Give me something to cheer about...

[UniverseSeven]

Thanks for taking the time JG

I also couldn't find a transcript despite my best efforts.

[jonnygemini]

HEE HEE...JINGLE ALL THE WAY BOYS!!

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) -- A group of 40 people dressed in Santa Claus outfits, many of them drunk, went on a rampage through Auckland, New Zealand's largest city, robbing stores, assaulting security guards and urinating from highway overpasses, police said Sunday.

The rampage, dubbed "Santarchy," began early Saturday afternoon when the men, wearing ill-fitting Santa costumes, threw beer bottles and urinated on cars from an overpass, said Auckland Central Police spokesman Noreen Hegarty.

She said the men then rushed through a central city park, overturning garbage containers, throwing bottles at passing cars and spraying graffiti on office buildings.

One man climbed the mooring line of a cruise ship before being ordered down by the captain. Other Santas, objecting when the man was arrested, attacked security staff, who were later treated by paramedics, Hegarty said.

The remaining Santas entered another downtown convenience store and carried off beer and soft drinks.

"They came in, said 'Merry Christmas' and then helped themselves," store owner Changa Manakynda said.

Two security guards were treated for cuts after being struck by beer bottles, Hegarty said. Three people, including the man who climbed on the cruise ship, were arrested and charged with drunkenness and disorderly behavior.

Alex Dyer, a spokesman for the group, said Santarchy was a worldwide movement designed to protest the commercialization of Christmas.

[UniverseSeven]

American 'nightmare' favored in Bolivia vote
edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/americas/12/18/bolivia.reut/

Crucial choice for Bolivia voters
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4539454.stm



In Bolivia’s presidential election yesterday, Evo Morales, a candidate of the Movement toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo; MAS), who is leading in the public-opinion polls, is heading for a voting booth. If Morales, a candidate and former coca farmer, becomes the president, the first leftist government of South America led by a South American Indian will come into being. Morales is being called a “second Chavez” and “the Che Guevara of Bolivia.”

[UniverseSeven]

Sharon in Hospital After Mild Stroke
abcnews.go.com/International/Mideast/wireStory?id=1418912

[jonnygemini]

more from Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

"Some European countries insist on saying that Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces and they insist on it to the extent that if anyone proves something contrary to that they condemn that person and throw them in jail"

"Although we don't accept this claim, if we suppose it is true, our question for the Europeans is: is the killing of innocent Jewish people by Hitler the reason for their support to the occupiers of Jerusalem?" he said.

"If the Europeans are honest they should give some of their provinces in Europe -- like in Germany, Austria or other countries -- to the Zionists and the Zionists can establish their state in Europe. You offer part of Europe and we will support it."

Earlier in his remarks, the Iranian president, a former Revolutionary Guardsman who won a surprise election victory in June, said:

"The question is, where do those who rule in Palestine as occupiers come from? Where were they born? Where did their fathers live? They have no roots in Palestine but they have taken the fate of Palestine in their hands.

"Isn't the right to national self-determination one of the principles of the United Nations charter? Why do they deprive Palestinians of this right?"

"Whatever they decide will be accepted by all humanity. This is a clear democratic solution which is based on international principles," he said.

[UniverseSeven]

Second day of constitutional referendum in Congo

14:38 2005-12-19

Voters marked ballots for a second day Monday in Congo's constitutional referendum on whether to adopt a draft charter meant to kickstart the war-battered central African nation's drive toward lasting peace. Only one-quarter of Congo's 40,000 polling centers, those that opened late on Sunday or experienced distribution problems, reopened on Monday, said Desire Molekela, spokesman for Congo's Independent Electoral Commission.

Many Congolese believed they could vote either day and hundreds of would-be voters lined up around the capital, Kinshasa, in front of polling centers that stayed dark. "I heard on national radio that we could vote on Monday, this is unbelievable," said Feret Mwanza, 33, an unemployed resident of Kinshasa who had traveled from the other end of the sprawling city to vote Monday morning. "I want to vote, but now I can't."

U.N. officials reported scattered violence during Sunday's first day of voting, with three injured in a fight in the southern diamond center of Lubumbashi.

