- Signs of the Times for Mon, 26 Jun 2006 -



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Editorial: The Fall of Reason in The West

Arkadiusz Jadczyk
Signs of the Times
June 26, 2006

As a scientist with a conscience, I am shocked almost every day by the uses that science has been put to on our planet in our present time. Science tells us that we have we evolved as human beings from primates and then go on to make the assumption that this biological evolution is paralleled by cultural and social evolution. Indeed, science has given us the space program, laser, television, penicillin, sulfa drugs, and a host of other useful developments, which would seem to make our lives more tolerable and fruitful. However, we can also see that after three centuries of domination by science, it could be said that never before has man been so precariously poised on the brink of such total destruction. Why are so many scientists blind to this? Why aren't scientists - as a whole - standing up against the madness we see in the world around us?

The answer is that scientists, like any other group of people, come in all different shapes, sizes and with varying inner content in terms of conscience. I would like to give an example.

In the "Comment and analysis" section of the recent issue (24 June 2006) of The New Scientist, Richard Koch has published an article entitled "The fall of reason in the west ". It starts with the observation that

Science has been at the heart of western society for centuries, so why is it under attack as never before? [...]

The triumph of science explains, more than any other single factor, the west's enormous lead over other civilisations in technology, innovation, living standards and military might. Yet since the 1920s, and more particularly since 1970, western misgivings about science have greatly increased. Attacks have come from left and right, from intellectuals and anti-intellectuals, from the media and angry protesters, from Bible-bashers and New Age gurus. Westerners appear to have lost faith in reason and science. Why has science for the past 600 years been virtually a western monopoly, and what explains its decline in standing today?

The above comments are followed by a historical analysis of the role of science and then, Koch arrives here:

[...] Up to 1900, science had made the world easier to understand; thereafter it made it more difficult.

The other challenge was external: a much more critical view of science adopted by the rest of society. Science revealed a darker side. Suspicions arose that it was dehumanising and the tool of dictators. Then came the atom bomb. Since the 1960s, evidence has begun to pile up that science's triumphs are poisoning the planet.

The result is a widespread western, and especially American, descent into superstition. About 40 per cent of Americans believe that Genesis accurately describes the creation. There is an apparent belief in magic that has had no parallel since the Middle Ages. The growing anti-intellectualism has no western precedent at all. We are witnessing the elevation of emotion over reason, of personal conviction over hard thinking.[...]

So far so good. But then comes the following:

Does this loss of faith in science matter? Science seems impervious to attack. To a greater degree than ever, the world is being shaped by it. Scientific advance is unstoppable, constant and cumulative. There is no "alternative" science, no Buddhist science, no New Age science, no relativist science, no fundamentalist science. The funds for science keep coming, as does a ready supply of highly educated scientists.

“There is an apparent belief in magic that has had no parallel since the Middle Ages”

Apparently the author completely forgets the fact that "the mysterious" was very close to science all the time; think of Newton, think of Clifford.

But pause. Reflect on the inspirations for modern science: belief in God and belief in humanity, a rational world view, and optimism about humanity's place in the cosmos. Science, it seems, has disposed of much of what made it successful. It has eaten away at its thought-foundations: its contribution to human meaning, the human spirit and the non-material richness of civilisation has shrivelled.

"Optimism about humanity's place in the cosmos?" The author must be joking. The planet is on the edge of destruction because scientists are the slaves of politicians! What kind of contribution to human meaning has science to offer? The "Selfish gene" philosophy of Richard Dawkins? Or read this text by the physicist Freeman Dyson, member of the JASON defense advisory group, where he says:

[...]The prevailing view (Weinberg, 1977) holds the future of open and closed universes to be equally dismal. According to this view, we have only the choice of being fried in a closed universe or frozen in an open one. The end of the closed universe has been studied in detail by Rees (1969). Regrettably I have to concur with Rees' verdict that in this case we have no escape from frying. No matter how deep we burrow into the earth to shield ourselves from the ever-increasing fury of the blue-shifted background radiation, we can only postpone by a few million years our miserable end. I shall not discuss the closed universe in detail, since it gives me a feeling of claustrophobia to imagine our whole existence confined within the box (4).

I only raise one question which may offer us a thin chance of survival. Supposing that we discover the universe to be naturally closed and doomed to collapse, is it conceivable that by intelligent intervention, converting matter into radiation and causing energy to flow purposefully on a cosmic scale, we could break open a closed universe and change the topology of space-time so that only a part of it would collapse and another part of it would expand forever? I do not know the answer to this question. If it turns out that the universe is closed, we shall still have about 10^10 years to explore the possibility of a technological fix that would burst it open. [...]

The author of the NewScientist article concludes with these paragraphs:

Let's be clear: science will continue, driven by the search for profit and by humanity's ineradicable intellectual curiosity. There is little justification to abandon our trust in rationality and in science, for the best forms of civilisation depend utterly on them. But in losing the idea that science helps us all make sense of the world, the west has forfeited one of its main sources of optimism, success and commitment to a humane society.

Will science continue to lose its shine. Not necessarily. The notion that science deprives life of meaning is, after all, erroneous. Neither can science disprove the existence of God. What we may call the "lonely hypothesis" - that there is no rational and good God, and probably no God at all, that humankind is a speck of insignificance on the edge of a vast, pointless universe - has its own splendour, inspiration and self-justification. If nothing else will supply meaning in the universe, the existence and achievements of human intellect, creativity and love are quite enough.

Notice this: "There is little justification to abandon our trust in rationality and in science, for the best forms of civilisation depend utterly on them." The best forms of civilization? Which civilization? The one that has built nuclear bombs and used them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Or the more modern one that is commiting crimes of mass murder in Iraq? In which sense is this science, now on the verge of replacing humans by genetically modified hybrids, the "main source of optimism, success and commitment to a humane society"?

And what "love" is he talking about when writing "If nothing else will supply meaning in the universe, the existence and achievements of human intellect, creativity and love are quite enough." As my wife, Laura Knight-Jadczyk has written:

Our lives, as individuals and groups and cultures, are steadily deteriorating. The air we breathe and the water we drink is polluted almost beyond endurance. Our foods are loaded with substances which contribute very little to nourishment, and that may, in fact, be injurious to our health. Stress and tension have become an accepted part of life and can be shown to have killed millions. Hatred, envy, greed and strife multiply exponentially. Crime increases nine times faster than the population. We swallow endless quantities of pills to wake up, go to sleep, get the job done, calm our nerves and make us feel good. The inhabitants of the earth spend more money on recreational drugs than they spend on housing, clothing, food, education or any other product or service.

The ancient evils are still with us for those who emerge from their "personal myth" long enough to be in touch with reality. Drought, famine, plague and natural disasters still take an annual toll in lives and suffering. Combined with wars, insurrections, and political purges, this means that not only are great numbers of people killed each year for political reasons, but also multiplied millions of people across the globe are without adequate food or shelter or health care. Over one hundred million children starved to death in the last decade of the 20th century. [The Secret History of the World]

The real Fall of Reason in the West lies in the fact that what we see in the world today is science being used to manipulate society, to make human beings into remotely controlled robots, to use "applied game theory" (see Lambda Corporation) in order to eliminate 99% of the population of this planet at the behest of their political Lords and Masters.


Comment on this Editorial


Editorial: Signs Economic Commentary

Donald Hunt
Signs of the Times
June 26, 2006

Gold closed at 586.00 dollars an ounce on Friday, up 0.2% from $584.70 the Friday before. The dollar closed at 0.7996 euros Friday, up 1.1% from 0.7910 for the week. The euro closed at 1.2507 dollars compared to 1.2640 at the end of the week before. Gold in euros would be 463.61 euros an ounce, up 0.2% from 462.47 at the previous Friday's close. Oil closed at 70.84 dollars a barrel on Friday, up 1.2% from $69.97 for the week. Oil in euros would be 56.64 euros a barrel, up 2.3% from 55.34 at the end of the week before. The gold/oil ratio closed at 8.27, down 1.1% from 8.36 for the week. In the U.S. stock market, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 10,989.09, down 0.2% from 11,014.55 for the week. The NASDAQ closed at 2,121.47 on Friday, down 0.4% from 2,129.95 at the close of the previous week. The yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note closed at 5.22%, up 9 basis points from 5.13 for the week (and up 25 basis points over the last two weeks).

Not a lot of change in the markets last week with the exception of long term interest rates in the United States (the ten-year Treasury up 25 basis points in two weeks). The widespread use of risky adjustable rate mortgages in the United States makes such interest rate increases potentially catastrophic:

Foreclosures may jump as ARMs reset

By J.W. Elphinstone, AP Business Writer

As more hybrid adjustable rate mortgages adjust upward and housing prices dip, many Americans can't refinance out of this squeeze. They are finding themselves trapped in too-high monthly payments, and some face foreclosures.

In 2003, Anita Britten refinanced her two-story brick cottage in Lithonia, Ga. using a hybrid adjustable rate mortgage, or ARM. Her lender reassured her that she could refinance out of the riskier loan into a traditional one when her interest rate started to reset.

Three years later, Britten can't get a new mortgage and her monthly payment has jumped by a third in six months. She can't afford her payments and may face foreclosure if her financial situation doesn't change.

For those who can't make their payments, foreclosure is the only way out.
Foreclosure figures just released by the Mortgage Bankers Association show that foreclosure activity fell in the first quarter of 2006 over the first quarter of 2005 for all loan categories except subprime loans. The MBA didn't specify how many of subprime loans were adjustable rate mortgages.

In the last several years, millions of Americans took equity out of their houses and refinanced when interest rates were at historical lows and housing prices were at record highs.

Many of them chose to refinance into hybrid ARMs that lenders were aggressively pushing. ARMs, which featured a low introductory interest rate that resets upward after a set period of time, were easier to qualify for than traditional fixed-rate loans.

...This year, more than $300 billion worth of hybrid ARMs will readjust for the first time. That number will jump to approximately $1 trillion in 2007, according to the MBA. Monthly payments will leap too, many beyond what homeowners can afford.

For example, Britten's monthly payment jumped from $1,079 to $1,340 at the beginning of this year. It rose again on June 1 by another $104 and is scheduled to increase again in December. Britten, who is also paying off student loans, went to a credit counseling service to help her avoid foreclosure.

"I've gotten rid of all my credit cards and I'm not supposed to refinance for another year," she said. "All I can do is tread water right now."

"ARMs are a ticking time bomb," said Brad Geisen, president and chief executive of property tracker Foreclosure.com. "Through 2006 and 2007, I'm pretty sure we'll see a high volume of foreclosures."

Last year, foreclosures hit a historical low nationwide at about 50,000. But that number has more than doubled since then, according to Foreclosure.com.

And delinquency rates appear to be rising, as well. While delinquency rates fell for most types of loans from the fourth quarter of 2005 because of a stronger economy, delinquencies for both prime and subprime ARM loans increased year-over-year in the first quarter, according to the MBA.

The hardest hit states so far are those that have experienced the roughest times economically. Michigan, Texas and Georgia lead the pack, specifically around Detroit, Dallas and Atlanta, whose major employers have run into strikes, bankruptcies and industry downturns.

But as the housing market slows, experts expect foreclosures to skyrocket in those areas that have experienced the highest appreciation rate - like California, Florida, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

"There is a direct correlation between foreclosure sales and market activity," said Dr. James Gaines, a research economist at The Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University. "If the rate of appreciation is not there, then there is an increase in foreclosure sales."

Gaines pointed out that although California's default notices are rising by the thousands, actual foreclosure sales remain in the hundreds. Because of California's still-active housing market, homeowners there can sell their properties before going into foreclosure.

On the flip side, in less active markets like Texas and Georgia, homeowners can't find a buyer in time and are forced into foreclosure.

But as the housing cools in these once hot markets at the same time that ARMs reset, many homeowners may be unable to dump their properties before going into foreclosure, Gaines predicts.

Additionally, Gaines pointed out that these same real estate markets also boasted a higher percentage of ARM originations, because most buyers could only get into their homes using an unconventional loan.

California, where the median home price reached $468,000 in April, leads the nation in the percentage of homes purchased with adjustable rate mortgages. Nationwide, ARMs account for 24 percent of all home loans.

"In our zeal to make mortgage lending more available to a greater number of people, it's normal to expect the foreclosure rate to go up," Gaines said.

Even investors in foreclosures are having a harder time finding good deals, as the housing market cools. Many homes that do end up in foreclosure auctions are saddled with more than one mortgage and have little or no equity - so the investors take a pass.

Falling home values are also affecting homeowners' ability to refinance into a traditional 30-year fixed rate loan to avoid foreclosure.

In 2002, Christopher Jones, 32, refinanced into a hybrid ARM with plans to refinance again when the rate started to readjust. At the time, his downtown Atlanta house appraised for $108,000.

Now, his monthly payments have shot up, but Jones can't sell his house for more than $84,000 and he can't get an appraisal for more than $85,000.

The appraisal firm told Jones that the value of houses in his neighborhood have fallen victim to a cooling market. With no other options left, Jones has decided to pack it in and foreclose on the house.

"I'm just going to take the loss," he said. "That's all I can do."

Some homebuyers, especially first-time buyers, may not have fully understood the risk of ARMs. In the rush to close on a house sale, especially in the frenzied market of the past few years, many first-time buyers often failed to get the full details of their loan from their mortgage broker.

"Sometimes buyers are very optimistic of how much mortgage they can handle, especially in a strong housing market with aggressive marketing of riskier mortgages," said Suzanne Boas, president of Consumer Credit Counseling Services of Greater Atlanta.

When Dora Angel of DeSoto, Texas bought her first home in 2003, she paid $141,000 for the brand new three-bedroom, two-bath home. At the time, her mortgage payment was $1,400 a month.

DeSoto originally thought that she had a fixed-rate loan. But about five months ago, she noticed that her monthly payment kicked up to $1,900. She only made the monthly payments by sacrificing payments on her credit cards, which pulled down her credit rating.

Now, DeSoto can't continue paying $1,900 each month, but, because of her credit ranking, she doesn't qualify for a fixed-rate mortgage.

"I was a first-time buyer. I was blind. I didn't know what questions to ask," she said. "And the mortgage brokers are there telling you what you want to hear just to get you in the mortgage."

Unfortunately, during a runaway market, many buyers, sellers and mortgage brokers were more excited about making deals than making smart deals, and the fallout has just begun.

"We are on the front of this ARM problem. It will roll out over the next several years," Boas said. "Owning a home is the American dream, but losing one is the ultimate nightmare."

Rising interest rates and foreclosures, in turn, lead to lower prices and sharp slowdown in the overall housing industry (including financial services workers, construction and renovation skilled tradespeople, real-estate agents, bankers and lawyers, hardware and home improvement retailers and those who manufacture all those goods sold by Ace and Home Depot and the lumber stores. All that now comprises a good chunk of the U.S. middle class.

Home sellers, builders feel pinch of slowdown

By Andrea Hopkins
Thu Jun 22, 12:34 PM ET

When Keith Gersin saw the perfect four-bedroom house in southern Ohio four years ago, he jumped to buy it before anyone else could snap it up. When he finally sold it last month, it went for $30,000 less than he had hoped -- and that after seven months on the market.

In retrospect, the 41-year-old physician admits he overestimated the U.S. housing market, which has begun cooling after five years of record-breaking sales and double-digit price appreciation.

"I was naive," said Gersin, who sold his Cincinnati-area home in May to move to North Carolina with his wife and son. He made about $60,000 on the sale, but had hoped for better.

"Everyone thinks their house is the most beautiful in the world, so it comes as a bit of a shock when it doesn't sell right away."

The housing slowdown -- sharp in some regions and more gradual in others -- is seen by many economists as an inevitable and even healthy moderation to an overheated market. Even so, for many homeowners, real-estate agents and builders, the market's new direction is not particularly welcome.

With mortgage rates rising, sales of existing homes were 5.7 percent slower in April than they were a year earlier, and the inventory of new homes is at a record high.

The rising supply of unsold homes makes it that much harder for homeowners to get the sale price they hoped for.

"In our neighborhood, on our street, there were three houses that went up for sale within months of each other," said Gersin.

Cincinnati real-estate agent Jeff Schnedl has seen a shift in the market.

"It is absolutely slower. Some areas are still chugging along but even those are chugging along more slowly than they used to," said Schnedl, who has been selling homes in the Ohio River city for five years.

A drive down any street in Cincinnati, whose suburbs straddle Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana, turns up plenty of "For Sale" signs -- with the occasional "Price Reduced" addendum slapped on top.

Schnedl said homes are staying on the market longer.

"There is a lot more inventory on the market this year than last year -- about 25 percent more. So buyers have more homes to choose from and that slows the sale cycle down. Plus with rising interest rates, people are thinking harder. That slows it down, too."

The average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage rose to 6.63 percent last week, up a full percentage point from 5.63 percent last year, according to mortgage finance company Freddie Mac.

Such an increase boosts the cost of a $200,000 mortgage by about 11 percent, or $129 a month, to $1,281 -- an unwelcome jump for consumers who are already feeling the pinch of soaring energy prices.

The housing slowdown is also being felt by home builders. While housing starts rose 5 percent in May, permits for future groundbreaking -- an indication of builder confidence -- dropped to the lowest level since 2003, government figures showed this week...

But enough about the United States. What about the rest of the world? Well, nowadays, it's all tied together:

A hard landing in 2006 - just not in the US?

Brad Setser
Jun 18, 2006

Nouriel and I postulated back in early 2005 that there was a meaningful risk that the next "emerging market" crisis might come from the US - and it might come sooner than most expected. The basic quite simple: Ferguson's debtlodocus might find that it no longer could place its debt with the world's central banks, the dollar would fall, market interest rates would rise, US debt servicing costs would go up, the economy would slow and the value of a host of financial assets would tumble.

Why the emphasis on central banks? Simple: they have been the lender of last resort for the US, financing the US when private markets don't want to. See April 2006. Consequently, a truly bad scenario for the US seemed to require a change in central banks' policies. Real emerging markets aren't so lucky. When private markets don't want to finance them, they typically aren't bailed by someone else's central bank.

It sure doesn't look like sudden stops in financial flows and sharp markets moves have been banished from the international financial system. Certainly not this year. They just didn't strike the US, but other countries with large and rising current account deficits.

Iceland's currency is way down (its stock market too) even though interest rates on Icelandic krona are up. The private market's appetite for krona disappeared.

Inflation is up too, driven by the weak krona.

The Turkish lira is way down. Lira interest rates are way up - as is Turkish inflation.

Turkey's central bank sold dollars this week -- for the first time in quite some time. It was buying dollars in a big way in the first quarter. Times change.

Currency collapses do not necessarily translate into economic slumps. That was a key point that the Federal Reserve has made in response to fears about a US hard landing. A fall in the currency doesn't always translate into higher interest rates, at least in post-industrial countries. And in part because lots of the damage from a fall in the currency comes when firms, banks and the government have borrowed in foreign currency, turning a currency crisis into a debt crisis.

The US, thankfully, has financed itself by selling dollar-denominated debt, pushing currency risks onto its creditors. But so did Iceland. And even Turkey increasingly financed itself in Turkish lira. Particularly in 2005, there were big inflows into Turkey's local debt and equity markets. Turkey obviously still has a fair amount of dollar debt. It is an emerging market after all. But things were changing.

I still think the financial slump in both Iceland and Turkey could easily turn into a sharp economic slump. In both countries, both policy and market interest rates are up significantly - in part because a weaker currency (and still strong oil) translates into higher prices for imported goods. And I suspect higher interest will, over time, slow the pace of both economies' expansion.

One big reason why Turkey was growing fast was that because its banks were lending tons of money to Turkey's households, whether to buy a car or buy a house. But it only makes sense to lend long-term at 13% (say for a mortgage) if inflation and nominal interest rates are expected to fall over time. This year, both inflation and nominal rates rose. Ouch (if you are a bank).

I suspect that the result will be a significant slowdown in credit growth - and in the Turkish economy.

Charles Gottlieb of the European Capital Markets Institute notes that Iceland too was growing in part on the back of a strong expansion of credit (see his figure 1) - though in Iceland's case, demand for Icelandic Krona was for a while so long strong that Icelandic issuance alone couldn't meet it. Consequently, European banks started issuing so called Glacier bonds in krona (a note: I am sure the banks hedged their krona exposure, I just don't know how).

And Gottlieb nicely shows what a sudden stop looks like. See his Figure 4. It shows a huge surge foreign purchases of Icelandic securities issued by Icelandic residents (I think that means it excludes Glacier bonds) up until January of this year. And then a huge - and I mean huge - fall. Inflows became outflows. Foreigners sold; Icelanders bought.

I am not convinced Iceland is the next Thailand - but there are lots of unpleasant outcomes that aren't quite that severe.

Turkey and Iceland are not the only markets who went through a rather nasty sell-off. Emerging market equities just has their worst run since 1998. Of course, it comes after a huge run-up. And as no shortage of credible observers - like Ragu Rajan of the IMF -- have noted, the markets that are selling off the most are the markets that rose the most. That suggests that the causes of the sell-off are global, a change in the markets willingness to invest in emerging economies, not local - that is what the generally bearish BIS thinks and in this case they have support from some (former?) bulls, like MSDW's Turkey analyst Serhan Cevik.

Despite this indiscriminate sell-off, there is still no agreement among investors as to what the sudden burst of global volatility actually reflects. .... Risk reduction always brings indiscriminate selling of all 'risky' assets at the early stages, regardless of underlying economic structures and policy frameworks.

The team at Danske bank hasn't been as consistently bullish at Cevik, but they seems to agree that it is hard to pin down any fundamental cause of the recent sell-off.

I certainly didn't see this kind of global sell off of emerging economies coming, though I worried about a few specific markets. And not just ex post. But then again I am usually good for a cautionary quote ...

And in some sense, the fact that the current global sell-off focused on emerging economies is a bit strange. I see the logic: what went up too fast has to come down.

But the defining characteristic of the recent boom in private capital flows to emerging economies is that, at least in aggregate, capital was flowing into emerging economies didn't need the money. The US was attracting more financing that it needed to run very large deficits, and using some of the money to invest in emerging economies. And emerging economies were taking financial flows from say Europe and using them to lend to the US. It was a rather complex equilibrium.
Look at the statistical data in the latest issue of the World Bank's (very useful) Global Development Finance. Developing economies collectively ran a current account surplus of $245 billion in 2005. Private inflows of $490 billion were used to pay back the IMF and to build up reserves -- these countries reserves were up by $395b or so in dollar terms, more than their current account surplus.

