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Politics : Bush Administration's Media Manipulation--MediaGate? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: longnshort who wrote (4043)	6/17/2005 11:33:06 AM
From: Proud_Infidel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9838

Where is Amnesty International? More razings -- Zimbabwe extends demolitions to rural areas Friday, June 17, 2005 Posted: 10:36 AM EDT (1436 GMT) HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) -- Zimbabwe has extended the destruction of informal homes and businesses from the cities to rural areas, police told state radio Friday. The government calls the campaign a cleanup effort, but critics at home and abroad say it is a violation of human rights and inspired by politics. Police spokesman Austin Chikwavara said his force has started tearing down shacks and kiosks found at major crossroads in Chirumanzu, Umvuma and Lalapanzi in the Zimbabwe Midlands, between 200 kilometers (124 miles) and 300 kilometers (186 miles) south of the capital, Harare. Another police spokesman, who was not identified, told the radio station that police also are demolishing homes built without permission on some of the thousands of farms seized from their white owners for redistribution to black Zimbabweans. However, Security Minister Didymus Mutasa maintained in the same broadcast that the monthlong campaign was aimed only at cleaning out city streets and would not affect the government's rural strongholds. The government's Operation Murambatsvina, or Drive Out Trash, has already left more than 250,000 city dwellers homeless in the winter cold. Police also have arrested more than 30,000 vendors, accusing them of dealing in black market goods and attempting to sabotage Zimbabwe's failing economy. President Robert Mugabe's dismissed propaganda chief condemned the evictions Thursday as "barbaric." Jonathan Moyo, addressing his first public meeting in the capital since he was fired in January, said the blitz was linked to a power struggle within the ruling party over who would succeed the 81-year-old Mugabe. "It seems to be a directionless activity of some mischievous group which imagines it can profit by this in some mysterious way and position itself ahead of the pack in the succession game," he told the gathering at a Harare hotel Thursday. Moyo, who spent five years as information minister, was fired for opposing Mugabe's choice of Joyce Mujuru as a vice president. Moyo backed parliamentary Speaker Emmerson Mnangagwa, who represents a younger generation of ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front members. Opposition leaders say the eviction campaign is aimed at driving their supporters among the urban poor into rural areas, where they can be more easily controlled. "The government wants to depopulate urban areas ahead of the 2008 elections and re-create a rural peasantry in which voters are brought under the control of local chiefs and Mugabe's militias," Sydney Masamvu, an analyst from the International Crisis Group think tank, said in a statement Friday. As the unpopular drive spreads, Zimbabwe officials sought to play down superstitious fears that the ancestors have been angered. Residents of a small mining town told a government newspaper that the presence of a baboon in a destroyed shack was a sign of the ancestors' displeasure. The animal leaped out of the shack as it was being pulled down and refused to leave the site in Shurugwi's Mukusha township, 450 kilometers (280 miles) south of Harare, The Herald reported. Many Zimbabweans believe the spirits of ancestors inhabit wild animals and invade human habitations to take revenge when offended. "We are not really concerned because a baboon can never harm a person," police spokesman Patrick Chademana told The Herald.

To: longnshort who wrote (4043)	6/17/2005 11:55:12 AM
From: Proud_Infidel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9838

ADL TO DURBIN: APOLOGIZE! 6/17/05 The Anti-Defamation League blasted Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin on Thursday, demanding that he apologize for comparing U.S. troops at Guantanamo Bay to "Nazis." "Whatever your views on the treatment of detainees and alleged excesses at the Guantanamo Bay facility, it is inappropriate and insensitive to suggest that actions by American troops in any way resemble actions taken by Nazis in their treatment of prisoners," ADL chief Abraham Foxman wrote in a letter addressed to Durbin. The Anti-Defamation League blasted Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin on Thursday, demanding that he apologize for comparing U.S. troops at Guantanamo Bay to "Nazis." "Whatever your views on the treatment of detainees and alleged excesses at the Guantanamo Bay facility, it is inappropriate and insensitive to suggest that actions by American troops in any way resemble actions taken by Nazis in their treatment of prisoners," ADL chief Abraham Foxman wrote in a letter addressed to Durbin.

To: longnshort who wrote (4043)	6/17/2005 12:14:45 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9838

The filibuster is an anti-democratic instrument that upsets the delicate system of checks and balances already written into the Constitution. Liberal Democrats in the Senate aren't in favor of lynching, but they are fighting to preserve a reactionary weapon that, in future wrenching national debates, will empower obstructionists to kidnap that body just as they did during the civil rights debates. Not acknowledging that the filibuster was at issue in the lynching context, not even to address the filibuster's tarnished history, amounts to intellectual cowardice. latimes.com

To: longnshort who wrote (4043)	6/17/2005 12:52:36 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9838

Six Islamic militants, two others killed in Kashmir China Daily ^ \| 2005-06-17 15:53 Indian troops in Kashmir shot dead six Islamic militants, including three infiltrators from the Pakistani-zone of the divided state, while suspected rebels shot dead two people, officials said. The three militant infiltrators were killed late Thursday during a clash in the Tangdar sector of northern Kupwara district, which borders Pakistan-administered Kashmir, army spokesman Vijay Batra said on Friday. "The three were asked to surrender but instead opened fire that was returned, killing them on the spot," he said. Indian troops shot dead three more militants in the southern district of Doda late Thursday in two separate gun battles, a police spokesman said. In the same district, suspected rebels shot dead a civilian late Thursday, police said, adding that a former rebel, who was leading a normal life after his release from prison, was shot dead in the summer capital Srinagar Friday morning. The fresh violence comes as moderate separatists returned from a historic two-week tour to Pakistan and its portion of Kashmir on Thursday in a positive mood. They have said they are willing to reopen dialogue with India on the future of Kashmir, which is divided between India and Pakistan but claimed in full by both. Violence in Kashmir has continued despite an 18-month-old peace process between the nuclear-armed rivals. The neighbours have fought two of their three wars over the region since independence from Britain in 1947.