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2008-03-09T23:25:00.006Z

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2008-03-09T23:00:00.004Z

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2008-03-09T22:54:00.007Z

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2008-03-09T22:39:00.006Z

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2008-03-09T22:37:00.008Z

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2008-03-09T22:26:00.002Z

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2008-03-09T22:18:00.003Z

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2008-03-09T22:13:00.007Z

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2008-03-09T14:35:00.001Z

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2008-03-09T14:34:00.002Z

Myanmar junta refuses to amend charter barring Suu Kyi from polls

2008-03-08T19:37:00.000Z

YANGON (AFP) - Myanmar's ruling junta Friday flatly refused to amend its proposed constitution, which bars democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi from elections, while accusing a UN envoy of "bias" against the regime.

The information minister, Brigadier General Kyaw Hsan, made the remarks during his meeting with visiting UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari, according to state television.

Gambari arrived here Thursday on a mission to press the regime to include Aung San Suu Kyi in its plans to hold a constitutional referendum in May and multiparty elections in 2010.

Any hopes for progress in his talks appeared dashed by the information minister, who gave no indication that the regime would waver from its own plan to build what it calls a "discipline-flourishing democracy."

"It is impossible to draft the constitution again," Kyaw Hsan flatly told Gambari, according to state television.

The minister also made a scathing criticism of Gambari's performance as a mediator, accusing him of "bias" in favour of Aung San Suu Kyi for releasing a letter from her after his last visit here.

In the letter, she had declared her willingness to enter into a dialogue with the regime aimed at national reconciliation.

"You have acted outside your role as a mediator" by releasing the letter, Kyaw Hsan said.

"Most people have criticised you for showing a bias. Some also believe that you wrote this letter in advance and released it after negotiations with Ms Aung San Suu Kyi," the minister said.

"The statement you released was a danger that could have harmed the recent peace and stability of the country," he said.

"It is important for the mediator using good offices not to have any intention of orchestrating events," he added.

"There is no justice in attacking us with pressure from all sides," he said. "The United Nations should stand honestly, without any discrimination on anything."

Gambari is on his third visit to the country since the regime launched a deadly crackdown on pro-democracy protests last September, killing at least 31 people according to the United Nations.

But the political landscape has shifted enormously since his last visit in November, following the surprise announcement one month ago of the regime's election plans.

If held, the planned polls would be the first in the country formerly known as Burma since Aung San Suu Kyi led her National League for Democracy (NLD) to a landslide victory in 1990, a result the junta never recognised.

Western countries have criticised the regime for limiting the role of Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD in the polls.

The junta has brought in a law criminalising public speeches and leaflets about the referendum and announced that Aung San Suu Kyi would be barred from running in elections because of her marriage to a foreigner, Briton Michael Aris, who is now dead.

The NLD has warned that the public would not accept the junta's new charter, but has stopped short of calling for a boycott or urging a "No" vote.

Gambari has tried to open a dialogue between the Nobel peace prize winner, who has been kept under house arrest for 12 of the past 18 years, and the regime.

His initial efforts seemed promising. After his first mission in the aftermath of the crackdown, the junta appointed a liaison officer to meet Aung San Suu Kyi while military supremo Senior General Than Shwe made a heavily conditioned offer to meet her himself.

But Than Shwe shunned Gambari on his last visit here, and no meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi has taken place.

Even the talks with the liaison officer have dragged, with Aung San Suu Kyi saying in January that she was "not satisfied" with their progress.

The junta has so far not scheduled any talks between Gambari and Aung San Suu Kyi for this trip. Even his departure date has not been settled, although diplomats expect him to leave Sunday.

Beijing Tries to Ease Olympic Discomfort

2008-03-08T19:35:00.000Z

BEIJING (AP) -- Beijing will compensate car owners barred from driving on city streets during the Olympics and will not totally ban migrants, state media reported Saturday, in signs the government wants to take some of the sting out of restrictions planned for the August games.

The government is working on a compensation scheme for car owners during the Games when private cars will be restricted to driving every other day, newspapers and television reports said, citing remarks by Vice Mayor Ji Lin.

Ji acknowledged that the city was tightening controls on the swarms of rural migrants in China's capital by stepping up inspections of the permits residents are supposed to have.

But "during the Beijing Olympics we will absolutely not restrict outsiders from entering the capital," Ji was quoted as saying at a legislative meeting Friday.

The measures, Ji said, are intended to help Beijing clear away air pollution and traffic congestion - among the thorniest logistical problems Beijing confronts in hosting the games.

Beijing ranks among China's most polluted cities and is regularly shrouded in a brown smog made worse by swelling ranks of private cars and a metropolitan area population that has soared to 17 million. With only five months before the August 8 opening, Beijing is under pressure from athletes and the International Olympic Committee to drastically improve air quality.

At the same time, Beijing's efforts to soften the Olympic restrictions show how carefully the authoritarian communist government must tread as people grow wealthier and more aware of their rights.

Private cars account for an increasing share of Beijing's 3.3 million vehicles, most of them bought in the past five years by a rapidly rising middle class.

Burma's Suu Kyi 'taken from home'

2008-03-08T11:02:00.000Z

BURMA'S pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi was taken today in a convoy from the home where she is under house arrest, apparently to meet with visiting UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari, witnesses said.

She was taken to the State Guesthouse, a military facility near her home, where Gambari has conducted most of his meetings since he arrived on Thursday.

Burma officials could not immediately confirm that she would meet with Gambari, who earlier held talks with top officials from her National League for Democracy (NLD) party.

*heraldsun

China says Dalai Lama is an Olympic saboteur

2008-03-07T21:25:00.000Z

By Benjamin Kang Lim

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's top official in Tibet on Friday accused the Himalayan region's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, of seeking to sabotage the Beijing Olympics.

The Dalai Lama, who fled to India in 1959 after an abortive uprising against Communist rule, told Britain's ITV network in January that during the Games Tibet supporters should protest peacefully in China against Beijing's rule.

"The Beijing Olympics is the focus of world attention and the people are exalted ... but even a grand gathering like this, he is engaging in sabotage and threatening to cause trouble," Zhang Qingli, Communist Party boss of Tibet, said without elaborating.

"How can this not be called engaging in splittism?" Zhang told a news conference on the sidelines of parliament when asked by Reuters why China will not believe the Dalai Lama does not advocate independence and what he needs to do to convince China.

Five groups claiming to represent tens of thousands of exiled Tibetans are planning a march from India into Tibet ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics as part of a series of actions to try and embarrass China into ending its rule in the Buddhist region.

But the groups said they would not seek approval from the Dalai Lama, who has a more moderate line and says he wants autonomy for Tibet, not outright independence. The groups have said it would be difficult and dangerous to cross into China.

Zhang's lieutenant, Qiangba Puncog, the top government official in Tibet, said the activities of the Dalai Lama "clique were the main factors of instability in Tibet."

"They will not succeed. We are fully prepared and have full confidence. We will definitely ensure the Olympics and Olympic-related events in Tibet proceed smoothly," Qiangba Puncog said, apparently referring to the Tibet leg of the Olympic torch relay that is due to scale Mount Everest.

March 10 marks the 49th anniversary of the Dalai Lama's exile, but he remains the single most important figure in Tibetan life. The atheist Communist Party has competed against him for the loyalty of his people.

On Thursday, President Hu Jintao told Tibetan members of parliament that stability in the occasionally restive Himalayan region has a bearing on the stability of China as a whole.

"Tibet's stability has to do with the entire country's stability, Tibet's safety has to do with the entire country's safety," Hu said.

Critics say China continues to repress Tibetans' religious aspirations, especially their veneration for the Dalai Lama, who won Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. Periodic rioting by monks has been brutally crushed.

China has defended itself, saying it has poured billions of dollars to develop Tibet and improved the living standards of the impoverished region.

Asked by Reuters if China would court the Dalai Lama, Zhang said China would welcome him if he matched his words with deeds.

"No matter who it is ... as long as you love your country, as long as you don't engage in splittism and as long as you commit yourselves to building China, we welcome (you)," Zhang said.

Hu, who is also Communist Party and military chief, praised the hard work of cadres in Tibet in a sign Tibetans would not be given more say in their own affairs. The Party should "fully trust" Han Chinese cadres sent to Tibet, he said.

(Additional reporting by Guo Shipeng; Editing by Chris Buckley)

Eight confirmed dead in Jerusalem terror attack

2008-03-06T21:25:00.000Z

'Terrorist fired 500-600 bullets before he was killed'

Eight people were confirmed dead in a terror attack at Merkaz Harav Yeshiva, near the entrance to Jerusalem on Thursday evening. The attack was reportedly perpetrated by a resident of Jabel Mukaber in east Jerusalem.

Magen David Adom have confirmed 10 wounded civilians, including three seriously. One terrorist was said to have been killed by a student.

Witnesses said that only one terrorist had entered the building and that he managed to fire 500-600 bullets over the course of 4-10 minutes before he was killed.

Although witnesses said only a single terrorist carried out the attack, police were searching the building for an additional terrorist, preventing the entrance of rescue workers. Later Police Chief David Cohen confirmed that there were no additional attackers.

The terrorist entered the Merkaz Harav Yeshiva in the neighborhood of Kiryat Moshe carrying weapons. He was not wearing a suicide-bomb belt as earlier reported.

The gunman entered the library where about 80 people were gathered, witnesses said, and opened fire.

Yitzhak Dadon, a student, said he was armed with a rifle and waited on the roof of a nearby building. "He came out of the library spraying automatic fire ... the terrorist came to the entrance and I shot him twice in the head," he said.

Approximately 50 ambulances were sent to the scene and a 16-year-old boy in serious condition and suffering from chest wounds was seen being evacuated from the scene.

"It's very sad tonight in Jerusalem - many people were killed in the heart of Jerusalem," Mayor Uri Lupolianski told Channel 2,

"We bless the (Jerusalem) operation. It will not be the last," Hamas said in a statement.

In Jebaliya, about 7,000 Gazans of different factions marched in the streets, firing in the air in celebration, and visited homes of those killed and wounded in Israel's ground operation this week.

In Rafah on the Egyptian border, residents distributed sweets to moving cars, and militants fired mortars in celebration.

The public can call the Merkaz Harav Yeshiva's emergency hotline at 026524793.

*jpost.com

Myanmar Monk Tells Story of Killings

2008-03-06T16:55:00.001Z

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) -- A Myanmar monk called for a global weapons embargo on his country, telling human rights activists and foreign governments Thursday the junta's military leaders must not be allowed to use guns against his people again.

U Awbata said he struggles to shake memories of Myanmar soldiers opening fire on fellow monks, stomping on their heads and pummeling them with batons during protests last September.

"It doesn't matter how many tears I shed," U Awbata said, speaking on behalf of dozens of monks who fled after the military crackdown and live in exile. "I cannot erase these images from my mind."

Monks initially took to the streets of Myanmar's largest city, Yangon, to oppose a state-imposed fuel price hike, but their protests quickly escalated into the biggest anti-government rallies in two decades, with tens of thousands turning out.

The United Nations estimated at least 31 people were killed and thousands more were detained after troops were deployed to restore order. Hundreds remain in detention.

"The military generals have used their guns to crush and kill their own people," U Awbata said.

He called on the international community "to work together and urge those countries selling arms to Burma to stop doing so." Myanmar is also known as Burma.

The United States, which like the European Union had a weapons embargo and financial sanctions in place before the 2007 unrest, broadened restrictions after the crackdown.

U Awbata was speaking in Indonesia's capital, Jakarta, at a three-day gathering bringing together activists, Myanmar exiles, and embassy officials seeking ways to increase the role of Southeast Asian countries in improving human rights in Myanmar.

Regional neighbors have condemned the Myanmar government's use of excessive force, but have a policy of engagement with the country and have shunned sanctions.

"Violence and repression is still rampant in Burma but is no longer making media headlines," conference organizer and rights group Kontras said in a statement. The world must increase pressure on the regime "to democratize and put an end to its mass abuses."

Police investigating Times Square explosion

2008-03-06T16:52:00.001Z

The investigation into Thursday's pre-dawn Times Square explosion at a military recruiting office is focusing initially on an early-morning bicyclist wearing a backpack who was seen nearby, officials said.

An explosive device, which apparently was caused by a bomb fashioned from a military-issue metal box, caused minor damage to the landmark military recruiting station before dawn, prompting a huge police response that disrupted transit.

The bomb's metal ammunition box was like those commonly found in Army surplus stores, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said.

Soon after the explosion the Pentagon reportedly sent out an alert to its more than 1,000 recruiting stations nationwide, including those on Long Island.

But recruiters at offices in Greenlawn and Hempstead said their activities were not disrupted by the bomb or the alert.

In Times Square soon after the predawn blast, a police officer at an NYPD substation talked to a witness who said he saw a bicyclist in dark clothing, wearing a backpack, riding in a suspicious manner, Kelly said. The witness did not see the bicyclist's face.

The bomb was "not a particularly sophisticated device" but was certainly capable of causing injury or death, Kelly said.

Kelly did not comment on what kind of explosives may have fueled the bomb, which he said was a "low-order explosive" device.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said residents and visitors should consider the city a safe place to live, work and visit, and he said the NYPD together with federal investigators will track down whoever is responsible for the bombing.

"We will not tolerate such attacks," Bloomberg said in a news conference with Kelly. The mayor said he is proud to have a military recruiting station at such a high-profile location in the city, in part because it symbolizes American support for men and women in the armed forces.

The region's Joint Terrorism Task Force, largely made up of FBI and NYPD investigators, will seek videotape and witness evidence in the case, and the bomb evidence will be sent to FBI labs in Quantico, Va., for analysis, officials said.

The military is taking the Manhattan bombing seriously enough to issue a nationwide alert, CNN reported. Long Island's military recruiting stations include three storefronts containing Army, Navy and Marine Corps offices in Hempstead, Greenlawn, Patchogue, Lindenhurst and elsewhere. Peace activists routinely stage demonstrations at the recruiting stations.

At the Armed Forces Career Center in Hempstead Village, a storefront office on Fulton Street, there was no unusually heightened security Thursday morning, said a Marine recruiter who would not give his name because he was not authorized to speak to the press. Business went on as usual, with uniformed servicemen coming and going through a door with a buzzer-controlled lock.

The three storefront offices of Marine, Navy and Army recruiters in a strip mall on Broadway in Greenlawn were closed, but not because of the bomb threat, a recruiter said. The stores are normally closed on weekday mornings unless a potential recruit has an appointment, the recruiter said.

In Manhattan, no one was injured when the bomb went off about 3:45 a.m., police said. The blast left a gaping hole in the front window and shattered a glass door, twisting and blackening its metal frame.

Police said investigators would have to examine the evidence to determine what kind of device was used.

The center is normally staffed by two noncommissioned officers but was empty at the time of the explosion, said Capt. Charlie Jaquillard, the commander of army recruiting operations in Manhattan.

"If it is something that is directed toward American troops, then it's something that's taken very seriously and is pretty unfortunate," he said.

Members of the police department's bomb squad and fire officials gathered outside the recruiting station, which has occasionally been the site of anti-war demonstrations, ranging from silent vigils to loud rallies.

Police cars and yellow tape initially blocked drivers from entering one of the world's busiest crossroads, though some traffic was allowed through around the start of rush hour.

Guests at the Marriott Marquis on 46th Street said they heard a "big bang" and could feel the building shake. A large plume of smoke was also visible after the explosion, they said.

Terry Leighton, 49, from London, England, said he was on the 21st floor of the hotel when he heard the blast and looked out a window.

"I thought it could have been thunder," he said. "I looked down and there was a massive plume of smoke. So I knew it was an explosion."

Darla Teck, 25, was on the 44th floor of the hotel. "There was a big bang. I felt it," she said.

At one point in the investigation subway trains passed through the Times Square subway station without stopping, but normal service resumed with delays later in the morning. Police cars and tape blocked the streets.

The recruiting center has drawn sporadic protests for many years, including in October 2005, when a group who call themselves the Granny Peace Brigade rallied there against the Iraq war.

Eighteen activists, most of them grandmothers in their 80s and 90s, were later acquitted of disorderly conduct.

The center was renovated in 1999 to better fit into the flashy ambience of Times Square, using neon tubing to give the glass and steel office a patriotic American flag motif. For a half century, the station was the armed forces' busiest recruiting center. It has set national records for enlistment, averaging about 10,000 volunteers a year.

Police said it was too early to say if the blast may have been related to two other recent minor explosions in the city.

In October, two small explosive devices were tossed over a fence at the Mexican consulate, shattering three windows but causing no injuries. No threats had been made against the consulate, and no one took responsibility for the explosion, police said.

At the time, police said they were investigating whether it was connected to a similar incident at the British consulate on May 5, 2005.

In that incident, the explosions took place in the early morning hours, when Britons were going to the polls in an election that returned Prime Minister Tony Blair to power.

In both cases, the instruments were fake grenades sometimes sold as novelty items. They were packed with black powder and detonated with fuses, but incapable of causing serious harm, police said.

*newsday.com

Oil price hit record high near 106 dollars amid New York explosion

2008-03-06T16:51:00.001Z

LONDON (AFP) - Oil prices soared to a record high close to 106 dollars a barrel on Thursday as traders were spooked by a small explosion in New York, a surprise fall in US crude stockpiles and the weak US currency.

New York's main oil contract, light sweet crude for delivery in April hit 105.97 dollars per barrel, surging above 105 dollars after topping the previous record of 104.95 dollars set on Wednesday.

Brent North Sea crude for April jumped to 102.95 dollars, beating its previous all-time peak of 102.29 dollars set on Monday.

A small explosion struck a military recruiting station in New York's Times Square in the early hours of Thursday, causing minor damage and disruption but no injuries, police said.

"The spike (in prices) may have been a bullish, knee-jerk reaction to that (news)," said Societe Generale analyst Mike Wittner.

The blast occurred shortly before 0900 GMT and shattered windows and buckled the door of the small booth, a frequent focus of anti-war demonstrations and one of the most public faces of the US military.

Police said only that the explosion was the result of an improvised explosive device, while local reports quoted a witness as saying a passer-by had thrown an explosive device. Police would not confirm the account.

The Department of Homeland Security said there was no information to suggest an imminent threat to the United States after the explosion struck.

Later Thursday, New York crude stood at 104.06 dollars a barrel, down 46 cents from the close on Wednesday. Brent oil slid 57 cents to 101.07 dollars.

Before news of the explosion, the market was already well supported by figures showing lower US crude reserves and the plunging dollar.

The US Department of Energy said Wednesday that American crude inventories tumbled 3.1 million barrels last week, marking the first weekly drop for one and a half months.

The news shook the market, which had been expecting a gain of 2.4 million barrels, and sent New York crude spiking close to 105 dollars on Wednesday.

Meanwhile Thursday, the euro hit a record high 1.5373 dollars.

Dollar-priced raw materials like oil tend to gain from the weak US unit because a fall in the dollar makes them cheaper for buyers using other, stronger currencies.

Oil was also pressured after the OPEC crude exporters' cartel decided Wednesday to maintain current output levels despite calls from the West for a hike to help dampen runaway prices that threaten economic growth.

In announcing it would maintain daily production at the current level of 29.67 million barrels, OPEC said the market was "well-supplied" -- a sentiment not fully shared by traders.

"The truth of the matter is there is not a lot of supply in the supply chain," said Justin Wilks, director of trading and operations at Global Commodities fund group in Australia.

With prices over 100 dollars, Wilks said: "I would suggest that we would have to get used to it."

Diana's butler refuses to return to inquest

2008-03-06T16:48:00.000Z

LONDON (Reuters) - Princess Diana's butler has refused to be questioned about whether he lied to the inquest into her death.

Paul Burrell faced a three-day grilling from lawyers in January when he flew in from Los Angeles to give evidence over the deaths of Diana and her lover Dodi al-Fayed in a 1997 Paris car crash.

Dodi's father, luxury department store Harrods owner Mohamed al-Fayed, alleges the couple were killed by British security forces on the orders of Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth's husband and Diana's former father-in-law.

On the day that al-Fayed peppered his testimony to the inquest with a string of allegations covering a whole host of British establishment figures, The Sun tabloid published details of an interview with Burrell.

In a video recording obtained by the tabloid, he appeared to say he had held back certain facts and introduced "red herrings" during his evidence to the inquest.

In a statement released on Thursday, inquest officials said: "The coroner asked him to give further evidence, either in person, or via video-link, from abroad.

"Mr Burrell has refused to do this and as he is currently outside the court's jurisdiction, the coroner has no power to compel him to give evidence."

At an emotionally charged appearance at the inquest, Burrell was repeatedly asked by lawyer Michael Mansfield, representing Dodi's father, exactly how much he knew about the secrets he was supposed to have held for Diana.

"If I put it politely, you are all over the place," Mansfield told the butler, known as "Diana's Rock", after running through conflicting evidence he gave to the court.

Burrell, confessing to confusion as he tried to recall a lifetime of memories, said of his legal grilling: "Quite frankly, it's been horrid. It's been quite disgraceful actually. ... I didn't expect it to go to such depths."

Under British law, an inquest is needed to determine the cause of death when someone dies unnaturally.

French and British police investigations have both concluded that Diana and Dodi died in an accident caused by their driver who was drunk and speeding. Both inquiries rejected al-Fayed's conspiracy theories.

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

Explosion hits New York military recruiting center

2008-03-06T16:43:00.000Z

NEW YORK (AFP) - A small explosion struck a military recruiting station in New York's Times Square in the early hours of Thursday, causing minor damage and disruption but no injuries, police said.

The blast occurred shortly before 4 am (0900 GMT) and shattered windows and buckled the door of the small booth, a frequent focus of anti-war demonstrations and one of the most public faces of the US military.

Behind the shattered window, the blast exposed a familiar World War I recruitment poster featuring Uncle Sam and the words "I Want You For US Army."

The explosion sparked an immediate and large police response -- one of the legacies of the September 11 attacks six years ago, since when the city has been on a constant and heightened state of alert.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said the blast was the result of an improvised explosive device that could have caused serious injury or even proved fatal.

"This was not a particularly sophisticated device, it was a low-order explosive in an ammunition box," readily available in military surplus stores, he told reporters from the scene of the explosion.

He added that while a witness had seen a hooded individual cycling around the station wearing a backpack shortly before the blast, no-one had seen the device being planted or thrown at the recruitment center.

The Department of Homeland Security was swift to say there was no information to suggest an imminent threat to the United States after the blast.

The White House said the explosion "doesn't appear to be terrorism," adding that it was closely following the investigation.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg condemned the attack and said the city would not be intimidated.

"The fact that this appears deliberately directed at the recruiting station insults every one of our brave men and women in uniform stationed around the world fighting to defend our freedoms," he told reporters.

"New York City is back and open for business," he insisted. "This city is safe, the police department has kept the city safe."

"People are going about their business... they are not intimidated. Whoever the coward was that committed this disgraceful act on our city will be found and prosecuted to the full extent of the law," he told reporters.

One witness told CNN television she had felt the blast from the 44th floor of a nearby building.

The scene was closed off to pedestrians for several hours after the blast as forensic teams and bomb squad officers scoured the site. Dozens of emergency vehicles were at the scene, and a police helicopter hovered overhead.

However, traffic was being allowed through Times Square, affectionately known as "the crossroads of the world," and subway services, shortly suspended after the blast, were back to normal, sparing the city rush-hour chaos.

The recruitment station has frequently been the focus of demonstrations protesting US-led military action in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A recruiting center has been on the site since just after World War II, in 1946, although the current structure, a glass building around the size of a tall truck, is its third incarnation.

Bloomberg said the recruiting station was deliberately in an accessible, although exposed, position and there were no plans to change its location.

"The high profile of being in Times Square is exactly what we try to do," he said. "We're pleased to have the recruiting station here."

Last October, a crude bomb exploded outside the Mexican Consulate in New York, shattering windows, while in 2005, two powerful devices exploded outside the British Consulate in Midtown Manhattan, again shattering windows.

Both explosions occurred, like Thursday's blast, shortly before 4:00 am.

Europe alert to triple terror threat

2008-03-05T22:19:00.000Z

By Olivier Guitta

Last November, Gilles de Kerchove, the European Union's anti-terror chief, said that al-Qaeda was the biggest threat to Europe. To confirm this, Western intelligence services have recently established operational links between al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and al-Qaeda in The Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) whose goals include striking at the heart of Europe.

Al-Qaeda has not made any secret of its eagerness to target Europe. Indeed, Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's number two, has repeatedly threatened Europe. In 2007, numerous al-Qaeda-linked plots were foiled in Europe and several cells were dismantled in France, Spain, Denmark, Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom. In September, thanks to information provided by US intelligence, Germany arrested three members of an al-Qaeda cell that planned on blowing up the US military base of Ramstein and

the Frankfurt airport.

This network allegedly had ties to other European countries since the explosives seized were similar to those used in the London attacks. The investigation also showed that the terrorists had connections to both Pakistan and Syria. Another important fact is that two out of the three alleged terrorists were Muslim converts. In fact, al-Qaeda has for a long time advocated using European nationals, and if possible converts, in terror attacks.

Incidentally, German intelligence confirmed that, in the past few months, Islamist recruiters targeted new converts to Islam. The reason being that the latter are less easily identifiable and have better understandings of German culture and habits. Also what particularly worries German authorities is the rise in the number of young German Muslims traveling to study in Pakistan.

For proof, in July, Pakistani authorities arrested seven Germans that sought to join a terror training camp. The Pakistani connection does not stop there: Pakistani terrorists recently arrived in Algeria to train with AQIM members.

All the more worrisome is that of all al-Qaeda's affiliates, AQIM is the organization most capable of striking at Europe. In 2007, AQIM pulled off numerous major and spectacular and deadly terror attacks in Morocco, Mauritania (recently killing French tourists) and especially in Algeria with the multiple suicide attacks in Algiers on April 11 and December 11.

But the real challenge for AQIM is to inflict massive damage to Europe. Zawahiri instructed them to do so on multiple occasions. In order to keep its credibility alive and please its "masters", AQIM has been trying hard to orchestrate a terror attack on the continent.

At the end of last year, the level of "chatter" increased dramatically and has continued unabated since then. This led to the first-ever cancellation of the popular Paris-Dakar auto race and also compelled Belgian authorities to cancel New Year's Eve fireworks in Brussels.

Today, al-Qaeda threats seem even more imminent and European security services are on high alert. On January 19, Spain dismantled an al-Qaeda cell that was almost exclusively Pakistani, except for an Indian Muslim member. It was planning a terror attack in Barcelona and, as El Pais reported, a wave of attacks in Germany, France, Britain and Portugal. Also Le Figaro reported earlier that there are allegedly "moving cells" composed of terrorists of Pakistani origin traveling around Europe.

That article also pointed out that 50,000 Pakistanis (half of them illegals) live in France. Finally, a very worrisome trend in 2007 was the emergence of the "lone jihadi", loosely linked to al-Qaeda. One of them was arrested on May 2 in Nancy, France. He was planning attacks against the US Consulate in Luxembourg and a McDonald's.

For months, he had been in touch on the Internet with AQIM militants, asking them for material support. Sometimes these "invisible Islamists", known to "fly under the radar" of security networks, decide to act on their own. Said Christophe Chaboud, head of Uclat (Unit'de Coordination de la Lutte antiterroriste), the French counterterrorism czar, "An isolated individual can today inflict as much damage as an organization."

At the moment, Europe is facing a triple threat: AQIM, "al-Qaeda Pakistan" and the loosely al-Qaeda-affiliated "lone jihadis". Unfortunately, the likelihood of a successful terror attack on European soil in 2008 remains quite high.

*atimes.com

Five People Shot near Suu Kyi’s Rangoon Home

2008-03-04T23:53:00.001Z

irrawaddy/ Gunmen entered a home near Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi’s residence in Rangoon on Monday and shot five persons in an execution-style killing.

The dead were all shot in the head by unknown assailants inside the home during the night, a relative told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

The shootings occurred in a home owned by Thu Zaw, the owner of the Fuji House coffee shop, a nearby popular meeting place for opposition activists.

The dead are Mya Sandar, Thu Zaw’s wife; San San Mya, his mother-in-law; Hnin Pwint Aye, his sister-in-law; Saw Kyi Phay, his father-in-law; and Naw Ae Phew, a maid.

All six people lived in the home. Thu Zaw was away from the home when the shootings occurred and found the bodies when he returned, according to the AP story.

Police said empty shell casings were found in the home, which was sealed for investigation.

About US$1,000 was reportedly taken from the home, according to Agence France-Press.

Shooting deaths are unusual in Burma and especially rare in the neighborhood of Aung San Suu Kyi, which is kept under police surveillance. She has been under house arrest for 12 of the past 19 years.

A police officer confirmed the incident, but refused to give any additional information to The Irrawaddy.

The ownership of firearms is tightly restricted in Burma and ordinary citizens are not allowed to possess weapons.

Experts say cost of war on terror totals $3 trillion

2008-03-02T21:23:00.000Z

WASHINGTON — When U.S. troops invaded Iraq in March 2003, the Bush administration predicted that the war would be self-financing and rebuilding the nation would cost less than $2 billion.

Coming up on the five-year anniversary of the invasion, a new estimate from a Nobel laureate puts the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at more than $3 trillion.

That estimate from Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz also serves as the title of his new book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, which hit store shelves Friday.

The book, co-authored with Harvard University professor Linda Bilmes, builds on previous research published in January 2006. The two argued then and now that the cost to America of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is wildly underestimated.

When other factors are added — such as interest on debt, future borrowing for war expenses, continued military presence in Iraq and lifetime health care and counseling for veterans — they think that the wars' costs range from $5 trillion to $7 trillion.

"I think we really have learned that the long-term costs of taking care of the wounded and injured in this war and the long-term costs of rebuilding the military to its previous strength is going to far eclipse the cost of waging this war," Bilmes said in an interview.

Claims criticized
The book and its estimates were the subject of a hearing Thursday by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress.

The White House doesn't care for the estimates by Stiglitz, a former chief economist of the World Bank who's now a professor at Columbia University.

"People like Joe Stiglitz lack the courage to consider the cost of doing nothing and the cost of failure. One can't even begin to put a price tag on the cost to this nation of the attacks of 9/11," said White House spokesman Tony Fratto.

"It is also an investment in the future safety and security of Americans and our vital national interests. ... What price does Joe Stiglitz put on attacks on the homeland that have already been prevented? Or doesn't his slide rule work that way?"

Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., a decorated Marine Corps colonel and Vietnam veteran, welcomed the effort by Stiglitz and Bilmes to quantify the ways in which the wars will cost taxpayers.

"It's astounding that here we are about to mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and this administration still refuses to acknowledge the long-term costs of the war in Iraq," he said.

