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Despite its enormous wealth and highly advanced technology, the United States lags far behind other industrialised countries -- and even some developing ones -- in providing adequate health care to women during pregnancy and childbirth.

The U.S. ranks 41st in a new analysis of maternal mortality rates in 171 countries released by a group of U.N. public health experts on Friday. The survey shows that even a developing country like South Korea is ahead of the United States.

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M ichelle Turner's husband sits in the recliner with the shades drawn. He washes down his Zoloft with Mountain Dew. On the phone in the other room, Michelle is pleading with the utility company to keep their power on.

"Can't you tell them I'm a veteran?" asks her husband, Troy, who served as an Army scout in Baghdad and came back with post-traumatic stress disorder.

"Troy, they don't care," Michelle says.

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ndustrial clearance of rainforests accounts for 20 per cent of greenhouse gases. Every second of each day a portion of jungle the size of a football pitch is destroyed. As timber is carted off for export, giant agribusinesses often move in. And so spins the nightmare cycle: a growing release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere which in turn alters weather patterns and destroys delicate ecosystems.

Climate-change economists believe that slowing the speed of rainforest destruction is the most cost-effective way to fight global warming. In his Treasury report into the economics of climate change last year, Sir Nicholas Stern said $5bn a year was needed to provide rainforest nations with funds to ensure what remained was kept intact. But many people say Stern is unduly optimistic and put the real price at $15bn.

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The American Civil Liberties Union said Sunday that newly uncovered documents show that the Pentagon secretly sent hundreds of letters seeking the financial records of private citizens without court approval.

The ACLU said an analysis of 455 so-called national security letters issued after Sept. 11, 2001 shows that the Pentagon collaborated with the FBI to circumvent the law and may have overstepped its legal authority to obtain financial and credit records. The ACLU has been reviewing the letters and the accompanying documentation over the past few days.

“Once again, the Bush administration’s unchecked authority has led to abuse and civil liberties violations,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero in a statement. “The documents make clear that the Department of Defense may have secretly and illegally conducted surveillance beyond the powers it was granted by Congress.”

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The United Nations should pull out of the Quartet of Middle East mediators unless the group starts taking Palestinian human rights seriously, a UN envoy said on Monday.

John Dugard, the UN special rapporteur on human rights for the Palestinian territories, told the BBC the world body "does itself little good" by remaining in the Quartet group of the United States, European Union, Russia and the United Nations.

"In my most recent report to the General Assembly...I will suggest that the secretary general withdraw the UN from the Quartet, if the Quartet fails to have regard to the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories," Dugard said.

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A zoo. This is one of the ways that Palestinians describe the conditions under which nearly 1.5 million of them have been living: in an area of some 360 square kilometers, closed in on three sides by sophisticated barbed-wire fences, concrete walls and military lookout towers, and to the west by Israeli navy ships that seal them off from the sea. Overhead, in the sky, unmanned aircraft and hot air balloons continually photograph whatever happens inside this closed cage, which has seven gates connecting it to the world, all of which are sealed off almost hermetically.

During the past four months, Israel has permitted about 2,000 people to leave the Gaza Strip - a minority of them were ill; more than half were Fatah senior activists or loyalists who were fleeing from the Strip; and the rest were individuals holding dual citizenship or visas for prolonged stays abroad. For the sake of comparison: In 1999, 1,400 people a day went through the Rafah crossing point alone, in addition to the thousands who passed though the Erez crossing point, despite the permanent closure policy. Now, 1.5 million human beings are living with the knowledge that the length of their world is at most 41 kilometers long and 12 kilometers wide.

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Many in the US military think Bush and Cheney are out of control. They are rebelling against Bush and Cheney. Washington Post reporter Dana Priest recently said in an interview that she believed the US military would revolt and refuse to fly missions against Iran if the White House issued such orders.

CENTCOM commander Admiral William Fallon reportedly thwarted Cheney's wish to sent a third additional aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf. One paper wrote that he "vowed privately there would be no war against Iran as long as he was chief of CENTCOM."

Lt. Gen. Bruce Wright, in charge of US forces in Japan, told the Associated Press last week that the Iraq war had weakened American forces in the face of any potential conflict with China. He was quoted as saying, "Are we in trouble? It depends on the scenario. But you have to be concerned about the small number of our forces and the age of our forces."

