- Signs of the Times for Fri, 29 Sep 2006 -



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Editorial: Murdering Children - Israel's Domestic Policy

Joe Quinn
Signs of the Times
29/09/2006

In the past 8 weeks alone, the Zionist government of Israel and it's military aparatus have murdered 228 Palestinians, 37 of them children. Almost all of these children's names have been completely excluded from Western media reports, while at the same time, almost everyone knows the name of the single Israeli soldier whose capture ( allegedly by Palestinian militants) in June was used by the Israeli government to attack Lebanon and murder 1300 civilians.

The death of any child is a tradegy beyond compare, yet when we are faced with the deliberate mass murder of children by members of the Israeli military, under orders from their political leaders, and with the full conscious support (both military and political) of the Bush and Blair administrations, a feeling of anger accompanies the grief. Yet we are helpless, it seems, to stop them. We can do little more than publicly and in the strongest possible terms, denouce these evil men and women who should be allowd no part in the evolution of the human race. Indeed, under their stewardship, the human race seems destined for a future of war, death and suffering on an unimaginable scale.

The Israeli politicians responsible for the murders of 37 Palestinian children over the past 8 weeks would dearly love for their names and short lives to be wiped from the pages of history, yet we cannot and will not allow that to happen. Below are the names of these children, their young and innocent lives brutally taken from them by the actions of men who are simply not human beings. They are animals.

Bara Nasser Habib, 3 (hit by shrapnel to the head and body, Gaza City, 26 July)
Shahed Saleh Al-Sheikh Eid, 3 days old (bled to death after airstrike, Al-Shouka, 4 August)
Rajaa Salam Abu Shaban, 3 (died of fractured skull in air raid, Gaza City, 9 August)
Jihad Selmi Abu Snaima, 14 (killed by a shell, Al-Shoukha, 10 september)
Khaled Nidal Wahba, 15 months (died of wounds from an airstrike, 10 July)
Rawan Farid Hajjaj, 6 (killed with his mother and sister in an airstrike, Gaza City, 8 July)
Anwar Ismail Abdul Ghani Atallah, 12 (shot in the head, Erez, 5 July)
Shadi Yousef Omar 16 (shot in the chest by IDF, Beit Lahya, 7 July)
Mahfouth Farid Nuseir, 16 (killed by missile while playing football, Beit Hanoun, 11 July)
Ahmad Ghalib Abu Amsha, 16, (killed by missile while playing football, Beit Hanoun, 11 July)
Ahmad Fathi Shabat, 16 (killed by missile while playing football, Beit Hanoun, 11 July)
Walid Mahmoud El-Zeinati, 12 (died of shrapnel wounds, Gaza City, 11 July)
Basma Salmeya, 16 (killed in Israeli airstrike, 12 July, Jabalia)
Somaya Salmeya, 17 (killed in Israeli airstrike, 12 July, Jabalia)
Aya Salmeya, 9 (killed in Israeli airstrike, Jabalia, 12 July)
Yehya Salmeya, 10 (killed in Israeli airstrike, Jabalia, 12 July)
Nasr Salmeya, 7 (killed in Israeli airstrike, Jabalia, 12 July)
Huda Salmeya, 13 (killed in Israeli airstrike, Jabalia, 12 July)
Eman Salmeya, 12 (killed in Israeli airstrike, Jabalia, 12 July)
Raji Omar Jaber Daifallah, 16 (died of shrapnel wounds from missile, Gaza City, 13 July)
Ali Kamel Al-Najjar, 16 (killed by Israeli tank shell, Al-Maghazi refugee camp, 19 July)
Ahmed Ali Al-Na'ami, 16 (killed by Israeli tank shell, Al-Maghazi refugee camp, 19 July)
Ahmed Rawhi Abu Abdu, 14 (killed by drone missile, Al Nusairat refugee camp, 19 July)
Mohammed 'awad Muhra, 14 (killed by Israeli bullet to the chest, Al-Maghazi refugee camp, 20 July)
Fadwa Faisal Al-'arrouqi, 13 (died from shrapnel wounds, Gaza City, 20 July)
Saleh Ibrahim Nasser, 14 (killed by artillery fire, Beit Hanoun, 24 July)
Khitam Mohammed Rebhi Tayeh, 11 (killed by artillery fire, Beit Hanoun, 24 July)
Ashraf 'abdullah 'awad Abu Zaher, 14 (shot in the back, Khan Younis, 25 July)
Nahid Mohammed Fawzi Al-Shanbari, 16 (killed by artillery fire, Beit Hanoun, 31 July)
'Aaref Ahmed Abu Qaida, 14 (killed by artillery fire, Beit Hanoun, 1 August)
Anis Salem Abu Awad, 12 (killed by airstike, Al-Shouka, 2 August)
Ammar Rajaa Al-Natour, 17 (killed by drone missile, Al Shouka, 5 August)
Kifah Rajaa Al-Natour, 15 (killed by drone missile, Al Shouka, 5 August)
Ibrahim Suleiman Al-Rumailat, 13 (killed by drone missile, Al Shouka, 5 August)
Ahmed Yousef 'abed 'aashour, 13 (killed by missile fire, Beit Hanoun, 14 August)
Mohammed 'abdullah Al-Ziq, 14 (killed by drone missile, Gaza City, 29 August)
Nidal 'abdul 'aziz Al-Dahdouh, 14 (killed by rifle fire, Gaza City, 30 August)
Jihad Selmi Abu Snaima, 14 (killed by artillery fire, Rafah, 10 September)

In the above list, you will notice one name, that of Aref Abu Qaida, is highlighted. Aref was 16 years old when on the 1st August 2006 he had just finished playing football with his friend. His friend, Sharif Harafin, 15, who was with him a the time, explains what happened:

"We had been playing football and we had just finished. I was carrying the ball. I was going to my home, and [Aref] was going to his home. I heard a loud boom and then I saw him cut to pieces. His chest was torn out by the rocket. People were collecting parts of his body. I was crying a lot."

Many of the other children, the youngest just 3 days old, were murdered in similar fashion by the Zionist state. Normal decent human beings must take a stand against the brutal and inhuman policies of the state of Israel. The slaughter of Palestinians, young and old alike, by Israel has been continuing for almost 100 years. If we do take a stand now and reject these acts of inhumanity in the name of the bigus war on terror that many Westerners tacitly support, in 10 year's time, there will be no Palestinans left alive, and you will have played a part in the genocide.

Notes:

UK Indpendent: Children Killed in a War the World Doesn't Want to Know About
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Editorial: Remembering Gaza beach - how it all started

The Truth Will Set You Free
27/09/2006

A heart-wrenching, blood-drenched reminder of what our Zionist-controlled mainstream media wants you to forever forget - how this whole bloody fiasco started in Gaza.

Israelis deliberately fired several rounds of shells onto a crowded beach ripping to pieces this 12 year old girl's entire family before her very eyes.

But, instead of this incident and many more in between, our Zionist controlled media inserts their celebrated Shalit "kidnapping" following EVERY new grisly murder of Palestinian civilians by bloodthirsty Israelis, in order to "remind" readers how it allegedly all started. They even include Israel's 'cause celebre' in photo captions to justify images of dead children - killed by Israel's war machine, and paid for by our tax dollars.

An Israeli warplane bombed and destroyed a home in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, [September 27, 2006] killing a teenage girl in a neighboring building and wounding 10 other people, Palestinian medics said.

The Israeli army confirmed it had fired at a house camouflaging a weapons-smuggling tunnel in the southern Gaza town of Rafah, on the Egyptian border, and that its occupants had been warned [MINUTES] beforehand to leave.

Dr. Ali Mousa, the director of Rafah's hospital, told Reuters a girl, 14, died when a block from the house that Israel bombed twice ricocheted into a neighboring building causing it to collapse.

He said 10 other people were wounded by the blast, most of them women and children who suffered broken bones, bruises and shrapnel wounds.

The Israeli strike came hours after a rocket fired from Gaza wounded an off-duty Israeli soldier in the southern Israeli town of Sderot.

Israel has stepped up military operations in Gaza, a coastal strip it had withdrawn from last year, after Palestinian militants captured a soldier in a June 25 cross-border raid.
TOO BAD IT'S A LIE.

It all started June 9th, on a beach in Gaza.
The tears have not yet left the innocent face of one astonished girl, Huda Ghalia, 12, who lost 7 members of her family yesterday, while they enjoyed their weekend at the shore in the town of Beit Lahia, north of Gaza.

These enjoyable moments did not continue for long. Soon, the Israeli navy gunboats shot two bombs among the beachgoers.

Ali hailed a taxi and called for his family members to leave quickly, as soon as possible, and they collected their luggage, the children collected their toys, and they fled the now-dangerous beach.

"Suddenly, a rocket hit our family. I was only several meters away. The rocket fell among my mother, father, sisters and brothers. The dust was so intense that I couldn't see anything," she said, while laying on her bed at Kamal Udwan Hospital.

Seven members of the family were killed on the spot - the father Ali, 45, his son Haitham, 6 months, daughter Hanadi, 18 months, daughter Sabreen, 3, daughter Ilham, 7, daughter Alia, 25 and Ali's second wife, Raifa, 26. Several other women and children were wounded.

"I was so scared and ran away for several meters, and then I came back. I saw my brothers and sisters bleeding. I saw a head and hands but did not realize to whom they belonged. I saw my father - he was dead, lying on the dunes."

Eyewitness, Moneer Ghabin, said that he saw the "unbelievable and horrible" scene at the sea soon after the bombardment.

"Huda was running between the sand dunes as if she were looking for something. She was weaving between the bodies, and the body parts, of her family. She was scared, astonished, surprised and crying," Ghabin said.

Ayham, 20, another of Ali's sons, said that he was talking to his father just seconds before the attack.

"When the shell hit us, I do not know what happened. Within seconds, I realized that my family had been turned into a heap of flesh. Unconsciously, I carried someone's hand or leg - I'm not sure whose. I did not know what to do, and do not know why it happened," Ayham said.

Samir Kullab, 33, was carrying his bag leaving the shore. As his children followed, he said that the Israelis committed this crime because "they feel angry to see Palestinians enjoying their lives."

Kullab said that he could not understand why it happened and promised that he will never come, or allow his children to come, to see the sea again.

And to this day, the bloody massacre continues, unabated.

Nothing can justify this wholesale slaughter of innocents.

Spread the word. Israel must pay for its war crimes.
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Editorial: The Subtleties Of The Terrorist Mind

Joe Quinn
Signs of the Times
29/09/2006

A little quiz for the weekend to test how well you have been paying attention to the evolution of world politics over the past few years:

The new "al-Qaeda in Iraq leader" has issued a new statement urging all Muslims to:

A) Eat more hummus this Ramadan

B) Eat less hummus this Ramadan

C) Stop waging physical 'holy war' since the concept doesn't even exist in the Koran and only serves to provide the American and Israeli governments with an excuse to murder Palestinian and Iraqi civilians

D) Make Ramadan a month of 'holy war'

If you picked D, then you've obviously been paying attention, and if you have been paying too much attention to the likes of Fox News, then you are probably already beginning to feel the creeping fear that only the words "Islamic terrorism" can produce. But before your thinking abilities go completely off-line, let me sneak in another little tidbit of information.

This latest statement was allegedly made by a man that the US government claims is the new "leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq", the guy who took up the gauntlet after we all had to say our farewells to the much-loved "al-Zarqawi" in July. You know, I still can't believe that I'm not going to be using the name 'al-Zarqawi' on a regular basis anymore, it had become so familiar to me, it was almost like I knew him; but then I used to feel that way about my other favorite cartoon characters too.

Anyway, as stated, this new guy, 'Abu Hamza al-Muhajir' - also known as 'Abu Ayyub al-Masri' on a taped recording published on an Islamic website (www.muslimsterroristsRus.com also known as www.bywayofdeception.com) urged Muslims to make the holy month of Ramadan a "month of holy war," in an audiotape posted on an Islamic website yesterday.

Sadly however, and I know you're going to be disappointed about this, while the person on the tape identified himself as 'al-Muhajir', the voice could not, alas, be independently identified. Indeed, neither could it be personally identified by 'al-Muhajir' himself, given that, as reported by the BBC a few months ago, he has been languishing, incommunicado, in Cairo's Tura prison for the past seven years.

Now, if you are one of the people who picked D in our little quiz, you're probably the type of smarty pants that has already started wondering how he does it. How in Allah's name does the "new leader of al-qaeda in Iraq" manage to get a recorded message out from his spartan Egyptian hideaway and directly into your head, much less lead 'al-Qaeda' terror operations in Iraq? Well, you see, there's the rub. The fact is, you won't understand the true subtleties of US-Israeli geo-political strategy until you understand the all-important fact that you can't know the answer to that question.

The bottom line is that, despite your highly developed geo-political awareness, these t'rrists are much more savy than you. Heck, they're tricky, 'sneaky', 'Evil' even, and they have all sorts of nefarious ways and means that are simply beyond the ability of the average pasty white Westerner to fathom - and thank's be to jeebus too, the very last thing any of us wants is to sully our "beautiful minds" by accessing the depraved imaginings of these 'crazed terrorists' in an attempt to understand the ethos and rationale behind their "war on terror".

No siree, it's best to leave such perilous jobs to the professionals, the Israeli Mossad, the CIA and MI6, the guys who really understand the benefits of terrorism as a tool to mass manipulate the masses.
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Editorial: Enemy combatants: who decides

Dave Neiwert
Thursday, September 28, 2006

While Congress rushes to pass the torture bill, it's worth remembering just who gets to decide who is an enemy combatant:

Here's what former Solicitor General Ted Olson -- the architect of the Bush administration's executive power grab -- told the Washington Post back in 2002:

"At the end of the day in our constitutional system, someone will have to decide whether that [decision to designate someone an enemy combatant] is a right or just decision," Olson said. "Who will finally decide that? Will it be a judge, or will it be the president of the United States, elected by the people, specifically to perform that function, with the capacity to have the information at his disposal with the assistance of those who work for him?"

And what will be this all-knowing executive's criteria? Well, here's what else Olson said:

In a recent legal brief, Olson argued that the detention of people such as Hamdi or Padilla as enemy combatants is "critical to gathering intelligence in connection with the overall war effort."

Nor is there any requirement that the executive branch spell out its criteria for determining who qualifies as an enemy combatant, Olson argues.

"There won't be 10 rules that trigger this or 10 rules that end this," Olson said in the interview. "There will be judgments and instincts and evaluations and implementations that have to be made by the executive that are probably going to be different from day to day, depending on the circumstances."


In other words, it will be at George W. Bush's whim. With a little help, no doubt, from Karl Rove and Dick Cheney.

Original
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Sacrificing Palestinians to Yahweh


Over 4,000 Palestinians killed in uprising

www.chinaview.cn 2006-09-28 19:18:06

GAZA, Sept. 28 (Xinhua) -- Israeli troops killed some 4,348 Palestinians since the eruption of the second Palestinian Intifada (Uprising) began in 2000, said a report on Thursday.

The report was issued by the official Palestinian Central Bureau for Statistics of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) Thursday on the sixth anniversary of the Intifada.
The statistics showed that 2,372 were killed in Gaza Strip during clashes with Israeli troops or in various Israeli raids while 1,940 Palestinians where killed in West Bank. Among the killed during the Intifada, 847 were children aged under 18.

The report added that some others were killed both outside the occupied Palestinian territories and in Israel.

Moreover, the figure didn't include the number of Palestinians killed in the Israeli offensive action dubbed operation "Summer Rains" launched in late June after the capture of Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit in Gaza Strip by Palestinian militant groups. At least 250 have been killed in this operation which is still ongoing.

The Intifada was erupted on Sept. 28, 2000 when the then Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon visited the disputed al-Aqsa mosque compound in the Old City of Jerusalem.

The Palestinians, who considered Sharon's visit as provocative, took suddenly to the streets and clashed with Israeli troops.

However, affected by the Israeli operations and blockade, the Palestinian economy declined to the lowest level in 2002 and is still suffering today in spite of limited progress, said the report.



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Two teenagers killed in Gaza strike

Friday 29 September 2006, 13:37 Makka Time, 10:37 GMT

Two teenage boys have been killed by an Israeli military strike in northern Gaza, Palestinian security services and witnesses said.
Witnesses said that the two boys were riding bicycles in the street near the entrance of Beit Hanoun town when a missile fired by an Israeli reconnaissance plane hit them.

An Aljazeera correspondent said their bodies were badly lacerated, making it difficult to identify them.

The Israeli army said it could not release details on the attack but said it had targeted two men suspected of involvement in firing rockets into Israel.

An army spokeswoman said the two had been hit as they were collecting a launcher that had been used several times over the past week to fire rockets from northern Gaza.

She said they had been targeted by ground forces, not from the air, but would not confirm what sort of weaponry was used.

Eyewitnesses said the two boys did not have weapons on them.



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Israel restricts 'foreign' Palestinians

By Charmaine Seitz in Jerusalem
Friday 29 September 2006, 12:50 Makka Time, 9:50 GMT

Palestinian-American Jamal Abu Asi spent his summer trying to find a way into the West Bank. Turned away from Israeli-controlled borders three times since July, the Florida businessman was only allowed into the country last week.

"I don't know what to do. My options are either to stay and have my visa expired, or to leave and not come back for a year or two," he explains.

Asi, one of hundreds of Palestinians with foreign passports, who has been affected by a tightening of Israeli visa rules, may have to move his wife and four children back to the US.
Speaking about why he moved his family to Palestine, Asi said: "I want my children to learn the language, and our traditions. When they finish high school here, they will go to study in the US."

US officials say they began receiving complaints in March from Americans who were refused entry by Israeli border officials.

The consulate is recording these accounts, and diplomats have raised the issue with Israel.

But Israeli officials say the problem is procedural.

Sabine Haddad, a population administration spokesperson of the Israeli ministry of interior said: "I want to clarify that nothing has changed.

"The only thing that has changed is that for two or three years we let people enter without permits."

Permits required

Haddad says that Israeli border officials and the military were notified by the ministry of justice that any foreigner planning to enter the West Bank or Gaza needs a pre-arranged permit. Those who have tried to attain this permit, however, find that neither the Israeli army nor the Palestinian interior ministry is able to help them.

Since Israel's disengagement from the Gaza Strip in September last year, Israeli authorities have required foreign passport holders to co-ordinate with them before entering Gaza via Israel.

The only other access point, the Rafah crossing to Egypt, is reserved for Palestinians carrying residency documents, and has been closed for much of this year.

Palestinians fear that the West Bank, like Gaza, will be cut off from foreign tourism and trade.

Those affected by the visa crackdown include prominent business persons, educators, government consultants, development workers and the Palestinian diaspora.

Palestinian-Americans

An estimated 35,000 Americans live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Some are of Palestinian origin, while others are married to Palestinians or work for Palestinian or international organizations.

Sociologist Salim Tamari says that trade and family lines leading to the Americas are typical of Eastern Mediterranean societies.

"It's only with recent times and the Israelis that it became difficult to come back," he says.

But the majority of foreign nationals seeking residency in the West Bank are Jordanian citizens requesting to join children, parents or spouses. They are Palestinians who were separated from their homeland by war.

Procedures for legalising residency in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were frozen by Israel in 2000, with the start of the Palestinian uprising. The Palestinian ministry of the interior says it has a backlog of 120,000 petitions.

Israeli human rights workers say the tightening of visa rules is an additional form of pressure on the Palestinian government.

But Yehezkiel Lien, research director of the Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem says Israel's main reason for freezing Palestinian residency petitions is the "demographic consideration" or the desire to maintain a Jewish majority between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

Illegal, but defiant

Nevertheless, many foreign passport holders have continued to live in the West Bank despite the freeze by renewing a tourist visa every three months. Still others have remained illegally.

Last week, nearly 200 Palestinians gathered at the al-Bireh municipality at a meeting called by the Campaign for the Right of Entry/Re-Entry to the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Ramallah council member Mahmud Abd Allah told the group that villages and towns in his district, many of them hosting US and Latin American citizens, would be deeply impacted by the visa crackdown.

There has been no official contact between the Israeli government and Palestinian ministries since the Islamist movement Hamas won elections in January.

Israel and the US are leading an international economic and diplomatic boycott of the Palestinian Authority.



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Thousands of Palestinians rally behind Hamas

September 29, 2006

JABALIYA REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip (AFP) - More than 10,000 Palestinians have demonstrated in a Gaza refugee camp in support of the Hamas-led government as the embattled cabinet marked six months in office.

Thousands of men, women and children gathered Friday in the impoverished Jabaliya refugee camp, a Hamas bastion, amid a sea of the Islamist movement's green banners, children decked out in green and homemade placards.
"He who stands firm before these conspiracies, is the most qualified to lead the Palestinian people," said one banner held up by a child alluding to Western pressure on Hamas to recognise Israel and renounce violence.

"We support the Palestinian government and (prime minister Ismail) Haniya specifically to send a message to the world that we are prepared to continue our resistance," Mohammed Abu Askar, a Hamas official, told AFP.

