Templo Mayor de Iztapalapa

* Aflora en la construcción de una macroplaza comercial

Descubren en Iztapalapa templo mayor prehispánico

* Forma parte de un centro ceremonial culhua-mexica: INAH
* Se formó entre 1200 y 1500 dC; poco se conoce de esa cultura
* Arqueólogos evalúan la zona; suspenden trabajos de edificación

ANA MONICA RODRIGUEZ Y JOSEFINA QUINTERO

Report of information trip to Chad and Cameroon - January 16th to 26th, 2007

Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development of the German Bundestag


Oilfields in Chad and the Sudan. The Chad-Cameroon Pipeline runs from Doba to Kribi (left) and the Sudanese Pipeline to Port Soudan (right). (Source: www.rfi.fr)

CHAD CONFLICT ZONE

map of conflict zones
1. Chad says Sudan government-backed militias are attacking villagers in Chad. Some 200,000 Darfur refugees are also in Chad
2. Sudan accuses Chad of backing the Darfur rebels
3. Chad says it will send troops to help CAR fight the rebels
4. CAR says Sudan backs rebels who have seized towns in CAR

DARFUR/OIL/CHINA

... Whether it’s the 400,000 claimed by some or the 70,000 suggested by the UN in March, the human toll combined with rapes, burned villages and destroyed lives has torn a gaping hole in the fabric of humanity.

genocide, (or) “crimes against humanity”

In its outrage, the world community has offered various remedies:

• intervention,

• sanctions against the Bashir regime,

• and UN peacekeeping forces.

In the U.S., community and religious organizations ...

• targeting China, a large purchaser of oil and seller of arms to the Sudanese government.

• divestment campaign aimed at U.S. finance companies that own stock in China’s oil industry.

• actions directed at China’s hosting of the 2008 Olympics, suggesting boycotts and protests at the games themselves.

...many observers suggest that Sudan’s huge oil reserves are a key factor motivating U.S. government and corporate interest. Writing in the UK Guardian, recently, commentator Mandy Turner attributed U.S. interest ... “West Africa already supplies about 12 percent of U.S. crude oil imports, and America’s National Intelligence Council predicts that this share will rise to 25 percent by 2015.”

On the other hand, China too has a large stake in and need for African oil. ... It imports 25 percent of its crude oil from Africa.”

U.S. oil companies, it should be remembered, have been prohibited from operating in the Sudan since the 1997 embargo.

...the new emphasis on China seems a bit curious. ... Beijing’s recent abstention in the Security Council on bringing the janjaweed ringleaders of the massacres to justice smacks strongly of this posture. ... it’s also true that in recent months China has undertaken a wide range of mutually beneficial trade agreements with several African countries, widely hailed on the continent.

The Sudanese left, ... argues that China’s investment only benefits the bank accounts of the Bashir clique ... Beijing, they claim, utilizes no Sudanese labor, preferring instead to import Chinese workers.

U.S. solidarity ... In the past such concern swelled the ranks of civil rights and anti-apartheid movements. It would do well to draw on the experience of past solidarity in support of African liberation, ...

DARFUR IN THE COMMENTS

This is ABSOLUTELY what's going on in Darfur. The "genocide" in Darfur began roughly six months after the US initiated the "Pan-Sahel Initiative" (now expanded and renamed the "Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative."

The first thing the PSI did was funnel arms to Idriss Deby of Chad to destabilize Darfur. Sudan has been saying from the onset that they don't understand how a bunch of nomads have gotten high-tech weaponry better than the Sudanese forces have - its because they got it from the US military!

"Why is Africa important now?"

The nations immediately south of the Sahara form a string across Africa - Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Chad, Sudan. They all have oil as well as other natural resources. Sudan is the only one which has resisted the advances of the US.

It is important for the US to have all five nations, including , PARTICULARLY Sudan, as Sudan has the eastern seaport, most convenient for shipping petrol to central Europe.

CORP WATCH: SUDAN REBELS

by Nima Elbagir, Reuters
April 19th, 2005

• Sudan on Tuesday said its ABCO corporation -- in which Swiss company Cliveden owns 37 percent -- had begun drilling for oil in Darfur, where preliminary studies showed there were "abundant" quantities of oil.

• "The Sudanese people have never benefited from these (oil) discoveries," said Ahmed Hussein, the London-based spokesman for the Justice and Equality Movement. "The oil must wait until a final peace deal is signed."