U.N. radio reported one child trampled underfoot during a rush to vote in Bukavu, an eastern city. Officials couldn't confirm the incident. Congolese have not voted en masse since 1970, when then-dictator Mobutu Sese Seko stood as the sole candidate. His reign ended in 1997 amid the first of two wars that wracked the country until 2002. The referendum is viewed as a crucial step toward lasting peace.

The charter would grant greater autonomy to mineral-laden regions but is viewed by many as another attempt by corrupt politicians to enrich themselves.

Some 24 million people are registered to vote. Final results are expected by the end of the year. There were 280 international observers on hand to watch the voting. Turnout appeared moderate in Kinshasa, with traffic so light at some polling centers that election workers were asleep on the premises.

Many Western analysts say a rejection would represent bad news. Although they view the document as perhaps flawed in some ways, they consider it to be a crucial step toward ending a transitional government and laying the framework for the construction of a proper democratic government.

The charter was written by members of the transitional government, including many former rebel leaders and partisans of President Joseph Kabila. But many Congolese are suspicious, seeing manipulation that put politicians' interests ahead of their own. For example, the draft lowers the minimum age for presidential candidates from 35 to 30, allowing the incumbent Kabila, a 33-year-old who inherited his father's rebel army that ousted Mobutu, to seek re-election.

If the constitution is rejected, the transitional government will continue to govern Congo, at least until its mandate ends on June 30. The constitution attempts to ensure female participation at all levels of government, notable in a country where rapes and gender-based violence were common during the wars.

The draft constitution also aims to decentralize authority, dividing the vast nation into 25 semiautonomous provinces drawn along ethnic and cultural lines. The first general elections in decades are due in March, reports the AP.

[jonnygemini]

All that is gold does not glitter
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken
The crownless again shall be king

J.R.R. Tolkien - "Lord of the Rings"

[jonnygemini]

via: Jeff Wells' Rigorous Institution

The word mercy's gonna have a new meaning
When we are judged by the children of our slaves - Bruce Cockburn

I get many emails telling me I'm too negative. It's hard for me to disagree. Though what I want to be is just negative enough: neither striken by paralysis nor buoyed up by cheap hope. That's a tough one.

So when good things happen - when real blows land against the empire and the last become first, at least for a while - they need acknowledgement. If only for the good of clearing my own head. Even sometimes at hope's "limited hangout" of electoral victory. Especially in Bolivia, when an indiginous man who talks like this is elected president:

When we speak of the "defense of humanity," as we do at this event, I think that this only happens by eliminating neoliberalism and imperialism. But I think that in this we are not so alone, because we see, every day that anti-imperialist thinking is spreading, especially after Bush's bloody "intervention" policy in Iraq. Our way of organizing and uniting against the system, against the empire's aggression towards our people, is spreading, as are the strategies for creating and strengthening the power of the people.

As Evo Morales begins to exercise his unambiguous mandate, it will be interesting, and quite likely disheartening, to watch how Bolivia suddenly becomes a topic of great concern in certain quarters; even possibly a crisis of national security demanding intervention.

Here's an early example from Jim Kouri, a Vice President of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, who's written an opinion piece entitled "Bolivian Thug Becomes President." He predictably blovates that the win "will increase the destabilization of the South American continent," and that Morales is an "ally of the drug cartels and traffickers."

The continent enjoys far greater stability today - and in the mental health sense of the word, too - than in the days of death's head satraps employing the methods of the School of the Americas and answerable to none but Washington. And in an interview with Luis Gómez of Narco News, former Bolivian guerrilla leader and presidential candidate Felipe Quispe makes distinctions between coca and cocaine that undoubtedly would be lost on Kouri:

Coca has been, ancestrally, a sacred leaf. We, the indigenous, have had a profound respect toward it... a respect that includes that we don't "pisar" it (the verb "pisar" means to treat the leaves with a chemical substance, one of the first steps in the production of cocaine). In general, we only use it to acullicar: We chew it during times of war, during ritual ceremonies to salute Mother Earth (the Pachamama) or Father Sun or other Aymara divinities, like the hills. Thus, as an indigenous nation, we have never prostituted Mama Coca or done anything artificial to it because it is a mother. It is the occidentals who have prostituted it. It is they who made it into a drug. This doesn't mean that we don't understand the issue. We know that this plague threatens all of humanity and, from that perspective, we believe that those who have prostituted the coca have to be punished.