Inaccurate
By any estimate, the Bush administration's predictions in March 2003 of a self-financing war have proved wildly inaccurate. Stiglitz cites operational spending to date of $646 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, working off estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, presumes that spending on these wars over the next decade probably will amount to another $913 billion.

Pentagon officials had no immediate comment on Stiglitz's book or his estimates.

In an interview, Stiglitz said that too much of the public debate had been over the wars' operational costs while the real budget strains would show up only years from now.

"The peak expenditures are way out," he said, noting that the peak expenditures for World War II vets came in 1993.

The pair estimated that future medical, disability and Social Security costs for veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan range from a best-case $422 billion to what they call a more probable long-term expense of $717 billion.

It's why the two call in the book for creating a Veterans Benefits Trust Fund to set aside money in a "lock box" to pay for future health care needs of Iraq and Afghanistan vets.

Although veterans' health care amounts to a future promise, they said, it isn't an entitlement and instead is funded through discretionary spending. In the future, funding for vets will compete with other government programs.

The book divides war costs into two main categories: budgetary and social. The budgetary costs are the more quantifiable spending on operations, equipment, future benefits paid to veterans and the like. In a best-case scenario they total about $1.7 trillion; in a more probable scenario almost $2.7 trillion.

Societal costs
The social costs that Stiglitz and Bilmes offer in their argument are more theoretical and more thought-provoking.

When a soldier is killed in combat, they said, the U.S. armed forces disburse a $100,000 death gratuity and a $400,000 payment to his or her surviving family in the equivalent of insurance for an unexpected death.

If these men and women had died in private-sector employment or in some kind of disaster, compensation to family members generally would be settled in court after determining what economists and lawyers call "the value of statistical life." This measures the economic contribution that person would have made over the rest of his or her life if the death hadn't occurred.

Stiglitz and Bilmes settled on a statistical value of life that they say the Environmental Protection Agency uses when people are killed in environmental disasters: $7.2 million.

*chron.com

Bush pushes for more NATO troops in Afghanistan

2008-03-02T20:42:00.000Z

By David Alexander

CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - Ratcheting up pressure on NATO partners, President George W. Bush said on Saturday that he would use the alliance's next summit to push for more troops in Afghanistan to share the "heavy burden" there.

Bush's appeal was the latest in a U.S. drive to persuade reluctant NATO allies to take on a larger role in combating a resurgent Taliban and their al Qaeda allies in the most volatile parts of the country.

U.S. officials are disappointed at the meager results of their pressure campaign so far and warn that NATO's credibility could be at stake. The issue is expected to figure prominently at NATO's April 2-4 summit in Bucharest.

"I am going to go to Bucharest with the notion that we're thankful for the contributions being made and encourage people to contribute more," Bush said at a joint news conference with Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen at the president's Texas ranch.

Bush stopped short of naming the allies he believes should commit more troops while acknowledging "certain political constraints on certain countries."

But he insisted, "My administration has made it abundantly clear we expect people to carry a heavy burden if they're going to be ... in Afghanistan."

Standing shoulder to shoulder with Bush, Rasmussen agreed, "We need more troops in Afghanistan ... I feel confident that we can convince partners to contribute with more troops than today." Denmark has nearly 800 troops mostly in southern Afghanistan.

PRESSURE ON FRANCE, GERMANY
The United States wants France, Germany and other allies in particular to deploy troops to the south of the country where the fight against Islamist militants has been toughest.

Britain, Canada, Poland and others have backed the U.S. demand. In what would be a major blow to the 43,000-strong NATO mission, Canada has warned that it will not renew its deployment past 2009 unless other NATO allies come up with 1,000 troops to support its operation in Kandahar.

Germany, under pressure from Washington, has recently softened a longstanding insistence that it cannot exceed a self-imposed limit of 3,500 troops in Afghanistan, and no longer excludes reinforcements this year.

France has also signaled a willingness to send more troops, but appears to be balking about sending them south.

A senior Bush administration official, briefing reporters on Friday, said the United States expects "helpful" troop contributions to come out of the Bucharest summit, but that any increase would be within limits.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said during a visit to Germany last month that the NATO alliance was at risk if it became split between members willing and unwilling to fight.

The United States has 29,000 troops in Afghanistan, split between those assigned to the NATO mission and forces operating independently, and plans to send an additional 3,200 Marines in April.

(Writing by Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Philip Barbara)

Top commander unveils new Taliban tactics

2008-03-02T20:40:00.000Z

By Sayed Salahuddin

KABUL (Reuters) - A top Taliban commander has said suicide attacks and roadside bombs would spearhead its new strategy against foreign troops, and hinted the movement could work with Afghanistan's government if foreign troops left.

In an apparent policy shift, Taliban deputy leader Mullah Brother told a militant Website that the Islamic movement could cooperate with the government of President Hamid Karzai, rather than seek its ouster.

"The matter can not be solved through war...the issue should be settled through understanding and talks," he said.

In the past, the Taliban has vowed to topple Karzai's government and drive out foreign forces.

Ousted from power in 2001, the al Qaeda-backed Taliban have made a strong come back since 2006, causing splits among the NATO alliance as some members appear reluctant to send their soldiers to areas where the militants are active.

In his interview, Mullah Brother refused to spell out all aspects of the Taliban's new military strategy, but said: "Martyrdom attacks and roadside explosions will form major part of the such operations."

"Through our military commanders, local and central councils we are working on these tactics...which will be implemented across the country in the near future as the new military strategy," the website quoted him as saying.

The date of the interview was not mentioned.

Brother served as a top Taliban military commander during the reign of the group until its ouster and is among the militants list wanted by the Afghan and U.S. governments.

Western military commanders say the Taliban have suffered heavy casualties in conventional battles with NATO and U.S.-led forces in recent years and instead have resorted mainly to suicide raids and roadside bomb blasts.

The Taliban carried out more than 140 suicide attacks last year, a record high in Afghanistan as the militants adopted tactics used with devastating effect by insurgents in Iraq.

Brother said suicide attacks were "very effective" against foreign and Afghan government forces.

Most of the casualties in such attacks have been civilians, who have also lost lives in operations by foreign troops hunting militants.

More than 11,000 people, including more than 350 foreign soldiers, have been killed in the past two years, the bloodiest period since Taliban's removal.

The deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan has led some Western politicians to warn recently that Afghanistan could slide back into anarchy.

U.S.-led troops overthrew Taliban's government in 2001 after it refused to hand over al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the suspected architect of the September 11 attacks on the United States.

(Editing by Jon Boyle)

Afghans Protest Prophet Cartoon

2008-03-02T20:37:00.000Z

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- Hundreds of demonstrators set the Danish and Dutch flags ablaze Sunday in northern Afghanistan to protest the reprint of Prophet Muhammad cartoons in Denmark and an upcoming Dutch film criticizing the Quran.

Clerics and madrassa students gathered in front of Afghanistan's largest shrine in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif to demand the government shut down the Danish and Dutch embassies in Kabul.

"We don't want our government to have any diplomatic relations with these two countries," said Maulawi Abdul Hadi, one of the clerics organizing the protest. "We don't want Danish and Dutch troops in Afghanistan. They should be kicked out of the NATO forces here."

Denmark has 780 troops in Afghanistan as part of NATO's International Security Assistance Force and the Netherlands has 1,650.

Hadi said about 100 clerics and madrassa students launched Sunday's protest.

The crowd swelled to about 700 before dispersing, provincial police spokesman Sher Jan Durrani said, adding that the protest was peaceful.

Hadi said the organizers ended the protest after two and half hours because it had grown too large and they were concerned it might turn violent.

Last month in a gesture of solidarity, Denmark's leading newspapers reproduced cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad after Danish police said they uncovered a plot to kill the artist, whose drawings sparked deadly riots across the Muslim world in 2006.

The reproduction triggered another wave of protests in recent weeks.

The Afghans were also angered by a short film by a Dutch lawmaker that portrays the Quran as a "fascist book."

Afghanistan is a Muslim nation where blasphemy of Muhammad and the Quran is considered a serious crime that carries the death sentence.

Iraq war hits U.S. economy: Nobel winner

2008-03-02T20:36:00.000Z

By Daniel Trotta

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Iraq war has contributed to the U.S. economic slowdown and is impeding an economic recovery, Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government is severely underestimating the cost of the war, Stiglitz and co-author Linda Bilmes write in their book, "The Three Trillion Dollar War" (W.W. Norton), due to be published on Monday.

The nearly 5-year-old war, once billed as virtually paying for itself through increased Iraqi oil exports, has cost the U.S. Treasury $845 billion directly.

"It used to be thought that wars are good for the economy. No economist really believes that anymore," Stiglitz said in an interview.

Stiglitz and Bilmes argue the true costs are at least $3 trillion under what they call an ultraconservative estimate, and could surpass the cost of World War Two, which they put at $5 trillion after adjusting for inflation.

The direct costs exclude interest on the debt raised to fund the war, health care costs for veterans coming home, and replacing the destroyed hardware and degraded operational capacity caused by the war.

In addition, there are costs not accounted for in the budget such as rising oil prices and social and macroeconomic costs, which the book details.

To illustrate how the money could be spent elsewhere, Bilmes cited the annual U.S. budget for autism research -- $108 million -- which is spent every four hours in Iraq. A trillion dollars could have hired 15 million additional public school teachers for a year or provided 43 million students with four-year scholarships to public universities, the book says.

Stiglitz and Bilmes say they were excessively conservative in calculating the $3 trillion figure, overcompensating for their bias in having opposed the war.

'FLOODING THE ECONOMY'

Asked if the war has contributed to the U.S. slowdown, Stiglitz said, "Very much so."

"To offset that depressing effect, the Fed has flooded the economy with liquidity and the regulators looked the other way when very imprudent lending was going up," Stiglitz said. "We were living on borrowed money and borrowed time and eventually a day of reckoning had to come, and it has now come."

The war has also altered how the United States has reacted to its current economic troubles, he said.

"When America's financial institutions had a problem, they had to turn to the sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East for recapitalization, for the bailout," he said.

"The reason was obvious. The war had led to high oil prices. The war had meant that America had to borrow more money. There weren't sources of liquid funds in the United States. The sources of the liquid funds were in the Middle East," he said.

Bilmes, a former assistant secretary and chief financial officer of the U.S. Customs Department, said the war also limited options for the $168 billion stimulus package signed into law by President George W. Bush on February 13.

"We really had very little wiggle room in order to pass this because of the fact that we're spending $16 billion a month on Iraq and Afghanistan," Bilmes said. "Actually the country could have used a larger fiscal stimulus but there is (no) cash to accommodate it."

The authors said they were surprised by the hidden costs their research found, citing, for example, what they called the underreporting of casualty figures by the Pentagon.

The official Pentagon figure of nearly 30,000 wounded in action fails to account for an addition 40,000 service members who have required medical attention for non-combat injuries or illness, Bilmes said. She based her conclusion on official Defense Department data from a restricted Web site.

(Editing by Philip Barbara)

US warship threatens regional stability: Hezbollah

2008-02-29T22:58:00.000Z

By Laila Bassam

BEIRUT (Reuters) - The pro-Iranian Hezbollah group accused the United States on Friday of endangering regional stability by deploying a warship off Lebanon and vowed to defy what it called an act of military intimidation.

The United States said on Thursday it sent the destroyer USS Cole to the eastern Mediterranean because the Bush administration was concerned about Lebanon's political deadlock.

"The American move threatens the stability of Lebanon and the region and it is an attempt to spark tension," Hezbollah member of parliament Hassan Fadlallah told Reuters by telephone.

Hezbollah, which is backed by Syria and Iran, leads a Lebanese opposition locked in a 15-month-old power struggle with the Western-backed governing coalition.

The standoff, which Washington blames on Syrian meddling, has left Lebanon without a president since November.

"The American administration has used the policy of sending warships to support its allies in Lebanon before, and that experiment failed and backfired," Fadlallah said.

"We don't succumb to threats and military intimidation practiced by the United States to implement its hegemony over Lebanon."

Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said his government had not requested any such move by Washington.

"Regarding reports that U.S. warships have arrived to the east of the Mediterranean, it is important that I make clear that there are no foreign warships in Lebanese territorial waters," Siniora said, addressing Arab ambassadors.

"We did not call any warships from any side."

State Department spokesman Tom Casey said that for U.S. adversaries, the move was "just a reminder, that we are there".

"We have a long-term commitment to peace and stability there (in the region), and we're not going anywhere ... we intend to maintain a very robust, defensive presence there," he said.

REPEAT

"America repeats the adventure of '82," the headline of the pro-Hezbollah al-Akhbar newspaper said, referring to a big U.S. military deployment in Lebanon after the 1982 Israeli invasion.

At that time the United States deployed Marines in Beirut and warships off the coast to support a Lebanese government trying to reach a peace deal with Israel.

U.S. forces had to pull out after a series of suicide bombings by pro-Iranian militants, one of which killed 241 Marines. The Lebanese government was forced to scrap its peace agreement with Israel under pressure from Syria and its local allies.

A U.S. defense official said the Cole left Malta on Tuesday heading toward Lebanon. It would not be visible from the Lebanese coast but would stay "well over the horizon".
Lebanon's presidential election was postponed again this week to March 11 from February 26, the 15th such delay, after rival leaders failed to reach a deal.

The deadlock has threatened to degenerate into sectarian violence and continues to poison inter-Arab relations in the run-up to an Arab League summit in Syria on March 29-30.

The deployment of the USS Cole was announced two weeks after the assassination of senior Hezbollah commander Imad Moughniyah, who was on the United States' most wanted list of terrorists.

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah blamed Israel for Moughniyah's killing in Damascus and vowed to avenge his death. Israel denies any links but its secret Mossad spy service had sought the Lebanese militant for two decades.

(Additional reporting by Yara Bayoumy in Beirut and Susan Cornwell and Andrew Gray in Washington; Writing by Nadim Ladki; editing by Robert Woodward)

Burma army opens fire on Monks funeral

2008-02-28T21:15:00.001Z

Paletwa: A traditional funeral cremation ceremony being held for a Buddhist monk in Paletwa Township of Chin State was disturbed after two drunken army officials fired their guns into the air during a drama troupe's performance for the public during the first evening, reports a monk.

"The performance was stopped on the first night of the monk's funeral ceremony due to army officials firing their guns in the air after drinking a lot. Many children were hurt when the crowd was thrown into disarray by the gunfire," the monk said.

The traditional Buddhist funeral ceremony was celebrated in Miwa Village in Paletwa Township, a few miles from where Light Infantry Battalion 289 is stationed.

When the funeral ceremony began on 19 February, a platoon of Burmese soldiers led by two officers from the battalion arrived saying they were there to provide security for the ceremony.

In Arakanese tradition, the funeral of a monk is a festival event with performance troupes staging shows throughout three nights for the thousands of people who attend the funeral ceremony.

Many residents from surrounding areas attended the monk's funeral on February 19th, and the event was very lively with a teeming crowd.

The monk said, "The incident took place when the troupe started its performance that night. Two army officers came to the front of the crowd and began dancing on the stage during the dance of the leading actress.

The monk added that when the two army officers were dancing before the stage, the audience complained because their view of the leading actress was blocked.

At that time, five leading monks who were supervising the ceremony came out to try and stop the officers, but they refused to comply and responded to the monks aggressively.

When people heard the officers' response, many in the crowd besieged the two officers to attack them after they assaulted the monks. At that time, the army officials fired five shots into the air with their pistols. After firing their guns, the audience became very disarrayed as people tried to run from the festival grounds.

After the incident occurred, the festival was temporarily halted. The funeral ceremony was held successfully over the next two days, however, as the higher army officials from the battalion called back the two officers and the platoon to their base after hearing of the incident. #

*narinjara.com

Family urges Betancourt release

2008-02-28T19:42:00.000Z

The family of Ingrid Betancourt, the French-Colombian politician held for more than six years by the Colombian Farc rebel group, has pleaded for her release amid fears her health is failing.

Concern for Betancourt grew after four hostages released by the Farc on Wednesday said she was "physically and morally exhausted" by her captivity.

"My mother, the person that is dearer to me than anything in this world, is dying," Lorenzo Delloye, Betancourt's 19-year-old son, told a news conference in Paris, France, on Thursday.

"If we don't act quickly, mother will die. This is an emergency."

'Race against clock'
The calls come as Nicholas Sarkozy, the French president, made a plea for Betancourt's release and said he was prepared to travel to Colombia to fetch her himself.

"They cannot let this woman die. It is a race against the clock [and] we can wait no longer," he said on Thursday during a trip to South Africa.

"The Farc must know and understand that the martyrdom of Ingrid Betancourt is the martyrdom of France."

Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president who helped broker the hostage deal, also called on Manuel Marulanda, the Farc's leader, to move Betancourt to a safe location "urgently".

'Inhuman conditions'

Luis Eladio Perez, a Colombian former senator and one of the four hostages released on Wednesday, said that Betancourt was being singled out for particularly inhumane treatment by her captors.

"She is being kept in inhuman conditions. She has been very badly treated by the guerrillas [and] the whole world needs to know that," he said following his release.

The former hostage also said the health of three US Pentagon contractors who have been held for five years, Thomas Howes, Marc Gonsalves and Keith Stansell was also declining.

The men, who were captured after their plane crashed in Farc-held territory, had written letters to George Bush and Democratic members of congress pleading for assistance, but the letters were confiscated by the Farc, Peres said.

The other three hostages released are Colombian politicians Gloria Polanco, Orlando Beltran, and Jorge Gechem, who was released on the grounds of his ill health.

Their release follow the freeing of two women hostages, fellow former Colombian lawmakers Clara Rojas and Consuelo Gonzalez, last month.

Prisoner issue
On Wednesday the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) repeated its demand for the creation of a demilitarised zone in order to negotiate a prisoner swap between remaining political hostages and about 500 Farc fighters being held in Colombian prisons.

Alvaro Uribe, the Colombian president, has indicated a willingness to negotiate an exchange of prisoners.

However, he has ruled out the demilitarisation of such a large and populated part of the country - suggesting a smaller zone instead.

On Thursday, Fabrice Delloye, Ingrid Betancourt's ex-husband and the father of her two children, called on world leaders to support Uribe and urge him to create such a zone.

"We [ask] heads of states around the whole world to give their support to Uribe so, in order to save the life of his fellow citizens ... he bravely accepts as soon as possible and with the help and support of the international community to discuss the conditions of a humanitarian agreement," he said.

*aljazeera.net

HIV, hepatitis scare may affect 40,000 US clinic patients

2008-02-28T18:36:00.001Z

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - US officials Thursday said 40,000 people may have been infected with HIV and hepatitis in a Las Vegas clinic.

Authorities in southern Nevada said they were notifying some 40,000 patients who received anesthesia injections at the clinic's endoscopy center between March 2004 and January 11, 2008 about potential exposure to hepatitis and HIV.

They recommended in a statement that the patients "contact their primary care physicians or health care providers to get tested for hepatitis C as well as hepatitis B and HIV."

The move comes after several acute cases of hepatitis C showed up in the area.

Power goes out for millions in Florida

2008-02-26T21:12:00.000Z

By Tom Brown

MIAMI (Reuters) - A massive power outage struck parts of Florida on Tuesday, knocking out electricity to millions, snarling traffic and trapping people in elevators.

A spokeswoman for FPL Group Inc, the main energy provider in south Florida, said the company's Turkey Point nuclear reactor in Florida shut down due to the loss of off-site power but would not elaborate on the cause of the outage. Other power companies were also affected.

Mike Stone, a spokesman for the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said the blackout affected two to three million people in south Florida and as far north in the state as the Tampa area.

Local media said the number of those affected was higher. In many areas power was restored quite quickly.

Florida Power and Light, a subsidiary of FPL Group Inc, said it expected to restore power to most Florida customers that lost power in about two hours.

"I don't know the cause of the outage," Stone told Reuters, saying authorities were awaiting an update from FPL. "There was a failure within the FPL system," he said.

Officials in Washington said there were no signs of a link to terrorism.

"There is no indication of a nexus to terrorism at this time ... we will continue to monitor," U.S. Homeland Security Department spokeswoman Laura Keehner said.
CNN reported that eight power plants were shut down and Fox News said that substation equipment failure caused a domino effect of power plant failures.

It was not just the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Palm Beach area, the most populous part of the state, that was affected.

A spokesman for Progress Energy's Florida utility said power outages spread from south Florida to its territory in the middle of the state.

The outages were caused by the loss of generation outside its area, said Progress spokesman Drew Elliott. He could not say how many customers lost power.

"We expect to have power back on by this afternoon," he said.

Local newspapers said power was out in Volusia county, around Daytona Beach, site of the famous racetrack, and in Brevard county, where NASA launches space shuttles from its Kennedy Space Center.

On August 14, 2003, New York City and much of the Northeast and parts of the Midwest United States suffered a blackout that affected 50 million people. It was widely seen as the worst blackout in North American history.

That outage stranded hundreds of thousands of commuters and trapped subway riders underground in New York City, where thousands of people spent a hot night sleeping on sidewalks or walking miles in the darkness to reach their homes.

(Reporting by Scott DiSavino in New York, Randall Mikkelson in Washington, Jim Loney in Miami, Eileen O'Grady in Houston; Editing by Frances Kerry)

Hormone therapy skews breast cancer diagnosis

2008-02-26T21:02:00.000Z

By Andrew Stern

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Women on hormone replacement therapy have only a slightly higher risk of developing breast cancer, but there are much greater chances they will experience the worry of abnormal mammograms or may undergo an avoidable breast biopsy, researchers said on Monday.

Mammograms and biopsy exams were also found to be less reliable at detecting breast cancer among women taking hormones, which counteract symptoms of menopause such as hot flashes and vaginal dryness.

Originally, the 2002 Women's Health Initiative study involving 16,608 women aged 50 to 79 found breast cancer incidence among women taking the hormones estrogen and progestin projected to an additional one in 1,000 cases compared to women taking an inert placebo.

"What this data does is emphasize that yes, the breast cancer risk is still there, but more importantly, instead of that low number of one in 1,000 getting breast cancer, one in 10 women are told they had an abnormal mammogram they'll have to deal with, and probably even more importantly, one in 25 women will have an otherwise avoidable breast biopsy," Dr. Rowan Chlebowski at the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center said in a telephone interview.

"Both of those less reliably found cancer," he added.

Previous research has shown hormone replacement therapy increases breast tissue density, which can make detection of cancerous tumors more difficult, although the current study did not examine this factor.

Since the original findings of increased cancer risk, doctors generally have urged women opting for hormone therapy to use it at the lowest effective dose for the shortest possible time.

Roughly 25 million U.S. prescriptions for hormone therapy are written yearly, Chlebowski said.
The pharmaceutical company Wyeth said in a statement the study's findings did not change what is already known about the breast cancer risk from hormone replacement therapy.

DOCTOR'S ADVICE

"These findings represent a concern for post-menopausal women who are considering hormone therapy," Chlebowski said in a statement. "They should take the results of this study into consideration and consult with their physicians before undergoing even short-term hormone therapy."

In the study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, 35 percent of women taking hormones had mammograms with abnormal results compared to 23 percent of women taking a placebo. An abnormal test can create emotional as well as financial hardships, the study noted.

Ten percent of women taking hormones had breast biopsies ordered by their doctors, compared to 6 percent of women taking a placebo.

During the 5-1/2 years of the study, there were 199 breast cancers found in the hormone group and 150 in the placebo group. Women taking hormones had more advanced cancers yet biopsies ordered by their doctors had a lower rate of diagnosis -- 15 percent in the hormone group versus 20 percent in the placebo group.

"(A year) after discontinuation (of the therapy) ... the adverse effects on mammogram and breast biopsy performance were seen even in younger women in the fifth decade of life, so the finding may impact women just entering menopause as well," Chlebowski said.

(Editing by Eric Walsh)

Biden Warns of Failure in Afghanistan

2008-02-26T21:01:00.000Z

NEW YORK (AP) -- Sen. Joseph Biden on Monday called for more U.S. aid for Afghanistan and deeper NATO involvement there, saying failure could also have dire consequences for neighboring Pakistan.

NATO must be "fully in the fight" in Afghanistan - nothing less than the future of the alliance is at stake, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee told a luncheon crowd at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"Many of our NATO allies thought they were signing up for a peacekeeping mission, not counter-insurgency operations," said Biden, D-Del. "Many are fighting with incredible bravery in the south. But the so-called "national caveats" are making a mockery of NATO - and the notion of a unified mission."

Each nation that contributes troops operates under so-called national caveats that limit what its troops can do.

Nearly seven years after a U.S.-led invasion defeated the Taliban regime, NATO has about 42,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, 14,000 of whom are American.

Biden recently traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan and he said the stakes are as high as they've ever been for the future of those nations.

"Afghanistan must never again become a safe haven for al-Qaida. But just as important, if Afghanistan fails, Pakistan could follow, because extremists will set their sights on the bigger prize to the east," he said.

With Pakistan's recent parliamentary elections swept by opposition candidates, President Pervez Musharraf seemed willing to leave office peaceably, Biden said.

"I think he will go gently into the good night," Biden said.

Musharraf's spokesman, Rashid Qureshi, told Dawn News television in Pakistan on Monday that the Pakistani leader would not respond to any suggestion by a U.S. senator that he should withdraw from the presidency quietly and gracefully.

Some Pakistani leaders and many media commentators also have called for Musharraf, a key U.S. ally against terrorism, to resign.

The parties of assassinated Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto and former premier Nawaz Sharif won a majority of the seats in the new parliament and are expected to form a coalition government. But they fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to impeach Musharraf.

Biden urged a huge boost in U.S. spending on reconstructing Afghanistan, putting a single person in charge of reconstruction and focusing on arresting drug kingpins there.

"We have spent on Afghanistan's reconstruction in six years what we spend every three weeks on military operations in Iraq," he said. "How do you spell hope in Dari and Pashtu? A-S-P-H-A-L-T."

*hosted.ap.org

Depression drugs 'little better than placebos': study

2008-02-26T20:58:00.000Z

LONDON (AFP) - Best-s elling anti-depressants like Prozac and Seroxat are barely more effective than placebos in treating most people with depression, a study led by a British university said Tuesday.

The research, which analysed 47 clinical trials, breaks new ground by incorporating data not previously released by drug companies which researchers obtained under US freedom of information laws.

Its findings prompted some academics and mental health campaigners to question whether people with mild and moderate depression should be prescribed drugs like Prozac, which has been taken by 40 million people worldwide.

"The difference in improvement between patients taking placebos and patients taking anti-depressants is not very great," said Professor Irving Kirsch of Hull University, in northern England, who led the team.

"This means that depressed people can improve without chemical treatments.

"Given these results, there seems little reason to prescribe antidepressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients unless alternative treatments have failed to provide a benefit."

The study, published in the journal PLoS (Public Library of Science) Medicine, looked at Prozac, Seroxat, Effexor and Serzone and found the drugs were only better than a placebo for some people with severe depression.

Kirsch's team said it was one of the most thorough probes into the impact of new generation anti-depressants or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).

But drug companies strongly questioned the findings.

A spokesman for Eli Lilly, which makes Prozac, said that "extensive scientific and medical experience" had shown it is "an effective anti-depressant."

And GlaxoSmithKline, which makes Seroxat, said the study had not acknowledged the "very positive benefits" of the drugs.

"Their conclusions are at odds with what has been seen in actual clinical practice," a spokesman said.

"It is widely recognised by experts in the field that studies in depression are challenging and very difficult to conduct."

One leading academic who has studied why drug companies only publish some of their data on new drugs said in the wake of the findings they should be obliged to provide full details.

Doctor Tim Kendall, deputy director of Britain's Royal College of Psychiatrists research unit, said the study was "fantastically important."

"I think it's too dangerous to allow drug companies -- where profit is a key factor -- to be able to withhold data which shows that a drug is ineffective or harmful," he said.

Alison Cobb, of British mental health charity Mind, hailed the findings as "a serious challenge to the predominance of drugs in treating depression."

"Anti-depressants do help many people but by no means all and some people experience severe side-effects with them," she said.

"Nine out of 10 GPs (general practitioners) say they've been forced to dish out drugs because they don't have proper access to 'talking treatments' such as cognitive behavioural therapy, which are recommended as the first-line treatment for mild to moderate depression."

Another mental health charity, Sane, warned the findings "could remove what has been seen as a vital choice for thousands," adding people should not stop taking their drugs immediately.

As the study was published, the British government published details of a 170-million-pound (225-million-euro, 335-million dollar) programme to improve access to counselling and therapy for people with depression.

Officials say this should see 900,000 more people receiving such treatments over the next three years.

*afp.com

Pakistan lifts YouTube ban, says world outage accidental

2008-02-26T20:57:00.000Z

ISLAMABAD (AFP) - Pakistan said Tuesday that it has lifted a ban on YouTube after the website removed cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, adding that an earlier worldwide outage sparked by its actions was unintentional.

Telecommunications officials told AFP that the popular website was up and running again in the conservative Muslim nation after YouTube removed "highly profane and sacrilegious footage" that was offensive to Islam.

"We have issued instructions to all Internet service providers that YouTube should be unblocked as the specific content has been removed by the website," Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) spokesman Khurram Mehran told AFP.

YouTube was not immediately available to confirm whether it had removed the material, which the PTA said was controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that were republished by Danish newspapers earlier this month.

Authorities ordered the blocking of the website at the weekend in protest at what it said was blasphemous material but the move prompted worldwide problems with access for a few hours.

YouTube said Monday that an Internet service provider complying with Pakistan's ban on the website routed many worldwide users to nowhere for a couple of hours over the weekend.

"This was not intentional and might have happened when an international company, which is routing Internet traffic to Pakistan, tried to block the specific (web address)," a senior PTA official told AFP.

The ban was only partially effective, with industry officials saying that some Pakistani users were able to access YouTube through at least one major service provider that relies on a foreign-based router.

YouTube earlier said it was working to ensure there could be no repeat of the worldwide problems sparked by Pakistan's actions.

"For about two hours (Sunday), traffic to YouTube was routed according to erroneous Internet Protocols, and many users around the world could not access our site," YouTube said in a written reply to an AFP inquiry.

"We have determined that the source of these events was a network in Pakistan. We are investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening again."

Some Pakistani users have expressed doubts over the official reason for Pakistan's YouTube ban, saying that authorities wanted to block access to footage of alleged rigging in last week's parliamentary elections.

President Pervez Musharraf's allies lost heavily to opposition parties in the polls, which were preceded by allegations of massive vote fraud.

"Some Internet users are sceptical that the government banned YouTube because it contained clips from a private television station which showed election rigging," said Wahaj us Siraj, chief of the Pakistan Internet Service Providers Association.

Internet user Sajid Ali said the ban was unnecessary because Muslims in Pakistan would not want to access blasphemous material anyway.

