In his speech at the University of Lille, Villepin said the great democratic East the US government promised has not emerged from the war, and on the contrary, it has increased fear, divisions, and hostility toward the West.

Due to the invasion of Iraq, which France opposed, the international mechanisms have weakened and solutions to serious problems, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, have become complicated, he said.

The prime minister, who opposed the invasion at the UN Security Council in 2003, considers Iraq has become a laboratory for international terrorism.

After analyzing the convulsive situation, the head of government called on the European Union to make its own foreign policy because, he said, the French do not want to give up their social ambitions or see Europe yield to pressures of other powers.

"If Iran achieves the ability to produce nuclear weapons, as we know it is seeking to do, we will enter a new era of instability unlike any the world has ever seen," Olmert told several thousand members of the United Jewish Communities, an umbrella group for dozens of organizations.

Israel wants peace, he said, but "no longer can the international community afford to hesitate, contemplate or waver in its dealings with this defiant state."

Olmert's appearance came a day after he received reassurances from the Bush administration in Washington that it is not backing down from its view that Iran and its nuclear program are a world threat.

Israel is worried that political fallout from last week's Republican election defeat and rising calls for U.S. engagement with Iran may soften President Bush's resolve against a country whose leader has said the Jewish state should be wiped from the map.

With Olmert at his side following a White House meeting Monday, Bush told reporters that a nuclear-armed Iran not only would threaten Israel but loom as an "incredibly destabilizing" threat to the region and the world.

In his remarks Tuesday, Olmert called Bush "a great friend ... of Israel" but said America must have the support of the international community to "defuse this mortal threat."

It was Olmert's first appearance before the group since an inconclusive war with Hezbollah militants in Lebanon. The audience was silent when he said, "despite all that has been said and written, we stood up to the challenge."

But he was loudly applauded at other points, including when he said Israel will not tolerate "those who challenge Israel's right to exist."

Olmert thanked Jewish organizations for raising hundreds of millions of dollars to assist reconstruction efforts, and said tourism bolstered the nation's spirit in a time of war.

"Our fates are intertwined," he said. "We may be separated by a vast ocean, but our hearts beat together."

The five veto-wielding Security Council members - the U.S., Russia, China, Britain and France - and Germany have now held six rounds of closed-door talks here with both camps refusing to budge.

"We'll report back again that after the sixth meeting, we are still basically where we have been," Bolton said. Asked whether there had been any progress since the talks began, he said, "Well, we didn't make any progress today - let's leave it at that."

Churkin said senior foreign ministry officials from the six countries failed to bridge the differences during a telephone discussion Tuesday and at Wednesday's meeting of UN ambassadors there was "a rather intense exchange of opinion." He said there was "movement," but he couldn't tell whether it represented progress.

The Europeans circulated a draft resolution late last month that would order all countries to ban the supply of materials and technology that could contribute to Iran's nuclear and missile programs and impose a travel ban and asset freeze on companies, individuals and organizations involved in those programs. It would exempt the nuclear power plant now being built by the Russians at Bushehr, Iran, but not the nuclear fuel needed for the reactor.

Russia proposed major changes that would limit sanctions solely to measures that would keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles and eliminate any travel ban, asset freeze, or mention of Bushehr. The United States also proposed amendments that would strengthen the measures proposed by Britain and France.

Both Russia and China, which have major commercial ties with Iran, have continued to publicly push for dialogue instead of UN punishment, despite the collapse last month of a European Union attempt to entice Iran into talks.

"Our position is very clear," Churkin said. "We think at this point ... we should focus our efforts on non-proliferation risks which emanate from the Iranian activity in the nuclear area. So this is the stage of the game."

He referred to talks in Moscow last week between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Iran's top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani. Both called for a renewal of international talks with Iran, stressing that the dispute should be resolved through negotiations rather than sanctions. Lavrov said Moscow could help bridge the differences with the U.S. and Europeans.

In the most optimistic assessment of that meeting, Churkin said, "after the discussions which we had with Mr. Larijani ... we believe that there is a chance for a negotiated outcome."

