From a May 3 report in South Africa's Cape Times:

Cape Town - With the rapid decline of global oil supplies, the United States is heading for an economic crash unlike anything since the 1930s. And the collapse of the dollar will affect every nation on earth.

This is the chilling warning from academic Richard Heinberg of the New College of California. Heinberg is in Cape Town, South Africa, this week to share his views on what governments and societies need to do to mitigate the imminent global crisis after world oil production peaks.

"It's too late to maintain a 'business as usual' attitude. What is required is to manage the change that peak oil will bring in a way that causes the fewest casualties. This must be done at an economic and geopolitical level, to fend off resource wars. The US invasion of Iraq is clearly a resource war," Heinberg said on Monday.

A tribal woman in India's Andaman Islands who was paid just two rupees, or four cents, in compensation for damage to her coconut groves by the December tsunami has angrily returned the check from the local government, an official acknowledged. "Naturally, she is very angry," said the official, Sailen Singh Parihar, deputy administrator of Nancowrie Island in the Andamans chain. He called the assessment "absolutely absurd" and said he had ordered a review of claims on the islands. He rejected complaints that many other survivors had also received checks for tiny sums of money from the local administration but said he would investigate. (AFP)

Reviving a perennial theme of the reigning energy oligarchs, President Bush told the National Small Business Week Conference in DC April 27 that more nuclear plants are the answer to rising oil costs. "We've got a fundamental question we got to face here in America," Bush said. "Do we want to continue to grow more dependent on other nations to meet our enegy needs?

Five Muslim-Americans have filed suit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security claiming racial profiling after they were detained and fingerprinted by border agents upon crossing back into the U.S. from a religious conference in Canada. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, names Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff among four defendants, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union, representing the plaintiffs.

Court papers said that on their way back from the Reviving the Islamic Spirit conference in Toronto in December 2004, the plaintiffs were detained for up to six hours with other Muslim-Americans and searched, photographed and fingerprinted.

Seven suspected Islamist militants have been ordered to stand trial in Italy, charged with belonging to a cell that planned to recruit suicide bombers for attacks in Iraq, judicial officials said. The police closed in on the seven in May 2004 after wiretaps suggested that one was preparing to leave for Iraq. Investigators said the trial would start in October. In France on Thursday, judicial officials said they were holding two people suspected as militant Islamists as part of an investigation into young French Muslims heading to Iraq to fight U.S.-led forces. (Reuters, April 30)

M. Cherif Bassiouni, a professor of law at DePaul University in Chicago who was the UN Human Rights Commission’s independent expert for Afghanistan, released a 21-page report last week, accusing U.S. military forces and civilian contractors of "engaging in arbitrary arrests and detnetions and committing abusive practices, including torture." He had been expecting a routine two-year renewal of his mission; instead he was told April 29 his job is over. He suspects U.S. lobbying as the cause. (NYT, April 30, via Guerilla News Network)

The "peak oil" theory, which remains the domain of the wacko fringe in the U.S., appears to be taken rather more seriously in the U.K., where several members of parliament have signed on to a petition circulated by an alternative-energy advocacy group calling on the govenrment to release research findings on the phenomenon and take steps to prepare for an impending crisis. Here is the press release announcing the petition drive:

It is looking more and more like Egypt is heading towards a reprise of the "dirty war" between Islamist insurgents and security forces that shook the country in the '90s. From Haaretz:

Last update - 22:34 30/04/2005
Two Israelis hurt as wave of terror strikes Cairo
By Yoav Stern and Arnon Regular, Haaretz Correspondents, and News Agencies

CAIRO - A bomber and two veiled women attacked tourists in separate incidents in Cairo on Saturday, targeting people near a popular museum and a bus in the south of the city and wounding seven, including two Israelis, official sources said. An Egyptian man, probably the bomber, and the two women were killed, they said.