"No Muslim would want to view the blasphemous content on any website. The government is really disturbed over its defeat in elections and afraid of critical videos and remarks on YouTube," Ali, a banker, told AFP.

*afp.com

France eyes sending troops to Afghan combat zone

2008-02-26T20:56:00.000Z

PARIS (Reuters) - France may send hundreds of ground troops to east Afghanistan where NATO-led forces are fighting al Qaeda-backed insurgents, Le Monde newspaper reported on Tuesday.

It said the move would be part of a new Afghan policy being worked out by President Nicolas Sarkozy and his advisers.

France has about 1,900 soldiers under NATO's Afghan command, most of them based in relatively calm Kabul, and Le Monde said the fresh troops would be deployed outside the capital.

"Their destination would be zones of potentially fierce fighting, preferably the eastern region of Afghanistan close to the tribal areas of Pakistan," it said.

Early last year, France withdrew 200 special forces soldiers who had been operating under U.S. command in Afghanistan, but Le Monde said Paris was now expected to sanction the return of the special forces. About 50 remained to train Afghan commandos.

A presidential spokesman declined to confirm or deny the newspaper report. "The president has not made a decision. We are in discussion with our partners, inside NATO but not exclusively," he said.

An alliance source said the plan was one of a number of options that France was discussing with allies ahead of an April summit in Bucharest at which alliance leaders will look to give new impetus to the security mission.

Under the plan, the deployment of French soldiers to the east would free up U.S. forces there to go and help Canadian troops fighting insurgents in the south.

"Our understanding is that there is no decision on this. There is a long way to go until Bucharest," said the source.
Washington is heading a campaign for what it calls a fairer sharing of the burden in the fight against Taliban insurgents. Britain, Canada, Poland and others have backed the U.S. demand.

Germany, Italy and Spain have troops in relatively secure areas and have refused to send troops to southern and eastern provinces where the militants are most active.

At a meeting in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius this month, NATO defense ministers with troops fighting the Taliban in the south of Afghanistan backed calls by the United States for more countries to send forces there.

NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said last week the alliance's future rested on its mission in Afghanistan.

Earlier this month, senior Canadian officials had talks in Paris on a possible offer of French support for 2,500 Canadian troops in southern Afghanistan.

Since his election in May, Sarkozy has sent more combat aircraft to Kandahar in southern Afghanistan and beefed up French efforts to train the Afghan army.

(Reporting by Andrew Dobbie in Paris and Mark John in Brussels; Editing by Robert Woodward)

Watchdogs warn about EU central Europe projects

2008-02-25T21:26:00.000Z

By Marcin Grajewski

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Two environment watchdogs on Monday said European Union newcomers from central Europe were seeking the bloc's funds for regional development projects that could harm the environment.

Friends of the Earth Europe and CEE Bankwatch Network criticized 50 projects worth 22 billion euros ($32.6 billion), such as motorways or waste incinerators, for which the countries were seeking 10 billion euros in EU funding.

"If the money drives reckless developments and environmental destruction, its potential to deliver benefits is being wasted," said Martin Konecny, coordinator for EU funds at Friends of the Earth Europe.

The organizations said the EU might deny the funds for these projects because they might not meet the bloc's environmental standards.

"We welcome the non-governmental organizations' involvement in this debate. We will look at the all projects ... once member states apply for EU funding," European Commission spokeswoman Eva Kaluzynska said.

The watchdogs highlighted three planned schemes they said would be especially harmful to the environment, dubbing them "RegioScars," a pun on the "RegioStars" projects lauded by the executive European Commission for being innovative.

The three schemes include a plan to build nine waste incinerators worth one billion euros in Poland.

"The plan ... will divert money from the much more needed and effective recycling services. This is unjustifiable at a time when Poland recycles merely 3 percent of its municipal waste," said Magda Stoczkiewicz from CEE Bankwatch Network.

Other projects are the Polish stretch of the Via Baltica expressway that is to link Warsaw and Helsinki through the Baltic states and the R52 expressway in the Czech Republic that is to link Brno and Vienna.

The Polish motorway is supposed to run through the northeastern region of Mazury known for clean lakes, large forests and wildlife. The Commission has already blocked the construction of a part of this road through the protected Rospuda Valley.

The environmental groups also questioned eight river engineering and other water management projects.

The EU has earmarked 167 billion euros in its 2007-13 budget for regional development schemes in the 10 mostly ex-communist countries that joined the bloc in 2004.

(Editing by Caroline Drees)

Computer Virus Attacks Burmese Opposition Groups

2008-02-24T16:18:00.000Z

Irrawaddy : Burmese opposition groups are being targeted by a new virus that attacks their computers and destroys their files. The virus, which carries the name “Happy Birthday,” is circulating mostly in offices in the Thai-Burmese border town of Mae Sot, but has also appeared in Rangoon.

Among the affected organizations are the Burma Lawyer Council (BLC), Political Defense Committee (PDC), Karen National Union (KNU), Assistance Association of Political Prisoners (AAPP) and Dr Cynthia Maung’s clinic. A PDC technician said the virus “starts working as soon as you start opening the computer. It will ask you to restart the computer when opening the window.” PDC had lost all its files because of the virus, and the systems of other groups were also being damaged, the technician said.

*Abitsu

'Sharia is not the problem'

2008-02-24T16:04:00.000Z

When Hibah Khan wanted a divorce, she turned to a sharia court. Her case would have concluded swiftly and happily – if the ruling had been allowed to stand...

By Claire Dwyer Hogg
Sunday, 24 February 2008

Tucked away in Leyton, east London, is Britain's oldest sharia court. Entirely innocuous, there are no signs promoting its presence, nor anything in its façade to suggest the gravity of the decisions made within its four walls. Once a corner-shop, and haphazardly arranged into an office space with the help of temporary partitions, it is now the site of hundreds of judgments each month based on the requirements of Islamic law. Yet, in the 25 years since its inception, it has not presided over any of the stereotypical cases associated with sharia law – not one hand has been cut off, norfornicator flogged. Rather more prosaically, penal law is never addressed – the fatwas (judgments) all concern personal issues such as divorce, financial arbitration, family disputes and inheritances.

It is here that Hibah Khan, 38, is currently trying to divorce her husband. She was brought up in England and her parents instilled in her both western and Islamic values. She met her husband on a holiday in Pakistan. "He was good-looking, educated – a doctor – and we had similar backgrounds," she says. "We liked each other and kept in touch." A year later, in late 1990, they got married in Pakistan. "I decided that following our wedding I would move there," she says. "I was in love, excited, and although I was working as an accountant in London I wanted a change; I was pretty naive."

The differences began to surface immediately. On the wedding day itself, the groom's family shocked Khan by demanding a dowry. "In Islam, the groom is meant to give a gift to the bride," she says. Although she had been married before, at the age of 21, she'd never lived with her then-husband and the marriage was annulled through a sharia court. "My new husband had said that he didn't mind about me being divorced, but once we were married it was clear he thought my family and I should be very grateful that he had married me. That really shocked me. I was very independent, living and working in London, and then there I was, living in a village to please my in-laws."

The couple started arguing and not long after the wedding, Khan's husband declared he was going to take a second wife. "Again, people think this is Islamic," says Khan, "but they don't know that there is small print. In Islam, you should have one wife, but if you have a second, you have to live with her equally and divide your earnings equally. What man can do that?" Her husband then had an affair. "I forgave him because I'd just given birth to our first child. The harder I tried, the more he thought I was desperate to be married to him." Then Khan became pregnant with her second child. "I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown," she says, "So I returned to England and started seeking a divorce."

The court in Leyton where Khan's divorce is now being heard is one of dozens, also known as councils, across Britain. The judgments made there are informed by the teachings of the Koran, but have no basis in British law; modern British Muslims can therefore find themselves working within a legal system that they feel does not fully understand the rigours of their faith. Much in the way a Jewish couple will seek a religious divorce from the Beth Din court, some Muslims turn to sharia for an Islamic divorce.

It is a far cry from the raging debate prompted by the comments from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, when he implied in a lecture earlier this month that the adoption of parts of sharia law will be "unavoidable" in this country's legal system.

Faced with outrage and claims that he was opening a door to extremist Islamic punishments and a parallel legal system, Williams insisted he was simply addressing an issue that had to be debated, and that, "Christians and people of other faiths ought to be doing some reflecting together" about the relationship between law and religion. Calls for his resignation quickly ensued – including from two members of the Church of England synod – though the Prime Minister came out in support, praising Williams' "great integrity".

Khan's case illustrates a flaw in the dual-legal system. "Even though my marriage was never registered here, and my husband has never even been to the UK, my solicitor tells me the Islamic marriage certificate is recognised by the British government as legitimate, but the Islamic divorce certificate is not." So Khan now has to seek a divorce through British law as well as the one she is currently seeking through the sharia court.

Ironically, when the row over sharia law first came up in Britain, many people argued it would make life more difficult for women, since it has a poor reputation for upholding women's rights. In Khan's case, the problem seems to be the British court. It sent a petition to Khan's husband and gave him two weeks to answer. They heard nothing. If he was resident in this country, they would send bailiffs to present the petition in person, but because her husband lives in a different country, it is up to Khan to ensure he receives it.

"I have to find someone in Pakistan to send the petition to, and get them to take it to my husband, take a photograph of him, and sign an affidavit. But I don't know where he is. And I'm scared of posting the petition because Pakistan is having elections, and things are a bit unreliable there. The only thing holding me up now is the British court. It's causing so much stress. I don't know where to go, who to ask or why this is happening."

Meanwhile in the sharia court, progress is being made. "I have one more meeting, then in three months I will be a free woman," says Khan. "The thing is, some people practise Islam according to the way their forefathers did. But in Islam the learning is never-ending – you're always finding new ways, always interpreting. In this light, the current argument about sharia law in Britain is a pity: it's sad to see people saying anti-Islamic things when they haven't read what the Archbishop's lecture was about.

"There are laws here which are close to sharia already. Look at the benefit system and disability allowance: that's basically the Prime Minister – the leader – looking after his people. In sharia law, it says the leader of a nation has to look after the people. Whereas, is [Pakistani President Pervez] Musharraf giving benefits to his people? No.

"The sharia council has been brilliant – they've really helped me, and I'm relieved someone out there is listening," she adds. "I respect the laws of this country, but for me, marriage vows are sacred, and being married by Islamic law, having an Islamic marriage, is first and foremost.

"The sharia court is a very important part of the law, and the council is such a help to our Muslim community. People who have a negative attitude say that it is barbaric, but really, it is moderate Muslims, rather than the extremists, who are the ones who turn to it. It has allowed me to have the chance of freedom, to take up teaching, and start being happy with my life again."

Hibah Khan's name has been changed to protect her identity

Crime and punishment: What is sharia law?

Sharia is the body of Islamic religious law based on the Koran, Muhammad's teaching, the actions of his followers, and centuries of precedent.

Liberal Muslims say sharia law is not a static code but is open to interpretation, while more hardline followers claim the laws are eternal and should be followed to the letter.

Penal law is only a small part of sharia. The flogging of drunkards and adulterers and cutting off of thieves' hands is perhaps the best-known aspect of sharia law to non-Muslims, but most of the laws are concerned with prosaic issues, from financial arbitration to divorce and personal hygiene.

Sharia law is not legally binding in Britain. However, there are a dozen sharia courts in Britain, which operate out of mosques and deliver judgments on personal law, including divorce and financial issues.

Britain's oldest sharia court is in Leyton (judges Abu Saeed and Suhaib Hassan, pictured below). In operation for 25 years, it has Charity Commission status, issues around 10 fatwas (judgments) a day and hears around 50 divorces a month.

*independent.co.uk

Warning of catastrophe from mass of 'space junk'

2008-02-24T16:02:00.001Z

The amount of debris orbiting the Earth has reached a critical level. Old satellite parts, solar panels and the odd astronaut's lost glove now pose serious risks to space missions. A report from the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety is calling for stringent international laws to be brought in urgently to avert a tragedy.

The threat posed by orbiting debris can only be allayed by extending civil aviation standards into space, says the report, which is to be presented to the United Nations in April. 'Failure to act now to regulate space to protect property and human life would be pure folly,' says the association's director, Tommaso Sgobba. Professor Richard Crowther, who is representing the UK at a UN space safety meeting in Vienna, agrees: 'Eventually binding international civil aviation style laws will have to come.'

Last week, the United States courted an international row after shooting down a disabled spy satellite, saying its fuel could cause serious damage if it crashed to Earth. Russia, however, claimed that the operation was a US cover-up to test its anti-satellite weapons.

According to the space agency Nasa, there are now 9,000 pieces of orbiting junk, weighing a total of more than 5,500 tonnes: old rocket launchers, tools and instruments dropped by astronauts, and pieces of exploded spacecraft. Examples include a glove lost by astronaut Ed White during a 1965 space walk, a camera that Michael Collins let slip in space in 1966 and a pair of pliers that an International Space Station astronaut recently let slip through their fingers.

Space junk varies in size from tiny bolts and screws to huge lumps of fuselage and are to be found in two main regions: low Earth orbit, a few hundred miles above Earth, and geostationary orbit, 22,300 miles up, where communication satellites are programmed to hover above the planet.

In low Earth orbit, pieces of debris pose particular problems. They could strike manned spacecraft and lead to fatal depressurisation, space experts warn. In 1991, a space shuttle had to carry out an emergency seven-second burn of its engines to avoid being struck by part of a Russian Cosmos satellite.

Low-orbiting debris also poses a risk to Earth itself. In 2006, pieces of a Russian spy satellite burnt up in the atmosphere, passing perilously close to a Latin American Airbus carrying 270 passengers over the Pacific.

To date, only one person has been injured by space debris, however: an Oklahoma woman who was hit in the shoulder by a piece of a Delta rocket's fuel tank, but who was uninjured by this extraterrestrial attack.

The problem, according to the Association for the Advancement of Space Safety report, is that up to 20 countries are now able to launch objects into space - but very few of these have rigid safety protocols. Nor is the problem of space debris confined to near Earth, it adds. Satellites in geostationary orbit are supposed to be moved farther into space after they become defunct - but often that obligation is not met.

More than 200 dead satellites now litter this vital part of space. Within 10 years that number could increase fivefold, warns the report. The resulting chaos could lead to serious damage or loss of a spacecraft.

'Unfortunately we may have to wait for something to happen, perhaps a big near miss, before people realise we can't go on as we are,' Crowther said.

*guardian.co.uk

Madeleine: Detective linked to McCanns' private investigators in £25m cocaine probe

2008-02-24T15:58:00.001Z

A private detective linked to the agency hunting for Madeleine McCann has been arrested on suspicion of helping a gang smuggle £25million worth of cocaine.

Retired police officer Antonio Jimenez, 53, was remanded in custody on Thursday by a judge investigating the loss of half a ton of cocaine from a container docked in Barcelona in 2005.

Jimenez was a business partner of Maria Fernandez Lado, 57, founder of Metodo 3, the agency charging £50,000 a month to search for Madeleine.

Spanish police had the container under surveillance following a tip-off.

But Jimenez, then a chief inspector with the Drugs and Organised Crime Unit of the National Police, is suspected of providing vital information to the gang.

He retired from the police shortly afterwards.

The cocaine was smuggled into Spain in 974 packets on the ship Hispanota, which was transporting frozen prawns from Venezuela. It docked in Barcelona in November 2004 and the drugs were taken on January 24, 2005.

Five officers from the Civil Guard have also been arrested and remanded in custody.

A serving police officer has been arrested and released on bail.

*dailymail.co.uk

Is Madeleine in Britain? Dorset councillor claims: 'She came to my house with a Portuguese couple'

2008-02-24T15:53:00.000Z

Kate and Gerry McCanns face yet another potential disappointment after reports emerged last night that Madeleine McCann has been spotted in Britain.

Detectives are said to be launching a major inquiry into the claim that the missing four-year-old was seen by a man in Dorset.

Retired civil servant Alan Cameron alerted police after a Portuguese couple turned up his home in the village of Stratton.

Mr Cameron became suspicious when he saw a girl matching Madeleine's description sitting in the couple's car.

It is the first time a sighting of Madeleine has been reported in Britain since she vanished while on holiday in Portugal last May.

Mr Cameron,66, told the Sunday Express: "They knocked on my door and said they had come to buy the garden furniture I'd put on sale in a local ad."

"Straight away they struck me as odd. The woman said she was Italian but they were speaking fluent Portuguese.

"The man had a few days' growth on his face and was wearing filthy clothes. He told me they ran a language centre in Weymouth but then the woman hit him and told him to be quiet."

Mr Cameron, a former clerk with the Director of Public Prosecutions, said the girl spoke in English and appeared distressed.

"I hear a voice, in perfect, clear English say 'I need to use the toilet'. I could see that she was blonde and four years old."

"I said of course and the woman grabbed her and scooped her under her arm. She didn't allow the girl to walk and deliberately pushed the hood of her jersey over her head. She was sobbing. This little girl was unhappy and she was scared.

"I knew straight away it was a face I'd seen in the news. I'm convinced of it."

A spokesman for Dorset police confirmed that inquiries into the sighting were ongoing.

The McCanns' spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, said last night that the private detectives in charge of the investigation had been informed.

He said: "There's a lot about this sighting which suggests at the very least that we are talking about an abducted young girl.

"We are eagerly awaiting any outcome."

The new reports will cause more fresh heartache for the couple, coming hard on the heels of a suspected sighting of Madeleine in South of France earlier this month.

The McCanns urged French police to show them CCTV footage of a suspected sighting of daughter Madeleine in the South of France.

Although French police have ruled out the possibility it is the four-year-old her parents want to see the surveillance video from a French diner where a Dutch tourist reported seeing the missing British girl.

They refuse give up hope it is her until they have seen the footage and believe it would "put their minds at rest".

There have been several suspected sightings in Europe and North Africa of Madeleine, who vanished from her bed in the Portuguese holiday resort days before her fourth birthday.

Meanwhile detectives from the McCann's private investigators Metado 3 were back in Praia da Luz last night. They were seen studying aerial photos of the area.

*dailymail.co.uk

Amsterdam Tries Upscale Fix for Red-Light Area

2008-02-24T15:50:00.001Z

AMSTERDAM — Some of the most visited brothels in Amsterdam’s red-light district have gained unexpected new neighbors.

For years, the brothels’ large street-side windows have showcased women of all races, wearing minute bits of clothing as they preened and beckoned customers. But in some windows, women have recently been replaced by plastic mannequins in designer clothes.

What may appear to be a new form of street theater is, instead, the most visible sign of an ambitious new gentrification plan that may take years to complete. The city council has voted to clean up the historic but notorious district, which has become bloated with expanding sleaze. The city is buying up brothels, and it has lent the first 18 windows and boudoirs for one year to young designers and photographers.

The elders of the Dutch capital, long known for its broad-mindedness, insist they have not been seized by a wave of prudishness. They say there is new evidence that criminal gangs, including East Europeans and Russians, have encroached on the area, making it meaner, more violent and more in the grip of the underworld of international sex traffickers.

It is not that city officials believe the sex trade here was ever benign. But the business has expanded rapidly and, along with violence, it has spawned cheap hotels, gaudy souvenir shops and greasy snack bars along once-elegant nearby boulevards.

“We’ve realized this is no longer about small-scale entrepreneurs, but that big crime organizations are involved here in trafficking women, drugs, killings and other criminal activities,” said Job Cohen, the mayor. “We’re not banning prostitution, but we are cutting back on the whole circuit: the gambling halls, the pimps, the money laundering.” The mayor said the cleanup was possible because of tough new zoning codes. The national government has also given cities more leeway to revoke licenses.

By official estimates, sexual transactions alone yield about $100 million per year. But city planners hope they can reduce the smut and attract art galleries, boutiques, upscale restaurants and hotels to the city’s oldest quarter, valuable real estate that is home to seven medieval churches and hundreds of historic buildings.

Once, prostitution was confined to a small area near the port. The brothels were usually run by older women who had retired from the trade. But a report prepared for the mayor’s office last year said that in the past 20 years, power had shifted from madams to Dutch and Eastern European pimps. Tourism, the spread of pornography and changing mores also worked to turn the old center into a vast, lewd bazaar.

On most days the district, covering less than half a square mile, has a parade of men moving along the canals and the alleyways, lined with peep shows, live-sex theaters, legal marijuana cafes and enough shops with erotic films and sex toys to equip an entire battalion. Brothels were legalized in 2000, and according to city statistics, there are now 142, with some 500 display windows for prostitutes. Many more, who work with illegal immigrants, operate around town secretly.

The planned makeover has angered the working residents and landlords, who have enlisted lawyers and formed action groups to defend “the unique character” of the neighborhood, as one of their protests said. Posters saying “Hands Off” have appeared in the windows of cafes and shops.

At the Love Club Thai 21, where a quartet of Asian women were waiting for clients on a recent evening, the club’s owner, Robin Fischer, invited a journalist inside. “Come see, we are a normal business,” he said in his small office, fitted with a computer, a washing machine and a row of drying towels overhead. “We have a license. We pay taxes.”

He and his friends say city leaders are being hypocritical in demanding change in the district. “It’s the diamond dealers, the hotel people, the banks who want to drive us away,” he said. “Their business isn’t clean, either.”

Mr. Fischer, who has worked in the red-light district for 20 years, and two other Dutch landlords who did not want to be identified, blame foreign pimps for ruining the atmosphere.

“The guys from Eastern Europe bring in young and frightened women; they threaten them and beat them,” Mr. Fischer said. “In the old days, pimps mostly stuck to the rules, and police would warn people, like, ‘Hey Jan, you’re crossing the line.’ There was a kind of balance. But the local sex bosses are too old or dead or in prison, and the market has opened up.”

In some ways, city officials concede they are having to deal with problems created by the Netherlands’ own lenient policies. A parliamentary inquiry, criminologists and prostitutes’ support groups have warned in recent years that prostitution and the permissive marijuana trade were increasingly a magnet for international organized crime.

In a report about the sex trade, Karina Schaapman, a former prostitute and now a member of the City Council, described a police face book with some 80 “violent pimps” of whom only 3 were Dutch-born. She said more than 75 percent of Amsterdam’s 8,000 to 11,000 prostitutes, including 1,000 men, were from Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia.

Mr. Cohen, the mayor, recalled that in 2000, the Dutch legalized prostitution, intending to make the sex trade more transparent and protect women by giving them work permits. “We realize that this hasn’t worked, that trafficking in women continues,” he said. “Women are now moved around more, making police work more difficult.”

A task force set up by the mayor’s office, in a report last year, said that the marijuana cafes and the licensed brothels had helped generate more crime by providing legal outlets. “The marijuana and the women have to come from somewhere, and organized crime fills much of this demand,” the study said. The money earned in this lucrative trade is pumped back into the area, widening the criminal circle, it said.

Metje Blaak, who runs the Red Thread, a support group for prostitutes, said her group had mixed feelings about the city’s plans. Cutting back crime and trafficking was great, but cutting back brothels would be worse for women. “They may end up in a back room somewhere where we can’t reach them,” she said.

While Amsterdammers could ignore the red-light district if they wanted, its problems of human trafficking and violent turf wars have become the stuff of headlines.

Last year, after several turf battles broke into gunfights, the police arrested a gang of 12 men from Turkey who were running a prostitution ring of about 90 women from Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Germany. In February, a trial in a Dutch court involved three Polish women who the police said had ordered the killing of their Polish pimp.

Along some alleyways like Korte Niezel and Lange Niezel, there are some signs of the new cleanup campaign. Pierre van Rossum, the campaign’s project manager, pointed to Mata Hari, a gambling palace, and to Venekamp, a butcher shop, that had just been boarded up. “The butcher ran a few brothel rooms on the side; he was selling cold meat and warm flesh at the same time,” Mr. van Rossum said.

More closings will follow as the city applies tough new zoning codes and runs tax audits. “Right now people seem more eager to sell rather than fight,” he said.

On the square facing Amsterdam’s oldest church, the city has just bought five buildings used as brothels. In nearby streets it bought 18 similar buildings last year, most of which have now been lent to young designers.

Herbert van Hasselt, who heads the foundation that looks after the 14th-century church and its tombs of prominent citizens, said he was “looking forward to a bit more loving discipline.”

“I’m not looking for bourgeois boredom,” he said, “but it would be nice to see a few more regular people and some normal restaurants here. I’m tired of the roaming drunks that urinate every night on our ancient walls.”

Mr. Cohen, the mayor, an affable former university chancellor who seems an unlikely mafia hunter, recently took a cautious view. “Of course it won’t all become impeccable and wonderful,” he said. “You can’t normalize this business.”

*nytimes.com

Pakistan blocks YouTube website

2008-02-24T15:47:00.001Z

Pakistan has blocked access to the popular YouTube website because of content deemed offensive to Islam.
Its telecommunications authority ordered internet service providers to block the site until further notice.

Reports said the content included Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that have outraged many.

But one report said a trailer for a forthcoming film by Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders, which portrays Islam in a negative light, was behind the ban.

"They asked us to ban it immediately... and the order says the ban will continue until further notice," said Wahaj-us-Siraj, convener of the Association of Pakistan Internet Service Providers.

"Users are quite upset. They're screaming at ISPs which can't do anything.

"The government has valid reason for that, but they have to find a better way of doing it. If we continue blocking popular websites, people will stop using the internet."

Other countries that have temporarily blocked access to YouTube include Turkey and Thailand.

*BBC

Iran warns will hit back at UN sanctions

2008-02-24T15:45:00.000Z

TEHRAN (AFP) - Iran on Sunday warned it would hit back with an appropriate response to new UN Security Council sanctions over its contested nuclear programme, as Western powers stepped up efforts to punish Tehran.

Britain, France and the United States are pushing for a new sanctions resolution in the coming week after the UN atomic watchdog said it could still not confirm if the Iranian atomic drive was peaceful.

"In the case of the adoption of the resolution, we will make a deserving action. We will announce our decision at the right time based on the content of the resolution," foreign ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Saturday warned of "firm reprisals" against any country leading the way to impose new sanctions, adding that Iran was "not joking."

"They could spend 100 years passing resolutions but it will not change anything," he said in an interview with state television.

Neither Hosseini or Ahmadinejad gave any details over exactly what Iran's response could involve.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said Friday in its latest report that it had made "quite good progress" in its four year-probe into the Iranian nuclear drive.

But crucially for future sanctions, the report said it was still not in a position to determine the "full nature of Iran's nuclear programme" and confirmed Tehran was continuing to defy UN demands by enriching uranium.

The report met with starkly different responses from Western capitals and Tehran.

Iranian officials said the report proved that the nuclear case was now closed, with Ahmadinejad hailing the "historic victory of Iran in its greatest confrontation with the oppressive powers since the Islamic revolution".

But US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the report provided "a very strong case" for moving forward with a third UN Security Council sanctions resolution to punish Tehran's failure to suspend enrichment.

"It is our firm belief that there is all the more reason now for the Security Council to pass a third sanctions resolution," added US assistant secretary for political affairs Nicholas Burns.

Iran has defied calls in previous resolutions for it to freeze uranium enrichment operations, a sensitive process world powers fear could be used to make nuclear weapons.

Tehran insists its nuclear programme is peaceful and only aimed at generating atomic energy for a growing population whose immense oil and gas reserves will run out in decades.

Meanwhile, top Iranian cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani accused the United States of unbalancing IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei's "mental state" by submitting secret documents just days before the report.

"The US has submitted a stack of documents to disrupt ElBaradei's mental state and has been successful to some extent," said the head of the elite clerical body the Assembly of Experts, according to the state IRNA agency.

Washington was to host a new round of talks between world powers on Monday ahead of a Council meeting on Wednesday and a vote on the resolution text on Friday, US officials said.

The draft text has been brought forward by Britain and France and it remains to be seen how veto-wielding members China and Russia will respond. Four non-permanent members are also said to harbour reservations.

The draft would impose a travel ban on officials involved in Tehran's nuclear and missile programmes and inspections of shipments to and from Iran if there are suspicions they may contain prohibited goods.

But Hosseini brushed off the prospect of further sanctions, saying that they could only cause "slight problems" for the Islamic republic.

"It is not possible to sanction a country like Iran with so many natural resources and 15 regional neighbours. Sanctions are a defeated measure," he told reporters.

*afp.com

West warns Serbia against violence; more rallies due

2008-02-23T21:58:00.002Z

By Ellie Tzortzi

BELGRADE (Reuters) - The European Union told Serbia on Friday to protect embassies after attacks over Western support for Kosovo's secession, and suggested such violence could harm its prospects of closer ties with the bloc.

A U.S. embassy spokeswoman said families of diplomats and support staff were being evacuated after rioters stormed the mission in Belgrade and set it on fire on Thursday. The ambassador and core staff would remain.

"We believe that yesterday's attacks on our embassy were conducted by hooligans and thugs," a White House spokesman said in Washington.

"We quite frankly don't believe that this is the face of Serbia. We've also been assured that there will be no repeat".

The U.N. Security Council condemned the "mob attacks" that came after a mass state rally for Kosovo. Serbia blamed the violence on isolated vandals.

A young man was found dead in the U.S. embassy. The British, German, Croatian and Turkish missions were also attacked.

"Things will have to calm down before we can recuperate the climate that would allow for any contact to move on the SAA (Stabilization and Association Agreement)," EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said.

Brussels hopes to lure Serbs away from nationalism with the relative stability, prosperity and travel freedom that cooperation with the bloc will bring. Its stance is complicated by its commitment to Kosovo's independence -- declared on Sunday and quickly recognized by Washington and many EU states.

Russia, Serbia's ally, said Western states should have anticipated the backlash over Kosovo, seen by Serbs as the nation's heartland but now home to an Albanian majority who have been under U.N. rule since NATO drove out Serb forces in 1999.

"People who advocated a unilateral proclamation of independence for Kosovo should have calculated the consequences," a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

In the flashpoint city of Mitrovica in north Kosovo, several thousand ethnic Serbs massed to taunt U.N. riot police on the main bridge after a rally against Kosovo's independence.

A Reuters witness said the mostly young crowd was singing patriotic Serbian songs and chanting anti-Albanian slogans. Some lobbed firecrackers towards the police who were blocking the way to the bridge's southern end, in the Albanian part of the city.

Rallies were also scheduled in Serbia's southern city of Nis and Montenegro's capital Podgorica.

CHEERS, SMOKE

Some 250,000 people, according to city authorities, attended Thursday's peaceful official rally in Belgrade, listening to speeches and songs in a melancholy atmosphere. Serbia's Interior Ministry put the number at half a million.

But several hundred young male rioters split off, smashed their way into the U.S. embassy and set fire to part of the building, the second time in a week that it had been attacked.

A crowd of about 1,000 cheered "Serbia, Serbia" as one ripped the Stars and Stripes off its pole and others jumped up and down on a balcony, holding a Serbian flag.

