A few days ago, I saw the documentary Unprecedented: the 20000 Presidential election, and LA Independent Media Center Film by filmmakers Richard Ray Pérez and Joan Sekler. I had paid close attention to events during the Florida recount and had heard most of the facts, but the strength of this documentary comes from placing all these different elements of malfeasance and fraud together and making use of results of public inquiry made after the elections.
They start off by talking about Jeb Bush. He lost his first bid for Florida governor. During that campaign, when asked what he could do for African-Americans in Florida, he responded "Not much". When he won his second race for governor, he did more than that, he removed most affirmative action laws. That prompted a large voter registration campaign by African-Americans for the 2000 elections, with the take five people to the polls drive. As a result, in 2000, 65% more African-American voters went the poles. But there they faced multiple obstacles. Many weren't on the roster, although they had voted in the same county previously. Some voter were wasked for multiple forms of id, although state law has not such requirement. Police gave tickets for loitering to people waiting in line. Who knows how many votes were lost this way. But there were more coordinated modes of voter exclusion:
(a) the felon purge list - this involved the misuse of a 1868 florida law, written by ex-confederate soldiers, in order to exclude many Af-Am from voting. Since then, it had been used haphazardly, but in 1998, the Florida State Legislature toughened the law, requiring a private firm to compile a computerized felon list. Katherine Harris, in charge of implementing the making of this list, hired Data Base Technologies (DBT). Florida state officials told DBT to use loose parameters in building the list. In Unprecendented, Greg Palast explains that among these parameters were the disregard of middle initials and Jr./Sr., the use of only the first four letters of the first name, a close apporximation of a persons birthdate. So that if your name somewhat matched that of a convicted felon anywhere in the states, you were put on the purge list. It was later shown that DBT had concerns about this practice and the number of resulting false positives.They wrote Emett Mitchell IV of the state government, and the state replied this is how they wanted the list compiled.
(b) Even if you conviction date appeared to be somewhere in the future - which I didn't quite understand how that could be. But they showed a excluded voter, whose conviction date was in 2007. Most of these were dealt with by blanking out the conviction dates. There were 4,000 missing conviction dates. 50% of these were Af-Am. 93% of the Af-Ams voted Democrat in Florida. Overall, its estimated that 15% of the people on the list were not felons. Someone points out that the state payed 4 million dol. to compile felon list, but would not spend 100,000 dol. on voter education.
[The trick to watching the documentary is to add up the number of votes that were not cast or thrown out, and how it swamps the differance between Gore and Bush.]
(c) In addition, 2,883 ex-offenders, convicted outside of Florida, whose voters rights were restored, and subsequently moved to Florida, were wrongfully not allowed to vote. According to Florida Supreme Court, you cannot have any of your civil rights removed when entering the state. However, Jeb Bush required that these ex-felons, some of which had already voted after leaving prison, had to write him and ask for permission to vote, a requirement that appears nowhere in state law. 93% of people coming out of prison vote democrat. So the future president's brother and Florida governor, Jeb Bush, and the Bush Florida Campaign director and Florida Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, knew they were desenfranchising sectors that voted democrat overwhelmingly.

