www.knoxstudio.com Scripps Howard News Service January 31, 2003

WASHINGTON - The "majors list" - which identifies the most problematic illicit drug-producing and transit countries - has been released by the White House. It contains many of the usual suspects: Afghanistan, the Bahamas, Bolivia, Brazil, Burma, China, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Laos, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Thailand, Venezuela and Vietnam.

President Bush's report also noted the alarming increase in the quantity of ecstasy entering the United States; a significant amount of it is manufactured clandestinely in the Netherlands. Bush also noted his concern that Canada, although not on the majors list, is a primary source of pseudoephedrine, which is exported to the United States and used in illegal drug laboratories to make methamphetamine. The report noted Canada increasingly has become a source of high-potency marijuana exported to the United States.

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You probably don't need another study to be convinced that too many commuters are distracted by talking on cell phones.

But here goes anyhow.

According to the National Safety Council, drivers are often distracted whether they are holding a cell phone during a conversation or using a hands-free cell phone. The conclusion? Local laws requiring hands-free use only will not help much.

Cell phone stats: About 134 million are in use in this country, and about 75 percent of drivers have used their phone while driving. Federal officials estimate that 20 percent to 30 percent of all crashes are caused by some form of driver distraction, with cell phones being just one of several culprits.

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Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry! ... As if enough hot air hasn't settled over the Senate, Jerry Springer, the former Cincinnati mayor who hosts one of the more, uh, flamboyant TV talk shows, is contemplating a campaign. The Democrat would face off against Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio.

Meanwhile, some folks are hinting that Oprah Winfrey, who soon is expected to end her longtime Chicago-based talk show, would be the perfect Democratic candidate to oppose Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, R-Ill.

As if there isn't enough talk in Washington.

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Who favors war with Iraq? Support is highest among Republicans, conservatives, younger Americans and those with a high school education or less, says the Gallup organization, which analyzed data from six polls taken in December and January. A majority of Democrats, liberals and those with a postgraduate education oppose an invasion. Men are slightly more likely than women to favor U.S. action against Iraq.

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California Gov. Gray Davis is having a slight problem delivering on his Super Bowl bet with Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. The Sunshine State is one of 37 states that restrict direct shipping of wine. So the dozen bottles of 1999 Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon that Davis put on the line, which run at $150 a bottle, will remain in the Napa Valley.

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Irony doesn't get much better than this.

Guess which country is slated to take over the rotating chairmanship of the U.N. Conference on Disarmament in May? Yep, Iraq. In alphabetical order, U.N. member countries get the chairmanship for a month or so at a time. The conference is the globe's top disarmament forum.

"The irony is overwhelming," said a spokesman for John Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

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Maybe President Bush should have let Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul and Randy Jackson occupy the front-row seats at his State of the Union address instead of the Joint Chiefs.

"American Idol," the lead-in to the president's Tuesday speech on the Fox network, drew an estimated 23 million viewers, according to the Nielsen ratings. But about 13 million fans of the tone-deaf singers getting bashed by a smarmy Brit found something better to do when president took the podium.

Even so, the 10 million who stuck around, along with those viewing on other networks, helped make the state of the union Bush's most watched televised address ever - 62 million overall.

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You've heard of the teacher shortage? The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future says it's actually more of a retention problem. A new report by the panel finds almost a third of all new teachers leave the classroom after three years, and that close to 50 percent leave after five years.

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Regular beach swimmers might take offense, but environmental groups are suing a federal agency to reduce the number of sharks that the fishing industry can catch and kill.

Ever since the release of the movie "Jaws" back in 1975, swimmers have kept a close watch for signs of sharks near their beaches. But Earthjustice, The Ocean Conservancy and the National Audubon Society claim that federal officials need to shrink quotas for hunting certain species of sharks to avoid dangerous population declines. One study estimated that the sandbar shark family has declined by up to 80 percent since the late '70s. In the past two decades, hammerhead numbers are down as much as 89 percent, great whites by 79 percent, and tiger sharks by 65 percent.

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Drug lobbyists are trying to deep-six Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., former high-profile chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, famous for skewering Bill Clinton. Thanks to GOP rules, Burton had to forfeit his chairmanship in this Congress, and drug-industry lobbyists are urging GOP leaders to ensure he doesn't get another because of Burton's opposition to vaccinations. Burton, who has an autistic grandson, has been investigating whether children's vaccines can cause autism.