Some 130 people were injured in street clashes, including 50 police and some journalists, and almost 200 were arrested. European and U.S. leaders criticized police for a slow reaction.

Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, whose fiery anti-Western rhetoric has been at the forefront of Serbia's diplomatic battle to keep Kosovo, said the peaceful rally "was magnificent and showed what the people of Serbia thought about Kosovo".

In a statement to state news agency Tanjug, he condemned the violence, saying it "directly inflicts damage to our fight" to protect national interests.

Liberal commentators have attacked him for stoking up tension in the hope that the West would back off from supporting Kosovo so as not to risk a nationalist backlash in Serbia.

"This was a disgrace, it was hooliganism of the worst kind," said Miroslav Markovic, walking his dog past looted, broken kiosks near Belgrade's train station. "The government should have been prepared and not have encouraged these people."

(Additional reporting by Matt Robinson in Mitrovica, Dusko Mihailovic in Podgorica and Gordana Filipovic in Belgrade; Editing by Richard Meares)

Taliban Bomb-Making Expertise Growing

2008-02-23T21:58:00.001Z

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- A ruthless new generation of Afghan insurgents is casting aside Taliban doctrine that opposed killing large numbers of civilians, instead using more powerful explosives and packing bombs with ball-bearings to maximize kills.

Just this week, some 140 people died in two bombings. Afghan security officials say the militants have started using C-4, a powerful explosive not seen before in Afghanistan

"It's not like Baghdad, but the terrorists are learning lessons from each other," said Abdul Manan Farahi, counterterrorism chief for the Interior Ministry.

The recent bombings are part of a bloody trend in the deepening Afghan conflict. Militants have stepped up attacks, and NATO has boosted its forces and taken the fight to the Taliban. Last year was the deadliest since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, with over 6,500 people killed in militant-related violence, mostly Taliban fighters.

Both sides have caused civilian deaths. According to an Associated Press count based on figures from Afghan and Western officials, militants killed 480 civilians in 2007, while U.S. or NATO action killed 360 civilians - many of them in airstrikes.

The United States and NATO have successfully worked to cut down on civilian deaths since a spate of casualties in June drew stern warnings from President Hamid Karzai and outraged the Afghan public.

At the same time, a surge in suicide attacks in the past two years is increasingly putting Afghan civilians in the line of fire. There were only six suicide bombings in Afghanistan in all of 2003 and 2004. Militants ramped up such attacks in late 2005 and they've been rising steadily since, culminating in more than 140 in 2007.

Sunday saw the deadliest insurgent bombing since the Taliban's 2001 ouster from power, when a suicide attacker killed more than 100 people at a dog fighting match near the southern city of Kandahar. The next day, 38 Afghan civilians were killed when a suicide car bomber attacked a Canadian military convoy, officials said.

A Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility for Monday's attack - claiming that only police and soldiers were killed. But the spokesman denied the militia was behind Sunday's killings.

The Afghan government has not formally accused the Taliban of Sunday's attack. However, Karzai's spokesman hinted the Taliban was to blame when he said the bombing had "all the hallmarks of previous attacks."

"Whether they claim responsibility or not, they are held responsible by the people of Afghanistan and the government of Afghanistan," Humayun Hamidzada said.

The Taliban insists that it is avoiding attacks that target civilians.

However, a militant spokesman said Taliban leaders have called on bomb-makers to raise the power of blasts against U.S. and NATO military forces, which could increase the possibility that civilians will also be killed.

"All these bombs that are stronger than before, this is because of the growing experience of our jihadi fighters," spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi told The Associated Press by telephone from an undisclosed location. "We will continue to make these kinds of bombs to attack our enemies."

Reclusive Taliban leader Mullah Omar has in the past called on his fighters not to carry out attacks around civilians, apparently aware that such killings hurts the militia's cause. But a new breed of ruthless militants has replaced dozens of insurgent leaders killed or captured by coalition and Afghan forces.

A recent analysis by NATO theorized that while the older Taliban leadership associated with Mullah Omar sought to avoid civilian casualties, "the new guys just don't care," said an official at NATO's headquarters in Kabul who asked not to be identified by name when revealing internal reports.

The influence of one such commander - Siraj Haqqani - is growing, the U.S. says. Haqqani, a Taliban-associated militant with close ties to al-Qaida, is accused of masterminding beheadings and suicide bombings reminiscent of the deadliest days of the Iraq war.

"We believe him to be much more brutal and much more interested in attacking and killing civilians. He has no regard for human life, even those of his Afghan compatriots," said Army Lt. Col. David Accetta, spokesman at the U.S. military's main base in Afghanistan, Bagram.

Accetta said the recent Kandahar bombings were "classic terrorist methodology - intimidate the population."

While it is difficult to identify specific links between militants fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, military and counterterrorism officials have acknowledged there is a crossover between the Taliban and al-Qaida, and jihadists across the world share knowledge using the Internet and videos.

The U.S.-led coalition has said the tactics used by Haqqani are more closely aligned with "international jihadism" - a reference to al-Qaida - than tactics used by Mullah Omar or even longtime insurgent leader Jalaluddin Haqqani, a veteran of the war against the Soviet occupation and Siraj Haqqani's father.

The U.S. military has offered a $200,000 bounty for Siraj Haqqani, who the U.S. says is believed to oversee several madrassas in Pakistan that train insurgents. He has expanded his operations from eastern Afghanistan to include Ghazni and Wardak in central Afghanistan and into Helmand and Kandahar in the south.

Hamidzada, Karzai's spokesman, condemned the Taliban for attacking "soft targets" - a tactic already scaring war-hardened Afghans in Kandahar, former seat of the Islamist regime.

Ibrahim Khan, whose nephew was killed in Sunday's Kandahar bombing, said he told his relatives to stay away from crowds.

"I told my family especially not to go to cultural festivals or dog fighting matches," Khan said. "These insurgents are carrying out attacks everywhere. There are no safe places. We are worried about our children. We are praying for God to bring peace to our country."

---

Associated Press writers Rahim Faiez in Kabul and Noor Khan in Kandahar contributed to this report.

*hosted.ap.org

Myanmar Takes Potshot at Rambo

2008-02-23T21:55:00.001Z

YANGON, Myanmar (AP) -- Sylvester Stallone's Rambo character looks like a fat lunatic in his new movie, a Myanmar magazine said this week, bucking local public opinion that has glorified him for his exploits fighting the ruling junta's unpopular soldiers.

The new "Rambo" film shows the weary hero on a mission to rescue a group of Christian missionaries taken captive by brutal government troops in the jungles of Myanmar.

Stallone's fictional exploits have made him a folk hero among the government's real-life foes here, who circulate bootleg DVDs of the film, even though state censors have ordered video shops not to carry the movie because it denigrates the army's image.

"We need many Rambos in Myanmar," said a 75-year-old retired civil servant after watching it. Like other viewers, he asked not to be named for fear of trouble from authorities.

The movie's catch phrase, "Either live for something, die for nothing - it's your choice," is especially poignant after nonviolent demonstrations for democracy were violently quashed by the army last September.

But an article in The Voice, a Myanmar-language magazine, decried Rambo's bloodletting and said he "looks funny fighting a war even though he's so fat with sagging breasts."

"Stallone's unsmiling and serious-looking style makes him look like a lunatic," it added.

The magazine's critique is actually a loosely translated version of a column criticizing the movie published in the Jan. 28 edition of Singapore's The Straits Times newspaper. Its reference to Myanmar's "dictators" did not make it into The Voice's story.

The Voice, like other privately owned publications in Myanmar, is often pressured into carrying pro-government articles and commentaries.

Even film snobs who normally turn their noses up at such a shoot-em-up said they can't wait to load up their DVD players.

"Everyone likes to live in the world of fantasy at least for a short period. Even in a movie, we are happy to see the American mercenary enter Myanmar to smash up the brutal army," a 22-year-old university student said.

*hosted.ap.org

US Military Deaths in Afghanistan at 415

2008-02-23T21:52:00.000Z

As of Friday, Feb. 22, 2008, at least 415 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to the Defense Department. The department last updated its figures Feb. 16 at 10 a.m. EST.

Of those, the military reports 283 were killed by hostile action.

Outside the Afghan region, the Defense Department reports 63 more members of the U.S. military died in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. Of those, two were the result of hostile action. The military lists these other locations as Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba; Djibouti; Eritrea; Ethiopia; Jordan; Kenya; Kyrgyzstan; Philippines; Seychelles; Sudan; Tajikistan; Turkey; and Yemen.

There were also four CIA officer deaths and one military civilian death.

* hosted.ap.org

McCanns seek footage of Maddie 'sighting'

2008-02-21T16:42:00.000Z

LONDON, England (CNN) -- The family of Madeleine McCann wants to see surveillance video footage from a French diner where a Dutch tourist reported seeing the missing British girl, a family spokesman said Thursday.

Clarence Mitchell said the family was aware of reports that French police concluded the girl was not Madeleine, but he said the family wanted to hear directly from French investigators before discounting the report.

"We want to see the video of this girl," Mitchell told CNN.

"We want to hear from the French police about what they have investigated and what they have decided. This line that French police have discounted that it is Madeleine is not official so we're still waiting to hear whether French police believe this to be the case."

A Dutch tourist told authorities earlier this month that she saw Madeleine at a roadside restaurant near Montpellier, France.

On Wednesday, the Associated Press quoted an unnamed police official as saying police took the sighting seriously but determined the girl was not Madeleine.

The tourist, Melissa Fering, told Dutch television that she had a clear view of the girl and was shocked to realize she resembled Madeleine. She said the girl even had the well-publicized defect which Madeleine had in one of her eyes.

"I saw the eyes of this child and I freezed ice cold," Fering said in the interview.

Fering said she wanted to be sure the girl was Madeleine, so she approached the girl and said her name.

"When she heard her name she looked up and kept on dancing a little bit," Fering said. "There was a man in her company. ... When we called her name he quickly closed her jacket, put a cap on her head, and gone he was."

Madeleine went missing on May 3, days before her fourth birthday. Her family, who were vacationing with her in Portugal, has said she disappeared from their room at a resort while they dined in a nearby restaurant.

Despite a global search and the attention of celebrities like Virgin Chairman Richard Branson, author J.K. Rowling and soccer star David Beckham, there have been no major breaks in the case.

Portuguese investigators named the McCanns as official suspects in the case in September. The parents deny any involvement in the disappearance, saying they believe Madeleine may have been abducted by pedophiles and taken to North Africa.

There have been numerous reported sightings of Madeleine since her disappearance. Last year, a video surfaced of a Moroccan woman carrying a child that looked very similar to Madeleine on her back, but authorities determined that the little girl was the woman's child.

*CNN

Feds Probe Whether Pilots Slept in Flight

2008-02-21T16:38:00.000Z

HONOLULU (Feb. 21) - A go! airliner overshot Hilo International Airport by 15 miles last week, and the Federal Aviation Administration is investigating whether the pilots were sleeping.

"We're investigating whether the pilot and co-pilot of a Feb. 13 go! airlines flight fell asleep while the plane was in the air between Honolulu and Hilo," FAA spokesman Ian Gregor said.

Midmorning Flight 1002 drifted off course during the 214-mile trip and had to turn back to get to the airport on the Big Island. The flight landed safely.

Air traffic controllers tracking the plane by radar were unable to contract the cockpit for 25 minutes, according to a report by KGMB-TV.

Mesa Air Group, the parent company of go!, is cooperating fully with the FAA, said Paul Skellon, vice president of communications. He said the company would not comment further until the investigation was complete.

If the pilots did fall asleep while the plane was on autopilot, FAA rules carry penalties ranging from a warning letter to license suspension or revocation.

Mesa launched go! in June 2006. It is the state's fourth largest carrier, flying 50-seat Bombardier CRJ-200 aircraft.

*aol.com

Strokes have tripled in recent years among middle-aged women in the U.S

2008-02-21T16:34:00.000Z

NEW ORLEANS (Feb. 20) - Strokes have tripled in recent years among middle-aged women in the U.S., an alarming trend doctors blame on the obesity epidemic. Nearly 2 percent of women ages 35 to 54 reported suffering a stroke in the most recent federal health survey, from 1999 to 2004. Only about half a percent did in the previous survey, from 1988 to 1994.

The percentage is small because most strokes occur in older people. But the sudden spike in middle age and the reasons behind it are ominous, doctors said in research presented Wednesday at a medical conference.

It happened even though more women in the recent survey were on medicines to control their cholesterol and blood pressure - steps that lower the risk of stroke.

Women's waistlines are nearly two inches bigger than they were a decade earlier, and that bulge corresponds with the increase in strokes, researchers said.

In addition, women's average body mass index, a commonly used measure of obesity, rose from 27 in the earlier survey to 29. They also had higher blood sugar levels.

No other traditional risk factors like smoking, heart disease or diabetes changed enough between the two surveys to account for the increase in strokes.

In a "pre-stroke population" of middle-age women, a tripling of cases is "an alarming increase," said Dr. Ralph Sacco, neurology chief at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

The study was led by Dr. Amytis Towfighi, a neurology specialist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and presented at the International Stroke Conference in New Orleans.

She used the National Health and Nutrition Surveys, a federally funded project that gives periodic health checkups and questionnaires to a wide sample of Americans. Participants are routinely asked whether a doctor had ever told them they had had a stroke, and about 5,000 middle-aged people answered that question in each survey.

Researchers saw that the stroke rate had spiked in middle-aged women but stayed about the same - around 1 percent - in middle-aged men. So they looked deeper at the responses to see if they could learn why.

Belly fat stood out, Towfighi said. The portion of women with abdominal obesity rose from 47 percent in the earlier survey to 59 percent in the recent one. The change in men was smaller, and previous studies have shown that "abdominal obesity is a stronger risk factor for women than men," she said.

Men traditionally have had a greater risk of stroke than women, and "women start catching up to men five or 10 years after menopause," said Dr. Philip Gorelick, neurology chief at the University of Illinois in Chicago and chairman of the stroke conference.

The new research means "we need to redefine our textbooks about stroke in women," because they may now be more at risk in middle age than men.

Obesity "sets the stage for all the other risk factors to come in" like diabetes and heart disease, Gorelick added.

In other news at the conference, two studies found that stroke patients were more likely to die if they went to hospitals on nights or weekends, echoing other recent studies that found similar risks for heart attack and surgery patients.

Michigan State University doctors analyzed 222,500 stroke cases at more than 850 hospitals participating in an American Heart Association quality improvement program from 2003 to 2007.

In-hospital deaths were about 6 percent for those who arrived during normal business hours and had strokes caused by a clot, compared with 5 percent of those who entered the hospital after-hours. Deaths were 27 percent for off-hour strokes caused by bleeding in the brain versus 24 percent during normal hours.

A second study of 2.4 million stroke patients in California found death rates of 10 percent on weekends and nights versus 8 percent during weekdays.

Despite the poorer outcomes, doctors said no one should ever delay getting help, since any delay raises the risk of death. The best treatments can only be given in the first few hours after symptoms appear.

*aol.com

Violence erupts on Kosovo-Serbia border

2008-02-21T16:00:00.000Z

BELGRADE (AFP) - Violence flared on the Kosovo-Serbia border on Thursday, when several hundred former Serbian army reservists angered by Kosovo's independence attacked police with stones and burning tyres.

As Italy joined other major European powers in recognising Kosovo and Serbs poured into Belgrade for a rally to protest against the independence declaration, the group attacked around 100 Kosovo riot police at the southern Serbian border crossing point of Merdare.

Serbian police estimated around 300 reservists were involved in the assault.

The violence was the latest in a series of incidents that followed Sunday's unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia by Kosovo's ethnic Albanian-dominated parliament -- a move vehemently opposed by Belgrade.

Thick black plumes of smoke billowed from the border crossing and a NATO helicopter hovered overhead after the attack by the reservists, which lasted 20 minutes until they retreated.

The reservists, civilians who once served in the Serbian army, had crossed a Serbian checkpoint unhindered.

In another incident, a UN-run court was stoned overnight in the Serb-populated half of the tense northern Kosovo town of Mitrovica, police said.

On Tuesday, two other border crossing points at Banja and Jarinje were closed for 24 hours after they were ransacked and torched by at least 1,000 Serbs from Kosovo and Serbia.

The commander of the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR), General Xavier Bout de Marnhac, said leaders of Kosovo's minority Serb community were responsible for the incident.

Hardline Kosovo Serb political leader Milan Ivanovic hit back, calling KFOR "a servant of US interests" and accusing foreign forces of turning "Kosovo into a concentration camp."

The border attack was the most violent reaction to the unilateral break by Kosovo and marked the first intervention by KFOR -- made up of 17,000 troops from more than 30 countries -- since the independence declaration.

Meanwhile, convoys of buses and trains ferried people to Belgrade for a "Kosovo is Serbia" protest in front of the old Yugoslav parliament, which was expected to draw hundreds of thousands demonstrators.

Both President Boris Tadic and Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica had urged a peaceful protest.

The Belgrade rally was due to begin at 5:00 pm (1600 GMT) and end with "prayers for Kosovo" at the huge Serbian Orthodox Temple of Saint Sava.

Most Serbs bitterly oppose losing Kosovo, which they consider the cradle of their history, culture and religion.

So far, 21 of the 27 EU member states have backed Kosovo's independence, either formally recognising it or declaring their intention to do so. Cyprus, Romania and Spain have explicitly refused to do either.

The latest countries to give their nod to Kosovo were Italy, Denmark and Estonia on Thursday.

Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi said recognition "in no way diminishes our friendship and affection for Serbia."

Speaking to European lawmakers in Strasbourg on Wednesday, Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic said: "We are struggling for what is legitimately ours. We will not tolerate this illegal act of secession."

Serbia, whose parliament declared the break illegal, is recalling its ambassadors from nations that recognise Kosovo, including Australia and the United States, and has fired off letters of protest.

Pope Benedict XVI called on all sides Thursday to exercise calm.

"With regard to the current crisis in Kosovo, I call upon all interested parties to act with prudence and moderation, and to seek solutions that favour mutual respect and reconciliation," the pope told the new Serbian ambassador to the Vatican.

In Vienna, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe was due to discuss Kosovo on Thursday, the first day of its two-day parliamentary assembly.

Oil, gold prices strike historic highs

2008-02-21T14:22:00.001Z

LONDON (AFP) - The price of oil touched an all-time peak of 101.32 dollars a barrel on Thursday, lifted by fears of supply disruptions according to traders.

Oil's surge meanwhile helped gold to a record high of 948.59 dollars an ounce, they added.

Gold was in demand from investors seeking a haven for their cash amid concerns about rising inflation amid surging oil prices.

The price of New York crude for delivery in March later settled back to 101 dollars in electronic trading while gold stood at 945.63 dollars on the London Bullion Market.

"Oil prices are being supported by lingering worries about oil supply," said Commonwealth Bank of Australia analyst David Moore.

He added that in the near-term the oil market will be "heavily influenced" by any decision of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries on output levels at its next meeting on March 5.

OPEC ministers kept the official daily output ceiling at 29.67 million barrels of oil at an emergency meeting on February 1, resisting calls from US President George W. Bush to increase supplies to help bring down prices.

But the market is rife with speculation that OPEC, which supplies about 40 percent of the world's oil, would keep steady or even decide to cut production.

As for gold, James Moore of TheBullionDesk.com said the precious metal "looks set to extend higher in the coming sessions as investors seek assets to offset rising inflation".

"The metal should now look to challenge 950 dollars, with 1,000 dollars an ounce still a realistic target this quarter," he added.

*afp.com

Next human plague 'likely to come from animal contact'

2008-02-21T14:20:00.000Z

PARIS (AFP) - Scores of infectious diseases have emerged to threaten humans in the past decades as viruses leap the species barrier from wild animals and bacteria mutate into antibiotic-resistant strains, scientists have reported.

Presenting the first-ever map of "hotspots" of new infectious diseases, they predict that the next pandemic is likeliest to come out of poor tropical countries, where burgeoning human populations come into contact with wildlife.

A three-year investigation led by four major institutions tracked 335 incidents since 1940 when a new infectious disease emerged.

The category includes HIV/AIDS, which has slain or infected more than 65 million people around the world, and outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and H5N1 bird flu, which have cost tens of billions of dollars to contain.

The emergence of new diseases have roughly quadrupled over the past 50 years, says the study, appearing in the British journal Nature.

Sixty percent of them are so-called zoonoses, or diseases that have been transmitted from animals to humans.

Most zoonoses come from wild animals, especially mammals, which are the most closely related species to humans. Novel pathogens that adapt to humans can be extremely lethal, as we have no resistance to them.

New zoonoses include AIDS, which is believed to have jumped from chimpanzees to humans, possibly through hunters who killed and butchered apes; SARS, whose natural reservoir is Chinese bats; and the Ebola virus, which holes up in three species of African fruit bat and infects animal primates and humans.

"We are crowding wildlife into ever-smaller areas, and human population is increasing," said co-author Marc Levy of the Center for International Earth Science Information Network, affiliated to Columbia University's Earth Institute in New York.

"Where those two things meet, that is a recipe for something crossing over."

Areas that present the biggest potential source for a new zoonose are "the whole of the East Asia region, the Indian sub-continent, the Niger delta (and) the Great Lakes region in Africa," he said in a teleconference with reporters.

Some wild zoonoses end up infecting humans through an intermediary path, via livestock, such as the Nipah virus, which emerged in Malaysia, or via poultry, such as bird flu.

More than 20 percent of emerging infectious diseases derive from a growing imperviousness to drugs, such as extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB), chloroquine-resistant malaria and verocytotoxigenic Escherichia coli, a highly dangerous strain of intestinal bug.

Many of these outbreaks have occurred in Western Europe or North America.

A spike in new infectious diseases occurred in the 1980s, probably because the AIDS pandemic unleashed a range of other new diseases, the authors believe.

El Nino weather patterns in the 1990s may also have helped spread mosquito-borne diseases, according to the study, amplifying concern voiced last year by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that global warming would spread such dangers.

The research is based on an exhaustive trawl through medical literature to identify new infectious diseases, which were then correlated with global patterns in human population density, changes in population, latitude, rainfall and wildlife biodiversity.

"Our hotspots map show that the next new important zoonotic disease is likely to originate in the tropics, a region rich in wildlife species and under increasing pressure from people," said Peter Daszak, executive director of the Consortium for Conservation Medicine at Wildlife Trust, New York.

"The problem is, most of our resources are focused on the richer countries in the North that can afford surveillance."

Daszak said the priority should be to set up monitoring networks in developing countries that would identify a threat from the outset and circumscribe it, rather than let it spread like wildfire around the globe thanks to jet travel and trade.

"If we continue to ignore this important preventative measure, then human populations will continue to be at risk from pandemic diseases."

*afp.com

China's Human rights violations :Organ Harvesting from Still Alive People

2008-02-20T16:36:00.004Z

China violates human rights in a variety of ways. These violations are chronic and serious. Besides Falun Gong, other prime targets of human rights violations are Tibetans, Christians, Uighurs, democracy activists and human rights defenders. Rule of Law mechanisms in place to prevent human rights violations, such as an independent judiciary, access to counsel on detention, habeas corpus, the right to public trial, are absent in China. China, according to its constitution, is ruled by the Communist Party. It is not ruled by law.

Communist China has had a history of massive, jaw dropping cruelty towards its own citizens. The Communist regime has killed more innocents than Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia combined[1]. Girl children are killed, abandoned and neglected in massive numbers. Torture is widespread. The death penalty is both extensive and arbitrary. China executes more people than all other countries combined. Religious belief is suppressed[2].

This pattern of human rights violations, like many other factors, does not in itself prove the allegations. But it removes an element of disproof. It is impossible to say of these allegations that it is out of step with an overall pattern of respect for human rights in China. While the allegations, in themselves, are surprising, they are less surprising with a country that has the human rights record China does than they would be for many other countries.

When there are so many violations of human rights in China, it is invidious to point to only one victim. We nonetheless draw the attention to the victimization of human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng as an example or a case study. It was Gao who wrote to us last summer, inviting us to come to China to investigate the stealing of vital organs from Falun Gong prisoners of conscience. No visa was subsequently issued by its embassy in Ottawa to do so; he was detained not long afterwards.

Gao wrote three open letters to President Hu and other leaders, protesting a range of abuses against the Falun Gong, including specific cases of torture and murder. Gao also wrote about and condemned the extraction and sale of organs from Falun Gong practitioners. He expressed his willingness to join the Coalition to Investigate Organ Harvesting from Still Alive People[3].

He was convicted of inciting subversion and on December 2, 2006 given a three-year prison sentence. His removal to custody, however, was suspended for five years; his political rights were removed for a year by the Beijing court. This repression of someone whose only concern is respect for human rights in general and the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in particular in itself reinforces his concerns and ours.

The International Olympic Committee, in 2001, awarded Beijing the 2008 Olympics. Liu Jingmin, Vice President of the Beijing Olympic Bid, in April 2001, said: "By allowing Beijing to host the Games you will help the development of human rights."

Yet, the result has been just the opposite. Amnesty International, in a statement released September 21, 2006 said:

"In its latest assessment of the Chinese government's performance in four benchmark areas of human rights ahead of the Olympics, Amnesty International found that its overall record remained poor. There has been some progress in reforming the death penalty system, but in other crucial areas the government's human rights record has deteriorated."

The international community, by carrying on with the Olympics in Beijing despite the deterioration of human rights in China in crucial areas, sends to China a message of impunity. The impression China must get is that it does not matter how much it violates human rights; the international community seems not to care.

>>>FULL REPORT on "Organ Harvesting from Still Alive People"

'Thousands' moved for China Games

2008-02-20T16:36:00.001Z

Just under 15,000 people have been moved from their homes to make way for Olympic venues, the organisers of the Beijing Olympics say.

Beijing's Municipal Construction Committee said 14,901 people from 6,307 households had been moved.

The figures differ dramatically from those provided last year by an international campaign group.

The Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) said 1.25m people had been displaced ahead of the Games.

Zhang Jiaming, of the Municipal Construction Committee, said everyone who was relocated did so voluntarily.

Mr Zhang's figures are strikingly precise, but the discrepancies can be explained.

Beijing's numbers refer exclusively to people who have had to move to make way for Olympic venues - and nothing more.

The figures from the COHRE include everyone who has had to make way for new building work designed to make Beijing a more modern city for the Olympic Games.

So, for example, the centre would count people who have been made to leave their homes to make way for a new skyscraper - but Beijing would not.

*BBC

China hits back over Olympics row

2008-02-20T16:34:00.000Z

Beijing has gone on the offensive following the resignation of Steven Spielberg as an artistic director to the Olympic Games.

State-run media has criticised the Hollywood director, saying his actions were naive and defied common sense.

At the same time, China has been playing up its own role in bringing peace to Sudan's Darfur region, the issue over which Mr Spielberg resigned.

The director cut his links with the Olympics last week.

He said China was not doing enough to resolve the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.

A front-page editorial in the overseas edition of the People's Daily newspaper on Wednesday lambasted a "certain Western director".

"The Darfur problem was not created by China and is not in any way related to China's policies in Africa," said the editorial.

"Linking the Darfur problem to the Beijing Olympics is unfair."

It went on to say that childish vanity lies behind the West's criticism of China's policy on Darfur.

"The Western media has also shown naivety over the Beijing Olympics, and that is childish and ridiculous," it said.

Other newspapers have also carried commentaries laying out China's position with regard to Mr Spielberg's resignation.

'Worked constructively'

China is doing its utmost to convince the West that it is playing a beneficial role in Darfur, where at least 200,000 people have died in fighting since 2003.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao spoke to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown about the issue in a telephone call this week.

"China hopes for a quick realisation of peace, stability and development for the Sudanese region and has worked constructively to this end," Premier Wen apparently told Mr Brown.

Liu Guijin, China's special envoy on Darfur, is also due to give a keynote speech in London later this week about his country's role in the region. He will then travel on to Sudan.

China has strong trade and military links with Sudan, which is accused of backing militias that have raped and murdered in Darfur.

Critics say Beijing should use these links to pressure Khartoum on this issue. China says it is already doing all it can.

It points out that it backs a United Nations mechanism to resolve the crisis and has already sent peacekeepers to Darfur.

China's current publicity offensive stands in sharp contrast to its slow response in reacting to the initial news of Mr Spielberg's resignation.

It took Beijing about a day and a half before it gave its first official comment.

*BBC

Former MI6 Chief Denies Assassination of Princess Diana

2008-02-20T16:33:00.002Z

LONDON — The former head of MI6 denied Wednesday that the British intelligence agency was responsible for killing Princess Diana and her boyfriend, Dodi al Fayed, in 1997.

Sir Richard Dearlove, who was MI6's director of special operations at the time of Diana's Paris death, testified at the inquest into the pair's death that he also believed an operation by rogue agents would have been impossible.

Fayed's father, Mohamed Al Fayed, has accused MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, of engineering the death of his son and the princess at the behest of Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II.

As director of special operations, Dearlove said it was his responsibility to sign off on any operation that would otherwise be illegal, such as breaking into an office or receiving a stolen document.

The operation would then have to be approved by the foreign secretary, a senior member of the government.

Dearlove said no assassinations were approved while he was director of special operations from 1994-1999, nor was he aware of the agency carrying out any during his entire MI6 career from 1966 to 2004.

Ian Burnett, a lawyer for the coroner's inquest, asked Dearlove whether he could confirm that "no authorization was sought in respect of any activities concerning Princess Diana."

"I can absolutely confirm that," Dearlove said.

Burnett asked later whether that denial included "such things as eavesdropping, surveillance, bugging, anything that anyone can think of?"

"Everything," Dearlove said.

Burnett asked: "And it would plainly have been outside the functions of (the agency) to do so?"

"Had it been done, it would have been outside the function of the service," Dearlove said.

Burnett asked if it was possible for rogue elements to mount an operation outside the chain of command.

"I would have regarded that as an impossibility," Dearlove said.

Dearlove, who headed the agency from 1999-2004, said he did not authorize any slayings, and denied a claim by former agent Richard Tomlinson about a proposed plan to assassinate ex-Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

Dearlove said he believed the idea involved another target — but that it was immediately rejected at a low level. He said the proposal was "killed stone dead."

Al Fayed's claim that Philip directed MI6 was "utterly ridiculous," Dearlove said. There was no formal relationship between the agency and the prince, although Philip had visited the agency's offices in the queen's company, he said.

He also dismissed Fayed's claim that Philip and the intelligence agencies effectively ran the country.

"I am tempted to say I am flattered, but once again it is such an absurd allegation. ... It is completely off the map," he said.

Michael Mansfield, Al Fayed's attorney, said the incident described by Tomlinson raised questions about how tight MI6's controls were.

Mansfield said he was asking the jury "to consider ... the possibility that elements within the security services in 1997 were responsible not just for drawing up a plan, but the possibility that one or more of them may have been responsible for what happened."

