The euro closed at 1.2236 dollars on Friday, down 2.5% from last week’s 1.2542. That puts the dollar at .8173 euros compared to .7973 the week before. In the U.S. stock market, the Dow closed at 10,460.97, down 0.78% from the previous Friday’s close of 10,542.55. The tech-heavy NASDAQ closed at 2071.43, down 0.2% from 2075.73 a week earlier. The yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury bond fell again to 3.98% at Friday’s close compared to 4.07% a week earlier. Oil closed at $55.40 a barrel, up sharply (6.8%) from the previous Friday’s $51.85. Oil in euros increased even more sharply, closing at 45.28 euros a barrel, up 9.5% from the previous week’s close of 41.34 euros. Gold closed at $426.10, up 0.8% compared to $422.70 an ounce the week before. Comparing gold to oil, an ounce of gold would buy 7.69 barrels of oil on Friday, down 6.0% compared to 8.15 the previous Friday.

The big news, then, from the past week was the expected drop in the value of the euro following No votes against the proposed EU constitution in France and the Netherlands and the sharp rise in the price of oil. The United States also released the jobs report for May and, although spun positively, was not good news. Only 78,000 non-farm jobs were added in May, a number half as large as expected, with the gains coming in construction and health care. Construction jobs, of course, are heavily dependent on the increasingly fragile housing bubble. There was also a lot of talk about the “conundrum” mentioned by Alan Greenpsan: rising short-term interest rates coinciding with falling long-term rates. Here’s Mark Gilbert on Bloomberg:

Greenspan's Bond Conundrum Ripens Into an Enigma:

Mark Gilbert

June 3 (Bloomberg) -- The 10-year U.S. Treasury note was a “conundrum” to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in mid- February at a yield of about 4.10 percent. After cracking the 4 percent barrier this week, it looks more like Winston Churchill's Russia: “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”

The median forecast of 62 of the finest minds in finance, surveyed by Bloomberg News in December, was for the 10-year bond to yield 4.78 percent by mid-year. Instead, the note pays about 3.9 percent, the lowest in more than a year. Barring a market crash in the next four weeks, that's quite a margin of error.

Bond mavens are now lining up to call for lower yields. Morgan Stanley Chief Economist Stephen Roach said earlier this week he's turning bullish on bonds, with a 3.5 percent level possible in the coming year. Bill Gross at Pacific Investment Management Co., never shy to predict an increase in value for the securities he owns, said May 18 that the 10-year rate could drop to 3 percent by the end of the decade.

Gabe Borenstein, managing director of global investments at Investec Holdings Ltd. in New York, predicts a 10-year yield of 2.5 percent in the current business cycle, which has 18 months or less to run. Higher energy costs, renewed wariness among indebted consumers, and continued recycling of dollars into Treasuries by overseas investors will help drive down yields, he says.

‘Serious Recession’

“All of the economic forces point to a dramatic slowdown ahead which will turn into a serious recession, with almost no tools left to abort that possibility,” says Borenstein, whose firm manages $100 billion globally.

What they are saying is that things are going to get worse and more frightening, so people with money will invest them in something safe with guaranteed returns and will bid up the prices, thereby decreasing yields (because, for example, if someone purchases a ten-year bond for $1,000 at 5.00%, say, and sells it to someone for $1,200, the person paying $1,200 will still get the same return, that is $50 a year, only, since they paid $200 more, the yield has now dropped to 4.17%). Remember that these long term interest rate drops fuel the housing bubble, since they keep mortgage rates low. Remember also, that these drops come after a year of the Federal Reserve Board trying to increase interest rates, to cool down the increase in consumer debt as the following chart shows:

(Interesting how Fed-controlled rates hit their lowest point at the beginning of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.)

Does this mean that the financial elite, who, after all, are the ones bidding up long term debt instruments, are losing faith in the economic future? It looks that way.

CFOs' Optimism Declines, Study Finds

Corporate financial chiefs express concern over the continuing surge in the cost of healthcare and energy.

From Reuters
June 3, 2005

Optimism among U.S. chief financial officers tumbled to a three-year low this quarter as executives struggled with high fuel and labor costs, rising interest rates and pricing pressures, according to a business outlook survey released Thursday.

In the survey, 40% of company financial chiefs were more optimistic about the economy than they were in the previous quarter, down from 46% last quarter and 70% a year ago, the survey of 365 U.S. chief financial officers by Duke University and CFO Magazine showed.

"In a situation like this, where the optimists barely outweigh the pessimists, we can expect to see sluggish economic growth," said John Graham, professor of finance at Duke's Fuqua School of Business.

The survey, which also polled hundreds of Asian and European corporate finance chiefs, showed Asian CFOs were as cautious as U.S. CFOs, while almost a majority of European financial chiefs were explicitly pessimistic.

American CFOs were most concerned about the cost of healthcare. They expected those costs to rise 9% in the coming year, on average, the survey showed. They also were concerned about high fuel prices, particularly in the face of limited pricing power.

CFOs also were nervous about the effects on the economy if the Federal Reserve continued to raise its key short-term interest rate, now 3%.

"Right now, the CFOs say we're kind of at a tipping point, where further increases in interest rates would start to put a drag on the economy," Graham said.

