This article titled “WikiLeaks cables detail Fidel Castro’s doomed love for Obama” was written by Rory Carroll, for The Guardian on Friday 17th December 2010 21.30 UTC

Barack and Fidel: like so many great love affairs it was doomed. But memory of the passion, or at least infatuation, lingers.

Having seen off 10 US presidents – all committed to his assassination, overthrow or isolation – Fidel Castro had more reason than most to beware the occupant of the Oval Office.

But Barack Obama was different. The octogenarian communist revolutionary fell for the young new president and became “obsessed”, according to confidential US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.

Having confidently predicted the US would not elect a black man, Castro sat bolt upright when the candidate of hope and change swept to the White House. His Reflections columns in the communist party newspaper, Granma, were filled with observations about, then praise for, Obama.

The US diplomatic mission in Havana, long accustomed to reporting the commandante’s diatribes against American tyranny, was not prepared for fan mail.

“Fidel’s subsequent Reflection on 9 June will only add to speculation from our civil society and diplomatic contacts that Fidel is obsessed with President Obama,” said one memo.

Obama’s speech in Cairo on US relations with Muslims inspired a 3,500-word response from the retired Cuban leader in which he lauded Obama as a “very good communicator” with “impressive working capacity”. Coming from a workaholic famous for marathon speeches, this was praise indeed.

He noted that the president of the US, called “Potus” in the cables, took office at an “exceptionally complex time” and could not be blamed for the Middle East quagmire he inherited.

“Fidel mostly sympathised with Potus – in his own way,” said a memo from Jonathan Farrar, the US chief of mission. “Fidel then continued his attempts to walk a thin line between a positive impression of a popular US president and the idea that the evil empire will never change.”

In other Reflections columns, the US nemesis who called George Bush a genocidal drunk praised Obama as intelligent, sincere, serene, honest and well-meaning. He welcomed the president’s Nobel peace prize and called his position on global warming courageous.

Latterly, the commandante’s ardour for Obama began to cool, with a tone of disappointment and sense of betrayal over the president’s stance at the Copenhagen climate change summit.

“Following the conference, Fidel wrote three straight Reflections devoted to attacking President Obama’s participation in Copenhagen. Fidel called President Obama’s conference remarks ‘deceitful, demagogic and ambiguous,’” a cable said.

Cuba’s leader, it noted, had taken to calling Obama the “yanki president”.

Communication failure

US diplomats were left isolated and afraid that Cubans were intercepting every call after secure phone lines were cut at the mission in Havana, a leaked cable shows.

They complained to Washington that the mission could not function properly until the technological glitch was fixed.

“Post is experiencing extreme difficulty establishing secure voice calls,” a classified dispatch said in January 2010.

Several solutions had been tried but secure voice calls were unable to be established, it said.

“This has left post with no secure voice link to Washington or other missions. As post operates in a critical technical threat environment, this situation is unacceptable and post needs assistance in resolving the situation expeditiously.”

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On Monday, The Lede continues to update readers on the leak of American diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowers’ Web site.

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The Lede: Hackers Take Down Swiss Bank’s Site

On Friday, The Lede continues to update readers on the leak of American diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowers’ Web site.

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The Lede: The Lede: Ron Paul Defends WikiLeaks

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Video of Clinton’s remarks; a cool response from the Kremlin; Turkey’s leader called the leak “suspicious.”

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Suppose he is serious. What if Barack Obama is telling the truth about his own beliefs when he says that neither party by itself can realistically hope to solve the challenges facing the United States?

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Demonstrators still protest the School of the Americas, but their numbers are diminishing.

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This article titled “Brad Pitt may helm Chilean miners film” was written by Xan Brooks, for The Guardian on Monday 15th November 2010 19.43 UTC

It was hailed as the ultimate tale of triumph against the odds, a tribute to human fortitude that climaxed with a miraculous rescue that played out live on TV screens across the globe. But if you thought that the drama of the 33 trapped Chilean miners had safely run its course, think again. “Los 33″ now look set for a new lease of life, courtesy of a big-budget Hollywood motion picture.