"We will die of hunger before we compromise the principles of the Palestinian cause," he added.

The European Union and United States suspended direct aid after Hamas took office last March owing to its status, in their eyes, as a terrorist organisation and because of its refusal to change its hardline stance.

An ensuing financial crisis, exacerbated by an ongoing Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip and closures have seen living conditions plummet.

"We reject the unjust siege imposed on our people and any unseating of the government. We will never recognise the legality of the occupation," said Hamas spokesman Mushir al-Masri.

He said his movement would "make every effort" to form a national unity cabinet, despite discussions in limbo with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas and his moderate
Fatah party over reaching an agreement.

"I cannot say that there has been progress in any sense," Abbas admitted to reporters in Doha on Friday.



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The Human Catastrophe of Gaza Is a Time Bomb

By Jan Egeland and Jan Eliasson
Le Figaro
Thursday 28 September 2006

While global attention is still centered on Lebanon, less than 200 km to the south, Gaza constitutes a time bomb. Some 1.4 million people, mostly children, are piled up in one of the most densely populated regions of the world, with no freedom of movement, no place to run, and no space to hide. Virtually without external access since June, Gaza is experiencing a rise in poverty, unemployment, penury, and despair. Sadly, that which Gaza most needs today is precisely what it lacks the most: hope.
Earlier in September, 35 countries, to which were joined the UN, the Red Cross movement and NGOs, met in Stockholm to contribute to the restoration of some small measure of hope for the Gaza population. Donor countries announced a supplementary 116 million dollars for urgent humanitarian needs in the occupied Palestinian territories, half of which was in response to the appeal for 384 million dollars from the UN. While we must congratulate the donors on their constructive initiative, the Gaza population needs much more, and quickly. The UN's humanitarian appeal still requires 42% of the funds requested in spite of the warnings about a situation that is deteriorating rapidly, susceptible to destabilizing many families.

Since the Israeli operation "Summer Rain" began end-June in response to the kidnapping of an Israeli Defense Forces soldier, one Israeli soldier has been killed. During the same period, 235 Palestinians have been killed, including 46 children. Every loss of human life must be deplored. But there is no doubt that the response, measured in terms of civilian victims, is disproportionate. For the Palestinians, as for the Israelis, the consequences of the confrontations of the summer are devastating, just as they are pernicious to the perspectives for peace in this troubled region.

A ccess by air, sea, and land has been virtually cut off for Gaza. The movements of goods and peoples have practically ceased. Supplies of electricity and water, interrupted by Israeli Defense Forces attacks on electric power stations, is irregular and insignificant. Civilian infrastructures have been affected. Gaza today remains dependent on outside sources for its food and commercial supplies. Hygienic conditions are deteriorating, while access to potable water is inadequate. With a Palestinian economy in continuous freefall, we must expect a more severe deterioration in sanitary conditions.

Imagine: You are a mother or a father in Gaza, living in a space inferior to a quarter of that of greater London (1,620 sq. km) with a population the size of Leeds (1.49 million inhabitants). You cannot leave this territory, nor import nor export products. Your children live in continuous fear of violence. Shortages of essential goods, including water, increase the propagation of contagious illnesses and reinforce the problems of daily life. Every day, as many as 185 artillery shells strike your territory. Every night, you witness blind rocket attacks on Israel by militant groups. You know that when the reprisals come, you and your family will not be spared their effects.

Now, imagine that you live in Israel, where every night the rockets fall. Armed groups undermine your country, your daily life and your existence. We think it is not in either party's interest for violence to prevail in Gaza and the West Bank, situated at the crossroads of all the great world cultures and religions. To help disarm the Gaza time bomb, we need action on three fronts: humanitarian, economic, and political. In the first place, civilians and civilian infrastructure must be protected by all parties. We ask the Israeli government in its capacity as occupying power, the Palestinian Authority, and all armed groups to acquit themselves of their responsibilities in the eyes of international law.

A cessation of hostilities must be accompanied by freedom of movement for civilians and humanitarian workers. For the Gaza population, the perception of being trapped, confined, of living in a cage is intolerable and feeds the feeling of despair. The November 15, 2005, agreement on movement and access must be wholly carried out.

Freedom of movement is also essential to allow humanitarian personnel to reach those in need in Gaza and the West Bank. The Karni passage, the main passageway between Israel and Gaza, must be transformed into a no-conflict, protected zone, open to the flow of products essential for the Palestinian population. An independent third party could be designated to maintain surveillance of this zone in response to Israel's security expectations. With the majority of Gaza's population dependent on outside aid for its basic survival, restricting humanitarian access becomes a matter of life and death. On the economic front, we ask Israel to free up the roughly 500 million dollars of income from taxes and duties that it retains.

These funds are indispensable to respond in all urgency to humanitarian and economic needs. But money alone is certainly not the answer, any more than are "humanitarian Band-Aids on open wounds." In the end, only a return to the peace process and a durable two state solution can bring hope and healing to this troubled region. The need is urgent. The time is now. It's a question of solidarity and a question of security for all of us.

Jan Egeland is the UN Assistant Secretary for Humanitarian Affairs and Coordinator of Emergency Aid. Jan Eliasson is Sweden's Foreign Affairs Minister and former (1992-1994) UN Assistant Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs.



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Meanwhile in Iraq


Saddam judge's brother-in-law killed

Friday 29 September 2006, 13:45 Makka Time, 10:45 GMT

A brother-in-law of the judge trying Saddam Hussein on genocide charges has been shot dead by gunmen while driving in western Baghdad.

One police source told Reuters news agency that the 10-year-old nephew of chief judge Muhammad al-Uraybi and a third person in the car were also wounded in the attack on Thursday evening.
A second source said the nephew had died and the third person, who was al-Uraybi's sister, was seriously wounded.

It was not immediately clear if the attack was linked to al- Uraybi's work at the Iraqi High Tribunal.

He was appointed chief judge only last week after the government sacked his predecessor for telling Saddam, the former president, he was "not a dictator".

Three defence lawyers working for Saddam and his co-accused have been killed over the past year, and international legal rights groups have questioned whether he can receive a fair trial in the country.

The first police source said the dead man was Kadhim Abdul Hussain, who was in his 40s, and said his son was Karrar.

"They were attacked in Ghazaliya [a largely Sunni neighbourhood] around 7pm yesterday," the source said.

Al-Uraybi has taken a firm line with the defendants in the month-old trial and has ejected Saddam from court in each of the three sessions over which he has presided.

Gunmen frequently attack the relatives of prominent figures because they receive considerably less protection than leading political figures and judges.



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Bob Woodward: Bush Misleads On Iraq; Tells 60 Minutes' Wallace That Kissinger Is Regular Visitor To White House

CBS
Sept. 28, 2006

NEW YORK - Veteran Washington reporter Bob Woodward tells Mike Wallace that the Bush administration has not told the truth regarding the level of violence, especially against U.S. troops, in Iraq. He also reveals key intelligence that predicts the insurgency will grow worse next year.

In Wallace's interview with Woodward, to be broadcast on 60 Minutes this Sunday, Oct. 1, at 7 p.m. ET/PT, the reporter also claims that Henry Kissinger is among those advising Mr. Bush.
According to Woodward, insurgent attacks against coalition troops occur, on average, every 15 minutes, a shocking fact the administration has kept secret. "It's getting to the point now where there are eight-, nine-hundred attacks a week. That's more than 100 a day. That is four an hour attacking our forces," says Woodward.

The situation is getting much worse, says Woodward, despite what the White House and the Pentagon are saying in public. "The truth is that the assessment by intelligence experts is that next year, 2007, is going to get worse and, in public, you have the president and you have the Pentagon [saying], 'Oh, no, things are going to get better,'" he tells Wallace. "Now there's public, and then there's private. But what did they do with the private? They stamp it secret. No one is supposed to know," says Woodward.

"The insurgents know what they are doing. They know the level of violence and how effective they are. Who doesn't know? The American public," Woodward tells Wallace.

Woodward also reports that the president and vice president often meet with Henry Kissinger, who was President Richard Nixon's secretary of state, as an adviser. Says Woodward, "Now what's Kissinger's advice? In Iraq, he declared very simply, 'Victory is the only meaningful exit strategy.'" Woodward adds. "This is so fascinating. Kissinger's fighting the Vietnam War again because, in his view, the problem in Vietnam was we lost our will."

President Bush is absolutely certain that he has the U.S. and Iraq on the right course, says Woodward. So certain is the president on this matter, Woodward says, that when Mr. Bush had key Republicans to the White House to discuss Iraq, he told them, "I will not withdraw, even if Laura and Barney are the only ones supporting me."

Woodward reported for two years and interviewed more than 200 people, including top officials in the Bush administration, to learn these and other revelations that he makes in his latest book, State of Denial, published by Simon & Schuster, part of the CBS Corp.



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Cost of Iraq war nearly $2b a week

By Bryan Bender
The Boston Globe
September 28, 2006

WASHINGTON -- A new congressional analysis shows the Iraq war is now costing taxpayers almost $2 billion a week -- nearly twice as much as in the first year of the conflict three years ago and 20 percent more than last year -- as the Pentagon spends more on establishing regional bases to support the extended deployment and scrambles to fix or replace equipment damaged in combat.

The upsurge occurs as the total cost of military operations at home and abroad since 2001, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will top half a trillion dollars, according to an internal assessment by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service completed last week.

The spike in operating costs -- including a 20 percent increase over last year in Afghanistan, where the mission now costs about $370 million a week -- comes even though troop levels in both countries have remained stable.
The reports attribute the rising costs in part to a higher pace of fighting in both countries, where insurgents and terrorists have increased their attacks on US and coalition troops and civilians.

Another major factor, however, is "the building of more extensive infrastructure to support troops and equipment in and around Iraq and Afghanistan," according to the report. Based on Defense Department data, the report suggests that the construction of so-called semi-permanent support bases has picked up in recent months, making it increasingly clear that the US military will have a presence in both countries for years to come.

The United States maintains it is not building permanent military bases in Iraq or Afghanistan, where the local population distrusts America's long-term intentions.

But for the first time, a major factor in the growth of war spending is the result of a dramatic rise in "investment costs," or spending needed to sustain a long-term deployment of American troops in the two countries, the report said. These include the additional purchases of protective equipment for troops, such as armored Humvees, radios, and night-vision equipment; new tanks and other equipment to replace battered gear from Army and Marine Corps units that have been deployed numerous times in recent years; and growing repair bills for damaged equipment, what the military calls "reset" costs.

At least one lawmaker, referring to reports of equipment shortages in the war zones and at US bases where troops are training for combat, says some of the spending is misplaced. "While we are spending billions in Iraq to build and maintain massive bases, we cannot [effectively] repair our abused equipment or replace it," US Representative Martin T. Meehan , a Lowell Democrat and member of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement.

The Pentagon, which had previously made public its own estimate of operating costs, has not released up-to-date war costs.

The Congressional Research Service report estimates that after Congress approves two pending bills, the total war costs since Sept. 11, 2001, will reach about $509 billion. Of that, $379 billion will cover the cost of operations in Iraq, $97 billion will be the price tag for Afghanistan operations, and $26 billion will have gone to beefed-up security at US military bases around the world.

Though the military's operational costs in Iraq and Afghanistan have gone up despite a level number of US troops, the report attributes a large portion of the increased spending to the military's ongoing preparations to sustain combat operations in the two countries for the foreseeable future.

For example, the report shows that under the category of "procurement," the funds designated for "resetting the force" -- replacing or repairing equipment damaged in combat and preparing for long-term fighting -- has jumped from $7.2 billion in 2004 to $20.9 billion in 2005, and $22.9 billion this year. Separately, the Army has told Congress that it estimates it will need at least $36 billion more for equipment, while the Marine Corps has reported it needs nearly $12 billion.

Another major war cost is for infrastructure -- bases, landing strips, repair shops -- for the forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. These "operations and maintenance" costs remained steady at about $40 billion per year in 2003, 2004, and 2005, but have spiked to more than $60 billion this year.

Those factors alone, however, are "not enough to explain" the spiraling increase in operating costs, according to the report.

"You would expect [operating costs] to level off if you have the same level of people," said the report's principal author, Amy Belasco, a national defense specialist at the Congressional Research Service. "You shouldn't have as much cost to fix buildings that were presumably repaired when you got there. It's a bit mysterious."

The Pentagon has not provided Congress with a detailed accounting of all the war funds, making it impossible to conduct a full, independent estimate of how much Americans are spending in Iraq and Afghanistan -- or to predict what future costs might be.

"In congressional hearings, the Department of Defense has typically provided estimates of the current or average monthly costs over a period of time for military operations, referred to as the 'burn rate,' " the report stated. "While this figure covers some of the costs of war, it excludes the cost of upgrading or replacing military equipment and improving or building facilities overseas, and it does not cover all funds appropriated."



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Bush calls Democrats 'cut and run' party

Friday, September 29, 2006
TOM GORDON
News staff writer



President Bush said Thursday the Democrats want to cut and run from Iraq, while he and his fellow Republicans will do what it takes to win the war on terror.

"Five years after 9/11, the worst attack on American homeland in our history, the Democrats offer nothing but criticism, obstructionism and endless second guessing," Bush said in a speech at the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex.
"That's right," replied someone in the friendly audience of about 2,000 gathered at a luncheon fund-raiser for Gov. Bob Riley's re-election campaign.

"The party of FDR and the party of Harry Truman has become the party of cut and run," Bush said to applause.

Republicans, he said, "see the stakes. We understand the nature of the enemy. We know that the enemy wants to attack us again. We will not wait to respond to the enemy. We're not going to wait for them to attack us in order to respond. We will fight them wherever they make a stand. We will settle for nothing less than victory."

The president's toughly worded speech, one of the harshest he's made this campaign season, was given with an eye toward the Nov. 7 elections, in which public concern over Iraq may help Democrats regain control in Congress.

Bush spent part of his remarks urging Riley's re-election on Nov. 7, but most of his 40-minute speech was a dogged defense of the 3½-year war in Iraq and criticism of Democrats who oppose the war or how it is being waged.

"Now's the time for the United States of America to lay the foundation of peace, to confront the challenge we have square on, to protect our country, to do our duty, so that generations will look back and say, 'Thank God this generation of Americans was willing to serve and serve strong,'" said Bush, who received at least nine standing ovations during his speech.

Riley, who introduced the president, reflected the war on terror theme when he said, "Ladies and gentleman, this is exactly the kind of man I would want to lead our country in a time of war."

People paid $250, $500 or $1,000 to attend the luncheon, which was expected to raise as much as $1 million for Riley's re-election campaign. Bush called Riley one of the nation's finest governors and credited him with creating an environment that spurred economic growth in Alabama, which now has a jobless rate of 3.5 percent.

"When you have people working, it makes sense to put the man in charge of setting the tone for the state back in office," Bush said.

He also said that he and Riley shared the same view that tax cuts help economic growth.

"You see, we believe that when you've got more of your own money in your pocket to save, spend or invest, the economy grows," Bush said. "He (Riley) told me that he's running on cutting taxes, another reason to put him back in office ... And I'm telling you, cutting taxes works."

Focus on terror:

But Bush's main focus was the war on terror and what he termed Democrats' "policy of withdrawal from Iraq." He referred to the House passage this week of a bill to set out rules governing the trials and interrogations of suspected terrorists. Bush said the bill would set up military commissions "to enable us to bring to justice the people that ordered the attacks on the United States of America. The Supreme Court said, 'You must work with the legislature to achieve these objectives,' and we're doing just that."

Bush noted the bill passed "over the objections of 160 House Democrats, including the entire Democrat leadership.

"We must give our professionals the tools necessary to protect the American people in this war on terror," he said, "and those in the House of Representatives were wrong to vote against this bill."

Democrats who opposed the bill said it was faulty and could lead to a Supreme Court decision overturning terrorist convictions.

Presidential visits sometimes help candidates win in election years. Though Riley has been leading his Democratic opponent, Lt. Gov. Lucy Baxley, by wide margins in recent opinion polls, Rep. Mike Hill, R-Columbiana, said Bush's visit should give a shot of adrenaline to Riley supporters.

Bush "may not pick up that many more votes, but what he does is, he gives the voters out there that really ... respect him and love him a vitality they may not have," Hill said. "Right now everybody's so tired of the campaign ... I am sickened every time I turn on the TV and see a negative ad being run. This (Bush's visit) is sort of bringing a breath of fresh air."

Comment: Uh, are we on the same planet here? The Democrats have done nothing since Bush got into power. They rolled over and have been playing "We love Israel more than you do!" while Americans are losing their jobs, being killed in the occupation of Iraq and Afghanisan, losing their rights, and are suffering under a more and more openly tyrannical state.

Bush wants war. He says it openly, clearly, and proudly. And he cynically calls it laying "the foundation for peace". With the new detention laws being passed, you, too, will one day be defined as an enemy combatant for expressing your outrage at the killing and war crimes that people of conscience the world over are horrified by.

It is normal, natural, and completely right to see this killing as horrific and to demand that those responsible be brought before the courts. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, the whle gang should be arrested and tried. Unfortunately, the pieces are being put into place to silence you, at best, or to lock you up.

The time to take a stand is now.


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Halliburton Gave $4 Million to Politicians and Received 600 Percent Gain on Contracts Since 2000

28/09/2006
Common Dreams

WASHINGTON - Halliburton spent $4.6 million since 2000, buying influence in Washington via campaign donations and lobbying, a HalliburtonWatch analysis reveals.

The board of directors and their spouses personally gave $828,701 to candidates for Congress and the presidency while Halliburton's political action committees gave $1.2 million, most of it donated to Republicans and political organizations with strong Republican ties, according to the analysis.

The company spent an additional $2.6 million lobbying members of Congress, the White House and federal agencies.

Conclusion: Halliburton's $4.6 million in political arm- twisting since 2000 has paid-off magnificently as the company's government contracts ballooned by over 600 percent in value by the end of 2005, mostly because of the war in Iraq. Web: http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/reports/waxman0606.pdf

In 2000, Halliburton was the 20th largest federal contractor, receiving $763 million in federal contracts. By 2005, Halliburton had grown to become the sixth largest federal contractor, receiving nearly $6 billion in federal contracts during that year.

Between March 2003 and June 30, 2006, Halliburton received $18.5 billion in revenue from the federal government for the war in Iraq.

The company has seen its profits in government contracting almost quadruple to $330 million in 2005 compared to $84 million in 2004.

During one quarter in 2005, Halliburton's war profits skyrocketed by 284 percent. Web: http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/news/earnings072205.html




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Peaceful Iraq war protests prompt 71 arrests

CNN
26/09/2006

Two Presbyterian ministers were among 71 people arrested during a series of peaceful protests against the Iraq war Tuesday, said a spokeswoman for a group participating in the protests.

Demonstrators held sit-ins, prayer services and sing-alongs at four locations in the Capitol complex, including the central atrium of the Senate Hart Office Building.

The demonstrations were reminiscent of the Vietnam era, with protesters strumming guitars, singing peace songs, holding flowers and wearing hats made of balloons.

Senate staffers watched the demonstrators from their offices. Protesters said that several workers gave them a thumbs-up or other signs of approval.

"We are trying to protest a lack of civil liberties and to try and end a war culture," said protester Alex Bryan of New York.
Thirty-three of those arrested were charged with unlawful conduct inside the Hart Building, said Sgt. Kimberly Schneider of the Capitol Police.

Thirty-eight more demonstrators were arrested at separate protests near the Capitol, she said. Of those, 23 were charged with crossing a police line and 15 were charged with demonstrating without a permit.

All of those arrested were cooperative with police, Schneider said.

The National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance, which has organized dozens of anti-war protests around the country, coordinated Tuesday's effort, which included several religious and secular groups.

Among those arrested during the demonstrations were two Presbyterian ministers, a Catholic activist and a member of a Quaker group, said Jennifer Kuiper, spokeswoman for The Declaration of Peace, one of the groups participating in the protests.

Both groups apparently expected participants to be arrested. On a notice posted at The Declaration of Peace Web site, the protests are described as an "interfaith religious procession around the Capitol, followed by peace presence and nonviolent resistance, including risking arrest at the U.S. Senate."

The National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance Web site adds, "Those willing to engage in nonviolent acts of civil resistance against the war and occupation are encouraged to join us. We also enthusiastically call upon those who cannot risk arrest, but who are willing to support those who do."

Despite a rising tide of war opposition, the protesters said they represent no party or political movement.

Baptist minister Jamie Washam of Wisconsin, who led an interfaith service during the protests, said she is adamantly opposed to the war.

"My congregation wants peace," she said. "And I think it's an offense to God."

Tuesday's events in Washington were part of 375 protests and other activities being held around the country this week in opposition to the war, according to The Declaration of Peace.

There were hundreds of arrests in a protest organized by the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance a year ago. On September 26, 2005, 371 people were arrested during the "Resist and Remember" protest in Washington, one of the organization's founders, Gordon Clark, wrote in an online article.

Of those, 104 were arrested at the White House for refusing to leave after being denied an audience with President Bush, Clark wrote.