Of CFOs surveyed, 83.2% said a Fed rate of 4% would slow U.S. economic growth overall, but far fewer — 43% — said it would slow growth at their own firms.

As rising interest rates contribute to higher costs, many CFOs said they would reduce their capital spending plans.

To make matters worse the Bush administration this past week gave the green light for white-collar crime by replacing the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the main regulator of the stock markets and corporate finance in the United States,

Bush picks anti-regulatory hard-liner to head Wall Street oversight board

By Joseph Kay
4 June 2005

On Thursday, President George Bush nominated Christopher Cox, a Republican congressman from southern California, to head the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the main government regulatory agency for Wall Street.

Cox’s selection is a brazen move by the Bush administration to shift the SEC toward an even more openly pro-corporate policy. It portends an end to the probes into corporate fraud that have occurred in the wake of Enron, WorldCom and other business scandals, and the effective reversal by administrative means of the limited regulatory reforms put in place over the past three years.

Cox has made a name for himself as a partisan of unfettered capitalism, à la Ayn Rand. He is an unabashed defender of big business and an adamant opponent of corporate regulation and taxation. In Congress, he has pushed for measures to cut back or eliminate taxes on capital gains and dividends, championed the repeal of the estate tax, and opposed the mandatory expensing of stock options. He sponsored a key piece of legislation in the mid-1990s that limited the ability of investors to file lawsuits over corporate malfeasance.

Cox’s nomination has been universally hailed by business groups as heralding an end to “regulatory excesses” at the SEC under its outgoing chairman, William Donaldson, also a Bush appointee. Donaldson, a Rockefeller Republican, is considered a turncoat in Republican and corporate circles because he has on numerous occasions sided with the two Democratic members of the five-member SEC in implementing new regulations and fining corporations for wrong-doing.

Marc Lackritz, president of the Securities Industry Association, responded to Bush’s announcement by noting that Cox “has a particular sensitivity to costly and unnecessary regulation.” Lackritz continued, “He understands that the increased costs of regulation put an unnecessary tax on investors.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which has long championed Cox, declared on Friday, “We assume the appointment marks the end of the era of post-Enron regulatory overkill.”

Cox entered politics as a staunch anti-communist in the Reagan administration. He served as a legal adviser for Reagan during the Iran-Contra scandal, and later took a position at the elite corporate law firm of Latham & Watkins, serving clients such as Arthur Andersen and Merrill Lynch. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1988, and since that time has promoted the interests of his major campaign contributors: Wall Street, the technology giants of Silicon Valley, and the major accounting firms.

More than anything else, his role in pushing through a 1995 bill known as the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act has won him the backing of Wall Street. The act, which was passed with bi-partisan support over the veto of President Clinton, significantly raised the standard of proof required in investor lawsuits against corporations and executives.

…Cox has been a strong critic of class action lawsuits in general, helping to push the bill passed into law earlier this year that severely limits the ability of ordinary Americans to use this legal mechanism as a way to challenge the actions of big business.

…Cox is expected to reverse a period of mild regulatory actions taken by the SEC under the leadership of Donaldson, who stepped down on June 1. Wall Street has opposed a measure that had been supported by Donaldson and the two Democrats on the commission—Goldshmid and Roel Campos—that would have given shareholders more power over corporate boards of directors.

Hedge funds—the elite investment companies that cater only to wealthy investors—are strongly opposed to a measure proposed by Donaldson that would have required the funds to register their advisors. This was part of an effort to increase the transparency of hedge funds, which are notoriously opaque to investors and regulators.

While Donaldson cited family reasons for his decision to leave the SEC, the fact that his departure was so quickly followed by the Cox nomination is a clear indication that he was pushed out by the Bush administration. In recent months, actions he has proposed have been publicly criticized by Bush administration officials, including Treasury Secretary John Snow and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

…After the wave of accounting scandals that began three-and-a-half years ago with the collapse of Enron, the Bush administration made a show of implementing measures to curb corporate criminality. These measures included the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which requires corporate executives to personally certify the accounting books of their corporations. The administration has also prosecuted a handful of corporations and executives for their role in scandals at Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and elsewhere.

The appointment of Cox is an unmistakable signal that even these limited measures will be rolled back. His appointment comes the same week as a Supreme Court decision overturning the obstruction of justice conviction of accounting firm Arthur Andersen for its role in accounting fraud at Enron. The ruling will likely make it harder to charge companies with obstruction of justice, frequently used against white-collar criminals.

There is a degree of extraordinary recklessness in the Bush administration’s policy, which will eliminate even the minimal forms of accountability that had been put in place. The Democrats and sections of the Republican Party—including Donaldson—have pushed these measures as a means of restoring investor confidence in American corporations, a confidence that was severely undermined by the corporate scandals of 2001 and 2002.

That these measures could be characterized as “regulatory overkill” is an indication of the determination of the administration and its backers to eliminate all constraints on the most wealthy and corrupt sections of the American ruling elite.

Are they opening the gates for one last orgy of theft before the whole system comes crashing down?

CRAWFORD, Texas - President Bush said on Saturday that the U.S. economic expansion was solid, with thriving small-business and factory sectors, despite a report showing weak payroll growth.

