From The Guardian UK
By Max Arthur

Of the millions who fought in the first world war, only a handful are still alive today - and all are now well over 100 years old. With the horror of the trenches about to slip from living memory, Max Arthur has tracked down and interviewed these last survivors of what Wilfred Owen called a ‘carnage incomparable’. Here, to mark next week’s Remembrance Day, we publish a selection of their stories.

Harry Patch
107 (born June 17 1898)
Private, Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry

On my 19th birthday in 1917, we were in the trenches at Passchendaele. We didn’t go into action, but I saw it all happen. Haig put a three-day barrage on the Germans, and thought, “Well, there can’t be much left of them.” I think it was the Yorkshires and Lancashires that went over. I watched them as they came out of their dugouts and the German machine guns just mowed them down. I doubt whether any of them reached the front line.

A couple of weeks after that, we moved to Pilckem Ridge. I can still see the bewilderment and fear on the men’s faces as we went over the top. We crawled, because if you stood up you’d be killed.

All over the battlefield the wounded were lying there, English and German, all crying for help. But we weren’t like the Good Samaritan in the Bible, we were the robbers who passed by and left them. You couldn’t stop to help them. I came across a Cornishman who was ripped from shoulder to waist with shrapnel, his stomach on the ground beside him. A bullet wound is clean - shrapnel tears you all to pieces. As I got to him he said, “Shoot me.” Before I could draw my revolver, he died. I was with him for the last 60 seconds of his life. He gasped one word - “Mother”.

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From MSNBC via The FT
By Guy Dinmore

US planning for Cuba’s “transition” after the demise of Fidel Castro has entered a new stage, with a special office for reconstruction inside the US State Department preparing for the “day after”, when Washington will try to back a democratic government in Havana.

The inter-agency effort, which also involves the Defense Department, recognises that the Cuba transition may not go peacefully and that the US may have to launch a nation-building exercise. Caleb McCarry, the Cuba transition co-ordinator, is working on the project within the Office for Reconstruction and Stabilization, which was established by the Bush administration to prevent and prepare for post-conflict situations.

Every six months, the National Intelligence Council revises a secret watchlist of 25 countries in which instability could require US intervention. The reconstruction office, headed by Carlos Pascual - a Cuba-born former ambassador - was focused on Sudan, Haiti, Congo and Nepal. In a controversial move, Cuba was added to the list.

The US Institute of Peace, funded by Congress to work on conflict management, declined to lend its expertise to the Cuba project. “This was an exercise in destabilisation, not stabilisation,” said one person involved.

Mr McCarry acknowledges wearing two hats: to help a post-Castro Cuba establish a democratic government and market economy, and to hasten that transition.

Read more Cuba

From The Independent UK
By Andrew Buncombe

Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the senior White House official charged over the CIA leak affair, is to appear in court this week, as investigators continue their inquiries into the activities of President George Bush’s senior political adviser, Karl Rove.

The issue of greatest concern now to the White House is what may emerge during Mr Libby’s trial. It has already been revealed that the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, may wish to call Mr Cheney as a witness, especially since the indictments revealed that Mr Libby had learnt about the identity and position of Ms Plame from several sources, one of whom was the Vice-President.

The trial could also become a wider inquiry that examines the processes that went on in the White House as senior officials plotted to make the case to the public of the need to launch an invasion of Iraq.

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From Yahoo News
By Terence Hunt

The White House on Monday rebuffed calls for a staff shakeup, the firing of Karl Rove and an apology by President Bush for the role of senior administration officials in the unmasking of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Three days after the indictment and resignation of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, the administration said it would have to remain silent as long as there was an investigation of the leak and legal proceeding under way. Bush ignored reporters’ questions during an Oval Office meeting with Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi.

“We don’t want to do anything from here that could prejudice the opportunity for there to be a fair and impartial trial,” presidential spokesman Scott McClellan said.

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From LA Times
By Chris Piller

If bird flu erupts into a pandemic, the world will need a lot of vaccine in a hurry. That would be virtually impossible with the current flu-vaccine manufacturing method, which is little changed since the 1940s.

Several companies have bird flu vaccines in development, though none is yet commercially available.
But flu vaccines traditionally are grown in millions of fertilized chicken eggs, a process that takes at least six months. The lengthy production cycle makes it hard for drug makers to keep up with mutating flu strains and limits the amount of vaccine they can produce quickly.