Comment: And you all thought we were scaremongering when we said that the US was becoming an overt fascist regime. Ha!

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Target: Iran


Iran rules out suspending nuclear activities

by Aresu Eqbali
AFP
September 29, 2006

TEHRAN - Iran has said there was no reason to suspend its nuclear activities, maintaining a tough line despite talks with the European Union aimed at persuading Tehran to halt uranium enrichment.

"Iran does not see any reason to suspend nuclear activities," state television quoted Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki as saying Friday, a day after another key round of talks between Iran and the European Union ended in Berlin.
Mottaki's comments appeared to refer to uranium enrichment, a sensitive nuclear process that the West wants Iran to suspend as proof that it is not seeking nuclear weapons.

A suspension at least of temporary nature is a key demand of the European Union and United States. Enriched uranium can be used both to make nuclear fuel and, in highly enriched form, the explosive core of an atomic bomb.

But Mottaki said Western countries "have found out that threatening language and a referral to the United Nations Security Council is not efficient and there is no way for them now but to negotiate."

Iran insists that its nuclear programme is solely for peaceful energy needs, vehemently rejecting US allegations that it is seeking to manufacture nuclear weapons.

Washington is leading a push for UN sanctions against Iran if it fails to halt uranium enrichment and agree a deal proposed by the five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany that offers Tehran incentives and negotiations.

Mottaki's comments represented Tehran's most explicit signal yet since the talks between its top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana that it does not intend to suspend enrichment.

The talks that ended Thursday in Berlin failed to produce an accord but both men said they were positive and constructive, with Solana hailing what he described as progress.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had vowed in a speech Thursday that Iran "would not bend" over its nuclear programme and also questioned the value of suspending uranium enrichment.

There have been conflicting reports over whether Iran made any offer in the EU talks to suspend enrichment for a limited time, with some Iranian officials denying assertions by EU diplomats that it had done so.

The Washington Times reported Tuesday that Iran was close to agreeing a secret deal that would have it suspend uranium enrichment for 90 days in order for additional talks to take place.

"Why are they insisting that we stop it (enrichment) even for one day? Why should we pretend to stop it even for one day?" Ahmadinejad asked the cheering crowd in his speech.

The United States, which has backed the EU talks while also showing increasing impatience with Tehran, warned that time was running out for Solana to convince Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment activities.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack confirmed that a new deadline for Iran to halt enrichment agreed last week among the permanent five UN Security Council members and Germany was looming and would not be changed.

"The timeline that was agreed in New York stays, and we are getting short now in terms of that time." The deadline has not been officially revealed but European diplomats involved in the negotiations said it was sometime next week.

Iran defied a previous UN deadline of August 31 to halt uranium enrichment but was given more time to see if the talks between Larijani and Solana were successful.

Meanwhile, Mottaki was also quoted as vowing that should the standoff intensify "Iran will not use oil as a political weapon and there is no need to do so either."



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Iran seen borrowing nuclear strategy from Israel

Reuters
27/09/2006

In developing its nuclear program Iran is using strategies that allowed its enemy Israel to assemble the Middle East's only atomic arsenal without admitting it had one, according to a leading expert on the Israeli program.

"Whether deliberately or inadvertently, there are elements of resemblance between the way Iran is pursuing its nuclear program today and the way Israel was pursuing its own program in the 1960s," Avner Cohen, author of a landmark study entitled "Israel and the Bomb," in a telephone interview.
"This is a great irony of history but Iranian policymakers and nuclear technocrats may be strategically mimicking the Israeli model," said Cohen, senior research scholar at the University of Maryland's Center for International and Security Studies.

As Cohen sees it, the elements the Israeli and Iranian nuclear programs have in common are secrecy, concealment, ambiguity, double talk and denial.

Iran's probable strategy, he says, is to create the perception of having a secret weapons program, or being close to it, without actually testing a bomb or declaring its possession or impending possession.

That echoes the Israeli program, which began in the late 1950s at the Dimona nuclear complex in the Negev Desert. Since then, Israel has declined to confirm or deny it has nuclear weapons, saying only it would not be the first to "introduce" them into the Middle East.

Over the decades, Israel's attitude has been "let the world guess" or as former Prime Minister Shimon Peres called it, "deterrence by uncertainty."

INTELLIGENCE GAPS

Intelligence agencies are guessing again. The current Washington debate on Iran features widely varying estimates of how close the Islamic state might be to a nuclear weapon.

Iran has consistently denied it is working on a weapons program and the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, has found no evidence of one. Last month, the IAEA disputed a U.S. congressional report saying Iran was already producing weapons-grade uranium.

The
Central Intelligence Agency and the 15 other U.S. intelligence agencies use equipment from spy satellites and supercomputers to subterranean listening devices. But there are few spies on the ground in Iran, where Washington has had no official presence for more than a quarter of a century.

"The ... nature of the Iranian target poses unique HUMINT (human intelligence) challenges; since American officials have so little physical access to Iran, it is difficult to collect information there," a congressional intelligence report said last month.

"There is a great deal about Iran that we do not know."

That includes, intelligence officials acknowledge, insight into the small circle of religious figures in Iran with the authority to decide whether to pursue building a nuclear bomb and how many resources to devote to the project.

U.S. intelligence czar John Negroponte said in February that Iran was 10 years away from a bomb but later talked about "the beginning of the next decade perhaps to the middle of the next decade" - four to ten years.

He added: "Iran is ... a hard (intelligence) target. They engage in denial and deception. They don't want us necessarily to know everything that they are doing. So we don't, for example, know whether there is a secret military program and to what extent that program has made progress."

While there are parallels between Iran now and Israel then, the political context is vastly different. Beginning with
Richard Nixon, a succession of U.S. presidents looked the other way as Israel built up its arsenal, historians says. Published estimates of the number of Israel nuclear devices range from 75 to 200.

In contrast, the administration of George W. Bush has said it would not tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran, a country the president has termed part of an "axis of evil."

Comment: Hypocrisy? What hypocrisy?

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Iran wanted to work with the US regime to prevent the diplomatic crisis but was ignored

BBC News
25/09/2006

The US and Iran almost never speak to each other.

"It's the most unusual relationship we have with any country in the world," explains US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns.

"It's been 27 years since we've had a normal diplomatic, social and political relationship. And so for instance I am one of the people responsible for Iran in our government and yet I have never met an Iranian government official in my 25-year career."

The fiery rhetoric between Iran and the US of recent months has made it appear that the two countries are on a collision course. But did it have to be this way and could the two sides still sit down face to face?
9/11 opportunity

In the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US, there were some tentative steps.

In Iran, vast crowds turned out on the streets and held candlelit vigils for the victims. Sixty-thousand spectators respected a minute's silence at Tehran's football stadium.

Some of Iran's leaders also sensed an opportunity. America quickly fixed its sights on the Taleban in Afghanistan with whom the Iranians had nearly come to war just three years earlier.

With a common enemy in the Taleban, the two found grounds to co-operate.

After the Afghan war, US negotiators worked closely with Iranian counterparts to form a new Afghan government.

Some of the talks between US and Iranian officials moved beyond Afghanistan and there was hope that it could lead to tentative re-engagement and eventually a restoration of relations.

But back in their respective capitals, there were voices of dissent.

Debates in Washington and Tehran paralleled each other. Hardliners and moderates clashed about whether it was worth talking to the other side and whether it could ever be trusted.

Hardliners in Iran, scarred by the past, cited Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's dictum that any friendship between the US and Iran was like that between a wolf and a sheep.

And just a few weeks after Iran and the US had worked so closely over Afghanistan, Iran was described by President George W Bush as part of an "axis of evil" in his 2002 State of the Union address.

Javad Zarif, now Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, said this was a big surprise at after the co-operation over the Afghan government.

"We were all shocked by the fact that the US had such a short memory and was so ungrateful about what had happened just a month ago," he said.

But the hardliners in Washington had been bolstered by Israel's discovery just a few weeks before the speech of a consignment of arms alleged to be heading from Iran to Palestinian groups.

Surprise overture

Another potential opening came in May 2003.

America's swift march to Baghdad the previous month had led to fears in Tehran that it would be next.

So Tehran made a dramatic - but surprisingly little known - approach to the Americans.

Iran's offer came in the form of a letter, although Iranian diplomats have suggested that their letter was in turn a response to a set of talking points that had come from US intermediaries.

In it, Iran appeared willing to put everything on the table - including being completely open about its nuclear programme, helping to stabilise Iraq, ending its support for Palestinian militant groups and help in disarming Hezbollah.

What did Iran want? Top of the list was a halt in US hostile behaviour and a statement that "Iran did not belong to 'the axis of evil'".

The letter was the product of an internal debate inside Tehran and had the support of leaders at the highest level.

"That letter went to the Americans to say that we are ready to talk, we are ready to address our issues," explains Seyed Adeli, who was then a deputy foreign minister in Iran. But in Washington, the letter was ignored.

Larry Wilkerson, who was then chief of staff to US Secretary of State Colin Powell, thinks that was a big mistake.

"In my mind it was one of those things you throw up in the air and say I can't believe we did this."

He says the hardliners who stood against dialogue had a memorable refrain. "We don't speak to evil'.

The problem was that at the very moment that Iranian vulnerability was at its greatest, thanks to America's swift march to Baghdad, Washington was at its most triumphalist.

Why talk to Iran when you could simply dictate terms from a position of strength?

Gift to the hardliners

The effect of America's rejection of talks was far reaching.

It would tilt the balance of power within Tehran towards the hardliners.

"The failure is not just for the idea, but also for the group who were pursuing the idea," explains Seyed Adeli.

Over the following years, the hardliners in Tehran who were far less supportive of dialogue moved into the ascendancy. And the balance of power between Iran and the US began to shift.

America's victory in Iraq began to look like something far more ambivalent as a bloody insurgency gathered strength. Meanwhile, Iran's influence both in Iraq and across the Middle East grew, augmented by rising oil prices.

In March 2005, the US announced it would back the EU's negotiations with Iran over its nuclear programme, which Iran says is peaceful but the US and others believe is geared towards weapons.

The possibility of talks is currently on the table. But the US insists that Iran must suspend its nuclear activity first.

At the UN, Iran's ambassador Javad Zarif argues that this is the source of the problem.

"Had it not been for those arbitrary red lines and the pressure that went along with those arbitrary red lines imposed on our negotiating partners, I believe the nuclear issue could have been resolved long time ago."

But the US believes that Iran has failed to be open about its nuclear programme and needs to abide by UN demands that it halt its activity first.

The two sides may be able to sit down and talk face to face in the coming months, if agreement can be reached regarding some form of Iranian suspension of nuclear activity. But if this chance is lost, there may not be many more.

Mixed Messages and Secret Diplomacy was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 8pm on Monday 25 September.



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Iran To Mass Produce New Artillery Gun

Sep 27, 2006
Spacewar.com

Iran on Wednesday announced it has started mass production of a marine artillery gun, the Fajr 27, which it said is capable of firing 85 76-millimeter shells a minute. "The Fajr 27 addresses our naval forces' needs and is capable of hitting surface as well as aerial targets. Six years of work by our military specialists have borne fruit," Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar said.

"This weapon is capable of quickly reacting to any incoming aerial and surface attacks, has the capability to fire 85 rounds of 76 millimeter shells a minute and can be controlled automatically," he added on state television.

He added that the cannon, which can be mounted on a ship or dry land, has a range of 17 kilometers (10.5 miles).

Najjar said at the unveiling of the weapon's mass production plant that since 54 countries have this kind of artillery, its mass production will open up export markets for the Islamic republic.

The announcement is the latest of a string of military breakthroughs claimed by Iran over the past month and comes at a time of mounting tension with the West over the Islamic republic's nuclear program.




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Americans favor diplomacy on Iran: Reuters poll

September 28, 2006
ABC News

WASHINGTON - A majority of Americans want the United States to increase diplomatic efforts over Iran's nuclear ambitions, while 70 percent oppose the use of U.S. troops to thwart Iran, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Thursday.

Asked the best course of action for the United States in dealing with Iran's nuclear ambitions, 45 percent said Washington should join with allies to increase diplomatic efforts and another 17 percent said the United States should step up diplomacy on its own.

One in four respondents, 26 percent, said they supported the use of U.S. ground troops in Iran, while 70 percent opposed it. Nine percent favored air strikes on selected military targets in Iran.
President George W. Bush said last week at the U.N. General Assembly that he was willing to give diplomacy more time before resorting to sanctions to resolve its nuclear dispute with Iran.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has accused Washington of trying to deny his country the right to peaceful nuclear power.

The Reuters/Zogby poll found 42 percent supported a strike on Iranian facilities if carried out by the Israeli military, with 47 percent opposed.

The national poll of 1,000 likely voters, conducted on September 22-25, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.

Comment: Ya know what? It doesn't matter what the American people think. America has ceased to be a Democracy. Bush and his handlers will do as they see fit, and the people be damned!

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Israeli and the Non-Existent Lobby


GOP Slanders Dems With 'Anti-Israel' Ads

Howard Berman
Fri. Sep 29, 2006
The Forward

Over the last month, the Republican Jewish Coalition has placed ads in Jewish newspapers across the country making the outrageous and ridiculous assertion that Democrats are "turning their backs on Israel." At the same time, the accusation has been made by individuals who have sent out thousands of e-mails to all those in their inboxes.

That the Republican Jewish Coalition is deliberately distorting the facts is bad enough. But it is even worse when it is done as part of a reckless strategy to politicize support for Israel - a strategy that will have negative long-term consequences for the vital American-Israeli relationship.
President Bush, former House speaker Newt Gingrich and many other Republicans have certainly been reliable friends of Israel. But they have been no better friends than the great majority of Democratic leaders - including former president Bill Clinton, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi - all of whom are unwavering supporters of the Jewish state.

Democrats have a long and proud tradition of supporting Israel. It was a Democratic president, Harry Truman, who recognized Israel just minutes after David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the founding of the Jewish state.

When Democrats controlled Congress, we passed legislation prohibiting American contact with the Palestine Liberation Organization until it recognized Israel's right to exist, approved massive increases in aid for Israel, blocked certain arms sales to Israel's enemies in the Middle East and took other steps to enhance Israel's security.

As members of the minority, Democrats have played an integral role in legislative efforts to cut off funding for Hamas and stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Both of those legislative efforts have, unfortunately, been blocked by the Bush administration.

I'm not even going to make the case - and there is a strong case to be made - that a number of Bush administration actions and blunders in the international sphere have hurt America's credibility and have therefore weakened America's effectiveness in its support for Israel.

The Republican Jewish Coalition chose to feature former president Jimmy Carter in its political ads, but notwithstanding his comments to the contrary, he is an outlier on this issue and does not represent the mainstream of Democrats. Even more ludicrous is the notion that Cindy Sheehan speaks for any meaningful number of Democrats on the subject of Israel. If Democrats wanted to sink to the Republican Jewish Coalition's level, we could just as easily trot out statements made by a number of prominent Republicans and claim that the GOP is therefore hostile to Israel.

In the increasingly polarized American political system, support for Israel is one of the few issues that remains truly bipartisan. This gives Israel confidence that no matter which party occupies the White House or controls the House and Senate, the United States will always be committed to Israel's security and right to exist free from terrorism. The Republican Jewish Coalition is making a conscious effort to destroy that bipartisan consensus in the pursuit of illusory short-term political gains. But it is not acting on behalf of Israel when it sets one party against the other. This cheap ploy will inject uncertainty into the American-Israeli relationship - and ultimately make Israel less secure.

If Republican leaders really care about Israel's wellbeing, then they should renounce the Republican Jewish Coalition's dangerous campaign and devote their energies to strengthening the longstanding bipartisan consensus on supporting Israel.

Rep. Howard Berman, a California Democrat, is a member of the House International Relations Committee.

Comment: More evidence that when it comes to Israel, there is only one policy in US politics: Israel's.

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House approves Iran sanctions

JTA Daily Briefing

The Iran Freedom Support Act, approved in a voice vote Thursday, would extend existing sanctions, scheduled to lapse Friday, and expand them to include overseas companies that deal with Iran.
The Senate is due to consider the act, sponsored by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), before Congress breaks Friday for midterm elections.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which led lobbying for the act, praised its passage.

"The passage of IFSA is an important step in further isolating the radical regime in Tehran, and represents a unified American commitment from both the administration and Congress toward ensuring that Iran does not obtain the world's most dangerous weapons," AIPAC said in a statement.



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House passes homeland security cooperation

JTA Breaking News

The U.S. House of Representatives approved legislation that would formalize homeland security cooperation with Israel and four other allies.
The bill, passed Tuesday night, establishes an office in the Homeland Security Department that would foster legal and research cooperation with Israel, Britain, Australia, Singapore and Canada.

The office will be funded at $25 million a year for three years.

The Promoting Antiterrorism Capabilities Through International Cooperation Act now goes to the U.S. Senate.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which lobbied for the bill, said its passage would allow the United States "to leverage the anti-terrorism expertise of our leading allies in the global war against terror.

It provides a framework for expanded homeland security collaboration and creates increased opportunities for the United States and Israel to work together to address the common terrorist threat."



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Israeli-powered dream team to create a 'no-hijack' plane of the future

September 25, 2006
Israel21C

Omer Laviv can't usually name a lot of names in his line of work.

As chief operations officer for Israel's Athena GS3 Security Implementations Ltd., Laviv and his company usually work behind the scenes with governments or super-corporations in creating and implementing proactive security solutions against threats of terrorism or crime.

But one project that the former Israeli naval officer and security duty manager at Ben-Gurion Airport can reveal details about is Athena's involvement in the four-year, $45.7 million project, called SAFEE, or Security of Aircraft in the Future European Environment.
Implemented in 2004 with the European Commission contributing $25 million, the project's end goal is to develop a system that will be able to prevent airplane hijackings through an ambitious security program to combat on-board threats.

"The starting point of the project is the assumption that ground security has failed, and there's an in flight perpetrator - it could be a terrorist with a weapon, a bomb or bomber or a hijacker. They're up there and the question is, what do we do about it," Laviv told ISRAEL21c.

Since Sept. 11, the idea that civilian planes can be used as weapons by hijackers has become a real threat, and the SAFEE project has taken the reins of international efforts to fight that threat. In attempting to build a last barrier against attacks on planes, the project is working on a number of features that would be part of a 'non-hijackable' plane: computer systems designed to spot suspicious passenger behavior, and a collision avoidance system that will correct the plane's trajectory to prevent it from being steered into a building or mountain.

But SAFEE - and Athena GS3- are not just about technology. According to Laviv, security relies on much more than a good system.

"Airplane security since 9/ 11 has changed radically. Before 9/11 the budget for security was very limited, now especially in the US, there's no limit, but it's not necessarily invested in the right places. Our concern is that almost all of the security budgets go to technology. Security is built on three cornerstones: technology, procedure and protocol, and human resources and training," he explained.

"When you put all your eggs in the one basket of technology, you don't have a security system, and that's unfortunately the situation today. It's evident at Heathrow. If the British hadn't stopped the plot at that stage, the technology wouldn't have been able to stop them at the airport. What the terrorists planned to do there would not have worked at Ben-Gurion, due to the different security considerations. Technology is wonderful, but you need an overall system," Laviv added.

While Athena is dwarfed in name recognition by its partners in the SAFEE project - including aircraft maker Airbus, its parents EADS and BAE Systems, as well as Thales and Siemens AG - the 10-year-old company's expertise and influence is the fuel that's driving it ahead. ATHENA GS3's client roster consists of notable Global 100 companies, governments and public organizations including: the EU, Microsoft, Northwest Airlines, Pittsburgh International Airport, MWAA, Exelon Generation and many others.

"You could say that we're security concept designers. As an analogy, let's use this comparison. If someone is buying a home and they want to redesign the interior, the first thing they'll do is to take on an architect or interior designer. They design the concept and only after that is a contractor or an integrator hired to actually implement the designs and do the job," said Laviv.

"We're not only security concept designers but also security integrators. But we'll almost never take on the integration if we didn't have input into the planning. For most of our clients, it works out that we do the design work, and if possible the integration as well. Doing both enables a better job in the end."

"As concept designers, we've played a major role in designing the system whose motto is 'zero hijacking policy.' What we've planned is a system that will be able to give early warning of an actual terror event in flight and provide the means to prevent it."

Founded by Shabtai Shavit, the former head of the Israeli Mossad (1989-1996) and a leading authority on homeland security, intelligence gathering and counter terrorism issues, ATHENA GS3 has assembled a team of top international security experts from the Israeli Security Services, El Al Airlines and the Israeli Navy, along with leaders from the public sector and private industry, who focus on the core areas of security and crime fighting.

Careful not to divulge any information which might compromise the identity of a client, Omer describes an actual customer.

"In a certain country, there was a very high percentage of a certain kind of crime, and the country couldn't deal with the problem using their own police squad because they suspected the criminals were getting inside information from the police. The government approached us for a plan ? what we did was to establish a totally new unit within the local police that would report directly to the internal security minister of the government.

