[PEN-L:1915] Libya Asks U.S. To Hand Over Reagan-Era Officials
Thursday December 31 7:19 AM ET Libya Asks U.S. To Hand Over Reagan-Era Officials TUNIS, Tunisia (Reuters) - Libya wants the United States to hand over nine officials of the Reagan administration -- one of them dead -- to face charges in connection with U.S. air raids on Libya in 1986, the official Libyan news agency JANA said. The agency quoted the Libyan attorney-general as saying in a statement that warrants would be sent to the United States requesting the men's arrest and extradition to face charges in Tripoli. The report, monitored in Tunis Thursday, did not make the handover a condition for the handover of two Libyans accused by Washington and London of killing 270 people in the bombing of an airliner over the Scottish town of Lockerbie 10 years ago. But the attorney-general drew a parallel with the U.S. and British warrants, which are backed up with U.N. sanctions, by saying Libya would appeal to the U.N. Security Council if the United States did not hand over its citizens. ``Our right is based on the fact that the U.S. and Britain turned to the Security Council in a lesser case than this one, namely the suspicion against two Libyan citizens in the so-called Lockerbie incident,'' he said. The accused from the administration of then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan included national security adviser John Poindexter, his deputy Robert Gates and aide Oliver North as well as Central Intelligence Agency director William Casey. Casey died in 1987, and the attorney-general, who was not named, did not make clear how he expected Washington to honor the arrest warrant against him. Other indictees were senior State Department official Robert Oakley, Frank Kelso, the then commander of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, two U.S. air force pilots and a weapons officer. Libya considers the men responsible for U.S. air raids on Tripoli and Benghazi in April 1986. It says 40 people were killed including a girl adopted by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, whose house in the Azizia barracks in Tripoli was destroyed. Washington said the raids were in response to an explosion at a Berlin discotheque in which two Americans were killed. The United States blamed Libya but Tripoli denied the charge, just as it denies all involvement in the Lockerbie bombing. Earlier this month U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan held meetings in Libya in the hope of persuading it finally to hand over the Lockerbie suspects, for whom arrest warrants were issued in 1992. But although Libya has agreed to hand the suspects over for trial in the Netherlands, it continues to reject American and British demands that they should be tried by Scottish judges and serve any prison sentence in Scotland.
[PEN-L:1916] Russia: Homeless Kids on New Year's
FEW HOMELESS KIDS SEE COMFORT ON NEW YEAR'S MOSCOW, Dec. 31, 1998 -- (Agence France Presse) At least 17,000 homeless St. Petersburg children will greet New Year's, Russia's most-awaited holiday, in freezing cellars and streets. Only 10 percent of that number have lost their parents, Anatoly Zheleznev, head doctor of the Tsimbalin hospital -- the only one to serve orphans in Russia's second city -- told Itar-Tass news agency. The rest have simply been abandoned. Those 32 children who will meet the new year in the hospital are the lucky ones. Many of them have never received a traditional present for New Year's. Most also do not enjoy the luxury of heat in winter, comfort and clean clothes. Hospital workers teach children to read and write in addition to treating their illnesses and injuries. Around 1 million children are estimated to be homeless in Russia, which has a population of 148 million, according to Interfax news agency, citing figures from a conference on the protection of children. Among factors contributing to homelessness are divorce resulting in one spouse losing residence privileges, confidence tricksters who cheat people out of their homes and a growing number of underage runaways. Another factor is that the government has been unable to provide housing for needy individuals like those who grew up in state-run orphanages and those recently released from prison. Russia's current economic crisis has only increased the number of abandoned children. As for the orphans in the Tsimbalin hospital, the St. Petersburg city administration and the Petersburg Tradition Fund have provided toys and food for their New Year's presents Some of the luckier patients are even taken for excursions around the Baltic city at the mouth of the Neva river. "The children don't recognize the city. They've only seen fences and basements and not luxurious palaces," for which the city is famous, Zheleznev said to Itar-Tass. -- Gregory Schwartz Department of Political Science York University 4700 Keele St. Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 Canada tel: (416) 736-5265 fax: (416) 736-5686
[PEN-L:1917] happy new year and signing off for awhile
Friends, I am going to be away, teaching a class in economics to AFL-CIO folks at UMass-Amherst, from January 3 through Jan. 13. I am going to sign off these lists for that time, but I will be checking my email, so if anyone sends me a personal message, I will get it and respond. [EMAIL PROTECTED] is my address. I hope that everyone on these lists has a great new year. In friendship and solidarity, michael yates