"So Prince Philip bypassed the top people and went to someone else?" asked the coroner, Lord Justice Scott Baker.

In testimony on Monday, Al Fayed allegations went far beyond a few rogue agents. He alleged that those involved in the plot and its cover-up included Prince Charles; then-Prime Minister Tony Blair; Diana's sister, Sarah McQuorquodale; Diana's brother-in-law Robert Fellowes; her butler Paul Burrell; two former chiefs of London police; driver Henri Paul; Diana's attorney, the late Lord Mishcon; two French toxicologists, members of the French medical service, and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

Mansfield pressed Dearlove about the training given to agents about assassinations.

Dearlove acknowledged that the "no assassination" policy was not put down in writing in training manuals during his time, but would have been communicated orally.

Dearlove's appearance before the inquest was an extraordinary exception to agency policy of neither publicly confirming nor denying any allegations about its activities.

He was the first MI6 director whose name was publicly confirmed. Previous directors were known only as "C."

*FOXnews

China arrests over HK sex scandal

2008-02-20T16:33:00.001Z

Police in the southern Chinese city of Shenzen have arrested 10 people in connection with a sex scandal that has generated intense public interest.
The arrested are accused of copying and distributing explicit pictures showing Hong Kong film star Edison Chan in encounters with a series of actresses.

The several hundred images have been widely viewed on websites since they were posted at the end of January.

It is believed they were taken from Mr Chan's computer when it was serviced.

The pictures, apparently taken by Mr Chan himself, show the actor in bed with a series of famous actresses.

They were published across the internet including on China's most popular search engine, Baidu.

The BBC's James Reyolds in Beijing says the photos have captivated China and caused deep embarrassment to those involved.

Censorship

A police official told China's Xinhua news agency that the authorities would "severely crack down on the criminal activities of manufacturing, selling and spreading discs of Hong Kong's celebrity photos and other pornography productions".

The Beijing Association of Online Media, a government-backed watchdog, has praised some sites for removing the images and demanded that Baidu apologise for allowing its users to find them.

"Baidu still hasn't implemented effective blocking and obscuring of the photos," it said, adding that the search engine had "become defensive" and "procrastinated".

Edison Chen has issued a video statement in which he apologised to anyone affected by "this strange, strange ordeal."

Pornography is officially banned in China and the internet is restricted and closely monitored by the government.

Our correspondent says that public curiosity over the pictures was been a real test for internet censors.

*BBC

Japanese police arrive to investigate journalist's death

2008-02-19T21:43:00.001Z

Mizzima News
February 19, 2008

Eyewitnesses report seeing a team of Japanese police in Rangoon, believed to be looking into the death of a Japanese journalist.

The team is thought to be investigating the death of Japanese photo-journalist Kenji Nagai, who was killed by security forces during the brutal crackdown on protestors in September of last year.

Kenji Nagai, seen covering public protests
in Rangoon before being shot-death
by a Burmese soldier.
"I saw a team of Japanese police in uniform near Sule Pagoda," an eyewitness told Mizzima.

The eyewitness said the Japanese police were traveling in a truck at about 10 a.m. (local time).

A TV reporter for the Japanese News Agency APF, Kenji Nagai, 50, was covering a public protest in Rangoon and was among the many shot to death by authorities who used automatic rifles to crackdown on demonstrators. The United Nations estimates at least 31 people lost their lives in the protests.

The four-member Japanese police team is scheduled to meet with officials of the Burmese Ministry of Home Affairs on Tuesday to discuss the progress of investigations by Burmese authorities, according to an Associated Press report.

An official at the Japanese embassy in Rangoon told Mizzima that the visiting police delegates, along with other embassy officials, are currently in a meeting, declining to comment further on the delegation's visit.

While video footage of a Burmese soldier shooting Nagai at point-blank range was televised around the world, the Burmese authorities said Nagai's death was accidental and he was not deliberately targeted.

Commentaries and opinions run in the state-owned press imply that Nagai, who entered Burma under the false pretense of being a tourist, was responsible for his own fate.

EU reiterates calls for reform in Burma

2008-02-19T21:42:00.002Z

Mizzima News (www.mizzima.com)
February 19, 2008

Chiang Mai – The European Union, yesterday, once again ingeminated its demands that Burma's ruling junta amend its ways or face further punitive measures.

A five-pointed epistle from the EU's Council in Brussels, where Foreign Ministers were gathered for a routine meeting, warned that further sanctions could be forthcoming if the junta does not respond to international pressure.

"The EU stands ready to review, amend or reinforce the measures it has already agreed in the light of developments," came the words of caution from Brussels.

Last year the EU further tightened sanctions on the regime following September's Saffron Revolution, targeting the financial assets and travel of junta officials and companies with whom they are associated.

The missive, "Council Conclusions on Burma/Myanmar", also echoed long-standing positions of the EU in urging the junta to release all political prisoners, enter into a genuine dialogue with opposition leaders and accept, as soon as possible, further visits to the country from both the United Nations Special Envoy to Burma and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Burma.

The EU remains steadfast in its belief that "only a process that involves the full participation of the opposition and ethnic groups will lead to national reconciliation and stability".

Ibrahim Gambari, the Special Envoy to Burma, had been informed that he will not be invited to return to Burma till the middle of April. The EU's Envoy to Burma, Piero Fassino, recently returned from a tour of regional neighbors.

Burma is to again be a point of discussion at next month's European Council meeting, to be held March 13 and 14.

A shock announcement earlier this month by the junta of a referendum to be held in May, followed by elections in 2010, has done little to break an icy stalemate between much of the international community and Burma's generals.

Family members visit Nay Phone Latt

2008-02-19T21:42:00.001Z

Than Htike Oo (Mizzima News)
February 19, 2008

Chiang Mai – Authorities at Rangoon's notorious Insein prison for the first time allowed family members a meeting with detained Burmese blogger Nay Phone Latt.

Daw Khin Than, mother of Nay Phone Latt (Nay Myo Kyaw), and his brother went to the prison on Monday after Thingan Kyun Township police informed them that the Burmese blogger was being held in Insein, sources close to the family said.

"At about nine in the morning his mother and brother arrived at the prison with parcels for him. Initially the prison guard told them it was not clear whether they would be granted a meeting. But later the authorities said they would be allowed to visit with him. The meeting only lasted about 15 minutes. He is in good health," the source added.

Nay Phone Latt, who was arrested on January 29, was briefly detained at the Ministry of Home Affairs before being transferred to Room no. 1 of ward 1 in Insein prison, where he is reportedly kept along with another prisoner.

The source said Nay Phone Latt was charged with article 32 (b) of the Video Act, an offense punishable by up to six months of imprisonment, a fine of 100,000 kyat ($85), or both.

Girl's death '17th suspected suicide'

2008-02-19T19:33:00.001Z

Another teenager was found dead today in an area blighted by teenage suicides. The death of 16-year-old Jenna Parry is the 17th suspected suicide involving young people from the Bridgend area of South Wales in the past year.

Assistant Chief Constable Dave Morris told reporters at a press conference in the town that Jenna's body was found at 7.45 this morning on the common at Cefn Cribbwr.

"She had apparently taken her own life," the officer said.

He said a review into teenage suicides in the county borough area was on-going but added: "We have found no suggestion of any suicide pact."

The youngsters all used social networking websites, such as Bebo and MySpace.

But Mr Morris said: "We haven't found any suggestion of a link or influence through those sites."

He added: "What we have found is that these are vulnerable young people, and taking one's own life may be becoming an acceptable option to young people for issues that they are facing."

At the same press conference, the parents of 15-year-old Nathaniel Pritchard, who apparently committed suicide last week, blamed their son's death on media coverage of the suicides in the Bridgend area.

Nathaniel's mother, Sharon, said: "Media coverage put the idea into Nathaniel's head."

Sitting beside Nathaniel's father, Vincent, Mrs Pritchard said: "We have lost our son and media reporting of this has made it an incredibly difficult time and more unbearable by intensive media coverage."

Nathaniel died in hospital after "harming himself" last week.

His cousin Kelly Stephenson, 20, was found hanged hours later while on holiday in Kent.

Mr Morris said there appeared to be a "constellation of factors" that had influenced these young people to take their own lives as individuals, not as groups.

These, he said, included relationship break-ups, friendship issues and family problems.

"I would like to put to bed any suggestion within the media that we are investigating suicide pacts or suicide internet links," he said.

Mr Morris said a number of the deaths were still awaiting an inquest and he could not comment on the latest four deaths.

He said: "We are speaking to young people in Bridgend and what we are getting from them is that the media is starting to contribute to their thoughts in terms of how they feel, pressures they are under and Bridgend becoming stigmatised through the media."

He told reporters: "If you ask me what is the link since Natasha Randall's death, it's you the media."

Earlier, Nathaniel Pritchard's mother described media coverage both before and after her son's death as "extremely intrusive".

She said: "We did not wish to speak to the media about our son's death but feel that we have to, not just for our family but other families in the Bridgend area who have lost loved ones suddenly."

Mrs Pritchard said: "We feel (the) media's coverage could trigger other young people, who are already vulnerable and feeling low, into attempting to take their own lives.

"Media coverage put the idea in Nathaniel's head. We feel he was influenced by media coverage.

"We feel it has glamorised ways of taking your life as a way of getting attention without fully realising the tragic consequences.

"We never believed his death was linked to other deaths and never believed there was an internet pact. We are certain it never had anything to do with living in Bridgend."

Carwyn Jones, the Welsh Assembly Member for Bridgend, said the reporting of the deaths had created "a real sense of fear" among many parents.

He told BBC News 24: "I've had many people contact me in Bridgend who have got teenage children who are immensely worried, who are saying, 'well, this might happen to our kids, we're very worried, we don't know what to do'.

"It's important that people get in touch with groups like the Samaritans. It's important to talk to teenage children and to try to listen to what they're saying on the streets.

"But that's been the effect - it's created a real sense of fear amongst many parents, not just in the Bridgend county borough but further afield."

*independent.co.

Chinese Olympic critic to stand trial for subversion

2008-02-19T14:35:00.000Z

By Clifford Coonan in Beijing

A Chinese activist who dared to criticise the Olympics while lobbying for farmers' rights goes on trial tomorrow for subversion, a sign of growing official intolerance of any dissent over the Games.

Yang Chunlin, an unemployed factory worker from Jiamusi city in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, faces charges of subverting state power for his activism, which has involved petitions, denouncing government corruption and seeking democratic reform of the one-party state.

Last year he helped organise a petition, which was signed by 10,000 villagers, over a land dispute. It declared: "We don't want the Olympics, we want human rights."

Mr Yang's timing couldn't be worse, as sensitivities about the Games are high. He could face several years in jail for criticising the Olympics, which are seen as a crucial way for the government to highlight China's economic prosperity, social cohesion and the economic fruits of its 30 years of opening up and reforms.

But the Communist Party brooks no dissent and has kept dissidents on a tight rein. Police recently formally arrested the prominent Beijing dissident Hu Jia, who was detained for inciting subversion after vocally supporting campaigns for democratic reform, Aids patients and environmental protection. He is in custody and there has been no word on when he will face trial.

Mr Yang, 51, goes on trial at the Jiamusi City Intermediate People's Court in Heilongjiang tomorrow on charges of "inciting subversion of state power", the same charge levelled against Mr Hu. This month, a Chinese court sentenced the democracy activist Lu Gengsong to four years in prison on the same charge.

According to his sister, Mr Yang was tortured while in detention, including having his arms and legs stretched and chained to the corners of an iron bed.

His sister, Yang Chunping, said her family had not been allowed to visit her brother since he was held by police in July. Early this year, two other locals who backed farmers' demands, Yu Changwu and Wang Guilin, were sentenced to 18 months' "re-education through labour".

There are many activists in China who are trying to highlight the problems of property disputes and illegal land-grabs. Corrupt local cadres often side with unscrupulous property developers, sometimes leading to riots. Wary of the politically destabilising effects of these demonstrations, the government has pledged to clamp down on corruption.

What has set Mr Yang's case apart, and what has most likely led to the serious charge of subversion, is the fact he mentioned the Olympics in his campaigns.

The leadership in Beijing was clearly stung by international criticism after the American film director Steven Spielberg's decision to quit as artistic adviser to the Olympics, and has stepped up the spin.

After initial inertia, state media has been critical of Spielberg and has defended Beijing's record on Darfur. The Xinhua news agency ran an interview at the weekend with China's ambassador to Sudan, Li Chengwen. "China is very concerned about the crisis in Darfur, and we have been making unremitting efforts to help resolve the crisis," Mr Li said.

(independent.co.uk)

Russia’s Claim Under Polar Ice Irks American

2008-02-19T14:31:00.000Z

Last August, a team of Russian scientists and legislators trekked to the North Pole and plunged through the ice pack into the abyss, descending more than two miles through inky darkness to the bottom of the ocean.

There, explorers planted Russia’s flag and, upon surfacing, declared that the feat had strengthened Moscow’s claims to nearly half the Arctic seabed. The ensuing global headlines fueled debate over polar territorial claims.

But that wasn’t the whole story. The heroes of the moment did not mention that the dive had American origins.

Alfred S. McLaren, 75, a retired Navy submariner, would like to set the record straight and, as he puts it, “acquaint the Kremlin with the realities” of recent history and international law.

A major figure of Arctic science and exploration who spent nearly a year in operations under the ice, Dr. McLaren says he developed the polar dive plan and repeatedly shared his labors with the Russians and their partners — a claim he supports with numerous e-mail messages and documents.

The Russians, for their part, acknowledge that Dr. McLaren played a central role in the dive’s origins. But they say he took no part in substantive planning and logistics.

Dr. McLaren’s plan drew on federal polar data and recommended specific sensors and methods to ensure a safe return.

“I wrote the procedures for the dive,” he said in an interview. The Russians, he added, “went for the territorial claim.”

Don Walsh, a pioneer of deep ocean diving who worked on the Arctic plan with the Russians, backed the account.

The divers, Dr. Walsh wrote in an e-mail message, “did not develop the original idea, the operational plan and they did not pay for it” because wealthy tourists picked up the bill.

“I am sure,” he added, “that this example of how to steal your way to fame will become a legend in the history of exploration.”

The Russians say they took little or nothing. “Talk is cheap,” Anatoly M. Sagalevitch, the expedition’s chief scientist, said in an interview. “But real operation, this is different.”

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has made the most of the divers’ feat, personally greeting them upon their return and announcing last month that Dr. Sagalevitch and two other team members would be named Heroes of Russian Federation, the nation’s highest honorary title.

Dr. McLaren first got to know the Russians through the lens of a periscope. As a submariner, he conducted more than 20 secret missions during the cold war, mainly in nuclear attack submarines.

Three of his voyages ventured beneath the Northern ice pack, gauging its thickness, probing the dark waters below and bouncing sound waves off the bottom to map the craggy seabed. An important goal was to find safe submarine routes near the Soviet Union in case the cold war turned hot. Over all, he spent nearly a year under the polar ice.

In 1972, he won the Distinguished Service Medal, the military’s highest peacetime award.

He left the Navy in 1981 and earned a Ph.D. in polar studies from the University of Colorado in 1986.

After the cold war, Dr. McLaren began working with his former enemies, lecturing aboard Russian icebreakers that carried tourists to the North Pole. He did so repeatedly while president of the Explorers Club, a post he held from 1996 to 2000.

The idea for a polar dive arose in early 1997 when a television journalist, Jack McDonald, had dinner with Dr. McLaren and asked if anyone had ever gone to the bottom. The two decided to explore the possibility.

“We spent a lot time on it,” recalled Mr. McDonald, who planned to make a documentary.

The team envisioned going down in a submersible — a small craft with a super-strong personnel sphere that typically carries a pilot and two observers. Tiny portholes designed to withstand crushing pressures let the occupants peer out. A dive is typically an all-day affair, requiring hours to go down to the bottom and back up.

Later in 1997, Dr. McLaren attracted the interest of Mike McDowell, an adventure tour operator who organized the polar voyages. The next year, Dr. Sagalevitch, who runs Moscow’s twin Mir submersibles, came aboard.

In 1999, the three men began diving in the Mirs to visit the deteriorating remains of the Titanic and the Bismarck. The dives were seen as practice runs for the polar plunge. All told, Dr. McLaren dived in the cramped submersibles five times.

In 2001, Dr. McLaren wrote a polar dive plan for Dr. Sagalevitch in Moscow. Drawing on decades of federal polar data, it gave information like mean ice thickness (about 8 feet), water depth (about 2.6 miles) and salinity near the bottom (34 to 36 parts per thousand).

“Jagged underwater projections and spurs,” the plan warned, could endanger a submersible.

The document, seven pages long, paid special attention to making sure the returning Mirs could find the hole through which they had entered the Arctic Ocean and not become trapped beneath the thick surface ice. It called for special upward-looking sensors.

“Thank you for your recommendations,” Dr. Sagalevitch wrote in an e-mail message after receiving the plan.

For several years the Explorers Club, based in New York City, marketed North Pole dives to adventure tourists.

A cabin would be $16,000, a suite $21,000. The actual dive beneath the pole: $50,000 extra. Despite a flurry of interest, the spectacle did not materialize.

By 2005, the plan collapsed. In a bitter e-mail exchange, Dr. McLaren accused Mr. McDowell, the tour operator, of abruptly removing him from the polar dive roster and evading commitments that would have aided fund-raising.

“You did not bother to answer any of my messages,” he wrote.

Mr. McDowell in turn accused Dr. McLaren of failing to recruit dive sponsors and defended his removal as necessary because of rising costs and the need to attract more paying tourists.

“I do all the work and take all the financial risk,” he added.

Dr. Walsh, who worked with both men, laid the rupture to personality conflicts. “We were top-heavy in chiefs and needed more braves,” he said.

Another factor was the Kremlin, which was seeking new displays of geopolitical muscle. It seized control of the project. On Aug. 2, 2007, Dr. Sagalevitch and Mr. McDowell descended to the bottom, taking along two Moscow legislators.

The polar dive was part publicity stunt and part symbolic move to enhance the Kremlin’s disputed claim to nearly half the Arctic seabed. It made global headlines, with much comment on Moscow’s new swagger. Time magazine’s cover article asked, “Who Owns the Arctic?”

After the dive, many nations sharpened their claims. Denmark mapped icy regions. The United States mounted a polar expedition. And Canada unveiled plans for an Arctic military base.

“The first principle of Arctic sovereignty,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada said in a much quoted statement, “is use it or lose it.”

Dr. McLaren grew livid as the dive’s impact spread. He now ridicules the Russian territorial claims as not only empty but duplicitous because of his unacknowledged contribution. He said, however, that he harbored no hard feelings against the Mir team.

For his part, Mr. McDowell vigorously denied any fault and said any aid from Dr. McLaren was immaterial to the Russian feat.

“What he’s saying is complete rubbish,” Mr. McDowell said from Australia, where he lives. “He’s all bent out of shape because he wanted to be first to the pole. Well, it just didn’t work out that way.”

Dr. Sagalevitch confirmed that the original idea for the polar dive arose with the Westerners but said that he and his team had developed it exclusive of Dr. McLaren’s advice since 1998.

“Fred was so far from any dive plan,” he said. “He doesn’t understand the technical side of the operation. He doesn’t understand the submersible.”

If there are fireworks, they may erupt March 15, when the Explorers Club will hold its annual dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. All the dive planners and doers are to be there, with Dr. Sagalevitch getting an award for excellence in ocean science.

It will be a bittersweet moment for Dr. McLaren, who helped Dr. Sagalevitch and Mr. McDowell become members when he was club president.

At the dinner, the Russian dive team is to complete a triumph: returning a club flag that it carried to the polar seabed.

Dr. McLaren said he planned to go to the dinner but might excuse himself from the room when the flag was returned.

(nytimes)

British soldier becomes 140th to die in Afghanistan after being killed in booby-trap blast

2008-02-19T14:30:00.000Z

A British soldier was killed by an explosion in southern Afghanistan yesterday, raising the death toll from two days of bombing to more than 140.

The soldier from the 2nd Battalion The Yorkshire Regiment was part of a team training Afghan troops.

He was taking part in a foot patrol alongside Royal Marines from 40 Commando in northern Helmand Province.

At around 9pm on Sunday the patrol was hit by an explosion - thought to be caused by a booby-trap bomb placed by Taliban insurgents.

Another soldier was injured and both men were flown by helicopter to the British field hospital at Camp Bastion, where one was pronounced dead.

A spokesman from the Ministry of Defence said: "Just before 9pm local time, soldiers from the 2nd Battalion The Yorkshire Regiment, as part of their Operational Mentoring and Liaison Team role, were taking part in a foot patrol with 40 Commando Royal Marines near Kajaki, Helmand Province, when they were caught in an explosion.

"Medical treatment was administered at the scene and both soldiers were evacuated to Camp Bastion by emergency response helicopter.

"Sadly one of the soldiers was pronounced dead on arrival."

The second soldier's injuries were not thought to be life-threatening.

His next of kin have been informed and the man is expected to be formally named today.

The rate of casualties has tailed off over the winter months, though commanders are braced for the traditional Afghan pattern of an upsurge in violence in the spring.

In Germany yesterday Chancellor Angela Merkel said she saw no reason to increase her country's presence in Afghanistan despite Nato pressure.

(dailymail)

China inflation hits 11-year high

2008-02-19T14:29:00.001Z

Chinese inflation hit an 11-year high in January after rising price pressures were exaggerated by fierce snow storms, official figures show.
Soaring food prices were largely blamed for pushing consumer inflation up to 7.1% last month, from 6.5% in December.

Inflation in China continues to rise despite higher interest rates and other measures by Beijing to keep the economy from overheating.

The worst winter for decades hit food supplies, sending food costs up 18%.

Massive snowfalls wrecked crops and killed millions of livestock.

But analysts cautioned that the severe weather was not the only factor behind rising food costs, and warned that prices could still increase further.

Unrest

January's inflation rate of 7.1% was the highest figure since September 1996, when consumer price inflation hit 7.4%.

Non-food inflation rose only slowly, hitting an annual rate of 1.5%, the figures showed.

Chinese leaders have been under pressure to control spiralling food costs, the biggest factor behind historical periods of social unrest in a country where according to the World Bank 300 million people live in poverty.

Measures taken by the government include giving farmers incentives to rear more pigs.

Last year, the government also raised interest rates six times in an attempt to keep inflation under control.

Analysts said in light of the latest figures they expected further interest rate rises.

(BBC)

Children Pay The Price For Afghan War

2008-02-19T14:27:00.001Z

David Bowden in Sangin

Two young girls are seriously ill in hospital after rocket attack aimed at killing British troops missed its target in southern Afghanistan.
Six-year-old Kharook lost an arm and her cousin Nazir who is five has severe head injuries as a result of the Taliban strike in Helmand province.

It's thought the attack was in response to a Royal Marine patrol through the town of Sangin which returned to base just minutes before the rocket was fired.

It's a well known Taliban tactic to use what the Marines call "Dickers" (spotters) to monitor their patrols and choose if and when to attack, usually in very short burst of what the commandos call "shoot and scoot" missions.

It was exactly that which almost killed the two girls, a man in dark clothing was seen riding away from the suspected launch site at speed on a motorbike immediately after the rocket attack.

The two childen were given emergency treatment at the base medical centre before being airlifted to the main British compound in Helmand at Camp Bastion.

When I asked Army Doctor, Colonel David Morgan-Jones whether the girls would be all right he pensively replied: "as the Arabs say...Inshallah (God Willing)," adding that he had grave concerns about Nazir who has a compressed skull fracture and potential brain damage.

Dr Morgan-Jones was more optimistic about Kharook making a full recovery, all be it as an amputee.

The Taliban have largely been driven out of Sangin over the last year after months of intense fighting between British forces and the insurgents.

Bravo Company of 40 Commando now secure the town under the command of Major Dan Cheesman who describes life at the base as being "surreal, real and then surreal again in an instant".

Under the security blanket of the marines a school has been set up in the town and the local bazaar is once again bustling with people who fled when the fighting was at its height.

This is a Poppy growing area and much of the money here comes from the opium trade, but Major Cheesman is happy to turn a blind eye to the drugs trade in the area, seeing the eradication of the Taliban as his main priority.

There is daily proof that while the insurgents may not be in control of Sangin anymore they are very much still around.

Boys as young as ten have been threatened with death if they go to school and a young girl told she'd be raped if she continued coming to classes, though shockingly its alleged the threat came not from the Taliban, but a local Afghan Police Officer.

Life has undoubtedly been transformed over the last year for the people of Sangin, but it is still far from what most of us would describe as normal.

(skynews)

Sperm damage 'passed to children'

2008-02-19T14:25:00.000Z

Sperm defects caused by exposure to environmental toxins can be passed down the generations, research suggests.
Scientists say fathers who smoke and drink should be aware they are potentially not just damaging themselves, but also their heirs.

Tests on rats showed sperm damage caused by exposure to garden chemicals remained up to four generations later.

The US study was presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

It suggests that a father's health plays a greater role in the health of future generations than has been thought.

A team from the University of Idaho in Moscow tested the effects of a hormone-disrupting fungicide chemical called vinclozolin on embryonic rats.

The chemical altered genes in the sperm, including a number associated with human prostate cancer.

Rats exposed to it show signs of damage and overgrowth of the prostate, infertility and kidney problems.

The defects were also present in animals four generations on.

The scientists admitted that the rats were exposed to very high levels of vinclozolin.

Proof of principle

But they argued that their work shows that once toxins cause defects in sperm they can be passed down the generations.

Professor Cynthia Daniels, from Rutgers University in New Jersey, has written books on male and female reproduction.

She said men who drank a lot of alcohol had been shown to have increased rates of sperm defects; and nicotine from tobacco found its way into seminal fluid as well as blood.

Professor Daniels said: "We need to open up our eyes and look at the evidence.

"My advice to young couples would be moderation. Substances that have an impact on reproduction are often also carcinogenic.

"If I was a young man I would not drink very heavily and not smoke two packets of cigarettes a day while I was trying to conceive a child."

Professor Neil McClure, a fertility expert at Queen's University Belfast, UK, said the DNA in sperm cells was more tightly packed than in other cells, and so, to some extent, was protected from damage.

However, once sperm cell DNA was damaged, it had no mechanism by which to effect repairs.

He said: "There is no doubt that if you smoke like a chimney or drink vast amounts of alcohol it will result in sperm damage, and probably damage in the DNA of the sperm.

"My advice to any man trying for a baby would be to lead as healthy a lifestyle as possible."

(BBC)

JFK transcripts cause stir in US

2008-02-19T14:23:00.000Z

transcript of an alleged conversation between two key players in the mystery of President Kennedy's assassination has caused a stir on its release in the US.

Items and documents relating to the 1963 assassination of JFK have been revealed for the first time after being kept under lock and key inside a US courthouse safe.
Among the items is the transcript of an alleged conversation between Mr Kennedy's assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and Oswald's killer, nightclub owner Jack Ruby.

A leather gun holster that held the weapon Ruby used to shoot Oswald, brass knuckledusters found on Ruby when he was arrested and a movie contract signed by then-Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade were also in the vault.

The transcript of the apparent chat between Oswald and Ruby includes talk of killing Mr Kennedy at the request of the Mafia.

Ruby killed Oswald on November 24, 1963, two days after Oswald was arrested for JFK's assassination.

The two-page transcript resembles one published by the Warren Commission, which investigated Kennedy's assassination and determined Oswald was the lone gunman.

In that report, the FBI concluded that transcript of an alleged conversation between Oswald and Ruby was fake and that it had been "re-created" for authorities by a now-deceased Dallas attorney who claimed he recognised Oswald in a newspaper photo as the man he saw talking to Ruby.

The transcript unveiled is dated October 4, 1963, and allegedly happened at the Carousel Club, a Dallas nightclub.

It begins with a discussion of how the "boys in Chicago" want to "get rid of" US Attorney General Robert Kennedy, JFK's brother.

Later Oswald asks Ruby: "Are you with the Mafia?"

Ruby responds: "You're asking too many questions."

(itn.co.uk)

Afghan city hit by car bomb

2008-02-19T14:18:00.002Z

At least one civilian has been killed in a car bomb blast in Afghanistan's southern city of Kandahar, with at least three other people injured in the attack.

The bombing on Tuesday, appatently carried out by remote control, was the latest attack in a series of blasts that have hit the area, killing scores of people over the past two days.

Tuesday's explosion was aimed at a police vehicle, witnesses and police said, but missed.

The attack came as many people in the city observed a general mourning for more than 140 people killed in two suspected suicide raids in the past two days in other parts of Kandahar province.

The area is a stronghold of Taliban fighters who are battling the Afghan government and the US-led troops operating in the country.

Taliban stronghold

In recent years, the Taliban has made a comeback, especially in the southern areas where it enjoys the most support among civilians.

An attack on Sunday killed more than 100 people, the deadliest single raid since the US-led invasion overthrew the Taliban government in 2001.

The latest attacks come as discussions are under way among the Afghan government, the US and its Nato allies on how to stabilise the country and prevent it from sliding back into anarchy.

But in light of the rising violence, many Afghans have questioned the ability of the US military and its allies to secure the country.

(aljazeera)

NATO Steps in as Serbs Torch Kosovo Border Post

2008-02-19T14:18:00.001Z

PRISTINA (Reuters) - NATO peacekeepers in newly independent Kosovo intervened on Tuesday as Serb mobs opposed to its secession attacked border posts and police fled.

Serbs burned down one border post and were attacking a second, a Kosovo police spokesman said. Police manning the post called for help from the NATO peacekeeping force, KFOR, which said it was stepping in.

"KFOR is going to intervene now," a force spokesman said. He declined to say which troops of the 35-nation, 17,000-strong force were being deployed.

The violence highlights the challenge facing a European Union law enforcement mission preparing to deploy in the Albanian-majority territory which has been under U.N. administration for nearly nine years.

"We are inches from partition," said a Western official.

He said he believed it was "only a matter of time before KFOR closes the bridges" that cross the River Ibar in the flashpoint city of Mitrovica, dividing Kosovo Serbs from Albanians.

Some 2 million Albanians live in Kosovo alongside around 120,000 remaining Serbs. Half of these are concentrated in an area running north from Mitrovica to the Serbian border, the rest in isolated enclaves further south.

A spokesman for the EU's International Civilian Office, whose Dutch leader Pieter Feith is expected in Kosovo any day, said there was no plan to withdraw a small advance EU team from the north side of Mitrovica. They would stay on and carry out their mandate, he told Reuters.

TUNNEL

"Protesters have destroyed the border crossing post at Gate 1 in Jarinje," a Kosovo police spokesman said. "No one has been injured." Serbs were also attacking a second post near Zubin Potok, he said.

