This is a regular Raw Story feature; thought y'all might get a kick out of it. There's more at
http://www.rawstory.comTHE FINE PRINT
This week's neglected news
By Brendan Kiley
RAW STORY COLUMNIST
Remember Haiti? The 15-nation Caribbean Community and 53-nation African Union aren't so sure they like the new prime minister on the block.
The two pan-national bodies have called on the United Nations to investigate Aristide's claim that the U.S. agents forced him onto an outbound plane at gunpoint, leading a coup against Haiti's first democratically elected government.
U.S. officials counter that they saved Aristide's life from the rapidly approaching rebel army. The Caribbean Community and African Union have asked that the investigation go through the U.N. General Assembly instead of the Security Council to dodge the possibility of a U.S. or French veto.
The request comes on the heels of controversial statements by Haiti's interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, who hailed Haitian rebels as "freedom fighters," despite the many convictions of assassination and human rights abuses they share between them. Human Rights Watch has reported the illegal detention of Aristide-era officials and journalists.
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Danish artist Marco Evaristti has begun painting an iceberg off the coast of Greenland blood red. "We all have a need to decorate Mother Nature because it belongs to us," the artist told the Associated Press. "This is my iceberg; it belongs to me." Before all you whole-grain and scratchy underwear types start throwing around adjectives like "arrogant," "frivolous" and "destructive," ask yourselves how many halls you've decked with boughs of holly. No, I've never done that either. But you know what I mean.
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Speaking of chopping up the forest, U.S. timber companies have successfully lobbied the Bush administration to allow increased old-growth logging on public lands in Washington, Oregon and California. The 1994 Northwest Forest Plan fixed survey-and-manage logging standards, mandating that the U.S. Forest Service survey for salmon-bearing steams and roughly 300 rare plant and animal species before approving logging.
The protections proved too efficient — the plan predicted an annual harvest of 805 million board feet and last year's take was a mere 475 million. Timber companies complained and survey-and-manage got the ax. Poor logging towns, especially in Oregon, are hopeful that the relaxed regulations will revitalize their struggling economies. Wealthy timber company owners, on the other hand, needn't be hopeful of gain — they can, as usual, be certain.
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And finally, I just have to confess my growing awe of and affection for Dr. Demento Donald Rumsfeld. He is a bold übermensch who has realized his will to power — you can see it in his crooked pointing fingers and lucid, fearless eyes. I have always been a bit dumbfounded that a society so large and technologically capable has a free press at all, and Rumsfeld's admirably self-assured disregard for the basic mechanisms of transparent, democratic government reminds me why.
Cultural critics can carp and whine about the dumbing down of American news, complaining that corporate propaganda ministers like Rupert Murdoch* hawk irrelevant cat-rescued-from-tree trash and spin the real news to within an inch of its veracity, but I think that's inevitable in a massive centralized republic. Rumsfeld has made plain what we all should have known for years: Nobody who has been invited into the seat of power has to answer to the press, the citizenry or anybody else.
Thank you, Donald. Thank you for your naked honesty and evil genius eyebrows. You are my secret shadow hero.
* I'm not being bombastic - the British paper The Guardian reported that on March 19, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice took time out of her day for a secretive satellite address to Rupert Murdoch and media executives in his Fox/New York Post/Weekly Standard/DirecTV empire. Do you remember what was happening on March 19? The new Spanish prime minister was calling the Iraq occupation "a disaster," terror guru Clarke had torn into the Bush administration's incompetence, the Taiwanese president had just been shot, and Osama's No. 2 man supposedly was surrounded in Pakistan. A busy day for any national security adviser, but Rice found time to address Murdoch's media family, which is doubly suspicious considering her reluctance to address the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission in front of the media. If you ever had doubt, know it now: Murdoch is the Bush administration's most powerful spin-doctor.
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