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Six people were killed and 14 others wounded on Monday after Shiite militiamen pounded a U.S.military base and a joint security center in southern Iraq's Diwaniyah city, some 180 km south of Baghdad, a local police source said.

Early in the morning, Shiite militiamen of the Mahdi Army,loyal to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, fired some dozen mortar rounds on the U.S.-run base and a nearby joint security center, which is run by U.S., Iraqi and Polish forces in Diwaniyah,the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

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Israel exchanged a Hezbollah prisoner and the bodies of two Lebanese fighters for the corpse of a drowned Israeli civilian Monday night, a move that could pave the way for a trade involving two Israeli soldiers whose capture sparked their war last year.

A crowd of people, some weeping, mobbed two ambulances carrying the Lebanese bodies after a swap with the Israeli military just after sundown in the no man's land along the heavily fortified border.

Two women in black showered the ambulances with rice while relatives of the two dead Hezbollah guerrillas held up their pictures. The freed Hezbollah member came across the border in a black Mercedes, peering out of the window and smiling.

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Revolutionary allies Cuba and Venezuela signed a raft of economic accords on Monday aimed at furthering cooperation, including plans for nickel and oil development and a billion-dollar petrochemical complex in Cuba.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and acting Cuban President Raul Castro presided over the signings, the latest in a series of such events as the two countries cement their political and economic ties in fierce opposition to the U.S. presence in the region.

Ailing President Fidel Castro and Chavez in 2004 founded the Bolivian Alternative for the Americas, under which Monday's accords were signed, as an alternative to U.S.-led free trade initiatives.

So far just Bolivia and Nicaragua have joined the pact.

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Oil prices hit a record high, spurred by rising tensions between Turkey and Iraq, and deteriorating relations between Turkey and the U.S.

Washington sent envoys on a surprise visit to Ankara this weekend, to urge restraint, as the Turks threaten to attack Kurdish separatists in Northern Iraq.

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Turkey's cabinet asked parliament on Monday for permission to launch attacks on Kurdish separatists in northern Iraq that Washington fears could destabilize one of the most peaceful areas of the country.

Government spokesman Cemil Cicek said Turkey still hoped military action against the Kurds, who use the mountainous region as base for attacks inside Turkey, would not be needed.

"But the most painful reality of our country, our region, is the reality of terror," he told a news conference.

Iraq urged Turkey not to resort to military action on its territory, calling on it to be "wise and patient."

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Home-building megalith D.R. Horton surely hoped that the ongoing housing slump had done its worst. But the latest housing news shows that this is at best unlikely, as the slump should hurt not only Horton, but its peer firms, for at least some time more.

The National Association of Home Builders reported on Tuesday that the confidence of United States home builders fell to the lowest level since the builder surverys began in 1985 because of continuing problems in the mortgage market, large amounts of unsold inventory, and the perceived effect of negative media coverage on potential buyers.

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U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Board chief Ben Bernanke and have acknowledged the housing slump isn't nearly over, rekindling economic gloom on Wall Street.

In his starkest take yet on the housing and credit mess, Mr. Paulson called the situation “troubling” and warned the crisis would take “some time yet” to ease.

“Despite strong economic fundamentals, the housing decline is still unfolding, and I view it as the most significant risk to our economy,” Mr. Paulson said Tuesday in speech at Georgetown University in Washington.

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During a round table discussion on “the Fight for Oil, Water and a Healthy Planet” at Stanford University on Saturday, Gen. John Abizaid (Ret.), the former CENTCOM Commander, said that “of course” the Iraq war is “about oil“:

“Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that,” Abizaid said of the Iraq campaign early on in the talk.

“We’ve treated the Arab world as a collection of big gas stations,” the retired general said. “Our message to them is: Guys, keep your pumps open, prices low, be nice to the Israelis and you can do whatever you want out back. Osama and 9/11 is the distilled essence that represents everything going on out back.”

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Last week, they slaughtered from the air a large group of men and children who gathered one Ramadan (the Fasting month in Islam) evening to play a traditional game which needs two groups of men sitting facing each other. A ring is hidden in the hand of a member of one group, the others in the facing group have to guess where the ring is hidden. Usually this game attracts bystanders .

The US Army said, of course, that they had killed Al Qaeda terrorists.

Before that, men , women and children were sleeping on the roof of a house , which is an Iraqi habit in summer. They were airstruck and accused of being Al Qaeda terrorists. Of course, there were other slughters of wedding gatherings, of funeral gatherings. Any gathering is hit from the air.