Kouri walks his readers right up to "regime change": "should [Morales's] coca policy show an increase of cocaine on US city streets, his regime will be seen as a national security threat and rightly so."

Funny, that. Or rather, like so many things these days, it would be funny if it didn't mean people's lives. Because on July 17, 1980, "los Novios de la Murete" - narcotics traffickers and mercenaries recruited by fugitive Nazi and CIA asset Klaus Barbie - overthrew the democratic government of Bolivia in the "Cocaine Coup." Cocaine production increased dramatically and America was flooded with the cheap drug. In his essay on the drug war's shills in Kristina Borjesson's Into the Buzzsaw, 25-year DEA veteran Michael Levine writes that "there are few events in history that have caused more and longer-lasting damage to our nation." Bolivians could say the same.

Levine made headlines two months prior to the coup when his DEA sting netted Bolivian cartel leaders Roberto Gasser and Alfredo Gutierrez outside a Miami bank. He had paid them $8 million for the then-largest ever seizure of cocaine. Just a few weeks later Gasser and Gutierrez were released, thanks to pressure from the CIA and the State Department, and weeks after that both men and their cartels became principal financiers of the coup, and were rewarded by the new regime with squads of neo-Nazis to bully their competition.

And then there's Sun Myung Moon. Robert Parry remembers that one of the first international well-wishers who travelled to La Paz to congratulate the putschists was Moon's right hand Bo Hi Pak, former publisher of The Washington Times and "Koreagate" principal, who declared "I have erected a throne for Father Moon in the world's highest city." Later disclosures from the Bolivian government strongly suggested that Moon's organization had heavily invested in the coup, and Parry writes that in 1981 "war criminal Barbie and Moon leader Thomas Ward were often seen together in apparent prayer." Lt. Alfred Mario Mingolla, an Argentine intelligence officer recruited by Barbie, described Ward as his "CIA paymaster." His monthly salary was drawn from the offices of Moon's anti-communist umbrella organization, CAUSA. (As we've seen, Moon still has a huge stake in South America, having purchased the land above the world's largest fresh water aquifer, in Paraguay. These people play a long game.)

"Meanwhile," Parry adds, "Barbie started a secret lodge, called Thule. During meetings, he lectured to his followers underneath swastikas by candlelight." Old habits, hardly dying, and a polyglot web of fascist patrons unashamed to profit by the labours of their Nazi lieutenants.

And here's another would-be funny thing: there were no American headlines about all of that. None at all.

But maybe that's enough talk for now about a coup, while there's a revolution going on.

[jonnygemini]

Girls Gone Wild creator grilled on police record in court
32-year old Joe Francis, who became a gajillionaire by convincing countless young women to "show us where babies feed" for Girls Gone Wild videos, was grilled about his own criminal record when he appeared in court as a burglary victim yesterday:

[Francis] testified that an armed intruder stole cash and possessions and then forced him to make a humiliating, half-naked video. Francis identified his assailant as Darnell Riley, 28, who is accused of six felony counts of burglary, robbery, carjacking, kidnapping and attempted extortion.

In Los Angeles County Superior Court today, Riley's lawyer fired back at Francis, grilling him on his own police record. Defense attorney Ronald Richards asked Francis about a theft arrest in North Carolina, and a case pending in Florida alleging that he filmed minors for one of his videotapes and was charged with racketeering, prostitution, obscenity, child pornography and possession of an illegal drug.

[jonnygemini]

"I don't want a black history month. Black history is American history. ... I am going to stop calling you a white man and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man."

Morgan Freeman.

[jonnygemini]

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best intentions do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.

-- Sheenagh Pugh

[UniverseSeven]

Italy warrants for 22 purported CIA operatives

ROME, Italy (CNN) -- An Italian judge has issued European arrest warrants for 22 purported CIA agents alleged to have kidnapped an Egyptian-born Muslim cleric in Milan in 2003, a prosecutor said Friday.

The warrants make it legal for the 22 to be arrested in any of the European Union's member nations.

Prosecutor Armando Spataro said the warrants were issued December 20.

The 22 were already facing arrest warrants in Italy, and are considered fugitives.