"America's economy is on the right track," Bush said in his weekly radio address. "Small businesses are flourishing. Factory output is growing. And families are taking home more of what they earn."

Bush did not mention Friday's report from the Labor Department showing U.S. employers added only 78,000 workers to their payrolls in May, the weakest job growth in nearly two years.

The figure fanned fears on Wall Street of a slowing economy. Stock prices slid nearly 1 percent.

The news was not entirely bearish as the Labor Department also said the unemployment rate edged down to 5.1 percent, its lowest since September 2001, from April's 5.2 percent as a survey of households found job growth much more robust.

Bush urged lawmakers to pass some of his priorities, including a broad energy bill and the U.S.-Central American Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA.

A Benedictine Sister of Erie, Sister Joan is a best-selling author and well-known international lecturer. She is founder and executive director of Benetvision: A Resource and Research Center for Contemporary Spirituality, and past president of the Conference of American Benedictine Prioresses and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. Sister Joan has been recognized by universities and national organizations for her work for justice, peace and equality for women in the Church and society. She is an active member of the International Peace Council.

Am I the only one who's shocked by this? And if not, why aren't we hearing an outcry about it.

It may seem a little naive, I realize, to claim to be "shocked" at the obvious. After all, I've gone to graduate school. I've taught at all levels of the educational system. I've been around the world a couple times. I am, in other words, a living example of what is now a rather sizable segment of the current population. I'm not an isolate, not ghettoized, by any means. By this time, given that kind of background, that kind of experience, I should be a little jaded, a touch cynical. A "realist," I think they call it.

But I am also part of the generation who were taught to fear Communists, who were trained to hide under school desks or sit on the floor in darkened basement corridors to protect ourselves from nuclear attack, who were told lurid tales about Russian gulags. And who, most of all, in my case, learned that when the godless Communists came, they would take down the crucifixes on our schoolroom walls and destroy our religion with them.

We prayed public prayers for "the conversion of Russia" after every Mass, in fact.

These people, these barbarians, these Communists, wanted to impose a way of life on us that went to the core of the American dream and ate out the heart of the Catholic faith. They believed in the common ownership of goods rather than good old Yankee capitalism with its ethic of "rugged individualism" -- the notion that if you worked hard enough you could get anything you wanted. They considered religion "the opium of the people," the way you got a people to offer up hard times in this world as the will of God for you and so be content to wait for good times in the next.

It was a time of tension, of great enemies, of implacable resistance.

Laugh now, if you will. But those were very real and present horrors then. Especially the part about the suppression of religion.

We were prepared to do anything to avert such a fate, to destroy such an enemy. We built bombs big enough to destroy the globe. We sent thousands of young Americans into the jungles of Vietnam to block the advance of the Red Tide and brought thousands of them home in pine boxes. We had defeated the Germans. We would defeat the Russians, too. Whatever the cost.

We were a Messianic people. We did no wrong, and we destroyed the Darth Vaders who did. We were international heroes. If you were a citizen of the United States somewhere else in the world, you were, indeed, received with flowers and cheers. Drum roll, please.

Then we won the Cold War, became the world's only Super Power, set out to make the rest of the world just like us, and began immediately to lose -- our international image and our integrity. Our president told us that it was all because people were jealous of us. "Some people hate freedom," he said. And, apparently, some people believed it.

Then, in May, Amnesty International, the world's most reputable human rights organization, released its annual report on the state of human rights around the world. That's where the shock came in.

Amnesty International, founded by British lawyer Peter Benenson in 1961, functions as a kind of watchdog organization of volunteers whose purpose is to monitor and evaluate the practice of Human Rights around the globe as defined by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Human rights are in retreat worldwide, this year's report states, and -- most disturbing of all -- the United States bears most of the responsibility for it. Citing routine abuse of detainees, detention without trial, fishnet roundups of men labeled "enemy combatants" without cause, and U.S. attempts to circumvent both domestic and international bans against terror, the report is a scathing indictment of U.S. dishonor and international lawlessness.

What's more, the report says, U.S. actions, imposed by the military but sanctioned by the government, justify repression, dictatorship and abuse by oppressive regimes everywhere. Irene Khan, secretary general of Amnesty International explained, "When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a license to others to commit abuse with impunity."

The U.S. war on terror, Amnesty International argues, has been used as an excuse for "murder, mayhem and abuse of women and children" from one end of the globe to the other.

The U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, the report goes on, "has become the gulag of our times."

President Bush, of course, dismissed the report as "absurd." Vice President Cheney said he was offended. Now what are we to make of that? Irene Khan is quick to answer. If our allegations are false, she said, open up the detention centers and let us look. "Transparency is the best antidote to misinformation," she said. Not a likely event.

So now people are marching in the streets from Indonesia to the Middle East, in every Islamic country on earth, not because they fear the Soviet Union or Russia. They are marching because they fear the United States.

They are as sure that we are coming to destroy them as we once were that the Communists were coming to do the same to us.

They fear the loss of a culture, a lifestyle, a value system. They fear the destruction of their religion, the loss of their way of life, the violation of their women, and the enslavement of their children to decadence and destruction.

