was part of a team of CIA operatives and Bolivian soldiers who captured Che. "Mr. Rodriguez ordered the soldier who pulled the trigger to aim carefully, to remain consistent with the Bolivian government's story that Che had been killed in action in a clash with the Bolivian army," said the BBC report. Che's hands were then cut off and put in formaldehyde to preserve his fingerprints. (Ben © Heine)

The world of Phillip II sits at the heart of the Golden Century of Spain. Its empire spanned the globe. It was the envy of Europe. Its coffers bulged with silver and gold from the New World. Spanish armies brought repression to the Low Countries and threatened destruction and ruin to England in the Elizabethan age. The great historian Fernand Braudel portrayed it as a period of dramatic rise; the 1. Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (3 vols., 1949). Reformation was checked; a new “Mediterranean World” was crafted.11. But was it truly the siglo de oro–was it not instead the era of conflicts and repression? This period produced one great work of literature that ranks ahead of all others. It is the tale of Don Quixote de la Mancha, authored in two parts by Miguel Cervantes. In our literary canon, the novel has come to dominate the other forms in modern times. And with respect to the novel we can say, “in the beginning was Cervantes.” The genre springs from his work. And even today, after four hundred years, how many novels can begin to compete with this one? It is a work of amazing flexibility; it piles layer upon layer of meaning. It can be studied in universities and performed in Broadway musicals. Cervantes’s genius was to be simultaneously great, complex, subtle, and yet packed with immediate popular appeal. Cervantes fills a great panorama and he perfects the art of the tragicomedy. What seems at first blush a farce, a comic send-up, turns into a work filled with pain, loss, horror and introspection. What seems at first shallow soon emerges, especially in the second part, as a work of great philosophical depth; of wit and profound and timeless wisdom. I have read Don Quixote three times in my life; the last time just now.

In one of the longest-held secrets of the Cold War, the U.S. Army explored the potential for using radioactive poisons to assassinate "important individuals" such as military or civilian leaders, according to newly declassified documents obtained by The Associated Press. Approved at the highest levels of the Army in 1948, the effort was a well-hidden part of the military's pursuit of a "new concept of warfare" using radioactive materials from atomic bombmaking to contaminate swaths of enemy land or to target military bases, factories or troop formations. Military historians who have researched the broader radiological warfare program said in interviews that they had never before seen evidence that it included pursuit of an assassination weapon. Targeting public figures in such attacks is not unheard of; just last year an unknown assailant used a tiny amount of radioactive polonium-210 to kill Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London.

"Big Brother" is how Orwell depicted the totalitarian state in which human individuality, freedom, choice, and lives are subordinated to the needs of the "state". Every means is, therefore, justified to maintain the omnipresent state in power. Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. --1984, Chapter I, Part I, George Orwell

The mainstream media are continuing to use figures provided by the website Iraq Body Count (IBC) to sell the public a number for total post-invasion deaths of Iraqis that is perhaps 5-10% of the true death toll.

As we recently reported, only a handful of media outlets covered a new ORB poll revealing that 1.2 million Iraqis had been murdered since the 2003 invasion. BBC Online provided a rare example:

“A UK-based polling agency, Opinion Research Business (ORB), said it had extrapolated the figure by asking a random sample of 1,461 Iraqi adults how many people living in their household had died as a result of the violence rather than from natural causes.

“The results lend weight to a 2006 survey of Iraqi households published by the Lancet, which suggested that about 655,000 Iraqi deaths were 'a consequence of the war'.

“However, these estimates are both far higher than the running total of reported civilian deaths maintained by the campaign group Iraq Body Count which puts the figure at between 71,000 and 78,000.” (BBC Online, ’US contractors in Iraq shootout,’ September 17, 2007; http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6998458.stm)

Every country must surrender their sovereignty in order to establish the One World Order. This is facilitated by the globalists and their American minions, abetted by the obedience-trained U.S. Congress. Economic destabilization, with or without military blitzkriegs (a.k.a. major acts of terrorism) is an effective method for taking over a vulnerable country. The play-for-pay political puppets are installed or replaced according to their compliance to the globalist handlers. The elite affluent men behind the curtain remain the same: big banks and multi-national businesses. The privatization of so many government functions has stripped Congress, with their compromised consent, of congressional approval and oversight which is mandated by congressional law.

The privatization of warfare, rendition flights, torture, and economic destabilization has produced numerous enemies and vehement animosity. Most Americans, who get their daily dose of government-friendly 1984 Orwellian-style propaganda, have no idea why foreigners hate us.

