December 20
Descendants of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse break away from US
WASHINGTON (AFP)

The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States, leaders said Wednesday.

"We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us," long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.

A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old.

They also visited the Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan embassies, and will continue on their diplomatic mission and take it overseas in the coming weeks and months, they told the news conference.

Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming. The new country would issue its own passports and driving licences, and living there would be tax-free -- provided residents renounce their US citizenship, Means said. The treaties signed with the United States are merely "worthless words on worthless paper," the Lakota freedom activists say on their website. The treaties have been "repeatedly violated in order to steal our culture, our land and our ability to maintain our way of life," the reborn freedom movement says.

Withdrawing from the treaties was entirely legal, Means said. "This is according to the laws of the United States, specifically article six of the constitution," which states that treaties are the supreme law of the land, he said. "It is also within the laws on treaties passed at the Vienna Convention and put into effect by the US and the rest of the international community in 1980. We are legally within our rights to be free and independent," said Means.

The Lakota relaunched their journey to freedom in 1974, when they drafted a declaration of continuing independence -- an overt play on the title of the United States' Declaration of Independence from England. Thirty-three years have elapsed since then because "it takes critical mass to combat colonialism and we wanted to make sure that all our ducks were in a row," Means said. One duck moved into place in September, when the United Nations adopted a non-binding declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples -- despite opposition from the United States, which said it clashed with its own laws.

"We have 33 treaties with the United States that they have not lived by. They continue to take our land, our water, our children," Phyllis Young, who helped organize the first international conference on indigenous rights in Geneva in 1977, told the news conference. The US "annexation" of native American land has resulted in once proud tribes such as the Lakota becoming mere "facsimiles of white people," said Means. Oppression at the hands of the US government has taken its toll on the Lakota, whose men have one of the shortest life expectancies -- less than 44 years -- in the world.

Lakota teen suicides are 150 percent above the norm for the United States; infant mortality is five times higher than the US average; and unemployment is rife, according to the Lakota freedom movement's website. "Our people want to live, not just survive or crawl and be mascots," said Young.

"We are not trying to embarrass the United States. We are here to continue the struggle for our children and grandchildren," she said, predicting that the battle would not be won in her lifetime.

Free coats! - About 1,000 Coats Headed To S.D. Reservation
KATHY WATERS/HIGHLANDS TODAY
By Bill Rettew Jr. of Highlands Today
Published: December 20, 2007

From left: Sheri and Simon Bjorn sort coats on Tuesday in south Lake Placid. The couple and other members of their family are going to Wounded Knee in South Dakota to deliver about 1,000 coats and other donated items.

LAKE PLACID — A local winter coat drive to warm the residents of a Lakota Sioux reservation at Wounded Knee, S.D., exceeded the expectations of organizer Betty Luckey and her family.

Luckey dreamed of collecting 500 coats. Thanks to overwhelming response, she will be able to present almost 1,000 coats to 500 residents — and just in time for Christmas.

The residents are unable to afford winter coats and often bundle up with blankets and wear several shirts. Coats donated include five fur coats, several coats manufactured by London Fog and many made from cashmere and camel hair. "There were beautiful coats hanging in closets — some never worn, with the tags still on them — and many were used very little," said Betty Luckey. "Several people bought new coats — especially for the children."

Betty Luckey, her four grandchildren and her two daughters are packing for an early departure today, with a trailer in tow, to arrive in time to give out coats Sunday evening. "Santa Claus has been really, really busy — a job well done," said Betty Luckey. "The people of Highlands County really responded. I'm going to have the happiest Christmas of anybody on the planet."

Sheri Bjorn said her mother planned for years to help the Indians after a stint as a Bible school teacher at the reservation and is excited to travel in one of vehicles towing trailers headed to South Dakota. "When she started to get the word out, she didn't know if anybody would respond," said Sheri Bjorn, "and now we don't have room for anything else. It's all going to go, we just don't know yet how. "I think it will all work out. Everything has so far."

Three trucks containing coats and supplies, towing horse trailers or U-Haul type trailers, were stranded by severe weather Monday night in Nebraska, but were able to reach the reservation on Tuesday.