(One note for true balance of payments geeks: the GDF's reserve increase isn't adjusted for valuation changes. If you make that adjustment, total reserve growth would be bigger, and the errors and other flows term would fall)

Of course, what happens in aggregate can mask big differences in the specifics. China, Saudi Arabia and Russia all had big current account surpluses. Brazil a more modest surplus. India had a small and growing deficit. Turkey - and Hungary -- had big deficits.

Despite these differences the equity markets of Russia, Brazil and Turkey have all tumbled this year. Foreign funds that poured into these economies earlier this year poured out in May. When the data comes in, the change will look a bit like Gottlieb's graph showing flows in and out of Iceland.

My hypothesis therefore is twofold:

The recent correction has been driven as much by developments inside the financial markets of the post-industrial economies as by a change in the emerging economies themselves. Hence the general sell-off.

And the impact of the correction will vary dramatically. Some countries didn't need inflows. Russia. Others did. Turkey. But even in turkey, the inflows that were coming in far exceeded what Turkey needed. In the first quarter, annualized inflows were something like $60b relative to a current account deficit of $30b. If flows go to $30 or $25 Turkey is fine. If they go to zero, not so much.

Actually, my hypothesis is threefold.

In April, the G-7 communique triggered a fall in the market's willingness to finance US deficits. We saw that in the TIC data. There also was a bit of a surge in capital inflows to Asia that prompted a bout of intervention. Central banks financed the US when markets didn't want to.

In May and early June, folks who borrowed dollars and yen to buy emerging market equities (and debt, to a lesser degree) sold their emerging market equities and repaid their loans. Call it deleveraging.

The net effect has been to help finance the US. Less money was flowing out of the US - US purchases of foreign equities averaged about $10b a month for the first four months of the year. And if Americans may have actually reduced their exposure to emerging economies in May and June. That too would help to finance the US deficit. Deficits can be financed by selling (external) assets as well as issuing (external) debt.

My question: What happens once this process is over?

Do higher US rates continue to draw the financing the US needs to run big current account deficits - a deficit that I still think will be over $900b?

In part because China and the oil exporters continue to use their central banks and oil investment funds to finance the US?

Or does the US join the list of high-carry (at least relative to Japan and Europe) countries that have experienced trouble in 2006?

And what happens if an incipient US slowdown start to generate expectations that US rates have peaked and won't provide as much support for the dollar?

If I had to guess, I would say Bill Gross (quoted in Business Week) is right.
It's like Peter Pan who shouts, "'Do you believe?' And the crowd shouts back, in unison, 'We believe.'" You can believe in fairy tales and Peter Pan as long as the crowd shouts back, "we believe." That's what the dollar represents, a store of value that people believe in. They can keep on believing, but there comes a point that they don't.

Greenspan was here two months ago and talked with us for two hours. The most interesting point was his comment that there will come a time when foreign central banks and foreign investors reach saturation levels with their dollar holdings, and so he sort of drew his hand across his neck as if they've had it. Why can't they keep on swallowing dollars? Logic would suggest that these things start to fray at the fringes. Once the snowball starts it can really get going. ...

The dollar is really well supported by its yield. We've got 5% overnight rates and Japan has zero. You get over 2% relative to the euro, so obviously 5% or 5.25% is dollar-supportive, and the more that Bernanke sounds off that he's going even higher, the more that supports the dollar. The real question is what starts it on the way down? At the moment people believe that's O.K. and yes, housing is starting down, but the rest of the economy is looking good, 2% to 3% GDP growth isn't so bad. I would say that if that's the case we've got a pretty good little fairy tale going here. But if it doesn't, if 5% leads to a crack in the housing market and the unwind of various global markets and the U.S. stock market ... If the stock market keeps going down then that's a sign that 5.25% is too onerous a rate. So what the question becomes then is can the U.S. economy be supported at that level? That's when the question of whether there's the possibility of an avalanche begins. If we get rates then down to 4.5% and then all of a sudden the [other central bankers] are moving up, the money flows out. It's not because of the [lack of a] yield advantage; they've had it up to their necks in terms of dollars. The unwind of the dollar can come from saturation or geopolitical issues or simply that the U.S. economy isn't as strong as people think and they stop believing in Tinkerbelle.

A big fall in the dollar isn't bad for the US. A big fall in financial inflows that led to a rise in US interest rates though is another story. A 200 bp move is not so big for emerging economies, but it is big for the US. And because the US financial system is much more leveraged, it would also have much bigger consequences.

Basically, to keep other central banks happy when the United States gobbling up debt, Bernanke has to raise interest rates much higher than would normally be warranted, just to avoid a currency collapse. And, he has to do it just when the economy is heading into a recession:

Key gauge points to slowing economy
Index of leading indicators fell more than expected in May as higher gas prices and interest rates start to bite.

June 22, 2006: 4:53 PM EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A key forecasting gauge for the U.S. economy fell by a larger-than-expected 0.6 percent in May, a report from a private research group showed on Thursday.

The sharp decline in the Index of Leading Economic Indicators from the Conference Board outpaced market expectations for a 0.5 percent fall in May after an unrevised 0.1 percent fall in April.

Ken Goldstein, a labor economist at the Conference Board, cited a slew of factors inhibiting the economy even as leading indicators in European and Asian countries were showing strength.

"The cumulative impact of higher gasoline prices, higher costs to run the air conditioner this spring, a slowing housing market, higher interest rates, a loss of confidence and even higher taxes in some localities, have all combined to slow the forward pace of economic activity, pushing growth to a sub-par level this summer -- possibly extending into the fall," Goldstein said in a statement.

"Given the slower pace, the economy has less ability to absorb another round of strong hurricanes this summer," he added.

Seven of the 10 indicators that make up the leading index fell in May, the Conference Board said.

The largest negative contributor to the index was initial claims for unemployment insurance. The index of consumer expectations made the second largest negative contribution.

So once again we find ourselves in the paradoxical state of stagflation. High inflation, layoffs and high interest rates. The following piece by James Killus explains why stagflation is not as paradoxical as it seems:

Let me suggest a hypothetical.

Suppose there were two countries, in some sort of neo-colonial relationship. The rich country follows something like the German model, good social benefits, primarily tied to corporate employment, high capital stock, high education levels, and so forth. The poorer country has some social benefits, a social security system, a health care system that is overstressed and that doesn't cover everybody, stagnating wages, and its capital stock is almost entirely colonial, i.e. the other country owns almost all of it.

Both share a common currency, and on a cash flow basis, the poorer country is sending a lot of cash to the richer country.

Monetary policy from the central bank clearly affects both countries, but both countries can have different fiscal policies. Moreover, cash flows between the two countries can dominate their local monetary policies. The cash flow from the poor country to the rich country has, in fact, produced a liquidity trap in the poor country. By the same token, the same cash flow has created a high degree of liquidity in the rich country, but, because the rich country imports much of its goods and services, it hasn't seen much CPI inflation. Rather, it has had a series of asset price bubbles.

Now actually I'm talking about a single country here, the United States. The rich country consists of those who have substantial capital assets, and/or are well-situated in the corporate hierarchy. The poor country is low and middle income wage earners without major assets, whose primary asset, in fact, is their share of the social security system, and perhaps a low equity house in a "non-bubble" area like the mid-west.

The major cash flow is the Social Security surplus, which continues to divert enormous sums to the general fund, and the general fund pays out much of its cash to corporate contractors. Also whenever a member of the low income class buys something, a portion of that goes to the rich class, in the form of profits or the wages paid to the affluent class who manage the enterprise.

I think that, with only a few exceptions, "the poor country" has been in a liquidity trap for the past 25 years. CPI price inflation occurs when some of the liquidity that washes over the "rich country" manages to leak into "the poor country." It is then immediately stamped down by raising interest rates, which pulls yet more money from low income workers (who tend to be debtors). Since high income liquidity primarily affects asset prices, and since asset price inflation is not considered inflation, monetary policy does not react.

Economic "growth" has been confined to the high income group, but since this tends to consist of nominal asset growth, it is not clear to what extent the growth is real. It may be largely an artifact of asset price inflation whose effects have been confined to a part of the economy that doesn't show up in inflation estimates.

In short, the economy may actually be experiencing stagflation, but that is masked by asset price inflation. Any attempt to turn that nominal growth into actual consumption would trigger CPI inflation, which would immediately be met with interest rate hikes, which further hurt the real economy of low wage earners, but which does little to correct the underlying fiscal malady.


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Editorial: The Wall Street Journal Calls Hugo Chavez A Threat to World Peace

by Stephen Lendman

You won't find commentary and language any more hostile to Hugo Chavez than on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Their June 23 piece by Mary Anastasia O'Grady in the Americas column is a clear, jaw-dropping example. It's practically blood-curdling in its vitriol which calls Hugo Chavez a threat to world peace. The sad part of it is Journal readers believe this stuff and are likely to support any US government efforts to remove the "threat."

The O'Grady article is about the elections scheduled to take place in the fall for five non-permanent UN Security Council seats to be held in 2007. One of them will be for the Latin American seat now held by Argentina. The two countries vying to fill the opening are Guatemala and Venezuela, and the other countries in the region will vote on which one will get it. You won't have to think long to guess the one the US supports - its Guatemalan ally, of course. And why not. For over 50 years its succession of military and civilian governments have all followed the dictates of their dominant northern neighbor. In so doing, they all managed to achieve one of the world's worst human rights records that hasn't abated even after the 1996 Peace Accords were signed ending a brutal 36 year conflict. Although the country today is nominally a democratic republic, it continues to abuse its people according to documented reports by Amnesty International.

Amnesty is aware of sexual violence and extreme brutality against women including 665 murders in 2005 gotten from police records; 224 reported attacks on human rights activists and organizations in the same year with little or no progress made investigating them; forced evictions and destruction of homes of indigenous people in rural areas (echoes of Palestine); and no progress by the government and Constitutional Court in seeking justice for decades of genocidal crimes and crimes against humanity committed by paramilitary death squads and the Guatamalan military. The sum of these and other unending abuses led Amnesty to call Guatamala a "land of injustice."

That record of abuse hardly matters to the Bush administration nor did it bother any past ones either since the CIA fomented a coup in 1954 ousting the country's democratically elected leader Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. That coup began a half century reign of terror against the country's indigenous Mayan majority. It was fully supported by a succession of US presidents who were quite willing to overlook it as long as Guatamalan governments maintained a policy of compliance with the US agenda. They all did, and in return received the support and blessing of the US and its corporate giants that continue to suck the life out of that oppressed country.

Guatamala fills the bill nicely for the Bush administration and would be expected to be a close ally in support of US positions that come up for votes in the UN Security Council. Venezuela, on the other hand, is a different story. Since he was first democratically elected in 1998, Hugo Chavez has done what few other leaders ever do. He's kept his promises to his people to serve their interests ahead of those of other nations, especially the US that's dominated and exploited Venezuela for decades. He's served them well, and in so doing engendered the wrath of his dominant northern neighbor that already has tried and failed three times to oust him and is now planning a fourth attempt to do it.

The idea of a Chavez-led government holding a seat on the Security Council does not go down well in Washington, and the Bush administration is leading a campaign to prevent it with aid and support of the kind of attack-dog journalism found in the Wall Street Journal. Honest observers know this newspaper of record for corporate America has a hard time dealing with facts it dislikes so it invents the ones it does to use in their place.

The June 23 editorial is a good example. It extolls the record of the Guatamalan government with its long-standing record of extreme abuse against its own people falsely claiming it's been "accumulating an impressive record of international cooperation on a variety of UN efforts." It claims one of its main qualifications is its "active role in international peacekeeping" and that the country is now home to a Central American regional peacekeeping school and training center. Oddly, it mentions that Guatamalan peacekeepers are now serving in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and Haiti. What it fails to mention is that those so-called "peacekeepers," along with those from other countries serving with them, have in large part functioned as paramilitary enforcers, and in that capacity have committed gross human rights abuses against the local people rather than trying to protect them. The WSJ writer surely knows this but didn't choose to share that information with her readers. Instead she extolls the country's "democratic credentials." But readers with any knowledge of recent Guatamalan history surely know that country's true record is one of extreme violence and abuse against its own people and one no one would think of as a nation representing them democratically.

The WSJ's June 23 editorial is titled "A Vote for Venezuela Is a Vote for Iran." The commentary in it is one of the paper's most extreme diatribes against the Venezuelan leader which would seem to indicate the Bush administration and corporate America are stepping up their attack on Hugo Chavez in advance of when they plan to make their move to oust him. The Journal writer calls him a "strongman" in an "oil dictatorship" leading a government that values "tyranny and aggression" who'll use his seat and Council presidency when his nation assumes it to support "hostile states" like Iran, Cuba, Sudan and North Korea. Observers knowledgeable about Venezuela under Chavez would have a hard time containing themselves as the true Chavez record is totally opposite the one the Journal portrays. The Journal writer, of course, knows this, but would never report it in her column. Her employer and the interests it serves wouldn't be pleased if she did.

While claiming that a Guatamala seat on the Council is a "voice for the region, not its own national interests," it says Venezuela's "rests largely on oil 'diplomacy' and the capacity to push anti-American buttons around the UN." It goes on to state "It may seem strange Venezuela has any support in the region. Over the past seven years, its meddling in its neighbors' politics 'have' (even the grammar is wrong) earned it a reputation as a bully. Mr. Chavez is persona non grata in more than a few Latin nations. Many countries are worried about Venezuela's 'big spending' to acquire fighter jets and 100,000 kalisnikovs from Russia." Readers may need to pause to catch their breath.

What the Journal writer doesn't explain is far more important than what she does - but she's doing her job as a servant of the US empire. Chavez's so-called "oil diplomacy," in fact, is based on his Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas or ALBA. It's based on the principles of complementarity (not competition), solidarity (not domination), cooperation (not exploitation) and respect for other nations' sovereignty free from the control of dominant powers like the US and its large transnational corporations. It's the mirror opposite of US-style predatory capitalism and the one-sided trade agreements it uses to exploit other countries for its own gain.

The nations participating in ALBA-style agreements are able to operate outside the usual international banking and corporate trading system in their exchange of goods and services so that each country benefits and none loses - just the opposite of the one-sided way the US operates. Because Venezuela is rich in oil, it's been able to trade that vital commodity with its neighbors who need it, even sell it to them at below-market prices, and get back in return the products and services its trading partners can supply on an equally favorable basis. It's a true "win-win" arrangement for participating countries but one that angers the US because it cuts its corporations and big banks out of the process. The Chavez plan is to help his people, not serve the interests of the corporate giants or dominant US neighbor. The WSJ calls this "meddling" and Chavez a "bully." What glorious meddling it is, in the true spirit of the country's Bolivarian Revolution, and "bully" to Hugo Chavez for doing it.

As for Chavez's so-called "big spending" for weapons that has "many countries worried," one must wonder which countries the Journal writer means. She mentions none, which she surely would have and quoted their officials if, in fact, there were any. The truth, of course, is Hugo Chavez is acting no differently than most all other countries in the region or elsewhere, has expressed no hostility toward any of them, has never invaded a neighbor or threatened to, and is a model of a peace-promoting leader who's only taking sensible steps to upgrade his small military and protect his nation against a hostile US he has every reason to believe will attack him. But you'll never find that commentary on the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

The Journal editorial ends in grand style. It demeans the poor countries of the region benefitting from below-market priced Venezuelan oil as likely supporting that country for the Latin American Council seat. It also attacks Argentina for being a "Venezuelan pawn," calling it "once a haven for Nazis" (the US was and still is), and stating "the country has been so incompetent about managing its 'resources' that it too needs charity from Mr. Chavez." Indeed, Argentina had big financial trouble at the end of the 1990s, but the Journal writer doesn't explain why. It was because the country became the "poster child" model for US-style neoliberal free market capitalism in the 1990s. It wrecked the economy causing it to collapse into bankruptcy it's still struggling to recover from.

The Journal writer also attacks Bolivia and Cuba for supporting Chavez but is particularly hostile to the Lula government in Brazil for its siding with the Venezuelan leader. She calls that support "surprising" and accused the Brazilian government of being "Bolivia's unofficial energy advisor (that) orchestrated the confiscation of Brazilian assets (in Bolivia) recently." Bolivian president Evo Morales nationalized his nation's energy resources which Bolivian law clearly states the nation owns. He confiscated nothing, which the Journal writer surely knows but failed to tell her readers. She also mentioned a so-called "eternal Brazilian struggle to prove that it can challenge US 'hegemony' in the region (that) trumps the need to regain dignity and protect its investments abroad." Left out of the commentary is any mention that Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba and Brazil are sovereign states with the right to support whatever policies and other countries they wish without needing US approval to do it.

About the only final comment the Journal writer can make is to claim Guatamala has the "solid backing of the 'more serious democracies' in the region - such as Colombia and Mexico." It's likely what the writer means by "serious" is those countries' elections are about as free and fair as ours - meaning, they only are for the power-elites controlling them who arrange the outcomes they want.

The June 23 Wall Street Journal editorial was a typical example of what this newspaper calls journalism and editorial commentary. This writer follows it to learn what the US empire likely is up to. In the case of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, it's no doubt up to no good. The continued hostile rhetoric is clearly to signal another attempt to oust the Venezuelan leader at whatever time and by whatever means the Bush administration has in mind. Stay tuned.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
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Israel's God-Given Right to Kill


Israeli "Justice": An eye for an eye

By Yoel Marcus
Haaretz

It is easy enough for a political leader, who spends most of his life traveling in an armored car, protected by bodyguards from all sides, to tell Sderot residents not to panic. If Qassams were landing every day and every night in Savyon, Ramat Aviv and Herzliya Pituah, I am not certain that Vice Premier Shimon Peres would have uttered that stupid phrase "Qassams-Shmassams."
Peres, known for his preoccupation with defense issues, has never experienced battle. Throughout his career, he has never been under mortar and rocket fire. He lives in a bubble, like a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who has an algebraic formula that nobody understands - the essence of which is that one must not get hysterical, one must be steadfast. Theoretically, everyone agrees with it and admires his wisdom, certainly in Paris and in other world capitals. But when he demands that Sderot residents not panic, he proves just how cut off he is from the people. Preaching that people should not panic or get hysterical is justified, but the question is, why should Sderot have to play the role of a second Massada? Is it a military post or something? Is it an illegal settlement outpost? Is it in occupied territory?

The moment the Israel Defense Forces evacuated Gaza and its Jewish settlements, in which a third generation of settlers lived, and handed the territory over to the Palestinians, the firing of Qassams should have stopped immediately, if only to encourage Israel to continue to withdraw. The expectations that the Palestinians would rapidly construct multistory buildings in the evacuated territories to house refugees and create an atmosphere of progress were dashed. Instead, the liberated territories turned into a firing base. The increased bombardment of Israeli territory is the last thing that Israeli peace-seekers expected following the beginning of the end of the occupation and the separation from the dream of the greater land of Israel.

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The firing of hundreds of Qassams into Israel is not only annoying; it is also unwise. Not only does this not serve the Palestinians, it also strengthens Israeli opponents of evacuating most of the territories. The Qassam launches, which have made the lives of Sderot residents hell, may derive from rivalry among the terror organizations, or from a desire to get rid of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). If so, they do not need our services as mediators. There is no political logic to the Qassam fire; it has one sole aim: to kill Israeli civilians because they are Israelis. Only a miracle from heaven and technical flaws in the rockets have prevented mass slaughter in Sderot. But the very fact that a town in sovereign Israeli territory lives in fear every day is intolerable.

The internecine motives of the war of attrition that the Palestinians have declared on us - whether it is a competition between Hamas and Islamic Jihad or among other organizations - should not interest us. It is the government's obligation to protect its citizens. Over time, harsh responses have been suggested, among them wiping Beit Hanun off the face of the earth. Amram Mitzna, both a dove and a major general, has insisted that for every Qassam, "we have to come down on them with all our might."

The response that Israel has chosen thus far is pinpoint deterrence: Artillery fire at every site from which Qassams are launched, from air, land and sea. Now, pinpoint assassinations have also been added. In this method of response, civilians, women and children are killed by mistake, to a large extent because the terror organizations intentionally operate from within densely populated Palestinian territory, thus endangering their own people. And wonder of wonders: The Palestinians, who are firing exclusively at civilian targets, are raising an outcry, while we are apologizing. The sensitive souls among us are even infuriated at the killing of innocent and blameless Palestinian civilians. And are the inhabitants of Sderot not innocent and blameless? The Palestinians are knowingly and intentionally firing indiscriminately at civilian population centers, while we are looking for those who are doing the firing and expressing regret for killing by mistake.

A Qassam that is fired into the heart of a population center, even if it does not kill anyone, is tantamount to a Qassam that has hit the target and caused a mass slaughter of civilians, and it demands a strong response. The Palestinians should know that if our civilians continue to be targeted indiscriminately, their civilians, too, are liable to become a target. Not in the Peres-Shmeres method, but in the eye for an eye method.

Comment from Jeff Blankfort: When Israelis massacre Palestinians, it is not a massacre. When Palestinians fire home-made rockets at Israel and no one is killed it is a slaughter. This is what veteran Israeli journalist wants his readers to believe in this extraordinary paragraph that concludes his article:

"A Qassam that is fired into the heart of a population center,
even if it does not kill anyone, is tantamount to a Qassam that has hit the target and caused a mass slaughter of civilians, and it emands a strong response."


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Palestinians launch raid from Gaza into Israel

By Nidal al-Mughrabi
Reuters
June 25, 2006

RAFAH, Gaza Strip - Palestinian militants launched on Sunday their first deadly raid into Israel from Gaza since an Israeli pullout last year, killing two soldiers in an assault on a military post in which two attackers also died.

An Israeli military spokesman said a soldier was missing after the incident, which raised tensions along the Gaza border to their highest point since Israel completed a withdrawal of troops and settlers last September after 38 years of occupation.

Israeli forces scrambled across the frontier into the
Gaza Strip to search for the soldier amid fears he was kidnapped. There was no immediate claim from any of the militant groups that took part in the dawn raid that they were holding him.
A strong Israeli military response to the assault, claimed by the armed wing of the governing Hamas group and the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) as an "earthquake reaction" to recent air strikes that killed 14 Palestinian civilians, seemed likely.