Then came election date, Nov 7th 2000. Remember staying up until late, and then finally concluding it was going to take longer than normal.
Of the 6,137,938 ballots cast, Bush was ahead 1,784 votes in the first count. As this was <0.03%, less than a 'tenth of a percentage point' state requires an automatic recount. This was done in the same way, by machines. On the second count, the margin was reduced to 350. This in itself is amazing. 350 votes separated the presidential candidates!. [Of course, not counting at all all those desenfranchised voters mentioned earlier.] After the machine recount, officials revealed that 175,000 ballots were uncounted by machines, wither because they were under- or overvotes. Here's were the 'butterfly ballot' comes in. This is the ballot with names of presidential candidates on both sides of a middles strip where voters had to punch their vote. The order of the holes alternated in correspondance to names to its left and right, such that the second hole corresponded not to Al Gore, the name underneath George Bush in the left-side column, but to Pat Buchanan, who was the first name on the right side column. 5,300 ballots overvoted for Buchanan and Gore. There was also the catterpillar ballot (this one I had missed): a multi-page ballot, with the explicit instruction that voters need vote on every page. The problem is there were presidential candidates on more than one page. This lead to 27,000 overvotes being thrown out in Duval county. 16,000 of these were in precints that vote 98% democratic. [Still counting?]
As a result of these irregularities, the Gore campaign, lead by Warren Christopher, requested manual recounts in only 4 counties: Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Volucia. The fact that a state-wide manual recount was immediately requested was heavily criticized by different interviewees in the documentary. An the legal battle begins. The Bush side was lead by James Baker III and had the help of many Jeb Bush key aides that resigned shortly after a mess was percieved and joined the Bush campaign full time.
Katherine Harris refused to delay the state certification deadline of Nov 17th, which wouldn't give enough time for manual recounts. The democrats appealed to the State Supreme Court. The Court ordered a delay of certifications pending their rule on the case. During the delay, the manual recounts continued and a battle over absentee ballots began. Ironically, because democrats wanted to exclude the absentee ballots cast after the election, the Bush camp turned the table on Gore argument, and accused him of wanted to not count all the votes, particularly those by voters serving in the armed forces.
The Florida Supreme Court ruled the deadline of certification moved to Nov 26th. Republicans appealed to US Supreme Court. Amid vociferous protests from Bush supporters, the counties continued counting. When Nov 26th arrived, Palm Beach hadn't yet finished recount and Miami-Dade decided to shut down because of pressures from protesters lead by Republican staffers. Broward county reported a net gain of 563 ballot gain for Gore and Volucia County a 96 gain for Gore: a sum 659 ballot net gain for Gore. Hoever, combined with the absentee ballots, mostly republican, gave Bush a margin of 537 votes. The NY Times later reported that 680 overseas absentee ballots marked after election day were certified by K.Harris. Based on the official count, on Nov 26th, Katherine Harris excluded to unfinished return from Palm Beach and delcared Bush the winner of Florida's 25 electoral votes. The Gore campaign went back to the courts, and by a vote of 4-3, the Florida Supreme Court ordered manual recounts in Florida counties were these had not yet occurred. The recount Dec 9th deadline. The Republicans appealed to the US Supreme Court. Their 4-3 ruling, on Dec. 12th, to stay the recount ended the election. Their majority argument was that the lack of a uniform standard for counting manually violated the 'equal protection clause' of the 14th ammendment. The dissenting Supreme court justices argued that if a unform standard was lacking, send the case back to Florida and request them to devise one. According to Alan Dershowitz, the ruling ignored Florida court rulings in which 'voter intent prevails over tecnicalities'. The decision was unique in that it only applies to Bush vs. Gore, because the majority was full aware that if it were used broadly, given the heterogeneity of standards nationwide, any elections in the US would be invalid.
In 2001, a media consortium including the NYTImes, Washington Post, LA Times and Orlando Sentinal and others, analyzed the statewide 175,000 unread ballots. Somewhere from 2,000 to 20,000 of these were retrievable votes. Their results were published on Nov 12 2001, and conclude that if you look at all of the ballots, in all the Florida counties, Gore would have won by a small margin.
However, if you included only their recounts for the 4 counties requested by Gore - and which had never been completed - then Bush had more votes. The media, almost without exception, made more of the later fact. Inside, however you would find that a full statewide review - never requested, which the Florida Supreme Court had permited, but the US Supreme Court disavowed - would have given Al Gore the majority of Florida votes . The Washington Post presents a table, with the margin of votes favorable for Gore, regardless of the method used. Actually, the more accepting the method is (say from 'fully produced chads and limited marks on optical ballots' to 'one corner of chad or any optical mark') the smaller the margin for Gore. The later method would have given him a margin of 60 votes statewide.