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Alarmed by childhood obesity rates, some Democrats want to use the upcoming reauthorization of child nutrition programs to bar public schools from leasing space to vendors selling sugar snacks and sodas. But the new chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., says such decisions should be left up to local schools. His father was a school superintendent.

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It must be tough being so out of the loop as America faces its biggest diplomatic challenges in a long time. But ex-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright seems to have found a pressing cause to champion - dog parks throughout Washington, where canines can cavort off their leashes. Albright's sister, Kathy Silva, is one of the key organizers of the D.C. Dog Owners Group, which is lobbying the city council for at least one such park in each of the city's seven wards.

"I don't understand why non-dog owners wouldn't want to have a designated area for dogs where it will be cleaned up," Albright argued at the rally, according to a local weekly newspaper.

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How secure are the smart bombs and positioning systems they use? The Air Force is confident enough of GPS satellites being able to evade any jamming efforts that a proposed upgrade for the new generation of spacecraft has been pushed back two years, until 2006.

And Air Force brass say they're sure signals can be kept strong and pure enough to guide munitions wherever they are sent in Iraq, no matter what countermeasures are put into play.

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While federal officials ponder stamping some scientific studies "sensitive" because of their potential for aiding terrorists, the scientific community is struggling to come up with common definitions of what might be harmful to researchers and publishers. Scientists hope self-imposed controls on distribution will head off any bid at government censorship of information exchange. But the diverse community of researchers has yet to come close to common ground on the issue, despite several gaggles in recent weeks.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com)

www.townonline.com By Amy Lambiaso / alambias@cnc.com Friday, January 31, 2003

As the country edges closer to a possible war with Iraq, gas prices are edging up on a nearly daily basis. But even more concerning as we face one of the coldest winter's in recent memory is the rapidly rising demand for home heating oil.

Advocates for federal fuel aid are estimating that tens of thousands of Bay State residents are struggling to pay to stay warm as temperatures continue to drop. But with President Bush's announcement last week to release $200 million in federal funds, Massachusetts will see $12.3 million to bring relief to consumers eligible for federal assistance and help warm cold homes. The funding, to be administered by the Department of Health and Human Services is expected to become available in early February.

Lisa Spencer, energy director for the South Shore Community Action Council, the Plymouth-based area energy assistance company for income-eligible households, said calls for assistance had been about even with past years, but have greatly increased during the bitterly cold month of January. Although she didn't have exact numbers from the month yet, Spencer estimated walk-ins needing assistance have almost doubled during the last month.

On top of the great demand for the oil, vendors are saying many people can't even afford what oil is left. Attributing this shortage of money for some families to a lack of planning and frivolous spending, some say there is little they can do to help.

"People don't have the money because they're foolishly spending it elsewhere," said Steve Balboni, of Balboni's Oil in Kingston. "They think the equipment in their homes is going to last forever and they'll never have to worry about it."

Reports say more than 100,000 families in the state have used up federal fuel benefits, and may face the rest of the winter without aid if they are not eligible. An average family of four must have a combined household income of no more than $36,200 to be eligible for the South Shore Community Action's assistance program.

The Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program helps mainly the poor and elderly in paying heating bills, paying fixed amounts based on house income. Local administering agencies determine household eligibility based on the annual income and the number of home residents and make payments toward the heating bills to the primary source vendor. This year's frigid winter temperatures are being called the coldest on record ever, Balboni said.

Calls to Citizens Energy Corp., the non-profit oil company run by former US Rep. Joseph Kennedy, are up 100 percent over last winter. And while the company still has oil, Kennedy said recently there is "no way" it can meet the demand.

Balboni said he deals with many residents who cannot afford to heat their homes because they have not saved money accordingly throughout the year, or may be on a fixed income as are many elderly residents. But with the current uproar in Venezuela, where a good portion of oil originates, Balboni cannot predict when the stock will replenish itself again.

"It's a supply and demand issue, but there are a lot of variables in play," he said. "The varying market values and international issues always come into play."

Advocates in Boston are calling for charitable donations to help the thousands of families suffering from the cold. Already, State Street Band has donated more than $100,000, while FleetBoston, Global Petroleum, Gillette, TJX and Citizens Financial Group have made donations to the federally funded low income assistance program.

