From Information Clearinghouse
By Andrew Thomas

An animated editioral worth watching…

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From Yahoo News
By Toni Loci

The Supreme Court dealt a setback Tuesday to abortion clinics in a two-decade-old legal fight over abortion protests, ruling that federal extortion and racketeering laws cannot be used to ban demonstrations.

The 8-0 decision ends a case that the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had kept alive despite a 2003 ruling by the high court that lifted a nationwide injunction on anti-abortion groups led by Joseph Scheidler and others.

Anti-abortion groups brought the appeal after the appellate court sought to determine whether the injunction could be supported by charges that protesters had made threats of violence.

In Tuesday’s ruling, Justice Stephen Breyer said Congress did not intend to create “a freestanding physical violence offense” in the federal extortion law known as the Hobbs Act.

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From Financial Times
By Demetri Sevastopulo

President George W. Bush has repeatedly argued that a premature withdrawal from Iraq would dishonour the US troops who have died in Iraq. But a rare opinion poll of US military personnel in Iraq released on Tuesday suggested that only a quarter of US troops agreed with their commander-in-chief.

Mr Bush on Tuesday repeated his mantra, telling ABC news that the US troops will stay so long as until the Iraqis can defend themselves– My policy has not changed.

The Zogby International/Le Moyne College poll “ the first attempt to gauge the opinion of US soldiers serving in Iraq “ coincided with a separate CBS news poll which found that only 36 per cent of the US public believes things are going well in Iraq.

The CBS poll was conducted following the attack on the Shia mosque in Samarra, which sparked a wave of violence across Iraq, prompting concerns that Iraq could be on the brink of civil war.

In recent days, senior US officials have suggested that Iraq remains in a precarious state. But Mr Bush on Tuesday told ABC that he disagreed with those who suggested Iraq could be heading for full-scale civil war.

General Michael Maples, director of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, told a Senate hearing on Tuesday: I think we should take heart in the leaders who have come forward at this point, but we’re also in a very tenuous situation right now.

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From The Telegraph UK
By Alec Russell

Ron Rethrope’s gold-toothed smile was as forlorn as his half-finished Mardi Gras costume. All he wanted was to be parading through New Orleans draped in his rhinestones, feathers and beads.

Instead he was fighting bureaucracy in exile in Houston yesterday where Mardi Gras means about as much - or rather as little - as in Harrogate or Hove.

“It’s kind of rough right now,” he said, brandishing the papers he needs to prove his right to federal funds for his rent. “I should be in New Orleans with crowds all around and my little girl dressed up at my side. Instead, I am in Houston waiting for Fema [the federal emergency service].”

“Some people say it is unfair that we are getting free rent. But they don’t realise we lost everything we had to lose — Now is not a time for having fun.”
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From North Jersey.com
By Alex Nussbaum

Amid chants of “U-S-A,” dockworkers, truck drivers and politicians made clear Monday that they don’t want Port Newark run by a company controlled by the Arab emirate of Dubai.

“We wouldn’t transfer the title to the devil, and we’re not going to transfer it to Dubai!” U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg thundered to the crowd of longshoremen and Teamsters gathered at the port.

The rally came as the U.S. Senate released a Coast Guard report that said the agency couldn’t tell whether Dubai Ports World was a security risk.

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From Forbes
By Steven R. Hurst

Sunnis and Shiites traded bombings and mortar fire against mainly religious targets in Baghdad well into the night Tuesday, killing at least 68 people a day after authorities lifted a curfew that had briefly calmed a series of sectarian reprisal attacks.

At least six of Tuesday’s attacks hit clearly religious targets, concluding with a car bombing after sundown at the Shiite Abdel Hadi Chalabi mosque in the Hurriyah neighborhood that killed 23 and wounded 55. A separate suicide bombing killed 23 people at an east Baghdad gas station, where people had lined up to buy kerosine.

In addition to those known to have been killed Tuesday, police found nine more bullet-riddled bodies, including a Sunni Muslim tribal sheik, off a road southeast of Baghdad. It was unclear when they died.

The surge of violence deepened the trauma of residents already shaken by fears the country was teetering on the brink of sectarian civil war, threatened talks among Iraqi politicians struggling to form a government and raised questions about U.S. plans to begin drawing down troop strength this summer.

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From BBC News

A domestic cat in Germany has become the first European Union mammal to die of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu.
The cat was found dead at the weekend on the Baltic island of Ruegen, where dozens of birds infected with H5N1 have been found.

Further north, Sweden has detected “aggressive” bird flu in two wild ducks and is testing to confirm H5N1.

Meanwhile, vets from 50 countries have been meeting in Paris for a second day to discuss ways to combat the virus.

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From Yahoo News
By Matt Spetalnick

President George W. Bush, hit by polls showing America’s support for the Iraq war at an all-time low, denied on Tuesday Iraq was sliding into civil war, despite the worst sectarian strife since a U.S. invasion.

The decline in Bush’s public approval ratings came as he told Iraqis they faced a choice between “chaos or unity” amid violence that has dented U.S. hopes for the stability needed to pave the way for a U.S. troop withdrawal.

At least 60 people were killed in Baghdad on Tuesday in the latest in a series of deadly attacks following the bombing of a major Shi’ite mosque last week.

Asked what Washington would do if civil war broke out in Iraq, Bush told ABC News: “I don’t buy your premise that there’s going to be a civil war.” He said he had spoken to leaders of all Iraqi sects and “I heard loud and clear that they understand that they’re going to choose unification, and we’re going to help them do so.”

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From The Nation
By Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith

Anyone who sees the photographs of the victims of the Nazi concentration camps must wonder how human beings could ever have allowed such things to happen. They must wonder how people of good will could have stood by while their government committed atrocities in their name. In the wake of that nightmarish era, people often asked, “Where were the good Germans?”

After the publication of the long-suppressed pictures of Abu Ghraib victims and the United Nations finding that torture and abuse are still taking place at the US prison in Guantánamo Bay, America has fashioned its own nightmare. We now must ask ourselves, “Where are the good Americans?”

After an eighteen-month study, five independent experts appointed by the UN Commission on Human Rights have just concluded that practices currently conducted at the US prison in Guantánamo amount to torture: excessive violence, force-feeding of hunger-striking detainees and arbitrary detention of prisoners that violates their right under international law to challenge the legality of their captivity before an independent judicial body.

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From Working For Change
By Molly Ivins

AUSTIN, Texas - With the Bush administration, it’s important to have in mind the old carnival con game: Keep your eye on the shell with the pea under it.

Among the many curious aspects of the administration’s approval of the Dubai Ports World takeover of operations at six major ports (and as many as 21) is this exemption from normally routine restrictions: The agreement does not require DP World to keep copies of its business records on U.S. soil, which would place them within the jurisdiction of American courts. Nor does it require the company to designate an American citizen to accommodate requests by the government. So what’s that about?

It makes DP World harder to sue and less subject to American regulation. The lovely thing about the ports deal causing such a commotion is that it allows us to bring attention to this fairly obscure provision, which is, in fact, part of a wave of similar special exemptions that’s starting to turn into a flood.

Here’s a lovely example of how it works: Just before Christmas last year, in a spectacular example of a straight power play, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert pulled off a backroom legislative deal to protect pharmaceutical companies from lawsuits. The language was slipped into a Defense Department appropriations bill at the last minute without the approval of members of the House-Senate conference committee meeting on the bill.

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