They fear exactly what we feared. And, like us back then, they are willing to do anything --anything at all -- to preserve it.

Surely we can understand that. Why are we so surprised? We did the very same things 50 years ago, only worse. We armed the globe. We threatened the existence of the planet. We sent thousands of our best into the rice paddies of Vietnam, young and wrapped around with explosives, who never returned.

From where I stand, the shock of becoming what we say we hate is at least as bad as fearing it. Amnesty International says it all: We are the new gulag. You and I.

Why aren't we all shocked? Why -- instead of simply insisting that it is unpatriotic to say the obvious -- why aren't we all saying stop?

WASHINGTON - The US government is operating an "archipelago" of prisons around the world, many of them secret camps into which people are being "literally disappeared," a top Amnesty International official said. [...]

Amnesty refers in the May 25 report to Rumsfeld and US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as alleged "torture architects." [...]

The furor sparked by Amnesty's claims shows no signs of abating.

The New York Times said Sunday that the Guantanamo Bay prison should be closed down, saying it had become "a national shame" and a "propaganda gift to America's enemies."

"What makes Amnesty's gulag metaphor apt is that Guantanamo is merely one of a chain of shadowy detention camps that also includes Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the military prison at Bagram Air Base in
Afghanistan and other, secret locations run by the intelligence agencies," the Times said.

The Washington Post, whose editorial page has been more critical of Amnesty's gulag claim, reported Sunday -- citing Schulz -- that Amnesty's donations have quintupled and new memberships have doubled in the past week since it released its report.

BEIJING, June 6 -- The chief of Amnesty International USA alleged Sunday that the Guantanamo Bay detention camp is part of an "archipelago" of U.S. prisons worldwide, "many of them secret," where detainees are mistreated and even killed.

A weeks-long dispute has raged since England-based Amnesty International's report, released on May 25, cited "growing evidence of U.S. war crimes" and labeled the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay as "the gulag of our times."

"The U.S. is maintaining an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons, into which people are being literally disappeared, held in indefinite, incommunicado detention without access to lawyers or a judicial system or to their families," William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty's Washington-based branch, told "Fox News Sunday."

"And in some cases, at least, we know they are being mistreated, abused, tortured and even killed."

Schulz recently dubbed U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld an "apparent high-level architect of torture" in asserting he approved interrogation methods that violated international law.

"It would be fascinating to find out. I have no idea," Schulz said.

"The United States should be the one that should investigate those who are alleged at least to be architects of torture, not just the foot solders who may have inflicted the torture directly, but those who authorized it or encouraged it or provided rationales for it," he said.

Human Rights Watch said U.S. interrogators had inflicted religious humiliation on Muslim detainees, a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

The U.S. military on Friday released details about five cases in which the Koran was kicked, stepped on and soaked in water.

A Newsweek story in its issue dated May 9 reported that American military investigators had found evidence that interrogators at the Guantanamo prison facility had flushed a Koran down a toilet to get inmates there to talk.

The article, which was retracted by the magazine one week later, sparked violent protests in Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, Pakistan and other Muslim countries.

About 520 prisoners, most of whom were captured during the US-led war in Afghanistan, are still being held at Guantanamo Bay, and some of them have been detained there for more than three years without charges and access to lawyers.

The Pentagon released this news late Friday in order to defeat the US news cycle, which closes down for the American weekend. I deliberately kept it for Monday morning.

The Pentagon now admits that it found evidence in its files of the Quran being "mishandled" at Guantanamo. (Muslims would say "defiled.") All this after poor Newsweek was pilloried by the Bush administration. Moreover, I cannot for the life of me understand why the Pentagon thinks all the interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo were carefully recorded for posterity.

A US judge has ordered the Bush administration to release more than 100 new photographs and videos of abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib, creating a fresh public relations nightmare for government officials as they seek to rebut accusations that the US is sponsoring torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond.

The ruling comes as Tony Blair prepares to fly to Washington for meetings this week with George Bush. Although the Prime Minister's trip is part of a series of visits to fellow G8 leaders before next month's summit at Gleneagles in Scotland, Downing Street has said that the two men will also discuss Iraq, where violence has recently surged. [...]

But fresh evidence of abuse at Abu Ghraib is likely to complicate Iraq's already precarious security situation. Judge Alvin Hellerstein of the New York federal court granted a petition by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to release the materials after viewing eight sample photos last week. It is not known exactly what the 144 photographs and videos depict, but they are from the same sources as the graphic images of prisoners being piled up on top of each other, threatened by attack dogs and forced into sexually compromising positions that triggered scandal and outrage just over a year ago.

"These images may be ugly and shocking, but they depict how the torture was more than the actions of a few rogue soldiers," said ACLU director Anthony Romero. "The American public deserves to know what is being done in our name. Perhaps after these and other photos are forced into the light of day, the government will at long last appoint an outside special counsel to investigate the torture and abuse of detainees."

Comment: Does a murderer or rapist get to appoint an "outside special counsel" to investigate his crimes? Why don't the people simply demand accountability from their government and prosecute those responsible for war crimes??