Reports from Chile suggest that Brad Pitt is in pole position to oversee the survivors’ trip from the shadows to the cinema. The Santiago-based newspaper El Mercurio claims that Pitt’s production company, Plan B, has made a multimillion-dollar offer to secure the exclusive screen rights to the survivors’ tale. According to Edgardo Reinoso, the lawyer representing the miners’ interests, several of the rescued men may also be given supporting roles in the picture.

Reinoso added that the miners plan to set up a holding company to ensure that all proceeds from the sale of their story are distributed evenly between them.

In recent years, Pitt’s company has produced the likes of Kick-Ass, Eat, Pray, Love and the fact-based drama A Mighty Heart, which focused on the kidnap and murder of the US journalist Daniel Pearl.

Industry experts concede that the Los 33 story carries many of the hallmarks of a hit Hollywood movie. “It’s a classic human story with a happy ending, so that bodes well,” said Mike Goodridge, editor of the trade magazine Screen International.

“But it’s not necessarily a box-office slam-dunk. You’ve got to face the fact that this is a story that’s set in Chile and will presumably feature an all-Latin cast. It all depends what price they choose to make it for. If it’s a big Hollywood movie, then you’re looking at a budget of about 0m, in which case you need an A-list cast and you have to make it in English.

“But if you go for authenticity, you need to shoot it in Spanish. That’s going to dramatically reduce your audience. All the evidence suggests you can’t make a financially successful Hollywood movie in Spanish. Steven Soderbergh tried it with his Che Guevara biopic, and it just doesn’t work.”

The workers at the San José copper-gold mine were trapped 700 metres below ground following a rock fall in August. After a 69-day ordeal, all 33 were successfully winched to safety on 13 October, watched by an estimated global audience of 1 billion.

In the wake of the rescue, the miners have been asked to endorse everything from chocolate bars to vitamin pills, with their lawyers claiming to be fielding up to 10 offers a day.

Several books about the drama are already in production, including one – 33 Men, Buried Alive – by the Guardian’s Chile correspondent, Jonathan Franklin.

In the meantime, several of the survivors appear to have settled into a new lifestyle as bona-fide celebrities. Edison Pena, an Elvis devotee who famously regaled his fellow workers with renditions of Presley songs, went on to run the New York marathon and is planning an all-expenses-paid trip to Graceland.

Before their ordeal, the San José miners are thought to have eked out a living on annual salaries of between 4m and 9m pesos (£5,200-£11,800). Insiders predict they may stand to make as much as 0m (about £60m) from the sale of their story and related endorsements. “The amounts that they could earn are potentially huge,” Phil Hall, chairman of the London-based PR agency PHA Media, told the Financial Times. “But if the miners decide to do anything – a book, potentially a film – they should pool the resources. Otherwise it will break up the camaraderie they built so carefully in the mine.”

Even assuming Pitt wins the rights to shoot the official account of Los 33, his film is unlikely to be the first or last word on the subject. A rival production, The 33 of San Jose, began shooting just five days after the rescue effort and reportedly contains exclusive news footage of the freed miners, obtained through a deal with Chile’s Channel 13 TV network. As speculation has swirled in Hollywood, last month Javier Bardem’s agent was forced to deny reports that the Oscar-winning Spanish actor was poised to star in another film treatment, entitled Buried Courage. Reports have also spoken of Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, Madonna and Angelina Jolie as possible directors and producers.

Also in the pipeline is The Mine That Ate the 33, a pornographic account of what went on below ground. Happily, the film’s director, Leonardo Barrera, insists that he has no plans “to show a massive orgy on screen”. Instead, he promises a “sympathetic, fictionalised” retelling of the miners’ ordeal.

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It’s not that communities do not want to help; the lines for communication just do not exist.

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America’s veterans: Lost at home

Coverage of the rescue of the Chilean miners.