"So we believe that if and when the resolution is adopted, it should leave doors open for further negotiations with the Iranians," he said.

The six countries offered Iran a package of economic incentives and political rewards in June if it agreed to consider a long-term moratorium on enrichment and commit to a freeze on uranium enrichment before talks on its nuclear program.

But Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly and defiantly said his country would continue enrichment, and is not intimidated by the possibility of sanctions.

Bolton said the Russian explanations about their text "shows that there are wide gaps in the items that would be covered under the two alternative sanctions proposals."

He said "the very targeted sanctions" in the European draft "are entirely appropriate and we don't want to strip away many of the goods and technology that would be covered."

Bolton and Churkin, when asked whether negotiations should now move up to foreign ministers, said the UN ambassadors would keep talking. But Bolton said other discussions would talk place, including on the sidelines of the upcoming Asia-Pacific summit in Hanoi, Vietnam which will be attended by the U.S., Russian and Chinese leaders.

In a Fox News interview earlier Wednesday, Bolton expressed hope that U.S. President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin would talk about sanctions against Iran because "we've been having a lot of difficulty with Russia in particular."

Russia must accept that "the fight against nuclear proliferation is more important than commercial contracts," he said.

U.S. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley played down differences between Washington and Moscow, saying negotiations on UN resolutions are "a little bit like sausage making."

"It's not pretty and a lot of it spills out to the public, but I think the international community has held together on this issue and I think it will again," he said.

As the current international situation shows, terrorism emerges where contradiction aggravate, where there is a change of social relations or a change of regime, where there is political, economic or social instability, where there is moral decadence, where cynicism and nihilism triumph, where vice is legalized and where crime spreads.

It is globalization what creates the conditions for the emergence of these extremely dangerous phenomena. It is in this context that the new world geo-strategic map is being designed, that the resources of the planet are being re-distributed, that borders are disappearing, that international law is being torn into pieces, that cultural identities are being erased, that spiritual life becomes impoverished...

The analysis of the essence of the globalization process, the military and political doctrines of the United States and other countries, shows that terrorism contributes to a world dominance and the submissiveness of states to a global oligarchy. This means that terrorism is not something independent of world politics but simply an instrument, a means to install a unipolar world with a sole world headquarters, a pretext to erase national borders and to establish the rule of a new world elite. It is precisely this elite that constitutes the key element of world terrorism, its ideologist and its "godfather". The main target of the world elite is the historical, cultural, traditional and natural reality; the existing system of relations among states; the world national and state order of human civilization and national identity.

Today's international terrorism is a phenomenon that combines the use of terror by state and non-state political structures as a means to attain their political objectives through people's intimidation, psychological and social destabilization, the elimination of resistance inside power organizations and the creation of appropriate conditions for the manipulation of the countries' policies and the behavior of people.

Terrorism is the weapon used in a new type of war. At the same time, international terrorism, in complicity with the media, becomes the manager of global processes. It is precisely the symbiosis between media and terror, which allows modifying international politics and the exiting reality.

In this context, if we analyze what happened on September 11, 2001, in the United States, we can arrive at the following conclusions: 1. The organizers of those attacks were the political and business circles interested in destabilizing the world order and who had the means necessary to finance the operation. The political conception of this action matured there where tensions emerged in the administration of financial and other types of resources. We have to look for the reasons of the attacks in the coincidence of interests of the big capital at global and transnational levels, in the circles that were not satisfied with the rhythm of the globalization process or its direction.

Unlike traditional wars, whose conception is determined by generals and politicians, the oligarchs and politicians submitted to the former were the ones who did it this time.

2. Only secret services and their current chiefs - or those retired but still having influence inside the state organizations - have the ability to plan, organize and conduct an operation of such magnitude. Generally, secret services create, finance and control extremist organizations. Without the support of secret services, these organizations cannot exist - let alone carry out operations of such magnitude inside countries so well protected. Planning and carrying out an operation on this scale is extremely complex.