Government lawyers argued that releasing the photographs would reveal the prisoners' identities, a violation of their rights under the Geneva Conventions. But the ACLU said that objection could be easily overcome by blocking out the prisoners' faces. The judge agreed, and gave the White House until the end of the month to hand over the material.

More pointedly, the ACLU also said the government's reasoning was absurd because the violation of the Geneva Conventions began with the abuse, not with attempts to uncover it.

Comment: Let's see if we have this straight: The ACLU alleges that US detainees were systematically tortured in a clear violation of the Geneva conventions. All the while, the US government claimed that either the conventions were being followed, or they did not apply. Now the Neocons want to use those same international laws to defend themselves, and the ACLU and the judge involved in the case simply agree?! It is painfully obvious that this case will do nothing to stop the illegal detainment and torture of those deemed "terrorists".

But a Pentagon spokesman indicated yesterday that the administration would not give up the materials without a further fight.

Comment: Why not? The only conclusion that can be drawn is that the Pentagon has something to hide. After all, if the prisoners' faces are blocked out in the images, no one will know who the prisoners actually are; we will simply be able to see how they were mistreated. Therefore, any arguments involving "protecting national security" or "intelligence" are clearly just an attempt to prevent the truth of the widespread use of torture from getting out.

President Bush has come under increasing scrutiny over his repeated claims to be interested in spreading freedom around the world, most recently in the damning Amnesty International report on conditions at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.

The White House has, in turn, responded aggressively to its critics, savaging Amnesty for its use of the word "gulag" to describe Guantanamo and impugning the journalistic ethics of Newsweek magazine over the "Koran-in-the-toilet" story, which was largely, if not wholly, untrue.

Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., knew the United States was a terrorist target before the Sept. 11 attacks because of a secret source - "Ali" - but the CIA refused to listen, the congressman writes in a new book.

In "Countdown to Terror: The Top-Secret Information That Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America . . . and How the CIA Has Ignored It," Weldon details intelligence secrets "Ali" has provided and warns that Iran, not al Qaeda, is the United States' biggest enemy, according to the book's description on Amazon.com. The 256-page book, published by Regnery Publishing, will be released June 13.

In the book, Weldon exposes warnings from his source that Iran will attack America next; that Iran, not al Qaeda, is actually the nexus of Islamic terrorism; and that Iran has an advanced nuclear program.

Weldon is vice chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee's Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces. He has been outspoken about the federal government's lack of attention to terrorism before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Countdown" is his first book. A company in his Pennsylvania district, DIANE Publishing Co., has repackaged some of Weldon's congressional testimony for sale, for which his staff said he did not receive any remuneration.

Religious devotion sets the United States apart from some of its closest allies. Americans profess unquestioning belief in God and are far more willing to mix faith and politics than people in other countries, AP-Ipsos polling found.

In Western Europe, where Pope Benedict XVI complains that growing secularism has left churches unfilled on Sundays, people are the least devout among the 10 countries surveyed for The Associated Press by Ipsos.

Only Mexicans come close to Americans in embracing faith, the poll found. But unlike Americans, Mexicans strongly object to clergy lobbying lawmakers, in line with the nation's historical opposition to church influence.

"In the United States, you have an abundance of religions trying to motivate Americans to greater involvement," said Roger Finke, a sociologist at Penn State University. "It's one thing that makes a tremendous difference here."

The polling was conducted in May in the United States, Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico,
South Korea and Spain.

Nearly all U.S. respondents said faith is important to them and only 2 percent said they do not believe in God. Almost 40 percent said religious leaders should try to sway policymakers, notably higher than in other countries.

"Our nation was founded on Judeo-Christian policies and religious leaders have an obligation to speak out on public policy, otherwise they're wimps," said David Black, a retiree from Osborne, Pa., who agreed to be interviewed after he was polled.

In contrast, 85 percent of French object to clergy activism - the strongest opposition of any nation surveyed. France has strict curbs on public religious expression and, according to the poll, 19 percent are atheists. South Korea is the only other nation with that high a percentage of nonbelievers.

Australians are generally split over the importance of faith, while two-thirds of South Koreans and Canadians said religion is central to their lives. People in all three countries strongly oppose mixing religion and politics.

Researchers disagree over why people in the United States have such a different religious outlook, said Brent Nelsen, an expert in politics and religion at Furman University in South Carolina.

Some say rejecting religion is a natural response to modernization and consider the United States a strange exception to the trend. Others say Europe is the anomaly; people in modernized countries inevitably return to religion because they yearn for tradition, according to the theory.

Some analysts, like Finke, use a business model. According to his theory, a long history of religious freedom in the United States created a greater supply of worship options than in other countries, and that proliferation inspired wider observance. Some European countries still subsidize churches, in effect regulating or limiting religious options, Finke said.

History also could be a factor.

Many countries other than the United States have been through bloody religious conflict that contributes to their suspicion of giving clergy any say in policy.

Comment: The US would do well to learn from the lessons of these other countries...

A variety of factors contribute to the sentiment about separating religion and politics.

"In Germany, they have a Christian Democratic Party, and they talk about Christian values, but they don't talk about them in quite the same way that we do," Nelsen said. "For them, the Christian part of the Christian values are held privately and it's not that acceptable to bring those out into the open."

