Fighting continues between loyal East Timorese government troops and rebel troops loyal to Maj. Alfredo Reinado, who is said to have been supported by secret contracts, arms, and training supplied by covert Australian private military contractors with a wink and a nod from the Bush and John Howard administrations. Bush and Howard met in Washington just prior to East Timor's military rebellion. Australian sources report that the scenario is the same as employed by Autralian neo-colonialists in the civil war-plagued Solomon Islands: secretly support a rebellion, force the government to call on Australian military assistance, and then declare the country a "failed state" and permanently establish a military and political presence in the country.

East Timor's government led by Xanana Gusmao, wise to this Australian ploy, a first denied entry to Australian troops, instead calling on help from Malaysia (as a counter to Indonesia) and Portugal (one of the few nations East Timor can trust). However, after the denial of Australian troop entry, Gusmao witnessed a drastic upturn in the rebellion by ex-East Timorese military rebels that directly threatened the entire East Timor government with a coup. The East Timor executive was then forces to accept Australian troops, which are now pouring into the country ahead of troops from Malaysia, Portugal, and New Zealand.

Quietly looking on is Indonesia, which hopes that a new government in East Timor beholden to the multinational oil industry will give former President Suharto's family's oil firms, trading firms that deal with the state-owned Pertamina, lucrative deals for East Timor's off-shore oil blocks. Meanwhile, big oil has now re-introduced war to East Timor, a nation that lost 100,000 of its people in a brutal war with Indonesia, supported by the past Republican administrations of Ford, Reagan, and Bush I.

The federal jury in Siraj's five-week trial heard hours of secretly recorded conversations between him and an Egyptian nuclear engineer who became a paid informant for the New York City Police Department, the Justice Department said in a statement.

In the calls, Siraj declared his hatred for the United States and openly discussed his desire to place explosives on various bridges and in subway stations in New York, including his plan to bomb the 34th Street station, the department said.

Siraj and Elshafay scoped out the subway station on August 21, 2004, and later drew diagrams as part of their plot, it said. They were arrested six days later, but they carried no explosive material.

"Siraj conspired to plant a bomb in one of the most active public transportation hubs in America," prosecutor Roslynn Mauskopf said in a statement.

"Thanks to the diligent work of law enforcement, the plot never developed beyond the planning stage, and the public was never at risk," she said.

Republicans and Democrats hold huge political conventions every four years to officially name their presidential candidates.

President George W. Bush was nominated as the Republican candidate at the 2004 gathering.

The Australian reported on May 21 that Howard was discussing nuclear issues during a visit to Canada, which has substantial uranium reserves.

Downer told ABC Television that Australia, with 30 to 40 percent of the world's known uranium reserves, needed a dispassionate discussion of nuclear issues, saying, "There's the question of whether Australia itself would eventually, some time, no doubt in the far distant future, build nuclear power stations.

There's a question of whether Australia would ever enrich uranium -- in other words, we go up the processing chain, rather than just dig it out. There needs to be at least a debate and some consideration about that."

Howard did not comment on whether Australia might export the enriched uranium if it went down the enrichment path.

Sen. Bob Brown said the Howard government's position conflicted with its strong stand against terrorism, remarking, "We are now in an age of handbag-sized nuclear weapons and the spread of technology means the inevitable increased danger of terrorists ... getting hold of nuclear technology."

After his meeting with Zielona Gora mayor Bozena Ronowicz, the Romanian ambassador said his country was interested in broader cooperation with Poland.

Trade volume between Romania and Poland stood at over 1 billion euro (1.28 billion U.S. dollars) last year, according to Gabriel Constantin Bartas.

He hoped that Polish and Romanian winemaking firms would establish cooperation.

The ambassador stressed that Romania should join the EU on Jan.1, 2007 as scheduled.

In the Netherlands, one of Europe's most integrated refugees and a critic of radical Islam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, resigned her seat in parliament in the wake of criticism that she faked details on her asylum application to the Netherlands in 1992. And France's lower house of parliament last week passed a strict new immigration law, now awaiting Senate approval.

Indeed, recent rumblings from the top echelons of governments across Europe suggest that the continent is rethinking its once-vaunted status as a haven for refugees as it becomes more suspicious that many immigrants are coming to exploit its social benefits and democratic principles.

"The trend today more and more in Europe is to try to control immigration flow," says Philippe De Bruycker, founder of the Odysseus Network, an academic consortium on immigration and asylum in Europe. "At the same time we still say we want to respect the right of asylum and the possibility of applying for asylum. But of course along the way we create obstacles for asylum seekers," he acknowledges.

A day after Ms. Prokop made her controversial statement on May 15, Ms. Hirsi Ali - a Somalian immigrant elected to parliament in 2003 - was informed by her own political party that her Dutch citizenship was in question. Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk, a former prison warden dubbed "Iron Rita" who has long promised a tough stance on immigration, said "the preliminary assumption must be that - in line with case law of the Dutch Supreme Court - [Hirsi Ali] is considered not to have obtained Dutch nationality."