3. Osama bin Laden and "Al Qaeda" cannot be the organizers nor the performers of the September 11 attacks. They do not have the necessary organization, resources or leaders. Thus, a team of professionals had to be created and the Arab kamikazes are just extras to mask the operation.

The September 11 operation modified the course of events in the world in the direction chosen by transnational mafias and international oligarchs; that is, those who hope to control the planet's natural resources, the world information network and the financial flows. This operation also favored the US economic and political elite that also seeks world dominance.

The use of the term "international terrorism" has the following goals:
Hiding the real objectives of the forces deployed all over the world in the struggle for dominance and control;

Turning the people's demands to a struggle of undefined goals against an invisible enemy;

Destroying basic international norms and changing concepts such as: aggression, state terror, dictatorship or movement of national liberation;
Depriving peoples of their legitimate right to fight against aggressions and to reject the work of foreign intelligence services;

Establishing the principle of renunciation to national interests, transforming objectives in the military field by giving priority to the war on terror, violating the logic of military alliances to the detriment of a joint defense and to favor the anti-terrorist coalition;

Solving economic problems through a tough military rule using the war on terror as a pretext. In order to fight in an efficient way against international terrorism it is necessary to take the following steps:

To confirm before the UN General Assembly the principles of the UN Charter and international law as principles that all states are obliged to respect;

To create a geo-strategic organization (perhaps inspired in the Cooperation Organization of Shanghai comprised of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) with a set of values different to that of the Atlantists; to design a strategy of development of states, a system of international security, another financial and economic model (which would mean that the world would again rest on two pillars);

To associate (under the United Nations) the scientific elites in the design and promotion of the philosophical concepts of the Human Being of the 21st Century.

To organize the interaction of all religious denominations in the world, on behalf of the stability of humanity's development, security and mutual support.

General Leonid Ivashov is the vice-president of the Academy on geopolitical affairs. He was the chief of the department for General affairs in the Soviet Union's ministry of Defense, secretary of the Council of defense ministers of the Community of independant states (CIS), chief of the Military cooperation department at the Russian federation's Ministry of defense and Joint chief of staff of the Russian armies.

The research came amid renewed calls for the Government to consider extending the time police can hold terror suspects without charge. The current limit of 28 days was set as a compromise after MPs threw out government plans to permit suspects to be held for up to 90 days.

Tomorrow's Queen's Speech is expected to include controv-ersial anti-terror legislation, while Gordon Brown and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair have called for an extension of the time suspects can be held in terror cases.

Labour MPs rebelled in 95 out of 343 votes, almost equalling the 96 rebellions suffered by the Government during the whole of Mr Blair's first term. MPs rebelled more often even than during the 1992-93 session, when John Major struggled to push the Maastricht treaty through Parliament.

Philip Cowley, a researcher, found that 114 Labour MPs had voted against their whips since the general election. He said no other post-war government with a majority of more than 60 in the Commons had suffered as many defeats in an entire parliament, let alone in its first session.

The most frequent rebel was John McDonnell, the chairman of the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs and a declared candidate to stand as a left-wing successor to Mr Blair. Mr McDonnell warned there was widespread unease over civil liberties across all parties and predicted fresh unrest if ministers failed to make the case for new anti-terror laws. He said: "If the Government is going to focus on this in the Queen's Speech they will have to come up with some very strong arguments and evidence."

Other senior Labour backbenchers also warned that the Government had to give strong evidence to justify extending the length of time police can hold terror suspects.

David Winnick, the Labour MP who proposed the 28-day compromise, told the BBC that he did not believe there was "any justification" for increasing it.

John Denham, chairman of the Commons Home Affairs Committee, called for an independent review of any case for an extension. He said: "If the Government is now convinced by the evidence they should subject it to the sort of independent scrutiny that the select committee called for. I think that if that happened, Parliament would be inclined to support a change."

Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar, was arrested in 2001 while studying in the United States. He has been labeled an "enemy combatant," a designation that, under a law signed last month, strips foreigners of the right to challenge their detention in federal courts.