When women and children are killed, the US army announces that he regrets but it is the fault of the terrorists who hide behind civilians.

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[ 16 October 2007: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

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Verizon Communications, the nation's second-largest telecom company, told congressional investigators that it has provided customers' telephone records to federal authorities in emergency cases without court orders hundreds of times since 2005.

The company said it does not determine the requests' legality or necessity because to do so would slow efforts to save lives in criminal investigations.

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But last week, the U.S. Supreme Court declared him, in essence, to be a nonperson.

In another perverse ruling that lets the Bush administration hide its most perverse anti-terrorism policies beneath dubious legal arguments, the high court refused to hear Masri’s appeal. His case is a “state secret,” the administration claims, that must be kept private even though it has gained international press attention, an official investigation by the German government and the acknowledgment of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the U.S. had erred.

Masri is perhaps the best-known individual to have become ensnared in the Bush administration’s program of “extraordinary rendition,” under which people are snatched from the streets and spirited away to secret prisons for interrogation, or worse. Masri was seized from a tourist bus en route to Macedonia in 2003. He was held there for five months before being turned over to Americans and flown to a prison in Afghanistan. There, he says, he was beaten, stripped, sodomized, photographed and injected with drugs. Then, as suddenly as he’d been seized, Masri was released and dropped on a mountain road along the border between Albania and Macedonia. He was handed a box with his belongings, including his passport.

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Venezuela's leftist government is leading Brazil, Argentina and other regional economies in creating a new bank with the ambition of casting off unwelcome oversight by the IMF and World Bank.

The idea was first announced by Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez last December as part of his crusade against US influence and international financial institutions that he says are merely "tools of Washington."

The finance and economy ministers of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela met last week in Rio de Janeiro to outline the main elements of the "Banco del Sur" -- or Bank of the South.

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[ 16 October 2007: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

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Some of the red lipsticks manufactured in the United States and used daily by millions of women contain high levels of lead, according to new product tests commissioned by the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, a nonprofit coalition.
Some of the red lipsticks tested contain high levels of lead.

The tests for lead in lipstick were conducted by an independent laboratory over the month of September on red lipsticks bought in Boston, Hartford, Connecticut, San Francisco and Minneapolis.

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"As the Clean Water Act turns 35, polluters continue to foul our rivers, lakes and streams," said Christy Leavitt, clean water advocate with U.S. PIRG, the national lobby office for the State Public Interest Research Groups.

"With so many facilities dumping so much pollution, no one should be surprised that nearly half of America's waterways are unsafe for swimming and fishing," she said. "But we should be outraged."

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The people who live on the Aamjiwnaang First Nation Reserve near Sarnia don't swim in Talfourd Creek anymore.

Children used to cool off in the creek, but about four years ago, they started getting sores on their legs.

The creek now is filled with thick, brown water. Signs with skulls and crossbones warn people against swimming or fishing there, where residents of the reserve said they have spotted trucks unloading unknown kinds of waste into the water.

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[ 16 October 2007: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

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Why has not the Turkish parliament given tit for tat and passed a resolution condemning the Iraqi Genocide?

As a result of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, more than one million Iraqis have died, and several millions are displaced persons. The Iraqi death toll and the millions of uprooted Iraqis match the Armenian deaths and deportations. If one is a genocide, so is the other.

It is true that most of the Iraqi deaths have resulted from Iraqis killing one another. But it was Bush’s destruction of the secular Iraqi state that unleashed the sectarian strife.

...

Not content with its many wars in the Middle East, the Bush Regime is sponsoring wars in Africa and is setting up an African Command. The US government has been bombing and attacking other countries ever since the cold war ended. Instead of peace, the gang in Washington DC chose war.

Other than the Israel Lobby, the greatest supporters of Bush’s wars are Christian evangelicals, specifically the "rapture evangelicals" and the "Christian Zionists."

I remember when Christianity was about saving one’s soul. Today it is about bringing on Armageddon.

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[ 16 October 2007: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

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By simply asserting that its techniques are not torture, the administration creates a debate where none existed before. As Luban put it, what were once questions of common sense are transformed into legal issues.

Newspaper editors and television news producers are naturally reluctant to flatly contradict the president, so the soldiers and CIA agents and private contractors who carry out the interrogations are not referred to as torturers, as they would be if they worked for, say, the governments of Russia or Egypt.

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