Michael Hardt's second talk was on the concept of Multitude, the focal topic of his and Antonio Negri's upcoming book, published by Penguin.
1. Multitude is suggested in contrast to the concept of the people and the social mutiplicities of the mob, masses or crowd. The later are manipulable, need a leader, and members become undifferentiated. The people is a unity, individuals set aside their differences, and can be sovereign. The multitude represents a multiplicity, it is a set of singularities, able to be an active subject, and thus to rule itself.
2. Multitude is also in contrast to the working class, which is based on exclusion of nonmembers (the unproductive labor, the unwaged classes). Under the framwork of Multitude, all forms of labor are productive. This concept gains value as the traditional working class has lost its hegemonic position over society. It has been replaced by immaterial labor and affective labor, whose product is immaterial, primarily intellectual, yet creates social life. Just as the working class was a minority when it became hegemonic, the immaterial labor is also a minority numerically, but hegemonic qualitatively, dictating trends, e.g., society has become affective, intelectual, informational, visual, etc.
3. Multitude is also an alternative to the party as a form of political organization. However, because it is all inclusive: where does it leave the issue of class struggle?
Listen to the lecture [Note - the file is over an hour and poor in sound quality]

Yesterday I saw the first of two talks given by Michael Hardt at the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University. Hardt is an associate Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke Univ., and is the co-author (with Antonio Negri) of has published Empire (Harvard, 2000) and the forthcoming Multitude (Penguin, Sept. 2004). The series is entitles War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. He argues the nature of war has changed in recent years.
1. Whereas previously wars were usually waged between sovereign states, the present state of war is that of a global civil war, within a global empire. Instances of war have their local aspects, but largely wars contain of element of war against empire.
2. Whereas previously was was seen as an exception to be used when politics was exhausted, we are now in a global state of of exception, with the USA - having an exceptional role - in driving the permanent war which replaces regular politics as a means of negotiation.
3. The present war against an abstract enemy is equivalent to police activity, used in time of omnicrisis. It is boundless in spatial range and and time.
4. The arguments used to legimitize violence have changed, and states have a declining ability to legimitize it. He gave the example of Gulf War I (justified by the breech to international law after the invasion of the sovereign state of Kuwait), then the NATO intervention in Kosovo (an intervention against a sovereign state justified on moral grounds, to avoid ethnic cleansing), and finally the present Gulf War II. Contrary to the prior two examples, where a priori reasoning was used, preventive war uses a posteriori arguments, 'violence' is justified retrospectively if it can bring order. This is a more tenuous form of legitimation. [Illustrated particularly well with Iraq, where it is still to be demonstrated whether security has been increased.]
5. War has become the foundation of politics (e.g., nation building). It has been reduced to police action (albeit at a global scale), while retaining its ability of waging mass destruction and individualized torture. He refers to this as Biopower.
6. Democracy is threatened by this change to a permanent state of exception, of suspension of the rule of law by a state of emergency - a practice accepted previously when state of emergency was understood to be brief. But the change in the character of was is cause and consquence of a failure of democracy and loss of the concept of democracy. The crisis in democracy allows the state of permanent war to continue. He gave as examples of this crisis the 2000 presidential election (I have to find time to summarize the excellend documentary Unprecedented) and the Norwegian Study of Power and Democracy that describes a decay in democracy even in Norway. What's new, that adds to a older trend of breakdown in democracy, are the effects of globalization on democratic representaion and functioning. Quite possibly the mechanisms of democracy that were developed for states are not appropriate at the global scale. At a time when state democracies are in crisis, we find ourselves needing and lacking a concept of global democracy. Most of the discussion about global democracy centers on the reform of global institutions, e.g., WTO and IMF, revolves around the issues of transparency, accountability and governance. But this illustrates how we don't know what global democracy means, or what democracy in itself means. Transparency is great, but it is not a sufficient condition for democracy. In fact, tyrannies may be transparent. And the question of accountability, raises the question of accountability to whom. Reform proponents, such as Stiglitz, answer: accountability to expert economists. They're really talking about efficiency and stability.
How would one organize a form of representation on a global scale? How would one vote for a global president, or WTO? An optimistic note: there were also strong doubts that democracy could be expanded from the scale of a city-state to a nation-state. Its not an insoluble problem.

Listen to the talk [note - the recording is not great and last over an hour]

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was killed on Monday, March 22. While he was being wheeled out of an early morning prayer session, he was struck by missiles fired from Israeli helicopter gunships and died instantly, along with seven others. More than a dozen people were injured in the attack, including two of his sons. The Israel Defense Forces issued a terse statement:

"This morning, in a security forces operation in the northern Gaza Strip, the IDF targeted a car carrying the head of the Hamas terror organization, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and his aides," the IDF statement said. "Yassin, responsible for numerous murderous terror attacks, resulting in the deaths of many civilians, both Israeli and foreign, was killed in the attack." Hamas official Ismail Haniyeh commented: "This is the moment Sheikh Yassin dreamed about". The Hamas leadership said Ariel Sharon had "opened the gates of hell."