"This was a very serious Hamas terrorist attack," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in broadcast remarks.

"Israel sees the Palestinian Authority headed by Chairman Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) and the Palestinian government responsible for the incident, with all that implies," he said, raising speculation Hamas leaders could be targeted.

Abbas, in a statement, said the raid, near the Kerem Shalom crossing, "violated the national consensus." He called on the international community "to prevent Israel from exploiting the attack to carry out large-scale aggression in the Gaza Strip."

The Israeli military spokesman said seven to eight gunmen infiltrated through a tunnel militants had dug under Israel's border fence near the Kerem Shalom crossing.

"They divided into three cells. One attacked an armored personnel carrier. The APC was empty. Another group attacked a tank with grenades ... causing two deaths and one serious injury. Another two attacked another position with gunfire," the spokesman said.

"Then they returned to Gaza ... We have two dead, three wounded and a soldier that is missing."

Hamas and the Popular Resistance Committees said two gunmen were killed.

"LIMITED ENTRY"

A spokesman for Hamas's Izz el-Deen al-Qassam brigades said about the missing soldier: "We neither confirm nor deny (we have him)."

Army Radio said Israeli generals had convened to discuss a possible broad ground operation in response to the raid.

Witnesses said that in the aftermath of the gun battle, two Israeli tanks backed by a helicopter crossed into an empty field in the Gaza Strip at the scene of the attack. The army said it was a "limited entry" to search the area.

Israeli air strikes, amid daily cross-border rocket launchings from Gaza, have killed 20 Palestinians in the past two weeks, 14 of them civilians.

Hamas and the PRC said their assault was also in response to the Israeli assassination this month of PRC leader Jamal Abu Samhadana.

Hamas, which heads the Palestinian government, ended a 16-month-old truce with Israel on June 9 after seven members of one Palestinian family were killed on a Gaza beach during a day of heavy Israeli shelling.

Hamas has blamed Israel for those deaths. Israel has denied responsibility.

Hamas, a militant movement sworn to Israel's destruction, came to power in March after winning a parliamentary election in January.



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Lebanon Condemns U.N. for Ignoring "Israeli Spy Network"

25/06/2006

Lebanese Foreign Minister Fawzi Salloukh stated yesterday that his country reserves the right to call upon the U.N. Security Council to hold a debate on Israeli Mossad espionage, which he claims was recently discovered in Lebanon.

Salloukh added that he would pass on information about the Israeli spy network and those involved in it to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. The minister expressed his surprise that the U.N. adviser on diplomatic matters had not raised the issue of Israeli espionage in the monthly report that he presents to the Security Council.

Salloukh stressed that, "this issue is very dangerous, especially when it comes to Israeli violations of Lebanese airspace."


Comment: The issue is much more dangerous that most think. We also would like to see the UN investigate Israeli spy networks and their activities - specifically concerning the murder of Rafik Hariri, the Madrid bombings and the 9/11 attacks, to name but a few.

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Hamas militants attack Israeli military outpost

Posted on Sun, Jun. 25, 2006
By Dion Nissenbaum
Knight Ridder Newspapers

JERUSALEM - For the first time since its leaders took control of the Palestinian government in March, Hamas militants led a sophisticated pre-dawn attack Sunday on an Israeli military outpost along the Gaza border, killing two soldiers and abducting a third.

The raid created the most serious crisis here since Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip last summer.

Israeli tanks almost immediately moved into the fringes of the Gaza Strip, talks between rival Palestinian factions over ending attacks inside Israel fell apart, and Egyptian diplomats worked feverishly to prevent the situation from spinning out of control.
JERUSALEM - For the first time since its leaders took control of the Palestinian government in March, Hamas militants led a sophisticated pre-dawn attack Sunday on an Israeli military outpost along the Gaza border, killing two soldiers and abducting a third.

The raid created the most serious crisis here since Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip last summer.

Israeli tanks almost immediately moved into the fringes of the Gaza Strip, talks between rival Palestinian factions over ending attacks inside Israel fell apart, and Egyptian diplomats worked feverishly to prevent the situation from spinning out of control.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his military leaders warned the Palestinian government that it would be held responsible for the safety of the kidnapped soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, 19.

"We intend to respond to what happened this morning in such a way that everyone involved will know the price they will pay will be painful, and if the situation does not change, will hurt sevenfold," said Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz.

It was unclear whether the attack could have taken place without the knowledge of top-level Hamas leaders. Nor was it clear how long the operation had been planned. In taking credit for the attack, militants called it retaliation for several recent Israeli raids, but the Palestinians attacked the Israeli outpost through a 700-yard tunnel that Capt. Noa Meir of the Israel Defense Forces said would have taken months to dig.

The new Hamas-led government urged militants holding Shalit to keep him safe, but stopped short of calling for his release. Israel's Cabinet met late Sunday night to weigh its options and reportedly cleared the way for a possible rescue attempt before staging a wider military assault.

But efforts to free Shalit could be tempered by painful memories of past efforts to rescue kidnapped Israelis. In 1994, another 19-year-old soldier, Israeli-American Nachson Waxman, was kidnapped by Hamas militants and killed five days later during a failed Israeli rescue mission.

Sunday's attack came as Hamas leaders were working out the final details of an agreement with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to halt attacks inside Israel.

Abbas, who leads the more moderate Fatah party, joined Israel in criticizing Hamas for staging the raid just as the two sides were finalizing a deal that would have barred such attacks.

Sunday's attack took place before dawn at an Israeli army outpost near the Kerem Shalom kibbutz, which lies just inside Israel at Gaza's southern end. The kibbutz is about four miles southeast of Rafah and about two miles northeast of the Egyptian border.

Using a tunnel more than a third of a mile long, three teams of Palestinian commandoes surprised soldiers at the outpost with mortars, machine guns and hand grenades.

The tunnel, which began under a Palestinian home 400 yards inside the Gaza Strip, stretched 300 yards into Israel.

At least two of the Palestinian militants were wearing Israeli military uniforms during the assault.

Two Israeli soldiers were killed and four others wounded, the Israeli military said.

Two Palestinians were also killed, but five or six others managed to escape back into the Gaza Strip with Shalit, who was seen walking with his captors, the Israeli military said.

The raid - dubbed "Operation Fading Illusion" by the attackers - marked the first time since Hamas took over the Palestinian government that its militant wing has launched such an assault inside Israel. Until this month, Hamas had largely stood by a 16-month cease-fire with Israel as smaller militant groups launched suicide bombings and other attacks on Israelis.

But Hamas called off its cease-fire in early June after a series of inflammatory deaths. First, Israel assassinated a top Hamas security official and leading Gaza Strip militant, Jamal Abu Samhadana, in an aerial missile strike. The following day, eight Palestinian civilians out for a day at the beach were killed in an explosion during an Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip coast.

An Israeli military investigation declared that none of its shells hit the Palestinians that afternoon, but the findings are in dispute, and Hamas immediately resumed launching rudimentary rockets into southern Israel.

The Hamas military wing joined Samhadana's Popular Resistance Committees and a new group called the Islamic Army in taking credit for the attack, calling it a response to the recent Israeli attacks, including three botched missile strikes that killed 13 Palestinian civilians in the past two weeks.

"The operation is a natural response to the occupation crimes and massacres against the Palestinian people," said Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri. "Hamas will continue to resist as long as there is occupation."

Sunday's kidnapping was the first since 2000, when three Israeli soldiers were kidnapped and killed by Hezbollah forces on Israel's border with Lebanon. Their bodies were returned to Israel four years later as part of a prisoner exchange.

Knight Ridder Newspapers special correspondent Cliff Churgin contributed to this report from Jerusalem.

Comment from Jeff Blankfort:P "But efforts to free I could be tempered by painful memories of past efforts to rescue kidnapped Israelis. In 1994, another 19-year-old soldier, Israeli-American Nachson Waxman, was kidnapped by Hamas militants and killed five days later during a failed Israeli rescue mission."

This is another classic example of how the Zionist controlled US media covers the Israel-Palestine conflict. Soldiers are not kidnapped, they are captured (except, it appears when they are Israelis). Children and innocent civilians are kidnapped (unless they happen to Palestinian, apparently, and they are simply arrested or detained). Israeli soldiers and soldiers of any country on active duty are not innocents.. One positive: the author did not refer to the Hamas militants as "terrorists" since attacks on soldiers are not terrorist acts despite the statements to the contrary by the Israeli and US propaganda ministries, This is a good basis for letters to the editor because you can compliment the paper on not using "terrorists" but criticize them for using "kidnapping."


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Islamic Army rejects to release seized Israeli soldier

www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-26 17:47:01

GAZA, June 26 (Xinhua) -- The new Palestinian militant group participated in the abduction of an Israeli soldier in Gaza under the name of the Islamic Army said on Monday that the group is an offshoot of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC).

The PRC is also a close ally to the ruling Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and have carried out, along with the Islamic Army, an attack against an Israeli army post at Kerem Shalom crossing in southeastern Gaza Strip, abducting Israeli soldier and killing two others.
A spokesman of the Islamic Army, calling himself as Abu Muthana, affirmed to reporters that the seized Israeli soldier would not be handed "as a present for any European or Arab side."

"We have spent nights for the sake of carrying out such operation, so would we hand him as a free present without any charge while our prisoners are held in Israel and the bodies of our martyrs are in Israeli morgues," he wondered.

About 8500 Palestinians are held in Israeli jails, including a number of senior Hamas activists who have spent more than 20 years in prison.

Abu Muthana also denounced the Israeli raid at the Palestinian jail of Jericho where Ahmed Sa'dat, the Secretary-General of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was kidnapped by Israeli soldiers and transported to Israel.

As he welcomed the Egyptian mediation to free the Israeli soldier, Abu Muthana wondered "where the mediations were when Sa'dat was abducted, when the family of Ghalia was killed and when the Secretary-General of the PRC, Jamal Abu Samhadana, was assassinated."

The PRC, most of its members were Fatah fighters, has supported Hamas in the January parliamentary elections.

After taking office in March, the Hamas-led government has appointed Abu Samhadana of the PRC as the General Director of the Interior Ministry. A few weeks later, Israel assassinated Abu Samhadana since he was wanted for Israel since the year 2000.



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Erekat warns of Israeli reoccupation of Gaza Strip

www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-26 17:07:34

RAMALLAH, June 26 (Xinhua) -- Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat warned on Monday of a possible Israeli reoccupation of the Gaza Strip in the wake of the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier on Sunday.

"The situation is really dangerous, we might face not only a large-scale military operation, but also reoccupation of the Gaza Strip," Erekat told the Voice of Palestine.
He said that President Mahmoud Abbas, who was in Gaza at the moment, has been holding "intensive and multi-level contacts" with Arab leaders and the Middle East quartet comprising the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations.

Erekat went on to say that Israel contacted the Palestinian National Authority via a third party, saying that "they (Israelis) contacted the U.S., which, in return, contacted us and also contacted Spain and the EU."

An Israeli soldier was abducted in an attack launched by eight Palestinian militants from three armed groups on an Israeli army post near Kerem Shalom crossing on the Gaza-Israel border on Sunday, in which two Israeli soldiers were killed and four others wounded.

Hamas' armed wing Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades, the leftist Popular Resistance Committees and the little-known Islamic Army jointly claimed responsibility for the fierce attack.

The Israeli army said that the missing soldier was still alive, vowing to spare no effort to secure his safe return. In the wake of the deadly attack, Israeli troops invaded the Gaza Strip in the largest intrusion since Israel pulled out forces and settlers from the Gaza Strip last summer after a 38-year-long presence there.

Erekat also urged the abductors to keep the soldier alive to avoid an imminent Israeli military operation on the Gaza Strip.



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Olmert says army ready for major Gaza operation

Mon Jun 26, 2006
Reuters

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Monday he had put the army on standby for a major military offensive against Palestinian militants in Gaza as officials tried to secure the release of a kidnapped soldier.

Olmert warned of a "comprehensive and protracted operation" after a raid into Israel on Sunday by militants including members of the ruling Hamas movement. The gunmen killed two soldiers and carried off a third. Two attackers were killed.

Israel has vowed reprisals that could include the re-invasion of Gaza, a coastal territory it quit last year after 38 years of occupation, or the assassination of Hamas leaders.

"Let it be clear: We will reach everyone, no matter where they are, and they know it," Olmert said in a speech in Jerusalem. "There will not be immunity for anyone."

[...] Israeli officials have hinted that should the deadline for Shalit's release go unmet, there could be an aerial blitz on Gaza targeting both civilian infrastructure and Hamas leaders including Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.

Israeli troops and armour have also been massing on Gaza's borders. Ramon said that an incursion, if ordered, would not constitute a reoccupation of the cramped and impoverished strip.

"When we go in, this operation, even if it lasts more than a couple of days, will not last for years," he said. "We left Gaza, we are not there. There is no reason for anyone in Gaza to act against Israel."
Olmert's inner cabinet have given the Palestinians until Tuesday to return Corporal Gilad Shalit, 19, a conscript tank gunner.

Palestinian security officials said there were negotiations with a group of gunmen that claimed responsibility for the border raid, although they have not confirmed holding Shalit.

"We are continuing our efforts to release the kidnapped soldier," one mediator said on condition of anonymity. "As of now, we have been told that the soldier is fine."

Olmert held both Hamas and President Mahmoud Abbas responsible for the raid, dashing any chance Israel could revive peacemaking with the moderate leader and circumventing the hardline Palestinian government with which he shares power.

Comment: Note the comment that Israel plans to target "civilian infrastructure", which of course means targetting Palestinian civilians. Note also the statement by the Israeli government official that "We left Gaza, we are not there, there is no reason for anyone in Gaza to act against Israel"

Such "logic" can only be understood from a complete biased perspective. Israel has confined 1.4 million Palestinians into a tiny parcel of Palestinian land known as the Gaza strip. It regularly cuts off food and essential goods deliveries to Gaza and has entirely destroyed any economic infrastructure that existed. The Israeli army regularly fires missile indiscriminately into Gaza, killing many Palestinian civilians. People in Gaza are generally forbidden to leave to see family members living in other parts of occupied Palestinian land. Palestinians in Gaza are being squeezed mercilessly and murdered, on almost a daily basis, by the Israeli government. Yet that same government has the gall to say that "there is no reason for anyone in Gaza to act against Israel."

You see, the "natural law" that Olmert et al is following here is that the life of one Israeli Jew is worth 1,000 lives of lesser people, especially the Palestinians, as he more or less stated last week. So while anyone else might see Palestinian militant attacks on an Israeli army that is occupying Palestinian land as justified, Israeli politicians feel compelled now to invade Gaza and seek retribution in the form of the murder of dozens of Palestinian civilians.

Such is the "law" to which the psychopath adheres.


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Getting locked up to get away from it all

Globe & Mail
MARK MACKINNON
Monday, June 19, 2006, Page A1

A mother wonders why her son prefers life in an Israeli jail

NABLUS, WEST BANK -- Mohammed Kharaz wanted to get away. He longed to escape the stretches of boredom broken by intense eruptions of violence that are a teenager's life in this strife-ridden city. So, for a break, he got himself thrown into an Israeli jail.
The idea wasn't even his, the 17-year-old confesses. He first heard it from a kid who sat beside him in class: If you get yourself arrested by the Israeli army, they send you to a prison with digital television, interesting books and even a decent soccer pitch. In short, everything you don't find in Nablus, a city cut off from the rest of the West Bank by a series of Israeli military checkpoints.

To Mohammed, it sounded like a dream vacation. So on Feb. 25, he tucked a kitchen knife under his shirt and headed toward the concrete barriers and metal turnstiles that block the road south to Ramallah.

It played out just as his friend described. When he got to the front of the long, slow-moving line of Palestinians seeking to leave Nablus, an Israeli soldier told him to lift up his shirt. With a sniper's rifle pointed at his chest, Mohammed pulled out the knife.

"Two soldiers jumped on top of me and started beating me up, but I didn't care," Mohammed recalled. "Getting arrested was like a fashion trend. It was the thing to do."

It's the latest peculiarity in a region already full of contradictions: Palestinian youths, who speak openly of their hatred for Israel, willingly putting themselves into Israeli custody because life in jail is seen as being better than life at home. Call it teen angst gone awry in a conflict zone.

"It's a real phenomenon," said Jacob Dallal, a spokesman for the Israeli army. He said soldiers had seen dozens of cases like Mohammed's, coming from both Nablus and nearby Jenin. "It's sort of a backhanded compliment to the [Israeli army] and the prison service. It passes from word of mouth that the conditions are not so bad in Israeli jails."

The first few nights after his arrest -- he was held with five others in a tiny cell just outside the Hawara checkpoint where he had been arrested -- were a gruelling disappointment for Mohammed. But 12 days later, he got the break he was hoping for: a transfer to Ofer prison, an Israeli jail for Palestinian prisoners just outside Ramallah.

Conditions in Ofer, the site of large-scale prisoners' riots late last year, have come under attack from human-rights groups alleging the torture and mistreatment of detainees. But Mohammed, as his classmates had promised him, had a different experience.

Prison life was a welcome break from the numbing routine of days sitting in school, evenings helping his father at the family's tailoring business and nights broken by gunfire. It was also a respite from his cramped family home where six people live in two small rooms, and from his father's insistence that the Western-dressed teenager abide by a strict interpretation of Islam.

"Ofer was like paradise. You could go to the toilet whenever you wanted, and we had a good time playing football and table tennis in the big courtyard. I started reading good books in there," he said, his hair short and gelled, and a hint of future stubble ringing his thin face. With a shy glance at his father, he added, "And I could stay up as late as I wanted."

Mohammed was pleased to get a seven-month sentence. He was crestfallen when his father, Qasim, paid a $250 bond to get him released early. "I was disappointed. My classmate who was sitting next to me went to jail two days before me and he's still there," he said jealously, suffering his father's glare. "In prison, there's digital television. You can watch everything. Out here, there's nothing."

While the stern Mr. Kharaz isn't impressed with his son's antics, he understands the motivation. "When a person becomes a young man, he starts looking for entertainment, and there are no good sports centres around here. All the sports fields in Nablus are all made of asphalt."

Other youths who have gotten arrested at the Hawara checkpoint did so in hopes of helping their families out of increasingly dire financial situations. Until a cut in Western aid forced the Palestinian Authority into effective insolvency earlier this year, the government paid a monthly stipend of about $200 to Palestinians held in Israeli jails.

Samira Tabbouq's son Mahmoud just celebrated his 18th birthday inside Ofer. Mahmoud has gotten himself jailed twice in the past two years in hopes of getting money for his family, and his mother glows with pride describing her son's crafty efforts to get the Israelis to arrest him.

Last year, Ms. Tabbouq said her son got arrested at Hawara checkpoint while carrying a smoke bomb he had made from sugar and coal. When the Israelis released him from jail 2˝ weeks later, he began plotting to get sent back.

The teenaged Mahmoud became the sole breadwinner for the family of eight when his father, a construction worker, was injured in a workplace accident five years ago.

At first, Mahmoud struggled to find after-school work in this economically depressed town that has been largely isolated from the outside world since Israel built the checkpoints during the height of the recent Palestinian intifada.

"His father pressured him to bring home money, to be a man, to help us with our poverty," Ms. Tabbouq said. "He would come home with nothing and his father would beat him."

On Feb. 4 of this year, he headed toward Hawara with a knife under his shirt and, ever since, has been in jail awaiting trial. Even though the Palestinian Authority's cash crunch means he's not helping his family financially, his mother, who visits him regularly, says he's as happy as he's been for a long time, reading books and dreaming of getting married and moving to Syria.

"My son is in jail because he has a big brain and is very intelligent. He thought about it a long time and realized the only way out of his economic and mental crisis was in prison," Ms. Tabbouq said.

Ironically, another reason Mahmoud wanted to go back to jail was to concentrate on his studies. His 17-year-old sister, Yusra, said that her brother, who was good in school, had spoken longingly of prison ever since he was released the first time.

"He couldn't stand the guys from the refugee camps who were always carrying weapons. He felt like he was suffocating. He told me, 'I can't achieve in school with this chaotic environment around me.' " Her brother is now applying to take his high-school exams from behind bars, Yusra added.

Mr. Kharaz, Mohammed's father, said that while he hoped his son wouldn't try to get jailed again, it was possible as long as life in Nablus continued to worsen.

"If the situation continues the way it is, everybody will be doing it," he said. "Young and old."



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Hamas: A Pale Image of the Jewish Irgun And Lehi Gangs

By Donald Neff
Washington Report, May/June 2006, pages 14-15
Special Report

AS EASY as it is to dismiss clichés as banal and misleading, the troubling problem is that they often cloak an essential truth. Scoffs and derision often greet the cliché that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." Yet freedom fighters is exactly how Israelis view the early Zionists who fought in 1947 for the establishment of Israel-and how Palestinians now consider their fighters resisting Israeli occupation.

The reality is that when faced with a superior military force, such as Britain possessed in 1947 and Israel does today against the Palestinians, terror is the underdog's only viable weapon. Once a state has been established and legitimized, however, as in the cases of Israel and South Africa, the former "terrorists" tend to gain a veil of legitimacy as well. But legitimacy is now being denied Hamas. Even though Palestinians elected a Hamas-led government in free and fair elections, Israel denies it legitimacy on the grounds that Hamas is a terrorist organization.
Sixty years ago, however, at the time of the British Mandate, it was Jews in Palestine who mainly waged terrorism against the Palestinians. As Jewish leader David Ben-Gurion recorded in his personal history of Israel: "From 1946 to 1947 there were scarcely any Arab attacks on the Yishuv [the Jewish community in Palestine]."

The same could not be said for the Zionists. Jewish terrorists waged an intense and bloody campaign against the Palestinians, British, and even some Jews who opposed them leading up to the establishment of Israel.

The two major Jewish terror organizations in pre-independence Palestine were the Irgun Zvai Leumi-National Military Organization, NMO, also known by the Hebrew letters Etzel-founded in 1937, and the Lohamei Herut Israel, Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, Lehi in the Hebrew acronym, also known as the Stern Gang after its leader Avraham Stern, known as Yair, founded in 1940.