That law is being used to argue the Guantanamo Bay cases, but Al-Marri represents the first detainee inside the United States to come under the new law. Aliens normally have the right to contest their imprisonment, such as when they are arrested on immigration violations or for other crimes.

"It's pretty stunning that any alien living in the United States can be denied this right," said Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney for Al-Marri. "It means any non-citizen, and there are millions of them, can be whisked off at night and be put in detention."

The new law says that enemy combatants will be tried before military commissions, not a civilian judge or jury, and establishes different rules of evidence in the cases. It also prohibits detainees from challenging their detention in civilian court.

In a separate court filing in Washington on Monday, the Justice Department defended that law as constitutional and necessary.

Government attorneys said foreign fighters arrested as part of an overseas military action have no constitutional rights and are being afforded more legal rights than ever.

In its short filing in the Al-Marri case, however, the Justice Department doesn't mention that Al-Marri is being held at a military prison in South Carolina - a fact that his attorneys say affords him the same rights as anyone else being held in the United States.

The Justice Department noted only that the new law applies to all enemy combatants "regardless of the location of the detention."

The Bush administration maintains that al-Marri is an al-Qaida sleeper agent. The Defense Department ordered a review of Al-Marri's status as an enemy combatant be conducted if, as requested, the case is thrown out of court.

Gillette, her husband Brad and their daughter River, who live in New Mexico, had been visiting relatives in Vermont. Their flight was three hours late but appeared to be preparing for takeoff Oct. 13 when Gillette decided to breast-feed her 22-month-old, she said.

Gillette said she was being discreet. She was seated by the window in the second-to-last row, her husband was seated between her and the aisle and no part of her breast was showing, she said.

A flight attendant approached, tried to hand her a blanket and told her to cover up, Gillette said. She said she had a legal right to breast-feed her baby.

Moments later, a Delta ticket agent approached and said the flight attendant had asked that the family be removed from the flight, Gillette said. She said she didn't want to make a scene and complied.

"It embarrassed me. That was my first reaction, which is a weird reaction for doing something so good for a child. And then helpless," Gillette said.

The Vermont Human Rights Commission investigates complaints and determines whether discrimination may have occurred. The parties to a complaint are given six months to reach a settlement. If none is reached, the commission then decides whether to go to court. A complainant can file a separate suit in state court at any time.

With most of the polls and surveys showing that Chavez has a huge advantage in the upcoming December elections, there remains little doubt about who will win the presidential elections on December 3rd. However, the opposition candidates and opposition media in Venezuela have a habit of claiming fraud every time Chavez or his party win an election. The stage is already being set for the upcoming elections, as mainstream media in Venezuela constantly mention the possibility of fraud, and claims the elections are not transparent. The question remains; how can they claim fraud when dozens of surveys taken over the last few months show that the election won't even be a close contest? And secondly, why would the Chavez government commit fraud when it is obvious that they will easily win? The answer: it is all part of a plan to overthrow the government in the days following the December 3rd election.

The opposition parties in Venezuela have been making claims of fraudulent elections over the last few years. Often times they focus on the "captahuella" machines, which take the voters fingerprint to prevent them from voting more than once. Other times the claims center on the CNE, the national electoral body which oversees the elections. The opposition claims that this body is totally under the control of the Chavez government. All of these claims by the opposition are, of course, widely covered in the private media, and have created the feeling that Venezuela has unfair elections. So, for the December presidential elections, whether people believe it or not, this is all more of the same old story.

Last week, however, leaders of the opposition stepped up their rhetoric and discussed a "plan" for the days surrounding the elections. Prominent journalistic businessman Rafael Poleo, who was also involved in the 2002 coup attempt, announced on the cable network Globovision the opposition "plan" for December 3rd, 4th, and 5th. The plan calls for all voters aligned with the opposition to come out and vote on December 3rd. Then, on December 4th, claiming that the elections were fraudulent, the opposition voters must take to the streets to protest the Chavez victory. Referring to the "Orange Revolution," when popular protests in Ukraine overturned fraudulent elections in 2004, Poleo claims that the electoral fraud is already in place, and makes a call for all Venezuelans who are opposed to Chavez to come out into the streets and protest on December 4th. He emphasizes that Manuel Rosales, the opposition candidate, must join this movement on December 4th and claim that the elections were fraudulent. If he does, says Poleo, Rosales could become the most important person in 21st century Venezuelan history.