Prosecutors have asked Justice Minister Roberto Castelli to call on the United States to extradite the 22. Castelli has not done so, and has said he needs more information about the allegations.

The case revolves around the alleged abduction of Osama Nasr Mostafa Hassan, also known as Abu Omar, in February 2003.

At the time of his disappearance, Milan prosecutors were investigating him for alleged links to terrorism.

Prosecutors allege that a CIA team seized him, flew him to Egypt, and used torture as part of an interrogation there.

Earlier this year, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi summoned U.S. Ambassador Mel Sembler for an explanation. No details of their meeting were released.

Former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer said the Italian military secret service had approved the operation, and CIA sources who refused to be named told CNN that the agency had briefed and sought approval from its Italian counterpart for such an abduction.

But the Italian government vigorously denied having authorized Hassan's kidnapping, which it called illegal.

edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/12/23/italy.warrants2/

[jonnygemini]

Sharon Suffers a Cerebral Hemorrhage
Jan 04 5:07 PM US/Eastern

By MARK LAVIE
Associated Press Writer

JERUSALEM

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered a cerebral hemorrhage Wednesday and was receiving breathing assistance while under general anesthetic, a hospital official said. Power was transferred to his deputy.

Sharon, 77, suffered a "significant" stroke and was brought to Jerusalem's Hadassah Hospital from his ranch in the Negev desert, an official said. Channel 2 TV said Sharon was suffering from paralysis in his lower body and was taken into the hospital on a stretcher.

Dr. Shlomo Mor-Yosef, the hospital's director general, said Sharon was under general anesthetic and was receiving breathing assistance while doctors assessed his condition.

A few minutes later, Mor-Yosef emerged to say that initial tests showed Sharon had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, or bleeding in his brain.

Addressing reporters in English, Mor-Yosef said Sharon had "massive bleeding and was being transferred to an operating theater."

Cabinet Secretary Yisrael Maimon said Sharon's authority had been transferred to Vice Premier Ehud Olmert.

The latest health crisis came hours before Sharon was to undergo a procedure to seal a hole in his heart that contributed to a mild stroke on Dec. 18.

Sharon adviser Raanan Gissin told CNN the premier was attending meetings and went home to his ranch after suffering chest pains and weakness.

"In the presence of his doctor, and upon his advice, he said he should be taken to the hospital," Gissin said.

Sharon reportedly is 5-foot-7 and weighs more than 300 pounds, but doctors checking him last month said he otherwise was in good health. Since then, Sharon has lost several pounds while dieting, doctors said.

The dramatic downturn in Sharon's health comes as he runs for re- election on March 28 leading a new centrist party, Kadima. Sharon has a wide lead in the polls.

The party's strength is centered on Sharon himself, and if he were forced to leave the scene, Israel's political scene would be thrown into turmoil.

Sharon's office said his personal physician was with him at his ranch. He was taken by ambulance, a drive of more than an hour from his ranch in Israel's south, instead of by helicopter.

After his first stroke, doctors said Sharon would not suffer long-term effects, but they discovered a birth defect in his heart that apparently contributed to the stroke.

Since then, Sharon has been taking blood thinners.

[Healthy Merking]

all politicians seem to meet dramatic or excrutiating demises




i have noticed the same thing with a lot of white philosophers as well over the last couple of centuries

[jonnygemini]

Okla. pastor arrested on lewdness charge

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

OKLAHOMA CITY -- A pastor who has spoken out against homosexuality was arrested after propositioning a male undercover police officer outside a hotel, authorities said.

As the Rev. Lonnie Latham, 59, left jail Wednesday, he said "I was set up. I was in the area pastoring to police."

Latham, a member of the Southern Baptist Convention's executive committee, was arrested Tuesday and charged with offering to engage in an act of lewdness, Capt. Jeffrey Becker said.

Calls to Latham and his South Tulsa Baptist Church were not returned for comment.

Latham has supported a convention directive urging members to befriend gays and lesbians and try to convince them that they can become heterosexual "if they accept Jesus Christ as their savior and reject their 'sinful, destructive lifestyle.'"

The Southern Baptist Convention is the nation's largest Protestant denomination. Messages left for the convention were not returned.