The Irgun was led by Menachem Begin, the future Israeli prime minister who was a leading proponent of Revisionist Zionism, the militant branch of Zionism pioneered by Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky, which openly despised the Arabs and sought restoration of what it called Eretz Yisrael, the ancient land of Israel. By this was meant "both sides of the Jordan," the Irgun slogan meaning all of Palestine and Jordan was the rightful home of the Jews.

Another belief of Begin's was that of the "fighting Jew," a romanticized idea expressed in Jabotinsky's old Betar movement song of "we shall create, with sweat and blood, a race of men, strong, brave and cruel." Israeli scholar Avishai Margalit translated the verse as "proud, generous and cruel," adding: "Many are still waiting for the generous part to emerge."

The Irgun was the dominant Jewish terrorist organization, both in size and the number and frequency of its attacks. Its most spectacular feat up to this time had been the July 22, 1946 blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, with the killing of 91 people-41 Arabs, 28 British and 17 Jews. Mainstream Zionists despised Begin and his Revisionists, although there was cooperation between the two on military matters. Ben-Gurion, the leader of mainstream Zionism, fought throughout his premiership with Begin.

The other major Jewish terrorist group, Lehi, was more extremist than the Irgun, claiming all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates as belonging to the Jews. When Jabotinsky declared a cease-fire in the fight against Britain and its mandate troops in Palestine during World War II, Stern broke with him and founded Lehi. Stern sought alliance with the Nazis, both because they shared an enemy in Britain and because Lehi shared Hitler's totalitarian ideology. During the war Sternists openly celebrated Nazi victories on the battlefield.

An infamous document called the "Ankara Document" because it was found in the German Embassy in Ankara after the war, detailed Avraham Stern's ideas "concerning the solution of the Jewish question in Europe." It was dated Jan. 11, 1941. At the time, Stern was still a member of the Irgun, which he called by its initials, NMO. Wrote Stern: "The evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe is a precondition for solving the Jewish question; but this can only be made possible and complete through the settlement of these masses in the home of the Jewish People, Palestine, and through the establishment of a Jewish state in its historical boundaries....The NMO...is well acquainted with the goodwill of the German Reich government and its authorities toward Zionist activity inside Germany and toward Zionist emigration plans....The NMO is closely related to the totalitarian movements in Europe in its ideology and structure."

In the Partition period, Irgun had around 2,000 men, while Lehi had about 800. Though the memberships were comparatively small, the damage these two groups caused in inflaming animosity between Arab and Jew was considerable. When Stern was killed by British police in 1942, leadership of Lehi was shared; among the leaders were Nathan Yalin-Mor, one of the eventual killers of Count Bernadotte, and Yitzhak Shamir, another future prime minister of Israel.

Arab terrorists carried out some major operations as well, including the bombing of the Jewish Agency and the Palestine Post. But in contrast to Jewish violence, it was unorganized and episodic. As historian Michael C. Hudson noted: "Organized Jewish violence against the British and Arabs (exemplified by the Irgun's bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946), however, was far more systematic and successful than that of the Palestinians, and the latter were unable to play a significant role in the final years of the Mandate."

The Jewish Agency, as the official representative of the Jewish community, repeatedly denied any responsibility for the acts of the Irgun and Lehi, maintaining they were underground terrorist groups operating outside the law. However, there was close cooperation among Irgun, Lehi and the Haganah underground army under an agreement called the Hebrew Resistance Movement and aimed specifically against the British Mandatory government. It went into force in the fall of 1945, when "Irgun and Lehi accepted Haganah discipline in the conduct of all armed operations," in the words of historian Noah Lucas.

By December 1947, British High Commissioner Alan Cunningham reported to London: "...the Haganah and the dissident groups are now working so closely together that the Agency's claim that they cannot control the dissidents is inadmissible."

Donald Neff is the author of the Warriors trilogy, Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy towards Palestine and Israel, and Fifty Years of Israel, all available from the AET Book Club.

1947: A Year of Terror

Jan. 12-Four killed by Irgun terrorist bombing of British headquarters.
Jan. 13-Arab kidnapped and castrated by Jewish terrorists.
March 1-Sixteen Britons killed by Jewish terrorists/Britain invokes martial law
March 10-Jewish informer killed by Jewish terrorists.
March 11-Two British soldiers killed by Jewish terrorists.
April 8-British constable killed by Jewish terrorists.
April 8-Jewish boy killed by British troops.
April 8-Jew beaten to death by Arabs.
April 22-Eight killed in Jewish terrorist bombing of the Cairo-Haifa train.
April 25-Five killed in Jewish terrorist bombing of British camp.
April 26-British police official killed by Jewish terrorist.
May 8-Three Jewish shops in Tel Aviv whose owners refused to contribute to Jewish terrorist groups burned down by Jewish terrorists.
May 8-Jew killed near Tel Aviv by Arab terrorists.
May 12-Two British policemen killed in Jewish Jerusalem.
May 15-British policeman killed in terrorist ambush.
May 15-Two British soldiers killed in terrorist Stern Gang attack.
May 16-Two British police officers killed by terrorists.
May 18-One Jew killed, one wounded by Arab terrorists.
June 5-Jewish terrorists introduce letter bombs in Middle East.
June 28-Four British soldiers killed in Jewish terrorist raids.
July 3-"Anti-terrorist" Jewish families beaten up by Irgunists.
July 18-British soldier killed by Jewish terrorists.
July 19-Another British soldier killed by Jewish terrorists.
July 20-Yet another British soldier killed by Jewish terrorists.
July 23-65 Jews killed when Haganah sinks immigration ship.
July 26-Two British soldiers killed in booby trap.
July 29-Three Jews executed by hanging. Jewish terrorists retaliate by hanging two British soldiers.
Aug. 5-Three British police killed by bomb; plot discovered to poison the water supply of non-Jewish parts of Jerusalem with botulism and other bacteria.
Aug. 10-Four Jews killed in Arab terror attack on Tel Aviv café.
Aug. 12-Five Jews, four Arabs killed, others injured, in spread of violent incidents over three days.
Aug. 15-Twelve Palestinians killed in raid by Haganah troops.
Aug. 18-Shops of five Jews in Tel Aviv destroyed by Jewish terrorists.
Aug. 23-Five Arabs of one family-two men, a woman and two children-killed by Jewish terrorists.
Sept. 7-French foil Stern Gang plot to air bomb London.
Sept. 21-British messenger killed by Jewish terrorists.
Sept. 26-Four British policemen killed in Irgun terrorist bank robbery.
Sept. 27-Illegal Jewish immigrant killed by British.
Sept. 29-13 killed, 53 wounded in Irgun terrorist attack on British police station.
Oct. 4-Two Jews killed in ambush, two Arabs killed in retaliation.
Oct. 13-Two British troops killed by Jewish terrorists in Jerusalem.
Oct. 26-Jewish settlement policeman found killed near Gaza.
Nov. 3-Jewish policeman killed, reportedly by Stern Gang after refusing to reveal secret police matters.
Nov. 12-21 killed in British-Jewish clashes.
Nov. 14-Jewish terrorists kill 4 Britons in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv
Nov. 30-Violent riots erupt throughout Arab world following adoption of U.N. partition plan. In Palestine, seven Jews killed and eight wounded in the first day. All told, during the first week at least 159 persons were killed in the Middle East, 66 of them in Palestine.
Dec. 2-Palestinians begin 3-day protest strike; 20 Jews, 15 Arabs killed. Five Arabs and seven Jews were killed the next day during a six-hour battle on the Tel Aviv-Jaffa border.
Dec. 13-35 Palestinian civilians killed in Jewish terrorist attacks.
Dec. 14-14 Jews killed by Arab Legion in retaliation.
Dec. 18-Palmach ("assault companies") kills 10 Arabs, including 5 children, in nighttime raid on northern Galilee village of Khissas. The following day Haganah troops blew up the home of the village elder of Qazaza in central Palestine, killing several inhabitants. Wrote The Times of London: "While the Jews are suffering mainly through sniping at their road convoys, the Arabs have lost many lives through Jewish assaults on their villages."
Dec. 20-Haganah raid on village of Qazaza kills one Palestinian.
Dec. 24-Stern Gang member killed for betrayal of another member.
Dec. 25-16 Arabs, Jews and British killed on Christmas.
Dec. 25-Palestinian landowner killed for selling land to Jews.
Dec. 26-Ben-Gurion proposes major offensive to reduce Arab population.
Dec. 26-Jewish terrorists get $107,000 in heists of diamond plants.
Dec. 29-14 Arabs killed by Irgun bomb in Jerusalem.
Dec. 29-Irgun flogs British major and three sergeants.
Dec. 30-41 Jews, 6 Arabs killed in riot sparked by Stern Gang.
Dec. 31-Irgun claims to have killed 374 Arabs and British during year.-D.N.



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American Psycho


Neil Young, from Nixon to Bush

Sean O'Hagan
Sunday June 25, 2006
The Observer

A big black vintage Buick stands, gleaming and immaculate, in the empty car park of an otherwise nondescript studio complex on the southern outskirts of San Francisco. The car's owner, who drove here this morning from his 180-acre ranch in nearby San Mateo county, is of a similar vintage, but looks altogether less well-tended. His 60-year-old frame, once impossibly gangly, has filled out, and is clothed in a faded cotton shirt, ill-fitting denim jacket and baggy, khaki-coloured trousers that give way to white socks and scuffed trekking sandals. The thrift shop-meets-great outdoors look is topped off by a battered safari hat of dubious provenance which sits atop a straggly mess of long, greying hair. Everything about him looks slightly faded, windblown, weatherbeaten.
And yet this ageing unkempt figure exudes a timeless cool, a languorous, dishevelled grace that only those who truly don't give a hoot what the world thinks of them exude. Despite what style magazines might tell you, it is a look that cannot be bought or styled. It takes a lifetime of not caring to perfect, and if you were to ask Neil Young about it he would look at you like you were mad, and maybe fix you with that gimlet stare of his that has chilled many an interviewer's soul.

'People were always afraid of Neil,' his long-time manager Elliot Roberts once remarked when asked about his charge's legendary hair-trigger temperament, 'but he was actually very frail. He sort of glared at people and they'd freeze. He was so intense, nothing was casual.'

The glint in his eye is still there but today, at least, it seems more mischievous than malevolent. And Neil Young, though he has had a recent brush with mortality, no longer appears frail, but robust and hearty. When he finally ambles into the back room of the studio he seems relaxed and affable, and, despite his longstanding aversion to interviews, comes across initially as shy rather than wary.

'I'm doin' good,' he says, grinning, when I tell him how well he looks. Last year he underwent brain surgery to remove an aneurism that had gone undetected for years, and there were some unspecified post-operative complications he is loth to talk about. 'I've come though, and I feel kind of blessed.'

There is no evidence to suggest that this recent illness has made him ease up on his relentless work schedule. If anything, the opposite is the case. He recently released Living With War, hismost controversial album to date. It signals another major change of direction, both musically and politically, the abrasive sound matched by lyrics that pull no punches in their anti-war, anti-Bush message. 'Let's impeach the President for lyin'.' runs one song, 'and misleading our country into war/Abusing all the power that we gave him,/And shipping all our money out the door.'

He cut the album in a couple of weeks and initially released it on the internet. It followed close on the heels of last year's wistful and reflective Prairie Wind, several songs of which were written and recorded in the fortnight between the diagnosis and the removal of his aneurism. 'I had to wait a few weeks because the doctor wasn't available to do the operation,' he says matter of factly, 'so I just headed up to Nashville and started working.'

Last year, too, he played a pair of intimate shows in Nashville which form the core of new concert film, Heart of Gold, directed by his friend Jonathan Demme and due for release here in August. There is also a late summer stadium tour scheduled where he will once again be reunited with the equally grizzled Crosby, Stills & Nash with whom he has conducted a fitful and often fraught working relationship. 'When we were younger we fought like brothers,' he says, 'but we've got some history on that now.' One wonders, though, what's in it for him; as a rueful David Crosby once remarked, 'Neil needs the three of us like a stag needs a hat rack.'

In the meantime, in this very studio, he is overseeing the final stages of an exhaustive - and, among fans, semi-mythical - archival project which will culminate in the release of a series of CDs of unreleased material spanning his 40-year career. 'I've be en real busy this year, even by my standards,' he laughs. 'I kind of picked up a head of steam back there after the illness, and I just went with it. Plus,' he says, without a discernible trace of irony, 'I reckon I'm finally getting pretty good at what I do.'

What can you say to that? I just grin back at him and shake my head. If truth be told I'm feeling slightly nervous-going-on-starstruck in his presence. Journalistic objectivity be damned, I'm just grateful to be meeting the great man. We go back a long way, Neil and me, back to my teenage years in the early to mid-Seventies when his songs as well as his high prairie voice and his brooding outsider persona held me in their sway like nothing since.

For a long time back there, like many closet romantics, I was mesmerised by the very notion of Neil Young, and by the promise his songs carried of another altogether more gilded life among the impossibly bohemian denizens of America's fabled West Coast. A life lived in thrall to the highway and the desert and spent in the blissful company of all those dreamy sunkissed Laurel Canyon ladies. A life where you simply hung out and got high and wrote song after song about the heartbreak and despair of unrequited love. What could be finer?

Back then, in the grey, rain-drenched dreariness of small-town Northern Ireland, I listened to Neil Young's albums incessantly, poring over the sleeves, the credits, the lyrics. I even had my mother sew patches of an old rug on the backside of my Wranglers in homage to that photograph of Neil's jeans on the back of After the Goldrush. He was the brooding West Coast-rock troubadour par excellence. And wherever Neil went I journeyed with him, even along the druggy, desolate back roads he travelled on the ragged masterpiece that was Tonight's the Night, even across the remote, whacked-out terrain he was stranded in on On the Beach

Not even the great punk purge of the late Seventies, which consigned most of his complacent contemporaries to the dustbin of musical history, could shake my faith in the man or his music. I stuck by Neil and he responded accordingly, releasing the magnificently twisted Rust Never Sleeps, the album that bequeathed us his most infamous and oft-quoted line: 'It's better to burn out than to fade away'. Fifteen years later that same line would come back to haunt him when the dismal Kurt Cobain, much to Young's dismay, scrawled it on his suicide note.

But to everyone's surprise, including his own, Young neither burnt out nor faded away. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, it seemed like the only thing he knew how to do was to keep on keeping on. It's been quite a journey. Or, as Elliot Roberts once put it: 'It's not like the art is separate from the life, it's one and the same with Neil.' Only Dylan, indeed, has walked that line with the same kind of devil-may-care determination and utter disregard for the vagaries of musical taste. Only Dylan walks on to a stage trailing such a mythology, such a surfeit of startling songs, such a devoted to-the-point-of- obsessive following. Put simply, Neil Young is one of the last great maverick geniuses of rock, and bone fide living legend to boot. Not that he gives a hoot about that either.

'It's strange but I now have the kind of fame that comes with just being around so long,' he says. 'I have all the people who have been with me for a long time, and know my work, and have made the journey with me. But I also have all these other people who know who Neil Young is but don't really know shit about me. It all gets kind of strange sometimes.'

We are gathered here ostensibly to talk about his latest album, Living With War, a bunch of what he calls 'rough and ready, simple, straight-ahead folk songs about the war in Iraq'. In typically perverse fashion he has set those songs to storming electric guitar riffs and employed a 100-piece choir to ram home the anti-Bush message. The whole album, he tells me proudly, was recorded 'live and fast and with no overdubs'. The most catchy, and controversial, song is called 'Let's Impeach the President', which I can't imagine has received much mainstream radio play in America.

'More than you'd think, actually,' he says, eyes glinting. 'Which surprised me, too. A big part of what this record is about is just getting the information out there that Americans have a conscience about what's happening, too. There's a lot of people in America who didn't want this war to happen, who just want to be able to express themselves about this situation, but for various reasons they are not being heard. In a way this record is not for me, it's for them.'

Why, though, did he make a 'metal-folk' record that's heavier on the metal than the folk - and then bring a choir on board? 'Well I just went with my instincts as always. I was trying for a sound that really resonates so that's why the choir's on there. I wanted something so utterly simple and unarranged that people could sing along with it and play along with it, just like those old stirring folk songs. So when we play them live, anyone can get on board. There's no arrangements to learn, no fancy harmonies. It's stripped-down folk really, but I wanted it to sound angry and agitated and raw, too. My voice, and what I think as an individual, is much less important on this project. It's the project itself that's the important thing. It's about making yourself heard.'

Living With War is indeed an angry record but one that manages to sound somehow patriotic, too. Young says he waited a long time to make it because he was hoping that 'maybe a younger artist would stand up and write these kinds of songs'. That never happened, or at least not in the high-profile way he thought it would. 'For a while, you know, I didn't feel it was my place. Being 60 years old, and being who I am, it just didn't feel appropriate,' he continues, getting into his stride. 'Plus, after 9/11, we were told by the government that expressing dissent was not patriotic. I mean, I trusted the government back then. I was one of those guys who thought the Patriot Act was an OK idea when it first came out. I got behind it.' He shakes his head at his own folly. What, I ask, changed his mind? 'Bush did. The government did. We need a leader who's more cautious, not so reckless with things they don't understand. Other cultures need to be respected. Culture itself needs to be respected. I mean, I feel Saddam was bad and had to be overthrown, but are we smart or are we stupid? At this point in our evolution, with all the technology that we have, there has to be a better way of doing this than bombing a country into oblivion.'

I read somewhere that the anger that underpins Living With War was precipitated by a newspaper article he had read about Iraq. 'Well, it was a picture on the cover of USA Today actually. A cargo plane full of soldiers who we re doctors ready to take off for Iraq. The story was about how medicine had made such leaps and bounds in this war, how doctors had learned so much from this conflict. Man, that was just too much for me. Are you really trying to tell me that the positive side of the war is the medical experience gained from all those wasted people. There's really something wrong with that picture.'

It has to be said that Young himself is a complicated political creature and his allegiances have often been decided with the same kind of impulsiveness that underpins many of his artistic decisions. (This is a guy, after all, who plots his creative course according to the lunar cycle, scheduling recording dates and even live shows to coincide with the full moon.) In the late Sixties, when Nixon was in office, he wrote one of the great American protest songs, the tense and accusatory 'Ohio', a visceral response to the shooting dead of four students by the National Guard at Kent State University. In the Eighties though, when he hit one of his more sustained fallow periods - releasing a series of albums that prompted his label boss and former friend David Geffen to sue him for making wilfully uncommercial music - he briefly came out publicly for President Reagan. It was a move that would have terminally scuppered the credibility of many a lesser artist.

More recently too, just after 9/11, he recorded the bullish 'Let's Roll', the kind of song you could imagine a fired-up fighter squadron listening to before they took off for Iraq. Consistency has never been one of Neil Young's characteristics, in his life or his art, but one senses that, following his illness and the recent death of his father, he finally has adopted a more centred - even, dare I say it, less contrary - world view.

'We need to discuss this stuff, you know, just address it in public,' he says, sounding impassioned but focused, when I press him on his anti-Bush stance. 'There's been too much silence, too much phoney news. That's why I have put the Living With War videos on my website with all the news info running through them. Let's debate. Let's discuss. It's an open sore on this country, this war, and you can't just put a band-aid on it. You gotta lance it, and drain it, and let it heal. Might take a while but what's the alternative?'

Young, whose faith in the internet as a 'tool for getting the truth out there' is almost total, has even created a link on his website called 'The Great Debate' where fans and critics alike can express their feelings. 'There's been a lot of viciously negative reviews and we've stuck them on there too,' he grins, ever the iconoclast. 'It's not the Sixties any more, it's not about rock'n'roll, it's a different world now. It's about the things people feel and fear today, and those feelings and fears need - and have a right - to be expressed too.'

Almost four decades have passed since the frail and shy 20-year old Neil Young drove another big, black, vintage car - a '53 Pontiac hearse, to be exact - all the way from his hometown, Ontario, to the promised land of Los Angeles. Four decades since he and his sidekick, the late Bruce Palmer, met up with Stephen Stills on Sunset Boulevard and formed Buffalo Springfield, the most promising - and in many ways most disappointing - West Coast rock group of the Sixties. The restlessness that precipitated that epic journey from Canada to California, an acoustic guitar and a bag of grass for company, has remained a constant in his life and is perhaps the key aspect of Young's extraordinary and often wilfully impulsive creative odyssey.

'I guess it's pretty constant, yeah,' he nods. 'I don't like to stay. Got to move on. Even when I'm writing songs I need to up and move, even if it's only down the block. Soon as you change the scenery something happens, and the words start coming. Anything but staying in the same place. That ain't ever worked for me.'

Where does he think that restlessness comes from? 'Growing up, I guess. Up in Canada we were always going to different places - down to Florida in the wintertime, back up to Ontario in the summer. As a kid I grew up with that sense of movement, the highway, the prairie rolling by. My dad was a writer and he liked to keep moving, too.'

His father, Scott Young, died last year, aged 87, and his spirit hovers over many of the more reflective songs on Prairie Wind. By all reports, Scott was a bit of a maverick himself. He worked as a sports writer of some repute in his native Canada and once moonlighted to write an illuminating book, Neil & Me, about the often troubled relationship he had with his more famous son. Neil Spencer, former editor of NME and now an Observer writer, remembers Scott turning up at the NME offices to trawl though the back issues while researching the book. 'He was quite a dashing figure, tall, handsome, well-dressed, extremely charming. He stayed all afternoon and you could see he was very rigorous and thorough. He chatted easily about Neil. I remember him saying he was "real proud" of him.'

The father-son relationship, though, was for a long time a troubled and fractious one. Scott Young was another itinerant soul, who had upped and left the family home when Neil was 15, leaving both his young sons in the care of their mother. According to Young's biographer, Jimmy McDonough, the indomitable 'Rassy' Ragland Young was a hard drinker who, until her deathbed, never forgave her errant husband for his betrayal.

Neil Young's life has also been mapped out by impulsive relationships with strong women. He married his first wife, Susan Acevedo, in 1968, and divorced her just as swiftly in 1970. That same year he moved in with Carrie Snodgrass, an actress he first saw and fell for while watching the film Diary of A Mad Housewife. She was later immortalised on the baroque ballad 'A Man Needs A Maid', on which he sang, 'I fell in love with the actress/ She was playing a part that I knew so well'.