"We provided this unit with the system and training to gather intelligence and the tools to handle crisis situations. They came to Israel for six months, learned about intelligence work and how to understand the background of criminal activity, and how to plan actions to prevent that activity. They went back home and mobilized and the result was a decrease of 60% in six months in that kind of crime in the part of the city where the unit was deployed. Now, as a result of that success, we're preparing the next stage which is doubling the number of officers in the unit," said Laviv with pride.

He added that part of the company's uniqueness is their ability to provide and train personnel.

"We help our clients recruit and train people - we recruit new people from universities or from wherever applicable and train them from scratch. You need to go outside because you don't know who you can trust inside. We have our system tools and a psychologist as part of our team, and they undergo extensive exams and we do background checks. But we're not a manpower company," he said.

Laviv said that Athena joined SAFEE at the very beginning "even before it was authorized by the EU" after being headhunted and offered the position. He credits the company's expertise in security technology consulting as being one of the main factors in the confidence the project has placed in them.

"We have tremendous know-how in current technologies that are evolving in the security area. For some companies, we're constantly monitoring what's happening out there and what new developments there are. We're constantly keeping up with the latest literature, going to expositions which are presenting the front line of technological innovations. Israeli companies come to us because they know we're in a position to recommend them. Being concept designers, we're in that position to recommend certain technologies to solve a client's specific problem," he said.

Laviv often lectures around the world. He has addressed the issue of airport security technologies at an airport security conference in Hong Kong, and in November will be speaking at an Aviation Security Technology Symposium in Washington DC.

Athena's staff is spread out around the globe with the management team in Israel numbering 10, and another 20 employees in Africa and Europe. Laviv said that a good amount of resources are being devoted to the SAFEE project, and that the cooperation and exposure of the multinational partners to Athena's way of thinking has resulted in some unexpected benefits.

"We were accepted into the 'club' very easily, and I think we're appreciated as an Israeli company. And the other companies are making use of our experience to benefit the project. We also used the opportunity to bring delegates to Israel, which under normal circumstance wouldn't have likely happened. About six months ago, we organized a conference here on security aviation and many of our colleagues from the project came here," he said.

With the SAFEE project due to end next year, Laviv is confident that the group will meet its goals of devising a plan to prevent planes from being hijacked.

"The goals of our projects are just for a design, and at the end of the project, there will be a system that's workable. Then, I presume and I hope that it will start a new phase of implementation."

Comment: Israel has long since developed technology to remotely hijack planes. They used it on 9/11. See our book: 9/11: The Ultimate Truth for the details.

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Israeli group calls power plant attack a 'war crime'

UK Independent
28/09/2006

A 34-page report says the cuts in power are: harming health care; drastically limiting water supplies to three hours a day; plunging sew-age treatment to near crisis levels; limiting the mobility of high-rise dwellers by halting lifts; and threatening residents with food poisoning because of interruptions to refrigeration.




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Christians: We'll fight for Israel

Ynet
27/09/2006

Evangelical delegates from around the world arrive at Knesset to express 'love for Israel'

Millions of Evangelical Christians around the world support and constantly pray for the State of Israel , representatives at a meeting of the Knesset's Christian Allies Caucus said Wednesday.

Dozens of Evangelical pastors, parliament members, and leaders from an array of countries gathered at the Knesset in Jerusalem to proclaim their support for the country, during a meeting of the Caucus, which was also attended by Knesset Members from across the political spectrum.

"We see Israelis as our spiritual mothers and fathers. It's an honor for us to be here," Pastor Norman Miller of Australia told Ynetnews. "We love your God, Israel," Miller told the meeting, to a round of warm applause.

"The line between the political and the biblical is disappearing," Josh Reinstein, Director of the Caucus, told the meeting. "Around the world, we see the rise of radical Islam come against our Judeo-Christian values, and we must meet it with a well organized response," Reinstein said. "We formed the Christian Allies Caucus to coordinate cooperate and communicate with our Christian allies around the world... we want to work with you, and we thank you for your support," he told delegates.

Speaking to Ynetnews, Reinstein said that modern events were shaping up to fit well with Torah prophecies. "If you can read the newspaper, than you can read the Torah, because things are coming into place like people have predicted many years before us."

"This isn't just a time to shake hands... this is really the start of a relationship, of a political relationship, and that means an economic relationship, a social cooperation, and that also means political support for the State of Israel," he said.

Addressing concerns voiced by some about an alliance with Evangelical Christianity, Reinstein said: "Of course we have to be vigilant to make sure that we're not working with organizations that are just befriending us to convert us, but what we are doing is finding real friends and creating real relationships, so we can promote each other.

"Evangelical Christians around the world are the greatest friends Israel has. And for us to turn our noses at them because of past transgressions is a ridiculous idea... the relationship between Jews and Christians in the 21st century is going to be the most important issue of our time, I think."

Reinstein said concerns about the Evangelical belief in the second coming of Jesus were unfounded: "We also have our own beliefs. For our purpose, it's completely irrelevant. If you're a Jew and you're concerned about what's going to happen in the Christian faith, you're not really a practicing Jews, because that's something you shouldn't be concerned about."

'We have soldiers for you'


During the lunch-meeting, delegates introduced themselves, declaring their love for Israel. A delegate from Africa said: "We have soldiers in Africa, not just spiritual soldiers, but those who even want to come and fight with you." A Kenyan member of parliament said he would soon run for prime minister in his country, promising that should he win, "the next morning the Kenyan embassy would be moved to Jerusalem."

"The friendship that we receive from you, our Christian friends, has significance far beyond the good feeling it gives to us Israelis," Knesset Member Gilad Eran said. "It is clear proof to us, and to the whole world, and particularly to the terrorists, that Israel is not alone," he said.

"It says in the book of Isaiah that Egypt, Israel, and Syria will worship God together," Tom Hess, an American Evangelical pastor who has lived in Israel for the past 19 years, told the delegates.

"What's beginning to happen in the Middle East is that there are Arab leaders that God's raising up as pillars, that are standing with God's covenant, that are saying the land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people," Hess said, introducing a number of Evangelical pastors from east Jerusalem, Egypt, and Turkey, described by Hess as "biblical Syria."

"They are teaching their people in their nations, they are the leaders of their nations, against replacement theology, to stand with God's covenant with the people of Israel and the Land of Israel," Hess said.

Palestinian: Jerusalem belongs to Israel and Jesus

Amir Boutros, and Egyptian Christian, said to warm applause: "I assure you, Members of Knesset, and the government here in Israel, that no one can wipe away Israel. I'm not talking nonsense. It's from my own experience. I've been in the Six Days war, 1967, fighting against Israel.

"And in those days, president Nasser assured to the whole world that he is going to wipe away Israel from the map... thousands of tanks and troops came to the border, and Nasser said that we are going to throw Israel into the Mediterranean Sea. But I tell you people, that the God of Israel is defending Israel."

Boutros said he had a revelation, during which he was ordered by God to love Israel.

Naim Khoury, a Palestinian Christian, said he is "wanted" by Islamic groups, adding: "I believe the land of Israel is going to prosper... the Iranian president cannot touch this land, because it belongs to God's chosen people. And God is going to protect this land, and keep Jerusalem a united city, forever and ever. Because Jerusalem does not belong to Iran, Hamas, Hizbullah, or Syria. It belongs to the State of Israel, and the great king the lord Jesus Christ."



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British politician claims Zionists have taken over the world

BBC News
21/09/2006

Lib Dem peer Jenny Tonge has been summoned for talks with her leader after saying her party was "probably in the grip" of the pro-Israel lobby.

Ms Tonge said: "The pro-Israeli lobby has got its grips on the western world, its financial grips. I think they've probably got a grip on our party."

The peer, who has been sacked before for comments on suicide bombers, was speaking at a conference fringe event.

Senior Lib Dem officials said they were "deeply disturbed" by the remarks.
Norman Lamb, chief of staff to the Lib Dem leaders, said: "We will be seeking a meeting between Jenny, Ming Campbell and Tom McNally, our leader in the Lords, at the earliest opportunity to seek an explanation."

'Despicable'

Ms Tonge's outburst comes despite the conference overwhelmingly passing a motion on Wednesday condemning the Israeli military action in Lebanon as "disproportionate".

And it comes after a group of MPs warned this month that anti-Semitism was on the rise.

Jon Benjamin, Chief Executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said the remarks were of exactly the kind of problem identified by the MPs' report.

"At a time when anti-Semitism is on the increase everyone should be working to develop communal harmony, I find it despicable that she believed it was appropriate to make comments such as these at a major political conference," he said.

Repeating controversy

Ms Tonge was sacked from the Lib Dem front bench in January 2004 after saying she would consider becoming a suicide bomber if she was a Palestinian.

She insisted she was not condoning suicide attacks. Since then she has retired as an MP but entered the House of Lords.

At a conference fringe meeting, she said she stuck by her original remarks.

"I said, and I would repeat it now: if I had had to live through that as a Palestinian over decades and I was being given no hope for the future whatsoever I might have considered being a suicide bomber," she said.

"I condemn terrorism, whether it comes from bomber pilots dropping bombs on Iraq or Afghanistan or Lebanon or whether it's a suicide bomber.

"The suicide bomber is prepared to give his life, the bomber pilot goes home for a beer in the bar afterwards. That is the only difference."

Gavin Stollar, a spokesman for the Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel, said: "Jenny Tonge's original support for suicide bombers in Israel got her sacked from the front bench.

"I think her vulgar repetition and rhetoric means that her position within the party needs to be seriously reviewed."

And Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said: "Jenny Tonge's remarks are based around one of the oldest discredited myths about Jewish people and serve to plant the seeds of racism for others to harvest in justifying acts of anti-Semitism."

Comment: We too are deeply disturbed by the fact that Zionists are pushing the world towards massive conflict. Can we get rid of them somehow?

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Israel caught supporting terrorists in Iraq

BBC News
20/09/2006

The BBC has obtained evidence that Israelis have been giving military training to Kurds in northern Iraq.

A report on the BBC TV programme Newsnight showed Israeli experts in northern Iraq, drilling Kurdish militias in shooting techniques.

Kurdish officials have refused to comment on the report and Israel has denied it knows of any involvement.

The revelation is set to cause enormous problems for the Kurds, not only in Iraq but also in the wider region.

Israel is seen as an enemy of Arabs and Muslims, both inside Iraq and elsewhere in Arab and Muslim countries.
'Against Israeli law'

Kurdish politicians will most likely come under pressure to explain what their semi-autonomous government has been up to.

Israeli security experts who spoke to the BBC said they could not have worked inside Kurdistan without the knowledge of the Kurdish authorities.

The news will most probably increase tension between the Kurds and Iraq's Arab population, both Sunnis and Shias, reinforcing fears that the Kurds are pursuing a secessionist agenda.

This would be a serious blow to efforts for national reconciliation at a time when hundreds of Iraqis are killed every month in inter-communal violence.

Iraq's neighbours, too, will be outraged.

Iran and Syria, which have long accused the Kurds of allowing the Israelis to operate on Iraqi territory, will most likely demand an explanation from the government in Baghdad.

The Israeli government says it is conducting an investigation into the BBC report because it is against Israeli law to export military know-how without prior permission.

'Conspiracy evidence'

The BBC report will be like the smoking gun the Arab media has spent years looking for.

Ever since the US-led invasion of Iraq began over three years ago, Arab journalists have been speaking of Israelis operating inside the autonomous region of Kurdistan.

They said this was evidence that toppling Saddam Hussein was only the first chapter in a wider American-Israeli conspiracy to eliminate threats to their strategic interests and re-draw the map of the Middle East.

Syria and Iran, which have common borders with Kurdish areas, are believed to be the primary target.



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Foreign Affairs


Georgia-Russia 'spy' row heats up

by Maya Topuria
AFP
Thu Sep 28, 2006

TBILISI - Georgian security forces have imposed a blockade around a Russian military office as Moscow recalled its ambassador and launched a furious verbal assault on the government here after several Russian officers were arrested on spying charges.

Defence Minister Irakli Okruashvili angrily rejected Russian accusations Thursday that Georgian forces had beaten the arrested men, who were detained overnight near a Russian military base on the Black Sea coast for carrying weapons without relevant permits.

The interior ministry said five Russian officers and a driver had been arrested in all.
"There was no beating. Certainly we detained them, which naturally was in the interests of the security of the region, where President Mikheil Saakashvili was travelling," Okruashvili said.

"All the rest is pure invention," said Okruashvili.

Georgia's foreign ministry said it had formally asked Russia to hand over another Russian officer, who was believed to be hiding in the Russian military headquarters building in Tbilisi.

Georgian police formed a blockade around the building using dozens of vehicles.

Georgian Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili told reporters Wednesday that Russian officers of the military intelligence service had been arrested as they "were spying in Tbilisi, Batumi and all over Georgian territory".

Relations between Russia and this ex-Soviet state in the strategic Caucasus region have been tense on and off for two centuries.

They have worsened significantly in the three years since US-educated Mikheil Saakashvili came to power in Tbilisi and vowed to lead Georgia away from Russian influence and toward the West.


The current row comes after NATO said last week that it had agreed to start "intensified dialogue" with Georgia over the country's possible entry to the alliance.

Russia on Thursday said it had recalled its ambassador to Tbilisi for consultations and was evacuating some personnel for safety reasons.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, quoted by domestic news agencies, demanded the immediate release of the Russian officers and said the case should be taken to the UN Security Council, complaining that "the party of war" was getting the upper hand in Tbilisi.

Speaking from Sakhalin in Russia's far east, Lavrov also lashed out at Georgia's increasingly warm relationship with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), saying it had served only "to intensify the anti-Russian policy" of the government in Tbilisi, the reports said.

"There are grounds for the Security Council to address this problem," the RIA Novosti and Interfax agencies quoted Lavrov as saying.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov meanwhile unleashed a blast of vitriol himself, describing the actions of the authorities as "completely wild and hysterical."

Ivanov warned that Russia could be expected to deliver an "appropriate" response to Georgia and compared the arrests of the Russian officers to 1930s repression by the regime of Josef Stalin, according to Interfax news agency.

Ivanov said that six Russian servicemen had been detained and beaten by Georgian police near the western Georgian port of Batumi before being released.

The Russian embassy in Tbilisi on Thursday indefinitely suspended the issue of visas to Georgian citizens for travel to Russia, an embassy spokesman told AFP.

Russia's foreign ministry meanwhile said that the deputy foreign minister had met with the US ambassador to Moscow to inform him of the "baselessness" of the Georgian accusations, adding that Russia "counts on the understanding and support of its American partners".

Comment:
"Relations between Russia and this ex-Soviet state... have worsened significantly in the three years since US-educated Mikheil Saakashvili came to power in Tbilisi and vowed to lead Georgia away from Russian influence and toward the West."


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Russia begins evacuation from Georgian capital as tensions rise

by Maya Topuria
AFP
September 29, 2006

TBILISI - Russia started evacuating personnel from its embassy in the Georgian capital as Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili angrily denied that they were in any danger, during a row over the arrest of alleged Russian spies.

A first plane arrived in Tbilisi to begin the partial evacuation of embassy staff and family members and would leave later in the day, the embassy said.
Russian ambassador Mikhail Svirin told AFP Friday that in the Russian view the "security threat is credible".

At the United Nations in New York, Russian envoy Vitaly Churkin called for Security Council action to restrain Georgia, which he accused of "serious provocations".

Churkin said he had circulated a draft statement Friday for possible adoption by the Security Council expressing "deep concern" over Georgia's actions and demanding a withdrawal of Georgian troops from a gorge overlooking the separatist region of Abkhazia.

The latest row between Russia and its Caucasus neighbour blew up after Georgia arrested four Russian officers and a driver Wednesday, saying they had been spying on Georgian military installations.

Another arrested man said earlier to be a Russian officer was in fact a Georgian citizen and is under investigation, interior ministry official Shota Khizanishvili told AFP Friday.

The officers' driver has been released, Khizanishvili said.

The four Russian officers were to appear at an initial court hearing later Friday after formal charges were lodged against them earlier for spying, Khizanishvili said.

Georgian police maintained a cordon of dozens of vehicles Friday around a Russian military headquarters building in Tbilisi, demanding the hand-over of another Russian officer wanted by Georgia on suspicion of spying and said to be hiding there.

Relations between Russia and this ex-Soviet state in the strategic Caucasus region have been tense at various times for two centuries.

They have worsened significantly since 2003, when the US-educated Mikheil Saakashvili came to power in Tbilisi and vowed to lead Georgia away from Russian influence and towards the West.

Saakashvili on Thursday denied that there was any need for Russia's evacuation of personnel.

"I don't understand why this hysteria is being created. There are no kind of threats to the security of Russian families in Georgia as our country acts strictly in accordance with international agreements," Saakashvili told journalists.

The arrests were aimed "at the maintenance of Georgian law," he said.

"Nothing illegal has happened. We are building democracy and protecting our statehood. That's how all democratic countries act," Saakashvili said.

The current row comes against a background of Russian anger at Georgia's growing links to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and in particular an announcement on those links by the alliance last week.

NATO said it was starting "intensified dialogue" with Georgia over the country's possible entry into the alliance.

Adding to the tensions, Saakashvili visited the Kodori gorge, which overlooks the Russian-backed breakaway region of Abkhazia, on Wednesday.

His visit came after Georgian forces this summer dislodged a local militia leader who dominated the gorge.

Saakashvili said the restoration of central power there would in time lead to the return of Abkhazia proper to Georgian control, announcing that the gorge would henceforth be known as Upper Abkhazia.

On Thursday Russia recalled its ambassador for consultations.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, quoted by domestic news agencies, demanded the immediate release of the Russian officers and said the case should be taken to the UN Security Council, complaining that "the party of war" was getting the upper hand in Tbilisi.

The Russian embassy has indefinitely suspended the issue of visas to Georgian citizens for travel to Russia.



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Mexico's leftists continue protest

www.chinaview.cn 2006-09-29 10:15:57

MEXICO CITY, Sept. 28 (Xinhua) -- Leftist protesters backing former Mexican presidential candidate, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, clashed with security officers, trying to block the door to president-elect Felipe Calderon's transition headquarters on Thursday.
Elite soldiers of the Presidential Staff and officers from the Federal Preventative Police, who were guarding the headquarters, frustrated the plans of the Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD) members.

Gerardo Fernandez Norona, a spokesman for Obrador's PRD, and Marti Batres Guadarrama, PRD chief in Mexico City, were trying to hang a sign saying "Illegitimate President and Usurper" on the front of the building.

Obrador and his supporters are waging a campaign, which they describe as "resisting the imposition of a right-wing candidate," alleging that the election that brought Calderon to power was a fraudulent one.

After a scuffle with security officers, some 40 PRD supporters engaged in a shouting match, chanting "Felipe the Usurper" across the barriers, while Calderon supporters shouted back "Felipe won" and "keep dancing for six more years."

Calderon, President Elect and former candidate of the ruling National Action Party (PAN) won the July 2 election with a slim margin of 0.56 percentage point, and will take office on Dec. 1.

Lopez Obrador has refused to concede defeat, alleging massive fraud in the electoral process, and said he will not recognize the incoming administration.



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Blair pinched speech from Murderer in 'The Grapes of Wrath'

Daily Mail
27/09/2006

His promise to the party faithful that he would 'always' be with them earned Tony Blair a seven-minute standing ovation.

But the Labour conference may have been slightly less overawed if they had realised that the Prime Minister had based the finale to his farewell speech on the words of a fugitive double murderer.
Mr Blair has confided to friends that he drew inspiration for his big sign-off from a favourite passage of John Steinbeck's 1939 classic The Grapes of Wrath.

The Premier ended his last conference speech by telling delegates: 'Whatever you do, I'm always with you. Head and heart. Next year I won't be making this speech. But in the years to come, wherever I am, whatever I do, I'm with you. Wishing you well, wanting you to win.'

He later admitted he had borrowed heavily from a speech by Tom Joad, the central character of Steinbeck's Pulitzer prize-winning novel about the Great Depression.

Joad, played by Henry Fonda in the film version, tells his mother he is going to come out of hiding to confront a gang of vigilantes, one of whose number he had earlier killed.

Knowing he is likely to be murdered himself, Joad tells his tearful mother that he will always be with her in spirit.

'I'll be everywhere - wherever you look,' he says. 'Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there... an' when our folks eat the stuff they raise an' live in the houses they build - why, I'll be there. See?'

Steinbeck's seminal work caused controversy when it was first published because of his sympathetic portrayal of the killer Tom Joad, who is released on parole at the start of the book after being jailed for murdering a man with a shovel in a drunken fight.

Having broken his parole conditions by moving from the Oklahoma dust bowl to California in search of work, Joad then kills a vigilante who has murdered a friend striking over low wages.

The book is now regarded as the definitive portrayal of poverty and social injustice in 1930s America.

Comment: What's the big deal? Is it strange that Blair, a murderer himself, would identify with a fictional murderer?

