Killer Shouts 'Allah is Great' and two American soldiers die, more critical

By CNN Wire Staff, March 2, 2011, on CNN website
A 21-year-old man from Kosovo is in custody after two U.S. airmen were killed and two others were wounded Wednesday in a shooting incident on a U.S. military bus at Germany's Frankfurt Airport, authorities said.

The suspect is named Arid Uka, from the northern town of Mitrovica, Kosovo's interior minister, Bajram Rexhepi, told CNN, citing the U.S. Embassy in Pristina as his source.
Uka approached the bus, which was parked outside Terminal 2 and was clearly marked as a U.S. military vehicle, German police said. He first engaged U.S. military members in a conversation, then pulled out a handgun and began firing -- first outside the bus and then inside the bus, police said.
He then fled, making it into the terminal, where he was taken into custody by German federal police, according to police.
Uka has passports from Germany and from Yugoslavia, the latter of which was issued prior to Kosovo's declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008, Rexhepi said. Officials were running a background check on Uka, who lives in Germany, for possible terrorist links, he said.
"It's either a terrorist act or he's crazy," Rexhepi said. "There cannot be any other reason."

Gates and Kerry tussle over "no-fly" zone in Libya

By Elise Labott, CNN Senior State Department Producer, March 2, 2011 on CNN website
Sen. John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, called for the United States to impose a no-fly zone over Libya. While he noted that the Libyan people weren't asking for foreign troops, he said they "do need the tools to prevent the slaughter of innocents on Libyan streets."

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, speaking to a House committee, said creating a no-fly zone would have to begin with an attack on Libya.
"If it's ordered, we can do it, but ... there's a lot of, frankly, loose talk about some of these military options, and let's just call a spade a spade. A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya to destroy the air defenses. That's the way you do a no-fly zone, and then you can fly planes around the country and not worry about our guys being shot down," he told a House Appropriations hearing. "But that's the way it starts."
Some protesters have charged that troops loyal to Gadhafi have fired on demonstrators, and military planes have bombed several sites held by the opposition. Libya's ambassador to the United States estimated Monday that as many as 2,000 people may have been killed.
"I believe the global community cannot be on the sidelines while airplanes are allowed to bomb and strafe," said Kerry, who chairs the Senate committee. "A no-fly zone is not a long-term proposition, assuming the outcome is what all desire, and I believe that we ought to be ready to implement it as necessary."
Of course, the Foreign Relations Committee of the U.S. Senate is going to bring up the issue of a "no-fly" zone over Libya, and there are other countries calling for a similar measure, including the Prime Minister of Canada. Military intervention is a classic American talking point, although coming from Committee Chair, John Kerry, himself a strong opponent, finally, of the VietNam war, it is a little surprising. It is Robert Gates, however, the Secretary of Defence whose department would have to enact the "orders" if President Obama were to issue such an order, who brings some perspective on "where the rubber meets the road," as the cliche puts it.
And herein lies the essential American and global dilemma, "what to do" while Libyan citizens are dodging bullets from both the ground from guns fired by Gadhafi mercenaries and from the air from planes ordered to fire by the Libyan dictator. And even then, some of  these reports have to be considered "unconfirmed" because if there is one thing the dictator is good at it is generating a "fog" around his actions and his intentions.
A full-fledged military invasion of Libya, as a necessary prelude to a "no-fly" zone, to quote Gates, is not something the U.S. could easily tolerate among the global community, given that it is already engaged in two major conflicts, Iraq and Afghanistan, although the former has seen combat troops withdraw, leaving a political vaccuum in Baghdad, and more unrest than before they left. However, if a full-scale military invasion of Libya is what it takes to save thousands of innocent people in Libya, then, it will have to be considered...and hopefully considered in conjunction with other western governments.
We already know that China and Russia would vote against such a move if it were to come to the Security Council at the U.N. and other countries, such as Italy, would lobby against such a move. NATO spokespersons have already indicated there is no readiness to consider such a move by their forces. And Gates' clarity will have to give U.S. legislators pause in their "rush to action" that is so characteristic of the U.S. in tight diplomatic situations.
Military support for the conveyance of supplies medicines, food, water for Libyan citizens would be easily and readily approved internationally, or at least should be. However, a move to invade...that is a horse of a different colour!
It is not a situation in which simple, uncomplicated and easily executed strategies or tactics are feasible.
And the fate of hundreds of thousands of Libyans is at stake.