Though he made some of his finest music in the Seventies, the decade was also marked by a series of personal tragedies. In 1972 his first son, Zeke, was born, and soon after diagnosed with cerebral palsy. That same year Young lost his guitarist and close friend 27-year-old Danny Whitten, and his favourite roadie, Bruce Berry, to drug overdoses. Then, six years later, having married his current wife, Pegi, Young's second son, Ben, was born with an even more severe form of cerebral palsy.

'It took time to get used to the fact that it wasn't one but two,' Young told Time magazine in 2005, one of the few times he has publicly commented on this appalling twist of fate. 'Eventually Pegi and I just came to the understanding that we had been chosen, and this was one of the things we were going to do with our life, turning this situation into something positive for all kinds of kids.'

To this end Young and Pegi, his wife of 28 years, founded the Bridge School in Hillsborough, California in 1986, which specialises in providing communication through technology for non-verbal, physically challenged children. Each year Young hosts and headlines a concert there and has cajoled the likes of Paul Simon, Tom Petty and Pearl Jam to appear.

Ben, now 28, quadraplegic and unable to speak often accompanies his father on tour in a coach that Young has fitted with a hydraulic lift. The singer's obsession with model trains - he is part-owner of Lionel, the model train company - is also bound up with Ben's condition. Young has developed a command and control system that allows his son to operate the vast model train track he has installed in the converted barn near his home. For the last 36 years Young has lived on that same sprawling ranch near San Francisco that he bought with the royalties of the first CSNY album, Deja Vu, and christened 'Broken Arrow' after one of his early songs. (His third child, Amber, aged 22, is studying fine art.)

'The ranch has given me root,' he says, 'and I have family now. Things tend to be a bit more planned these days. Didn't use to be, though.' He shakes his head and laughs. 'I used to just up and go where I wanted to, never tell anybody.'

I put it to Young that the family is now a recurring motif in his later work, just as the notion of movement and restlessness was on his earlier albums. 'Oh yeah. I'm glad you picked up on that. The whole underlying story on Living With War is the bond of the family, and the effect that living with war has on families, not just in Iraq but here in America. I mean, the news doesn't focus too much on the bodies of the kids that come home. That's the part that's heartbreaking to me. I'm a family man to the core.'

How, though, has he managed to balance his family commitments with the nomadic life of the rock musician? 'Well I try and take my family on the road with me. You have to commit to the family and the work, give them both the respect and the attention they deserve. With me, I have to go with the work when it takes me. I can wait around for the songs to come but I got to go with them when they do. My wife, Pegi, she's just a great woman, and it's worked largely because she's been so understanding of that. She's intelligent and she's a hell of a lot of fun. You got to have that stimulation in a relationship,' he says, grinning like a big, goofy kid, 'I got a lot of work to do just to keep up with her.'

I ask Young if his recent brush with mortality has affected the way he writes songs. 'That's a hard question to answer,' he says, staring off into the corner. 'I mean, when it comes to songwriting I tend not to analyse it too much. I just let if flow out from the subconscious, unedited. I figure if you don't question it too much you keep it pure. I don't analyse and I don't question, and I don't do too much editing.'

So he doesn't get hung up on mistakes? 'Hell, no. If I did I'd still be working on my first project. I can't afford the time. I'd rather do something new than try to fix something I already did. I got to move on. It's always the next thing with me. Always.'

What would he do if the muse suddenly forsook him, if the songs dried up? 'Shit! Who knows? I mean, I'm not threatened by the thought of not having an idea. It's happened before and I just waited it out. I just look at it that the Great Spirit has given me a break. I'd think, time to go sailing! Time to go swimming! Time to go to Hawaii and look at some fish! Man, there's so many other things to do.'

He thinks this over for a long while, looking around this overcrowded room at all the various fragments from his archives, the old tour schedules, the track listings, the photographs of his younger self, the CDs full of old familiar songs, and new songs and live songs. All the map reference points from his restless, song-strewn life. Then he says, 'what I do, it's all about energy. Always. But the energy comes from knowing when to hit it. I don't do it because it's on the schedule. It's not about a schedule. It's not about writing songs that are going to be accepted, or songs that are going to make a lot of money. None of those reasons are good enough anymore. You've got to have a valid reason if you want to make the kind of music I play. You really have to want to make music, and have something to say. That's what I'm committed to.'

Still restless then, and still searching, even at 60 Neil Young remains a law unto himself. Long may he run.

In his words

On his father It was from him I got the idea you could be whoever you want to be, just make up a character.

On Kurt Cobain's suicide I read something and someone told me a few things that made me think he was in trouble that week. I even had my office look for him.

On Iraq To be rid of Saddam was good for the Iraqi people. But the manner in which it took place,maybe there was a better way to do it. Our leaders lost patience.

On Bush Bush has polarised the country, creating a breeding ground for opposition.

On Buffalo Springfield If we reformed we'd be like a statue or something. A monument with birds shitting on our heads. That wouldn't be right.



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CIA officer claims US ignored warnings about WMD errors: report

AFP
June 25, 2006

WASHINGTON - US administration officials chose to ignore a CIA officer's warnings that an Iraqi defector's claims of purported biological labs made by Iraq for germ warfare were unproven, The Washington Post has reported.

The Post quoted veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller who, it said, "recognized the source, an Iraqi defector suspected of being mentally unstable and a liar.

"The CIA officer took his pen," he recounted in an interview, "and crossed out the whole paragraph" in a statement to be presented by then secretary of state
Colin Powell to the United Nations.

"A few days later, the lines were back in the speech. Powell stood before the UN Security Council on February 5 (2003) and said: 'We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails.'"
Drumheller was stunned, the newspaper reported.

"We thought we had taken care of the problem," it quoted the man who was the CIA's European operations chief before retiring last year, as saying. "But I turn on the television and there it was, again."

The newspaper said that although the US government had "acknowledged intelligence failures over Iraqi weapons claims that led to war", new accounts by former insiders such as Drumheller shed light on "one of the most spectacular failures of all".

This was, it added: "How US intelligence agencies were eagerly drawn in by reports about a troubled defector's claims of secret germ factories in the Iraqi desert. The mobile labs were never found."

Drumheller "described in extensive interviews repeated attempts to alert top CIA officials to problems with the defector, code-named Curveball, in the days before the Powell speech," The Post said.

Yet "the warnings triggered debates within the CIA but ultimately made no visible impact at the top, current and former intelligence officials said," it added.

"In briefing Powell before his UN speech, George Tenet, then the CIA director, personally vouched for the accuracy of the mobile-lab claim, according to participants in the briefing.

"Tenet now says he did not learn of the problems with Curveball until much later and that he received no warnings from Drumheller or anyone else," the Post said.

In late 2002, the Bush administration began scouring intelligence files for reports of Iraqi weapons threats, the newspaper went on.

"Drumheller was asked to press a counterpart from a European intelligence agency for direct access to Curveball. Other officials confirmed that it was the German intelligence service," the Post said.

"The German official declined but then offered a startlingly candid assessment," Drumheller recalled.

"'He said, 'I think the guy is a fabricator,'" Drumheller was quoted as saying, declining to name the official.

"He said: 'We also think he has psychological problems. We could never validate his reports.'"

Although "no American had ever interviewed Curveball, analysts with the CIA's Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control believed the informant's technical descriptions were too detailed to be fabrications," the Post said.



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Congressman accuses New York Times of treason

Last Updated Mon, 26 Jun 2006 06:45:38 EDT
CBC News

The U.S. congressman who criticized Canada's effort in the war on terrorism earlier this month is now denouncing the New York Times.

New York representative Peter King, who is also the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, is urging the Bush administration to seek criminal charges against the newspaper for reporting last week about a secret financial-monitoring program used to trace alleged terrorists.
"We're at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous," King told the Associated Press.

King said he would write U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales urging him to begin a prosecution.

While the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times also ran stories about the program, King is targeting the New York Times because the paper in December also disclosed a secret domestic wiretapping program.

New York Times executive editor Bill Keller wrote in a letter on the newspaper's website Sunday that the decision to publish came after weeks of discussion with administration officials and that the paper didn't feel the program would be jeopardized.

The Times' editors, Keller wrote, "remain convinced that the administration's extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest."

Earlier this month, King seized on the anti-terrorism arrests of 17 men in an alleged bomb threat in the Toronto area to raise concern of the possibility of an attack in the U.S. spawned in Canada.

"Americans should be very concerned," King said at the time. "Canada is our northern neighbour and there is a large al-Qaeda presence in Canada.

"I think there is a disproportionate number of al-Qaeda in Canada because of their very liberal immigration laws, because of how political asylum is granted so easily."

King is one of several politicians to seize on the revelations reported last week.

It was revealed that since late 2001 the CIA and the U.S. Treasury Department examined financial records from an international banking co-operative known as Swift (The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication).

Swift captures information on millions of wire transfers and other methods of moving money in and out of the country each day.

The service generally does not detect private, individual transactions in the United States, such as withdrawals from an ABM or bank deposits.

Democrats and civil libertarians have questioned whether the program violated privacy rights.



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US to deploy PAC-3 missiles by year end: report

www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-26 09:41:45


TOKYO, June 26 (Xinhua) -- Washington has recently notified Tokyo that it will deploy Patriot Advanced Capability 3 (PAC-3) missiles in Okinawa, southern Japan by the end of the year and Japan plans to accept it, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported Monday, quoting government sources.

The surface-to-air PAC-3 missiles are to be deployed at the Kadena Air Base or the U.S. Air Force's Kadena Ammunition Storage Area in the Okinawa prefecture, to defend U.S. forces in Japan from possible threat of missiles from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), the report said.
The United States notified Japan about the deployment plan on June 17 at a meeting in Hawaii about missile defense. Japan plans to accept the deployment arrangement in principle, according to the sources.

The missiles, with an effective protective range of tens of kilometers, will complement the Standard Missile 3 missiles installed on Aegis-equipped ships.

Some additional 500 to 600 U.S. troops are expected to be deployed along with three or four PAC-3 missile batteries, the paper said.

Japan's Self-Defense Forces will also deploy PAC-3 missiles at Iruma Air Base in Saitama prefecture by the end of fiscal 2006, and at Kasuga Base in Fukuoka, Gifu Base and Hamamatsu Base in Shizuoka prefecture by fiscal 2010.



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American Soldiers' Hatred Breeds 'Hadji Girl' Song and Video

By Sheldon Rampton
SourceWatch
June 26, 2006

If you want to understand why the war is going so badly in Iraq, it may help to examine the recent reaction to "Hadji Girl," the videotaped song about killing Iraqis by U.S. Marine Corporal Joshua Belile. The song became controversial when the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) discovered it on the internet and objected to its lyrics. "Hadji Girl" tells the story of a soldier "out in the sands of Iraq / And we were under attack":
Then suddenly to my surprise
I looked up and I saw her eyes
And I knew it was love at first sight.

And she said...
Dirka Dirka Mohammed Jihad
Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah

Hadji girl I can't understand what you're saying.
The girl says that she "wanted me to meet her family / But I, well, I couldn't figure out how to say no. / Cause I don't speak Arabic." They visit her home, a "side shanty" down "an old dirt trail," and as soon as they arrive,
Her brother and her father shouted...
Dirka Dirka Mohammed Jihad
Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah

They pulled out their AKs so I could see

... So I grabbed her little sister and pulled her in front of me.

As the bullets began to fly
The blood sprayed from between her eyes
And then I laughed maniacally

Then I hid behind the TV
And I locked and loaded my M-16
And I blew those little fuckers to eternity.

And I said...
Dirka Dirka Mohammed Jihad

Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah
They should have known they were fucking with a Marine.

The song is gruesome, to be sure, and CAIR complained that it celebrated the killing of Iraqi civilians. The video shows Belile performing the song before a laughing, applauding audience of fellow soldiers at their base in Iraq. Recognizing that the song could only bring bad publicity, U.S. military officials promptly issued a statement saying that it was "clearly inappropriate and contrary to the high standards expected of all Marines." Belile also apologized, saying the song was intended as "a joke" and that he didn't intend to offend anyone. Pro-war pundits, however, actually rallied to the song's defense. The conservative Little Green Footballs weblog thought news reports about the video controversy were the "mainstream media disgrace of the month." There's nothing wrong with the song, the Footballs said, because it doesn't actually describe a soldier killing civilians: "the people who kill the 'little sister' in this darkly humorous song are -- not the Marines -- but her father and brother, as they attempt to perpetrate an ambush." Some of the comments on LGF even called it "a wonderful song," and attacked the "nutless Pentagon star-chasing bastards" for their "capitulation." Here are some of the other comments about the song, from Little Green Footballs and elsewhere:
* "Damn it, we are in a fucking war! Nobody whined about 'insensitivity' to the fucking Japs and Jerries."

* "I expect more from the Pentagon. The State Dept & the CIA are just a bunch of cucumber sandwich eating fools. The Pentagon USED to be about waging war on our enemies. Now they just want to kiss up to them."

* "I'm Proud of my fellow Marines in that video. That is EXACTLY the espirit de corps needed, the HIGH MORALE needed in the middle of a combat zone where those self-same jihadists are trying to kill those Marines every single day.

* "Insensitive? Marines insensitive? God I hope so. We need them to kick ass and follow orders but we don't need them to be particularly sensitive. A sensitive Marine Corps will be the death of this country."

* "One of the things CAIR didn't like was the phrase 'Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad, Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah' which makes fun of the Arab language. To hell with CAIR and to hell with the Arab language. ... And the Islamist pigs can keep going to hell."
As these comments illustrate, defense for the song quickly turns into traditional conservative anger at what they see as censorious "political correctness." They have a right, they insist, to be insensitive and hostile to Arabs and Muslims. I would argue, in fact, that this cultural xenophobia is the main theme of the song and that the violence in it is a secondary byproduct.

Let's start with the title, "Hadji Girl." The term "hadji" (also sometimes spelled "haji" or "hajji") is the Arabic word for someone who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca. In Iraq and Afghanistan, it has become a common slang term used to describe the locals. According to a dictionary of war slang compiled by GlobalSecurity.org, the term is "used by the American military for an Iraqi, anyone of Arab decent, or even of a brownish skin tone, be they Afghanis, or even Bangladeshis" and is also "the word many soldiers use derogatorily for the enemy." Related terms include "haji mart" (a small store operated by Iraqis) or "haji patrol" (Iraqi soldiers).

The term seems to have come into usage even before the war began in Iraq. Its use was noted following a U.S. military investigation into the 2002 murder of two prisoners at the Bagram Collection Point in Afghanistan, by some of the the same soldiers who later oversaw abuses at Abu Ghraib. ''We were pretty much told that they were nobodies, that they were just enemy combatants,'' said one of the soldiers at Bagram. ''I think that giving them the distinction of soldier would have changed our attitudes toward them. A lot of it was based on racism, really. We called them hajis, and that psychology was really important.''

One of the prisoners beaten to death at Bagram was an innocent taxi driver named Dilawar whose only offense was that he happened to drive his taxi past the American base at the wrong time. According to Corey E. Jones, one of the MPs who guarded him, the beatings intensified when "He screamed out, 'Allah! Allah! Allah!' and my first reaction was that he was crying out to his god. Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny. ... It became a kind of running joke, and people kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out 'Allah.' It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes."

The term "haji" is not simply an ethnic slur, like "gook," "jap," "jerry" or "nigger." All ethnic slurs entail hostile stereotypes, but "haji" is a specifically religious stereotype based on hostility toward Muslims. In our 2003 book, Weapons of Mass Deception, John Stauber and I described the efforts that the Bush administration has undertaken to rebrand America in the eyes of Arabs and Muslims, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on projects including Radio Sawa, Al Hurra, a "Shared Values" campaign, and the Council of American Muslims for Understanding. Through glossy brochures, TV advertisements and websites, the United States has sought to depict America as a nation of religious tolerance that respects and appreciates Islam. These words, however, are constantly being undermined by the actual deeds and attitudes of the Bush administration's most ardent supporters, including soldiers in the field in Afghanistan and Iraq. While the White House has tried to frame the war in Iraq as a "war on terror," its own supporters keep reframing it as a war against Islam. This is a serious, if not fatal error. Rather than fighting a few thousand actual terrorists, the United States is positioning itself in opposition to one of the world's major religions, with more than a billion adherents worldwide.

Culture shock and awe

"Hadji Girl" also refers to another aspect of soldiers' experiences in Iraq: the language barrier that prevents them from communicating effectively. The refrain, "Dirka dirka Mohammed Jihad / Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah," is borrowed from the movie "Team America: World Police." According to filmmaker Matt Stone, the the phrase is not real Arabic but a parody of "Arabic gibberish which they just go, you know, 'Dirka-dirka, Muhammad, Muhammad Ali.' ... And that, to me, is what terrorists sound like when I look at their little tapes that they release." This inability to comprehend the local language contributes to the soldiers' inability to distinguish between friend or foe, forcing them to suspect that anyone -- including the beautiful girl you just met, or her family -- might be a terrorist.

These facts began to shape the relationship between U.S. soldiers and Iraqis early in the war, as Associated Press reporter Andrew England noted in September 2003:
Young American soldiers -- many carrying out operations they have little training for -- find themselves in a hostile environment, unable to speak the local language or distinguish "the good guys from the bad guys."

Most just want to survive and return home. Some have grown to despise Iraqis, whom they call "Hajis," scowling rather than waving as they pass locals along highways and dirt roads. ... "I hate the Hajis. All of them are liars. They injured one of my soldiers," said one.

"You don't want to know what I think about them, they shot at me one too many times," said another.
It is worth noting that one of the few conscientious objectors who have actually served with the military in Iraq, Aidan Delgado, had a very different perspective of Iraqis because he did know how to speak the language:
It was tough for me to see brutality coming out of my own unit. I had lived in the Middle East. I had Egyptian friends. I spent nearly a decade in Cairo. I spoke Arabic, and I was versed in Arab culture and Islamic dress. Most of the guys in my unit were in complete culture shock most of the time. They saw the Iraqis as enemies. They lived in a state of fear. I found the Iraqis enormously friendly as a whole. One time I was walking through Nasiriyah with an armful of money, nadirs that were exchanged for dollars. I was able to walk 300 meters to my convoy -- a U.S. soldier walking alone with money. And I thought: I am safer here in Iraq than in the states. I never felt threatened from people in the South.
It would be a mistake to imagine that the casual brutality of "Hadji Girl" is coming from people who are simply evil or racist or cruel. The soldiers occupying Iraq are normal men and women who, in other circumstances, would never commit the abuses that have been documented in Bagram and Abu Ghraib and that are now alleged in Haditha. The situations in which this war has placed them -- far from home, surrounded by a foreign language and foreign culture, carrying guns and fearful for their lives -- have brought out behaviors that we would not see otherwise. If American soldiers and Iraqis could meet under different circumstances, things would be different. Here, for example, is how Iraqi blogger Salam Pax described his experience upon visiting the United States and having dinner with an American soldier:
You have no idea how strange it feels that we share so much in common. When I told him I would never actually approach an American soldier on the street in Baghdad, he told me that if we were in Baghdad he would probably be talking to me with his gun pointing at me because he would be scared shitless. Yet there we sat, drinking beers together.
America's cultural isolationism and prejudices are exposed by "Hadji Girl," but that's only part of the story. The war itself is encouraging these dark aspects of human nature, by bringing Americans and Iraqis together in an environment full of tension, fear, hatred and violence. And if the war itself is creating these evils, how can it hope to end them?



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Supreme Court has unleashed an 'invading army'

Tribune Media Services
Robyn Blumner

The U.S. Supreme Court just eviscerated the "knock and announce'' rules that require police to announce their presence and give residents a bit of time before smashing in their door. Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion in Hudson v. Michigan discounted the privacy interest involved, sneering that ''knock and announce'' amounts to little more than the right ''not to be intruded upon in one's nightclothes.''

(I don't know about him, but I would put a pretty hefty premium on avoiding that particular scenario.)
But Scalia has a point in implying that the case has little practical importance, since the protocol that police knock, identify themselves and then wait 15 or 20 seconds before entering, has gone the way of the 50-cent cup of coffee. It can still be found, but not often.

The Joe Friday approach to conducting a search has been replaced by Rambo in riot gear because years earlier the high court permitted the waiver of the "knock and announce" requirement - a rule grounded in our 4th Amendment privacy rights - in almost every circumstance. If there's a chance that evidence will be destroyed, such as the possibility of drugs being flushed down the toilet, or a potential for physical violence - police suspecting there is a gun in the home, for instance - the Supreme Court has said it is not necessary to give advanced notice of entry.

We now have plenty of experience with ''no-knock'' warrants, as they are called, and the trail of victims this terrorizing tactic has left behind. Radley Balko, a policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, says that he has documented nearly 200 cases of ''wrong door'' raids occurring in the last 15 years, where the police broke into an innocent person's house. He says the correct figure is probably higher, but police and prosecutors don't generally bother keeping statistics on the operations they botch.

And when police come charging through the wrong door, they aren't dressed in a trench-coat and Dockers. These raids are typically conducted by militarized SWAT teams, outfitted for war. They are dressed in black masks and carry military-issue automatic weapons and other paramilitary gear, obtained gratis from the Pentagon. People who experienced such a raid must have felt like they were being attacked by an invading army. It isn't any wonder that, as in war, there is significant ''collateral damage.'' Balko has counted two dozen innocent people who died during one of these raids.

Some of the more notorious examples include the 1994 case of 75-year-old retired Methodist minister Accelyne Williams, who was reading a Bible in his living room when Boston police crashed through his door with sledge hammers. He died of a heart attack after being wrestled to the ground and handcuffed.

Similarly, in 2003, Alberta Spruill, a 57-year-old employee of New York City, died after police battered her door in and threw a concussion grenade inside. The coroner ruled that Spruill's death was a homicide. She had been scared to death.

Sometimes, the victim gets shot because his natural reaction to an invasion by gun-toting masked men is to reach for a firearm himself.

Is this highly confrontational tactic really necessary to secure evidence or ensure police safety when serving drug warrants? Not in the least, Jack Cole says.

Cole is the executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (http://www.leap.cc), an international drug-policy reform group made up of former drug warriors - police, prosecutors, wardens - who believe the U.S. War on Drugs has been a destructive failure. He is also a retired detective lieutenant and undercover narcotics investigator who spent 26 years with the New Jersey State Police.