LONDON, April 19 (Reuters) -

Sudan's main oilfields are in the south and disputes over oil prolonged negotiations to end 20 years of civil war.

Mohamed Siddig, a spokesman for Sudan's Ministry of Energy and Mining, told Reuters by phone on Monday: "The drilling (in Darfur) was undertaken on the basis of the geological studies and surveys which proved the presence of oil in abundant quantities."

Sudan Liberation Movement spokesman Adam Ali Shogar told Reuters from the Chadian capital N'Djamena that the drilling for oil was a waste of time...

... without a just distribution of wealth and a resolution to the conflict it is pointless."

Sudan began exporting oil in 1998 and exports around 300,000 barrels per day, which is set to rise to 500,000 bpd by August. Work on the first Darfur oil well, southwest of El-Fasher in North Darfur State, is under way.

... the rebels at the start of the rebellion, they were asking for 80 percent of Darfur's oil wealth," Mohamed Issam, a Sudanese political analyst, told Reuters from Khartoum.

"Now they know for a fact the oil is there. ...

CORPWATCH "DARFUR" KEYWORD SEARCH

AFRICAN OIL

Empire of Oil: Capitalist Dispossession and the Scramble for Africa
by Michael Watts

...a central plank of U.S. foreign policy since President Roosevelt met King Saud of Saudi Arabia and cobbled together their “special relationship” aboard the USS Quincy in February 1945—is in a total shambles. The pillars of that policy—Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf oil states, and Venezuela—are hardly supplicant sheep within the U.S. imperial fold.

So-called supply risks in Iran, Venezuela, and Nigeria coupled with the speculative impulses of the oil traders have driven up the price of oil to around $70 a barrel,

Although Africa is not as well endowed in hydrocarbons (both oil and gas) as the Gulf states, the continent “is all set to balance power,” and as a consequence it is “the subject of fierce competition by energy companies.”

A new scramble is in the making. The battleground consists of the rich African oilfields (see map).

Energy security is the name of the game.

The strategic interests of the United States certainly include not only access to cheap and reliable low-sulphur oil imports, but also keeping the Chinese (for example in Sudan) and South Koreans (for example in Nigeria)—aggressive new actors in the African oil business—and Islamic terror at bay. Africa is, according to the intelligence community, the “new frontier” in the fight against revolutionary Islam. Energy security, it turns out, is a terrifying hybrid of the old and the new: primitive accumulation and American militarism coupled to the war on terror.

The real crisis of Africa is that after twenty-five years of brutal neoliberal reform, and savage World Bank structural adjustment and IMF stabilization, African development has failed catastrophically.

It was Africa after all that was the testing ground for the Hayekian counter-revolution that swept through development economics in the 1970s

This was the first systematic attempt to take the Chicago Boys experience in post-Allende Chile and impose it on an entire continent. The ideas of Elliot Berg and his fellow travelers marked the triumph of a long march by the likes of Peter Bauer, H. G. Johnson, and Deepak Lal (ably supported by the monetarist think tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Mont Pelerin Society, and the astonishing rise to power from the early presence of Leo Strauss and Fredrich Hayek of the “Chicago School”)

Is Socialism Relevant Today?

Capitalist barbarism exists still, socialism is relevant!

Just look around the world and you see capitalism is in crisis. We’re faced with wars, environmental disasters, the squalor of poverty, unemployment, homelessness, and exploitation.

• US imperialism is even more aggressive and arrogant, they’re open about their preemptive strike doctrine.

• In Iraq, they’re contemplating staying 12 more years, sending more troops, and the imperialists are threatening other countries.

• They want to keep their nuclear monopoly, and consider using it, and are utterly hypocritical in attacking the nuclear programs of Third World countries. This year is the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “The worst terrorist attack in history.”

• In Palestine, real apartheid is being consolidated, ethnic cleansing with the full backing of imperialism.

• Global warming is a fact, climatic extremes and melting icecaps.

• Genetically modified crops are being forced on us, Monsato aiming to monopolise the seeds of the planet for its profits, with monstrous consequences.

• The US invades and occupies countries on the other side of the world, but can’t rescue, or care for, its own citizens in New Orleans after such a huge natural disaster (They’re poor and Black!)

• The gap is widening between rich and poor, between countries, and within countries.

• In the richest country in the world, the USA, the wealthiest 1 percent has more assets than the poorest 90 per cent of Americans combined.