In Spain, where the government subsidizes the Catholic Church, and in Germany, which is split between Catholics and Protestants, people are about evenly divided over whether they consider faith important. The results are almost identical in Britain, whose state church, the Church of England, is struggling to fill pews.

Italians are the only European exception in the poll. Eighty percent said religion is significant to them and just over half said they unquestioningly believe in God.

But even in Italy, home to the Catholic Church, resistance to religious engagement in politics is evident. Only three in 10 think the clergy should try to influence government decisions; a lower percentage in Spain, Germany and England said the same.

Within the United States, some of the most pressing policy issues involve complex moral questions - such as gay marriage, abortion and stem cell research - that understandably draw religious leaders into public debate, said John Green, an expert on religion and politics at the University of Akron.

The poll found Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to think clergy should try to influence government decisions - a sign of the challenges ahead for Democrats as they attempt to reach out to more religious voters.

"Rightly or wrongly, Republicans tend to perceive religion as, quote-unquote, 'on their side,'" Green said.

The survey did find trends in belief that transcend national boundaries. Women tend to be more devout than men, and older people have stronger faith than younger people.

The Associated Press-Ipsos polls of about 1,000 adults in each of the 10 countries were taken May 12-26. Each has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

BOSTON - Authorities staged an elaborate anti-terrorism drill Saturday at Logan International Airport, responding to a simulated hijacking reminiscent of the December 2001 plot to detonate a shoe bomb aboard a trans-Atlantic flight.

Operating on the premise that gun-toting terrorists were trying to hijack a United Airlines plane carrying 169 passengers from Paris to Chicago, two F-15 Eagle fighter jets intercepted the airliner over the Atlantic Ocean and forced it to land at Logan.

On the ground, FBI and State Police tactical teams stormed the plane, freed the volunteer "hostages" and arrested two "terrorists" after negotiators failed to yield a peaceful end to the fictional hijacking.

"Things went just as we hoped they would go," said Amy Corbett, regional administrator for the Federal Aviation Administration.

"Operation Atlas," which cost roughly $700,000 and brought together about 50 federal, state and local agencies, was billed as the first training drill involving a real airborne intercept of a commercial airliner.

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino said the exercise, paid for by a federal Homeland Security grant, was money "well-spent."

"It's about practice," he said. "I would rather have a glitch today than (during) an actual terrorist attack."

Many of the same emergency workers from Saturday's drill also responded to the 2001 incident on American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami.

That flight was diverted to Boston and landed safely at Logan after Richard Reid, a self-proclaimed member of the al-Qaida terrorist network, tried to ignite explosives in his shoe. Reid, now serving a life sentence, was subdued before the flight landed and then arrested.

Logan officials had warned neighboring residents, pilots, airlines and passengers in terminals that Saturday's display was only a drill. The exercise didn't cause any delays at Logan, according to a Massport spokesman.

In April, New Jersey and Connecticut teamed up for the five-day "TOPOFF 3" drill, which included a simulated bioterror and chemical weapons attacks resulting in 6,508 fake deaths and the arrests of five mock terrorists in a raid.

EAST PALATKA, Fla. -- Federal agents raided a migrant farm labor camp where homeless men and women were kept in what labor officials called a version of modern-day slavery.

Four people, including the camp's owner, Ronald Evans, face federal charges in a case that officials said is likely to grow. Investigators are looking into alleged environmental violations and drugs found at the camp in Friday's raid.

"The word is out that we are concerned about human trafficking, and we will leave no stone or camp unturned," said Steve Cole, a spokesman for Jacksonville U.S. attorney Paul I. Perez.

Officials said homeless people were recruited to the Evans Labor Camp through offers of room and board, along with alcohol, tobacco and drugs, which they bought on credit. But they never made enough in the field to pay it off, according to an investigative summary.

"A lot of times, they get them indebted even before they get back to the camp," said federal agent Rebecca Hall.

In a small central shed, investigators found about 100 rocks of suspected crack cocaine along with cigarettes and beer. Detective Lt. John Merchant described the shed as a "shop" where the rocks were sold for $20 each.

Department of Labor agents were joined in the raid by local officials and agents from the Environmental Protection Agency, which was investigating illegal dumping of raw sewage into a tributary of the St. Johns River.

"They've found what clearly looks like EPA violations, discharging raw sewage into the environment," said Putnam County Sheriff's Capt. Gary Bowling.

Seventy-eight potato field workers were interviewed at the compound south of Jacksonville. Some were arrested on unrelated, outstanding warrants.

Federal civil rights attorneys waited outside the camp to talk to the workers, offering them help getting out of the camp and finding other work. About 20 left with the attorneys.

BANGKOK, Thailand - The Bush administration may ask the
United Nations to punish North Korea for refusing to return to international talks about its nuclear weapons program, Pentagon officials say.

Such a move would signal the failure of the six-nation talks aimed at persuading the communist country to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

Since the discussions broke off last June, North Korea has claimed that it possesses nuclear weapons and has rebuffed calls to resume bargaining. The other countries involved in the talks are China, Japan, Russia and South Korea.