The international community, including the EU and UN secretary general Kofi Annan, firmly condemned the assassination of Yassin. The United States Administration has sent confusing statements. Condoleezza Rice, seemed close to endorsing the killing, saying "Hamas was a terrorist organisation and Sheikh Yassin was heavily involved in terrorism." State department spokesman, Richard Boucher, struck a very different note, saying he "the US government was deeply troubled by the attack."

I guess the question is whether this was an act undertaken under the framework of war. Only during war does one accept such targeted assasinations, such frontal murder. Only during war, when the objective is to bring the enemy to its knees and surrender, is it conventional to trespass over enemy territory and launch a broad attack. Obviously, Sharon assumes Israel is at war, which raises the question of what his war objectives are. Does he honestly think he is simply engaging a war on Hamas and other terrorist organizations, which happen to be intertwined with a oppressed population? Is it a broad war against Palestinians - this is most assuredly how they percieve it, along with most of the Muslim world. Does he hope the assasination will help decrease terrorism? He is falling under the same misleading conception - to which the Bush administration falls victim - that terrorism can be fought with brutal violence. It may sound like a trite cliché, that violence breeds more violence, but rings true.

Perhaps this isn't an idication that Israel is at war. Assuming, this was "simply" a targeted assasination, I am compelled to still react against it. I am against the death penalty, and think more would have been acheived by arresting and trying Yassin. Others would not have to have died during his assasination. And most importantly, it would have projected a message of justice, not revenge, that would contribute to an eventual peace process. The targeted assasination merely lead to acts of counte-revenge.

BBC obituary
Wikipedia biography

Yesterday, the one year anniversary of operation "Shock and Awe" in Iraq, March 20th was a great day of marching for peace all world round. According, to United for Peace and Justice, one of the major organizers in the US, there were over 300 Events in the U.S., and more than 270 other cities in more than 60 countries. Upwards of 2 million people worldwide on the streets marching for peace. I went with people from Stony Brook and other Long Island towns on a´LIRR 'Peace Train' into NYC. The day before I indulged myself, and got a 128Mb memory card for my camera, and took loads of photos. While the Long Island contingent was congregating, I was interviewed by a Newsday journalist, Tomoeh Murakami Tse.
And parts of the interview made it into her report. She did refer to me as a student of 'ecology and revolution [sic]', which is not untrue, but it is not really the name of my graduate program. I marched with a Bush puppet on my back, dressed as the Grim Reaper, with a clown's nose - which we got as we left Penn Station from someone advertising the circus in Madison Square Garden. The march went peacefully, no scuffles with police. I marched with EE friends, but then they got tired, and I continued by myself. I managed to walk all the way back to the rally spot, on 24th and Madison, in time to hear a number of speeches, including Amy Goodman and part of her interview with Aristide on his way to Jamaica. I got close enough to the stage to take some pics of the speakers and tape some speeches. I felt all high tech with the large memory card and the digital recorder.Unfortunatelyy, I didn't record some of the speakers names, so I can't identify them, including one of the speakers that most affected me. She was a poet from Brooklyn, and after she was announced I was expecting her to read a poem of hers. But she was so emotional, she couldn't find the words. She remembered how NYers were loving to one another after Sept. 11th, and how the most important task facing us is defeating Bush, to get his foreign policy out of office, for the benefir of the US and on behalf of all those that cannot vote in the US. The later really struck home. Another speaker was Jewishsh activist, who had gone to the south in 1960 working under Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and spent 20 years there working for civil rights. She invoked heJewishsh ethical tradition that said, "Thou shall not stand idly by". The same principle took her to Israel and Palestine to protest Israel's occupation and control of Palestinian territories, which she compared to the segregation she saw in Southern US.
I walked back to Penn Station, up Broadway, with Bush still on my back, and there was so much street commerce it felt like a bazaar. Its mostly a African-American area, and there was a lot of support, but hardly any other evidence of the march. I made it back to Stony Brook at 8, exhausted. My voice wasn't as tired as usual, but my body ached.
I tried to get some rest, also because the last week had plenty of short nights. Sunday, I spent the afternoon and evening sorting the photos, writing a piece about the march for Portuguesese paper. And then a reply , to an editorial that appeared the the Stony Brook Statesman, titled "Election 2004: No Europeans allowed." This piece was a reaction to John Kerry statemant's about foreign leaders wanting Bush out of office and his refusal to disclose the names. I had seen the article on Friday and knew I had to reply, before even reading the it the whole way through. Just the title was offensive, particuarly because it came after the US reaction to the elections in Spain. In my reply I criticize his reation to Kerry, but also the reactions to the Spanish elections. Newsday was one of the newspapers that had run on its front page the insinuation that the elections were a victory for Al-qaida. But sunday in Newsday there was an article that was pretty good. The article talks mostly about al-Qaida, but also was where I finally read about were the islamic connection in the Spanish train bombings comes from. The Abu Hafs Al-Masri Brigade, claimed responsibility for the Madrid attacks in a letter published in a London newspaper on March 12. This is the same organization that claimed responsibility for the August 2003 blackout in the United States, calling it "Operation Quick Lightning in the Land of the Tyrant of this Generation." For those who attribute the blackout to technical failures, Abu Hafs is not a credible source.