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Woman pensioner arrested in UK Peaceful CND demo

London Independent
September 28 2006

A 62-year-old woman was arrested and cautioned for common assault yesterday, after a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament protest involving 70 people was broken up by mounted police and officers with dogs.

Kate Hudson, the CND chairperson, complained the response was heavy-handed. Greater Manchester Police said last night that a Section 14 order, compelling the protesters to disperse, was served after they "refused to co-operate".

Joe Richardson, a graphic designer, who was also arrested, said he was merely a passerby who stopped to watch. He said he was told by officers that CND had failed to provide advance notice of the protest.
"I couldn't help but stop to look because the protest had seemed so insignificant - just a bunch of old peaceniks," he said.

Nathan Jackson, 30, one of the protesters said: "There were fewer than 100 people gathered and no sign of any trouble."

Police said they believed the group "intended to cause disruption to the city centre and conference area".




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Lebanon: French UN tanks block Israeli Military

Ynet
29/09/2006

According to reports, the IDF force asked to advance deeper into Lebanese territory, but was stopped about 500 meters from the road leading to the village by four UNIFIL tanks manned by French soldiers as two Israeli Merkava tanks operated nearby on Lebanese soil, setting up checkpoints.




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Soiling the Nest


Thousands flee 'mud volcano' in Indonesia

September 29, 2006
BY CHRIS BRUMMITT

PORONG, Indonesia -- Factories that once produced watches and shoes lie under a sea of thick, stinking mud. Villagers stand on hastily constructed dams and gaze at the thousands of homes swallowed by brown sludge.
Four months ago, a torrent of hot mud from deep beneath the surface of Indonesia's seismically charged Java island began surging from a natural gas exploration site following a drilling accident.

The ''mud volcano'' pours out some 165,000 cubic yards of mud every day -- enough to cover a football field about 75 feet deep. Often spewing out in geyser-like eruptions, the mud has left some 665 acres swamped or abandoned as unsafe, forcing more than 10,000 people from their homes.

Experts say the mud volcano is one of the largest ever recorded on land. Geologists fear the technology may not exist to stop the eruption, saying mud could flow for years or even centuries -- or stop on its own at any time.

Police seize drilling rig

The mud is believed to come from a reservoir 3½ miles below the surface that has been pressurized by shifts in the crust or by the accumulation of hydrocarbon gases.

The calamity has underscored the patchy safety record of mining companies exploiting the natural resources of this Southeast Asian nation made up of thousands of islands.

Police seized the drilling rig involved in the accident and are investigating whether to bring criminal charges against the principal well owner, PT Lapindo Brantas.

Lapindo, which is linked to the wealthy family of Indonesia's welfare minister, is paying for an ever expanding network of earthen dams to contain the mud, but many people fear the resulting slimy ponds will overflow during the approaching rainy season.

''The volume of mud that is coming out of the hole is not just large, it's enormous,'' Earl Hunt Jr., an engineer from Oklahoma, said while supervising dredging operations.



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Climate change report calls for urgent action from Ottawa

Last Updated: Thursday, September 28, 2006 | 11:07 AM ET
CBC News

It is "crucial" the federal government does more to help Canadians cope with climate change, the federal environment commissioner says.

"Canadians are facing risks such as the spread of disease, more drought in the Prairies, melting permafrost in the North, longer and more intense heat waves and smog, and rising coastal waters," Johanne Gélinas said as she released a report Thursday criticizing Ottawa's efforts to combat climate change.
"The government urgently needs a believable, clear and realistic plan to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions," the report said, adding that the government "must establish and commit to short- and long-term national goals."

Developing the capacity to adapt is crucial and Kyoto goals should be supported rather than abandoned, Gélinas said.

"Something drastic has to happen if we want to get on the right track."

Gélinas, who is part of the Office of the Auditor General, devoted this year's annual report to measuring the country's progress in dealing with global climate change linked to emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane.

The report found the former Liberal government announced $6.3 billion in climate change funding since it signed the international Kyoto Accord and agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in 1997. But it led Canada away rather than toward its targets.

For example, Canada had agreed to reduce emissions to six per cent below 1990 levels by sometime between 2008 and 2012. But Gélinas's report found that in 2004, emissions were 26.6 per cent above 1990 levels.

Must target oil and gas industries

The federal government has done too little too slowly to meet that goal, said the report, concluding that Ottawa has:

* Not adequately targeted the oil and gas industries - even though fossil fuel production and consumption accounts for 80 per cent of the country's emissions. As well, those emissions have been growing rapidly as Alberta increases production from its oil sands.
* Done little to help Canadians cope with the consequences of climate change, such as damage to northern infrastructure as permafrost melts or increased droughts in the Prairies
* Did not set clear goals for its climate-change-related programs.
* Did a poor job of measuring those goals.
* Did not sufficiently report whether those goals were effective or how money was being spent.


Harper's Tories must scale up efforts

The report said Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservatives should not continue to use the lack of progress on the country's Kyoto commitments as an excuse to abandon the international pact.

"The current government has announced that Canada cannot realistically meet its Kyoto target," the report said. "If so, then new targets should take its place."

The report urges Ottawa to instead scale up its efforts to curb emissions and adapt to climate change, by:

* Working on ways to help Canadians adapt to climate change.
* Integrating its energy and climate strategies, which Gélinas points out are closely linked.
* Providing strong leadership in combatting climate change.
* Ensuring it co-ordinates federal efforts and measures their success.


The government departments involved have accepted the recommendations. However, they have not committed to doing anything to implement those recommendations, the report notes.

Canada made some progress: report

But Gélinas's report was not entirely critical.

She said the government addressed some issues raised by Canadians who wrote them letters, though not always effectively.

For example, the government took on a 2002 suggestion to purchase 20 per cent of its electricity from green-power sources such as wind by 2006 - although it only met a third of its commitment.

Gélinas found some government departments such as Indian and Northern Affairs have made progress, crediting good management with their success.

And the large federal programs to make houses more efficient, increase the use of ethanol fuel and step up wind-power production have yielded some emission reductions.

"There is a foundation to build on," Gélinas said.



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US fast-food chains sued over carcinogenic chicken

by Jitendra Joshi
AFP
Thu Sep 28, 2006

WASHINGTON - A US doctors' group sued seven leading fast-food chains including McDonald's and Burger King over their use of a "dangerous carcinogenic" in grilled chicken.
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The Washington-based Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) filed suit in California "to compel the restaurants to warn unsuspecting consumers" through in-store posters and menu messages.

The group said every sample of grilled chicken products from the seven national chains "tested positive for a dangerous carcinogenic compound called PhIP" during analysis at an independent laboratory.
PhIP is one of a group of carcinogenic compounds called heterocyclic amines (HCAs) that are found in grilled meats. In 2005, the US government officially added HCAs to its list of cancer-causing agents, the doctors' group said.

"Grilled chicken can cause cancer, and consumers deserve to know that this supposedly healthy product is actually just as bad for them as high-fat fried chicken," PCRM president Neal Barnard said in a statement.

"Even a grilled chicken salad increases the risk of breast cancer, prostate cancer and other forms of this lethal disease," he said.

Aside from McDonald's and Burger King, the chains named in the lawsuit were Chick-fil-A, Chili's, Applebee's, Outback Steakhouse and TGI Friday's.

The California Restaurant Association, which represents the major chains in the richest US state, dismissed the doctors' lawsuit as groundless and politically motivated.

"The PCRM are anti-meat advocates who want to limit consumer choice and limit access to healthy dining options, which grilled chicken most definitely is," association spokeswoman Jordan Traverso told AFP.

"There's no evidence that the small amount of PhIP that comes out from cooked grilled chicken poses a health risk to humans," she said, stressing that undercooked chicken was far more dangerous.

But Mark Kennedy, staff attorney with the PCRM, said the restaurants had been serially flouting a 1986 California law that requires them to give a "clear and reasonable warning" about any carcinogens in their food.

He noted that the law, dubbed Proposition 65, carries a fine of 2,500 dollars per violation per day.

But Kennedy added: "We're not seeking to punish these restaurants. We just want them to obey the law.

"If at any time these restaurants were to come to us and say we'll post these warnings, we'd be happy to drop the lawsuit."

McDonald's has found itself on the legal frontlines of late.

This year, it has been sued for failing to advertise the presence in its French fries of dairy and gluten products, which can trigger a severe reaction in some allergy sufferers.

Last year, a federal judge allowed an action to proceed against McDonald's brought by plaintiffs who accuse the burger giant of making them obese.

In 2004, the House of Representatives passed the so-called "Cheeseburger Bill" to ban "frivolous" lawsuits by obesity sufferers against the fast-food industry. But the measure has not received a vote in the Senate.

In Thursday's stock market trade, shares in McDonald's fell 0.58 percent to 39.59 dollars. Burger King Holdings was unchanged at 15.90 dollars.



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Travelers to Africa, Asia returning with new virus

By Matthew Bigg
Reuters
Thu Sep 28, 2006

ATLANTA - Travelers to parts of Africa and Asia are returning with a new mosquito-borne virus and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned on Thursday it could become entrenched in new areas.

Some people returning to Europe, the United States, Canada, Martinique and French Guyana reported cases of Chikungunya fever (CHIKV) in 2006 and large outbreaks have been reported in Indian Ocean islands and in India, according to the report.
The virus first emerged in Tanzania in 1953 and, though no deaths have been recorded, it can cause a debilitating illness whose symptoms include fever, headache, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, muscle and joint pain and rash. No specific drug therapy or vaccine exists to treat it.

"Some risk exists that CHIKV might be introduced into previously nonendemic areas by travelers with viremia, leading to local transmission of the virus," the report said.

It singled out tropical or subtropical areas of the U.S. including the Gulf Coast, Hawaii and the Virgin Islands as particularly at risk.

"Suspected cases should be reported promptly to local and state public health officials and to CDC," it said, adding that in the week after the virus had been detected it was essential that patients be screened from contact with mosquitoes.

"Clinicians should be alert for additional cases among travelers and public health officials should be alert to evidence of local transmission ... through infection of local mosquitoes by a person with viremia," the CDC report said.

The Atlanta-based CDC said it had detected 12 cases since the start of 2005 from travelers returning to the United States from areas where the virus was present.

In one case a man from Minnesota returned from a three-month trip to Somalia and Kenya in May 2005 and hours after arrival began to suffer from headache, malaise and joint pains, mainly in his shoulder and knee.

CDC diagnosed CHIKV infection, treated him and he recovered within weeks.

In another case, a physician in Maryland diagnosed CHIKV fever in a woman who had visited Reunion in the Indian Ocean in October 2005 and stayed for several months during which there was an outbreak on the island.

In the two years to May 2006 around 300,000 suspected CHIKV fever cases were reported on Indian Ocean islands, mainly on Reunion, a French overseas department, but also in Mombasa, Kenya; Madagascar; Mauritius and the Comoros islands.

Most of the 340 imported CHIKV cases in Europe between January and May this year were in France, in part because Reunion is a popular destination for French tourists.

Around 180,000 suspected CHIKV fever cases were also detected in the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Maharashtra since early this year, the report said.



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At least 48 die as Typhoon Xangsane moves across the Philippines

Last Updated: Friday, September 29, 2006 | 6:13 AM ET
The Associated Press

The death toll from a powerful typhoon that cut across the northern Philippines rose Friday to at least 48, with dozens of people missing in floods and landslides, officials said.
Residents mounted a massive cleanup and the financial markets, schools and government offices in the capital, Manila, remained closed for a second workday since Typhoon Xangsane slammed ashore late Wednesday.

Most of the deaths occurred in Laguna province, south of Manila, said Romeo Panisales, a provincial social welfare officer.

At least 19 people were killed in landslides and flash floods in the town of Santa Rosa and another 15 in five other towns. Another 29 people were missing in the same province.

The coast guard reported a yacht with at least six crewmembers was missing in Manila Bay. A crewmember of another boat in Batangas province south of Manila also was reported missing.

Among dozens of missing were at least 30 people in General Trias town, about 40 kilometres south of Manila, where an irrigation dike collapsed as they were watching houses washed away by raging river waters, said Walter Martinez, a local village official.

Police officer Quintin Trinidad said only one body has been recovered.

The entire northern island of Luzon, including Manila, was without power on Thursday but electricity was restored to 36 percent of consumers by Friday morning, the state-run National Transmission Corp. reported.

The typhoon was briefly downgraded to a tropical storm as it moved toward the South China Sea heading to Vietnam, but gained strength again Friday, packing winds of 120 kilometres per hour and gusts of up to 150 kilometres per hour, the Philippine weather bureau reported.

Chinese state media said Friday the typhoon was likely to skirt China's Hainan Island but bring strong winds and heavy rain during the first few days of a weeklong national holiday.

In Manila and neighbouring provinces, residents began the day by cleaning up toppled trees, broken branches, fallen signposts and power pylons.

The capital and two other provinces declared a state of calamity to enable them to draw emergency funds.

Xangsane, the Laotian word for elephant, is the 10th typhoon this season, and the strongest to hit Manila in 11 years.



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In Stunning Display of Common Sense, Experts Declare "Forests Worth Far More Alive Than Dead"

Stephen Leahy
Inter Press Service (IPS)
Wed Sep 27, 2006


TORONTO - Boreal forests provide 250 billion dollars a year in ecosystem services like reducing atmospheric carbon and water filtration, but which have gone unacknowledged by governments and industry, experts say.

Governments need to begin accounting for those services before allowing timber, oil and gas and mining to carve up the world's remaining northern forests, argues the Edmonton, Canada-based ecological economist Mark Anielski.
The globe-spanning boreal forest is the last great forest ecosystem -- larger even than the Amazon. The boreal is also the largest terrestrial storehouse of carbon, making it one of the world's best defences against global climate change.

"The boreal is like a giant carbon bank account. The forests and peatlands store an estimated 67 billion tonnes of carbon in Canada alone -- almost eight times the amount of carbon produced worldwide in the year 2000," Anielski told IPS.

Storing carbon and absorbing carbon dioxide are just one of 16 ecological services the boreal provides.

"We couldn't calculate values for them all -- such as providing food and habitat for bees that perform valuable services like pollination," said the researcher, who presented his findings at Canada's 10th National Forest Congress Sept. 25-27.

Other services like waste recycling and soil formation also went uncounted.

"This 250-billion-dollar estimate is a very conservative number," Anielski noted.

Most of the world's original wild forests have been logged or developed, and today, only about 20 percent remains, mainly in the boreal and Amazon region. Canada's portion of the boreal represents more than 1.3 billion acres -- over 25 percent of the remaining intact forest on the planet.

"If these ecosystem services were counted in Canada, they would amount to roughly nine percent of GDP [Gross Domestic Product]," he said.

That represents more than the GDP contribution of Canada's huge mining sector, at four percent, or its booming energy industry, at 5.6 percent.

Most of the Canadian boreal is in public hands, but just eight percent is officially protected. There is growing pressure to expand industrial logging, hydropower, mining and oil and gas development in the boreal.

"It is high time for everybody to realise that Canada is not an endless sea of virgin forest anymore. Almost half of the forest is either logged or fragmented," said Peter Lee, executive director of Global Forest Watch Canada, an environmental group in Edmonton, Alberta.

Global Forest Watch and the World Resources Institute in Washington are part of an international effort to map and document the extent of the world's remaining forest using satellite data. Satellite pictures also clearly reveal forest cover loss through fires and logging.

New satellite pictures show massive clear-cutting of the boreal forest in the province of Ontario. Despite a government commitment to sustainable forestry, photos from space show big holes in the forest cover exceeding 260 hectares in size, where nothing is left but rocks and broken tree branches.

Ontario allows clear-cutting up to 750 hectares while Russia, home to the majority of the boreal, allows only 50 hectares.

Concern over the Canadian boreal has grown such that a large coalition of environmental groups and industry, including some forestry companies, has joined the Canadian Boreal Framework, which calls for protection of at least 50 percent of the forest.

"Canada is one of the only countries in the world that still has an opportunity to get it right, to protect our boreal forest and ensure a sustainable, conservation-based economy," said Tzeporah Berman of ForestEthics, an environmental group active in Canada, the United States and Chile.

While efforts gain momentum to preserve existing Canadian forests, the U.S. could offset nearly 20 percent of its current emissions of CO2 by turning marginal farmland into forests.

An estimated 115 million acres of land in the lower United States that is poor for agriculture but good for growing trees could store enough carbon to reduce the country's current emissions of 7.075 billion metric tonnes by nearly 20 percent, according to the report "Agricultural and Forestlands: U.S. Carbon Policy Strategies" released recently by the Pew Centre on Global Climate Change.

"There is lots of land out there and we are tapping so very little of our ability to sequester carbon," says report co-author Ken Richards of the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University.

"It would cost about 50 dollars per metric tonne of carbon stored," Richards told IPS.

Most of the 50 dollars per tonne of carbon cost is compensation for landowners.

"Farmers support the idea but only if they can count on receiving money for this over the long term such as decades," he said.

Many U.S. government conservation programmes either fail to get funding at all or are funded for short periods of time. There have been at least nine programmes that could have stored carbon on farms in the past few years but they never received the necessary funding, he said.

This re-foresting of the United States would bring many other benefits, such as erosion control, water quality protection and improved wildlife habitat.

"Over longer time horizons, agricultural and forestlands can produce biomass-based substitutes for fossil fuels, thereby further reducing emissions," the Pew report notes.

It would also be good for farmers in the U.S., where agricultural overproduction has kept crop prices low for many years.

"The challenge is how to make this (reforestation) happen quickly and effectively," said Richards.



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'One degree and we're done for'

27 September 2006
New Scientist

"Further global warming of 1 °C defines a critical threshold. Beyond that we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know."

So says Jim Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. Hansen and colleagues have analysed global temperature records and found that surface temperatures have been increasing by an average of 0.2 °C every decade for the past 30 years. Warming is greatest in the high latitudes of the northern hemisphere, particularly in the sub-Arctic boreal forests of Siberia and North America. Here the melting of ice and snow is exposing darker surfaces that absorb more sunlight and increase warming, creating a positive feedback.

Earth is already as warm as at any time in the last 10,000 years, and is within 1 °C of being its hottest for a million years, says Hansen's team.

"Large amounts of greenhouse gases are currently locked in the permafrost and if released could accelerate the greenhouse effect," says Balzter.

Hansen's paper concludes that the effects of this positive feedback could be huge. "In past eras, the release of methane from melting permafrost and destabilised sediments on continental shelves has probably been responsible for some of the largest warmings in the Earth's history," he says. [...]




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Trinidad shaken by Magnitude 6 earthquake

Bloomberg Newshttp://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/caribbean/sfl-929trinidadquake,0,6965695.story?coll=sfla-news-caribbean
Posted September 29 2006, 11:04 AM EDT

A magnitude-6.0 earthquake struck 26 miles north-west of Port of Spain in Trinidad, the U.S. Geological Survey said in an e-mailed alert.

The quake struck at 9:08 a.m. local time and the epicenter was 39 miles (63 kilometers) east-north-east of Guiria in Venezuela.
There were no immediate reports of major damage in Venezuela, Agence France-Presse reported, citing Gustavo Malava, director of the country's seismological institute. Tremors were felt across most of eastern Venezuela, AFP said.

In Port of Spain buildings swayed and some schools were evacuated, Sky News reported.



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Less Bang for Your Buck


Ford Credit to Cut 2,000 Jobs

AP
Thursday September 28, 2006

DEARBORN, Mich. -- Ford Motor Co.'s financing arm said Thursday that it would cut about 2,000 salaried jobs in the United States and Canada as it consolidates operations.

Ford Motor Credit said it would fold its 59 U.S. branches into six existing service centers by the end of 2007. A similar structure is being considered for Canada, which has seven branches and one service center, the company said.

The 2,000 job cuts -- which the company said would be achieved through attrition, early retirements and layoffs -- amount to a 23 percent reduction of its 8,600-person work force in the U.S. and Canada.
Ford Credit spokeswoman Chris Solie said the job cuts will be completed by the end of 2007.

"As a company with strong business fundamentals, we believe this new structure will further strengthen our operational effectiveness," Chairman and Chief Executive Mike Bannister said in a statement. "Our strong collections processes will continue while we enhance our originations of automotive financing contracts. The North American restructuring also will provide us with the flexibility and scale necessary to adapt to any changes in business conditions."

The six consolidated centers will manage all back-office functions, such as checking customers' credit, Solie said. Sales employees who work directly with dealers will remain in local markets.

Solie said the job cuts are completely separate from Ford Motor's own restructuring. The automaker said earlier this month that it would slash 10,000 white-collar jobs by the end of 2008 and offer buyouts to all unionized employees.

Ford Credit has restructured operations in North America and several other countries over the past decade. Since 2003, it has closed about 110 branches in the U.S. and Canada.



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Economy Grows at a 2.6 Percent Pace, even slower than predicted

By JEANNINE AVERSA
AP Economics Writer
Sep 28, 2006

WASHINGTON - Economic growth clocked in at a 2.6 percent pace in the spring, even slower than previously thought.

The latest reading on the gross domestic product, released Thursday by the Commerce Department, reinforced expectations that the economy is settling into a spell of somewhat sluggish activity.