At an Asian security conference in Singapore over the weekend, U.S. and Japanese officials floated the possibility of sending the matter to the U.N. Security Council for consideration of economic penalties and other punishments.

North Korea has said it would interpret U.N. penalties as an act of war. But it is not clear whether North Korea actually would consider military action or whether the statement was just more of the country's harsh rhetoric.

The U.S. plans to decide by month's end what to do next about North Korea, according to a senior defense official traveling with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said the administration was seriously considering idea of referring the matter to the Security Council.

Rumsfeld told reporters on his trip that U.S. policy on North Korea is under review. He would not offer further details.

Japan's defense chief, Yoshinori Ono, said at the security conference on Saturday that taking the issue to the United Nations was possible if the U.S., China, Japan, Russia and South Korea agreed that was the best option.

Rumsfeld also raised the possibility, saying the world is threatened by North Korea's nuclear weapons.

"It would require, certainly, the United Nations to ask itself, does it want to have a role in trying to avoid allowing the kind of proliferation that is threatened?" Rumsfeld said during a question-and-answer session at the security conference. [...]

Today, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov spoke out against the U.S. Missile Defence System, because it would set a dangerous precedent. Consider the reasons why Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov was against the U.S. Missile Defence System. What were the guarantees that they would not be used by a rogue government in the U.S. to subjugate peaceful countries? If the U.S. has already voided international covenants like the United Nations Charter, the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Immunity and The Geneva Conventions, what guarantee is there that they will abide by any agreement they now make with any country?

In both Afghanistan and Iraq the United States of America has taken on the role that Nazi Germany had during World War II. It has openly used torture and murder to attain what it cites as information. But further than that, it has used Depleted Uranium Shells against civilian men, women and children, knowing fully well, that this is in violation of international agreements.

In Venezuela, that U.S. is bent on overthrowing the Bolivarian government of President Hugo Chavez Frias, in an attempt to gain control of Venezuela's OIL. The Bush regime has already lost all credibility and feels that it has nothing to lose in overthrowing the Chavez government in Venezuela. The Bush regime has a "GO FOR BROKE" attitude, thus it will not hesitate to even invade Venezuela if necessary to control its OIL. But the point is, will the Bush regime stop at Venezuela? That is the moot point. If it succeeds in Venezuela, then there can be no doubt that IRAN will be its next victim.

Right now, that Bush regime has only vassals that do its bidding, and has no real friends. If common sense had any play, then the U.S. might think seriously of withdrawing its forces that are in occupation of other lands. Because at least they might have some friends left. Under the present scheme, U.S. soldiers are dying in foreign lands that cannot be subjugated. Its a morass like Vietnam, and will than likely end up like Vietnam, where the U.S. forces were pulled out with one hours notice on April 30, 1975. The present morale of the U.S. forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq is not very high. U.S. soldiers are returning home with their minds blown to hell. They are quite unfit to return to normal daily life in the U.S. The shame of it is that it could have be averted, had the Bush regime not cooked up the false story of the Weapons of Mass Destruction to invade Iraq. But that is now water under-the-bridge, and they cannot go back to where they started. Future generations of Americans will remember this part of their history, as an error in judgment by a government that was greedy and vicious.

06/02/05 "Bangor Daily News" - - A British citizen leaked a memo to London's Sunday Times. The memo was of the written account of a meeting that a man named Richard Dearlove had with the Bush administration in July 2002. Dearlove was the head of the England's MI-6, the equivalent of the CIA. On July 23, 2002, Dearlove briefed Tony Blair about the meeting. He said that Bush was determined to attack Iraq. He said that Bush knew that U.S. intelligence had no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and no links to foreign terrorists, that there was no imminent danger to the U.S. from Iraq. But, since Bush was determined to go to war, "Intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy." "Fixed" means faked, manufactured, conjured, hyped - the product of whole cloth fabrication.

So we got aluminum tubes, mushroom clouds imported from Niger, biological weapons labs in weather trucks, fear and trembling, the phony ultimatums to Saddam Hussein to turn over the weapons he didn't have and thus couldn't. We got the call to arms, the stifling of dissent, the parade of retired generals strategizing on the "news" shows, with us or against us, flags in the lapel, a craven media afraid to look for a truth that might disturb their corporate owners who would profit from the war. Shock and Awe. Fallujah. Abu Ghraib.

It was all a lie. Many of us have said for a long time it was a lie. But here it is in black and white: Lies from a president who has taken a sacred trust to uphold the Constitution of the United States.

So, what does it mean? It means that our president and all of his administration are war criminals. It's as simple as that. They lied to the American people, have killed and injured and traumatized thousands of American men and women doing their patriotic duty, killed at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians, destroyed Iraq's infrastructure and poisoned its environment, squandered billions and billions of our tax dollars, made a mockery of American integrity in the world, changed the course of history, tortured Iraqi prisoners, and bound us intractably to an insane situation that they have no idea how to fix because they had no plan, but greed and empire, in the first place.

What does it mean? It means that everyone in this administration should be impeached. It means that our Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins and our Congressmen Tom Allen and Mike Michaud should call for immediate impeachment. They were lied to by their president, voted for war, and are thus complicit in the multiply betrayals of the American people unless they stand up now for the truth.