Countries with huge populations of indigenous, brown-skinned “enemies” seem particularly vulnerable to resource pilfering, together with the atrocities and massacres that accompany such activities. After all, they are “uncivilized” and standing in the way of our “national interests,” without appreciation or vision for what their resources could produce in our insatiable, more sophisticated society. Incredulous Americans, comfy at home, don’t like hearing about the bloody, gory details. However, there are astute foreign leaders, though U.S. media-demonized, who won’t readily acquiesce to economic assailants or conform to globalist demands. In addition to the Middle East, the resource-rich countries of South America have been especially targeted.

"If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this: In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people. It was no secret that this time the revolution would have to be bloody; when we spoke of it we called it 'The Night of the Long Knives.' Everyone must know for all future time that if he raises his hand to strike the State, then certain death is his lot."

The Night of the Long Knives is seen by many as the turning point where Hitler made it clear that he was above the law and the supreme leader of the German people.

Durkin Uncovered Information That She Said Troubled Her Just Before She Was Killed in Afghanistan. There is a new mystery in Afghanistan and at its heart is the death of a U.S. soldier and the family she left behind. Top lawmakers have gotten involved and are seeking answers from the Pentagon about Ciara Durkin and the details surrounding her death. She was killed by a gunshot wound, inside the tightly secured Bagram air base in Afghanistan. Massachusetts Army National Guard Spc. Ciara Durkin, 29, on home leave in early September, gave her siblings what now seems ominous advice. She told them that if anything were to happen to her while she was serving to investigate. Friday, Ciara was found dead near a church in the Bagram airfield in Afghanistan. She had been shot in the head. So far, the Army only has said that her death was not combat related. "We need answers.

A soldier killed in Afghanistan last week told her family they should press for answers if anything happened to her, reports CBS station WBZ-TV in Boston. Spc. Ciara Durkin, 30, of Quincy, Mass., was shot in the head last week outside a chapel near her office at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. The Department of Defense reported Durkin was not killed in action. Durkin's sister, Fiona Canavan, told the Patriot Ledger on Wednesday that when her sister was home three weeks ago, she told her about something she had come across that raised some concern with her. "She was in the finance unit and she said, 'I discovered some things I don't like and I made some enemies because of it.' Then she said, in her lighthearted way, 'If anything happens to me, you guys make sure it gets investigated,''' Canavan told the paper.

A probe was launched this week into the death of an Irish-born U.S. woman soldier in Afghanistan. Ciara Durkin, who was born in Connemara, County Galway and moved with her family to the Boston area at age 10, was found dead with a single gunshot wound to the head at her base camp. Her death occurred on Thursday of last week. Durkin was a member of the Massachusetts National Guard and was assigned to the army's Task Force Diamond. She had been serving in Afghanistan since February. "We're completely in the dark," Pierce Durkin, the dead soldier's 28-year-old brother, told the Globe.

The New York Sun publishes something true and useful – there’s a first time for everything – about the NSA’s semi-secret seminars given to ‘journalists’ between 2002 and 2004 on how to avoid telling the truth, as if ‘journalists’ needed any help in that regard. Oddly enough, none of the attendees can remember attending. The NSA must have slipped them one of those new selective amnesia drugs! This reminds me of the story, from the Angry Arab News Service, of how, during the illegal American attack on the people of Iraq, Lebanese military, together with American officials (the CIA?), camped out in the offices of the Daily Star in Beirut, and made sure nobody dared print the truth about American violence. Is it any wonder that people now go to the internet for their news? The internet is full of nonsense, but at least some of what you can read there is true.

Last week, Josh Gerstein explained how the information control freaks at the National Security Agency conducted secret "seminars" for reporters—basically, little classes on how and when the government would like them to keep their mouths shut about top-secret and not-so-secret information. What's funny is that no one seems to remember the sessions, which went down at NSA headquarters between 2002 and 2004. Maureen Baginski, who was listed as a presenter at the seminars, said she had no recollection of being present. Why would she? She was only the FBI's "intelligence czar" back in 2004, before she left to work for SPARTA, an employee-owned defense contractor of utmost secret-government-like creepiness. Likewise? Not a single reporter has yet come forward to claim attendance.

Frustrated by press leaks about its most sensitive electronic surveillance work, the secretive National Security Agency convened an unprecedented series of off-the-record "seminars" in recent years to teach reporters about the damage caused by such leaks and to discourage reporting that could interfere with the agency's mission to spy on America's enemies.