Spencer said approximately 8,300 South Shore homes benefit from the assistance program, a number that may increase if eligible residents come forward now that more funding is available. With prices hitting close to $1.50 per gallon, rising as much as 3 cents a day, even the homes receiving aid will be stretched thin.

But while many oil vendors are hitting high prices, Balboni said he has been able to keep his in tact at $1.37 earlier this week. Markets closer to Boston are reporting higher prices with daily rising margins.

In addition to the South Shore Community Action Council and Citizen's Energy, the local Salvation Army, American Red Cross, churches and senior centers may also be able to provide relief.

Portions of Michael Levenson's State House News Service report were used for this story.

Sidebar, boxed:

Winter Energy-Saving Tips:

• Caulk and weather-strip doors and windows that leak air.
• When the fireplace is not in use, keep the flue damper tightly closed.
• Set your thermostat as low as is comfortable and consider an automatic setback thermostat to save additional money.
• Clean or replace filters on furnaces every other month.
• Make sure that warm air registers, baseboard heaters and radiators are not blocked by furniture, carpeting or drapes.
• Close your curtains and shades at night; open them during the day.
• Have your oil-fired heating system serviced annually and your gas-fired heating system serviced every three years.

www.commondreams.org by repost • Friday January 31, 2003 at 08:13 PM Published on Friday, January 31, 2003 by CommonDreams.org

"If You Want To Win An Election, Just Control The Voting Machines" by Thom Hartmann

Maybe Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel honestly won two US Senate elections. Maybe it's true that the citizens of Georgia simply decided that incumbent Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a wildly popular war veteran who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was, as his successful Republican challenger suggested in his campaign ads, too unpatriotic to remain in the Senate. Maybe George W. Bush, Alabama's new Republican governor Bob Riley, and a small but congressionally decisive handful of other long-shot Republican candidates really did win those states where conventional wisdom and straw polls showed them losing in the last few election cycles.

www.deepikaglobal.com

 Thailand's three-month war against drugs begins  Spy tapes show Iraqi deceit, magazine says  U.S. to bring in new rules for Canada immigrants  Powell to give UN secret proof Iraq lied about weapons  Georgia UN envoy says Moscow "annexing" Abkhazia  Israeli Army begins crackdown on Palestinians  Iraq to assume chairmanship of UN disarmament conference

athena.tbwt.com By Roger  Burbach IPPN Article Dated 1/30/2003

Bush’s aggression against Iraqi represents a rupture with the framework of globalization that the United States has been pursuing ever since the end of the Vietnam War. This rupture is going to have appalling consequences for the United States as well as the rest of the world.

Beginning in the 1970s as the United States withdrew from Vietnam, it sought to expand its interests in concert with the other dominant power by laying the foundations for what is now called globalization. This has meant an extensive reliance on a framework of global, multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations. This convergence among the great powers was necessary because capital itself had become internationalized. International investments required stability and an array of supportive international institutions to facilitate their continued expansion.

Within this new global framework, the New World Order as it was dubbed by Bush the father, the United States operated as the primus inter pares in terms of the role that its business class and its government leaders played on the world scene. Antoni Negri and Michael Hardt in their book “Empire” captured the role of the United States in this New World Order. The U.S. project was that of a “network power.” The United States in effect networked globally with the other dominant financial and state interests, and basically forged a consensus before undertaking military actions abroad.

This is the case with all the conflicts and interventions that have occurred since the end of the Cold War. In the first Gulf War the United States enjoyed broad international support because Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, thereby threatening the oil supplies of the dominant powers as well as the existence of other nations in the Gulf. This explains why Bush Senior had the backing of a highly diverse international coalition ranging from Japan to Saudi Arabia to the nations of Western Europe. In the first Gulf War, U.S. allies paid for two-thirds of the total cost of the conflict.

The subsequent U.S. interventions in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti and Yugoslavia/ Kosovo can all be seen as efforts to restore stability in parts of the world that were threatened by domestic or regional conflicts. These interventions did not respond to the specific, narrow unilateralist interests in the United States; they were supported by a spectrum of the international community of nations.