The egg-based method is particularly problematic for bird-flu vaccines because the disease threatens chickens, which provide the essential raw material.

So pharmaceutical companies are developing two methods — using cell cultures and DNA cloning — that could speed things up. But each faces hurdles in gaining official approval.

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From Herald Tribune SW Florida
By Daryl Lease

Early one morning in the Oval Office …

“Good morning, Mr. President.”

“What is it now, Karl?

“Actually, sir –

“Hey! What’s going on here? You’re not Karl!”

“No, sir, it’s Michael — ”

“Security!”

“Brown, sir. Michael Brown, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Reporting for duty.”

“I know who the devil you are, Brownie. What are you doing in MY office?”

“Well, Mr. President — ”

“I fired you. Or you quit. Or however we put it. Either way, you’re history. Gone. Vamoosed!”

“Actually, sir, FEMA just extended my employment for another 30 days.”

“Pardon?”

“FEMA just extended my employment for another 30 days.”

“I heard you, Brownie. But you’re not making any sense.”

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From The Guardian UK
By Katherine Shrader

WASHINGTON (AP) - The National Security Agency has been blocking the release of an article by one of its historians that says intelligence officers falsified documents about a disputed attack that was used to escalate the Vietnam War, according to a researcher who has requested the article.

Matthew Aid, who asked for the article under the Freedom of Information Act last year, said it appears that officers at the NSA made honest mistakes in translating interceptions involving the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident. That was a reported North Vietnamese attack on American destroyers that helped lead to President Johnson’s escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Rather than correct the mistakes, the 2001 article in the NSA’s classified Cryptologic Quarterly says, midlevel officials decided to falsify documents to cover up the errors, according to Aid, who is working on a history of the agency and has talked to a number of current and former government officials about this chapter of American history.

Aid draws comparisons to more recent intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction that overstated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s arsenal.

“The question becomes, why not release this?” Aid said of the article. “We have some documents that, from my perspective, I think would be very instructive to the public and the intelligence community … on a mistake made 41 years ago that was just as bad as the WMD debacle.”

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From The BBC News

The 8 October South Asian earthquake killed at least 17,000 children when their schools collapsed, the UN children’s fund, Unicef, says.

It said those that survived were either injured or suffered the trauma of losing friends and teachers. It also warned of a second wave of deaths if children did not get health care, clean water and immunisations. Pakistan says the quake killed more than 55,000 people, injured another 78,000 and left three million homeless.

Unicef says Pakistan government estimates show 6,700 schools were destroyed in North-West Frontier Province and 1,300 in Pakistan-administered Kashmir as children attended morning classes. Ann Veneman, Unicef executive director, said the trauma suffered by the children who survived could well be worse than those who escaped last December’s Asian tsunami.

“The ones that survived, many have injuries. The ones that survived, also many lost friends. They lost teachers, they lost important people in their lives.” Unicef estimates nearly 20,000 children “will have physical impairments after this tragedy due to injuries and amputations”.

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From Reuters

Costa Rican trade unions called on Monday for a one-day general strike next month to oppose ratification of a regional free-trade pact with the United States, which they fear could hurt standards of living.

More than 200 unions and civic groups are expected to take part in the stoppage on Nov. 17, which seeks to pressure the Costa Rican Congress to reject the U.S.-Central American Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA, union leaders said.

Costa Rica is the only Central American nation yet to ratify the agreement. It has been approved by the United States, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic.

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From The Khaleej Times

GENEVA - A leading pressure group, Human Rights Watch (HRW), on Monday dismissed a US invitation to UN experts to visit the controversial Guantanamo Bay detention centre as a farce.

Kenneth Roth, head of the US-based rights group, said the conditional invitation announced by Washington on Friday would not allow the three experts to talk freely to detainees held at the military base.

That’s a farce, a farce that we hope that the Special Rapporteurs … will definitely reject, Roth told journalists.

Roth underlined that UN Special Rapporteurs on human rights always insisted on being able to interview detainees or alleged victims of abuse in private during their missions abroad.

It is important for them to follow their regular terms of reference and to have private, confidential access to any prisoner they want, Roth said. Instead what the Defence Department offered was a show tour. The US State Department said that the invitation was aimed at showing that detainees at Guantanamo Bay are treated humanely.

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