Police took shelter in a tunnel there as more than 1,000 protesters tried to tear it down, Kosovo police sources said.

"We asked NATO to send a helicopter to evacuate our officers," a police source told Reuters in Pristina.

KFOR forces in the district include French, Danish, Belgian and American units.

Local Serbs backed by the Serbian government and Russia say the planned EU supervisory mission to Kosovo, which will deploy 2,000 police and justice officials, is illegitimate and warn that its authority will not be accepted.

EU foreign affairs chief Javier Solana was expected in Kosovo later in the day to congratulate leaders on Sunday's independence declaration, recognized by most major Western powers but denounced by Serbia and Russia as illegal secession.

But angry Serb demonstrations and two nights of vandalism against vehicles and symbols of the international presence in Kosovo have thrown down a gauntlet to the incoming "EULEX" mission.

The EU expects to send the 2,000 police and justice officials to Kosovo to take over from the U.N. mission that has administered the province since NATO intervened in 1999 to end a Serb counter-insurgency war.

NATO had said on Monday conditions on the ground in Kosovo were quiet after its declaration of independence and there was no current need to reinforce its peacekeeping force.

(Writing by Douglas Hamilton, edited by Richard Meares)

Carnage worsens in Afghanistan

2008-02-18T14:28:00.000Z

A British soldier has been killed in Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defence has announced.

Officials said the soldier was serving with the 2nd Battalion The Yorkshire Regiment.
The announcement came after at least 35 civilians and soldiers were killed in a suicide attack on a foreign military convoy in the strife-torn country.

"The toll has gone up to 23 and more than 20 other civilians have been wounded," said border commander Abdul Razaaq.

Another official from the area said that two foreign soldiers also died in the attack on a road in the town of Spin Boldak.

Meanwhile, the number killed in a suspected suicide bombing in southern Afghanistan on Sunday has risen to 100.

Another 100 people were injured in the attack on a crowd of spectators at a dog fight in Arghandab, on the western outskirts of Kandahar.

The largest mourning ceremony was held at a mosque in Arghandab for a top provincial police officer, Abdul Hakim, who was killed along with 32 of his colleagues.

Kandahar's governor Assadullah Kahlid accused the Taliban of the attack, but the insurgents denied responsibility.

The attack came at a time when some Western politicians have called for a stronger resolve to tackle the insurgency to stop Afghanistan sliding back into anarchy.

But Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel said earlier that she saw no need to send more of her country's troops to the troubled south Asian nation.

Germany, which has roughly 3,300 troops in Afghanistan, is under pressure from its Nato allies to send additional soldiers and shift them to the more-dangerous south to help battle Taliban insurgents.

*itn.co.uk

Mohamed Fayed 'calls Prince Philip a Nazi'

2008-02-18T14:27:00.000Z

Mohamed Fayed accused the Duke of Edinburgh of being a "racist Nazi" who ordered MI6 to assassinate Diana, Princess of Wales because she was pregnant with Mr Fayed's grandchild.

In a series of dramatic accusations, delivered from the witness box at the Princess's High Court inquest, Mr Fayed also accused the Princess's former husband the Prince of Wales of being involved in planning the "murder" so he could marry his new "crocodile wife" Camilla.

Mr Fayed outlined his belief there was a massive cover-up which included the Princess's sister Sarah McCorquodale, two former Scotland Yard Commissioners Lord Condon and Lord Stevens, two French pathologists, the French police and the French Establishment.

He also claimed the Princess had been about to announce her engagement to his son Dodi when they were killed in a staged car crash in Paris on Aug 31, 1997 - along with their driver Henri Paul who, Mr Fayed claimed, was working for MI6.

Mr Fayed claimed the couple told him about the pregnancy and the engagement an hour before the crash and that he was the only person they told.

Of the Duke of Edinburgh, Mr Fayed said: "He would not accept my son, anyone who is a person of different religion, naturally tanned, curly hair, they will not accept that he will have anything to do with the future King.

"Prince Philip rules the country behind the scenes. I think Prince Philip is the actual head of the Royal Family. He is a racist. He was brought up by his aunt who married one of Hitler's generals. This is the man who is in charge who is manipulating and can do anything.

"Time to send him back to Germany from where he comes. You want to know his original name – it ends in Frankenstein."

Ian Burnett QC, for the coroner, asked Mr Fayed: "All this stems from your belief that Prince Philip is not only a racist but a Nazi as well."

Mr Fayed replied: "That's right." Mr Burnett said there had been an "avalanche" of evidence that the princess was not pregnant but Mr Fayed said witnesses who claimed that were "lying".

He claimed Rosa Monckton, the Princess's close friend, was in fact working for MI6 and "spying" on the Princess.

Mr Fayed told the hearing: "Princess Diana told me personally before and during the holiday we shared in July 1997 of her fears. She told me that she knew Prince Philip and Prince Charles were trying to get rid of her."

He focused on a document - dubbed the Mishcon note – which was written by the Princess's divorce lawyer Lord Mishcon after an October 1995 meeting in which she voiced her fears there was a plot to kill her in a staged car crash.

The document was locked in a safe at Scotland Yard and eventually sent to the coroner in December 2003.

Mr Fayed said: "My belief that my son and Princess Diana were murdered was confirmed when I learned that the two leading Commissioners - Lord Condon and Lord Stevens - did not show the coroner the note made by a leading lawyer, Lord Mishcon, detailing the princess' fears for her life.

"I cannot believe that they sat upon such an important note and did not pass it on. I believe that they acted unprofessionally and they must have no conscience."

The Harrods boss described the note as "devastating" and said it explained Diana's fears in "black and white".

Mr Fayed broke down in the witness box as he was asked about the moment he was told of his son's death.

*telegraph

Exclusive: Dallas County DA's office finds cache of JFK memorabilia

2008-02-18T14:18:00.000Z

By JENNIFER EMILY / The Dallas Morning News
jemily@dallasnews.com

The Dallas County district attorney's office has unearthed a treasure trove of memorabilia from the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy's assassination in an old safe on the 10th floor of the courthouse.

It includes personal letters to and from former District Attorney Henry Wade, a gun holster, official records from the Jack Ruby trial, letters to Ruby and clothing that probably belonged to him and Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, said Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins.

And conspiracy theorists will rejoice over one find: a highly suspect transcript of a conversation between Ruby and Oswald plotting to kill the president because the mafia wanted to "get rid of" his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

"It will open up the debate again about whether there was a conspiracy," said Mr. Watkins, who at 40 was born four Novembers after Kennedy was killed in 1963.

But the curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza said the conversation could not have happened.

Terri Moore, Mr. Watkins' top assistant, said she believes the transcript is part of a movie that Mr. Wade was working on with producers.

"It's not real. Crooks don't talk like that," she said.

"If that transcript is true, then history is changed because Oswald and Ruby were talking about assassinating the president."

Mr. Wade wrote about the movie, Countdown in Dallas, in letters found in the safe. Mr. Wade prosecuted Ruby in Oswald's death, although the verdict was overturned and Ruby died of cancer in 1967 before his second trial could begin.

"I believe it important for the film to be factually correct, that it come from official files, that the witnesses who in any way were participants should appear in person in the film, and in my opinion, will result in an excellent film not only of interest at present but the record of events for history," Mr. Wade wrote.

It is unclear if any further work was ever done on the film.

Mr. Watkins is expected to formally announce the finding of about a dozen boxes of materials on Monday at a news conference. The vast majority of the documents are authentic records from the 1960s.

The purported Oswald-Ruby conversation took place on Oct. 4, 1963, at Ruby's Carousel Club on Commerce Street. It reads like every conspiracy theorist's dream of a smoking gun that ties the men to a plot to kill Kennedy.

Part of the two-page transcript reads:

Lee: You said the boys in Chicago want to get rid of the Attorney General.

Ruby: Yes, but it can't be done ... it would get the Feds into everything.

Lee: There is a way to get rid of him without killing him.

Ruby: How's that?

Lee: I can shoot his brother.

...

Ruby: But that wouldn't be patriotic.

Lee: What's the difference between shooting the Governor and in shooting the President?

Ruby: It would get the FBI into it.

Lee: I can still do it, all I need is my rifle and a tall building; but it will take time, maybe six months to find the right place; but I'll have to have some money to live on while I do the planning."

Later, Ruby warns Oswald that the mafia will ask Ruby to kill him if he's caught.
Gary Mack, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, laughed when told of the transcript. He has not seen it or any of the other documents found in the safe.

The transcript resembles one published in a report by the Warren Commission, which investigated Kennedy's assassination and determined that Oswald was the lone gunman. The FBI determined that conversation – again between Oswald and Ruby, but this time about killing the governor – was definitely fake.

Mr. Mack said that it's well documented that Oswald was in Irving the evening of Oct. 4, at a home where his wife was staying. He could not have been at Ruby's club.

Mr. Mack suggested that the transcript in the Warren Commission report was probably used as a model for the one found in the district attorney's safe.

The conversation published in the commission report was a fake account of a conversation between Ruby and Oswald on the same night at the Carousel Club. A now-deceased Dallas attorney "re-created" the conversation after Kennedy's assassination for authorities after he claimed he recognized Oswald in a newspaper photo as the man he saw talking to Ruby that night.

"The fact that it's sitting in Henry Wade's file, and he didn't do anything, indicates he thought it wasn't worth anything," Mr. Mack said of the newly found transcript. "He probably kept it because it was funny. It's hilarious. It's like a bad B movie."

William J. Alexander, the only surviving prosecutor from Ruby's trial for killing Oswald in the days after Kennedy's assassination, told the district attorney's office he'd never seen the Ruby-Oswald transcript. But it's labeled with a sticker that says, "Plaintiff's Exhibit 27." Typically, exhibits for criminal trials are marked as state's exhibits or defense exhibits.

The DA's office said Mr. Alexander, who rarely talks about the Ruby trial, declined to be interviewed.

While the two-page transcript is most likely fake, Mr. Watkins says he's never believed Oswald acted alone.

"You know me: I'm always a conspiracy theorist," Mr. Watkins said. "It was too simple of an explanation. I don't see that."

Mr. Watkins, Ms. Moore and several investigators from the DA's office found the boxes of materials about a year ago because they had heard that the gun used to kill Oswald was somewhere in the courthouse. They didn't find the gun, which Mr. Mack said is privately owned, but instead found the records and other items.

For the past year, they've been trying to determine what they discovered and began scanning some of the documents. The process is not complete.

The boxes probably sat in the safe since being moved when the courthouse opened in 1989. Mr. Watkins said he plans to donate the files to an entity that will authenticate and preserve them, as well as make them available to the public.

"It's interesting, and it's not ours," Mr. Watkins said. "It's the public's."

No one has yet thoroughly read all of the documents, so it's not known whether they contain information previously unknown to the public or the Warren Commission.

Mr. Mack, the museum curator, said many of the court files and even personal letters to Mr. Wade and Ruby have been widely circulated. The museum already has a transcript of Ruby's trial, as well as his medical records.

Still, he said, he would be eager to obtain the documents and authenticate them to see "anything and everything that can help answer lingering questions."

"These records may not have any particular value," he said. "But 100 years from now, who knows what's going to be important?"

What was found?
The district attorney's office discovered about a dozen boxes of materials in a courthouse safe that included items and documents from the Jack Ruby trial. Ruby was convicted of killing Lee Harvey Oswald, but the verdict was overturned. He died before a second trial occurred.

Many of the records, including interrogations with Ruby, his family and witnesses, are undated, and it's unclear which agency or people conducted the interviews. Other documents are signed and dated. A sampling of what was found:

• Transcripts of interviews with prospective jurors.

• Notes to District Attorney Henry Wade about prospective jurors from people, possibly in the DA's office, who knew them. One note mentioned that someone was Catholic. Others said a person had mental problems or was likely not to consider harsh punishment.

• Letters that show Mr. Wade was working on a movie deal for a documentary-type film to be titled Countdown in Dallas.

• A typed, undated, unsigned memo from the DA's office with Mr. Wade's name on the letterhead that says Ruby said he planned to kill Oswald because he did not want President Kennedy's widow to have to testify at his trial. Mr. Ruby also said, according to the memo, that there were no conspirators in his plan. The memo says in an interview that appears to have taken place after the trial that Ruby "said there was absolutely no blackout, that he had premeditation with the intent to kill Oswald if he was there."

• Typed notes from an interview with Ruby before the trial where Ruby said he did not recall anything after walking down the ramp into the area where he shot Oswald.

• A document that says that during an interview Nov. 24, 1963, in Dallas police Capt. Will Fritz's office, Mr. Ruby said he "felt Oswald was a Red" and he "felt Oswald was alone in the assassination."

• The files also contain hundreds of pages of copied letters and cards sent to Ruby before and during his trial. Some letters and cards sympathize with Ruby. At least two women – one from Philadelphia and another from Plainfield, Ind. – sent Ruby checks for $2. Others sent Valentine's Day cards, and at least one sent a St. Patrick's Day card.

• Other letters lash out at Ruby. One handwritten, unsigned note apparently sent to him says: "You expect a fair trial. So did Mr. Oswald. It would not be a happy situation if the assassin of the assassin were himself assassinated." Others are addressed "Dear Killer" and called Ruby a "Commie Jew." One man typed a letter using red ink because he said the black ribbon was out.

*dallasnews.com

Iran MPs want action over Dutch, Danish cartoons

2008-02-18T14:17:00.000Z

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iranian lawmakers have urged the president to review ties with Denmark and the Netherlands over reprints of satirical cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad in Danish and Dutch newspapers, state radio said on Monday.

Protests and rioting erupted in 2006 in Muslim countries around the world when the cartoons, one showing the Prophet with a turban resembling a bomb, first appeared in a Danish daily. At least 50 people were killed and three Danish embassies attacked.

Most Muslims consider depictions of the Prophet Mohammad offensive.

Danish newspapers republished one of the drawings of the Prophet last week in protest against what they said was a plot to murder the cartoonist who drew it.

In a letter to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, some 215 lawmakers of Iran's 290-seat assembly said Iran should review trade and political links with Denmark and the Netherlands to respond to "an anti-Islamic and Islamophobic current" in Holland and Denmark.

"We, representatives of the honorable Iranian nation, condemn this devil measure. We ask the president ... to seriously review Iran's political and trade ties with these countries," the lawmakers said in the letter.

In the Gaza Strip, controlled by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, a leader of a militants' umbrella group called on Muslim faithful to attack Danish embassies and diplomats.

"Blow up the Danish embassies and kill the ambassadors," Abu Abir, spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), said at an open-air news conference in a Gaza square, where PRC members burnt a Danish flag.

"We urge (Islamist fighters) to track down those who printed the cartoons, those who drew them and those who published them and slaughter them immediately," he said.
Danish police arrested two Tunisians and a Dane of Moroccan descent last Tuesday, accusing them of planning to kill a cartoonist who drew one of the images.

Dozens of Islamist students burned the Danish flag in southern Pakistan on Thursday, while in Kuwait, several parliamentarians called for a boycott of Danish goods.

On Saturday, two days before their planned departure, 10 Danish lawmakers aborted a trip to Iran. The Danish Foreign Ministry said the scheduled visit was cancelled after Iran's parliament demanded an apology over the cartoon.

(Writing by Parisa Hafezi; Editing by Charles Dick)

Is Maddie McCann in France?

2008-02-17T21:51:00.002Z

Maddie McCann was spotted by a Dutch woman in France. The woman walked to the little girl and called her Maddie. The little girl reacted to the name. The little girl was in the company of a man. When he noticed that the woman called her Maddie he quickly dressed the little girl and went away. The Dutch woman called the French police and they looked at the camera images and recognised the little girl. The French police will give a statement tomorrow.

(DutchTimes)

Intelligence chief blames militant's death on Hezbollah or Syria

2008-02-17T20:13:00.000Z

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. intelligence chief said Sunday that internal Hezbollah groups or Syria may be to blame for the killing of a Hezbollah commander that has led the FBI to put domestic terror squads on alert in the United States.

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said the United States is still reviewing the case following the death last Tuesday of commander Imad Mughniyeh. Hezbollah blamed Israel and has pledged to attack Jewish targets worldwide in retaliation. That led the FBI last week to be vigilant for possible threats in the U.S. against synagogues and other potential Jewish targets.

McConnell said he considers the threat to be primarily against Israel. But he said U.S. intelligence officials are keeping close watch and taking any necessary action to protect the United States because Mughniyeh has been "responsible for more deaths of Americans and Israelis than any other terrorist with the exception of Osama bin Laden."

"It is a serious threat," McConnell said. "There's some evidence it may have been internal Hezbollah, it may have been Syria. We don't know yet, and we're trying to sort that out."

McConnell also expressed hope that Monday's parliamentary elections in Pakistan will help produce a stable, democratic government. The elections are considered crucial to restoring democracy in Pakistan after eight years of military rule under President Pervez Musharraf.

Over the weekend, a suicide bomber in Islamabad rammed a car packed with explosives into a crowd following a rally for a candidate allied with the opposition, killing at least 40 people and heightening fears of Islamic militant violence. Most of the victims appeared to be members of the opposition Pakistan People's Party, formerly led by the slain Benazir Bhutto.

"The whole effort in our work with Pakistan, negotiating back and forth, is to see these elections be fair and free, and hopefully put them on a path to democracy," McConnell said.

On other matters, McConnell:

--Reiterated his belief that the U.S. is at "increased danger" of a terrorist attack and "it will increase more and more as time goes on" because Congress did not quickly renew an eavesdropping law that expired at midnight Saturday. The Bush administration wants the House to approve a Senate bill that would in part have provided legal protections for telecommunications companies that helped the government wiretap U.S. computer and phone lines after the September 11 attacks without approval first from a secret court.

McConnell said Sunday that without the legal protections, telecommunications companies are now unlikely to cooperate with the government in tracking suspected terrorists, and "we cannot do this mission without help and support from the private sector."

--Said intelligence officials have not located a terrorist cell inside the United States "that is directly associated with al Qaeda," but that al Qaeda remains viable because it has leadership, maintains a safe haven in Pakistan and is recruiting and training. Still, McConnell said al Qaeda is not as dangerous as it was before September 11, 2001.

--Contended that the threat of Iran developing nuclear weapons has not changed much despite a U.S. intelligence report released in December that concluded Tehran halted its nuclear weapons ambitions in 2003. McConnell said Iran had terminated one aspect of a technical design but "they could have turned it back on now and we wouldn't necessarily know."

They could do it by 2009 -- unlikely," he said, referring to the ability to make a nuclear bomb. "The range is 2010 to 2015. And the best guess is about the middle range there for having a nuclear weapon."

McConnell spoke on "Fox News Sunday."
(CNN)

Dying Under the Army's Care

2008-02-17T19:17:00.001Z

Iraqi insurgents wounded Gerald Cassidy in the deafening blast of a roadside bomb just outside Baghdad on Aug. 28, 2006. But it took more than a year for him to die from neglect by the Army that had sent him off to war. When Cassidy returned to the U.S. last April, the Army shipped him to a hospital in Fort Knox, Ky., to get treatment for the excruciating headaches that had accompanied him home. For five months, he made the rounds of Army medical personnel, who couldn't cure a pain that grew steadily worse. Unable to make room for him in a pain-management clinic, the Army increasingly plied him with drugs to dull the torment.

At summer's end, the headaches had grown so intense that Cassidy pleaded once more for help, and his doctor prescribed methadone, a powerful narcotic. The next day, calls to Cassidy's cell phone from his wife Melissa went unanswered. After two more days without word from her husband, she frantically called the Army and urged that someone check on him. Nine hours later, two soldiers finally unlocked the door to his room. They found Cassidy slumped in his chair, dead, his laptop and cold takeout chicken wings on his desk.

The "manner of death" was summed up at the end of the 12-page autopsy: "Accident." But when he died, Cassidy had the contents of a locked medicine cabinet coursing through his body, powerful narcotics and other drugs like citalopram, hydromorphine, morphine and oxycodone, as well as methadone. The drugs--both the levels that Cassidy took and "their combined, synergistic actions," in the medical examiner's words--killed him.

Horrifyingly, it appears that Cassidy lived for up to two days after falling into a stupor. Forgotten and alone, he sat in his room until he died. "My God, he was there for three days, and no one even found him. That's a huge scandal," says Dr. William Kearney, Cassidy's Army psychiatrist. Regulations that require a soldier to show up for formation three times a day or be tracked down were widely ignored, say soldiers who stayed at Fort Knox. "You could easily linger for two days in a coma," Kearney says, "and if anybody had opened his door, they would have found him unconscious and they would have called 911."

Soldiers fall through the cracks in every war. But the death of Sergeant Gerald (GJ) Cassidy, a cheerful 31-year-old husband and father of two, highlights the tragic and persistent shortcomings of Army medicine. The same Army that spends $160 billion on tomorrow's fighting machines is shortchanging the shell-shocked troops coming home from war in need of healing. Cassidy was promised world-class health care. But he didn't get the simple help--quick treatment, pain-management classes, knowledge of his whereabouts or even a roommate--that could have saved his life.

Combat Trauma

Cassidy grew up playing army games with cousins and re-creating Civil War battles on a Ping-Pong table covered with fake grass and tiny trees in the basement of his Carmel, Ind., home. He joined the Army Reserve in 1992, and the Indiana National Guard in 2003, intending to serve 20 years, get a pension and then retire to teach junior-high history. He served in Bosnia in 2004. And in April 2006, when the Army called, Cassidy left his landscaping job for Iraq. "Some guys had gone to Iraq three times at that point, and he hadn't gone," Melissa says. "He felt if he volunteered, someone else would get to stay home."

In Iraq, Cassidy's job was to protect the serpentine convoys that carry food, fuel and mail to and from Kuwait. On a routine mission in August 2006, a roadside bomb blew up 10 yds. (9 m) from his armored humvee. There was no apparent damage to the humvee or the four men in it. But for two to three minutes after the attack, Cassidy lost his hearing, and he quickly developed a bad headache. The next day medics diagnosed a minor concussion. "Since that time," he wrote in a January 2007 statement, "I have been plagued with migraine headaches every seven to 10 days."

Melissa was grateful when Cassidy finally came home. "I felt like I could breathe again," she says. But because of the continuing head pain, the Army decided to send him to Fort Knox, 150 miles (240 km) from his home in Indiana. It was a strange choice. Cassidy was apparently suffering from traumatic brain injury (TBI) compounded by posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which should have required treatment by neurologists. But there are none at Fort Knox's Ireland Army Community Hospital.

Just as the Pentagon failed to anticipate the duration and cost of the Iraq war, it has been woefully unprepared for the waves of wounded who return home needing care. Earnest, hardworking medical personnel haven't been able to handle the deluge. At Fort Knox, Cassidy and more than 200 other soldiers were placed in a newly created Warrior Transition Unit (WTU). The Army is spending $500 million this year on such units, in which troops operate as a military detachment and continue to be paid. After a 2007 Washington Post series focused attention on poor conditions at the service's flagship Walter Reed hospital in Washington, the Army created the units to streamline the care of Army outpatients. There are currently 8,300 soldiers in 35 WTUS. One in 5 suffers from TBI, PTSD or both.

Mild TBI is the "signature wound" of the Iraq war, afflicting up to 250,000 troops. It nearly doubles the chance of developing PTSD, according to a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine. While severe TBI cases are easily identified by bloodied and broken craniums, disorders in which brains are rattled inside intact skulls by IEDS (improvised explosive devices) are harder, and sometimes impossible, to diagnose.

During his first month at Fort Knox, an MRI of Cassidy's brain revealed no "hemorrhage, edema, mass effect or midline shift" that would clearly indicate TBI. Nonetheless, his case manager made a note in his file that "headaches are gradually worsening." Cassidy tried a slew of prescription pain relievers without success. Because there was no physical evidence of an injury, a civilian neurologist working for the Army who examined Cassidy in late April concluded that the headaches were most likely "posttraumatic migraines." The doctor prescribed two more kinds of drugs. It was the soldier's lone visit to a neurologist during his 13 months of headaches.

"He Was Getting Worse"

At Fort Knox, Cassidy spent most of his time alone in his room with his laptop computer and Xbox video game. "While he was at Fort Knox," his wife says, "he was actually getting worse." He met with his case manager weekly but saw Kearney, his psychiatrist and only regular doctor, barely once a month. Their first visit was on May 30, 2007, nearly two months after he arrived at Fort Knox. "Alert and smiles throughout the interview, is anxious," Kearney typed into Cassidy's file. "He was under fire and under constant stress and was mortared frequently." Kearney prescribed Valium and another medication in addition to the other drugs the soldier was already taking.

But while the pills sometimes worked, they didn't keep the headaches at bay. "We kept asking, 'What's the treatment plan here?'" his wife recalls. "There was never an answer for that." After a terrible headache drove Cassidy to Fort Knox's emergency room, Kearney prescribed methadone for the first time on Sept. 13.

Cassidy's final day of Army medical care began early on Tuesday, Sept. 18. That morning the Fort Knox medical clinic noted that he was "awake, alert, oriented to time, place and person, well developed, well nourished, well hydrated, healthy appearing, in no acute distress." A short time later, Cassidy met with Kearney, who observed in his file that "the methadone worked for the headache...used 40 mg without difficulty or too much sedation." So Kearney wrote a prescription for 16 more 10-mg methadone tablets "for severe pain" after discussing "potential side effects with patient who indicated understanding." Cassidy showed no suicidal inclinations, Kearney added.

About lunchtime, Cassidy spoke by telephone with his mother Kay McMullen. "Mom, there's a lift dropping huge bundles of shingles on top of the roof," she says he told her. "It seems like I'm back in Iraq again--my head is pounding." But around dinnertime he had an upbeat conversation with Melissa. He talked happily about visiting home the next weekend. Two weeks after that, he was to return for good and continue treatment at a civilian hospital.

Melissa was unable to reach her husband on his cell phone later that night or the next day. By Thursday, she became anxious after he had failed to respond to her four messages. On Friday morning, she called and found his voice mail was full. Moments later, her apprehension turned into panic when she dialed into his cell-phone messages and found he hadn't listened to any of them, including her good-night call on Tuesday.

She immediately dialed Kearney and her husband's platoon sergeant, but they didn't answer. She reached a soldier at his barracks who promised to hunt him down. When Melissa hadn't heard anything by mid-afternoon, she called the barracks again and spoke to Sergeant Rory Martin, another outpatient. She asked him to check to see whether her husband had applied on Wednesday, as required, for his weekend pass. When they spoke again four hours later, Martin told Melissa that Cassidy had not applied for a weekend pass and that a knock on his door had gotten no response.

Martin promised he would find her husband, but when she hadn't heard from him by 6:45, Melissa placed another call to Martin's cell phone. "I haven't got in yet, I haven't got in yet," Martin told her, voice shaking. "Let me call you back, sweetie." Then he hung up. "I knew," Melissa says quietly, "something was terribly wrong."

After another hour, Colonel Rhonda Earls, the hospital commander, got on the phone to give Melissa the news. "Mrs. Cassidy, I regret to inform you that we found your husband in the barracks, and he is dead." A military chaplain and casualty-assistance officer arrived at the house at about midnight.

Killed by the System

Martin, who found Cassidy's body, can still recall his horror but says he understands how it happened. "Nobody there had accountability for nobody," he says. Sergeant Jim Hunt, who lived in the Fort Knox barracks from January to July 2007, says only about half of those who were supposed to show up for mandatory formations--at 7 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4:30 p.m.--actually did.

Five days after Cassidy's death, the Government Accountability Office told Congress that more than half the WTUS had "significant shortfalls" in key positions. At Fort Knox, more than half the squad-leader positions--those most responsible for Cassidy's well-being--were unfilled. An Army report on TBI released in January also offered a grim assessment, finding "no specific standards" for dealing with the TBI problem, "major gaps" in coordinating care and "no medical-provider core competencies." Now the Army is rushing to catch up, setting up screening tools and treatment plans to deal with TBI and a "center of excellence" dedicated to the challenge.

A month after Cassidy's death, the Army removed from command the three soldiers most responsible for his well-being. The Army suspended Kearney on Jan. 11 after an aide to Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, who has been probing the circumstances surrounding Cassidy's death, complained that he was still seeing patients. (Kearney says he did nothing wrong and is a victim of political pressure.) "The enemy could not kill him, but our own government did," Bayh said of Cassidy. The Senator has succeeded in requiring the Army to make sure wounded soldiers are sent to the "most appropriate" facility for care and to set time limits on delivery of that care.

But for some, such reforms come too late. Cassidy's death was the first in a string of at least three that led to urgent meetings at the Pentagon earlier this month on how to prevent them. They included soldiers who died in late January at WTUS in New York and Texas. Lieut. General Eric Schoomaker, the Army's top doctor, told TIME that easy access to drugs and lack of accountability played key roles in Cassidy's death. "If there's any good to come of this at all," Schoomaker said, "it's that we will work as hard as we possibly can to prevent any recurrence." But moments later, he conceded that while Cassidy is the first such death, he's "not an isolated case. We know of several others at this point." Once again, Sergeant Cassidy is leading soldiers in a war not of his making.

*time

The only winner in Beijing will be tyranny

2008-02-17T10:24:00.000Z

Pick any dictatorship at random and chances are you'll find China lurking in the background
At the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics, spectators will watch as athletes from the worst regimes on the planet parade by. Whether they are from dictatorships of the left or right, secular or theocratic, they will have one thing in common: the hosts of the games that, according to the mission statement, are striving 'for a bright future for mankind' will support their oppressors.

The flag of Sudan will flutter. China supplied the weapons that massacred so many in Darfur. As further sweeteners, it added interest-free loans for a new presidential palace and vetoes of mild condemnations of genocide from the United Nations. In return, China got most of Sudan's oil.

The Burmese athletes will wave to the crowd and look as if they are representing an independent country. In truth, Burma is little more than a Chinese satellite. In return for the weapons to suppress democrats and vetoes at the UN Security Council, the junta sells it gas at discounted rates far below what its wretched citizens have to pay.

There will be no Tibetan contingent, of course. Chinese immigrants are obliterating the identity of the occupied country, which will soon be nothing more than a memory. Athletes from half-starved Zimbabwe, whose senile despot props himself up with the Zimmer frame of Chinese aid, will be there, however. As will teams from the Iranian mullahocracy, grateful recipients of Chinese missiles and the prison state of North Korea, for whom China is the sole reliable ally.

With Steven Spielberg citing China's complicity in the Sudan atrocities as his reason for withdrawing as the Olympics' artistic adviser, comparisons with the 20th century will soon be flowing. Will Beijing be like the 1936 Berlin Olympics Hitler used to celebrate Nazism? Or the 1980 Moscow games the Americans boycotted in protest at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? I suspect the past won't be a guide because the ideological struggles of the 20th century are over. China's communists are communists in name only. They are not helping dictators because they are comrades who share their ideology. They have no ideology beyond national self-interest and a well-warranted desire to stop the outsiders insisting on standards in Africa or Asia they do not intend to abide by.