• 80 per cent of the world’s domestic product belongs to 1 billion people living in the developed world, while the remaining 20 percent is shared by 5 billion people living in developing countries.

• Africa is a disaster area.

• Yet you see the obscene wealth, the luxury for a few, with millionaires living in their gated suburbs, and venturing out in luxury cruise liners to gawk at the poor of the world.

• Read the statistics in their own financial papers, and do the sums: the share to wages is falling, the share to profits is rising, and goes to the few.

ROSA LUXEMBURG AND BARBARISM

From:

The following was submitted by comrade Hug Yue as a contribution to the discussion on the communist position on Iraq....


...In her Junius Pamphlet, Rosa Luxemburg quoted Fredrich Engels as saying

• “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.”

She goes on to say,

“[T]he triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization. At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences. Today, we face the choice exactly as Fredrich Engels foresaw … either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization …. or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international [working class] against imperialism and its method of war.” Today we are in the period of “unlimited wars” and now stand at that crossroads—the victory of socialism or world-wide death and destruction.

RED AS A BABOON'S ASS AND PROUD OF IT

By STAN GOFF

Fayetteville, North Carolina

...I'm speaking for myself as an unabashed leftist -- that's someone who opposes capitalism, in case this term is confusing. -- and we argue openly for our position: that capitalism as a system, and not some moral or intellectual failure, causes these wars.

EPIC's website claims is "was" against the war, but now... here's the uniform mantra among these fronts... WE cannot "abandon" Iraq. The caps are intentional, and the claim is mendacious. Their opposition was not to invading and occupying Iraq, but to the way in which the neocons went about it...

The other speciality of this "tendency" is to red-bait. So I might as well take that away right here. I'm as red as a baboon's ass and proud of it.

I don't have to put on a red hat, though, to talk about this WE business... this WE must not "abandon Iraq." ... support of ANY continuation of ANY imperial military occupation is NOT antiwar. If you support a military occupation, then you are supporting a war. Two plus two. This is not complicated.

... the US military is not in Iraq to do a damned thing for the Iraqi people. What particular brand of cheap magical-mystery acid does someone take when he implies that Pizarro should be nominated to help the Incas with reconstruction? WE are the barbarians here!

This benevolent force you are arguing to leave in Iraq has

• been used to enforce attacks and sanctions that are slouching toward a body count of 2 million,

• microtoxified the entire environment with a radioactive condiment that produces babies born without brains,

• slaughtered children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children,

• trashed the social and economic infrastructure,

• imprisoned thousands of people in indiscriminate round-ups (including children, by the way),

• subjected detainees to sexual humiliation, beatings, rape, murder, and other methods of systematic torture,

• bombed whole neighborhoods, kicked in the doors of sleeping families and waved guns at their infants and grandmothers,

• surrounded a city (Fallujah, in case WE forgot), then blocked the exits against "military-aged males," who the US armed forces then exterminated, Warsaw-style, by the thousands.

...containment mission for the liberal bourgeoisie ... WE can't abandon the Iraqis, indeed!

There is no WE. There is a THEY. THEY are an imperial ruling class. THEY really do exist, and with about a month's dedicated research, it would be possible for a small staff to list them out with names and addresses...

THEY operate very like a mafia, and THEY rely very much on their US state to keep things running smoothly, including sending out hirelings to kill their enemies and victims. The difference is that the hirelings, who are vast numbers of working class kids, have been convinced all their lives by a zillion-dollar-a-year Orwellian brainwashing apparatus to believe that killing for bankers and currency speculators and politicians is some noble cause.

THEY want to establish permanent military bases there, and every day that they stay there puts them one day closer to that... or more likely to some humiliating denouement like Vietnam, ...

YOU and all the rest of the civil-societist gasbags in the alphabet soup of issue-policy NGO's are advising moderation in the face of a world that is already deeply in the grip of the very barbarism ... because what YOU are endorsing is nothing more nor less than the continuation of Wolfowitz's lethal Caligulan fantasy in Iraq to save capitalism from its own dirty, dangerous, and expensive messes.

So I am not going to be diplomatic with (those who) misrepresent the (anti-war) action ... as somehow being directed against those bewildered, economically caged-in workers in uniform we call "the troops."

The left in this movement is not "against" the soldiers. Speaking for myself, I am on the soldier's side, not as a soldier, but as a human being. I encourage all soldiers to resist. I won't conceal the fact that my encouragement of that resistance is aimed at utterly gutting the capacity of that institution to continue operations in the charnel house they've made of Iraq.