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The Lede: Live Video and Latest Updates

This article titled “US says sorry for ‘outrageous and abhorrent’ Guatemalan syphilis tests” was written by Chris McGreal in Washington, for The Guardian on Friday 1st October 2010 18.25 UTC

The US today apologised for “outrageous and abhorrent” experiments in Guatemala by American doctors who infected hundreds of prisoners, soldiers and mental patients with syphilis in the 1940s.

The experiments were intended to test the use of penicillin, then an early antibiotic. Medical researchers sought out prostitutes with syphilis to deliberately pass on the sexually transmitted disease to men through intercourse. Other men were injected. Conducted between 1946 and 1948, the experiments were led by John Cutler, a US health service physician who would later be part of the notorious Tuskegee syphilis study in Alabama in the 1960s.

According to Susan Reverby, a Wellesley College professor who uncovered records of the experiment and thereby led to today’s apology, Cutler chose Guatemala because he would not have been permitted to do the experiments in the US.

The researchers were interested in whether penicillin could prevent, not just cure, early syphilis infection.

“Cutler and the other physicians chose men in the Guatemala national penitentiary, then in an army barracks, and men and women in the national mental health hospital for a total of 696 subjects.

“Permissions were gained from the authorities but not from individuals, not an uncommon practice at the time, and supplies were offered to the institutions in exchange for access,” Reverby wrote in a research paper.

“The doctors used prostitutes with the disease to pass it to the prisoners (since sexual visits were allowed by law in Guatemalan prisons) and then did direct inoculations made from syphilis bacteria poured onto the men’s penises or on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded when the ‘normal exposure’ produced little disease, or in a few cases through spinal punctures.”

Reverby said that the men were given penicillin after they had contracted the disease but it is not clear whether they were cured, and “not everyone received what was even then considered adequate treatment”.

The US apologised in a joint statement by the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and the health secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, in which they described the experiments as “clearly unethical”.

“Although these events occurred more than 64 years ago, we are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health. We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologise to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices. The conduct exhibited during the study does not represent the values of the US, or our commitment to human dignity and great respect for the people of Guatemala.”

Guatemala said it would study whether there were grounds to take the case to an international court. “President Alvaro Colom considers these experiments crimes against humanity and Guatemala reserves the right to denounce them in an international court,” said a government statement, which announced a commission to investigate.

Guatemalan rights activists called for the victims’ families to be compensated, but a US official said it was not clear there would be any compensation.

The revelations have echoes of the Tuskegee study, in which over four decades from the 1930s, hundreds of African American men were left untreated after having contracted syphilis.

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This article titled “Hurricane Earl weakens as it hits US east coast” was written by Ewen MacAskill in Washington, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 3rd September 2010 15.13 UTC

Thousands of people abandoned their homes and drilling on oil rigs was suspended today as Hurricane Earl moved along America’s Atlantic coastline, but the worst fears were avoided as it was downgraded to a category two storm.

North Carolina, the first state in the firing line, escaped all but minor damage, although as the storm moved northwards there were fears it might swipe New England early tomorrow.

The US president, Barack Obama, declared North Carolina and Massachusetts as disaster areas, and the Massachusetts governor, Deval Patrick, declared a state of emergency, but this was essentially a precaution.

About 35,000 people were advised by the federal government to evacuate North Carolina’s Outer Banks. While some holidaymakers cut short their trips and some residents abandoned their homes, many opted to sit it out, armed with generators in case of power cuts. They were joined by surfers making the most of the big waves.

The national weather downgraded the storm today from a category four to category two, and it was weakening as it moved north, hitting New Jersey this morning, before heading towards New York’s Long Island, Cape Cod, Maine, and Canada’s Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. The storm was offshore but weather forecasters warned there was a risk of a landfall at Cape Cod or further north.

Winds of more than 100mph had been predicted, with gusts of 145mph, but the weather forecasts predicted that, as the storm moved north, it would drop to 80mph and gradually down to around 40mph.

Authorities in Massachusetts advised people to leave their homes along the coast but it was not mandatory. Today storm shelters were being opened, shops were putting up shutters and some yacht owners lifted their boats out of the water. There were lines of cars at some popular island holiday spots in New England as holidaymakers and residents headed for safer locations. Others said they were determined to stay, looking forward to seeing the high waves.

