"$4 Million Paid to Earth First! Activists

Josh Richman, Oakland Tribune

Friday, May 14, 2004 — Settlement with FBI, Oakland police comes nearly 14 years after car bombing injured environmentalists.

Oakland and the federal government
have paid $4 million to end the long legal battle brought by
two environmental activists against city police and FBI
agents who investigated a 1990 bomb explosion.

Useful information may be found here, however ideologically contaminated by the purveyors, for those inclined to take polls, as well as electoral politics, seriously.

Electoral Battleground

Bush to Defend Iraq Policy in Monday Night Speech
CBC News

WASHINGTON — Hoping to convince Americans that Iraq hasn't been a terrible mistake and that he has a workable plan for creating a democracy there, U.S. President George W. Bush begins a series of speeches on Monday.

Bush will speak Monday evening at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., knowing that he will be heard around the world.

The speech will lay out Bush's plan for the United States to be a "partner with the Iraqi people," said White House spokesman Scott Mclellan.

Bush won't set out a time for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, Mclellan said. Events in Iraq are "at a critical stage, and the stakes are high," he said.

"The Other Prisoners"

Luke Harding, London Guardian

Most of the coverage of abuse at Abu Ghraib has focused on male detainees. But what of the five women held in the jail, and the scores elsewhere in Iraq?

The scandal at Abu Ghraib prison was first exposed not by a digital photograph but by a letter. In December 2003, a woman prisoner inside the jail west of Baghdad managed to smuggle out a note. Its contents were so shocking that, at first, Amal Kadham Swadi and the other Iraqi women lawyers who had been trying to gain access to the US jail found them hard to believe.

Iraq's Rebel Cleric Sees Surge in Popularity

Roula Khalaf, Financial Times

An Iraqi poll to be released next week shows a surge in the
popularity of Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical young Shia cleric fighting
coalition forces, and suggests nearly nine out of 10 Iraqis see US
troops as occupiers and not liberators or peacekeepers.

The poll was conducted by the one-year-old Iraq Center for Research
and Strategic Studies, which is considered reliable enough for the
US-led Coalition Provisional Authority to have submitted questions to
be included in the study.

Material Given to Congress in 2002 Is Now Classified

Eric LIichtblau, The New York Times

WASHINGTON, May 19 — The Justice Department has taken the unusual step of retroactively classifying information it gave to Congress nearly two years ago regarding a former F.B.I. translator who charged that the bureau had missed critical terrorist warnings, officials said Wednesday.

Law enforcement officials say the secrecy surrounding the translator, Sibel Edmonds, is essential to protecting information that could reveal intelligence-gathering operations. But some members of Congress and Congressional aides said they were troubled by the move, which comes as critics have accused the Bush administration of excessive secrecy.

Moore's Anti-Bush Film Wins Top Cannes Award

Houston Chronicle

CANNES, France — Michael Moore's controversial anti-Bush documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" won the Palme d'Or best film award at the Cannes film festival today. Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, a scathing attack on the White House, was up against French director Agnes Jaoui's sharp, literate ugly-duckling tale Look at Me; South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook's savagely energetic vengeance saga Old Boy; and Brazilian Walter Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries, a portrait of rebel Che Guevara as a young romantic.

Chalabi Aide is Suspected Iranian Spy

Knut Royce, Newsday

WASHINGTON — The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that a
U.S.-funded arm of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has been
used for years by Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the
United States and to collect highly sensitive American secrets,
according to intelligence sources.

"Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through
Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program
information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam
Hussein," said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the
Defense Intelligence Agency's conclusions, which were based on a
review of thousands of internal documents.

Melvin J. Lasky, Cultural Cold Warrior, Dies at 84

Richard Bernstein, New York Times

BERLIN, May 20 — Melvin J. Lasky, the editor of two major intellectual journals and a man at the vortex of the debates and controversies thrown up by the cold war, died Wednesday at his home in Berlin. He was 84.

The cause was heart failure, Marc Svetov, his secretary, said.

Probably no person was more associated than Mr. Lasky with the term cultural cold warrior. In a career that spanned several decades, during which he lived in London, Paris and Berlin, he edited the monthly magazine Encounter, which was not only one of Europe's leading literary and political journals but also a major force in articulating the point of view best summed up by the phrase liberal anti-Communism.

"Ground Zero Funds Often Drifted Uptown:

Money Also Went to Luxury Apartments"

Michael Powell and Michelle Garcia, Washington Post

NEW YORK — Six months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Congress approved an $8 billion program to repair this city's damaged office towers, build apartment buildings and finance the rebirth of the financial district.

But two years later, city records show that much of the money, dubbed Liberty Bonds, has gone to developers of prime real estate in midtown Manhattan and Brooklyn and to builders of luxury housing