Pill Mills in Florida Strip Malls...Who knew?

By Greg Allen, NPR website, March 2, 2011
Florida is the epicenter of a prescription drug abuse epidemic. Each day in communities from Jacksonville to Fort Lauderdale, thousands of doses of powerful narcotics like oxycodone are dispensed in pain clinics — storefront operations also called "pill mills."

When he started at the Broward County Sheriff's department 30 years ago, Al Lamberti says, the department was raiding crack houses and busting junkies.
"Nowadays, the drug dealers are working out of strip malls," he says.
Lamberti heads the sheriff's office in a county that includes Fort Lauderdale. It's a city that has become a destination, not just for spring breakers, but also for addicts and drug traffickers.
"We have more pain clinics than McDonald's," he says. "They're taking their toll."
Lamberti recently joined a dozen federal, state and local law enforcement officials at a news conference held to announce a major crackdown on Florida's pill mills. It was a series of busts, from Palm Beach to Miami, that included more than 20 arrests and the seizure of more than $22 million in cash, exotic cars and real estate.
Doctors in Florida prescribe 10 times more oxycodone pills than every other state in the country combined. People come from all over the Southeast to visit Florida pain clinics.
You know that when the abuse of prescription drugs, from what are called "pill mills" in strip malls exceeds the numbers both of McDonald's locations and their burger sales, "there is trouble right here in RiverCity."
And you also know that the U.S. addiction to medications, both prescribed and unprescribed, is legion, along with many other western countries...so you also know that whatever causes might be behind these stories including the kind of turbulence we are watching in the economy and its very slow, staggering recovery, the climate, the food price spike, the terrorist threat, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the political mush that passes for  "spine" in most of our capitals, and the threat of joblessness that hangs over many homes...that those numbers are only going to grow...
Unconsciousness is one way to address the mounting experience of powerlessness and alienation that greet many people when they awaken every morning. And pain pills are one route to that unconsciousness.

A little background on Gadhafi and OIL

By Thomas Walkom, Toronto Star, March 2, 2011
Over his 42-year rule, Gadhafi has supported terrorist groups ranging from the Irish Republican Army to the Italian Red Brigades to the Palestinian Abu Nidal faction.

