Medical aid not allowed inside Fallujah, 800 civilians believed dead

""Several of our Red Cross workers have just returned from Fallujah since the Americans won't let them into the city," he said. "And they said the people they are tending to in the refugee camps set up in the desert outside the city are telling horrible stories of suffering and death inside Fallujah.""

-- Dahr Jamail, quoting a Red Cross official in Baghdad

A striking point in the article:

"He said the Ministry of Health in the U.S.-backed interim Iraqi government had stopped supplying hospitals and clinics in Fallujah two months before the current siege.

"The hospitals do not even have aspirin," he said. "This shows, in my opinion, that they've had a plan to attack for a long time and were trying to weaken the people.""

Ambeth Ocampo

Wow! Ambeth Ocampo was in Dumaguete recently! He talks about his experience in today's Inquirer.

He visited the Village bookshop! and stopped by the tiangge, ordered puto maya, hot chokolate, and had suman! Isn't that amazing?

Read his article here.

I miss Dumaguete already. I'll probably be there next week.

100,000 lives!

"The first scientific study of the human cost of the Iraq war suggests that at least 100,000 Iraqis have lost their lives since their country was invaded in March 2003.

"More than half of those who died were women and children killed in air strikes, researchers say. Previous estimates have put the Iraqi death toll at around 10,000 - ten times the 1,000 members of the British, American and multi-national forces who have died so far. But the study, published in The Lancet, suggested that Iraqi casualties could be as much as 100 times the coalition losses. It was also savagely critical of the failure by coalition forces to count Iraqi casualties."

Read on

How come there was little mention of this in the mainstream press? This should be front-page news!