I also spent more time that I thought it would take finding the correct reference to the mandate "Thou shall not stand idly by". It is in Leviticus 19:16. It turns out the this is the translation in the Jewish tradition, "Lo ta'amod al dam rey'echa : You shall not stand idly by while your neighbor bleeds" where it clearly means it is unethical not to act while there is human suffering. But while looking for the Portuguesese translation, I discovered that the Christian version of the verse is very different. In the King James Bible, the same passage says, "neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy neighbor". This is a different principle, not condemning inaction, but harmful action. The same divide between Jewish and Christian translations happens in Portuguese. From a Jewish Brazilian website I found the translation "Lo taamod al dam reecha; Não fique impassível ao ver o sangue do seu irmão derramado". Wheras Christians versions had "não conspirarás contra o sangue do teu próximo", "não atentarás contra a vida do teu próximo". Does this divide reflect a ethical divide as well?

Sunday morning I finished watching a PBS documentary on DVD about Islam. It traces the origins of the Crusades to the burning of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, by order of the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim, in 1009. According to the academics in the documentary, al-Hakim was legitimately mad. But this fed the hatred for the far more advanced muslims, on the part of the 'dark-ages' Christians in Europe. Although the church was rebuilt in glory by 1048, and Christians continued to practice in Jerusalem in peace, Pope Urban II traveled all throughout Europe and brought religion and military goals together. On July 15th 1099, the crusaders entered Jerusalem. They massacred its population, killing both muslims and christians, as they could not distinguish among them. In 1187, Saladin (Salah-al-Din ibn Ayyub), reconquered Jerusalem. He did not retaliate against Christians. Members of all faiths once again worshipped in Jerusalem.

How is it possible that in Spain they arrested, within a week of the terrible Wednesday March 11th train bombings, killing more than 200 commuters, a number of suspects tied to the terrorist act, yet in the US so far only one person, the french citizen Zacarias Moussaoui, has been brought to trial in connection with 9/11? The Spanish have even arrested one of the most significant players in the September 11 plot, al-Qaeda's point man in Spain, Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, aka Abu Dahdah. This despite the hundreds of blanket arrests in the US right after 9/11. Despite the 'suspects' taken from Afganhistan and brought to Camp X-Ray in Guantanomo Bay, Cuba. Despite the 'suspects' arrested in Iraque. Not that these 'suspects' are known to have anything to do with the actual 9/11 attacks.

