Another Angle 22 - January - 2006

ANOTHER ANGLE
News others won't tell you



NATIONAL:



Time: Bush-Abramoff Photos "Suggest A Level Of Contact Between Them That Bush's Aides Have Downplayed"...
In one shot that TIME saw, Bush appears with Abramoff, several unidentified people and Raul Garza Sr., a Texan Abramoff represented who was then chairman of the Kickapoo Indians, which owned a casino in southern Texas. Garza, who is wearing jeans and a bolo tie in the picture, told TIME that Bush greeted him as "Jefe," or "chief" in Spanish. Another photo shows Bush shaking hands with Abramoff in front of a window and a blue drape. The shot bears Bush's signature, perhaps made by a machine. Three other photos are of Bush, Abramoff and, in each view, one of the lobbyist's sons (three of his five children are boys). A sixth picture shows several Abramoff children with Bush and House Speaker Dennis Hastert.



Belafonte: Bush administration backs Gestapo tactics
"We've come to this dark time in which the Gestapo of Homeland Security lurks here, where citizens are having their rights suspended. You can be arrested and not charged, you can be arrested and have no right to counsel," said Belafonte, who called President Bush "the greatest terrorist in the world" during a trip to Venezuela two weeks ago. Belafonte, 78, made that comment after a meeting with Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez. The Harlem-born Belafonte, who was raised in Jamaica, said his activism was inspired by an impoverished mother "who imbued in me that we should never capitulate to oppression."



Fear of the intelligent thug: When Black power gets gangsta
You see them every morning same time, same place. “Dem boyz in da hood sell anything for profit, five in the morning on the corner clockin’.” I wonder if anyone has ever taken the time to tell these 14-year-old kids about Fred Hampton, who by the age of 21, had already become one of the most powerful leaders we’d ever produced? Wonder if anyone ever took the time to tell them about Huey P. Newton or Bunchy Carter organizing tha hood to protect Black people?



Putting Black Women in Power in Alabama
Tanya Ott reports on an organization that's working to put black women in leadership roles throughout the state.



The Black Commentator - Cover Story: Fighting the Theft of New Orleans
The overwhelmingly Black New Orleans diaspora is returning in large numbers to resist relentless efforts to bully and bulldoze them out of the city's future.



Walking Wounded
Hatred comes easily. There are wounds and there are wounds. The memory haunts him. He was not a joyous killer. He remembers what he did, knows now that he was had. It gnaws at him.



Public School left behind
“For everyone of those we are saving through a variety of these kinds of programs, we are losing nine or 10 and we’ve got to confront it,” says Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund. “The Black community has got to confront it. The country’s got to confront it.”



Photography: Who Owns Seydou Keïta?
Okwui Enwezor, a scholar of photography and curator of a 1996 exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that included Mr. Keïta's work, maintained that in the amount of information he conveys about his middle-class subjects, in the controlled complexity of the portraits and the high level of quality maintained over a great volume, his work is "comparable to the portraiture of Rembrandt."
The Ghosts of Seydou Keita



INTERNATIONAL:



Iran's Really Big Weapon
Tehran is preparing to open a bourse, a mercantile exchange and potentially a futures market, where traders can buy and sell oil and gas, along the lines of the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) in London and the NYTMEX in New York. The differences are first, that this one would price its energy in euros, not dollars, and second, that it would not use West Texas Intermediate or Brent Crude (from the North Sea) as its standard oil for pricing. It would use a Persian Gulf-produced oil instead.



US navy captures Somali 'pirates'
When I started reading this my first thought was what right do we have to hunt pirates in the INDIAN OCEAN? But as the story tells you, it's always about money. AND this part is very telling...Piracy, including hijackings and hostage-taking, has become common off anarchic Somalia, where there has been no effective central government since 1991... The Somali government has signed a $50m (£28m) two-year deal with a private US marine security company to carry out coastal patrols.
If there is no central government who hired the private company? I am still on my original question.



Pakistan accused of Baluchistan abuses
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) said it had "received evidence that action by armed forces had led to deaths and injuries among civilians". It also said that "populations had also been subjected to indiscriminate bombing" in a crackdown in the southwestern province launched last month, after rocket attacks by tribal fighters battling for greater autonomy and control of natural gas fields.



Hydropolis - The World's First Underwater Hotel
Currently under construction in Dubai, Hydropolis is the world's first luxury underwater hotel. It will include three elements: the land station, where guests will be welcomed, the connecting tunnel, which will transport people by train to the main area of the hotel, and the 220 suites within the submarine leisure complex.


BUSH CRIME FAMILY:



Bush Empire's Version of the News
The clandestine Bush administration is so afraid of letting the public see what it's doing that it has denied the president himself all access to outside information except for the sports pages and religious news. It's not nice to turn the president, almost an emperor, into a figure of ridicule.



Chain of Fools
Things are looking a bit grim for the Bush faction these days. Their chief bagman, Jack Abramoff, is in the clink, naming names. Their top congressional enforcer, Tom DeLay, is in the dock, sinking fast. Their "war of choice" in Iraq has stalled in murderous quagmire. Their poll numbers are plummeting as scandal after scandal turn the American people against them. What, then, will be the fate of these brutal, bungling, bloodstained goons when they face the voters in the coming elections?Why, victory, of course!



OP-ED:



Impeachment Would Make Matters Worse
"We could impeach Cheney, but then we'd get Bush as president." All right, for the sake of argument let's assume that Bush is impeached and Cheney is carted off to The Hague to be tried as a war criminal along with Rumsfeld. What does that leave us? With President Hastert. That's an improvement?



SCIENCE&TECHNOLOGY:



Astronaut says space shuttle a deathtrap
It was this lack of ejector seats that ensured the deaths of Challenger's astronauts. Such a powered escape system could have blasted them from their stricken ship and saved them. 'That was the true tragedy of Challenger. Nothing was learnt. Only janitors and cafeteria workers at Nasa were blameless in the deaths of the Challenger seven.'



HEALTH&FITNESS:



New Mexico Begins Legislative Process To Ban Aspartame
A senate bill to rid New Mexico of what has been called "Rumsfeld's Disease" was introduced Thursday by Sen. Gerald Ortiz y Pino, D-Albuquerque, as 15 other senators from both sides of isle also signed on, supporting legislation to ban the deadly artificial sweetener, aspartame. Linked to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for his efforts in the 1970s for putting the sweetener on the market, New Mexico is the first state to consider banning the artificial additive linked to numerous ill-health affects, including cancer.



Live-in bugs fight HIV
Some of the 'friendly bacteria' found in yoghurt have been genetically modified to release a drug that blocks HIV infection.



FOOD&DRINK:



CHERRY CHEESECAKE WITH CHOCOLATE ALMOND CRUST
This cheesecake pops off the plate after you add SALT!!!!



REVIEWS/INTERVIEWS:



Blige's 'Breakthrough'
Before there was any such thing as American Idol, kids who aspired to singing careers had to find other paths to stardom. In 1989, a young girl from the New York projects stepped into a Karaoke booth at a White Plains mall and sang an Anita Baker tune. Today it's Mary J. Blige's songs that young girls sing.



JUST WEIRD:



Villagers Shun Man They Believe Is Dead
Is Raju Raghuvanshi alive or dead? Ask Raghuvanshi, he'll tell you he is alive.
Believed by his friends and family to have died in prison, Raghuvanshi returned home earlier this month from his short jail stint to shouts of "Help! Ghost!" and the sounds of neighbors locking their doors in his home village of Katra(India).