With all of this in place, the plan continues with a call to the high military command, in the words of Poleo, to "decide if it is going to continue forcing the Venezuelan opposition to put up with an embarrassing regime." These words, directed to the high military command, basically amount to a call to overthrow the government. He continues by referring to the plan as a sequence of events that all Venezuelans are going to see this December, and in which their destiny as dignified human beings, and the destiny of their respectable nation, is at play. Obviously, Poleo is implying that if Chavez continues in power, Venezuela will cease to be a dignified and respectable nation, and that Venezuelans should not have to continue putting up with him. He forgets to mention, however, that surveys show Chavez has the support of the majority of Venezuelans.

This message to the high military command coincides with a similar call made by candidate Manuel Rosales one day before. At a political rally, Rosales made a call for a meeting with the high military command, "because we have to be preparing for a transition and change of government that will come to Venezuela in the near future," he said. Rosales has yet to make the claim that the elections are fraudulent, but he did call on the government to get rid of the "captahuella" machines, which he had previously accepted as a condition of the election. Rosales maintains that he will win at the ballot box, although nearly all the polls show him to be trailing Chavez by a large margin.

If it weren't for the 2002 coup attempt, which occurred in a strikingly similar fashion, these words from the opposition might not be as significant. But the 2002 coup also began with large opposition protests against the government. When violence broke out between pro and anti-government groups, snipers and the Metropolitan police opened fire on innocent protesters both from the Chavez camp and from the opposition. Next, blaming the violence on the government, military officers aligned with the opposition forced the president to leave office under the threat that the Presidential Palace would be bombed. Just as they appear to be doing now, the private media set the stage for the coup after they made numerous calls for the people to come out and march against Chavez. Later, with the intervention of a group within the military they were almost successful in overthrowing the government. Popular demonstrations forced them to hand power back over Chavez, but the radical opposition groups didn't go away, and they have continued their attempts to destabilize the country in the years since.

On December 4th, it is almost certain that there will be large opposition protests in the major cities of Venezuela. Since the private media continues to report false surveys that show a possible victory for the opposition, a large sector of the population now believes that Rosales may hold the lead. When Chavez beats him at ballot box, which is the obvious result according to most polls, it will be a hard reality to accept for all those Venezuelans who have been decieved by their major media's manipulation. Rosales and the opposition leaders have called out to the people, and to the military command. There will no doubt be protests in the days following the elections, but will there be a coup?

If the allegations about the Hizbullah links and Iran's uranium quest are true, the report would vindicate those in the west who view the rise of the Islamic courts as a threat to world peace.
But several Horn of Africa analysts say these and other claims in the report appear exaggerated and lack evidence.

A diplomatic source who follows Somalia and asked not to be named said he feared the 80-page report could become a "very useful propaganda tool" for hawks in the west.

Matt Bryden, a regional consultant to the International Crisis Group, expressed similar reservations. "We need to treat many of these claims with caution until we see firm evidence," he said.

The four-man monitoring group is mainly based in Nairobi and relies on intelligence from Somalia. The team is respected, although some of its previous reports have been seen by some as alarmist. The latest covers the period from May 5, a month before Sics took control of the capital, Mogadishu.

Ethiopia and Eritrea are identified as the principal embargo violators, a fact no one disputes. Ethiopia, which backs the government, is believed to have thousands of soldiers in Somalia. Eritrea has sent a smaller number to back the courts. The report's mention of a massive build-up of heavy weapons on both sides is also not questioned, nor the fact that the country may be on the brink of an all-out war.

But the allegations of battlefield assistance to Hizbullah have aroused widespread scepticism. "To me it's completely counter-intuitive," said Ken Menkhaus, a professor of political science and Somalia expert at Davidson College in the US. "Somalis, whether secular or Islamist, are parochial, and have never been animated about distant causes."