In Mid February, 5 British citizens were released from X-Ray and returned to Britain: Shafiq Rasul, 24; Asif Iqbal, 20; and Rhuhel Ahmed, 21 -- all from the English Midlands town of Tipton and dubbed by British tabloids "the Tipton Taliban" -- as well as Tarek Dergoul, 24, of London. The fiftth man, Jamal Udeen, was backpacking through Afghanistan, where he was jailed by the Taliban as a suspected spy. Finally, he was rescued by American troops, only to be promptly packed off to a cage in Guantanamo Bay. All five were released Tuesday, March 9th. Lord Justice Johan Steyn, a senior British judge, recently called the Guantanamo detentions "a monstrous failure of justice." Four other Britons remain incarcerated in Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay. Speaking for the first time since his release this week, Jamal Udeen, 37, from Manchester, outlined a brutal regime of oppression including being chained to the floor during 12-hour interrogations and having an unknown drug administered by injection. In a separate statement, Tarek Dergoul, 26, from east London, said he had been interrogated at gunpoint, beaten and subjected to "botched medical treatment" thought to involve amputation.

The US is also failing to aid trial trials of 9/11 suspects in other countries. In Germany, Mounir el-Motassadeq, was sentenced to 15 years in prison in February 2003 after being found guilty of 3,066 counts of accessory to murder and of playing a logistical role for the members of the Al Qaeda cell in Hamburg that produced three of the Sept. 11 pilots. Lawyers for Motassadeq asked the court to overturn the verdict, arguing that he was denied a fair trial because the United States had refused to allow testimony by Ramzi bin al-Shibh. Germany's highest court on Thursday overturned the verdict against the only person convicted of involvement in the Sept. 11 terror attacks. also citing a refusal by the United States to allow testimony from bin al-Shibh, the Hamburg court acquitted Abdelghani Mzoudi, the second suspect to be tried on charges of involvement in the attacks, of accessory to murder and membership in Al Qaeda. The court made clear that it had acquitted Mzoudi not because it was convinced of his innocence, but because the evidence was not enough to convict him (NYT March 5). Ramzi bin al-Shibh,Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni who was allegedly a key planner of the Sept. 11 attacks was arrested in September, 2002 in the Pakistani city of Karachi and is in American custody.

And then some people have the nerve to equate the change of power in the Spainish March 15th elections as a victory of al-qaeda, that the Spanish are wimps in fighting terrorism. This reveals tremendous ignorance and roguishness. The Spanish have a much longer and horrible history of domestic terrorism. They have also learned, by experience, that you can't deal with terrorism militarily. Even marginal military victories against terrorism, such as the French in Algeria, come at a huge domestic cost for a democracy, as it requires a state to go beyond the boundaries of a true democracy. I even find it offensive to say that Aznar and the PP lost because of a reaction to the train attacks. It implies that Spanish voters are so superificial they vote as a function of things that happen in the week before the election, whereas discontent with Aznar's domestic policy and the deep divide between his policy of support for the US/War in Iraq and the majority opinion against the war, that these factors accumulated over 4 years of Aznar's governance had little impact upon voter decision. Al-Qaeda may like to state that is a victory for them, but why should the pundits keep repeating their message

Roland Flamini, of UPI, reports on March 16, that the margin between the government and the opposition Socialist Labor Party, or PSOE, had been steadily narrowing since the beginning of 2004. A NOXA poll published in the newspaper Vanguardia on March 7, [before the train attacks] showed that the PSOE had closed the gap with Aznar's PP to 2.5 percent. Then on Monday the 9th, a different poll published in another leading paper, El Pais, showed the PP winning, but losing their absolute majority. The poll showed the PP dropping 11 seats in the Spanish Parliament and the PSOE picking up 16 seats. At the start of election week, it was anybody's race. If anything I like to think of this as a defeat for George W. Bush, for in part the Spanish vote reflected their opposition to Aznar following W's foreign policies and their conviction that they're wrong. That opinion has been strongly for more than a year (today's the anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq). The attacks may have brought this more to the surface, but to say they drove the elections is to undermine the intelligence of spanish voters. To spin the Spanish elections as a victory for Al-qaeda is to devalue democratic transitions, and more seriously to subscribe to the view that Bush's anti-terrorism strategy is the correct one. There are more effective, more civilized, more consensual, more constructive, and less violent means of combating terrorism.