According to Cole, ''too much violence is instigated by the police and it's just not necessary'' to do the job. Cole says a war metaphor has no place in domestic policing in a democratic society. When there is a war, there has to be an enemy, Cole says, and since 110 million people in this country above the age of 12 have admitted to having used an illegal drug, ''The enemy is us.''

Cole says that whenever he served a warrant, he was able to come up with some ruse to get an occupant to open the door without breaking it down or using violence. ''You just don't have to go in as a SWAT team,'' Cole says.

SWAT teams have proliferated not because they are needed but because police like to play soldier with relatively little of the battlefield risk; and they have been goosed along by a federal government that hands out surplus military implements like candy.

The only backstop to all this has been the U.S. Supreme Court and its rulings establishing basic standards for police interactions with the public. But with the Hudson case, it is pretty clear there is a five-member majority for loosening whatever reins still exist. So, expect the ''war'' to get more bloody and its casualty list to get longer. Welcome to the Roberts court.



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Homeland security and the backyard barbecue

North Jersey Media Group
20/06/2006


Antiterrorism sometimes works in strange ways.

SOMEONE WE KNOW just wanted to do some backyard cooking at his home in Park Ridge. But when he opened his Grill Pro, he found one of the little plastic wheels was broken. So he called the manufacturer in Waterloo, Ontario, for a replacement. Not a problem. All he had to provide was his name, address, and Social Security number. His what?

"I thought it was quite strange what with all the ID scams Americans could be exposed to," he says. But he gave them the number and soon the wheel arrived.

"Oh, it's some kind of paperwork your Department of Homeland Security does at the border," said Ted Witzel, the president of Onward Manufacturing, the grill maker. "Truly it's an absurd rule."

But rules are rules and business is business, so Onward slapped the man's Social Security number on the invoice, and now Homeland Security knows that some guy from Park Ridge received a small caster for his barbecue. He wasn't asked for his Social Security number when he bought the grill itself, only the wheel.

So in one case a man had to give up his Social Security number for a replacement part, while in another an estimated 12 million people were kept in the dark three years ago about a planned cyanide attack on the New York City subway system. This is no over-there-in-the-city story; several thousand Jerseyans ride the subways every day.

The attack was to have taken place before the second anniversary of Sept. 11 and involve the uncapping of jars of cyanide aboard subway trains whooshing through the tunnels, according to Ron Suskind in his new book "The One Percent Doctrine." Suskind also wrote the 2004 book "The Price of Loyalty" about the inner workings of the Bush administration, which, Suskind asserted, is among the most secretive in recent decades.

What were they thinking?

To avoid panic, the government decided not to reveal the plot. Which raises the question: What did the government think would happen in a cyanide attack: subway riders walking politely toward the nearest exit?

It's not critical of human nature to imagine terrified passengers pouring out of a stalled A train and stampeding over one another to get out to the street.

What do you do if you're the government?

Leonard A. Cole, a professor of political science at Rutgers University in Newark and author of "Clouds of Secrecy: The Army's Germ Warfare Tests Over Populated Areas," thinks people should be informed so they can take precautions.

"And if that means no one's going to ride the subway, then close the subway," he says. "You give people information and let them make their own decisions."

Or do you keep it quiet and hope for the best? This way, at the moment cyanide is released, you witness panic and fear as they've rarely been seen before. Moreover, if you divulge news of the planned attack and scare daily riders off the trains, terrorists soon would understand they don't actually need to possess cyanide. They can just spread a rumor every so often. The disruption to people's lives and to business and commerce would be incalculable. If it works once, it probably would work again.

The New York Police Department knew about the 2003 threat and said nothing. The FBI isn't talking. The White House refuses to confirm or deny knowledge of it.

A 2003 attack wouldn't have been the first time the subway was targeted. Forty years ago it wasn't some snarling enemy but the U.S. Army that released what it described as harmless bacteria in the subways to check dispersion patterns. Cole, who has written extensively on that 1966 operation, said the alleged harmlessness has never been proved because the Army did no research and compiled no records about injuries or bacteria-related hospitalizations.

"The Army did say that if the material released had been smallpox, flu or anthrax, large numbers of passengers would have gotten sick and many would have died," Cole said.

Why was attack canceled?

The never-announced 2003 attack plan was canceled a mere 45 days before it was to have occurred by Ayman al-Zawahri -- Osama bin Laden's chief deputy. No one knows why. Or maybe someone does but just isn't saying. You never know.

So is it wise to announce such a cyanide threat?

Both arguments are compelling.

Living in the age of terror means the government can demand a man's Social Security number because he gets an item in the mail from Canada to make his grill easier to use and simultaneously can withhold information about plans for a chemical attack because discussing it might make people nervous.

Even if keeping news of a threat quiet is the right decision, there's still something wrong with this picture.



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World Aflame


Sarkozy seeks help from Blair

Alex Duval Smith, Europe correspondent
Sunday June 25, 2006
The Observer

In an effort to salvage his bid for the presidency from the chaos of France's centre-right government, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy has met Tony Blair twice in the past few weeks for advice, The Observer can reveal.

The overture is likely to be regarded with deep suspicion by many Frenchmen, who see Blair as the epitome of the detested free-market 'Anglo-Saxon' model. The unofficial meetings, covering both policy and campaign advice, have taken place despite calls from President Jacques Chirac for them to stop. Chirac is opposed to Sarkozy becoming the centre-right's 2007 candidate for President.
The most recent encounter was last weekend when Sarkozy was on a private visit to London to mark his reconciliation with his wife, Cecilia. Officially, he laid a wreath at Charles de Gaulle's statue in Covent Garden and met only Home Secretary John Reid. In fact, as one of Sarkozy's aides confirmed yesterday, France's most ruthlessly ambitious politician also met Blair. The aide, Gerard Longuet, said that comments made by Blair during their meeting had 'inspired' a keynote speech by Sarkozy to his Union Pour Un Mouvement Populaire.

Longuet said the men had discussed the euro and Blair allegedly said: 'We're not in Euroland and have better growth and less unemployment than you. How can you expect my voters to agree [with the French approach to Europe]?' The aide added: 'Nicolas was struck by the argument. He remains impressed by Mr Blair's forthrightness. '

Despite the high-profile Sarkozy has achieved through tough comments on law and order, he is seen by many in his own party as undecided on crucial economic issues and hesitant to take a stand on France's complex relationship with its public sector trade unions. But at Agen last Thursday, his first rally since meeting Blair, he launched a powerful attack on the European Central Bank and called for workers' overtime to be made tax-free, which would in effect dismantle the 35-hour week and expose him to a revolt from the powerful unions.

The revelation of the close relationship between the Prime Minister and Sarkozy comes at a difficult time in the minister's campaign to succeed Chirac. Though the socialist party will not choose its candidate until November, the popular Segolene Royal - who has also expressed admiration for Blair - is neck-and-neck with Sarkozy in opinion polls. While needing to carve out a clear campaign in the face of competition from Royal, Sarkozy needs to distance himself from the unpopular incumbent government of which he is part.

Last week, when Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin caused uproar in the National Assembly by insulting François Hollande, leader of the Socialist party, Sarkozy had stay uncharacteristically silent. The issue that led to the furore was the delays to the Airbus A380 project and allegations of insider dealing in the Franco-German EADS partnership. The EADS debacle is expected to dominate French politics this week, but Sarkozy has opted to travel to French Guyana on a mission to stamp out illegal gold mining.

Leaving the country is no way to win an election in the long run, but for his previous unofficial meeting with Blair, according to French sources, Sarkozy spent a weekend in Florence. The two men first met in 2002 after Sarkozy had reached an agreement with then Home Secretary David Blunkett over the closure of the Sangatte immigrants' centre.

In spring 2004, when he was finance minister, Sarkozy made his first request for a head-to-head with Blair. The Elysee Palace was not keen, but it is believed that Peter Mandelson intervened and a meeting was arranged for 25 May. Last October they met privately at a hotel in London, after the Elysee had asked Downing Street to turn down a request for an official encounter.

Most tellingly, Sarkozy's campaign team - 'The Firm' - has drawn direct inspiration from the Blairite spin tradition. According to Le Monde journalist Philippe Ridet, 'La Firme Nicolas' is a crack team of thirtysomething workaholic men, with the latest mobile phones, Ralph Lauren suits and an image-building obsession that stops at nothing: 'It's a political style we have never seen in France before.'



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Thousands rally against Taiwan president

by Benjamin Yeh
AFP
June 25, 2006

TAIPEI - Thousands of slogan-chanting protesters have rallied to push for the resignation of Taiwan's embattled President Chen Shui-bian ahead of a key vote on his political fate this week.

Defying the rain, demonstrators took to the streets for a third straight weekend, waving banners calling for Chen to step down over a string of corruption scandals that have tarnished his government's image.

Organizers estimated 15,000 people were on hand for the spirited rally, which included a classical Chinese drama in which a judge sentenced to death the son-in-law of an emperor.
Chen's son-in-law has been arrested for insider trading, only one of several scandals close to the president that have fired public anger over the president, whose second and final term does not end until 2008.

The protest comes with lawmakers set to vote Tuesday on whether to go ahead with a national referendum to decide Chen's political future -- an unprecedented move on this island of 23 million people.

Analysts expect Chen to survive the move in parliament but many fear the crisis could lead to months of political turmoil.

His wife has been accused of accepting department store vouchers in exchange for political favours, while a top presidential aide has also been indicted for corruption.

But in a nationally televised address last week, Chen insisted his wife was innocent and categorically refused to quit.

In a bid to shore up his support, he met hundreds of his supporters at his southern birthplace of Kuantien Township on Sunday -- and said the opposition campaign to oust him was "a comeback by the remnants of the old forces."

That appeared to be a reference to the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) party, which favours close ties with mainland China and held unbroken power here from 1949 until Chen's election in 2000.

"For Taiwan's sovereignty, consolidation of Taiwan's democracy, economic development and justice, I would like to bear the cross. I would like to dedicate my life," he said.

Taiwan split from China in 1949 after a civil war between the communists and nationalist KMT forces. China still considers the island part of its territory and threatens to invade if it formally declares independence.

Parliament on Wednesday began debating a motion to recall the president, two years before his term ends. If two-thirds of MPs vote for it on Tuesday, a national referendum will be held on Chen's fate.



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German police arrest 300 England fans after clashes

AFP
June 25, 2006

STUTTGART - German police are bracing for a tense day here after 300 England fans were arrested overnight following clashes with German supporters ahead of England's latest World Cup match.

Trouble flared after England fans, many of whom had been drinking in pubs and bars all day, began exchanging insults with German fans who were in a square in the city centre to watch Germany's match against Sweden on giant TV screens.

An AFP photographer at the scene said riot police conducted baton charges and used pepper spray to disperse thousands of German fans.
When both sets of fans began throwing bottles and tables from pubs and bars police, some of them on horseback, created a barrier to separate the two groups.

English troublemakers were restrained with plastic handcuffs and led away.

"The action of the police prevented the situation getting worse," said police spokesman Uwe Schmid.

A total of 380 people were arrested, including 300 England fans. Most were released but were banned from entering the centre of the city until Monday morning.

England were playing Ecuador in a last 16 match in the city at 1500 GMT on Sunday.

The Stuttgart police had indicated they would take a tough approach with fans who became abusive or violent after drinking. Police spokesmen said the city had not experienced any problems with fans from other countries.

An estimated 70,000 English fans are believed to be in Stuttgart.

England's once infamous supporters were praised by police for their behaviour in their country's first two matches, in Frankfurt and Nuremberg.

But there were scuffles in Cologne following England's 2-2 draw with Sweden in their final first-round match on Wednesday, although most of the 137 rowdy fans detained there were German.



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Iran warns it may use oil as weapon if interests attacked

AFP
June 25, 2006

TEHRAN - Iran's oil minister has warned that the country would use oil as a weapon if its interests are attacked.

"If the country's interests are attacked, we will use all our capabilities and oil is one of them," Kazem Vaziri-Hamaneh said on Saturday, the television reported Sunday.
Iran is currently locked in a standoff with the international community over its nuclear program, facing the threat of sanctions if it does not accept a US-backed offer and halt sensitive nuclear work.

Vaziri-Hamaneh warned about impact any sanctions on Iran would have in the oil market, saying the price of crude, currently around 70 dollars a barrel, risked going up to 100 dollars.

"The world needs energy and understands the affect of oil sanctions against Iran on the market and no-one will make such an unreasonable decision," he added.

The West fears Iran, which is OPEC's number two oil exporter, is secretly trying to build nuclear weapons, a charge denied by Tehran which insists its atomic program is purely for electricity-generation.



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Iran calls halt to petrol imports

BBC News
23/06/2006

Iran is to stop importing petrol from September and instead start rationing the fuel, its oil minister has said.

The move comes as Tehran seeks to reduce the billions of dollars it spends each year on petrol imports due to a shortage of domestic refineries.

While Iran is the world's fourth largest oil producer, it currently can only produce 57% of the country's daily petrol consumption.

The news comes as Iran continues its nuclear stand-off with the West.
Heavily subsidised

Petrol imports are an expensive problem for the Iranian government because it heavily subsidies its domestic petrol prices.

A litre of regular petrol in Iran currently costs just 800 rials (9 cents; 5p).

This problem has intensified for Tehran due to an upsurge in petrol demand caused by a big rise in car ownership, and increased petrol consumption to Iran's neighbours, where prices are far higher.

Iran's oil minister Kazem Vaziri Hamaneh said the decision to start rationing petrol was preferable to rising prices.

The country's ongoing nuclear row with the West centres on Iran's attempts to build its first nuclear power station.

While Tehran insists its ambitious are solely power generation, the US and Europe fear Iran wishes to develop nuclear weapons.



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French boutiques fight to stay open on Sundays

By ANGELA DOLAND
Associated Press
Sun Jun 25, 2006

PARIS - Most places in France, you can't shop on Sunday. The Champs-Elysees is an exception - sort of. You can buy T-shirts at the Quiksilver on Paris' most famous avenue, but not at the Gap. You can browse for CDs at Virgin Megastore, but forget luggage at Louis Vuitton.

French businesses and unions have battled for years over whether Sunday should remain a day of rest, worship and leisurely family lunches, and the tug-of-war has left behind a patchwork of baffling regulations on who can sell what and where.

Now, two high-profile legal battles have raised the question again. Supporters say Sunday shopping would help cut the 9.3 percent unemployment rate, and point to a poll suggesting three-quarters of Parisians like the idea.

But the courts have ruled - and the answer is no.
The debate resurfaced after Louis Vuitton opened a new store last fall on the Champs-Elysees - an airy, 21,500-square-foot temple to handbags and high fashion - with the intention of opening Sundays. Vuitton says 70 of its 300 employees were hired for that purpose and willing to work, and the shop had permission from the top local official.

But two groups filed a lawsuit - the National Clothing Federation, known by its French initials FNH, and the French Christian labor union, or CFTC.

Charles Melcer, president of the FNH, argues that France's consumer spending would not increase by even one euro if stores were open Sunday. At the heart of his fears is that only big chains have enough staffing to stay open, which would force France's cherished neighborhood shops out of business.

"We in France don't want that," Melcer said.

Vuitton, meanwhile, argued that it met the complex criteria for opening Sundays, which include being in a touristy area and having a cultural, recreational or sports dimension. The company pointed to the store's bookstore and art gallery, which was open to all, not just shoppers.

But in late May, Paris' administrative court ordered the shop to close Sundays. Vuitton said it would appeal, and in a statement, called the decision "totally incomprehensible." Officials declined further comment because of the appeal.

Throughout Europe, laws differ vastly. In Sweden, most shops stay open Sundays. Poland's stores are open, but the Roman Catholic church has been fighting to force shopping malls and supermarkets to close. The church is leading a similar battle in Croatia.

In Germany, during the World Cup, retailers are being allowed to open Sunday, though the 1949 constitution mandates Sundays as a day of rest from work and "for the promotion of spiritual purposes." Retailers and politicians are watching the World Cup experiment to see if might be expanded down the road.

In France, where most people no longer go to church, exceptions are the rule. Under the Champs-Elysees' regulations, Quiksilver can sell T-shirts because it also sells surfboards and other sports gear, but Gap cannot. Virgin Megastore, which waged its own battle years ago, can open because it has a cultural dimension. But Vuitton - which opened its first Champs-Elysees store in 1914 - cannot.

The closed shops leave foreign tourists perplexed, said Dominique Rodet, an official with a committee that represents shops on the avenue. About 80 percent of the 500,000 people strolling on the avenue every Sunday are foreigners, she said.

"For Paris' image, and on an economic level, it's very harmful," she said.

Outside Paris, an outlet mall called Usines Center has been waging a battle similar to Vuitton's.

For 20 years, the mall with 140 shops and 600 employees has been open Sundays - illegally. Usines Center points out that other outlet malls around Paris did win clearance from authorities because they classified as being near tourist areas such as Charles de Gaulle airport and Disneyland Paris. Never mind that Usines Center is just a few miles from the Chateau of Versailles.

Officials "know the law is old and stupid, and at the same time they don't want to change it, because of Catholic tradition and social issues," said Jean-Patrick Grumberg, president of Usines Center's association of shop owners.

Demand from the public is there: Grumberg says Usines Center gets at least 35 percent of its annual revenues of 92 million euros ($116 million) on Sundays.

On the mall's behalf, the Ipsos polling agency conducted a survey in April that found 75 percent of people in Paris and the suburbs favored Sunday shop openings, and only 24 percent were opposed.

Meanwhile, the FNH and two other groups have waged a battle against Usines Center's clothing shops. While a 2005 court decision allowed them to stay open, an appeals court in Versailles overturned that decision June 14, ordering them to close.

Since then, the mall's shops are staying open Sunday on a technicality as they await formal notification of the court decision.

If need be, Grumberg say they will take advantage of another loophole - shops can open Sundays if the owners and their immediate families are the only ones who work. Which means, he says, that 80 other mall employees could lose their jobs.



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Man freed after Swedish bomb alert

AP
Sunday, June 25, 2006

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- A Swedish bomb squad removed a device from around the waist of a man who claimed he was abducted and forced to wear a remote-controlled bomb, police said Sunday.

One man has since been arrested and police are searching for a second suspect.

Officers evacuated buildings and blocked off streets in the northern Stockholm suburb of Tensta after the man claimed he was wearing a bomb belt. The bomb squad removed the device after six hours, police officer Diana Sundin told The Associated Press.

Sundin, who spoke over the telephone from the scene, said the device was taken to be detonated in a safe area. She could not confirm whether it was a genuine bomb.

The man, in his late 20s, was taken to hospital and would be questioned by police, she added.

Police had arrived at the scene before noon Sunday, after members of the public reported seeing the man, police spokesman Stefan Larsson said.

Residents evacuated

About 30 officers surrounded the man and police cleared a 400-meter (440-yard) radius around him. Some 100 residents were evacuated from nearby buildings.

Sundin, who briefly approached and talked to the man herself, said he told police he had managed to escape from an apartment building after being held captive there for three days.

He wore a black box fastened around the waist, with wires sticking out, she said, adding that he looked frightened and was sweating profusely.

"It looked real to me," Sundin said.

A subsequent police search of an apartment there uncovered material which police would investigate further, she said.

Sundin said the man was born in 1977 in Norway but must have been living in Sweden for a while because he was speaking Swedish. Police were searching for the kidnappers, she said.

Swedish broadcaster channel TV 4 showed live footage of the man, seated on the ground by a parking lot and leaning against a pole, dressed in a green shirt and gray pants. The video showed police bringing him a glass of water

"He behaved in a weird way and just sat there crying," witness Jasser Mohammed Ali, who works at a nearby shop, earlier told Swedish news agency TT.


Later Sunday, police said they searched several apartment buildings across Stockholm and arrested one man suspected of "endangering public safety," and that they were still pursuing a second suspect in the case.

Comment: This story is interesting insofar as it seems clear that someone was attempting to create a fake "suicide bombing". Sweden has a track record of calling Israel out on its abuses of the Palestinians. Suicide bombings have been made the domain of "Islamic fundamentalists", chiefly by way of Israeli and American propaganda. Israel has perhaps the most to gain from the spread of such propaganda, and it is entirely plausible that Israel is behind many of the alleged "suicide bombings" in Israel and Europe over the past few years.

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Our Poor Planet


Fireball sightings stretch to Wyoming

RONA JOHNSON COLUMN
Posted on Sat, Jun. 24, 2006

On June 2, Dayne LaHooe was driving on a gravel road through Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming when something caught his eye.

"It was the most spectacular thing I've ever seen - I have never seen anything like it before," he said. LaHooe called after he read my June 10 column in the Herald about the fireball that streaked across the sky June 2.

"It shot across the sky and looked like it landed right behind the Tetons," he said.
LaHooe, who works in Jackson Hole, Wyo., figured it was about 9:30 p.m., because the stars hadn't even come out yet.

He didn't say much to anyone about it because he thought they wouldn't believe him. But he did tell his girlfriend and her father. Then, as luck would have it, his girlfriend's father, who lives in the Twin Cities, was driving through this area and somehow came across my column and sent it to LaHooe.

From Minnesota

Errol and Chris Johnson, who are from Chewelah, Wash., were in Roseau, Minn., on June 2. They were celebrating Errol's uncle Glen Johnson's 86th birthday. It was about 11:30 p.m. and Errol and about five other family members were sitting in the breezeway of his uncle's home when they heard some distant booming noises.

"My wife said it sounded like a baseball bat hitting the side of the house - like a sonic boom, I thought," he said. Johnson decided to go outside to see if there was anything going on.

"Almost immediately, I saw two large fireballs with tails fly by, moving from the south-southeast as they appeared to descend to the north," Errol said.

He called to the other family members to come, but the meteor was out of range by the time they got outside.

Johnson and his wife didn't hear anything more about the fireball until after they had returned to Washington.

"My aunt and uncle sent a thank you card and they sent along your article," he said. That's when Johnson called me.

Using Google Earth, Johnson was able to find the exact longitude and latitude of where he was standing when he saw the fireballs, which were 48 degrees, 50 minutes, 34.68 seconds north latitude and 95 degrees, 45 minutes, 38.84 seconds west longitude.

"As far as the angle off of the horizon, I am thinking I had to be looking up about 60 to 75 degrees as I looked directly east," he said.

Over in N.D.

At the same time that Johnson saw the fireball, Leann Weber was in a tractor cultivating a field about 3 miles north of Cando, N.D. It was about midnight and there was no moon.