The growth rate was weaker than the 2.9 percent figure estimated for the April-to-June quarter a month ago. Many economists were predicting that this estimate would hold and thus there would be no revision to the overall GDP figure.
Gross domestic product measures the value of all goods and services produced within the United States and is considered the best barometer of the country' economic standing.

The government said the downgraded reading for the second quarter was mostly related to less inventory building by businesses. Still, the weakness in the housing sector was vivid. Investment in home building plunged at an annualized rate of 11.1 percent in the spring, the most in 11 years.

The second-quarter slowdown comes after the economy sprinted ahead in the first three months of this year, expanding at a 5.6 percent pace, the strongest spurt in 2 1/2 years.

The economy has shifted into a slower gear due to a number of factors, including the cooling of the once sizzling housing market, the toll of once surging energy prices and the impact of the Federal Reserve's two-year string of interest rate increases.

Economic growth is expected to stay somewhat subdued through the rest of this year.

The National Association for Business Economics is forecasting the economy to expand at a pace of 2.6 percent in the current July-to- September quarter and in the final three months of the year.

With the November elections looming, voters' perceptions of the economy's health may influence their choices at the polls.

President Bush's approval rating on the economy is at 39 percent, according to an AP-Ipsos poll. That remains near his lowest ratings.



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Dow Ends Up 29 After Reaching Milestone

By Ellen Simon
AP Business Writer
Thursday September 28, 2006

NEW YORK -- The Dow Jones industrial average reached a milestone Thursday in Wall Street's nearly seven-year recovery from corporate upheaval, economic recession and terrorism, briefly trading above its record high close of 11,722.98 set on Jan. 14, 2000.
The index of 30 blue chip stocks surpassed its record, rising to a high of 11,728.46 in early morning trading. Stocks closed only modestly higher amid a dearth of news that could motivate investors; still, it was the market's fourth straight advance.

"These numbers sometimes tend to act as magnets and the market is sometimes pulled up toward it," said Russ Koesterich, senior portfolio manager at Barclays Global Investments in San Francisco.

The Dow rose 29.21, or 0.25 percent, to 11,718.45. It has yet to reach its all-time trading high of 11,750.28, also set Jan. 14, 2000.

The broader Standard & Poor's 500 and Nasdaq composite indexes are far off their all-time highs, although their records were reached around the same time.

The S&P, which gained 2.56, or 0.19 percent, to close at 1,339.15, is still about 188 points below its closing high of 1,527.46, but is at a 5 1/2-year high. The Nasdaq, which rose 6.63, or 0.29 percent, to 2,270.02, is not expected to approach its high close of 5,048.62 any time soon.

The Dow, whose large-cap stocks range from aluminum producer Alcoa Inc. to discount retailer Wal-Mart Stores Inc., was the first big index to recover because it did not rise as much in value as the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq in 2000.

The last time the Dow stood at these levels, Wall Street was propelled by wide-eyed investors eager for a slice of the wealth being generated by the dot-com and housing booms. Traders raced to buy any stocks that looked remotely promising, catapulting the major indexes sharply higher.

But after early 2000, the market began to crumble, slowly at first as doubts about the high-tech boom set in. Signs of recession accelerated the decline, and then the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and their aftermath, including earnings declines and losses in many industries, sent stocks plunging.

It didn't stop there -- corporate scandals including the collapse of Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc. also shook Wall Street. The combination of all these factors devastated stocks, sending the Dow to a five-year closing low of 7,286.27 on Oct. 9, 2002, nearly 38 percent off its record high close.

Wall Street made its way back slowly, with investors behaving more cautiously and limiting their exposure to risk as they slowly regained faith in stocks. What has also helped is more than four years of sturdy corporate profit growth despite the threat that energy prices and interest rates would hurt consumer spending and companies' bottom lines.

More recently, the Federal Reserve's decision to pause after more than two years of interest rate hikes and evidence the economy is moderating, not heading for a hard landing, gave investors the impetus to push the Dow past its high close.

On Thursday, the economic news was mixed, and didn't appear to have much impact on trading. The Commerce Department revised its gross domestic product number for spring downward to 2.6 percent from 2.9 percent.

Meanwhile, the Labor Department reported that the number of new people signing up for unemployment benefits dropped last week. The department said new applications filed for unemployment insurance declined by a seasonally adjusted 6,000 to 316,000 for the work week ending Sept. 23. The latest showing on claims was close to economists' expectations for claims to total around 315,000 last week.

Bonds fell Thursday, with the yield on the 10-year Treasury note at 4.61 percent, up from 4.59 percent Thursday. The dollar rose against other major currencies. Gold prices also rose.

Crude oil futures also fell. A barrel of light crude settled at $62.76, down 20 cents, on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

In corporate news, General Motors Corp. rose 78 cents to $33.06 after dissident shareholder Kirk Kerkorian told GM he is interested in buying up to 12 million more shares of the company as he presses the automaker to enter a three-way alliance with Renault and Nissan.

Hewlett-Packard Co., which is drawing scrutiny from Congress over a corporate spying probe, rose 58 cents to $35.97 after the company announced the resignation of general counsel Ann Baskins.

American Greetings Corp., the nation's second-largest greeting cards maker, fell $2.21 to $22.83 after swinging to a loss in the second quarter from a year-ago profit, due in part to new marketing and operational initiatives.

Advancing issues led decliners 8 to 7 on the New York Stock Exchange, where consolidated volume was 2.36 billion shares, down from 2.76 billion Wednesday.

The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies rose 0.02, or less than 0.01 percent, to 732.56.

Overseas, Japan's Nikkei stock average rose 0.48 percent. Britain's FTSE 100 rose 0.69 percent, Germany's DAX index slipped 0.01 percent, and France's CAC-40 gained 0.13 percent.



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Canadian Students squeezed by soaring education costs

Last Updated: Thursday, September 28, 2006 | 1:45 PM ET
CBC News

While many Canadians are struggling to pay for the soaring costs of higher education the numbers indicate that many students can expect a high return on their investment, according to Statistics Canada studies.
The federal agency on Thursday released its Back-to-school factbook, culling information on tuition, student spending and debt from a series of recently released education studies.

The compilation study indicates that rising tuition fees are a difficult burden for students to carry. However, researchers noted that university graduates enjoyed lower unemployment rates.

"In 2004, the unemployment rate for 25- to 29-year-olds with less than high school was 15 per cent compared to nine per cent for high school graduates, six per cent for college or trade graduates and seven per cent for university graduates," the researchers noted. "Clearly, education plays a big role in overall lifetime earnings."

Paying for education continues to be an uphill climb however with many parents miscalculating how their children will pay for tuition and living expenses.

For example, parents of 40 per cent of children expected that their child would win a scholarship or award based on their academic performance. In fact, only 15 per cent of post-secondary students reported receiving such an award in 2002.

Similarly, the federal agency also noted that parents of 11 per cent of children expected their child to take out loans to pay for school. However, 27 per cent of postsecondary students reported borrowing money from a bank, family, friend or spouse.

More summer and part-time jobs

These percentages are in part a reflection of rising tuition costs, which are outpacing the rate of inflation, according to a study released earlier this month.

Undergraduate students will have to pay an average of 3.2 per cent more in tuition this year than they did last year, the federal agency said. Inflation was 2.4 per cent from July 2005 to July 2006, according to the Consumer Price Index.

Undergraduate students will pay an average of $4,347 in tuition fees this year, up from $4,211 last year.

Researchers noted that more students are taking on summer and part-time jobs to help pay for their education costs, with nearly half of students reporting they had worked during the 2004 school year. By comparison, in 1976 only 28 per cent of students reported working.

"Post-secondary education costs are rising and the evidence suggests that, for many students, their personal savings and earnings during the school year are insufficient to cover the costs of tuition, books and supplies," researchers Jeannine Usalcas and Geoff Bowlby said in their report Students in the Labour Market.

Rising tuition and living expenses are leaving more and more students graduating with student debt. In 2000, about 46 per cent of college and university graduates held government student loan debt with an average balance due of $18,900, the federal agency said.

Despite the financial hardships, university enrolment levels have continued to rise. Between 1992 and 2002, enrolment rose 18 per cent.



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Britain becomes 'never, never land' as personal debt runs out of control

UK Independent
29/09/2006

UK borrowers account for one third of unsecured debt in Western Europe

On average, a Briton has twice the debt of a European

Total consumer debt in the UK is at a record £1.3 trillion

New debt last year came to an unprecedented £215bn

Citizens Advice faced 1.25 million new debt cases last year - the figure is rising
Britain's "buy now, pay later" consumer culture has led to unprecedented levels of personal debt. The average Briton now has more than twice as much unsecured borrowing - including overdrafts, personal loans and credit card debt - as the typical European, according to a report published by Datamonitor.

The market research analysts said yesterday that even before mortgage borrowing was considered, the average Briton owes £3,175, compared to the average debt in Europe of £1,588. Datamonitor said Britons had "an insatiable appetite for credit", taking on new unsecured loans of £215bn last year alone.

Borrowers from the UK now account for a third of all unsecured debt in western Europe, Datamonitor added. Paul Marsh, author of the report, said: "While the UK enjoys a buy-now pay-later culture ... many major European countries have a culture of saving and frugality. Countries such as France and Germany are particularly debt adverse."

The boom in unsecured lending has boosted total consumer debt, including mortgages, to almost £1.3trn, close to three times the level of borrowing in 1997, when Labour came to power.

The consumer borrowing crisis is set to become the most pressing concern for Gordon Brown's successor as Chancellor of the Exchequer. George Osborne, the shadow Chancellor, said: "Gordon Brown is presiding over an economy increasingly built on debt. This has left many families vulnerable to the triple blow of rising mortgage rates, taxes and energy bills."

The debt crisis is even hitting young borrowers, according to separate research published yesterday by One Advice, the debt advisers. The company said the average 18 to 24-year-old now owes £2,860 in unsecured borrowing. One Advice said the average figures obscured worrying individual cases. It said 108,000 18 to 24-year-olds had credit card debts of more than £5,000.

There are increasingly worrying signs that many borrowers are struggling to stay on top of repayments. The average person has debts that total 150 per cent of their annual income, according to the Bank of England, half as much again as in 1997.

The Bank believes around one million households face problems coping with debt repayments - around 10 per cent of the four in 10 households that have unsecured borrowing.

A report from Citizens Advice earlier this month said 770,000 mortgage borrowers had missed at least one mortgage repayment over the past year, while two million homeowners said they were concerned their finances would not stretch to cover their debts.

The charity said younger people were particularly vulnerable, with mortgage-holders aged 21 to 24 the most likely to default.

The latest figures from the Government's Insolvency Service, published last month, have also unnerved debt campaigners. The numbers becoming insolvent in the second quarter of the year reached 26,000, a 66 per cent rise on the same period in 2005.

Borrowing difficulties have already begun to affect the housing market. Britain's housing boom has saddled newer homeowners with far larger mortgages. Figures from the Hay Group consultancy , published yesterday, showed the typical borrower now spends 51 per cent of monthly pay on mortgage repayments.

The Council of Mortgage Lenders said the number of homes repossessed in the first half of the year was 8,140, the most for more than five years.

At the same time, there is evidence that Britain's biggest banks, which have all reported a rise in bad debt in recent months, are cracking down on consumer credit. Two weeks ago, for example, HSBC said it would introduce annual reviews of all its customers' overdrafts, with cuts to many borrowers' overdraft limits likely to follow.

Alice Douglas, 42, writer: 'We were happy with a £60 TV. Now we spend £1,500'

"Seven years ago, I moved to Wales for a change of lifestyle," says Alice Douglas, 42, a writer from Snowdonia. "I bought a 4,000 sq ft church for £54,000, which was incredibly cheap, because it needed renovation work, but I had never done a big building project before. I thought I'd be able to do the structural work for £80,000 but I've had to spend £300,000. I didn't think of the cost, and even things like floor tiles for the kitchen ended up costing £5,000 because they were limestone, and I spent £25,000 on windows.

"I used every credit card I could get. At one point, I had 10 different credit cards with £8,000 on most of them, so that my debt was up to £60,000. It was all about to collapse until my mortgage company valued my property, which has massively increased in price.

"I still have about £30,000 on my credit cards, but I've just learned to juggle them. Once you've got them, there's too much temptation and you get used to a lifestyle where you want to have lots of things. We used to be happy with a £60 television set, but now we spend £1,500 on a 38-inch LCD.

"You get sucked into it, and get used to spending large amounts without thinking about it, because it's on a card. It does make a different because it doesn't feel like real money. If it did feel real, it would feel obscene. I went to London recently and spent £3,000 in Whistles, on clothes. I'm about to buy another property with an 85 per cent mortgage and I'll get the deposit on credit card.

"It's a gamble but it could pay off. If you're shrewd, you can use it to your advantage. My credit rating is very good because I borrow a lot but I'm able to make my payments. It used to stress me out but now I think, if I lose everything, it wouldn't be the end of the world."



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Do You Like the New Jackboots?


Senate OKs detainee interrogation bill

By ANNE PLUMMER FLAHERTY
Associated Press
September 29, 2006

WASHINGTON - Republicans succeeded this week in pushing through a key piece of President Bush's anti-terror agenda, passing along party lines legislation that would endorse the military program to detain and interrogate terrorists.

The administration's allies fell short, however, in their efforts to authorize the terrorism surveillance program championed by Bush. That bill would have to be finished after lawmakers return for a lame-duck session following the November elections.
Both chambers this week approved legislation that sets up "military commissions" to prosecute terrorists. It also would prohibit the severe abuse of detainees, like mutilation and rape, but grant the president leeway to decide which other interrogation techniques are permissible.

The Senate's 65-34 vote on Thursday followed a House vote of 253-168 on a nearly identical measure a day earlier. To avoid having to reconcile differences between the two bills, which were described as minor, the House planned to vote Friday on the Senate bill and send that version to the president to sign.

"The Senate sent a strong signal to the terrorists that we will continue using every element of national power to pursue our enemies and to prevent attacks on America," Bush said in a statement Thursday night.

The White House failed to help bridge differences between the Senate and the House on the eavesdropping program. The House, on a 232-191 vote Thursday, approved a bill to grant legal status to the warrantless wiretapping program with new restrictions. The Senate bill was different enough that efforts to reach a compromise on the two measures was unlikely before the elections.

Most Democrats opposed the detainee bill, contending that Republicans were pushing through a sloppy measure to sell voters, but not because it made sense. GOP policies on national security "may have been tough, but they certainly weren't smart," said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.

"I'm convinced that future generations will view passage of this bill as a grave error," added Reid, D-Nev.

Added Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., "We are being asked to consider legislation that will determine how our troops and personnel, foreign troops and personnel, as well as innocent bystanders will be treated when captured during conflict."

But Republicans said passage of the bill would withstand court scrutiny and the test of time.

"In this new era of threats, where the stark and sober reality is that America must confront international terrorists committed to the destruction of our way of life, this bill is absolutely necessary," said Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga.

The overall bill would prohibit war crimes and define such atrocities as rape and torture but otherwise would allow the president to interpret the Geneva Conventions, the treaty that sets standards for the treatment of war prisoners.

Under the bill, a terrorist held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could be tried by a military commission so long as he was afforded certain rights, such as the ability to confront evidence given to the jury and having access to defense counsel.

Those subject to commission trials would be any person "who has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its co-belligerents." Proponents say this definition would not apply to U.S. citizens.

The bill would eliminate some rights common in military and civilian courts. For example, the commission would be allowed to consider hearsay evidence so long as a judge determined it was reliable. Hearsay is barred from civilian courts.

The legislation also says the president can "interpret the meaning and application" of international standards for prisoner treatment, a provision intended to allow him to authorize aggressive interrogation methods that might otherwise be seen as illegal by international courts.



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Wiretap bill sets up election-year issue

By LAURIE KELLMAN
Associated Press Writer
September 29, 2006

WASHINGTON - The House approved a bill Thursday that would grant legal status to President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program with new restrictions. Republicans called it a test before the election of whether Democrats want to fight or coddle terrorists.
"The Democrats' irrational opposition to strong national security policies that help keep our nation secure should be of great concern to the American people," Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said in a statement after the bill passed 232-191.

"To always have reasons why you just can't vote 'yes,' I think speaks volumes when it comes to which party is better able and more willing to take on the terrorists and defeat them," Boehner said.

Democrats shot back that the war on terrorism shouldn't be fought at the expense of civil and human rights. The bill approved by the House, they argued, gives the president too much power and leaves the law vulnerable to being overturned by a court.

"It is ceding the president's argument that Congress doesn't matter in this area," said Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., gives legal status under certain conditions to Bush's warrantless wiretapping of calls and e-mails between people on U.S. soil making calls or sending e-mails and those in other countries.

Under the measure, the president would be authorized to conduct such wiretaps if he:

- Notifies the House and Senate intelligence committees and congressional leaders.

- Believes an attack is imminent and later explains the reason and names the individuals and groups involved.

- Renews his certification every 90 days.

The Senate also could vote on a similar bill before Congress recesses at the end of the week. Leaders concede that differences between the versions are so significant they cannot reconcile them into a final bill that can be delivered to Bush before the Nov. 7 congressional elections.

For its part, the White House announced it strongly supported passage of the House version but wasn't satisfied with it, adding that the administration "looks forward to working with Congress to strengthen the bill as it moves through the legislative process."

But with Congress giving Bush the other half of his September anti-terrorism agenda - a bill setting conditions on how terrorism suspects are to be detained, interrogated and tried - Republicans shifted from lawmaking to campaign mode.

After the House voted 253-168 to set rules on tough interrogations and military tribunal proceedings, Speaker
Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., was even more critical than Boehner.

"Democrat Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and 159 of her Democrat colleagues voted today in favor of more rights for terrorists," Hastert said in a statement. "So the same terrorists who plan to harm innocent Americans and their freedom worldwide would be coddled, if we followed the Democrat plan. "

Retorted Pelosi: "I think the speaker is a desperate man for him to say that. Would you think that anyone in our country wants to coddle terrorists?"

She and other Democratic critics of the GOP's September anti-terrorism agenda contend the Republican-written bills make Bush's programs vulnerable to being overturned in court. More broadly, they argue the legislation reflects the White House's willingness to fight the war on terrorism at the expense of civil and human rights.

A Democratic majority in either House would set the balance right, Democrats say. "In 40 days, we can put an end to this nonsense," said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass, referring to the election.

A federal judge in Detroit who struck down the warrantless surveillance program turned aside a government request for an indefinite stay Thursday. U.S. Judge Anna Diggs Taylor said the government could have a week to appeal.



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Carter: U.S. in more danger of terrorism

AP
Thu Sep 28, 2006

FALLON, Nev. - Former President Jimmy Carter said Wednesday major policy changes are needed because the Iraq war has divided the nation "almost as much as Vietnam."

"So there's no doubt that our country is in much more danger now from terrorism than it would have been if we would have done what we should have done and stayed in Afghanistan," he said on the campaign trail with his son, Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Jack Carter.
The former president said the Bush administration made a "terrible mistake" by invading Iraq and diverting troops from Afghanistan.

Jack Carter criticized his opponent, Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., for supporting the Iraq war. Both Carters also said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should go.

"I think he's one of the worst secretaries of defense we've ever had," the former president said of Rumsfeld. "Almost every decision he has made has aggravated his military subordinates and has also proved to be a mistake."



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Military Commission Bill Would Authorize The Indefinite Detention Of Immigrants - Without Any Access To Courts

Center for Constitutional Rights

Synopsis

Congress is on the verge of passing a military commissions bill that would authorize the indefinite detention, without access to the courts, of immigrants detained inside or outside of the United States-even if they are not charged with any crime. What began as legislation to regulate the trials of men at Guantánamo has grown so sweeping that it would encompass any non-U.S. citizen picked up anywhere in the world, even permanent legal residents detained inside the United States.
This is being voted on in the House of Representatives today and will likely be voted on in the Senate on Thursday. Senators Specter and Levin will be introducing a bipartisan amendment to remove a provision that denies these immigrants access to courts. It is essential that you call your Senators and Representatives and urge them to vote for the Specter Amendment to remove the jurisdiction-stripping provision from the military commissions bill. Particular Senators that we are targeting are Senators Hagel, Lugar, Sununu, Chaffee, Lieberman, DeWine, Collins, Snowe, and Menendez.

The White House made drastic changes to the military commissions bill over the weekend. The new version of the bill includes an expansive definition of an unlawful enemy combatant to include anyone determined by a tribunal under the authority of the President or the Defense Secretary to be an unlawful enemy combatant. The bill would deny anyone determined to be an enemy combatant - or anyone "awaiting such determination" - the right to challenge their detention, treatment, or conditions of confinement in court.