Sitting at home writing my post-doc application and my last thesis chapter. I'm taking a break from writing now .... by writing this. Outside it is snowing

Yesterday's department colloquim was by Paul Turner. It was quite interesting and he was a very good speaker. He talked about sex and complementation in viruses.. Apparently some viruses, including influenza, have multiple DNA fragments. If there is coinfection of a host, viral offspring can contain a reassortment of the fragments of parental viruses. This is for of sex in addition to recombination with host DNA. Complementation also requires coinfection, and occurs when a virus that is less fit when infecting by itself, gains a fitness benefit when coinfecting with a more fit virus - which incurs a cost in Turner's system, the bacterio+hage phi-6, because there is an upper limit to # of viruses produced in a host. He used this system experimentally to see how the forces of sex - that purge mutations - and complementation - which allow mutations to persist in a population longer - compare. This would address the question of whether sex in viruses allows them to avoid mutation load. His experiments showed that complementation was a stronger force, for populations udnergoing complementation lost mutations at a slower rate than controls. Complementation is a curious phenomena whose mechanism is not well understood. He ventured to ideas: that the less fit virus benefits either from a more efficient RNA polymerase or from an excess of protein shells produced by the fitter virus. I asked whether there were the equivalent of 'species barriers' to complementation, to which Turner replied there is a recently discovered bacteriophage phi-8 that may allow one to look into that.

In the evening, I did a performance of the Festival of One-Act Plays at Theatre Three. Jonathan Hickman and Lee Brown, my friends and housemates came. It went well - I love playing Chaplin, the scottie. Unfortunetly, Danny Amy didn't arrive in time for his act. He is directing 'Grease' at Rosylyn HS, and was there that night. We were convinced he would make it. But when it came time for the last act, 'Napkin', he wasn't there. Matt Paduano decided correctly to not go ahead with it, and made a (very) brief message that the performance was over. The actors were all standing backstage not knowing whether to come out and take a final bow. It was so bizarre I burst out laughing and had to run further into the theatre so as to not be heard.

What is going on in Haiti?

In March 2003, I had read an article in the New York Review of Books on Haiti by Peter Dailey reviewing Robert Fatton Jr.'s book Haiti's Predatory Republic: The Unending Transition to Democracy. The review describes the murder of journalists and other human rights abuses, massive unemployment (80%), and the split of the Fanmi Lavalas ("Lavalas Family"), Aristide's ruling party, as a result of personal struggles for wealth and power. It painted the fall of the popular Aristide the Priest to the corrupt leader. So when I started reading reports of an uprising against Aristide in Haiti I was not surprised. I was quite surprised however when western governments started to side with the rebellion's demand to exile Aristide. Afterall, he had been elected democratically. The US had ostensiblly intervened, under Clinton, to re-enstate Aristide. As usual the situation is more complex that meets a superficial reading.

Kim Ives, editor of the Haitian newspaper, Haiti Progres, talked with Aristide while he was in Central African Republic and reported to the radio program Democracy Now! (check it for Haiti updates: Amy Goodman just flew with Aristide to Jamaica). According to Ives, the "rebels" are most assuredly U.S. financed, headed by:
Guy Philippe - former U.S. Special Forces-trained Police Chief – trained in Ecuador under their guidance
U.S.-trained police chief. He had been a soldier, was taken to Ecuador during the coup where he was trained by U.S. Special Forces, and brought back with a group of 11 others ('the Ecuadorians'). They attempted a coup under the Preval administration. He's also been accused of drug dealing in Panama and Ecuador.
Jodal Chamblain - number two of the FRAPH death squad created at the suggestion of the C.I.A., funded by the C.I.A., responsible in large measure for the -- for a majority of the 5,000 killed and disappeared in Haiti during the 1991 to 1994 coup d'etat.
John Tatoune came up from the underclass of Gonaives and was also a FRAPH head involved in the 1994 Raboteau massacre
Ives recounts how the US and France drafted a resignation letter for him, how the US ambassador, James Foley, tricked Aristide into depart from Haiti. Other interesting facts mentioned by Ives include how Aristide was working on claiming USD$21.7 billion from France for reparations for colonialism and slavery.
The new prime minister LaTortue, brought from Florida, among the first things he is said to have to restore: the Haitian military. He is the former Foreign Minister of Leslie Manica of a neo-devaluerist sector - the president who was installed by the military in 1998 after the election massacre of 1987.