Storm warnings are commonplace in the summer in the Gulf of Mexico and Florida but are more unusual along the US north-east. In 1999 Hurricane Floyd killed 50 people.

The energy company Encana said it had suspended drilling and taken its workers off a Nova Scotia rig. Exxon Mobil also took non-essential staff off its Sable field in Nova Scotia.

Beverly Perdue, the governor of North Carolina, said there had been no serious damage. Mark Van Sciver, a spokesman for the North Carolina Emergency Operations Centre, said: “Swiping the coast was always better than coming ashore. We’re very grateful that the brunt of the storm passed us by.”

Washington was among the locations at risk of being hit by the outer edges of Hurricane Earl, but today life appeared to carry on as normal, with temperatures above 90F, no rain, wind of around 5mph and residents going to work as usual.

• This article was amended on 6 September 2010. The original gave Washington’s temperature as 90C. This has been corrected.

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This article titled “Fidel Castro claims Osama bin Laden is a US spy” was written by Chris McGreal in Washington, for The Guardian on Friday 27th August 2010 22.24 UTC

Fidel Castro has more reason than most to believe conspiracy theories involving dark forces in Washington. After all, the CIA tried to blow his head off with an exploding cigar.

But the ageing Cuban revolutionary may have gone too far for all but the most ardent believer in the reach and competence of America’s intelligence agency. He has claimed that Osama bin Laden is in the pay of the CIA and that President George Bush summoned up the al-Qaida leader whenever he needed to increase the fear quotient. The former Cuban president said he knows it because he has read WikiLeaks.

Castro told a visiting Lithuanian writer, who is known as a font of intriguing conspiracy theories about plots for world domination, that Bin Laden was working for the White House.

“Bush never lacked for Bin Laden’s support. He was a subordinate,” Castro said, according to the Communist party daily, Granma. “Any time Bush would stir up fear and make a big speech, Bin Laden would appear, threatening people with a story about what he was going to do.”

He said that thousands of pages of American classified documents made public by WikiLeaks pointed to who the al-Qaida leader is really working for.

“Who showed that he [Bin Laden] is indeed a CIA agent was WikiLeaks. It proved it with documents,” he said, but did not explain exactly how.

He made his comments during a meeting with Daniel Estulin, the author of three books about the secretive Bilderberg Club which includes men such as Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, leading European officials and business executives. Estulin says that the club is form of secret world government, manipulating economies and political systems.

Estulin offered his own views on Bin Laden: that the man seen in videos since 9/11 is not him at all but a “bad actor”.

However the two men did find something to disagree on.

Estulin has long argued that the human race will need to find another planet to live on because of overcrowding.

Castro was not keen. He observed that man had only made it to the moon, which is entirely unsuitable as a new home, and what lay beyond that was not much better. Better to fix things on earth.

“Humanity ought to take care of itself if it wants to live thousands more years,” he said.

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This article titled “Narco-censorship – how drug traffickers silence the Mexican media” was written by Roy Greenslade, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 17th August 2010 07.34 UTC

Los Angeles Times reporter Tracy Wilkinson introduces us to a new journalistic expression: narco-censorship.

It’s the description specific to the media’s coverage of the drug war in Mexico where reporters and editors, out of fear or caution, are being forced to write either what the drug lords demand, or to remain silent by not writing anything at all.

In a country where journalists have been intimidated, kidnapped and killed, Wilkinson writes: “One of the devastating by-products of the carnage is the drug traffickers’ chilling ability to co-opt underpaid and under-protected journalists — who are haunted by the knowledge that they are failing in their journalistic mission of informing society.

She quotes an editor in Reynosa, in the border state of Tamaulipas, who tells her: “You love journalism, you love the pursuit of truth, you love to perform a civic service and inform your community. But you love your life more… We don’t like the silence. But it’s survival.”