Background: On Tuesday, August 14th 2007, the Yezidis, one of the minorities in norhern Iraq, were the target of a bloody and ruthless massacre. This massacre took place in the city of Sinjar, in the Nineveh province. Early Tuesday morning, several trucks - fully loaded with several tons of the much sophisticated and explosive substance of Trinitroluene - TNT - exploded. The explosive is very hard to retain and is used by very well equipped armies or terrorist regimes that cooperate with super powers. The explosion was aimed at the civilians and is by far the most brutal and ruthless attack against civilians since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. The massacre took 520 lives and several hundreds were wounded. This act of terrorism made thousands of families homeless, as they got their homes blown away. Nineveh-the future of the province: According to the constitution of Iraq, law number 118, paragraph IV (II), the Assyrian province of Nineveh is considered "a province which is not part of a current region." This means that in the Assyrian province of Nineveh, the jurisdiction of the occupational power is the one that should be followed. The province of Nineveh is today the core area of the Assyrian triangle; the area between Nineveh, Turabdin and the province of Urmi. The Kurdish parties in northeastern Iraq want to change this demography. The do everything in their power to occupy and, against the Iraqi constitution, conquer the Assyrian province of Nineveh - a province rich of oil.

On 17 September 1982, journalist Robert Fisk registered the unfiltered rawness of witnessing the murdered victims of Sabra and Shatila up close: "Massacres are difficult to forget when you've seen the corpses." On the final morning of the mass execution, stumbling upon the bodies of unarmed civilians, the French poet, playwright and novelist Jean Genet wrote: "A photograph has two dimensions, so does a television screen; neither can be walked through." By the time Genet and other foreign journalists had arrived, the Lebanese right-wing Christian Phalange party had hastily buried most of the remains of their butchered victims, in an effort to prevent reporters from witnessing and broadcasting the carnage. In those early hours and days, the stark and blunt terror that the Phalange and their Israeli overseers visited upon the inhabitants of the camp, mostly Palestinian, had not yet been unmasked or imprinted into historical record. Despite the attempted cover-up of mass grave sites and the indiscriminate, execution-style slayings of more than 2,000 men, women and children -- at least three axed out of their mothers' wombs -- the massacre caused the outcry the Israelis and their Phalange proxies wished to avoid.

On Oct. 4, 1992 a Tel Aviv-bound El Al cargo aircraft crashed into an apartment complex in Bijlmermeer, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Amsterdam a few minutes after takeoff from the nearby Shipol airport. The crash of the Boeing 747-200 killed 39 people on the ground and all four crew members. After the crash El Al representatives handed over to the Dutch authorities a revised cargo manifest which, sources now admit, included a variety of materials previously not disclosed. For some unexplained reason, the Dutch officials agreed to keep Israel’s secrets. For years following the crash, however, residents of the surrounding neighborhoods displayed a uniquely high number of unusual ailments. But when they took to the media their inquiries as to whether the plane’s cargo could have contained health hazards, both the residents and the media were brushed off. Even though Dutch authorities knew what was on that plane, they preferred to lie to their own citizens rather than confront Israel. Finally, on Oct. 1 of this year, the Dutch daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad reported it had obtained documents confirming that when the El Al flight crashed six years ago it had on board 190 liters of dimethyl methyl phosphonate (DMMP), a chemical used to produce Sarin, the nerve gas used to deadly effect by members of a religious cult on the Tokyo subway system.

Local residents had suspected very early on that LY1862 was not a routine flight. Eyewitnesses reported seeing men in hazmat suits removing unidentified debris from the site immediately after the crash. And in the months that followed hundreds of local people and rescue workers complained of a range of chronic health problems, including depression, fatigue and listlessness, breathing difficulties and stomach pains. Tests commissioned by a Dutch citizens' group revealed traces of uranium at the crash site and abnormally high levels of uranium in the bodies of survivors.

In June 1993, the Dutch newspaper Trouw reported that on the morning of Monday, October 5, some twenty persons in white suits were seen at the site of the crash. These persons quickly became the subject of speculation. Witnesses claimed that the white-suited persons did not speak in Dutch and removed evidence from the crash site under white sheets.

"The number of occasions when parliament received unclear, incomplete, late or incorrect information is, in the Commission's opinion, too high," the committee wrote. "The government paid too little attention to public worries, even those that were based on misconceptions." Labour Prime Minister Wim Kok was also criticized. The commission found he failed in his coordinating role.

The Bijlmermeer Disaster Yesterday marked the anniversary of the 1992 crash of El Al Flight 1862 into the Amersterdam neighborhood of Bijlmermeer, "whose sordid aftermath opened up a whole can of worms relating to secret weapons trafficking and unaccountable government." Six years after the crash, an investigation revealed that the flight had been carrying three of the four chemicals needed for Sarin.

One of the Bijlmer crash issues was the presence of depleted uranium (DU) in the plane's counterweights. A total of 282 kilograms was constructed in the plane's tail wings. Laka made this public in October 1993[1] after which a discussion started on the potential burning of DU and the risks for citizens and rescue workers.