Human Rights Watch points out that if, say, Sudan were to turn into a peaceful state with a constitutional government, the Chinese would not care as long as the oil still flowed. China's post-communists are like mafiosi. It is not personal, just business. They are happy to do deals with anyone, as Henry Kissinger recognised when he set himself up to be PR man for so many of the corporations that went on to benefit from the Communist party's repression of free trade unions.

Campaign groups and governments that want to promote the spread of democracy have been far slower to understand that the emerging power of the 21st century will be every tyrant's first customer and banker of last resort and adjust their tactics accordingly.

Their failure may be because it is far from clear what fresh tactics are on offer. Take the supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi campaigning for a democratic Burma. Their demonstrations outside Chinese embassies have had no effect. They persuaded Gordon Brown to raise Burma in meetings with the Chinese leadership, but again the Prime Minister was unlikely to have made an impression. Their other successes look equally fragile. The European Union has imposed sanctions, but Western energy companies ask with justice why they should be told not to compete for gas contracts the Chinese will snap up.

More seriously, they are running into a problem familiar to anyone who campaigned against 20th-century dictatorships: where to find allies. If you are protesting about an aspect of American policy - Guantánamo Bay or attitudes to global warming - this isn't an issue. You can ally with and be informed by American activists, journalists, lawyers and opposition politicians. The resources of the civic society of a free country are at your disposal and you can use them to shift American opinion. A subject of the Chinese Communist party who helps foreign critics put pressure on Beijing risks imprisonment, and none but the bravest do.

David Miliband showed he understood the dilemmas of the new century when he gave a lecture in honour of Suu Kyi in Oxford last week. He described how the great wave of democratisation, which began with the fall of Franco's dictatorship in the Seventies, moved through South America, the Soviet empire, South Africa and the tyrannies of East Asia, was petering out.

The Foreign Secretary was undiplomatic enough to continue that the economic success of China had proved that history was not over and he was right. Its combination of communist suppression with market economics is being seen as a viable alternative to liberal freedoms, notably by Putin and his cronies, but also by anti-democratic forces across Asia.

The only justification for the Beijing games is that they will allow connoisseurs of the grotesque to inspect this ghoulish hybrid of the worst of capitalism and the worst of socialism close up. The march of China's bloodstained allies round the stadium will merely be the beginning. The International Olympic Committee and all the national sports bureaucracies will follow up by instructing athletes not to say a word out of place.

The free-market CEOs of Coca-Cola, McDonald's, General Electric and all the other sponsors who have made money out of China will join the communists in insisting that outsiders have no right to criticise. Any Chinese dissident who hasn't been picked up before the world's journalists arrive will face terrifying punishments if he speaks to them.

I know sportsmen and women are exasperated by demands to boycott events they have dreamed of winning for years. Why should they suffer when no business or government is prepared to turn its back on the vast Chinese market? For all that, they still should not go. The hypocrisy of the 2008 Olympics will make all but the most hard-hearted athletes retch. They will not look back on it not as a high point of their careers, but a nadir.

*guardian.co.uk

Obama Wears Iraqi Soldier's Bracelet

2008-02-17T10:22:00.000Z

(Eau Claire, Wis.) — Barack Obama is wearing a wristband in memory of a soldier killed in Iraq, given to him by a mother who said she wants the Democratic presidential candidate to keep others from dying.

Tracy Jopek of Merrill, Wis., gave Obama the bracelet at a rally Friday night in Green Bay, and Obama was still wearing it Saturday as he campaigned across the state before Tuesday's primary.

The bracelet has her son's name, Sgt. Ryan David Jopek, and the date the 20-year-old was killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb, Aug. 2, 2006. "All gave some — He gave all," it says.

"She gave me this wristband, which I'm very grateful for," Obama told the Green Bay audience, halting and lowering his voice from his normally upbeat presentation. "I meet mothers and family members all over the country who are still mourning their children but are also thinking about the young men and women who are still over there and wondering when it will end."

Mrs. Jopek said she and her daughter briefly met the Illinois senator at the rally and showed him a picture of a smiling Ryan dressed for battle. She said the senator hugged her and her daughter, asked a couple questions about Ryan and told her how much he appreciated the bracelet.

"I wanted him to know my son's name for one thing, for when he's commander in chief," Mrs. Jopek said during a telephone interview in which she frequently grew emotional. She said she was somewhat uncomfortable getting so publicly involved in the war debate, but felt the issue was too important for her to remain silent during this campaign.

She said she's a Democrat who will vote for Obama in Wisconsin's primary Tuesday. Like Obama, she said she was against the war from the start and had a hard time watching her son go to war.

"My son loved this country very much, I love this country, but I don't feel that staying in Iraq will vindicate my son's death," she said. "And it's not over for us until this war is over. I just don't want any more soldiers to die in vain for something that we can't solve."

Mrs. Jopek said she's a "political junkie" who was once watching a press conference on television and noticed likely GOP nominee John McCain wearing a similar bracelet. McCain's was given to him in August by the mother of Cpl. Matthew Stanley, also killed in Iraq, and the Arizona senator's been wearing it regularly ever since. He takes a different message from the memento.

"It means any political ambitions of mine pale in comparison to the sacrifice that nearly 4,000 family members have made," McCain said of the bracelet in an interview with The Associated Press last fall. He said although political pundits said his determination not to end the fight in Iraq will kill his political career, "when you meet the mother of Matthew Stanley, then what difference does that make?"

*time.com

8 Dead as Car Hits Stree-Race Crowd

2008-02-17T10:21:00.000Z

(Accokeek, Md.) — A car plowed into a group of street-racing fans obscured by a cloud of tire smoke on a highway Saturday, killing eight people and scattering bodies in the early morning darkness.

At least six others were injured in the gruesome wreck along a flat, isolated stretch of highway about 20 miles south of Washington known for illegal races.

Witnesses said about 50 people were gathered before dawn along Route 210 as two car spun their wheels, kicked up smoke and sped off, said Prince George's County police Cpl. Clinton Copeland.

Fans had spilled onto the smoky, dark roadway to watch the cars drive away when a white Ford Crown Victoria unexpectedly came up from behind and smashed into them.

"There were just bodies everywhere; it was horrible," said Crystal Gaines, 27, of Indian Head, whose father was killed.

Police interviewed the Crown Victoria driver, but no charges were pending, Copeland said. Authorities were looking for the drivers of the two cars involved in the race.

The combination of the smoke and the dark morning likely meant the unsuspecting driver could not see the crowd, police said. A tractor-trailer that came by shortly afterward may also have struck someone on the roadside as it tried to avoid the crash scene, according to investigators.

The Crown Victoria, which had a crumpled hood and a partially collapsed roof, ended up down an embankment with one of the victims lodged inside.

Bodies covered by white sheets lay in the road and on the shoulder across a 50-foot stretch of the road later Saturday morning before they were removed by the medical examiner.

Shoes were strewn about in the grass, and pair of dark skid marks scarred the highway.

"It's probably one of the worst scenes I've seen," Copeland said. "This is a situation that could have been avoided, and it's a very tragic situation."

About 50 people were watching the race, Gaines said, and she saw the Crown Victoria approach without its lights on. She grabbed her daughter, pulling the girl to safety. But her father, William Gaines Sr., 61, had a broken leg, and was not able to get away in time. Afterward, she found his body on the road.

"He wasn't breathing; he wasn't moving," Gaines said. "His body was in pieces."

Her brother, William Gaines Jr., was also there. The car came through so fast that "it just ripped people apart," he said.

"I didn't even see the car. All I heard was stuff breaking," he said.

Police could not confirm whether the car that struck the crowd had its lights on.

The victims' ages ranged from their 20s to 60s, police said. Seven people were pronounced dead at the scene, and an eighth died later at a hospital. Police said a body found in the car was one of the spectators and not a passenger, as they had previously assumed.

Route 210 is a thoroughfare with two lanes in each direction and traffic lights about every 150 to 200 yards. The road is flanked by some businesses but has little traffic in the early morning, Copeland said. The speed limit is 55 miles per hour.

John Courtney said his brother, Mark, 33, of St. Mary's County, also was among the dead. He identified his brother from a digital image police had taken.

"He liked going to the race track, watching races," Courtney said. "It's going to take a toll on my family for a long time."

Marion Neal feared her 42-year-old brother was among the dead and was awaiting images from the police.

"It's a tragedy," she said. "I don't like racing, but that was his hobby."

Police said that street races are not uncommon on the stretch of road, but that most occur in the summer and involve motorcycles. But relatives said some of the victims often went to see races held late at night on isolated stretches of road.

"It's a problem," said Denee Hines, whose mother owns a hair salon only a few hundred feet from the site of the accident. "Everyone knows about it, but I've never heard of it getting this bad."

*Time

Arrests follow Denmark violence

2008-02-17T10:17:00.001Z

Forty three people have been arrested after a sixth consecutive night of violence in immigrant neighbourhoods in Danish cities, police officials say.

On Saturday police arrested groups of youths in Copenhagen, Aarhus, Ringsted, Slagelse and other cities after they set fire to schools, cars and rubbish bins and threw rocks at frefighters.

Michael Hoejer, the deputy national police commissioner, said: "The bad [news] is that there's been a lot of vandalism; they've set fire to cars, garbage containers and in some cases buildings.

"The good news is that we've made a lot of arrests," he said.

The spate of vandalism started last weekend and is believed to have intensified after Danish newspapers reproduced a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad on Wednesday.

Hoejer said most of those arrested and later released were teenagers, but he declined to say how many.

Across the country more than 30 cars and 50 containers have been torched, and buildings such as schools and garages have also been targeted.

Hoejer rebuffed earlier police reports that the situation in Copenhagen, where police made 11 arrests, seemed to be calming.

"On Thursday the Copenhagen situation showed signs of calming, but it got worse last night again," he said.

Cartoon reprint

Police say they are not sure what has triggered the violence but observers say immigrant youths are protesting against perceived police harassment.

The situation may have been aggravated after Danish newspapers reprinted a cartoon that sparked massive protests in Muslim countries two years ago.

The reprinting of the cartoons, seen as a gesture of solidarity after police revealed an alleged plot to kill the cartoonist, also sparked protests in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The reproduction of the prophet cartoon has sparked protests and anger in many Muslim countries because Islamic law generally opposes any depiction of the prophet, even favourable, for fear it could lead to idolatry.

*aljazeera

China 'will make secret checks on backgrounds of Olympic visitors'

2008-02-17T10:15:00.000Z

The Chinese government has been accused of carrying out secret inquiries on the backgrounds of athletes, officials and journalists going to this summer's Olympics – so it can ban anyone who opposes the regime.

Tory MEP Edward McMillan-Scott claims China's Ministry of Public Security has drawn up a document detailing how people are to be assessed – and listing 43 categories to be kept out.

Any athlete, member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), journalist, sponsor or guest who has been on a peaceful demonstration in support of the independence of Tibet should be excluded, according to the alleged document.

Also allegedly due for checks are representatives of the "host city for the next Olympics", suggesting figures like London 2012 Games chairman Lord Coe and London Mayor Ken Livingstone will be screened for their political views on China.

The Beijing-based Public Security Ministry – responsible for policing 1.3 billion people – allegedly lists what type of people should be barred.

They include members of religious groups and terrorist organisations and sections of the media "who endanger the Olympic Games".

A category entitled "China's enemies" includes the families of people killed in anti-government protests, such as Tiananmen Square, "overseas hostile forces" and "individuals who disturb social stability".

And listed under "separatists" is the Dalai Lama's Government of Tibet in Exile and members of its affiliated organisations as well as "individuals who partake in parades, demonstrations and protest activities with the goal of breaking up nations".

Prince Charles, a long-time supporter of the Dalai Lama, has already said he will not attend the Olympics. But under the alleged criteria he would be on the blacklist.

Journalists attract particular scrutiny, with bans to be extended to "staff of any foreign media hostile to the People's Republic of China" and "staff of media who publish anti-communist articles and those who viciously slander the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government".

The secret checks will also look out for "individuals who form unlawful religious groups".

Mr McMillan-Scott, a long-standing critic of the Chinese regime, said last night that he had been assured the details were accurate and he believed them to be so.

They were passed to him by exiled members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, a philosophical and exercise regime that has been persecuted in China since 1999.

Mr McMillan-Scott said: "There is absolutely no question in my mind that it is a genuine document. The Falun Gong have an incredible network of communications and they penetrate every area of Chinese life.

"This document epitomises the way the Chinese state operates against any form of dissidence, any form of nonconformist religion and any form of opposition to the established order."

Erping Zhang, spokesman for Falun Gong in the USA, added: "The document came from inside the Chinese security bureau.

"Some people who are secret Falun Gong practitioners are in the security bureau. They passed us this information last year and we know it is genuine.

"We feel the Chinese authorities are politicising the Olympic Games. It should be a movement open to all individuals regardless of gender, race, religion or politics."

IOC Director of Communications Giselle Davies said: "We can't comment on this because we do not know the source.

"However, we have every reason to believe that the accreditation procedure will work as it has done in the past.

"We have had assurances from the organisers that the usual procedures will be followed, which would involve only the normal security checks and balances."

Last week, The Mail on Sunday told how British Olympic chiefs were forcing athletes to sign a contract promising not to speak out about China's appalling human rights record or face being banned from Beijing.

The controversial clause had been inserted into athletes' contracts for the first time and forbade them making any political comment about countries staging the games.

Just a day later, following an international outcry, the offending clause was dropped from the contract.

A British Olympic Association spokeswoman said last night she was unable to comment about the contents of the list but said: "At the Olympic Games it is standard procedure to carry out security checks on everyone attending, like competitors, IOC members and Association staff."

A London representative of the Chinese government refused to comment.

*dailymail.co.uk

New sharia row over Chancellor's plans for 'Islamic bonds'

2008-02-17T10:12:00.000Z

A new sharia law controversy erupted last night over Government plans to issue special "Islamic bonds" to pay for Gordon Brown's public-spending programme by raising money from the Middle East.

Britain is to become the first Western nation to issue bonds approved by Muslim clerics in line with sharia law, which bans conventional loans involving interest payments as "sinful".

The scheme would mark one of the most significant economic advances of sharia law in the non-Muslim world.

It will lead to the ownership of Government buildings and other assets currently belonging to British taxpayers being switched wholesale to wealthy Middle-Eastern businessmen and banks.

The Government sees sharia-compliant bonds as a way of tapping Middle-East money and building bridges with the Muslim community.

But critics say the scheme would waste money and could undermine Britain's financial and legal systems.

Senior Conservative MP Edward Leigh, chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, said: "I am concerned about the signal this would send – it could be the thin end of the wedge.

"British Common Law must be supreme and should apply to everyone."

A spokesman for the National Secular Society said: "There are lots of different ways to arrange financing.

"Constructing financial instruments to be sharia-compliant seems to me to involve a lot of unnecessary complication, which will serve only to make a lot of lawyers very rich."

The attempt to embrace Islamic financing would also appear to be at odds with Mr Brown's promise to promote Britishness and British values and institutions.

The Treasury has already faced heavy criticism for removing Britannia from 50p coins.

Other Western nations have been reluctant to issue Islamic bonds.

In the United States the bonds are banned partly as a result of claims that the money could be linked to terrorism.

The Treasury proposal follows the heated debate over the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams's claim that the spread of elements of sharia law in parts of Britain was "inevitable".

Downing Street distanced Gordon Brown from Dr Williams's comments.

A spokesman said: "The Prime Minister is very clear that British laws must be based on British values and that religious law, while respecting other cultures, should be subservient to British criminal and civil law."

However, The Mail on Sunday has established that Chancellor Alistair Darling is ready to give the go-ahead to sharia-compliant bonds – known as "sukuk", an early Arabic form of cheque.

Treasury officials have been working behind the scenes for months on the plan.

The deadline for responses to Mr Darling's consultation document setting out how the bonds will work expires on Thursday.

The Islamic bonds proposal was devised by Mr Brown's former Treasury adviser Ed Balls, now Schools Secretary and the Premier's most powerful Cabinet ally.

He claims it is a vital way of improving relations with Muslims in Britain as well as helping the UK to obtain vast sums from Middle-East banks in oil-rich nations such as Dubai and Qatar.

Sharia-compliant bonds have been issued by the governments of Pakistan and Malaysia and private banks but never by a Western government.

Treasury officials say the aim is to attract big investors as well as making it easier for British Muslims to invest in National Savings products at banks and post offices.

The Government has already backed Islamic car loans and mortgages.

Sharia-compliant bonds were designed to get round the ban on paying interest – "riba" in Islamic law.

The Koran says it is sinful to make money from money.

Unlike a conventional bond which is debt-based, a "sukuk" is asset-based. Instead of receiving interest, bond holders receive "rent" on the asset, thereby complying with sharia law.

The Treasury consultation document says Government assets such as "buildings or a piece of infrastructure" would be switched to a "special-purpose vehicle" set up to administer the bond.

This would be carried out by a contract known as an "ijara".

The asset would then be leased back by the Government, generating rental payments for the Islamic bond holders.

When the "sukuk" matured, the Government would guarantee to buy back the asset, allowing the bond-holders to get their redemption payments.

"Sukuk are akin to Islamic investment certificates," the document says.

"They are designed to be in compliance with sharia law, the divine law in Islam which is based on the Quran."

Islamic bonds are slightly more expensive than Western-style bonds, mainly because they require extensive legal and religious advice.

The Treasury initiative has been given added impetus by the worldwide credit squeeze, which is making it harder for all governments to raise money.

The Government says the bonds will also help London retain its position ahead of New York and Frankfurt as the world's leading financial centre.

Global Islamic finance assets, including private equity and bonds, are now said to be worth up to £150 billion. Sukuk volumes have soared from almost nothing to £35 billion in the past ten years.

Maurice Fitzpatrick, a senior tax partner at accountants Grant Thornton, said: "The Treasury wants to borrow money from as wide a range of sources as possible.

"Sharia bonds might well prove to be more expensive, but we would not know for sure until it was put into practice."

Special rules for Islamic finances have been challenged by Mahmoud El-Gamal, chairman of Islamic economics at Rice University, Houston.

"The main beneficiaries are lawyers, multi-national banks and self-styled religious scholars retained as consultants to certify the Islamicity of re-engineered financial products," he said.

Muslim Labour peer Lord Ahmed said: "This is a positive step for Muslims in Britain but the main reason for doing it is to attract money to the UK from Middle-East investors. Claims that it is connected to terrorist funds are absurd."

*dailymail

Governor Says 80 Killed in Afghan Attack

2008-02-17T10:05:00.000Z

A suicide bombing Sunday at an outdoor dog fighting competition killed 80 people and wounded dozens more, a governor said, in what appeared to be the deadliest terror attack in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.

More than 300 people had gathered to watch the event on the western edge of the southern city of Kandahar, including several Afghan militia leaders. Kandahar Gov. Asadullah Khalid said 80 had been killed. Abdullah Fahim, a Health Ministry spokesman, said about 90 people were wounded.

Witnesses reported gunfire after the blast from bodyguards. It was not immediately clear if the bullets killed anyone.

Kandahar the Taliban's former stronghold and Afghanistan's second largest city is one of the country's largest opium poppy producing regions. The province has been the scene of fierce battles between NATO forces primarily from Canada and the United States and Taliban fighters over the last two years.

Dog fighting competitions are common around Afghanistan and are considered as popular entertainment. They can attract hundreds of spectators who cram into a tight circle around the spectacle.

Wali Karzai, brother of President Hamid Karzai and the president of Kandahar's provincial council, said the target of the attack was Abdul Hakim Jan, the leader of a local militia whom Karzai said was killed in the attack.

Faizullah Qar Gar, a resident of Kandahar who was at the dog fight, said bodyguards of militant commanders opened fire on the crowd after the bombing.

The previous deadliest bomb attack came in November in the northern city of Baghlan, when a suicide bombing and subsequent gunfire from bodyguards killed about 70 people, including six parliamentarians and 58 students and teachers.

In eastern Kunar province, militants ambushed an Afghan army convoy, and several militants and a soldier were killed in the ensuing battle, the Defense Ministry said Sunday.

The clash occurred Saturday while the soldiers were on patrol in a mountainous area near a military camp in Kunar province's Kandagal area, the ministry said.

(AP)

Japan to send police, Foreign Ministry officials to Myanmar

2008-02-16T23:59:00.000Z

Abitsu/By vusi

keralanext.com : TOKYO — Japan will send National Police Agency and Foreign Ministry officials to Myanmar next week to discuss the state of investigations by Myanmar authorities into the fatal shooting of Japanese video journalist Kenji Nagai in September, government sources said Friday. The Myanmar junta has accepted a request from Japan that the two countries set up a framework for official discussions by experts to uncover the facts of the shooting incident.

Nagai was fatally shot by security forces while he was covering antigovernment demonstrations in Myanmar last September. While Japanese police investigators have found that Nagai was shot from close range, Myanmar maintains that the shooting was “accidental.”

Record number of 55,000 declare themselves bankrupt last year

2008-02-16T20:41:00.000Z

Record numbers declared themselves bankrupt last year in the latest sign of the credit crunch taking grip, government figures have revealed.

Nearly 55,000 in England and Wales took the drastic action after being unable to keep up with debt repayments.

The figure was up 44 per cent on 2005, and almost double the number who sought bankruptcy in 2004.

The Ministry of Justice said that 53,114 people asked to go bankrupt in 2007, up from 52,717 in 2006.

Wales saw the biggest jump, with a rise of 8 per cent, followed by the North-West, where bankruptcies rose by 6 per cent.

Experts believe the number petitioning the courts for bankruptcy will soar again this year.

Mark Sands, director of personal insolvency at KPMG, said: "Too many people have borrowings that they have no realistic hope of repaying."

Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Vince Cable said: "It is critical that we act now to find ways to help those in severe financial difficulties so an economic slowdown doesn't turn into a crash."

Another survey, by Friends Provident, revealed that twothirds of Britons will tighten their belts this year because of the credit crunch.

*dailymail

Soldiers' deaths 'down to lack of basic equipment'

2008-02-16T20:39:00.000Z

By James Macintyre

Two coroners criticised the Ministry of Defence yesterday after hearing that the deaths of three British soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq could have been prevented had they been better equipped.

eparate inquests were told of troops being denied potentially life-saving equipment – including night-vision goggles, weaponry and armoured vehicles. David Masters, the Wiltshire coroner, demanded a review of military spending after the deaths in Iraq last August of Lance Sergeant Chris Casey and Lance Corporal Kirk Redpath.

Meanwhile, the assistant coroner for Oxfordshire, Andrew Walker, accused the MoD of an "unforgivable" breach of soldiers' trust over the death of Captain James Philippson, who was killed in a firefight with the Taliban in Afghanistan on 11 June 2006.

The troops in Afghani-stan, from 7 Parachute Regiment Royal Horse Artillery, were "completely outgunned" in the battle and had repeatedly complained about their poor night-vision equipment and weapons, the hearing in Oxford was told. Even after the death of Capt Philippson, 29, replacement kit was not delivered. "[The soldiers] were defeated not by the terrorists, but by the lack of basic equipment," Mr Walker said.

Recording a narrative verdict and ruling that Capt Philippson was unlawfully killed, Mr Walker added: "To send soldiers into a combat zone without basic equipment is unforgivable, inexcusable and a breach of trust between soldiers and those who govern them."

Following the inquest, Capt Philippson's father, Anthony, of St Albans, Hertfordshire, said: "I do hold the MoD responsible for James's death but it is not just the MoD, it goes much deeper than that. The Treasury and the then chancellor, Gordon Brown, will be really to blame for what happened. The MoD was starved of cash by the chancellor. Soldiers should never be sent out under-equipped, the coroner made that clear."

The Defence minister, Bob Ainsworth, acknowledged there was a delay in the provision of night goggles and said: "This is not the first time delays in the supply chain have caused casualties in theatre. I cannot promise that it will be the last. We are operating in very difficult, very complicated circumstances. Getting supplies to the frontline in a difficult theatre will always be difficult."

The MoD said in a statement: "It was deeply regrettable that a failure to follow the correct staff procedures between a requesting unit and headquarters Helmand Task Force resulted in a 25-day delay in providing night-vision goggles. The department has accepted and implemented all of the board of inquiry's recommendations."

The second inquest, in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, heard that a request for Mastiffs – heavily armoured vehicles – made on the day the British soldiers in Iraq died, was denied because the vehicles were already in use on another mission.

Lance Sergeant Casey, 27, and Lance Corporal Redpath, 22, of 1st Battalion, Irish Guards, were hit by a home-made explosive while escorting a supply convoy between Kuwait and Basra.

Recording verdicts that both men were unlawfully killed, the coroner said: "It is my belief that it is imperative that our forces, whether they be in Iraq or Afghanistan, are given the best available equipment."

*independent

More U.S. troops seen in Iraq by summer than pre-surge

2008-02-16T20:37:00.001Z

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States will probably have more troops in Iraq this summer than it did before pouring in forces last year -- even after a planned drawdown, a U.S. general said on Friday.

There were some 132,000 U.S. troops in Iraq before President George W. Bush ordered a surge of about 30,000 more to curb rampant violence that threatened to plunge the country into all-out civil war.

By summer, U.S. commanders plan to have withdrawn more than 20,000 combat troops deployed as part of the surge. But officials indicated some support units sent around the same time would remain or be replaced.

"It's likely that... the (total) number will be a little bit larger than the 132,000 or so that was the number of personnel on the ground pre-surge," said Army Lt. Gen. Carter Ham, director of operations on the Pentagon's Joint Staff.

Sattler said he could not be more precise yet as commanders had still to complete their plans, but a Pentagon source said the number could be as high as 140,000.

At the same news briefing, Marine Corps Lt. Gen. John Sattler said Iraqi forces would continue to need substantial help from U.S. support troops in areas such as logistics.

"We will still be required for a period of time to provide those enablers," said Sattler, the Joint Staff's director of strategic plans and policy.

Defence Secretary Robert Gates, on a visit to Baghdad this week, backed the idea of a pause in drawdowns after the extra combat troops have pulled out.

That increased the prospect that troop levels could still be around 130,000 when Americans choose a successor to Bush in early November.

(Reporting by Andrew Gray)

Adventurer Steve Fossett Declared Dead

2008-02-16T20:33:00.000Z

Daredevil Steve Fossett, Whose Millions Helped Him Break Aviation Barriers, Declared Dead

Millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett, who risked his life seeking to set records in high-tech balloons, gliders and jets, was declared dead Friday, 5 months after he vanished while flying in an ordinary small plane.

The self-made business tycoon, who in 2002 became the first person to circle the world solo in a balloon, was last seen Sept. 3 after taking off in a single-engine plane from an airstrip near Yerington, Nev., heading toward Bishop, Calif. He was 63.

His wife, Peggy V. Fossett, had him declared legally dead in Cook County Circuit Court as a step toward resolving the legal status of his estate. Judge Jeffrey Malak heard testimony Friday from Peggy Fossett, a family friend and a search-and-rescue expert before deciding there was sufficient evidence to declare him dead.

While flight records brought him his greatest fame, Fossett, who was paunchy for most of his life, also climbed some of the world's best-known peaks, including the Matterhorn in Switzerland and Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. (Everest did elude him.) With top notch endurance and concentration, he swam the English Channel and completed the Boston Marathon, the Ironman Triathlon, the Iditarod dog sled race, and, as part of a team, the 24 Hours of Le Mans car race.

"Steve's lived his life to the full, and he hasn't wasted a minute of his life," Fossett's rival-turned-comrade, British billionaire Sir Richard Branson, had said as the search went on. "Everything he's done, he's taken a calculated risk with."

But Fossett was on a pleasure flight when he vanished and not looking for a dry lake bed to use as a surface on which to set the world land speed record, as was initially reported, according to his wife's petition.

Dozens of planes and helicopters spent more than a month searching the rugged western Nevada mountains before the effort was called off as winter approached.

The search area covered 20,000 square miles, and according to the Reno Gazette-Journal, about 15 to 20 private planes have vanished in the area since 1950. In 2005, wreckage was found in Kings Canyon National Park from a plane that went down during World War II.

*abcnews

Investigation underway into teen suicides

2008-02-16T20:31:00.000Z

An investigation is underway into the deaths of two teenagers from a community blighted by a spate of suicides.

Cousins Nathaniel Pritchard, 15, and Kelly Stephenson, 20, died within hours of each other in separate incidents in Bridgend County, South Wales.

A total of fourteen other youngsters are believed to have committed suicide in the area in just over a year.

Nathaniel is thought to have died on Friday after being taken to hospital on February 13, while Kelly was found dead in the early hours of Friday at a house in Folkestone, Kent, an area she was visiting.

Social networking sites have been carrying messages for the teenagers; one girl describing herself as Nathaniel's "big sis" wrote: "We all cant get over what u have done and dont understand why."

One neightbour said: "The first I knew about it was when I saw the ambulances on Wednesday. It's just so sad, and you've got to worry for your own kids. My 16-year-old daughter saw Nathaniel on the day it happened and he seemed fine."

A 43-year-old woman who has worked with both Nathaniel and Ms Stephenson's parents said: "We've seen them both grow up. You don't expect this to happen on your street. They are such a big, close family."

Police are refusing to confirm how the teenagers killed themselves but said neither death was being treated as suspicious.

They are also seeking to play down a link between the two teenage deaths and the other suicides within the area.

Bridgend AM's Carwyn Jones said: "It's important to understand that there is no link between the recent suicides in Bridgend, and each new death needs to be investigated individually.

"Obviously, I pass my sympathy to the families of Nathaniel Pritchard and Kelly Stephenson on their double loss."

Young people are being urged to seek help if they are facing any problems.

Childline can be contacted on 0800 1111, the local branch of Samaritans in Bridgend can be contacted on 01656 662333 and Papyrus, specialists in preventing young suicide, can be reached on 01282 432555.

*itn.co.uk

Beijing athletes allowed to blog

2008-02-16T20:29:00.000Z

The International Olympic Committee is for the first time permitting athletes to write blogs.
The IOC has set out guidelines for blogging at the Beijing Games to ensure copyright agreements are not infringed.

They include bans on posting any audio or visual material of action from the games themselves.

The move follows the increasing use of unofficial blogs by athletes in previous Games, including Athens in 2004 and the Turin Winter Games.

"It is required that, when accredited persons at the games post any Olympic content, it be confined solely to their own personal Olympic-related experience," said an IOC statement.

'Personal expression'

Posting confidential information about other people is also outlawed.

"The IOC considers blogging... as a legitimate form of personal expression and not a form of journalism," the Olympic authority said.

"Blogs should be dignified and in good taste."