"All of a sudden, the sky just lit up," Weber said.

She said the fireball stayed in the sky for about a minute.

"As it was falling, you could see debris coming off it and it started breaking apart," she said. "I've never seen anything like it, and probably will never see any like it again. I guess it's a good reason to keep cultivating late at night."

Weber, who works at the Herald as a copy editor, was reminded of the sighting when she was reading my column the night before it appeared in the Herald.

If you read my column June 10, you know that I was sitting in University Park in Grand Forks during the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life when I saw the fireball.

It's fun to hear from people who saw the fireball, but I still haven't received any photos - hint, hint. And it would be really cool to find out if anyone has found any pieces of the meteorite.

I have to apologize to anyone who has been trying to e-mail me lately. My e-mail address has been missing an "r" for the last month and wasn't caught until this last week. I haven't been ignoring your e-mails, I just haven't received them.



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Moderate earthquake hits central Japan

UPDATED: 08:52, June 25, 2006

A moderate earthquake measuring a preliminary magnitude of 3.9 jolted southern Nagano Prefecture and surrounding areas in central Japan Saturday night, Kyodo News reported.
The 11:10 p.m. (1400 GMT) quake, which was originated from about 10 kilometers below ground, measured 4 on the Japanese seismic intensity scale of 7 in the southern part of Nagano Prefecture, and was also felt in Nakatsugawa city of neighboring Gifu Prefecture, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.



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Earthquake of 6.2 Magnitude Strikes Off Indonesia's Sulawesi

June 25 (Bloomberg)

An earthquake with a magnitude of 6.2 struck near the north-eastern Indonesian island of Sulawesi early today, the U.S. Geological Survey said. There were no immediate reports of damage or casualties.
The tremor occurred at 5:15 a.m. local time. Its center was about 109 kilometers (68 miles) south of Gorontalo, the Geological Survey said in an e-mailed statement.

Indonesia has struggled with a series of natural disasters this year. At least 200 people were killed and more than 7,500 displaced by floods and landslides on Sulawesi this month, according to figures of the United Nations Children's Fund.

An earthquake on May 27, the worst tragedy since the 2004 tsunami, killed 5,782 people in central Java.

Last week, two earthquakes 12 hours apart of magnitudes 4.7 and 5.6 shook the eastern Indonesian province of Maluku, which covers hundreds of islands spread out between Sulawesi and Papua.

The nation is also preparing for an eruption of Mount Merapi in Java. As many as 17,000 people live in the danger zone on the slopes of the volcano.



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Ohio governor declares flood emergency

AP
Sat Jun 24, 2006

NORWALK, Ohio - Gov. Bob Taft on Saturday surveyed damage from two days of severe storms and declared emergencies in two northern Ohio counties.

Floodwaters had mostly receded in Norwalk, about halfway between Cleveland and Toledo, which was one of the hardest-hit areas. Residents continued piling blankets, clothes, carpets and other ruined possessions on the curb to be carted away.

About 800 homes in Huron County were damaged in the storms, including at least 45 with major damage, said Bill Ommert, director of the county's emergency management agency. He estimated the damage at $2 million to homes and businesses and $5 million to farmers' crops.
The governor's emergency declaration for Huron and Erie counties clears the way for state resources to be used in the cleanup efforts and allows the state to seek potential federal aid.

"It's going to take a while for these families to get back on their feet," Taft said.

The storms, which began Wednesday night and continued into Friday morning, killed two people, produced several tornadoes and knocked out power to thousands. About 30,000 American Electric Power customers remained without electricity Saturday, spokesman Doug Flowers said.

The storms also damaged hundreds of homes and businesses in Cuyahoga County.

"It hit us fast," said Stan Cohara of Valley View, a Cleveland suburb. "It was like someone opened a big faucet. I just spent $30,000 remodeling my kitchen, and now it's shot."

In southeastern Pennsylvania, heavy rain fell on Chester County on Saturday, damaging a railroad bridge, blocking underpasses, stranding motorists and causing minor mudslides.

Up to 5 inches of rain fell within a few hours, according to the National Weather Service.

"I thought it was a little shower, and all of a sudden, it was a river," Pauline Rulon said. "What I saw today was unreal."



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Greenland's Ice Sheet is Slip, Sliding Away

By Robert Lee Hotz
LA Times
June 25, 2006

JAKOBSHAVN GLACIER, Greenland - Gripping a bottle of Jack Daniel's between his knees, Jay Zwally savored the warmth inside the tiny plane as it flew low across Greenland's biggest and fastest-moving outlet glacier.

Greenland is losing 52 cubic miles of ice each year, more than anyone anticipated. The amount of freshwater ice dumped into the Atlantic Ocean has almost tripled in a decade. Climate experts have started to worry that the ice cap is disappearing in ways that computer models had not predicted.
Mile upon mile of the steep fjord was choked with icy rubble from the glacier's disintegrated leading edge. More than six miles of the Jakobshavn had simply crumbled into open water.

"My God!" Zwally shouted over the hornet whine of the engines.

From satellite sensors and seasons in the field, Zwally, 67, knew the ice sheet below in a way that few could match. Even after a lifetime of study, the raffish NASA glaciologist with a silver dolphin in one pierced ear was dismayed by how quickly the breakup had occurred.

Wedged between boxes of scientific instruments, tent bags, duffels and survival gear, Zwally had no room to turn inside the cramped passenger compartment of the twin-engine Otter. He passed the whiskey bottle over his shoulder to geophysicist Jose Rial from the University of North Carolina, squeezed on a jump seat between a surveyor and a sleeping climatologist.

Homeward bound - windburned, bone-chilled and greasy after weeks on this immense ice cap tilted like a beret flopped across the top of the world - they all had been in a celebratory mood.

Somber now, Zwally and Rial shared a drink in silence as the shadow of the plane slipped across azure meltwater lakes, rust-red tundra and silver tongues of ice.

The Greenland ice sheet - two miles thick and broad enough to blanket an area the size of Mexico - shapes the world's weather, matched in influence by only Antarctica in the Southern Hemisphere.

It glows like milky mother-of-pearl. The sheen of ice blends with drifts of cloud as if snowbanks are taking flight.

In its heartland, snow that fell a quarter of a million years ago is still preserved. Temperatures dip as low as 86 degrees below zero. Ground winds can top 200 mph. Along the ice edge, meltwater rivers thread into fraying brown ropes of glacial outwash, where migrating herds of caribou and musk ox graze.

The ice is so massive that its weight presses the bedrock of Greenland below sea level, so all-concealing that not until recently did scientists discover that Greenland actually might be three islands.

Should all of the ice sheet ever thaw, the meltwater could raise sea level 21 feet and swamp the world's coastal cities, home to a billion people. It would cause higher tides, generate more powerful storm surges and, by altering ocean currents, drastically disrupt the global climate.

Climate experts have started to worry that the ice cap is disappearing in ways that computer models had not predicted.

By all accounts, the glaciers of Greenland are melting twice as fast as they were five years ago, even as the ice sheets of Antarctica - the world's largest reservoir of fresh water - also are shrinking, researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Kansas reported in February.

Zwally and other researchers have focused their attention on a delicate ribbon - the equilibrium line, which marks the fulcrum of frost and thaw in Greenland's seasonal balance.

The zone runs around the rim of the ice cap like a drawstring. Summer melting, on average, offsets the annual accumulation of snow.

Across the ice cap, however, the area of seasonal melting was broader last year than in 27 years of record-keeping, University of Colorado climate scientists reported. In early May, temperatures on the ice cap some days were almost 20 degrees above normal, hovering just below freezing.

From cores of ancient Greenland ice extracted by the National Science Foundation, researchers have identified at least 20 sudden climate changes in the last 110,000 years, in which average temperatures fluctuated as much as 15 degrees in a single decade.

The increasingly erratic behavior of the Greenland ice has scientists wondering whether the climate, after thousands of years of relative stability, may again start oscillating.

THE THEORY AT WORK

Huddled inside a red cook tent atop 3,900 feet of ice, Zwally shoveled snow into a pot simmering on a two-ring propane camp stove.

He had to melt enough to boil lobster tails for dinner. Zwally, who works at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., had purchased them at Costco and lugged them to Greenland.

The beating wings of a 30-mph wind slapped against the tent fabric. Every 15 minutes, a gust sucked open the door and frosted the room.

The tent - buried in drifts and entered by a ladder through a hatch in the roof - was part of Swiss Camp, located 155 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

For those assessing the effect of global warming, there may be no more perfect place than this warren of red tents on the Northern Hemisphere's largest ice cap. Here, the theoretical effects seen in computerized climate models take tangible form.

University of Colorado climatologist Konrad Steffen set up Swiss Camp in 1990 to study the weather along the equilibrium line. As a precaution, Steffen, 54, built the camp on a plywood platform to keep it afloat when the ice turns into summer slush and open lakes before refreezing in the fall.

Even so, Steffen and Zwally often spent days chiseling out tables and chairs had frozen in floodwater into a single block of ice.

Zwally joined his colleagues there on May 8 in the regular spring migration of scientists to the Arctic.

He has been coming to Swiss Camp every year since 1994 and has been studying the polar regions since 1972, monitoring the polar ice through satellite sensors.

Eventually he realized he had to study the ice firsthand.

The ice sheet seemed such a stolid reservoir of cold that many experts had been confident of it taking centuries for higher temperatures to work their way thousands of feet down to the base of the ice cap and undermine its stability.

By and large, computer models supported that view, predicting that as winter temperatures rose, more snow would fall across the dome of the ice cap. Thus, by the seasonal bookkeeping of the ice sheet, Greenland would neatly balance its losses through new snow.

Indeed, Zwally and his colleagues in March released an analysis of data from two European remote-sensing satellites showing the amount of water locked up in the ice sheet had risen slightly between 1992 and 2002.

Then the ice sheet began to confound computer-generated predictions.

By 2005, Greenland was beginning to lose more ice volume than anyone anticipated - an annual loss of up to 52 cubic miles a year - according to more recent satellite gravity measurements released by JPL.

The amount of freshwater ice dumped into the Atlantic Ocean has almost tripled in a decade.

"We are clearly seeing the effects of climate change starting to kick in," Zwally said.

Since Steffen started monitoring the weather at Swiss Camp in 1991, the average winter temperature has risen almost 10 degrees. Last year, the annual melt zone reached farther inland and up to higher elevations than ever before.

There was even a period of melting in December.

"We have never seen that," Steffen said, combing the ice crystals from his beard. "It is significantly warmer now, and it happened quite suddenly. This year, the temperatures were warmer than I have ever experienced."

At this time of year, the sun never sets, and at Swiss Camp, the pace of field work slackens only for dinner.

Layered in fleece, the field researchers gathered around a makeshift plywood table littered with heels of whole grain bread, pots of raspberry jam and crumbs of granola. A ridge of ice 6 inches high encased an electrical cable running between their feet.

Their cheeks were coarse with stubble. Their hair rose in waxy spikes. Their eyes had reddened from insomnia and too much midnight sun.

While one researcher spooned out the first course - pasta in a sauce of sun-dried tomatoes - another opened the last bottle of the 2003 Cotes du Rhone.

Zwally tended the pot on the stove.

The Greenland ice sheet was in the same predicament as his frozen lobsters, steaming in meltwater.

GETTING INTO THE ICE

The pilot refused to land. There were too many crevasses.

Steffen waved him on to fly farther inland. He checked their position by satellite every few hundred yards.

After 34 years in the Arctic, Steffen was attuned to its subtleties. Where a novice could only see a monochromatic plain stretching to the horizon, Steffen could discern the undulating outlines left by seasonal lakes and riverbeds.

Clear of the hazard, the Otter touched down and glided on its skis to a halt on an inviting featherbed of snow.

Steffen and his crew unloaded crates of equipment and began drilling into the ice. Zwally, stripping wires with bare fingers in the biting wind, hooked up a satellite receiver.

Within the hour, they erected a tall mast festooned with monitoring instruments.

They continued to hopscotch by air across the ice sheet, planting sensors at every stop.

As spring comes earlier each year, alpine glaciers recede, hurricanes gather power and other signs of climate change accrue, the research team tries to understand how the Greenland ice sheet can respond so quickly to rising temperatures.

"How does climate change get into the ice?" Zwally asked.

Most of the computer models on which climate predictions are based did not take the dynamics of the glaciers into account.

Contrary to appearances, the monolith of ice is constantly on the move, just as Southern California, driven by plate tectonics, inches every year toward Alaska.

In that sense, the Swiss Camp is a measure of shifting property values.

The camp has been rafting on the ice stream toward the sea, on average, at about 1 foot every day. Since Steffen pitched the main tents, the camp has moved about a mile downhill.

When Zwally started tracking the velocity of the ice with Global Positioning System sensors in 1996, the ice flow maintained a steady pace all year.

But he soon discovered that the ice around Swiss Camp had abruptly shifted gears in the summer, moving faster when the surface ice started to melt. By 1999, the ice stream had almost tripled its speed to about 3 feet a day.

In an influential paper published in Science, Zwally surmised that the ice sheets had accelerated in response to warmer temperatures, as summer meltwater lubricated the base of the ice sheet and allowed it to slide faster toward the sea.

In a way no one had detected, the warm water made its way through thousands of feet of ice to the bedrock - in weeks, not decades or centuries.

So much water streamed beneath the ice that in high summer the entire ice sheet near Swiss Camp briefly bulged 2 feet higher, like the crest of a subterranean wave.

"This meltwater acceleration is new," Zwally said. "The significance of this is that it is a mechanism for climate change to get into the ice."

To better track the seasonal movements, Zwally and Steffen set up two new GPS stations around Swiss Camp, while a team led by University of Vermont geophysicist Tom Neumann erected an additional 10 GPS sensors to map the changing velocity of the local ice.

At the same time, University of Texas physicist Ginny Catania pulled an ice-penetrating radar in a search pattern around the camp, seeking evidence of any melt holes or drainage crevices that could so quickly channel the hot water of global warming deep into the ice.

To her surprise, she detected a maze of tunnels, natural pipes and cracks beneath the unblemished surface.

"I have never seen anything like it, except in an area where people have been drilling bore holes," Catania said.

No one knows how much of the ice sheet is affected.

Since 2002, Greenland's three largest outlet glaciers have started moving faster, satellite data show.

On the eastern edge of Greenland, the Kangerlussuaq Glacier, like the Jakobshavn, has surged, doubling its pace. To the west, the Helheim Glacier now appears to be moving about half a football field every day.

In all, 12 major outlet glaciers drain the ice sheet the way rivers drain a watershed, setting the pace of its release to the ocean. If they all slide too quickly, there is a possibility that, perhaps decades from now, they could collapse suddenly and release the entire ice sheet into the ocean.

"They are like the buttresses of the high cathedral," said Rial, the North Carolina geophysicist. "If you remove the buttress, the cathedral will collapse."

The accelerating ice flow has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in seismic activity, as the three immense streams of ice shake the Earth in their wake.

The lurching ice has generated swarms of earthquakes up to magnitude 5.0, researchers at Harvard University and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University reported in March.

Last year alone, the Harvard and Columbia researchers detected as many ice quakes as the total recorded from 1993 through 1996, with five times as many in the summer as in the winter months.

"Instability is the key," Rial said.

In the Swiss Camp laboratory tent, Rial moved his finger along the jagged seismic trace displayed on his iBook screen.

The signal had been detected by the 10 sensors he had placed around the camp six days before.

The ice sheet was trembling.

"It is significantly warmer now, and it happened quite suddenly. This year, the temperatures were warmer than I have ever experienced." -Konrad Steffen, University of Colorado climatologist who set up Swiss Camp in 1990

Comment: Despite all the "expert" claims about climate change, it is clear from this article that the so-called "experts" really have no idea what they're talking about since they neglected to account for many of the variables involved.

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Floods force evacuations on Md. shore

AP
Sun Jun 25, 2006

FEDERALSBURG, Md. - Heavy rains caused serious flooding Sunday in parts of Maryland's Eastern Shore, washing out roads and forcing evacuations.

Federalsburg Mayor Betty Ballas declared an emergency for the town of about 2,600 on Sunday morning after 10 to 12 inches of rain fell overnight. About 30 people had to evacuate, police said.
There were reports of 4 to 5 feet of water in some areas, said Jeff Welsh, a spokesman for the Maryland Emergency Management Agency.

Some residents evacuated homes in the Galestown area, said Mike Ziegler, an assistant director of the emergency agency.

At least 20 roads were closed in Dorchester County, said a spokesman for the Maryland State Police.

And in Seaford, Del., between 10 and 15 people had to leave their homes, said a city spokeswoman.



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Two feared drowned as Philippines braces for deadly storm-volcano combination

AFP
June 25, 2006

MANILA - The Philippines put civil defense personnel on alert for possible deadly volcanic mudflows as a tropical storm began bearing down on a volcano that has been spitting ash for weeks.

Civil defense reports said a ferry sank in rough seas off Sorsogon province, leaving at least two missing and feared dead. More than 40 others were rescued and rushed to hospital, the reports said.

Before leaving on a visit to Europe, President Gloria Arroyo said the civil defense office has prepared contingency plans in case rain from the storm mixes with ash on the slopes of Bulusan volcano in Sorsogon to form deadly mudflows.
Arroyo said two C-130 cargo planes, eight helicopters including the presidential helicopter and a train were ready to travel to the Bicol peninsula south of Manila to help people who might be displaced.

Arroyo said vulcanologists did not believe that the 1,565-meter (5,134-foot) Bulusan mountain was likely to erupt in the next few days but they should prepare for such contingencies.

More than 2,000 people have already evacuated their homes around the volcano for fear of mudflows, the civil defense office said.

There have been periodic ash emissions at Bulusan since March but these have become more frequent this month.

The Philippine vulcanology institute said it had detected four volcanic earthquakes in the past 24 hours. It warned that prolonged rain "might trigger life-threatening mudflows."

The institute reiterated that residents should stay at least four kilometers (2.5 miles) from the crater.

The government weather station said the tropical storm, locally named as "Domeng", was heading northwest towards Bicol at 19 kilometers (12 miles) per hour.

The eye of the storm, packing maximum winds of 90 kilometers (56 miles) per hour, passed Biliran island and was expected to pass beside the Bicol peninsula on Monday morning. It was not expected to hit the region directly.

Sea travel in the area around the storm has been restricted, stranding over a thousand people at various ports, the civil defense office said.

The second level of a four-step storm alert has been raised over parts of Bicol and the neighboring islands and provinces. A first-level storm alert has been raised in provinces just south of Manila.



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Blood, White, and Blue


Japan begins withdrawal from Iraq

AFP
June 25, 2006

BASRA, Iraq - Japan has begun withdrawing its forces from Iraq five days after deciding to end its first overseas military deployment since World War II in a country where hostilities are under way.

A convoy of more than a dozen military vehicles and engineering equipment left the Japanese base in the southern province of Muthanna for Kuwait, an AFP photographer reported from the Kuwaiti border.
Japanese military officials in Samawa confirmed that the withdrawal of its 600 troops from Iraq had begun with the dispatch of military trucks and other equipment to Kuwait.

The convoy of small military vehicles, bulldozers and other engineering equipment used in reconstruction work left the Samawa base at around 6:45 am (0245 GMT) Sunday and is now in Kuwait, a Japanese military official told the photographer.

However none of the 600 soldiers stationed in Samawa formed part of the convoy.

On June 20 Japan ordered its troops to leave Iraq, ending its first military mission since World War II to a country where fighting is under way.

Japan relies on British and Austrialian troops for protection in Iraq as its own troops are barred from using force.

The Japanese withdrawal is expected to be complete by late July.

Last week Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki announced that Iraqi forces will assume responsibility for security in Muthanna province -- the first such handover of a region from coalition troops to fledgling Iraqi forces.

Japan's military mission, which has helped reconstruct the relatively peaceful area around the city of Samawa since January 2004, is the first of its kind since Japan was forced by the United States to renounce war after World War II.

The Japanese troops suffered no casualties and did not fire their weapons.



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Two coalition soldiers, 48 rebels killed in Afghanistan battle

AFP
June 25, 2006

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - Two coalition soldiers and up to 48 rebels have been killed in southern Afghanistan where the biggest anti-Taliban operation since the hardliners were ousted in 2001 is under way.

The fighting erupted during the day Saturday in a Taliban hotbed in Panjwayi district of Kandahar province and lasted into the night, an Afghan commander said Sunday.

The Afghan army said that 48 rebels were killed and five arrested; the coalition put the toll at 45.
That brought to almost 200 the number of insurgents killed as part of Operation Mountain Thrust over the past two weeks. The Afghan defence ministry had put the toll for that period at 149 on Saturday.

Two soldiers with the US-led coalition died in hospital after being badly wounded in the clash, the force said in a statement. Another was hurt. Their nationalities were not released.

Forty-three coalition soldiers have now died in combat in Afghanistan this year, around half of them Americans.

Panjwayi district is only 35 kilometres (22 miles) southwest of the south's biggest city Kandahar, which has been hit by regular attacks including
Iraq-style suicide blasts.

The fugitive leader of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammad Omar, lived in the area for a while and is reputed to have first assembled the movement's religious scholars into a fighting force there in 1994 to rescue two girls abducted and raped by regional warlords.

Two years later the Taliban controlled most of Afghanistan and imposed a harsh version of Islamic Sharia law on the population which included public stoning to death for adultery. They also sheltered the Al-Qaeda terror network.

The hardliners were removed from power in late 2001 by a US-led coalition after they failed to hand over Al-Qaeda leaders following the September 11, 2001 strikes on US cities.

Panjwayi has seen some of the fiercest fighting in the past month, with the Taliban and security forces mounting some of their biggest attacks since 2001.

The clashes have killed dozens of Taliban but also 34 civilians who were caught up in a coalition strike in Panjwayi last month.

Saturday's battle started when a joint Afghan and coalition force initially engaged eight to 10 "enemy extremists," the coalition said.

"The enemy fighters attempted to flee the area but then joined other reinforcements in a nearby compound.

"Afghan and coalition forces pressed the attack with joint fire and a ground assault, killing an estimated 45 extremists in the firefight."

The coalition has said Operation Mountain Thrust is intended to "set the conditions" for a NATO-led force's takeover in late July of command of the southern region from a US-led coalition .

Mountain Thrust involves forces from Britain, Canada and the United States, among other nations, as well as around 3,000 soldiers from Afghanistan's fledgling army.