[PEN-L:1918] Russia: Zyuganov Statement on 'Jewish Question'
Comrades, Here is an article that recently appeared in Sovetskaya Rossiia and was subsequently translated into English. Although in this clever recant about the recent anti-Semitic remarks of his party comrades Zyuganov asserts a basically internationalist position of the Communist Party and projects the party's socially minded vision, some comments of his invalidate his supposed internationalism. For example, in the last third of the essay, Zyuganov implicitly points to the Jews (most likely people like Koch, Uhrinson, Berezovsky, Gaidar, Nemtsov, Chubais, Kirienko, etc.) who were prominently at the forefront of privatization and corruption, or have benefited from the loot that has been taking place in the last 7 years, but he fails to illustrate how these people are Zionists. That they are Jews is clear, not only from his implicit, but from his explicit statements, as well as from some factual evidence that Nemtsov and Kirienko are part-Jewish. That they have robbed the working people of Russia is evident to any unbiased reader of newspapers, either Russian or Western. But that these people operate (behind the scenes, as Zyuganov reminds us) to aid the Zionist conspiracy, still either needs to be proved, or at least adequately illustrated. What happens is some kind of perversion where, by virtue of being Jewish (albeit Jews who caused what Zyuganov recently called "the genocide of the Russian people") these men are automatically Zionist, and not simply who they really are. The people of Russia, therefore, are offered a scanty justification for seeing in every Russian Jew a potential (if not a real) Zionist, where _real_ difference between people disappears into a kind of unitary identity, and where the possibly disastrous effects of this technique of superimposing ontologically distinct entities are not difficult to imagine (history serves as an adequate referent). Peace, Greg. Zyuganov Statement on 'Jewish Question' Sovetskaya Rossiya 24 December 1998 [translation for personal use only] Statement signed by G. Zyuganov: "On the National Pride of Patriots. Statement by Communist Party of the Russian Federation Central Committee Chairman" -- passages within slantlines published in boldface Each time that politicians in the ruling regime suffer a failure, they resort to an old tried-and-tested means -- they whip up anti-Communist hysteria. The distinguishing feature of the current campaign of lies and slander in the electronic media has been its provocatively Russophobic nature. Once again the thesis about "Russian fascism" and a "brownshirt Red" threat, and about "anti-Semitism" allegedly being an official Communist Party stance has once again been thrust into the limelight. The aim of this entire campaign is obvious. To divert society's attention away from the country's catastrophic position and the real culprits for it. To provoke anti-Jewish sentiment among the masses. To channel the working people's mounting social protest down a dead end -- in the direction of interethnic conflicts. I am convinced that these plans are ultimately doomed to failure. But nor can we close our eyes to the fact that the provocateurs sometimes succeed in achieving the results desired. In response to this Russophobic hysteria, certain Communists have issued ill-considered statements about the Jews, which run counter to the provisions of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Program and the decisions of the Central Committee plenum on questions of interethnic relations. These statements are based on an incorrect and harmful confusion of Zionism as a political phenomenon with the Jewish question. Zionism itself, which states that it is a "purely national" blueprint for bringing Jews together in the land of their origin, primarily has an interest in such a confusion. If its goals were indeed limited to this, no additional questions would arise. I would like to recall that it was the Soviet Union, recognizing the Jewish people's right to national and state self-determination, which actively promoted the creation of the state of Israel -- but, of course, not to the detriment of the vital interests of the Arab people of Palestine. But Zionism has actually shown itself to be one of the strains of the theory and practice of the most aggressive imperialist circles striving for world domination. In this respect it is related to fascism. The only difference between them is that Hitlerite Nazism operated behind the mask of German nationalism and strove for world domination /openly./ But Zionism, operating behind the mask of Jewish nationalism, acts /in secret,/ not least at second hand. Fascism and Zionism are the bitterest enemies primarily of the peoples whose national feelings and prejudices they exploit. Fascism and Zionism are non-national and profoundly antipeople in their essence. At the close of World War II Hitler strove to take the entire German people to the grave with him,
[PEN-L:1919] Re: Stampeding bison?199812171533.BAA06772@elf.brisnet.org.au 4.0.1.19981219130529.0101b960@popserver.panix.com
The source for the stampeding bison is Lewis and Clark's Journals. I found the exerpt in Lewis, Meriwether (1971) 'An Indian Method of Hunting Buffalo', extracted from Journals of Lewis and Clark; in Wes Jackson (ed.) Man and the Environment (Dubuque, Ia: William. C. Brown Co). How trustworthy was there information? -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