People can see Luxemburg's prediction of barbarism right in front of them. It's here, and this WE finds it unacceptable for future generations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_Goff

THE EMPIRE SLOWLY SLIPS THROUGH BUSH'S FINGERS

Chávez ofrece refinería
Esteban Solís

* Será construida en León y tendrá un costo de US,500 millones y podrá procesar 150 mil barriles de petróleo
* También hizo referencias al modelo de la democracia participativa y directa a través de los consejos, con buenos resultados en su país
* Ocupó buena parte de su intervención para fustigar al presidente de Estados Unidos, George W. Bush


Varieties of imperial decline - Honduras and Miranda
by toni solo

On July 20th Presidents Hugo Chavez Frias of Venezuela and Daniel Ortega Saavedra of Nicaragua laid the foundation stone for a US$4 billion oil refinery called "El Sueño Supremo de Bolívar" - the Supreme Dream of Bolívar. The refinery, located on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua, near the university city of Leon, will be capable of processing 150,000 barrels of oil a day. All told, the project will create over 3000 local jobs and is projected to generate profits of US$700 million a year. A joint venture company - ALBANISA - formed by the two State oil companies of Venezuela and Nicaragua, with 55% and 45% holdings respectively, will run the project. (2)

DownstreamToday.com

The refinery's first stone was laid at 5 p.m. local time (2300 GMT) Friday by Ortega and Chavez in Piedras Blancas (Puerto Sandino), near the Pacific coast and some 90 kilometers (55 miles) west of Managua.

Leon Nicaragua Photo Tour

HOW DO YOU SAY "PEACENIK" IN ARABIC

There are several choices. This is one of them

السلام عليك يا مذل المؤمنين

The word (peacenik) was invented with the suffix \"-nik\" in order to associate the idea of seeking peace with Soviet sympathizers (\"soft on communism,\" as they used to call them in the Cold War). In other words, the word was invented to mockingly malign pacifists or peace activists. All traditional words describing peace activists had postitive connotations, so a new word was needed with negative, subtly anti-American, anti-democratic connotations. Although the Cold War and the Soviet Union are gone, the word has proven useful in many contexts where one seeks to malign or mock peace activism as naive or misguided. Peace activists themselves, by and large, do not mind the word, although they are aware of the mocking intentions behind it.



ArabInk: I strongly disagree that "peacenik" has such negative connotations. It depends very much upon whom you ask and how the term is used. It is very much an artifact of the cold war era, the -nik suffix coming from Yiddish/Russian. See also "beatnik".

As to connotations, the term may very well be construed as an insult in meetings of Rumsfeld's inner circle, but in a meeting of Quakers - or soccer moms, for that matter - it would be a point of pride. I suspect "beatnik" is the parent of "peacenik"; the original intention probably being to associate the negative mainstream stereotype of the beatnik/hippie with anti-war activists of the 60s. But of course, once the term got loose there was no way to prevent the intended victims of its sarcasm from turning it on its head and making it a positive.

HACKING THE VOTE

YOU CANT HACK MY ATM, BUT YOU CAN HACK MY VOTING MACHINE! YOU BETTER FIRE THE FAULTY FED DISTRCT ATTORNEYS, TOO!


State-sanctioned teams of computer hackers were able to break through the security of virtually every model of California's voting machines and change results or take control of some of the systems' electronic functions, according to a University of California study released Friday.

The researchers "were able to bypass physical and software security in every machine they tested,'' said Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who authorized the "top to bottom review" of every voting system certified by the state.

including Sequoia, whose systems are used in Alameda, Napa and Santa Clara counties; Hart InterCivic, used in San Mateo and Sonoma Counties; and Diebold, used in Marin County.

Election Systems and Software, which supplied equipment to San Francisco, Contra Costa, Solano and Los Angeles counties in last November's election, missed the deadline for submitting the equipment,

New UN map charts West Bank reality

A new map of the West Bank (see below), 40 years after its conquest by Israel in the Six Day War, gives the most definitive picture so far of a territory in which 2.5m Palestinians are confined to dozens of enclaves separated by Israeli roads, settlements, fences and military zones.

Produced by the United Nations’s Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, it is based on extensive monitoring in the field combined with analysis of satellite imagery. It provides an overall picture officials say is even more comprehensive than charts drawn up by the Israeli military.