Richard Nixon was impeached for a cover-up of a two-bit break-in. William Cohen, a young Maine Republican, played an important role for the prosecution in those proceedings. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about sex with an intern. Now we have the irrefutable evidence that George W. Bush lied about the reasons for taking the United States to war. The intelligence wasn't flawed. The weapons weren't hidden. Our elected leaders were lying.

Democracy, like any sound relationship between people, is built on trust. We trust our leaders to tell the truth so that the consent that we give them is honestly informed. If the consent is won through manipulation, propaganda, fear, or lies, the basis of our democracy has been subverted. It is no longer democracy at all, but we continue to call it that because we have not the courage or stamina to demand its overhaul.

We live a lie when we fail to hold leaders accountable for their lies. By not calling now for impeachment, we are saying that we condone hypocrisy, pseudo-democracy, and murdering thousands of Americans and Iraqis for strategic control of energy resources that we have no right to. Patriotism demands that we insist on the ideals of democracy, not that we support the "leaders" who cynically destroy them.

What's curious is why anyone like me should have to even point this out. Don't our senators and congressmen feel betrayed? Are they content to continue the murdering rather than do what truth demands? Do they think they can lie to history, too. Do they think that this little Iraq problem will somehow just go away, that the courageous resistance to the United States occupation will give up and hand Bush the keys to the oil wells? Do they think that any of the grave crises facing the world now - energy consumption, global warming, species extinction - can be solved by lying about them?

We are living in an age of no accountability. It's also an age upon which may hang the survival of human life on this earth. One should not bet one's future on people who abjure responsibility. The first courageous step is to come to terms with what we know is true: America's president lied to America's people to create an unnecessary war. I ask Sens. Snowe and Collins, Reps. Allen and Michaud to take that step. Begin impeachment proceedings. It's really no more or less than their duty. It's also the first step toward restoring America's integrity.

Saturday, May 28, 2005 - It is stunning to see the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times simultaneously devote a series to the American class divide. The Journal reported last Friday, "Despite the widespread belief that the U.S. remains a more mobile society than Europe, economists and sociologists say that in recent decades the typical child starting out in poverty in continental Europe or in Canada has had a better chance at prosperity.'

In an echo, the Times wrote virtually the same thing, adding that in America, a child's economic background is a better predictor of school performance than in Denmark, the Netherlands or France. The best that could be said was that class mobility in the United States is "not as low as in developing countries like Brazil, where escape from poverty is so difficult that the lower class is all but frozen in place.'

Oh joy. This is what we have come to? Comparisons to developing countries?

Another odd thing about the series is that the mainstays of the mainstream press are making a big deal out of the divide after years in which many economists warned that our policies were plunging us straight toward Brazil. For years, groups like the Boston-based United for a Fair Economy and the Institute for Policy Studies sent up smoke signals that should have been a smoking gun.

In 1973, the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay was 43-to-1. By 1992, it was 145-to-1. By 1997, it was 326-to-1. By 2000, it hit a sky- high 531-to-1. The post Sept. 11, 2001, shakeouts and corporate scandals of recent years on the surface narrowed the gap back to 301-to-1 in 2003. But a much worse parallel global gap is emerging in the era of outsourcing. United for a Fair Economy published a report last summer that found CEOs of the top U.S. outsourcing companies made 1,300 times more than their computer programmers in India and 3,300 more than Indian call-center employees.

Such groups say if the minimum wage kept up with the rise in CEO pay, it would be $15.76 an hour instead of its current $5.15. Looking at it another way, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, another often written-off liberal think tank, published a report last month that in the last three years, the share of U.S. national income that goes toward corporate profits is at its highest levels since World War II, while the share of national income that goes to wages and salaries is at a record low.

This completes a perfect storm over the last quarter century of corporate welfare for those with the most among us and vilification for those with the least. Americans have been seduced by simplistic notions of rugged individualism to vote more to punish people (welfare mothers, prison booms, affirmative action in the 1990s, and gay marriage in 2004) than for programs and policies that might lead to healing the gaps (national health care and revamped public schools).

It is obvious that Americans believed that none of the inequalities long endured by the poor (because it's all their fault, right?) would seep into our lives. We were wrong. With suburban schools slashing their budgets, health-care costs rising, retirement funds in doubt, and the next generation facing a drop in their life span from obesity and diabetes, the nation is sliding into a dangerous place.

A quarter century of a "mine, all mine' ethos continues to work for CEOs and the upper class. The rest of America finds the ladder taller and steepening. Much of the nation is now one catastrophic injury away from falling into poverty. It should be a national emergency that stratification in the richest nation in the world has us fading from the relative mobility of Europe and sinking toward the discouragement in developing countries.

It is no wonder why politicians who protect the wealthy scream "class warfare' every time someone talks about inequity. It is a diversion to keep those who vote against their own interests from realizing they are victims of friendly fire.

George Galloway made worldwide headlines on May 17th when he appeared in front of a Senate committee on investigations, after its members accused him of profiteering from Saddam Hussein's regime by receiving vouchers for oil, despite the fact that such allegations against Galloway had already been proven to be based on forged documents.

Gallo