A separate trailer is headed north, packed full with toys. One hundred fifty children will each receive a new toy and a second used toy which appears almost new. The Faith Lutheran Church, of Sebring, donated dozens of winter coats which were slow sellers in the church's thrift shop. Pastor Stanley Hollow-Horn of the Wounded Knee Church of God will help with distribution at the uncompleted church and local community center.

Electrical heaters were also purchased at Wal-Mart to heat a room in each of the reservation's homes. "So badly they need heaters," said Luckey. "Many homes are without heat because the propane gas gives out."

Luckey wants to also present all 500 residents an orange or other piece of Highlands County citrus. "I want to do it every year," said Luckey, about the trip to South Dakota. "I hope my children continue it."About 1,000 Coats Headed To S.D. Reservation

Fire Breaks Out on White House Grounds
Shawn Thew/European Pressphoto Agency
A fire broke out Wednesday in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington.
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: December 20, 2007

WASHINGTON — A two-alarm fire broke out on the White House grounds Wednesday morning, sending 1,000 federal workers scurrying for safety and damaging Vice President Dick Cheney’s ceremonial suite in the historic Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street from the West Wing.

Mr. Cheney was not there when the fire started about 9:15 a.m.; he and President Bush were in the White House Situation Room for an intelligence briefing. The two were informed of the blaze when they returned to the Oval Office, and later went outside together to shake the hands of firefighters who had responded.

There were no serious injuries, but one person, a marine, suffered cuts when he punched his hand through a fifth-floor window to escape the smoke by crawling onto one of the building’s ornate Mansard roofs. He could later be seen, in his full dress uniform, calling to rescue personnel, who quickly reached him and escorted him to safety.

The ornate gray Eisenhower building, built in the 1870s and 1880s to house the War Department, the State Department and the Department of the Navy, was billed as “an ornament to the city of Washington” during its construction. Richard M. Nixon used it for his day-to-day working office, preferring it to the Oval Office. Dwight D. Eisenhower held the nation’s first televised press conference there.

The building’s centerpiece is the second-floor ceremonial office of the vice president, with two Belgian black marble fireplaces and wooden floors designed in a geometric pattern of mahogany, white maple and cherry. The office was used by 16 secretaries of the Navy beginning in 1879. In 1929, after a Christmas Eve fire damaged the West Wing, President Herbert Hoover moved in.

The desk is of particular significance; it was first used by Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, and its inside top drawer has been signed by all who have used it since the 1940s, including President Harry S. Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson when he was vice president.

It was not clear Wednesday whether the desk sustained any damage. Mr. Cheney’s spokeswoman, Lea Ann McBride, said the office, which Mr. Cheney has used for television interviews and swearing-in ceremonies, suffered smoke and water damage, but was not damaged by the fire. The White House press secretary, Dana Perino, lamented that the “gorgeous floors” are now “under water.”

Ms. Perino said the fire apparently began in an electrical closet or a telephone room not far from Mr. Cheney’s suite; city fire officials said it did not seem suspicious.

But, this being Washington, conspiracy theories and political wisecracks were rampant in its aftermath. When Mr. Bush visited wounded soldiers at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center in the afternoon, a reporter asked just how Mr. Cheney managed to be in the president’s office at the time of the fire.

Mr. Bush just chuckled.

Holli Chmela contributed reporting for this article.

Scientists find source of cosmic dust
Thu Dec 20

PASADENA, Calif. - Scientists in California have uncovered the best evidence yet that cosmic dust in the early universe mostly came from the explosions of giant stars.

The Spitzer Space Telescope recently detected large amounts of space dust, 10,000 Earth masses worth, in the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A located 11,000 light-years away.

The discovery comes two months after Spitzer found freshly made dust in the wind bursting out of super-massive black holes.

Astronomers believe both supernovae and quasars are responsible for the dust that helped seed early stars. Dust is essential in the cooling process to make stars, which are predominantly gas.

Researchers at NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology used a telescope instrument to analyze infrared light from the supernova and construct maps of the dust to determine the quantity and composition.

Results will be published in the Jan. 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

Hopes Dim for U.N. Solution for Kosovo
By WARREN HOGE
December 20, 2007
Kosovo Struggles to Forge an Identity (December 17, 2007)

UNITED NATIONS — The Security Council signaled Wednesday that it would not be able to resolve the status of Kosovo, the breakaway Kosovo Struggles to Forge an Identity (December 17, 2007)Serbian province, and that a solution would have to come from outside the United Nations.