Recent mass detentions of non-citizens in this country give us reason to fear that this unchecked authority will lead to rampant racial and religious profiling, prolonged detention without reason, physical and psychological abuse. The Government's own investigations have produced evidence that:

# Shortly after September 11, 2001, hundreds of non-citizens were swept up in the United States and detained in connection to the terrorism investigation without any evidence to connect them to terrorism or crime.
# These men were arrested and detained based on their Muslim faith, their Arab or South Asian descent, and their immigration status, rather than any evidence to connect them to terrorism.
# The "9-11 detainees" were imprisoned in the United States until they were cleared of any connection to terrorism by the FBI. This clearance usually took months, and some detainees were held for over a year.
# During the detention period, many men were held in the most restrictive confinement that exists in the federal system. They were locked down 23 to 24 hours a day, hand-cuffed and shackled, deprived of sleep, beaten and verbally harassed, and denied the opportunity to practice their religion.
# Since the men were released, at least two federal court judges have ruled that the treatment of the detainees would constitute violations of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution.


There are over 35 million non-citizens currently living in the United States. This provision would allow any one of them to be imprisoned indefinitely without their day in court. There is reason to fear that they could be investigated, detained, interrogated, and tortured without judicial remedy. While U.S. law prohibits torture, this bill would deny access to the courts to bring a torture claim.

Recent history shows that this power will not be exercised with restraint, but will substitute racial and religious profiling for true suspicion and evidence of wrongdoing. Please act now to ensure that out Constitution continues to protect all who reside in this Country. Call your members of Congress immediately, especially those listed with contact information below.

Chafee, Lincoln- (R - RI)
Class I
141A RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-2921
Web Form: chafee.senate.gov/webform.htm
Fax: (202) 228-2853
Chief of Staff: David Griswold
Legis. Dir.: Deb Brayton
Military LA: William Ralph

Collins, Susan M.- (R - ME)
Class II
461 DIRKSEN SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-2693
Web Form: collins.senate.gov/public/continue.cfm?FuseAction=Contact...
Phone: (202) 224-2523
Chief of Staff: Steve Abbott
Legis. Dir.: Jane Alonso
Military LA: MacKenzie Eaglen

DeWine, Mike- (R - OH)
Class I
140 RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-2315
Web Form: dewine.senate.gov
Fax: (202) 224-6519
Chief of Staff: Laurel Pressler
Legis. Dir.: Paul Palagyi
Military LA: Stacie Oliver

Hagel, Chuck- (R - NE)
Class II
248 RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-4224
Web Form: hagel.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.Home
Fax: (202) 224-5213
Chief of Staff: Lou Ann Linehan
Legis. Dir.: Jill Konz
Military LA: Fran DuFrayne

Lieberman, Joseph I.- (D - CT)
lass I
706 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-4041
Web Form: lieberman.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm?regarding=issue
fax: 202-224-9750
Chief of Staff: Clarine Nardi Riddle; phone:
(202) 224-4041
Legislative Director: Joe Goffman
Military Legislative Assistant: Fred Downey

Lugar, Richard G.- (R - IN)
Class I
306 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-4814
E-mail: senator_lugar@lugar.senate.gov
Fax: (202) 228-0360
Chief of Staff: Marty Morris
Legis. Dir.: Chris Geeslin
Military LA: Keri Maloney

Menendez, Robert- (D - NJ)
502 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-4744
Web Form: menendez.senate.gov/contact/contact.cfm
Fax: (202) 228-2197
Chief of Staff: Ivan Zapien
Legis. Dir.: Chris Schloesser
Military LA: Jessica Lewis

Sununu, John E.- (R - NH)
Class II
111 RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-2841
Web Form: www.sununu.senate.gov/webform.html
Fax: (202) 228-4131
Chief of Staff: Paul J. Collins, Jr
Legis. Dir.: Jamie Burnett
Military LA: Dave Cuzzi



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A New Security Strategy For The United States

by Martin Walker
UPI Editor Emeritus
Washington (UPI) Sep 27, 2006

A new national security strategy for the United States in the 21st century that would cut back sharply on the U.S. veto at the United Nations, or even replace the U.N. altogether with a new Concert of Democracies, was launched in Washington Wednesday by a high-powered bipartisan group.


The new strategy seeks to absorb the rising powers like China, India, Brazil and others into a law-based global economic and diplomatic structure that avoids open conflict by making them stakeholders within the system, and thus encouraged in their own interests to play by the rules.

Known as the Princeton Project, the venture lasted over two years and brought in over 400 participants, and was chaired jointly by the Reagan administration's former Secretary of State George Shultz and by former President Bill Clinton's national security adviser, Tony Lake.

The strategy they have devised, titled 'Liberty Under Law," seeks to chart of long-term course in the way that George F. Kennan in 1946 drafted the concept of "containment" that broadly defined U.S. policy in the Cold War for the next 45 years.

"The difference is that we soon came to realize that there is now no single threat as there was in 1946, so there can be no single theme like "containment," Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson school of public and international affairs and one of the directors of the project, and a former president of the American Society for International Law.

"There are now a series of threats, including global terrorism, nuclear proliferation, pandemics, the rise of Asia, the energy crisis and threats emanating from the Middle East becoming too numerous to count," Slaughter added.

The Princeton Project sees many of these threats as distinct and with separate causes and actors, while being inter-connected as part of the constellation of threats that will shape the future U.S. security agenda. For example, it places the energy threat within a wider regional and environmental context.

"When the U.S. purchases large amounts of petroleum from the Middle East, two things happen," the report says. "First, an enormous amount of wealth is transferred from Americans to autocratic regimes, stifling reform in those countries and possibly strengthening the military capabilities of some of our potential adversaries. Second, the oil we consumer -- at over $150 per barrel, when U.S. defense spending dedicated to keep oil flowing is factored into the price -- contributes to climate change and the degradation of our environment. Breaking up this axis of vice must be a key priority for America."

The Project begins from the perception that the network of international institutions that was established after 1945 is broken, and in consequence the global political and economic system they helped produce needs to be rethought. Institutions like the U.N., the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, NATO need fundamental reform, and should bring in important new players like India, Brazil, South Africa and Egypt and possibly Iran into leadership roles.

"The goal is a community of democracies living in liberty and under the law," Slaughter said. "But we are not simplistic about democracy. We recognize, for example, that you need a basic income level for a democracy to be stable. We do not see elections as necessarily the best or only definition of democracy. Indeed, in some countries simple good governance and accountability and the encouragement of civil society might precede elections. The priority should be what the U.S. founding fathers called 'the blessings of ordered liberty.'"

The Princeton Project advocates a fundamental re-ordering of the U.N. Security Council to include riding new powers, and to modify the veto. Currently, any one of the five permanent members (the U.S., Russia, China, France and Britain) may cast a veto on any resolution. The Project suggests that vetoes should be abolished on matters of instant action, like sending peace-keepers to Sudan or Kosovo. But the veto should be retained on declaratory resolutions, like those resolutions condemning Israel that the U.S. routinely vetoes.

Slaughter and her co-director, Princeton professor John Ikenberry, recognize that this kind of reform will not be easy, and that great powers will jealously seek to guard their right of veto, and that Russia and China are unlikely to forego their current power to block any U.N. action. But if the U.N. thus becomes increasingly irrelevant, the Princeton project suggests that the U.N. could be replaced by a new Concert of Democracies as a source of legitimacy for international action.

Any nation could join the Concert, if it agrees to abide by the rules of the founding Treaty. These rule out the use of military force against another member of the Concert, require regular free and fair multi-party elections, with civil and human rights enforced by an independent judiciary. The Concert declares that states have a responsibility to protect their citizens from avoidable catastrophe, including genocide, ethnic cleansing and deliberate starvation, and when states fail to do so the international community has a duty to intervene.

"The Concert of Democracies could be a pressure group to reform the U.N., or if that fails, possibly to replace it," Slaughter suggested.

"It is clear that in an age nuclear proliferation and of failed or failing states and global terror networks one cannot rule out the preventive use of force. But if used unilaterally, this is very dangerous," she added. "One needs some form of international mandate, and if the U.N. is structurally incapable of proving one, then we have to think of other ways to establish a multi-lateral legitimacy."

The participants in the national security project included former cabinet officials and senior White House staff, academics, diplomats, economists, retired military staff and Pentagon officials, international lawyers and a small group of journalists, including this UPI columnist.

Although the Princeton Project does not spell out any specific goal to maintain U.S. primacy (unlike the Bush administration's two most recent National Security papers) in a U.S.-led and U.S.-devised global system, it has been drafted with U.S. vulnerabilities foremost in mind. And it stresses that "the basic U.S. strategy must be to protect the American people and the American way of life."

"The U.S. must build a stronger protective infrastructure -- throughout or society, our government, and the wider world -- that helps prevent threats and limits them once they materialize," it says. "We must work through networks of security officials to contain immediate threats before they reach our shores and should consider defining our border protections beyond our actual physical borders.



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Life in George-uh


Authorities: 2 priests stole from parish

By LAURA WIDES-MUNOZ
Associated Press
Thu Sep 28, 2006

DELRAY BEACH, Fla. - Two Roman Catholic priests stole millions in offerings and gifts made to their parish over several years, authorities said Thursday.

Monsignor John Skehan, who was pastor at St. Vincent Ferrer Catholic Church for four decades, was arrested Wednesday night. Prosecutors say he and the Rev. Francis Guinan stole a total of $8.6 million from the church, using the money to buy property, vacations and other assets, investigators said.
The 79-year-old Skehan was arrested at Palm Beach International Airport as he returned from Ireland and was being held on $400,000 bond on grand theft charges.

Guinan, who succeeded Skehan three years ago, has disappeared and was being sought, authorities said. He is alleged to have stolen an unspecified amount of money to take gambling trips to Las Vegas and the Bahamas.

Guinan had an "intimate relationship" with a former bookkeeper at St. Patrick's Catholic Church, where he previously worked, according to a police report. Denis Hamel, the chief financial officer for the Diocese of Palm Beach, told police Guinan had paid the woman's American Express bills and her child's school tuition with funds from St. Vincent's that were not recorded on the church books.

"Millions of dollars that should have gone to helping the homeless folks or the school itself" didn't, said Amos Rojas Jr., a special agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

An anonymous tip in June 2005 led police and the church to launch the investigation.

An audit of church books detected the theft and the investigation continues to find possible misappropriation, said Preston Mighdoll, assistant state attorney in Palm Beach County.

Investigators say Skehan created several "slush" accounts, and instructed church workers to funneled there to hide it from the Palm Beach Diocese. The thefts began in 2001, police said.

Skehan is charged with grand theft of $100,000 or more between September 2001 and January 2006, while Guinan faces the same charge for activity from September 2003 to April 2005.

Specifics about where most of the $8.6 million went or precisely how it was taken were not included in court records.

Skehan's attorney, Ken Johnson, said he thought the multimillion dollar figure was "over sensationalized."

"My reading of the probable cause affidavit indicates that the amount of money he's actually accused of misappropriating amounts to about $325,000, which is a far cry from $8.6 million," Johnson said.

Bishop Gerald M. Barbarito of the Diocese of Palm Beach said the two priests were placed on administrative leave and will not have permission "to exercise publicly their priestly ministry" until the criminal matter is resolved.

Parishioners reacted with surprise to the news Thursday. Joan Kopins was among a small group of parishioners leaving afternoon Mass at St. Vincent Ferrer Church, which she has attended for more than 20 years. She wiped away tears as she got into her car.

"You can't judge because you haven't walked in their shoes," Kopins said.

Comment: The crooked clergy will apparently be offered top positions on the Bush economic team.

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Louisville Paper Gets Disc With 232 Photos of Nude National Guard Women

By E&P Staff and The Associated Press
September 28, 2006

LOUISVILLE, KY. -- U.S. Army officials are taking a close look at whether women in a Kentucky National Guard unit posed nude for pictures with their M-16s and other military equipment, authorities said.

A local newspaper reported that it had a disc containing 232 of the photos, which they did not publish, and do not plan to publish, E&P has learned.

Andrew Wolfson, who disclosed the existence of the disc in the Louisville Courier-Journal today, told E&P it came from an "anonymous" source.

"This is not the kind of activity condoned by the command leadership of the Kentucky National Guard," Lt. Col. Phil Miller, a spokesman for the Kentucky Guard, told the newspaper. The allegations were reported to the commander of the 410th Quartermaster unit a week or so before the company shipped out for Iraq on Aug. 26 from Camp Shelby, Miss.
The newspaper reported a compact disc contained 232 photographs of at least a half-dozen nude and seminude women in various poses with military rifles and covering their breasts with American flag decals. An e-mail said the women photographed were from the Kentucky Guard.

Miller said 11 of the 107 soldiers who deployed with the Danville-based unit are women.

"The CD containing the photos was sent to the paper via mail from an anonymous source. After doing background checks and some investigating, the source was deemed credible," Wolfson told E & P.

When questioned about the photos, he added, military officials did not ask to see them or get the paper's copy. He assumes, therefore, that the military has its own copy.

Several television outlets have asked the paper to release the photos, but Wolfson says: "We've been asked for it by several TV outlets, but obviously haven't given it."

It is unclear where the photographs were taken, but some of the women are shown wearing dog tags. And in many photographs, recent inoculations, like those given in preparation for service abroad, are visible.

One woman was photographed partially clad in a military uniform, and a last name is visible on the blouse. Seitz said the Kentucky Guard wouldn't confirm whether a woman with that name works in the unit.

Lt. Col. Rich Steele, a spokesman for the First Army at Fort Gillem, Ga., said that if the allegations are proved, punishment could range from informal reprimands to courts-martial. He said the investigation is being conducted in Iraq.

Maj. Dylan Seitz, a staff lawyer for the Kentucky Guard in Frankfort, said commanders there don't know how many soldiers allegedly were involved, who took the pictures, or how they were distributed.

"We don't know what happened, other than there are some photos out there," he said.

Marsha Weinstein, former executive director of the Kentucky Commission on Women, said that it would be hypocritical to punish women involved when there is a "long history of male soldiers posting pin-ups in their lockers" and of the U.S. military flying in female sex symbols to entertain mostly male troops. "I don't think these women should be court-martialed," she told the Courier-Journal.

Quartermaster units provide logistics and supply support for other troops.



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White House turns away "Kazakh reporter" Borat

By Andy Sullivan
Reuters
Thu Sep 28, 2006

WASHINGTON - Borat, the fictional TV reporter from Kazakhstan, may have gotten under the skin of Kazakh officials but on Thursday he couldn't get past the gates of the White House.

Secret Service agents turned away British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as the boorish, anti-Semitic journalist, when he tried to invite "Premier George Walter Bush" to a screening of his upcoming movie, "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan."

Also invited to the screening: O.J. Simpson, "Mel Gibsons" and other "American dignitaries."
Cohen's stunt was timed to coincide with an official visit by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who is scheduled to meet with Bush on Friday.

Nazarbayev and other Kazakh officials have sought to raise the profile of the oil-rich former Soviet republic and assure the West that, contrary to Borat's claims, theirs is not a nation of drunken anti-Semites who treat their women worse than their donkeys.

Kazakhstan is expected to become one of the top 10 oil producers within a decade. A U.S. ally with troops in Iraq, the country has drawn criticism for its deteriorating civil liberties and flawed elections.

Shortly after Nazarbayev dedicated a statue in front of the Kazakh embassy, Borat denounced an official Kazakh publicity campaign running in U.S. magazines as "disgusting fabrications" orchestrated by neighboring Uzbekistan.

"If there is one more item of Uzbek propaganda claiming that we do not drink fermented horse urine, give death penalty for baking bagels, or export over 300 tonnes of human pubis per year, then we will be left with no alternative but to commence bombardment of their cities with our catapults," Borat said.

Cohen, 35, who is Jewish, recently co-starred in the recent U.S. box office hit "Talladega Nights" and has appeared in TV comedy series "Da Ali G Show" on U.S. cable channel HBO and Britain's Channel 4.

Cohen's "Borat" comedy routine has drawn legal threats from the Kazakh government, which keeps a tight lid on criticism in its news media.

Kazakh press secretary Roman Vasilenko said he was worried that some may take the Borat routine seriously.

"He is not a Kazakh. What he represents is a country of Boratastan, a country of one," Vasilenko told Reuters.



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New Power Suit Amplifies Human Strength

Tariq Malik
LiveScience.com
Thu Sep 28, 2006

NEW YORK-Engineers in Japan are perfecting a wearable power suit that amplifies human strength to help lift hospital patients or heavy objects.

Driven by portable batteries, micro air pumps and small body sensors that pick up even the slightest muscle twitch, the Stand-Alone Wearable Power Assist Suit is designed to help nursing home workers lift patients of up to 180 pounds while cutting the amount of strength required in half, project researcher Hirokazu Noborisaka told LiveScience today.
At Wired Magazine's NextFest new-technology forum here, researchers demonstrated walking and lifting weights [image] in the 66-pound suit, which was developed at the High-Tech Research Center of Japan's Kanagawa Institute of Technology.

"When I wear it, I don't feel that it's heavy at all," said project team member Hiroe Tsukui after stepping out of the power suit. "The sensors can tell the muscle power needed to lift an object."

A network of sensors track the wearer's upper arms and legs and waist-muscle activity, then relay the data to an onboard microcomputer that regulates air flow into a series of inflatable cuffs which expand to amplify lifting strength. The suit supports its own weight and carries a battery lifetime of about 30 minutes.

"We think that 30 minutes is enough time to lift a patient from one place to another," said Noborisaka, who engineered the sensor computing system used in the suit, adding that future versions could help the elderly or disabled walk.

The current model - known as the 2nd Stand-Alone Power Assist Suit - is stronger and more compact than its predecessor, researchers said.

Designer Mineo Ishii said that the next step is to further reduce the size of the power assist suit to make it more practical for use by hospital staff.

"It needs to be more flexible so for more easy movement," Ishii said, adding that a protective cover that shrouds the suit's sensitive or sharp areas, is also required.



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The Right to Bear Arms


Fla. manhunt intensifies after shootings

By PHIL DAVIS
Associated Press
September 29, 2006

LAKELAND, Fla. - More than 500 police officers used night-vision scopes and tracking dogs early Friday to search thick woods and rural neighborhoods for a man who shot two sheriff's deputies, killing one of them.

Deputy Vernon Matthew Williams was killed in a burst of gunfire Thursday as he pursued the suspect, who had fled from a traffic stop, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said.
Judd held up a photo of the suspect at a news conference Thursday night. He said the name and address on the suspect's Florida ID were probably bogus, but the gunman's face was identified by Deputy Douglas Speirs, who made the traffic stop and was shot in the leg moments after Williams was killed.

Williams, 39, probably died instantly, Judd said.

"He was shot multiple times. I don't believe he felt a thing," he said.

Speirs, 39, was treated for a gunshot wound to the leg and released Thursday evening, Judd said.

Speirs had stopped the gunman for speeding in north Lakeland near Interstate 4 and became suspicious of the man's identification. The gunman got nervous and bolted into the woods, Judd said.

Speirs pursued him and called for backup. Williams arrived and they began working their way into the woods, Judd said.

As the officers tracked him, there was a "burst of gunfire" that is believed to have killed Williams and his police dog, Judd said. Speirs returned fire and was shot.

The suspect later exchanged gunfire with a Lakeland police detective who was at a home warning residents to stay inside. No one was hit.

"We won't rest," Judd said of the manhunt. "We are prepared for a gunfight if he wants a gunfight. Or we're prepared to take him in peaceably if he has any sense at all."

A $40,000 reward was being offered for information leading to the gunman's arrest.

Officers arrived en masse from other counties to assist in the search. Some drove for several hours to get to the scene, about 35 miles east of Tampa.

Judd said 10,000 to 15,000 people live in the area. Officers were going house to house Thursday in some areas asking people to lock themselves inside. Three schools were locked down for several hours, and two of them were closed Friday so officers could continue to search the area.

Williams had been with the sheriff's office since April 1994. He had a wife and three children.



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More questions in Colo. school shooting

By CATHERINE TSAI
Associated Press
September 29, 2006

BAILEY, Colo. - Investigators were piecing together evidence Friday to try to determine the motive of the gunman who held six girls hostage in a high school classroom, sexually assaulting some before killing one and committing suicide.

Authorities said they knew of no connection between Duane Morrison and the hostages he held for four hours Wednesday after bursting into a college prep English class at Platte Canyon High School.

"A male high school student was approached by a suspect (Wednesday) and asked about the identity of a list of female students," Sheriff Fred Wegener said Thursday, later adding that he wasn't sure if it was a written list or names rattled off by Morrison.
It was not disclosed whether the list included 16-year-old Emily Keyes, whom Morrison shot in the head as a SWAT team broke through the classroom door in a rescue attempt.

KCNC-TV in Denver reported that video from cameras outside the school showed Morrison sitting in his Jeep in the school parking lot for about 20 minutes and then mingling with students as classes changed, nearly 35 minutes before the siege began.

Wegener said the Colorado Bureau of Investigation spent much of Thursday examining an apparent roadside campsite about a mile north of the school, where a resident found trash and an assault rifle.

The sheriff said it was too early to know if the rifle was connected to Morrison.

Investigators said the 53-year-old Morrison was a petty criminal who had a Denver address but apparently had been living in his battered yellow Jeep.