An estimated 30 reporters have been killed or have disappeared since President Felipe Calderon launched a military-led offensive against the drug cartels in December 2006, making Mexico one of the deadliest countries for journalists in the world.

Ten days ago the UN belatedly sent its first such mission to Mexico to examine the resulting dangers to freedom of expression.

Few killings are ever investigated, and the climate of impunity leads to more bloodshed, says an upcoming report from the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

“It is not a lack of valour on the part of the journalists. It is a lack of backing,” says broadcaster Jaime Aguirre. “If they kill me, nothing happens.”

When a large drug gang attacked an army garrison in Reynosa in April, trapping soldiers inside, it was front- page news in the Los Angeles Times. It went unreported in Reynosa.

Reporters and editors say they routinely receive telephoned warnings when they publish something the traffickers don’t like. More often, knowing their publications are being watched and their newsrooms infiltrated, they avoid publishing anything considered risky.

Social media networks, such as Twitter, have filled some of the breach, with residents frantically sending danger alerts.

And a secretive “narco blog” has started posting numerous videos of henchmen and their victims. But traffickers also use social media to spread rumours and stoke panic.

In Durango, where more newsmen were killed in 2009 than in any other state, broadcast reporter Ruben Cardenas says journalists can no longer do their job.

Source: LA Times

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This article titled “Al-Qaida video shows Guantánamo Bay’s youngest detainee ‘making bomb’” was written by Haroon Siddique and agencies, for The Guardian on Friday 13th August 2010 08.54 UTC

The youngest prisoner at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp went on trial yesterday accused of war crimes, with prosecutors showing an al-Qaida video of him allegedly making and planting bombs in Afghanistan.

Omar Khadr, now 23, was 15 when he was captured in 2002. He has pleaded not guilty to all the charges he is accused of, including spying, supporting terrorism and murder for allegedly throwing a grenade that killed a US special forces soldier.

The defence claims that Khadr was pushed into war as an impressionable child by his father, alleged al-Qaida financier Ahmed Said Khadr. But prosecutor Jeff Groharing told the military jury at the US navy base in south-east Cuba that Khadr embraced terrorist ideology as his own and described his operations against US forces with pride after his capture.

“‘I am a terrorist trained by al-Qaida.’ Those are Omar Khadr’s own words,” said Groharing, describing one of the detainee’s first interrogations at Guantánamo. “Omar Khadr decided to conspire with al-Qaida so he could kill as many Americans as possible.”

But Khadr’s Pentagon-appointed defence lawyer, Lieutenant Colonel Jon Jackson, insisted: “He was there because his father told him to go there. He was there because Ahmed Khadr hated his enemies more than he loved his son.”

The video of Khadr was introduced as one of the first pieces of evidence recovered along with bomb-making materials from a mud-walled compound in eastern Afghanistan where he allegedly threw the grenade that killed Sergeant 1st Class Christopher Speer, 28, of Albuquerque, New Mexico during a four-hour firefight on 27 July 2002.

Khadr has denied throwing the grenade and Jackson said another fighter lobbed the explosive before he was killed by a US soldier who also shot Khadr twice in the back.

No eyewitness saw Khadr throw the grenade. Defence lawyers say the case depends on purported confessions extracted through mistreatment, including an interrogation conducted while Khadr was still on a stretcher in Bagram, Afghanistan.

Jackson said Khadr only made a confession after his first interrogator told him a story about an uncooperative Afghan youth who was sent to an American prison and raped.

Khadr is the first Guantánamo detainee to be tried under Barack Obama’s administration. Khadr’s case was delayed for years by legal wrangling and a series of challenges to the system of war-crimes trials, known as military commissions, set up during the Bush administration. They were criticised by human rights groups for not including the same protections as federal courts or traditional courts-martial, and Obama revised the system to offer more protections to defendants.

The first day of testimony was adjourned early after Jackson collapsed while questioning a witness. The trial is expected to last three to four weeks.

Khadr’s father, an Egyptian-born Canadian citizen, was killed in 2003 when a Pakistani military helicopter attacked the house where he was staying with senior al-Qaida operatives.

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