John Sawers, the British ambassador, emerged from a closed Council meeting to say that what he had heard inside from Vojislav Kostunica, the Serbian prime minister, and Fatmir Sejdiu, the president of Kosovo, “underlined just how enormous the gulf is between the two parties.”

Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador, said that the two had “irreconcilable differences” and that the time had come to proceed with granting Kosovo the independence it has sought but Serbia has resisted.

“The continuation of the status quo poses not only a threat to peace and stability in Kosovo but also to the region and in Europe,” Mr. Khalilzad said.

Mr. Sawers said the European Union would proceed based on the plan for “supervised independence” with protections for the Serbian minority developed by Martti Ahtisaari, the United Nations envoy, and sent to the Council in March. Serbia and Russia, its ally on the Council, had rejected that plan because it led to independence for Kosovo.

The dispute has pitted the principles of sovereignty and self-determination against each other and produced a stand-off between Serbia, backed vigorously by Russia, and Kosovo, supported by the United States and the European Union.

Massimo D’Alema, the foreign minister of Italy, who presided over Wednesday’s session as this month’s Council president, said the intervention of Russia and the United States had pushed the Serbian government and Kosovo even farther apart.

He said that President Boris Tadic of Serbia had told him, “I can’t let the Russians be more Serbian than me.” And the Kosovars, Mr. D’Alema said, “can’t let themselves appear less Kosovar than President Bush.”

While Mr. D’Alema said Italy backed the European Union plan for Kosovo’s independence, he said “the Americans have underestimated the difficulties of the situation.”

Leaders of Kosovo’s 1.8 million ethnic Albanians have said they will declare their independence only in coordination with the United States and Europe, both of whom have counseled against abrupt action. Mr. D’Alema said he believed that the declaration would be made in March. Kosovo, a province of Serbia with a population that is 90 percent ethnic Albanian, has been administered by the United Nations since 1999, when an American-led NATO bombing campaign ended Serbian repression of the Albanian majority.

Serbia, with the strong backing of Russia, says it will never agree to the departure of Kosovo, which it views as a cradle of Serbian nationhood.

Serbia is instead offering a return to the autonomy it had as part of the former Yugoslavia.

Wednesday’s meeting occurred after four months of talks among Belgrade and Pristina and mediators from the United States, Russia and the European Union that were held to satisfy Russian demands for more time. The West contends that the talks produced no movement and Moscow argues that they were substantive and should continue.

Restrictions for Australian terror supporter
Thu Dec 20

ADELAIDE, Australia - Former Guantanamo prisoner David Hicks remains a terror threat, a magistrate said Friday as he ordered restrictions on his movements after he is released from an Australian prison next week. Hicks, a former kangaroo skinner who was convicted of supporting al-Qaida at a U.S. military tribunal after being captured in 2001 in Afghanistan, will be subject to a midnight-to-dawn curfew and have to report to police three times a week under the order. "I'm satisfied that coupled with the defendant's views expressed and his capability and training ... that the defendant is a risk of taking part in a terrorist act," Federal Magistrate Warren Donald said.

Hicks is due to be released on Dec. 29 from the Yatala high security prison in the southern city of Adelaide, after completing a seven-year prison sentence struck after a plea deal with U.S. authorities that resulted in him being returned home from Guantanamo. The father of two was captured in December 2001 by the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, where he had been fighting with the Taliban, and spent more than five years at Guantanamo Bay before being tried. A U.S. military commission at Guantanamo sentenced Hicks, a Muslim convert, in March to seven years in prison, with all but nine months being suspended after he pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorism. Under a plea bargain, Hicks was returned to Australia to serve the remainder of his sentence.

Hicks has admitted he attended al-Qaida training camps in Pakistan, and police prosecutors who sought the control order said evidence showed Hicks undertook "substantial training" in basic arms and combat, guerrilla warfare and advanced marksmanship from al-Qaida and the Pakistani terror group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba. On Thursday, police lawyer Andrew Berger quoted letters sent in 2001 by Hicks to his family in which he said he had met al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden 20 times and described him as a "lovely brother." Hicks' lawyers said he did not object to being the subject of a control order, but that he believed some of the conditions were too onerous. Hicks' father, Terry, has said his son wants to forget about his recent past and get on with his life by enrolling in university.