The IOC guidelines follow concern that the games could become highly politicised, with China's human rights record, its treatment of dissidents and links with Sudan becoming major issues.

Some national Olympic committees in Europe found themselves at the centre of a row after being accused of trying to prevent athletes from speaking out on issues such as Darfur.

*bbc

Afghan winter toll tops 900

2008-02-16T20:26:00.000Z

The death toll from Afghanistan's harshest winter in recent living memory has hit 926, while more than 316,000 cattle have perished since the onset of winter in mid December.

Noor Padshah Kohistani, an official at the national disaster management commission, said on Saturday that the death toll could rise further.

"The figure for human losses stands at 926 today. It could go higher, for roads have been reopened and we will find unreported fatalities," Kohistani said.

Nearly half of the victims came from western areas and where more than 90 people have had their fingers or toes amputated due to frostbite.

A special hospital is dealing with frostbite victims in the western city of Herat.

Apart from human losses, the deaths of cattle are regarded as a huge loss for Afghanistan, an agricultural country that largely relies on foreign aid.

The United Nations World Food Programme last month appealed for extra food assistance for 2.55 million Afghans until the next harvest in June.

More snow is expected in coming days in several parts of the mountainous Central Asian country which may trigger floods and avalanches.

*aljazeera

Iranians urge Dutch to ban film

2008-02-16T20:23:00.000Z

The Iranian government has intervened to try to stop the screening of a film in the Netherlands about the Koran.

The Iranians say that the film, by the Dutch member of parliament Geert Wilders, is offensive.

The Iranian justice minister, Gholam Hussein Elham, wrote to his Dutch counterpart, Ernst Hirsch Ballin, calling for a ban.

Mr Hussein Elham said freedom of speech should not be used as a cover for attacking moral and religious values.

'Freedom of expression'

Mr Wilders says his film will show the Muslim holy book is an inspiration for murder.

But the Iranian justice minister says it is an unnecessary attack on what Muslims regard as the holiest of things.

He said the motivation behind the film was satanic and urged the Dutch government to stop its screening.

Mr Wilders has already been advised that he may have to leave the country for his own safety.

But the government has so far refused to intervene, saying the issue is one of freedom of expression.

In 2004, the Dutch film director, Theo van Gogh, was killed by a Muslim extremist in an Amsterdam street after bringing out the film Submission.

It dealt with the issue of abused Muslim women and included scenes of nearly naked women with Koranic texts engraved on their bodies.
*BBC

Darfur refugees' passage 'blocked'

2008-02-16T20:21:00.000Z

Armed men in eastern Chad have prevented the UN from moving refugees from Sudan's Darfur region away from a volatile border area and into camps, according to the UN refugee agency.

"Unidentified" armed men stopped refugees who were being moved away from the Birak border area for fear of attacks by Sudanese groups, UNHCR said on Friday.

"We are very disturbed that in eastern Chad on Tuesday our efforts to move traumatised, newly arrived refugees from West Darfur away from the volatile border to camps was blocked by the presence of unknown armed elements," the agency said in a statement.

"The situation is so serious that our representative in Chad is now at the border trying to find a solution to this problem, which is leaving the refugees extremely exposed and vulnerable."

Expulsion threat

Last week, Chad threatened to expel new refugees from Darfur, saying their presence was triggering insecurity, and it called on the international community to take them elsewhere.

Nouradine Delwa Kassire Coumakoye, the Chadian prime minister, said the influx of refugees into eastern Chad risked becoming a "bone of contention" with Sudan, and that if the international community did not relocate them, Chad would.

Some reports suggested the armed groups threatening the refugees included Sudanese "Toro-boro" rebels who back Idriss Deby, the Chadian president.

Chad and Sudan accuse each other of backing rebels to undermine each other's governments.

Jennifer Pagonis, a spokeswoman for UNHCR, said: "Our representative in Chad is now at the border trying to find a solution to this problem which is leaving the refugees extremely exposed and vulnerable.

"The area is highly insecure with roaming armed groups posing a real threat to the refugees and aid workers."

UNHCR said there were some 8,000 newly arrived refugees from Darfur in Birak and nearby Korok, underlining the urgency to deploy a European Union peacekeeping force (Eufor).

Eufor has a UN mandate to protect more than half a million Sudanese refugees and displaced Chadian civilians.

Eufor rejection

UN officials described desperate conditions for the mostly women and children arriving from Darfur. It said some had been raped, while children had become separated from their families.

Many of the new arrivals had already been displaced within Darfur and were exhausted.

They were keen to receive help as soon as they entered Chad even though aid agencies were trying to move them to two camps 50km from the border.

"It's extremely difficult to find water and food," Serge Male, head of UNHCR in Chad, said.

"The conditions are so difficult that at the end of the day I believe they will probably agree to be transferred further inland to a proper camp."

UNHCR and its partners are already caring for almost a quarter of a million Darfur refugees in 12 camps in eastern Chad.

Male said the two camps near Birak were overstretched. "The absorption capacity of these camps is limited to an absolute maximum of 6,000 to 8,000 places. If we have more than that it will be very difficult to settle them," he said.

*aljazeera

F.B.I. Received Unauthorized E-Mail Access

2008-02-16T20:20:00.000Z

WASHINGTON — A technical glitch gave the F.B.I. access to the e-mail messages from an entire computer network — perhaps hundreds of accounts or more — instead of simply the lone e-mail address that was approved by a secret intelligence court as part of a national security investigation, according to an internal report of the 2006 episode.

F.B.I. officials blamed an “apparent miscommunication” with the unnamed Internet provider, which mistakenly turned over all the e-mail from a small e-mail domain for which it served as host. The records were ultimately destroyed, officials said.

Bureau officials noticed a “surge” in the e-mail activity they were monitoring and realized that the provider had mistakenly set its filtering equipment to trap far more data than a judge had actually authorized.

The episode is an unusual example of what has become a regular if little-noticed occurrence, as American officials have expanded their technological tools: government officials, or the private companies they rely on for surveillance operations, sometimes foul up their instructions about what they can and cannot collect.

The problem has received no discussion as part of the fierce debate in Congress about whether to expand the government’s wiretapping authorities and give legal immunity to private telecommunications companies that have helped in those operations.

But an intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because surveillance operations are classified, said: “It’s inevitable that these things will happen. It’s not weekly, but it’s common.”

A report in 2006 by the Justice Department inspector general found more than 100 violations of federal wiretap law in the two prior years by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, many of them considered technical and inadvertent.

Bureau officials said they did not have updated public figures but were preparing them as part of a wider-ranging review by the inspector general into misuses of the bureau’s authority to use so-called national security letters in gathering phone records and financial documents in intelligence investigations.

In the warrantless wiretapping program approved by President Bush after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, technical errors led officials at the National Security Agency on some occasions to monitor communications entirely within the United States — in apparent violation of the program’s protocols — because communications problems made it difficult to tell initially whether the targets were in the country or not.

Past violations by the government have also included continuing a wiretap for days or weeks beyond what was authorized by a court, or seeking records beyond what were authorized. The 2006 case appears to be a particularly egregious example of what intelligence officials refer to as “overproduction” — in which a telecommunications provider gives the government more data than it was ordered to provide.

The problem of overproduction is particularly common, F.B.I. officials said. In testimony before Congress in March 2007 regarding abuses of national security letters, Valerie E. Caproni, the bureau’s general counsel, said that in one small sample, 10 out of 20 violations were a result of “third-party error,” in which a private company “provided the F.B.I. information we did not seek.”

The 2006 episode was disclosed as part of a new batch of internal documents that the F.B.I. turned over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group in San Francisco that advocates for greater digital privacy protections, as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the group has brought. The group provided the documents on the 2006 episode to The New York Times.

Marcia Hofmann, a lawyer for the privacy foundation, said the episode raised troubling questions about the technical and policy controls that the F.B.I. had in place to guard against civil liberties abuses.

“How do we know what the F.B.I. does with all these documents when a problem like this comes up?” Ms. Hofmann asked.

In the cyber era, the incident is the equivalent of law enforcement officials getting a subpoena to search a single apartment, but instead having the landlord give them the keys to every apartment in the building. In February 2006, an F.B.I. technical unit noticed “a surge in data being collected” as part of a national security investigation, according to an internal bureau report. An Internet provider was supposed to be providing access to the e-mail of a single target of that investigation, but the F.B.I. soon realized that the filtering controls used by the company “were improperly set and appeared to be collecting data on the entire e-mail domain” used by the individual, according to the report.

The bureau had first gotten authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor the e-mail of the individual target 10 months earlier, in April 2005, according to the internal F.B.I. document. But Michael Kortan, an F.B.I. spokesman, said in an interview that the problem with the unfiltered e-mail went on for just a few days before it was discovered and fixed. “It was unintentional on their part,” he said.

Mr. Kortan would not disclose the name of the Internet provider or the network domain because the national security investigation, which is classified, is continuing. The improperly collected e-mail was first segregated from the court-authorized data and later was destroyed through unspecified means. The individuals whose e-mail was collected apparently were never informed of the problem. Mr. Kortan said he could not say how much e-mail was mistakenly collected as a result of the error, but he said the volume “was enough to get our attention.” Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation who reviewed the documents, said it would most likely have taken hundreds or perhaps thousands of extra messages to produce the type of “surge” described in the F.B.I.’s internal reports.

Mr. Kortan said that once the problem was detected the foreign intelligence court was notified, along with the Intelligence Oversight Board, which receives reports of possible wiretapping violations.

“This was a technical glitch in an area of evolving tools and technology and fast-paced investigations,” Mr. Kortan said. “We moved quickly to resolve it and stop it. The system worked exactly the way it’s designed.”

*nytimes

When Strains on Military Families Turn Deadly

2008-02-15T19:21:00.001Z

A few months after Sgt. William Edwards and his wife, Sgt. Erin Edwards, returned to a Texas Army base from separate missions in Iraq, he assaulted her mercilessly. He struck her, choked her, dragged her over a fence and slammed her into the sidewalk.

As far as Erin Edwards was concerned, that would be the last time he beat her.

Unlike many military wives, she knew how to work the system to protect herself. She was an insider, even more so than her husband, since she served as an aide to a brigadier general at Fort Hood.

With the general’s help, she quickly arranged for a future transfer to a base in New York. She pressed charges against her husband and secured an order of protection. She sent her two children to stay with her mother. And she received assurance from her husband’s commanders that he would be barred from leaving the base unless accompanied by an officer.

Yet on the morning of July 22, 2004, William Edwards easily slipped off base, skipping his anger-management class, and drove to his wife’s house in the Texas town of Killeen. He waited for her to step outside and then, after a struggle, shot her point-blank in the head before turning the gun on himself.

During an investigation, Army officers told the local police that they did not realize Erin Edwards had been afraid of her husband. And they acknowledged that despite his restrictions, William Edwards had not been escorted off base “on every occasion,” according to a police report.

That admission troubled the detective handling the case.

“I believe that had he been confined to base and had that confinement been monitored,” said Detective Sharon L. Brank of the local police, “she would not be dead at his hands.”

The killing of Erin Edwards directly echoed an earlier murder of a military wife that drew far more attention. Almost 10 years ago, at Fort Campbell in Kentucky, a different Army sergeant defied a similar restriction to base, driving out the front gate on his way to a murder almost foretold.

That 1998 homicide, one of several featured in a “60 Minutes” exposé on domestic violence in the military, galvanized a public outcry, Congressional demands for action and the Pentagon’s pledge to do everything possible to prevent such violence from claiming more lives.

Yet just as the Defense Department undertook substantial changes, guided by a Congressionally chartered task force on domestic violence that decried a system more adept at protecting offenders than victims, the wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq began.

Pentagon officials say that wartime has not derailed their efforts to make substantive improvements in the way that the military tackles domestic violence.

They say they have, for example, offered more parenting and couples classes, provided additional victims advocates and afforded victims greater confidentiality in reporting abuses.

But interviews with members of the task force, as well as an examination of cases of fatal domestic violence and child abuse, indicate that wartime pressures on military families and on the military itself have complicated the Pentagon’s efforts.

“I don’t think there is any question about that,” said Peter C. McDonald, a retired district court judge in Kentucky and a member of the Pentagon’s now disbanded domestic violence task force. “The war could only make things much worse than even before, and here we had a system that was not too good to begin with.”

Connie Sponsler-Garcia, another task force member, who now works on domestic violence projects with the Pentagon, agreed.

“Whereas something was a high priority before, now it’s: ‘Oh, dear, we have a war. Well get back to you in a few months,’ ” she said.

The fatalities examined by The New York Times show a military system that tries and sometimes fails to balance the demands of fighting a war with those of eradicating domestic violence.

According to interviews with law enforcement officials and court documents, the military has sent to war service members who had been charged with and even convicted of domestic violence crimes.

Deploying such convicted service members to a war zone violates military regulations and, in some cases, federal law.

Take the case of Sgt. Jared Terrasas. The first time that he was deployed to Iraq, his prosecution for domestic violence was delayed. Then, after pleading guilty, he was pulled out of a 16-week batterers intervention program run by the Marine Corps and sent to Iraq again.

Several months after Sergeant Terrasas returned home, his 7-month-old son died of a brain injury, and the marine was charged with his murder.

Deployment to war, with its long separations, can put serious stress on military families. And studies have shown that recurrent deployments heighten the likelihood of combat trauma, which, in turn, increases the risk of domestic violence.

The more trauma out there, the more likely domestic violence is,” said Dr. Jacquelyn C. Campbell, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing who also was a member of the Pentagon task force.

The Times examined several cases in which mental health problems caused or exacerbated by war pushed already troubled families to a deadly breaking point.

In one instance, the Air Force repeatedly deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere Sgt. Jon Trevino, a medic with a history of psychological problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder.

Multiple deployments eroded Sergeant Trevino’s marriage and worsened his mental health problems until, in 2006, he killed his wife, Carol, and then himself.

The military declared his suicide “service related.”

A Call to Action

Within a six-week period in 2002, three Special Forces sergeants returned from Afghanistan and murdered their wives at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Two immediately turned their guns on themselves; the third hanged himself in a jail cell. A fourth soldier at the same Army base also killed his wife during those six weeks.

At the beginning of this wartime period, the cluster of murder-suicides set off alarms about the possible link between combat tours and domestic violence, a link supported by a study published that year in the journal Military Medicine. The killings also reinvigorated the concerns about military domestic violence that had led to the formation of the Defense Task Force on Domestic Violence two years earlier.

National attention to the subject was short-lived. But an examination by The Times found more than 150 cases of fatal domestic violence or child abuse in the United States involving service members and new veterans during the wartime period that began in October 2001 with the invasion of Afghanistan.

In more than a third of the cases, The Times determined that the offenders had deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq or to the regions in support of those missions. In another third, it determined that the offenders never deployed to war. And the deployment history of the final third could not be ascertained.

The military tracks only homicides that it prosecutes, and a majority of killings involving service members are handled by civilian authorities. To track these cases, The Times used records from the Army, Air Force and Navy — the Marines did not provide any information —and local news reports.

It is difficult to know how complete The Times’s findings are. What is clear, though, is that these homicides occurred at a time when the military was trying to improve its handling of domestic violence.

The Pentagon’s domestic violence task force, appointed in April 2000 and comprising 24 military and civilian experts, met regularly for three years to examine a system where, they found, soldiers rarely faced punishment or prosecution for battering their wives and where they often found shelter from civilian orders of protection.

When the moment arrived to explain their findings and recommendations to Congress, however, the timing could not have been poorer. Deborah D. Tucker and Lt. Gen. Garry L. Parks of the Marines, the leaders of the task force, presented their final report to the House Armed Services Committee on the very day that the Iraq war began, March 20, 2003. Ms. Tucker called it “one of the more surreal experiences of my life.”

“Periodically, members of the committee would call for a break and there would be some updated information provided on the status of our troops’ entry into Iraq and how far they’d gotten,” she said. “There was a map on an easel to the side.”

“I knew that while we were at war all other considerations would push back,” she added, “and I hoped that Operation Iraqi Freedom would be a quick matter on the order of Desert Storm.”

The task force was disbanded, and its request to reconvene after two years to evaluate progress was rejected. But the Defense Department embraced most of its 200 recommendations and gradually made many changes, from the increase in advocates to domestic violence training for commanding officers.

“The services have taken huge strides to implement the recommendations,” said David Lloyd, director of the Pentagon’s Family Advocacy Program, starting with sending out “a strong message across the department that domestic violence is not acceptable.”

Further, after the killings at Fort Bragg, Congress passed a law that made civilian orders of protection binding on military bases, and the Army gradually slowed the transition from war to home to help soldiers adjust.

Mr. Lloyd said he could not verify or comment on The Times’s findings on domestic killings. But, he said, domestic fatalities do not provide a complete picture of the incidence of domestic violence in the military.

“You have a pie, a nine-inch shell, and you have a slice of that pie, but there are other slices: verbal abuse and psychological control and assault that didn’t result in a homicide,” Mr. Lloyd said. “Even if the fatality slice has increased and it would look larger, the other numbers have gone down.”

According to the military, the number of general spouse and child abuse incidents reported to on-base family advocacy programs began declining in 1998, before the special effort to address the issue began, and continued to decline significantly through 2006. But whether those numbers reflect a genuine decline is a matter of debate, given that large numbers of service members have spent considerable time away on deployments and that the strengthening of sanctions for domestic violence has made some women more reluctant to report abuse.

The accuracy of the military’s domestic violence data has also been questioned, by advocates, the Government Accountability Office and military officials themselves.

Last fall, in a statement released during domestic violence awareness month, Mike Hoskins, a Pentagon official, said, “We shouldn’t necessarily take comfort in reduced rates of violence.” He said they probably reflected “good news” but urged caution in interpreting the numbers.

Dr. Campbell, the former task force member, said the task force had recommended periodic anonymous surveys to ascertain the full extent of domestic violence. She also said that she believed the “true incidence” of domestic violence had probably increased as a result of service members returning from Iraq with combat trauma, which can exacerbate family violence.

“It’s sort of like, on the one hand, they’re improving the system, and on the other hand, they’re stressing it,” she said.

Others agree, noting that wartime places a burden on the military as a whole, even on those who do not deploy to combat zones but absorb additional duties at home.

Christine Hansen, executive director of the Miles Foundation, which provides domestic violence assistance mostly to the wives of officers and senior enlisted men, said the organization’s caseload had tripled since the war in Iraq began.

And John P. Galligan, a retired Army colonel who served as a military judge at Fort Hood and now represents military clients in private practice, said he, too, had seen a “substantial” increase in military domestic violence cases in his area.

“Sometimes I just sit and scratch my head,” he said.

The separation of deployment, in and of itself, often causes marital strains.

“Even with a healthy marriage, there is a massive adjustment,” said Anita Gorecki, a lawyer and former Army captain who represents soldiers near Fort Bragg and is married to an officer currently in Iraq. “Add on to that combat stress and injuries and sometimes it can create the perfect storm.”

Some researchers draw a fairly firm connection between post-traumatic stress disorder and domestic violence. A 2006 study in The Journal of Marital and Family Therapy looked at veterans who sought marital counseling at a Veterans Affairs medical center in the Midwest between 1997 and 2003. Those given a diagnosis of PTSD were “significantly more likely to perpetrate violence toward their partners,” the study found, with more than 80 percent committing at least one act of violence in the previous year, and almost half at least one severe act.

Pamela Iles, a superior court judge who was permitted by the Marines to set up a privately financed domestic violence education program at Camp Pendleton in California, views much of the domestic abuse on the base as “collateral” from the war. She sees the domestic violence committed by marines, many of them young, as a reaction to jumping back and forth between the dangers of war and the trouble at home.

“One minute you are in Baghdad waiting for a bomb to go off and the next minute you are in Burger King,” Judge Iles said. “There is a lot of disorientation.”

A 9-Year-Old Witness

It was a little before dawn on Feb. 20, 2006, in a bedroom in Edwardsville, Ill. Carol Trevino and her 9-year-old son, sleeping deeply after watching “Wayne’s World,” were startled awake by a series of booms. “What was that?” Carol Trevino asked her son.

In seconds, Sgt. Jon Trevino, her estranged husband, barged through the door, according to a police report. Mrs. Trevino had just enough time to reach for her pepper spray before he shot her five times, the last time in the head. Then he shot himself.

Their son, wide-eyed, sat in bed watching his life explode, bullet by bullet.

Few details escaped the boy’s notice. His father used a silver gun and it “didn’t have a wheel on it, like the cowboys used,” he told the Edwardsville police. The boy could even name the precise time of his mother’s death: 4:32 a.m., as the glowing clock read.

Outside in Mr. Trevino’s car was the immediate motive for the murder-suicide: divorce papers, evidence of a marriage destabilized by multiple deployments to war zones and by Sergeant Trevino’s own increasing instability.

T. Robert Cook, his brother-in-law, said he believed Sergeant Trevino’s domestic violence was triggered by his combat trauma. “I’m 100 percent sure it was the war,” said Mr. Cook, who is raising the Trevinos’ son along with his wife, Cheryl Lee, who is Carol’s sister. “I don’t have any doubt their marital problems placed a burden on him, but I am quite sure that, but for the war, he would have taken a different approach. When you see people being shot every day, death is not a big thing.”

Sergeant Trevino, who had endured childhood sexual abuse and a difficult first marriage, suffered psychiatric problems long before he was dispatched to war zones to perform the highly stressful job of evacuating the wounded.

And the Air Force knew it.

Air Force mental health records show that Sergeant Trevino, who was 36, had been treated twice for mental health problems before the war: once in 1995 for serious depression as his first marriage crumbled, and then in 1999 for post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from the childhood abuse and marital problems with his new wife, Carol. He was counseled and treated with medication both times.

As a result of these problems, the Air Force insisted that he secure a medical waiver for a promotion that he sought to become an aeromedical evacuation technician. And military doctors certified that he could handle the job, despite research that shows that pre-existing post-traumatic stress disorder is exacerbated in a war zone.

Col. Steven Pflanz, a senior psychiatrist in the Air Force, who was not involved in the Trevino case, said the Air Force considered the stress disorder to be treatable and therefore was willing to deploy an airman with a history of it. But the decision is not taken lightly, he said.

“It’s not an exact science,” he said. “You try to make your best prediction. We spend a lot of time with our customers.”

In Sergeant Trevino’s case, the prediction was wrong. He had trouble shaking off the carnage that he experienced so viscerally while evacuating injured service members. After one deployment to Afghanistan and two to Iraq, his mental health and his marriage deteriorated. When he returned from his second tour in Iraq, Sergeant Trevino acknowledged in a health assessment that he had “serious problems” dealing with the people he loved and that he was feeling “down, helpless, panicky or anxious.”

The Air Force acted quickly. He was abruptly restricted from “special operational duty.” An Air Force doctor diagnosed “acute PTSD,” calling it a reaction to the war and marital problems. Sergeant Trevino began taking a cocktail of antidepressants and underwent therapy. According to doctors’ notes, he did not express thoughts of homicide or suicide. By the time Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in August 2005, he was considered well enough to be deployed domestically.

But his wife’s family, which had taken him under its wing, found the once affable, quick-witted sergeant to be profoundly altered. His temper flashed unpredictably, white-hot. He acted threatened and paranoid, his behavior so erratic that he frightened his son. One late night, he took his son on a rambling drive to nowhere, ranting to the boy about his mother.

At least one time, he struck his wife. A friend gave Carol Trevino the pepper spray that she reached for the night of her murder. But she never considered his abuse serious enough to report him to the authorities.

Four days before the murder-suicide, Sergeant Trevino bought a gun.

“This is just one of those things that unfortunately happens,” he wrote to his son in a suicide note. “I love you, and I know I let you down.”

Justice Delayed

The Pentagon task force had one overarching recommendation: that the military work hard to effect a “culture shift” to zero tolerance for domestic violence by holding offenders accountable and by punishing criminal behavior.

There was, members believed, a core credo that needed to be attacked frontally: “this notion that the good soldier either can’t be a wife beater or, if they are, that it’s a temporary aberration that shouldn’t interfere with them doing military service,” as Dr. Campbell put it.

The way the military handled several cases involving the deaths of babies and toddlers indicates that this kind of thinking has been difficult to demolish at a time of war.

In October 2003, four months after Jose Aguilar, 24, a Marine Corps sergeant, returned from the initial invasion of Iraq, his infant son, Damien, wound up in the intensive care unit of a local hospital with bleeding in his brain and eyes.

Sergeant Aguilar, a mechanic based at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, acknowledged to the local police that he had been rough with the 2-month-old baby, shaking Damien to stop him from squirming during a diaper change. He said that he had been abused himself as a child and that he did not mean to hurt the baby.

After the marine was charged with felony child abuse, he and his wife completed a parenting program.

The following summer, while the felony charge was pending, Sergeant Aguilar was deployed once more to Iraq, this time for nine months. His court case was delayed, which did not surprise local prosecutors.

Michael Maultsby, the assistant district attorney in Onslow County, N.C., who prosecuted Sergeant Aguilar, said that such frustrating delays in justice sometimes occur in his county, home to Camp Lejeune.

“It depends on the needs of the unit,” Mr. Maultsby said. “We can’t overrule them.”

In April 2006, a year after Sergeant Aguilar returned from Iraq but before his felony case was resolved, Damien, who by then was 2, died of a brain injury. His father claimed that the boy had been injured by a fall in the bathtub. The medical examiner disputed that explanation. The marine was arrested, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and felony child abuse, and was sentenced last fall to 28 to 35 years in prison.

Marine officials would not comment on individual cases. Elaine Woodhouse, a Marine Corps social services program specialist, said that “the family advocacy program does not recommend or advise deployment of a marine when domestic or felony child abuse charges are pending.” Still, that decision, she said, is left to the discretion of the commanders.

A conviction for domestic violence, unlike pending charges, almost always renders a service member ineligible to go to war, but that restriction has not always been considered binding, as is clear in the case of Sergeant Terrasas, who was stationed at Camp Pendleton.

One night in late December 2002, Sergeant Terrasas, drunk and angry over a telephone conversation about the looming war in Iraq, vented his anger by punching his wife, Lucia, in the face.

“He seemed to just lose it,” Mrs. Terrasas told the police in Oceanside, Calif., who arrested him on misdemeanor charges.

But Sergeant Terrasas was deployed to Iraq before his case was heard. It was not until his return seven months later that he pleaded guilty, was placed on probation and was ordered to complete a 16-week batterers intervention program run by the Marine Corps.

Sergeant Terrasas attended a few classes. But the Marine Corps, facing a runaway insurgency in Iraq, pulled him out of the batterers program and shipped him off to war for a second time in early 2004.

This deployment was illegal. A 1996 law bans offenders who are convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors from carrying firearms, with no special exception for military personnel. The ban is referred to as the Lautenberg amendment after its sponsor, Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey.

Army and Marine regulations, formulated in response to the weapons ban, explicitly prohibit deployments for missions that require firearms, and extend the policy to felony domestic violence offenders, too. The Marine Corps would not comment on Sergeant Terrasas’s deployment, citing confidentiality rules.

When Sergeant Terrasas returned from war, he completed his batterers program, said his lawyer, Philip De Massa. But his anger, tested by two tours in Iraq, still surfaced. In September 2005, when the police responded to a domestic argument, he broke down crying and told one officer that he suffered from “postwar traumatic syndrome.” There is no record that he sought or received mental health help.

Nearly two weeks later, the Terrasases’ 7-month-old son, Alexander, died from a powerful blow to the head. Mr. Terrasas was charged with murder. Last August, after a deal with prosecutors, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for felony child endangerment.

He never admitted to abusing his child.

Broken Promises

Sgt. Erin Edwards, emboldened by a year in Iraq, returned to Texas with the courage to end her troubled marriage.

“Being apart for such a long period of time enabled her to realize she could survive without him,” said Sgt. Jami Howell, 28, who was her best friend.

When Erin Edwards told her husband that she wanted a divorce after four years of marriage, he responded as she had long feared.

On June 19, 2004, he followed her to their baby sitter’s house to hand her a written proposal for a custody arrangement. When she did not immediately respond, he beat her so badly that she wound up in the emergency room.

Even before the assault, William Edwards’s troubles had so badly affected his performance at work that his commanding officer, Capt. Brian Novoselich, took the time to meet with him weekly to check on his welfare. After the assault, it was the captain who confined him to the base.

But William Edwards repeatedly left unescorted and often stayed with his brother, who lived across the street from Erin Edwards in Killeen. On several occasions, she alerted the police and his superiors that he was lurking.

On July 21, 2004, Erin Edwards went to court to make the temporary protection order permanent. At the hearing, William Edwards told the judge that he had enrolled in alcohol and domestic violence classes after the June assault, according to a transcript.

“I had hit rock bottom when I touched my wife, man,” he said in court. “That was the worst day ever in my life. I had always told my wife that I would never touch her, ever, physically.”

William Edwards also acknowledged that when the police showed up that day, he begged his wife not to press charges, saying: “Don’t do this to my career. Don’t do this.”

Erin Edwards spoke of the effect on their children, who witnessed the assault. “Since the incident happened, all my son talks about is how his father hurt his mother, and that ‘Daddy is going to kill Mommy,’” she said.

She also stated, and her husband learned for the first time, that she was transferring and moving with the children. William Edwards was “visibly upset” by this, according to Army documents turned over to the police.

The following morning, after reporting to an exercise session with other soldiers, William Edwards left the base alone one final time. After the murder-suicide, local police officers securing the scene noted that both bodies were dressed in military camouflage clothing with nameplates that said Edwards. Both were 24.

At Erin Edwards’s funeral, her boss, Brig. Gen. Charles Benjamin Allen, who was killed in a helicopter crash in late 2004, eulogized the soldier with a cracking voice. More than three years later, her relatives note that not even he, with his high rank, was able to ensure that the military was doing more than taking a troubled soldier “at his word,” as Mary Lou Taylor, Erin’s aunt, said.

“He couldn’t or failed to help her be safe,” Ms. Taylor said.

William Edwards’s former commanding officer, Major Novoselich, said in a recent interview that he was “shocked by the end result.” Now a professor at West Point, he said he had assumed that William Edwards’s immediate supervisors were monitoring him.

Near Fort Hood, Detective Brank of the Killeen police said soldiers continued to defy restrictions to the base.

“I am surprised,” she said. “Fort Hood is not enforcing these orders.”

The Army examined Erin Edwards’s death as part of a fatality review program recommended by the Pentagon task force “to ensure no victim dies in vain.”

A one-paragraph summary of the review seemed to discount the findings of the civilian police investigation. The summary noted that Erin Edwards had refused the assistance of the base’s family advocacy program, while William Edwards had enrolled in it. It added that William Edwards had “appeared to comply” with his restrictions. Until the day he “eluded his military escort” and killed his wife.

*nytimes.com