He has also engaged in terrorism of his own, famously sending agents abroad to assassinate political opponents.
In 1984, Libyan diplomats shot and killed a British police officer monitoring a peaceful demonstration outside Gadhafi’s London embassy.
In 1986, terrorists using Libyan-supplied explosives blew up a disco in Berlin. Two years later, Libyan agents blew up an airplane over Scotland.
Still, no one is perfect. And there was all that oil. Although Libya accounts for only 3 per cent of global reserves, its low-sulphur crude is in high demand for diesel and jet fuel
So, eventually, everyone made up. Gadhafi handed over his airline bomber for trial, paid compensation to some victims and promised to do better.
He even pledged to give up weapons of mass destruction that he may or may not have possessed.
In return, Western leaders flocked to Libya looking for deals. Britain’s Tony Blair snagged concessions for BP and Shell. Paul Martin, then prime minister, made a pilgrimage to plead for Canadian firms.
Alas, the ever-unreliable Gadhafi remained just so. In 2009, he abruptly nationalized the Libyan operations of Canadian oil company Verenex. That same year — angered by Ottawa’s threat to rebuke him publicly during a planned stopover in Newfoundland — he cut Suncor’s production quota by 50 per cent.
When the wave of Arab unrest hit Libya this year, Gadhafi — unlike Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak — didn’t have many friends.
The fact that Libyan rebels have taken over the oil-rich eastern part of the country (and resumed exports) has made the West’s shunning of Gadhafi easier.
British and German military transports have already flown missions into some of Libya’s oil fields. The French have promised to use their military to deliver humanitarian aid to rebels. Britain’s prime minister says he may give them arms. Italy has abrogated its non-aggression pact with Libya. The U.S. Mediterranean fleet is steaming toward Tripoli. Canadian transport planes are standing by in Malta and a Canadian frigate is on the way from Halifax.
All are claiming to act on behalf of democracy and human rights. But if that were true, no country — including Canada — would ever have had anything to do with Gadhafi.
The real reason is oil and the money oil brings. When he controlled Libya’s oil, Gadhafi was the man. Now that he no longer does, he is expendable.
Thank you, Mr. Walkom, for giving us a little clarity on some of the only vaguely recalled details and on the insatiable appetite for oil that drives the west, still virtually unconscious about our addiction.
Isn't it one of the primary symptoms of the alcoholic that he denies his addiction?
Isn't is one of the primary symptoms of the west that we deny our addiction to oil? Judging from the very few mostly token moves away from such a deep dependence, over the last forty years at least, (Carter was president in the 70's and made some bold statements about getting off our oil addiction, but was ridiculed), we remain permanently adhered to the spigot that reads "OIL" on its label.
And behind our addiction, feeding our addiction, are those mega-corporations like Exxon, BP, Chevron, Shell and multiple smaller firms, linked co-dependently to the auto manufacturers whose resistance to change has resulted, not only in world gone askew with climate change from carbon dioxide emissions (much of it industrial and certainly much of it also from auto's)  but also a tsunami of dollars spent on lobbying that far exceeds most other industries except perhaps insurance and pharmaceuticals.
And the culture of addiction/dependence continues to prop up the Canadian "commodities-based" dollar, itself now the cork in the cauldron of the oil-based economies, with the tar-sands project conducted virtually without environmental oversight by the Canadian government.
And we are years away from a completed transition to electric or hydrogen-fired vehicles, when we could have been there, given the existence of the technology, decades ago. Only for the lack of political will, or put another way, only because the politicians were unwilling to remove their lips from the tap of the big oil companies and their lobby, are we now in this place.
And there is little, if any, political will in many western countries to tackle effectively the symptoms of global warming and climate change.
So we stumble on, like a drunken derelict, reeling from crisis to crisis, like some uneducated, unenlightened and unconscious and addicted social system that refuses to acknowledge just how desperate we are, and thereby rejects the kind of political help/will/courage/consciousness/wake-up call...that is needed to grow up to maturity, responsibility and full political health.

Hedges: Day of Protest, March 19, Lafayette Park, D.C.