Morrison walked inside the school with two handguns and a backpack that he claimed contained a bomb. Investigators did not say what was in the backpack.

During the siege, Morrison released four hostages. While still holding two girls, he cut off contact with deputies and warned that "something would happen at 4 o'clock," authorities said.

About a half-hour before the deadline, a SWAT team used explosives to blow a hole in a classroom wall in hopes of getting a clear shot at him. When they couldn't see him through the gap, they blew the door off the hinges to get inside, said Lance Clem, a spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety.

Morrison fired at the SWAT officers, shot Keyes as she tried to run away and then killed himself, authorities said. During the gun battle, police shot Morrison several times, they said.

Classes were canceled for the rest of the week as the community tried to come to grips with the bloodshed, which evoked memories of the 1999 shooting rampage that left 15 dead at Columbine High School, less than an hour's drive away.

Louis Gonzalez, a spokesman for the Keyes family, said the girl's father was among the parents anxiously awaiting word from their children during the standoff. John Keyes had just bought Emily and her twin brother cell phones for their 16th birthday.

"How are U?" a volunteer text-messaged Keyes on her father's behalf.

At 1:52 p.m., she messaged back, "I love U guys."

"In memory of Emily we would like everyone to go out and do random acts of kindness, random acts of love to your friends or your neighbors or your fellow students because there is no way to make sense of this," Gonzalez said. "It's what Emily would have wanted."

Student Chelsea Wilson said she was in the classroom when the gunman came in and told the students to line up facing the chalkboard.

"All the hairs on my body stood up," she said. "I guess I was somewhat praying it was a drill."

One by one, the gunman started letting students go. Chelsea, a tall brunette, said she was the first to leave. Her mother, Julia Wilson, said she thinks the gunman selected the blond, smaller girls. Keyes' yearbook photo shows a smiling blond girl with blue eyes.

Chelsea said she heard what might have been a gunshot after she left the classroom.

"He's a pervert," she said. "I'm not sure of motivation. I just knew it wasn't good."

Residents of this mountain town of about 3,500 gathered Thursday at the Platte Canyon Christian Church for support. Others stopped by the Cutthroat Cafe, where Keyes had worked for about two years.

"It's very sad here. You know, the family lost their daughter but as a community, we lost a child," said Bobbi Sterling, a waitress and cook. "We're just sitting here, numb and in shock. We're all just kind of stunned."



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'My small county's gone'

September 29, 2006
By DENNIS HUSPENI THE GAZETTE


BAILEY - The gunman who held six girls captive Wednesday sexually assaulted some of his hostages before the standoff at a Park County high school ended in gunfire and death, authorities said Thursday.

"He did traumatize and assault our children," Park County Sheriff Fred Wegener said Thursday morning, describing the assaults as "sexual in nature."
He didn't say how many of the girls were assaulted during the four-hour ordeal at Platte Canyon High School in the small mountain town southwest of Denver.

The assaults went beyond touching and fondling, the sheriff said. "It was pretty horrific," Wegener said, declining to elaborate further.

The gunman was identified as Duane Roger Morrison, a 53-year-old who has a Denver address but apparently has been living in a battered yellow Jeep.

Morrison fatally shot 16-yearold Emily Keyes, then turned the gun on himself, committing suicide as sheriff's SWAT officers blew open the door and stormed into the classroom in which he had holed up with two remaining hostages.

Keyes, a junior, later died at a Denver hospital. Autopsies were completed Thursday on Morrison and Keyes, but Wegener did not release the results.

Morrison had a semiautomatic pistoland a revolver and was carrying a backpack in which he claimed to have a bomb. Authorities have not said if the backpack was empty.

Investigators found clothes and a motel key in the Jeep Wrangler that Morrison drove to the school.

They also received a tip that someone found an "assault rifle" at a Highway 285 turnoff, about a mile northeast of town, near the South Platte River.

"We don't know if it's connected," Wegener said.

Investigators haven't found a link between Morrison and the school, and the motive "still remains a mystery," the sheriff said.

"This is something that has changed my school, changed my community," said Wegener, a 36-year resident of Bailey. "My small county's gone."

The standoff began about 11:30 a.m. Wednesday when Morrison walked into a classroom, fired a shot at the floor and ordered students to line up at the chalkboard.

Before that, several students reported seeing him sitting in the Jeep in the school parking lot.

"The whole Jeep was filled with clothes, and pillows," said Roman Tucker, a senior at the school who was leaving for the day. "It was weird."

Tucker said he thought the man was a parent, and didn't connect that he was the hostage-taker until after the fact.

There were reports that Morrison approached male students in the parking lot and asked about several names, Wegener said.

A school resource officer from the Park County Sheriff's Office usually patrols the parking lot, Roman said. Wegener said the officer was on duty Wednesday but was at the substation down the street working on another case when the incident started.

SWAT team members witnessed Morrison assaulting some of the girls and relayed the information to the sheriff.

Wegener said he decided to try to rescue the hostages after Morrison said something would happen at 4 p.m. then cut off negotiations, and because of the assaults on the hostages.

"My decision was either wait (and have the) possibility of having two dead hostages, or act and try to save what I feared he would do to them," Wegener said. "We had to try to save them."

As SWAT members rushed the classroom, Morrison fired at them, shot the girl, then shot himself, Wegener said. SWAT members fired back.

Asked about his decision to send in the SWAT team, Wegener said: "Being a sheriff in a small community, knowing all the parents, knowing the kids - my daughter graduated last year, my son's a junior here - it is very difficult. Because I'd want whoever was in my position to do the same thing, and that is to save lives."

As the hostage situation began, the school announced a "Code White," and teachers instantly reacted by locking students in classrooms and keeping them away from doors and windows. Eventually, SWAT team members led students out of the building to safety.

Students were bused to a nearby elementary school, where they were reunited with frantic parents.

Junior Madeline Figenser said Keyes was one of her best friends.

"It's hard to let her go," she said, noting they had known each other since third grade.

Figenser said she was in the classroom across the hallway from where Morrison held the girls.

"I appreciate what they did," Figenser said of the SWAT team.

Gov. Bill Owens, who first visited the Platte Canyon Community Church where dozens of students, teachers and parents had gathered to console each other and talk to crisis counselors, also praised officers.

"I appreciate what the law enforcement professionals did yesterday," Owens said. "They kept the tragedy from becoming even worse."

Owens, who was in office about 100 days before the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School near Littleton in which two students killed 13 people and themselves, later toured the second-floor classroom where the girls were held. It was heavily damaged, he said. Wegener confirmed SWAT members used a "flash bang" grenade when entering the classroom.

Owens also praised the teachers for quickly and calmly evacuating the school.

"The tragedy of Columbine taught law enforcement and educators a lot about how to avoid a future tragedy," Owens said. "Columbine may have helped us in Park County" Wednesday.

Platte Canyon High School was built after Columbine, Owens said, and the classrooms were designed to isolate potential intruders.

"It allowed us to keep the shooter to one room," Wegener said. "We were able to lock down and evacuate more easily."

Court records show Morrison was arrested in July in the west Denver suburb of Lakewood on a charge of obstructing police in Littleton. He also was arrested in 1973 for larceny and marijuana possession.

"He's a weird dude. It was a telephone harassment. He left some messages at a business in the city," Littleton police Sgt. Sean Dugan said. He declined to release details of the charge but said Morrison received a nine-day jail sentence in August that was suspended.

Morrison's stepmother said she and her husband, Bob Morrison, "have no record of him being, having any trouble before."

"We just know the way he was raised," she said, but declined to elaborate. She declined to give her first name.

She said she and her husband, who live in Tulsa, Okla., had not heard from Duane Morrison recently.

She said Duane Morrison's mother died 30 or 35 years ago.

"His father was in the services, and he grew up in different places," she said.

School District spokeswoman Marilyn Saltzman said the high school and middle school will be closed again today, and that all weekend activities have been canceled.

"Our goal," Saltzman said, "is to begin the healing process and to resume education for our students as soon as possible."




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Former Student Shoots Principal at Wisconsin school

NBC News
29/09/2006

The principal at Weston School was shot Friday morning by a former student who entered the school armed with multiple weapons, WKOW-TV reported.

School district officials told NBC News affiliate WMTV the principal was flown to a hospital for treatment. His condition was not known.

The station also reported that the school was in lock down. Busses were en route to evacuate the students.

The school encompasses a high school and middle school.

On Wednesday, a gunman took six girls hostage in a Colorado high school classroom, sexually assaulting some before killing one and taking his own life.




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The Asian Desk


S. Korean emerges as leading candidate to lead UN

Last Updated: Thursday, September 28, 2006 | 8:19 PM ET
The Associated Press

South Korea's foreign minister was the only candidate for UN secretary general to receive the majority of votes from the UN Security Council in an informal ballot on Thursday.

Ban Ki-Moon received 13 votes in favour, one against and one that expressed no opinion.
Despite that dominating lead, the secrecy of the ballot still meant it was not known whether he got the necessary approval of all five veto-wielding members of the council.

The so-called straw poll is only meant to give the candidates a rough idea of where they stand.

However, none of the other six candidates to succeed Secretary General Kofi Annan even got the necessary nine favourable votes to make their campaigns viable.

Diplomats have said they want the race wrapped up by the end of October so the next secretary general can have time to prepare for the job.

The next straw poll is set for next Monday.

Under the UN charter, the secretary general is appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.

Annan, who is from Ghana, began his first term as secretary general in January 1997. He was re-elected to a second term, which began in January 2002 and which runs out at the end of the year.



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New PM to make Japan assertive

Friday 29 September 2006, 11:05 Makka Time, 8:05 GMT

Japan's new prime minister has pledged to make his country a decisive force on the international stage, while restoring values of hard work and patriotism at home.
Shinzo Abe, who is Japan's first leader born after the second world war, set out a vision of "beautiful country" that can distance itself from post-war guilt that conservatives claim has deprived Japan of its history and culture.

"Our country, Japan, is a country endowed with a long history, culture, tradition and beautiful natural environment of which we can be proud before the world," Abe told parliament in his first policy speech since becoming prime minister on Tuesday.

Abe pledged to move ahead with revising the Japan's pacifist constitution and exploring a collective defence system with close ally the United States.

"I believe it's entirely possible to create a country brimming with attractiveness and vigour, while maintaining the noble virtues of the Japanese people," he said. "I aim for a country that is trusted, revered and loved by the world and asserts its leadership'.

Patriotism

Abe's Liberal Democratic Party has long campaigned to replace the constitution, which was drafted by US forces after the war, to revise phrases that ban maintaining a military for warfare.

He also promised to foster patriotism in the nation's classrooms.

"I will immediately engage in a revival of education to create citizens who treasure their families, their regions, their country, and life itself," Abe said.

Abe said he wanted to build trust with China and South Korea who had been angered by his predecessor's visits to the controversial Yasukuni war shrine.

Important neighbours

"China and South Korea are important neighbours," he said. "Strengthening trust with the two is key for the Asian region and for the international community, and it is important for all sides to work to have honest, future-oriented discussions."

Abe has already agreed with Roh Moo-hyun, the South Korean president, that they should meet soon, and Kyodo news agency reported on Friday that the preparations were under way for him to visit Seoul in early October.

There is also speculation that he might meet Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, either at an Asia-Pacific leaders' gathering in Hanoi in November, or maybe even before.

Abe - who has taken a 30 per cent pay cut to demonstrate his commitment to trimming the budget - has a public approval rating of up to 71 per cent in newspaper polls published before the speech.



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Wary Eye Cast on Abe's 'New Japan'

By Bruce Wallace, Times Staff Writer
September 29, 2006

TOKYO - For those who view Japan's swelling nationalism through suspicious eyes, there is plenty of evidence that the World War II loser is straining at its pacifist shackles.

New Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has vowed to rewrite Japan's war-renouncing constitution. He yearns for a robust role in world affairs, and has even mused about the possibility of a pre-emptive military strike against North Korean missile sites.
Abe's talk of a "new Japan" also includes a plan to inculcate patriotism in schools and put an end to teaching what he calls a "masochistic" version of Japanese history. His newly minted Cabinet tilts so far to the hawkish side of Japanese politics that Mizuho Fukushima, the opposition socialist leader, has christened it "a Cabinet to prepare for war."

So as Abe took power this week, wary observers warned of a virulent form of nationalism they say is moving into the mainstream for the first time since Japan's defeat in 1945. Those voices came from American and European analysts, not just from China and Korea (the usual suspects, to Abe supporters), where memories of Japan's imperial aggression still burn. When Abe suggested during the summer that it might be necessary to take out North Korea's missile bases in self-defense, South Korea's government spokesman said the declaration "unveiled Japan's expansionist nature."

Is Japan sliding back to the dark days of the militarist 1930s? Are the Japanese really prepared to surrender their breathtaking materialism for the sort of foreign adventures that brought ruin upon their grandparents' generation?

Absurd, the Abe crowd responds.

"No single Japanese person thinks we are going back to that period," says Yoshihide Suga, one of the governing Liberal Democratic Party's most conservative members and someone who was an early Abe ally on the need to take a hard line with North Korea. "Other countries accuse us of going in a militarist direction, but we are just trying to become a normal country."

Those who dispute parallels with the 1930s point out that military spending then was the largest single budget item, whereas now it is less than 1% of Japan's gross domestic product. And unlike the 1930s, Japan no longer has a command economy tailored to the needs of the armed forces, and civilian leaders do not bend to the will of the army and navy.

Yet Abe's supporters do want to roll history's clock back if only as far as 1945. Their quarrel is with the political culture that was thrust on Japan after the war. Their targets are the American-imposed constitution and an accompanying education system they accuse of weakening traditional Japanese values and leading to a morally flabby nation.

"When we mention conservative politics, it is not the same as prewar politics or militarism," says Hakubun Shimomura, deputy chief Cabinet secretary of Abe's new government. "It is not an arrogant nationalism. We are not hostile to other cultures. But we want Japanese people to respect traditional Japanese culture, a culture that goes back more than 2,000 years but which has been weakened in the last 60 years."

It is a recurring theme with this new generation of nationalists. Yes, we got rich under the postwar American umbrella, they say. But the excesses of foreign values also infused an individualistic streak that diluted the social harmony at the core of Japanese society.

Foreigners look upon Japan as a remarkably cohesive society, but conservatives here see runaway egotism. And they complain that it has led to more broken families, a dearth of discipline in schools, youths adrift without jobs or hope - and even children who kill their parents.

And they fret that a rapacious capitalism accompanying globalization is undermining Japan's business culture, which has traditionally been far less cutthroat.

"Abe's stance is that postwar Japan is bad," says Takashi Tachibana, a commentator and author who has written about Japan's prewar intellectual class and is a critic of the new prime minister. Tachibana says Abe sees the constitution and the 1947 basic education law as the underpinnings of a stunted postwar era, "the root of all evils that need to be fixed."

Abe's is not a minority view. Polls show nearly two-thirds of Japanese support a new education law that would require schools to teach patriotism. Although teachers have resisted school board directives ordering them to stand, face the flag and sing the national anthem at school ceremonies, others see patriotic education as simply code for restoring discipline in classrooms gone wild.

Gearing up for a battle to rewrite the education law, Abe has stocked his Cabinet and closest advisors with socially conservative politicians connected to the clamor to restore family values.

The mood is reflected in Japan's popular culture. One of the best-selling books this year has been Masahiko Fujiwara's "Dignity of a State," a lament for the lost values of bushido that the author contends lie at the heart of Japan's national character. Better known as the samurai warrior's code, bushido emphasizes a public morality based on virtues such as benevolence, loyalty, respect and honesty.

These values strike a chord in a society wounded by the decade-plus malaise that followed the economic collapse of the 1990s. When the Tokyo office of Warner Bros. was looking for ways to market Hollywood's "The Last Samurai" to a modern young Japanese audience in 2004, it chose to emphasize the vitality of the movie's bushido theme. The film made $115 million in Japan.

"Even though kids didn't know a lot about bushido, it appealed to something in the national DNA," said William Ireton, head of Warner Japan.

Those are just the sort of emotional atmospherics that worry Abe's critics. They note the newfound willingness to question postwar shibboleths such as pacifism and war guilt. And they fear a mass mood could be manipulated into something more sinister, pointing to recent cases of government critics intimidated by threats of violence from right-wing extremists.



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Thailand brushes off loss of US military aid

AFP
September 29, 2006

BANGKOK - Thailand's military government brushed off a US decision to strip the kingdom of millions of dollars in aid money in protest at last week's coup.

Washington's decision to suspend 24 million dollars in military aid was "the mandatory minimum action" it could take, the permanent secretary of the foreign ministry told reporters Friday.

"I think they are measuring their response, keeping their eye on what's developing on the ground," Krit Garnjana-Goonchorn said.

The sanctions were imposed automatically under a US law which forbids assistance to the government of a country where an elected leader has been deposed in a coup.
General Winai Phattiyakul, the junta's secretary general, said the aid money had mainly financed training and education programs for the troops.

Winai bristled at remarks by US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, who described the coup a "a U-turn" for democracy in Thailand.

He said the nation had been headed for what he compared to a train wreck, amid fears that planned protests by opponents to ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra could turn violent.

"If you are riding a train, you see that it may derail or it may collide with the other train and will cause damage, or will cause loss of life of innocents, I think it makes sense to everybody that you either stop or make a turn," Winai said.

"Either make a sharp turn or make a U-turn in order to avoid the tragedy to happen," he said.

"So this is the case when we made the decision to have the political change. We understand the position of the US, and we hope that the US will understand the position of Thailand as well."

Krit described last week's coup as a "stumble" in Thailand's development as a democracy.

"There has been no substantive or real U-turn," he said.

"I maintain that there has been no going back to square one after all these decades of development of democracy.

"We have experienced a stumble, yes. We need to pick ourselves up. We hope that our friends will give us a hand to get up. Our friends are feeling inhibited by their own world view of what democracy should be," he said.

The sanctions by Washington jolted years of close links between Thai and US forces in the Asia-Pacific, which co-hosts the region's biggest annual American war games.

But some aid deemed crucial to US national security was spared, notably in counter-terrorism, a field in which the kingdom has emerged as a low-key, yet valued partner in the US battle against Al-Qaeda.

Comment:
"The sanctions were imposed automatically under a US law which forbids assistance to the government of a country where an elected leader has been deposed in a coup."
Unless, of course, the coup was conducted by the CIA...


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Israel's Still in Lebanon


Report: Israeli jets violate Lebanese airspace

www.chinaview.cn 2006-09-28 23:30:54

BEIRUT, Sept. 28 (Xinhua) -- Israeli warplanes violated Lebanese airspace on Thursday while Israeli forces continued to construct the border fence, Lebanese National News Agency reported.
Several Israeli fighter jets flew Thursday afternoon over West Bekaa Valley and Lake Qaroun, which located in eastern and southeastern Lebanon, and continued to fly at low levels over a number of areas in the south, the report said.

It added that the jets flew over the border towns of Nabatiya and Marjayoun as well as the areas of Al-Khayyam and Arqoub.

Meanwhile, a security sources said Israeli forces continued to construct the barbed-wire fence just across from the Israeli town of Kiryat Shemona, which coincided with the operation of Israeli patrol vehicles near the borders.

Israel went to war on Lebanon after Hezbollah guerrillas captured two Israeli soldiers and killed eight others in a cross-border raid on July 12. Nearly 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians, and 157 Israelis, mostly soldiers, were killed in the 34-day conflict.

Since the fighting ended with a shaky ceasefire on Aug. 14 brokered by the United Nations, the Israeli army has been handing over control of southern Lebanon to the UN peacekeeping forces and Lebanese troops, but Israeli soldiers still maintains 10 posts on Lebanese territories.



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Report: Israel has abandoned efforts to kill Nasrallah for now

29/09/2006

JERUSALEM (AP) - Israel has quietly backed off from its plan to assassinate Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah because of the international condemnation that his killing would create, the Israeli daily Maariv reported Friday.
During the 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah that ended Aug. 14, Israel had targeted the Hezbollah leader for assassination, security officials said, according to Maariv. In a successful effort to evade assassination, Nasrallah went underground, though he repeatedly recorded videos from his hiding place that were broadcast on Lebanese television.

When the war ended, the army recommended that the efforts to kill Nasrallah be called off because his assassination would lead to mass international criticism of Israel and would ignite an even more violent war, Maariv reported. However, the government declined to call off the hunt, the newspaper reported.

Nasrallah emerged from hiding on Sept. 22 to address a massive rally in Lebanon celebrating Hezbollah's fight against Israel. Israel army officials determined they could assassinate him with an airstrike during the rally, but dozens of bystanders would also be killed, Maariv reported.

The government decided an airstrike was not worth the risk, and accepted the army's recommendation that it should abandon efforts to kill Nasrallah for the time being, the newspaper reported. However, the government did not make a formal decision regarding Nasrallah.

Israeli government spokesman Miri Eisin declined to confirm whether Nasrallah had been a target or if he no longer was being pursued.

"We've always said that any terrorist should feel that his activities put him under our eye," she said.



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