At issue were inconsistencies in Hirsi Ali's application for asylum in 1992 - giving a false name and age, and saying she was fleeing from Somalia's civil war, not a forced marriage. Though she had publically admitted to the falsities in 2002, a recent TV documentary heightened public scrutiny of the controversial parliamentarian, who has been under 24-hour protection from death threats since the murder of Theo Van Gogh, the director of a film she wrote. Hirsi Ali's case, heatedly debated across Europe in the days since Ms. Verdonk's announcement, was seen as particularly ironic. But it also highlights the dramatic change in Europe since the turn of this century.

In the years following the World War II, a chagrined US and Europe vowed to follow the Geneva Conventions and create safe havens for refugees. Yet such lofty ideals were hard to uphold after massive influxes of workers in the 1960s and early 1970s were halted during an economic downturn.

Those immigrant populations - often Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East - swelled with family reunification, yet often remained economically and socially distinct from the societies they had adopted. The image of the immigrant began to change, and distinctions between those who came for work and those who came for safety began to blur.

Now, says Jean-Pierre Cassarino, a researcher at the European-Mediterranean Consortium for Applied Research on International Migration in Florence, Italy, "asylum seekers are viewed as potential cheaters."

Today, in once-homogenous Europe, tensions between immigrants and native Europeans appear to be increasing. The perception that an ever increasing number of newcomers - who neither speak the language of their adopted country nor accept its cultural mores - are changing the culture has increased support for ideas once only advanced by far-right political parties.

"France, Austria, and the Netherlands all have had very significant electoral success of the far-right parties," says Michael Collyer, a research fellow in European migration policy at the University of Sussex.

Collier points to the success in France - also this past week - of a strict new immigration law proposed by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. Mr. Sarkozy's proposal would institutionalize "selective" immigration, giving an advantage to privileged immigrants of better economic and education status who are more "integratable."

It would also change the rights of family reunification for workers already in the country; speed up the expulsion of undocumented immigrants who are discovered or whose applications for asylum are rejected; lengthen the amount of time it takes to apply for permanent residency status for married couples; and toughen visa requirements. Most controversial, Sarkozy announced deportations for undocumented immigrant school children.

"We speak of the need to fight immigration but we don't have a clear position on whether we need immigrants," says Mr. De Bruycker, noting the precipitous dip in population growth in
European Union countries in the last half century. He adds that a series of recent incidents have affected the image of immigrants in the European mind. The murder of a Jewish man - Ilan Halimi - on the outskirts of Paris earlier this spring, for example, by a band of immigrant youths. Or the murder of a Malian woman and a Flemish child in Antwerp last week by the son of a founder of Belgium's most far-right party.

"In Europe, we are still unable to accept that we are a continent of immigration," says De Bruycker.

In a first TV appearance on May 15, Castro brandished a copy of the magazine to tell the Cubans the story about his personal wealth is a "repugnant slander" by a capitalist publication.

"If they can prove that I have a bank account abroad, with 900 million dollars, with 1 million dollars, 500,000 dollars, 100,000 dollars or 1 dollar in it, I will resign," he said.

Castro said his net worth is zero and that he earns only 900 Cuban pesos (40 dollars) a month, stressing that he would step down if the U.S. publication could prove its assertion.

This is the third convoy of trucks which pulled out weapons and property of Russian troops from bases in Georgia in 2006. The two previous ones pulled out military property from the Akhalkalaki base. Another six train will depart from Batumi over the next few months.

Russia and Georgia signed an agreement in late March that set out the deadline and details of the pullout of Russian military bases from Georgia.

Under the accord, the two sides agreed to complete the phased withdrawal of the Russian bases and other military installations in Georgia by the end of 2008.

Russia inherited four military bases in Georgia from the former Soviet Union and has withdrawn two of them.

Speaking to A-Channel in London, Ont., Harper said "unfortunately the press gallery has taken the view they are going to be the opposition to the government."

"They don't ask questions at my press conferences now. We'll just take the message out on the road. There's lots of media who do want to ask questions and hear what the government is doing."

Since becoming prime minister in January, Harper has had a testy relationship with the national media in Ottawa. His staff has tried to manage news conferences by saying they will decide which reporters get to ask questions.

The press gallery has refused to play by those rules. "We can't accept that the Prime Minister's Office would decide who gets to ask questions," Yves Malo, a TVA reporter and president of the press gallery, told CP on Tuesday. "Does that mean that when there's a crisis they'll only call upon journalists they expect softball questions from?"

On Tuesday about two dozen Ottawa reporters walked out on a Harper event when he refused to take their questions.

That led Harper to say that from now on he will speak only to local media.

The CBC says it will continue to cover the prime minister. "If the prime minister chooses to take questions we will be there to ask them," said Ottawa managing editor George Hoff. "We will have a journalist there to ask questions," he said.

Harper's supporters said Wednesday they believed the conflict is being blown out of proportion.

"I think this will get sorted out over time," Conservative Geoff Norquay said during an interview on Politics on CBC Newsworld.

"I think both sides have an interest in sorting it out and I think they will over time. The reality is that every new government wants to keep a tight lid on its messages and this one in particular because it had the previous example of Mr. Martin who had so many priorities that they all turned to mush in the minds of the Canadian people. And that's why this government is tightly focused on its messages," he said.