By Chris Hedges, posted on truthdig.com website, February 28, 2011
I have watched mothers and fathers keening in grief over the frail corpses of their children in hospitals in Gaza and rural villages in El Salvador, Bosnia and Kosovo. The faces of these dead children, their bodies ripped apart by iron fragments or bullets tumbling end over end through their small, delicate frames, appear to me almost daily like faint and sadly familiar ghosts. The frailty and innocence of my own children make these images difficult to bear.
A child a day dies in war-related violence in Afghanistan. Children die in roadside explosions. They die in airstrikes. They die after militants lure them to carry suicide bombs, usually without their knowledge. They die in firefights. They are executed by the Taliban after being accused, sometimes correctly, of spying for the Afghan National Army. They are tiny pawns in a futile and endless war. They are robbed of their childhood. They live in fear and surrounded by the terror of indiscriminate violence. The United Nations, whose most recent report on children in Afghanistan covered a two-year period from Sept. 1, 2008, to Aug. 30, 2010, estimates that in the first half of last year at least 176 children were killed and 389 more wounded. But the real number is probably much, much higher. There are big parts of the country where research can no longer be carried out.
We will not stop the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, we will not end this slaughter of innocents, unless we are willing to rise up as have state workers in Wisconsin and citizens on the streets of Arab capitals. Repeated and sustained acts of civil disobedience are the only weapons that remain to us. Our political system is as broken and dysfunctional as that once presided over in Egypt by Hosni Mubarak. We must be willing to accept personal discomfort, to put our bodies in the way of the machine, if we hope to expose the lies of war and blunt the abuse by corporate profiteers. To do nothing, to refuse to act, to be passive, is to be an agent of injustice and to be complicit in murder. The U.N. report estimates that during the two-year period it studied almost 1,800 children were killed or injured in conflict-related violence, but numbers can never transmit the reality of such suffering.
On March 19, the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, I will join a coalition of U.S. military veterans from Iraq Veterans Against the War, March Forward!, Vietnam Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Peace who will gather in Lafayette Park across from the White House. The veteran-led action will result in numerous arrests, as did a Dec. 16 protest organized by Veterans for Peace. It will seek, because it is all we have left, to use our bodies to challenge the crimes of the state.
It does not matter if this protest or any other does not work. It does not matter if we are 500, as we were in December, or 50. It does not matter if the event is covered in the press or ignored. It matters only that those of us who believe in the rule of law, who find the organized sadism of war and militarism repugnant and who seek to protect the sanctity of life rise up. If we do not defend these virtues they will be extinguished. No one in power will defend them for us. Protests are rending the fabric of the U.S.-backed dictatorships in Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt and Libya. They are flickering to life in the U.S. in states like Wisconsin. And they are beginning to convulse Iraq. Iraqis, for whom eight years of war and occupation have brought nothing but misery and death, are surrounding government buildings to denounce their puppet government. They are rising up to demand jobs, basic services including electricity, a reining in of our mercenary killers, some of whom have been used to quell restless crowds, and a right to determine their own future. These protesters are our true allies, not the hired thugs we pay to repress them.
We are wasting $700 million a day to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while our teachers, firefighters and police lose their jobs, while we slash basic assistance programs for the poor, children and the elderly, while we turn our backs on the some 3 million people being pushed from their homes by foreclosures and bank repossessions and while we do nothing to help the one in six American workers who cannot find work. These wars have taken hundreds of thousands of lives. They have pushed millions into refugee or displacement camps. They have left young men and women severely crippled and maimed. They have turned our nation into an isolated pariah, fueling the very terrorism we seek to defeat. And they cannot be won. The sooner we leave Iraq and Afghanistan the sooner we will save others and finally save ourselves.

No Fox News North in Canada...Thank God and CRTC

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,Waterkeeper Alliance, Professor at Pace University, on Huffington Post, February 28, 2011 (CRTC in head, refers to Canadian Radio and Television Commission)
As America's middle class battles for its survival on the Wisconsin barricades -- against various Koch Oil surrogates and the corporate toadies at Fox News -- fans of enlightenment, democracy and justice can take comfort from a significant victory north of Wisconsin border. Fox News will not be moving into Canada after all! The reason: Canada regulators announced last week they would reject efforts by Canada's right wing Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, to repeal a law that forbids lying on broadcast news.

Canada's Radio Act requires that "a licenser may not broadcast....any false or misleading news." The provision has kept Fox News and right wing talk radio out of Canada and helped make Canada a model for liberal democracy and freedom. As a result of that law, Canadians enjoy high quality news coverage including the kind of foreign affairs and investigative journalism that flourished in this country before Ronald Reagan abolished the "Fairness Doctrine" in 1987. Political dialogue in Canada is marked by civility, modesty, honesty, collegiality, and idealism that have pretty much disappeared on the U.S. airwaves. When Stephen Harper moved to abolish anti-lying provision of the Radio Act, Canadians rose up to oppose him fearing that their tradition of honest non partisan news would be replaced by the toxic, overtly partisan, biased and dishonest news coverage familiar to American citizens who listen to Fox News and talk radio. Harper's proposal was timed to facilitate the launch of a new right wing network, "Sun TV News" which Canadians call "Fox News North."
Harper, often referred to as "George W. Bush's Mini Me," is known for having mounted a Bush like war on government scientists, data collectors, transparency, and enlightenment in general. He is a wizard of all the familiar tools of demagoguery; false patriotism, bigotry, fear, selfishness and belligerent religiosity.
Harper's attempts to make lying legal on Canadian television is a stark admission that right wing political ideology can only dominate national debate through dishonest propaganda. Since corporate profit-taking is not an attractive vessel for populism, a political party or broadcast network that makes itself the tool of corporate and financial elites must lie to make its agenda popular with the public. In the Unites States, Fox News and talk radio, the sock puppets of billionaires and corporate robber barons have become the masters of propaganda and distortion on the public airwaves. Fox News's notoriously biased and dishonest coverage of the Wisconsin's protests is a prime example of the brand of news coverage Canada has smartly avoided.