Now the current Bush administration has shattered the global consensus that previous U.S. administrations, including his father’s, had fostered. The reasons for this new unilateralist and imperialist thrust are internal as well as external. Internally, as is well known, George W. Bush basically stole the U.S. election in 2000. He did not represent the majority of voters either in Florida or in the United States at large. A narrow clique came to power with him representing what can be called the “military-petroleum complex.” It is based on petroleum and military interests, and it believes that it needs to act unilaterally to secure its hold over most of the world’s remaining supply of “black gold.” This military-petroleum complex does not express a broad consensus of U.S. capital, let alone that of global, international capital.

Many of the international accords and agreements that previous administrations had endorsed were seen as standing in the way of the advance of this narrow clique.This is why the Bush administration immediately jettisoned the Kyoto Treaty to control global warming, as well as the International Criminal Court, the latter because it represented a challenge to the Pentagon’s ability to wage war in any way the administration thought appropriate.

However, before September 11 the efforts of this elite to secure its control were floundering. Bush himself was viewed as inept and incompetent, even by much of the U.S. corporate media. In this context, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon provided a golden opportunity for the Bush administration to push forward its unilateralist agenda. Even before the Afghan war had ended, Bush proclaimed the “axis of evil,” a propaganda ploy aimed at securing control of the Gulf oil supplies via a war against Iraq, with the potential of even going after Iran’s oil supplies. North Korea was thrown in as a fig leaf, as we now see in the Bush administrations decision to use the United Nations to “disarm” the only one of the axis countries that may actually possess “weapons of mass destruction.”

Domestically it is also necessary for the Bush administration to launch a war of repression because it realizes that it is necessary to eliminate civil liberties and to cower even the corporate media in order to secure its grip on power. The Patriot Act, the detention of U.S. citizens with absolutely no civil rights, the virtually unrestricted surveillance of the internet and phone conversations--these are the opening salvos in the domestic war against all potential adversaries.

It is difficult to predict exactly where the international and domestic wars of the Bush administration will take the world. A war in Iraq will open a Pandora’s box. In the short term it appears the world is headed for a dreadful period of death and destruction. But given the fact that the Bush administration represents such a narrow unilateralist clique, there is every reason to believe that it will be consumed by its own war. Virtually the entire world is against the war in the Gulf, and there is no internal U.S. consensus supporting it as the demonstrations on January 18th in the United States verified. Opinion polls now indicate that 70 per cent of the U.S. people favor giving the United Nations team sufficient time to complete its inspections in Iraq that will extend into March or April.

As I said earlier, global capital needs stability and international institutions to flourish. These are the requisites for the expansion of markets and capital as well as the development of network technologies, the keys to globalization. International business will suffer a major shock with a new Gulf War. We already see the effects of the military buildup in the drop in stock market values around the world and the fall in the value of the dollar. Jeffery Sachs, one of the ideologues of neo-liberalism the 1990s, recently declared that a war in the Gulf would be a disaster for international business.

Given these realities, in the next two years it is likely that the United States itself will experience a major internal political crisis because the global and national consensus will be fractured by a new Gulf War. We are headed for a period akin to the domestic and international upheaval that occurred with the Vietnam War. That conflict lead to a political and cultural transformation of the United States and much of the world, not only due to the antiwar movement but also because of the growth of the civil rights and student movements and the upsurge of a new feminism.

Even before the launching of the new Gulf War we are already seeing the politicization of a new generation in the United States after a period of alienation and depoliticization in the 1990s. The new protest movement will spawn a broad rethinking of social, cultural and political norms that we do not yet fully understand or envision. Minimally it will compel us to realize that we can no longer depend on fossil fuels, that new energy technologies will have to be developed.

The aggression against Iraq also presents some important opportunities in Latin America, particularly South America. It is here that the major challenge to the paradigm of neo-liberalism is occurring in countries like Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Ecuador. If it were not for its obsession with Iraq, the Bush administration would undoubtedly be playing a more interventionist role in Venezuela, and may have even moved against Lula and the Workers Party in Brazil.

This is the moment for Latin Americans to build a continental alliance among their peoples, and to collaborate with the social forces in the United States that have been mobilizing against globalization since the Battle of Seattle in 1999. We in the United States now more than ever need international solidarity, and Latin America can play a critical role in assisting the unfolding of the politics of confrontation within the United States. For more discussion on this article and to see what others have to say click on the link below to go to discussion forums.

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