And who in the Bush administration might be behind this support to Aristide ousting: Roger Noriega, assistant U.S. secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs. (Excerpts from Newsday staff writer, Ron Howell March 1, 2004:
"Roger Noriega has been dedicated to ousting Aristide for many, many years, and now he's in a singularly powerful position to accomplish it," Robert White, a former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador and Paraguay, said last week.

White, now president of the Center for International Policy, a think tank in Washington, said Noriega's ascent largely has been attributed to his ties to North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms, an arch-conservative foe of Aristide who had behind-the-scenes influence over policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean before retiring from the Senate two years ago. Noriega's involvement with Haiti dates back more than a decade. In the early 1990s he was an adviser at the U.S. mission to the Organization of American States. Between 1994 and 1997, he served as a senior staff member on the House of Representatives' Committee on International Relations. Then, in 1997, he went to work for the Senate's Committee on Foreign Relations as a top aide to Helms.

Helms was passionate in his dislike of Aristide and tried mightily to stop President Bill Clinton from sending troops to restore Aristide to power in 1994 after his violent ouster three years previously. In an attempt to forestall that military action, Helms released a now-discredited CIA report purporting to show Aristide was "psychotic."Helms found a like-minded official in Noriega, who fed the senator's hostility toward Aristide, said Robert Maguire of Trinity College in Washington.)

This is the one year anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie, the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) activist who was murdered in the Gaza Strip by an Israeli bulldozer. On this day, I remember her heroism and the cruelty of the Israeli occupation she witnessed, fought against, and lost her life to. Check out her memorial website with a letter from parents "to all who have paused today to remember our daughter Rachel Corrie and to call for an end to the occupation".

UNRWA reported before October 2003 that Israel had demolished 655 houses in Gaza since September 2000, rendering 5,124 homeless, along with large tracts of agricultural land. Using figures from B'tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, Israel demolished 223 houses in 2003 and 30 so far in 2004, to March 7, and that these demolitions are conducted as punishment, "against families of persons wanted by the security forces or who have been killed." Btselem reports that Israeli security forces and armed settlers have killed 540 Palestinians since March 2003, 4 of whom were killed inside Israel's borders, 109 of whom were children under 18. At the same time, 132 Israeli civilians, including 20 children, were killed by Palestinians.

When I first saw the pictures of the bulldozer bringing her down, I was struck by the sheer inutility of the murder - I mean, although I profoundly disagree when Israeli troops shooting at Palestinian kids throwing rocks, I can at least see some, albeit violent, logic behind it. But to ram a person down that is in pure non-violent protest, in the absence of any "angry, menacing protesters" is bewildering. The other was the open fields that lay behind the bulldozer. Its not as if there was a lack of space requiring the Isrealis to make room. It was a profoundly futile murder. It qualifies as evil.

The Bush administration is tactful as always (NOT!). Libya agrees to desmantle its nuclear program, and what does the US do: flaunt it in front of journalists and the world. The US Energy Secretary, Spencer Abraham, led journalistspast wooden crates containing 22,680 kilograms of machine parts used for enriching uranium, at Oak Ridge, Tennesse. [The Oak Ridge complex is where the US developed enriched uranium and the original atomic bombs in World War II. What is the US going to do with all this Libyan material?] According to Abraham this is the "tip of the iceberg" of a vastly larger quantity of sensitive technology sold to Libya by a trading network headed by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. Libya paid $US100 million ($135 million) for the nuclear components and bomb designs over two decades. Khan admitted this year that he sold such equipment to Libya, Iran and North Korea, but Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf immediately pardoned him [isn't that nice]

Libya is upset the United States has portrayed its nuclear disarmament as a victory in US nonproliferation efforts, saying it should be recognized as the fruit of international cooperation. "Libya was quite unhappy with this dog and pony show because it hurts them domestically (and) in the Arab world," said the Vienna-based official close to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which is headquartered in the Austrian capital. "It looks like unilateral US disarmament of Libya, and Libya wants it recognized as disarmament under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and IAEA auspices," the official, who asked not to be named, told reporters in Washington. The head of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, said his agency also deserved credit for disarming Libya, a process which is being performed under UN supervision.