CMA urges action on Health Care; 5 million without doctors

By Gloria Galloway and Lisa Priest, Globe and Mail, February 28, 2011
The Canadian Medical Association said Monday that public health care is in decline. Five million Canadians do not have a family doctor, emergency departments are congested, services for the mentally ill are lacking and many patients cannot afford the drugs they need or a bed in long-term care when it is the best option.

Jeff Turnbull, CMA president, called on the federal Conservative government to create a “Health Care Action Plan” to deal with health issues, much as it created an “Economic Action Plan” to tackle the downturn in the economy. Such a plan, he said, would make the system more effective and accountable.
With the health accord between the provinces and the federal government set to expire in three years, it is time for Ottawa to come off the sidelines and “show leadership once again to tackle the looming crisis in health care,” Mr. Turnbull said.
Danielle Martin, chair of Canadian Doctors for Medicare, said the notion that the health-care system is about to collapse under its own financial weight is unsubstantiated.

In fact, Dr. Martin said, the cost of basic physician and hospital care has remained stable as a percentage of Canada’s gross domestic product for the past 35 years. What has made health care more expensive, she said, is government spending on such things as public health, publicly funded dental care and prescription drugs.
The CMA is succumbing to concerns being expressed by provinces who say health-care spending is eating up a larger part of their budgets, Dr. Martin said.
But “if experience shows us anything, it’s that the parts of our health-care system that are paid for publicly are the parts where we have the greatest control over costs,” she said.
Both the CMA and Canadian Doctors for Medicare agree that making prescription drugs and long-term care more affordable and accessible would go a long way toward curing what ails the system.
PDF Document

Neat, Plausible and Wrong: The Myth of Health Care Unsustainability
Report by Canadian Doctors for Medicare - Feb. 28 2011
Download this file (.pdf)
Every Canadian would do well, a favour to themselves and a sign of solidarity for the country, to thank their doctor on their next visit for the courage, clarity and foresight of the profession in preparing this report.
We have all heard the cries from some doctors complaining about the loss of income and the socialization of medicine, (some have even left for the U.S. to practice "for-profit" health care, so vehement was/is their ideological criticism of the Canadian Health Act) and yet, here is the medical profession urging Ottawa to get off its hands and, with considerable urgency, create a pro-active strategy to restore sustainability to the plan.
Let's hope that the Canadian Medical Association does not hold its breath in expectation of this government's willingness to comply with their recommendation.
After all, with the economic recovery plan, the Harper neo-cons were playing directly to their constituency base, their corporate bankers and backers, whose profits were threatened. With the National Health Act, and funding its provisions in order to assure sustainability, the government would be working to support ALL Canadians, and not their political base. And this government is nothing if not fixated on the service of their narrow political base of votes. If for a single moment Harper believed that, by injecting both imagination and determination into the health care crisis, he would guarantee himself a majority in the next elecction, there is no doubt in anyone's mind he would be grabbing his political heart monitor, attaching his heart, mind and political cunning to the task...and his cabinet would be lectured on how the process would unfold.
However, in his headstrong, and single-minded purpose of moving the country to the right, there is no evidence that he will compromise his for-private principles and ideology for the sake of a few million Canadians ( most of whom without doctors probably also do not go to the polls) when he would rather put that effort and money into the purchase of fighter jets, or into lower corporate taxes for his political puppeteers.
We need to change governments, if the country seeks to put legs under the health care system, and, if there were an election this spring, and the Liberals (even with a few NDP in a coalition) were to come to power, Canadians could be more confident that the doctors prescriptions would be implemented.
Just another reason, among many, for Canadians to think deeply about where they mark their X on voting day.