The impact of Israeli civilian and military infrastructure is to render 40 per cent of the territory, which is roughly the size of the US state of Delaware or the English county of Norfolk, off-limits to Palestinians.


The rest of the territory, including main centres such as Nablus and Jericho, is split into isolated spots. Movement between them is restricted by 450 roadblocks and 70 manned checkpoints...

...The map is one of a number of documents whose publication has coincided with Monday’s anniversary of the 1967 war. Amnesty, the rights group, issued a report that accused Israel of a land grab in the West Bank and called for urgent action to address “widespread human rights abuses committed under the occupation”.

The Israeli justice ministry branded the report as “one-sided, immoral and riddled with mistakes”.
Published: June 4 2007 16:51 | Last updated: June 4 2007 16:51

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

AN INCREDIBLE GRAPHIC

The map tells the truth. There is no peace process. Arabs know. Muslims know. Israelis know. Eyal Weizman just published a book called Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture Of Occupation which chronicles how an apartheid was enforced through a garrison state of roadblocks, checkpoints, strongpoints, security zones, sterile areas, summit settlements, mobile homes, bridgeheads, walls, and military bases. Here none dare call it Reservation. None dare whisper Concentration. To keep what it has taken, Israel must hold back many peoples, and many nations.

Found on Adored by Hordes

BLATANT FACT FROM VOLTAIRENET

Brzezinski confirms that the United States can organise attacks in their own territory

Auditioned on February 1st, 2007 by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, the former National Security Adviser read a statement the terms of which had been carefully chosen.

He indicated that : " a plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves

1. Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks,
2. followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure,
3. then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran,
4. culminating in a ‘defensive’ US military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan".
   

Two Interpretations

• the former National Security Adviser tried to beat the neoconservatives to it and to cast doubt in advance on any circumstance which would lead to the war.

in addition,

• to suggest that in case of collision with the war partisans, he could reopen the September 11th file.

In any case, Thierry Meyssan’s hypothesis - According to which the September 11th attacks would have been perpetrated by a Military-Industrial Complex faction to provoke the Afghanistan and Iraq wars - Leaves suddenly the taboo domain to be discussed publicly by Washington elites.

MORE BLATANT FACTS

BILL RICHARDSON

At the close of the Clinton administration, Richardson signed on as a senior managing director with Kissinger McLarty Associates,

joined the boards of three large oil companies:

• Houston-based Diamond Offshore Drilling, a company once run by George Herbert Walker Bush;

• Denver-based Venoco; and

• Valero, North America's largest independent refinery. Until recently, Richardson held Valero stock worth between $100,001 and $250,000 and options valued between $250,001 and $500,000, according to disclosures filed with the Federal Election Commission. He divested himself of his stake in Valero in May, saying his financial ties to the company had become a "distraction" to his presidential campaign.

Currently, he is one of the leading recipients of campaign contributions from oil and gas companies among the presidential contenders.

WHO IS HILLARY

After Clinton delivered a foreign-policy cold-cock to Barack Obama's head during a Democratic presidential debate on Tuesday:

— Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard, a neo-conservative weekly, wrote that she delivered her answer to the now-famous "would-you-meet-with-despots" question "firmly and coolly."

— Rich Lowry of National Review, a conservative weekly, gushed like a schoolboy with a new crush: "She excels . . . Clinton has run a nearly flawless campaign and has done more than any other Democrat to show she's ready to be president."

— David Brooks, the conservative columnist at The New York Times, wrote that Clinton "seems to offer the perfect combination of experience and change" and said she's changing perceptions in a way that may persuade voters to give her a second look.

— Charles Krauthammer, the conservative columnist of The Washington Post, summed up the Clinton-Obama smackdown: "The grizzled veteran showed up the clueless rookie."

Crónica visual de la resistencia

Con el título En Oaxaca, las paredes hablan, el encuentro reunirá en el Hemiciclo a Juárez de la ciudad de México, a partir de las 11 horas, a varios colectivos y artistas que realizarán in situ una larga manta con su propuesta gráfica. El proceso consiste en diseñar una imagen en cartón o plástico rígido, recortarla y estamparla luego en cualquier superficie con la ayuda de pintura en aerosol.



Junto con Zapata y Juárez, Ricardo Flores Magón sigue siendo un referente en las luchas sociales contemporáneas