Around four years after it was launched the insurgency shows no sign of abating, with more and more attacks also being reported in the normally relatively calm west and north.

The violence is demoralising the population and hobbling efforts to rebuild after nearly three decades of war.



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Two US soldiers charged with manslaughter in Iraq

AFP
June 25, 2006

BAGHDAD - Two US soldiers have been charged with voluntary manslaughter and assault in separate incidents concerning Iraqi civilians, according to the US military.

The US military said the soldiers were assigned to the 1st Battalion, 109th infantary (mechanised) of the Pennsylvania National Guard and "have been charged with several violations of the uniform code of military justice."

The US military has come under the spotlight over a number of incidents of abuse of Iraqis since the US-led invasion of March 2003.




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Market blast kills three in Iraqi capital

AFP
June 25, 2006

BAGHDAD - At least three people have been killed and seven wounded when a bomb exploded inside a busy wholesale clothing market in central Baghdad.

The blast happened at about 11:30 am (0730 GMT) in the "Tahet al-Takya" section of the capital's Shorga market, the largest and most crowded in Iraq, an interior ministry official said Sunday.
A plume of thick black smoke was seen rising from the area on the east bank of the Tigris river.

Baghdad markets have been targetted twice in the past week.

On Tuesday two people were killed and 28 wounded in a bombing at a second-hand clothes market in Bab Shargi, also on the east side.

And on June 16, a bomb hidden in a pushcart at Bab Shargi's Haraj market killed five people and wounded 25.



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More Saudis sent home from Guantanamo

AFP
Sun Jun 25, 2006

RIYADH - Saudi Arabia has said that 13 of its nationals who were held at the US detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have returned home.

A 14th former detainee of Turkestan descent whose parents live in Saudi Arabia arrived with the group early Sunday, Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz said Sunday.

The Pentagon announced Saturday that 14 Saudi nationals had been sent home from Guantanamo, apparently counting the Turkestan-born former inmate.
The state SPA news agency quoted Nayef as expressing "appreciation for the cooperation of the authorities concerned in the United States to facilitate the repatriation" of the group, who would be "subjected to the laws in force in the kingdom".

The Pentagon said one of the Saudis had been found by a special military tribunal to no longer be an enemy combatant, while the remaining 13 "were approved for transfer by an administrative review board decision".

The release of the group reduced the number of prisoners at the camp to "approximately 450", the Pentagon said.

It came after the US said two Saudis and one Yemeni committed suicide in the camp created after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to hold terror suspects captured by US troops in Afghanistan and other parts of the world.

The three were found in their cells on June 10 apparently after hanging themselves with cords fashioned from clothes and bedding, US officials said. Families of the three men disputed the account, accusing Washington of a cover-up.

Thirty-seven Saudis have now returned home from Guantanamo, leaving at least 90 Saudis still held in the notorious facility. The bodies of the two Saudis said to have committed suicide were also repatriated.

Approximately 310 Guantanamo detainees have now been handed over to countries including Afghanistan, Albania, Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Kuwait, Morocco, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden and Uganda, the Pentagon said.

About 120 detainees still at Guantanamo are eligible for transfer or release through a military-run review process.

"Departure of these remaining detainees approved for transfer or release is subject to ongoing discussions between the United States and other nations," the Defense Department said Saturday.

"The department expects that there will continue to be other transfers or releases of detainees."

Continued detention of hundreds of foreign nationals without trial at the US naval base has prompted calls in Europe and elsewhere for the camp's closure.

Last month, British Attorney General Lord Goldsmith publicly called the detention center "unacceptable", adding that to many people it had become "a symbol... of injustice".

US President George W. Bush faced persistent calls for its closure during his visit to Europe this past week, but declined to give a specific commitment.

"I would like to end Guantanamo," he said on Wednesday in Vienna, after a summit with European Union leaders.

But he cautioned that a way must first be found to send inmates back home -- mainly to Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Yemen -- or bring them to court.

The US Supreme Court may rule before the end of the month on the legality of the special tribunals set up by the Pentagon to try detainees suspected of involvement in terrorism.



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Court ruling could halt Guantanamo trials

By BEN FOX
Associated Press
June 25, 2006

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - A former driver for Osama bin Laden may help decide the fate of dozens of Guantanamo Bay detainees, and perhaps all of them, as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on his legal challenge to the first U.S. war crimes trials since World War II.

The court, which is expected to rule as early as Monday, is considering a range of issues in Salim Ahmed Hamdan's case, including whether President Bush had the authority to order military trials for men captured in the war on terror and sent to the Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Bush recently suggested the ruling will help him determine what should be done with all the prisoners at Guantanamo, where the U.S. holds about 450 men on suspicion of links to al-Qaida or the Taliban.
Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union said Friday that Bush doesn't need a court decision to close the prison, which has drawn intense international criticism. The case has nothing to do with the prison itself, they said.

"Bush can close Guantanamo, but this (court) decision can't," said Ben Wizner, an ACLU attorney who monitors Guantanamo. "That's not a question before this court."

The ruling, however, could determine whether the government can proceed with military trials for Hamdan and nine other detainees who have been charged with crimes.

Air Force Col. Morris Davis, the chief Guantanamo prosecutor, said about 65 more detainees being held at the U.S. base are likely to be charged with crimes if the Supreme Court upholds the process.

Prosecutors are preparing additional charges, including some that could incur the death penalty, Davis told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Washington.

"We're pressing on, anticipating a favorable decision," he said.

Hamdan's attorneys argued that the conspiracy charge filed against him is not legitimate. The government has charged each of the 10 detainees with conspiracy, and seven of them - including Hamdan - currently face no other charges.

If the Supreme Court upholds Hamdan's challenge, the government could "relatively quickly" file new charges such as aiding the enemy, Davis said.

Hamdan, a 36-year-old native of Yemen, admits working as a driver for bin Laden but denies conspiring to commit terrorist attacks on the United States. He fled
Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks, was captured in Pakistan and turned over to U.S. forces.

The U.S. military says Hamdan was also a bodyguard for bin Laden and would have at least had knowledge of al-Qaida attacks. They also say he delivered weapons to members and associates of the terror network. He faces up to life in prison if convicted.

His military-appointed attorney, Navy Lt. Cmdr Charles Swift, said the lawsuit is aimed at moving the case to the civilian court system or to a traditional military court-martial. Lawyers for several defendants contend the tribunals lack guidelines and favor the prosecution.

"This is about a fair trial, not a free pass," Swift said.

The Supreme Court was also asked to consider whether fair trial provisions of the Geneva Conventions apply to the military tribunals.

Another issue is whether the Supreme Court even has a say in the matter. The administration argues the Detainee Treatment Act, passed by Congress and signed into law by Bush on Dec. 30, strips the federal courts of much of their jurisdiction over Guantanamo detainees.

On Saturday, 14 Saudi Arabians were released from Guantanamo and transferred to their home country, leaving about 450 detainees at the prison, the
Pentagon said.

One Saudi was released because U.S. officials determined the detainee was no longer an enemy combatant. The other Saudis were released after a review process determined they could be transferred.

Comment:
Another issue is whether the Supreme Court even has a say in the matter. The administration argues the Detainee Treatment Act, passed by Congress and signed into law by Bush on Dec. 30, strips the federal courts of much of their jurisdiction over Guantanamo detainees.
Well, isn't that convenient? Why not just disband the Supreme Court? After all, Bush has said that he alone is the "decider"...


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On the Skids


U.S. population to hit 300 million in 2006

By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER
Associated Press
June 25, 2006

WASHINGTON - The U.S. population is on target to hit 300 million this fall and it's a good bet the milestone baby - or immigrant - will be Hispanic.

No one will know for sure because the date and time will be just an estimate.

But Latinos - immigrants and those born in this country - are driving the population growth, accounting for almost half the increase last year, more than any other ethnic or racial group.
White non-Hispanics, who make up about two-thirds of the population, accounted for less than one-fifth of the increase.

When the population reached 200 million in 1967, there was no accurate tally of U.S. Hispanics. The first effort to count Hispanics came in the 1970 census, and the results were dubious.

The Census Bureau counted about 9.6 million Latinos, a little less than 5 percent of the population, but the bureau acknowledged that figure was inflated.

In 1967, there were fewer than 10 million people in the U.S. who were born in other countries; that was not even one in 20.

Today, there are 36 million immigrants, about one in eight.

"We were much more of an insular society back then," said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

As of early Sunday, there were 299,058,932 people in the United States, according to the Census Bureau's population clock. The estimate is based on annual numbers for births, deaths and immigration, averaged throughout the year.

The 300 millionth person in the U.S. will likely be born - or cross the border - in October, though bureau officials are wary of committing to a particular month because of the subjective nature of the clock.



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Utah man kills himself during standoff

AP
Sun Jun 25, 2006

OGDEN, Utah - A man fatally shot himself during a standoff with police, and a woman sitting next to him in the car was struck by his bone fragment, authorities said.

Autumn Lee was listed in good condition at McKay-Dee Hospital on Saturday night after getting struck in the neck by a piece of bone, police said.

The standoff began after police received a call that Lee, 30, of South Ogden, had been taken from a women's shelter by her ex-boyfriend, against whom she had filed a protective order.
Lee was driving and Ryan Todd Oman, 21, of Ogden, was in the passenger seat with a handgun when police pulled the car over in a parking lot around 2:30 p.m., said assistant police Chief Randy Watt.

Lee told police she wasn't being held hostage, but was worried Oman would shoot himself if she got out of the car.

Oman shot himself just before 4 p.m. as a negotiator tried to talk to him, Watt said. He later died at the hospital.

Police had been looking for Oman in connection with a June 13 shooting.

Ogden is about 40 miles north of Salt Lake City.



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About 40,000 workers accept GM, Delphi buyouts

By Poornima Gupta
Reuters
Fri Jun 23, 2006

DETROIT - About 40,000 hourly workers have accepted buyout and early retirement offers from General Motors Corp. and Delphi Corp., exceeding expectations and potentially resulting in significant cost savings for the automaker.

About 30,000 GM workers, or almost one-quarter of the U.S. factory work force at the automaker, had taken the offer as of Friday morning, while about 10,000 workers at Delphi, a former GM parts unit that has filed for bankruptcy, had taken the offer, a United Auto Workers union local official said on Friday.
"It has exceeded all our expectations," the UAW local official said.

The offers end later on Friday.

The number of blue-collar workers who accept the early retirement incentives has been closely watched as an indicator of the success of GM's turnaround efforts.

"We believe the company is successfully accelerating its restructuring efforts through its buyout program. which will result in significant cost savings in the near term," said Merrill Lynch analyst John Murphy, reiterating his "buy" rating on the GM stock on Friday.

TALLY ON MONDAY

But Deutsche Bank analyst Rod Lache said he was concerned cash cost savings will not be sufficient to offset the pace of market-share and product-mix erosion that GM is currently experiencing.

"We estimate every point of market share loss equates to roughly $1.3 billion pretax," Lache, who has a "sell" rating on GM stock, said in a note to clients.

GM has offered a sweeping package of buyouts, ranging from $70,000 to $140,000, to more than 125,000 unionized factory workers in a bid to reduce costly benefits for an aging work force.

GM spokeswoman Katie McBride said the company would not have an interim tally until Monday since afternoon shift workers still had until midnight Friday to sign up.

Also, workers who accepted the offer on Friday still have seven days to revoke their acceptance.

"The final, final day is really June 30," she said.

Delphi spokesman Lindsey Williams said the parts maker would not provide information on the acceptance rate before late Monday at the earliest.

A spokesman for UAW International was not available for comment.

GM lost $10.6 billion in 2005 amid rising costs and falling U.S. market share. The automaker's U.S. market share fell 3 percentage points to 22.5 percent in May. The company is in the midst of a sweeping restructuring, which includes shuttering 12 plants and cutting 30,000 jobs.

At Delphi, the buyout plan initially covered only up to 13,000 UAW workers.

In June, Delphi, the UAW and GM announced a supplementary agreement extending the pre-retirement plan to workers with at least 26 years experience and offered straight buyouts to the entire Delphi UAW workforce under the GM UAW buyout terms.



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Man gobbles down 22 hot dogs in 12 minutes

By DANIELA FLORES
Associated Press
Fri Jun 23, 2006

CRANBURY, N.J. - With sweat pouring down his face, a 42-year-old courier from Moonachie methodically gobbled 22 hot dogs in 12 minutes Friday to win a regional hot-eating competition and a slot at Nathan's Famous Fourth of July eating contest in Coney Island, N.Y.

Pat Philbin, known in the competitive eating circuit as "Pat from Moonachie," beat 12 veterans and newcomers to competitive eating to be crowned the New Jersey Turnpike Regional Hot-Dog Eating Champion at a highway rest area.

"Eating is a natural thing," said Philbin, who stands 6-feet-2 and weighs 310 pounds. "People want to see how fast you can run, how high you can jump, how much you can eat. It's the evolution of sport."
Philbin, ranked 20th by the International Federation of Competitive Eaters, which sanctioned the competition, used a simple technique to win: dunking his hot dogs in water before bites.

While other competitors shoved entire buns into their mouths or swung their heads back to help them swallow, Philbin kept his head down and one fist on the table as he steadily bit into the dogs.

"It's called hungry and focused. Think, 'Don't puke, don't puke!'" Philbin said of his strategy, which came in handy when a competitor next to him got sick during the contest.

To train, Philbin said he drinks a gallon of water in three minutes.

"It expands your stomach and it has a memory of that," said Philbin, who didn't eat for a day before the competition. He planned to eat a light dinner Friday.

Philbin said the summer heat was tough to overcome during the chow-down, but it didn't slow him enough to let second place winner Allen Goldstein, of Plainview, N.Y., catch up.

Goldstein, 42, who works in the medical field, ate 20 hot dogs as his wife and coach, Greta, cheered him the whole way.

"Competitive eating is basically 25 percent stomach capacity, 75 percent mental," said Goldstein, who danced along to pop music while eating.

A crowd gathered to watch the contestants, including people who made a special trip to watch the contest and travelers who happened to wander by.

"Gluttony has now become a national sport," said Russ Dodge, a 68-year-old from Salem County who was manning a table for the state Division of Fish and Wildlife during a sidewalk fair at the rest stop. "It's a sign of the times."

Philbin, who joined the competitive eating circuit last year after winning a radio show's egg nog drinking contest, won a trophy, a year's supply of Nathan's hot dogs and his second trip to the Coney Island finals. He ate 20 hot dogs at that competition last year.

The finals will feature 15 participants representing the United States and four international competitors.



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Americans' circle of close friends shrinking

By Amanda Beck
Reuters
Fri Jun 23, 2006

WASHINGTON - Americans are more socially isolated than they were 20 years ago, separated by work, commuting and the single life, researchers reported on Friday.

Nearly a quarter of people surveyed said they had "zero" close friends with whom to discuss personal matters. More than 50 percent named two or fewer confidants, most often immediate family members, the researchers said.

"This is a big social change, and it indicates something that's not good for our society," said Duke University Professor Lynn Smith-Lovin, lead author on the study to be published in the American Sociological Review.
Smith-Lovin's group used data from a national survey of 1,500 American adults that has been ongoing since 1972.

She said it indicated people had a surprising drop in the number of close friends since 1985. At that time, Americans most commonly said they had three close friends whom they had known for a long time, saw often, and with whom they shared a number of interests.

They were almost as likely to name four or five friends, and the relationships often sprang from their neighborhoods or communities.

Ties to a close network of friends create a social safety net that is good for society, and for the individual. Research has linked social support and civic participation to a longer life, Smith-Lovin said.

People were not asked why they had fewer intimate ties, but Smith-Lovin said that part of the cause could be that Americans are working more, marrying later, having fewer children, and commuting longer distances.

The data also show the social isolation trend mirrors other class divides: Non-whites and people with less education tend to have smaller social networks than white Americans and the highly educated.

That means that in daily life, personal emergencies and national disasters like Hurricane Katrina, those with the fewest resources also have the fewest personal friends to call for advice and assistance.

"It's one thing to know someone and exchange e-mails with them. It's another thing to say, 'Will you give me a ride out of town with all of my possessions and pets? And can I stay with you for a couple or three months?" Smith-Lovin said.

"Worrying about social isolation is not a matter of nostalgia for a warm and cuddly past. Real things are strongly connected with that," added Harvard University Public Policy Professor Robert Putnam, author of "Bowling Alone," a book on the decline of American community.

He suggested flexible work schedules would allow Americans to tend both personal and professional lives.



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Knight Ridder Inc.'s demise reflects sobering times for U.S. newspapers

17:11:28 EDT Jun 23, 2006
MICHAEL LIEDTKE

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - Like many newspaper lovers, Larry Jinks is wrestling with mixed emotions as Knight Ridder Inc.'s (NYSE:KRI) shareholders prepare to vote Monday on the company's $4.5 billion US sale to McClatchy Co. (NYSE:MNI).

Jinks takes comfort knowing most of Knight Ridder's 32 daily papers will be turned over to a well-regarded publisher like McClatchy, where he sits on the board of directors.

But as someone who spent most of his career working for Knight Ridder, Jinks sympathizes with journalists and readers mourning the loss of the second largest U.S. newspaper publisher - a company long admired for its community service and enlightening stories.
While the U.S. Department of Justice has requested more information about the sale of two newspapers involved in the Knight-Ridder deal, McClatchy spokeswoman Sarah Lubman said this week that the shareholder vote is still on track for Monday.

"I am sorry to see it going away," said Jinks, who joined the McClatchy board in 1995 after retiring from Knight Ridder, where he served stints as executive editor of The Miami Herald and publisher of the San Jose Mercury News. "I have been involved in newspapers since 1950, and the last year has been the most tumultuous of any that I can remember."

Knight Ridder's demise may foreshadow more sobering times ahead for newspapers if advertising continues its shift to the Internet, intensifying pressure on publishers to cut costs to satisfy investors who continue to demand higher profits despite the industry's eroding revenue and readership.

Those tensions buried San Jose-based Knight Ridder, which spent much of the past decade fruitlessly trying to please Wall Street. Knight Ridder's papers have a combined daily circulation of 8.1 million, down from 8.5 million five years ago.

The relentless pursuit of more profit became an uphill battle as the company tried to offset its diminishing revenue by eliminating 3,500 jobs, or 16 per cent of its work force, over the past five years.

The purge weakened Knight Ridder's newsrooms when it should have been bulking up to cope with the online revolution, said Jay Harris, who quit as the Mercury News' publisher in 2001 because he didn't want to make deep cuts at the Silicon Valley paper.

Shareholders weren't placated because management still couldn't deliver on its promise to bring the company's profits in line with the rest of the industry.

Last year, Knight Ridder's operating profit margin stood at 16.4 per cent compared to the industry average of 19.2 per cent, according to industry analyst John Morton.

And it was backpedaling faster than its peers. In 2004, it posted an operating profit margin of 19.4 per cent compared to 20.5 per cent for the industry, Morton said.

Investors took out their frustrations on Knight Ridder's (NYSE:KRI) stock, which plunged from a high of $80 in 2004 to a low of $52.42 last year. Shares dropped 0.8 per cent Friday to close at $60.96 on the New York Stock Exchange.

Exasperated with Knight Ridder's performance, the company's three largest shareholders confronted the board last year. That rebellion led to the McClatchy sale, a cash-stock deal initially valued at $67.25 per share when it was announced in March.

If shareholders give their approval Monday, Knight Ridder plans to close the sale Tuesday, ending the existence of a company with roots dating back to 1892, when Herman Ridder bought a German-language paper in New York.

In 1974, Ridder Publications Inc. merged with Knight Newspapers Inc., which began in 1903 in Ohio.

The newspapers owned by Knight Ridder and its predecessor companies have amassed 85 Pulitzer Prizes, rewarding a corporate culture devoted to the public's right to know.

The sale to McClatchy will splinter a group of newspapers that includes The Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Kansas City Star, The Charlotte Observer, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Contra Costa Times and Mercury News.

McClatchy is keeping 20 of the daily papers and selling the rest. Sacramento-based McClatchy already has reached agreements to sell 11 papers to seven different buyers for more than $2 billion combined. It's still looking for a buyer for The Times-Leader of Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

"This is a tragedy for journalism and for the communities that were served by Knight Ridder's newsrooms," said Harris, currently the Wallis Annenberg Chair in journalism and communication at the University of Southern California.

Knight Ridder CEO P. Anthony Ridder declined to be interviewed for this story.

Selling the company against his will was something Ridder, 65, feared since he became Knight Ridder's chief executive officer in 1995. Unlike several other publicly held publishers, Knight Ridder never had a layer of elite stock to help insulate the company from dissident shareholders.

"Tony felt a great deal of pressure because he knew if just one institutional investor got really unhappy, it could bring the company's downfall," Morton said.

Morton doubts another executive could have saved Knight Ridder. "Considering the hand Tony was dealt, he did about as good as he could."


Comment: Can you say "greed"? Knight-Ridder was making a profit, but it was three points less than its competitors. So there goes the competition and the press monopoly in the US increases.

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US Government Terror Plot


Father: Sears Tower Plot suspect not in 'right mind'

By DOUG SIMPSON
Associated Press
Sun Jun 25, 2006

BUNKIE, La. - The father of a man accused in a terrorism plot to blow up Chicago's Sears Tower said Saturday he was at a loss to explain how his son was suspected of leading such a group.

"He's not in his right mind, I'll tell you that," Narcisse Batiste, 72, said in an interview at his home here in central Louisiana.

His 32-year-old son, Narseal, and six other men were arrested Thursday in a Miami warehouse. Federal authorities said they had no explosives and lacked adequate funding, with their only link to al-Qaida being an FBI informant fronting as a member of the terrorist group.
Their alleged plot to blow up the 110-floor tower in Chicago and government buildings around Miami was labeled "more aspirational than operational" by FBI officials.

Narseal Batiste was accused of being the group's ringleader, telling the informant that he and his soldiers wanted to attend al-Qaida training and planned a "full ground war" against the United States to "kill all the devils we can," according to an indictment.

Investigators said all members of the alleged plot were in custody on conspiracy charges.

Narcisse Batiste said he had not seen his son, Narseal, the youngest of his family of five boys and one girl, since right after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. At the time, his son expressed shock over the attacks.

"He even said himself, 'that's terrible what they've done to us.' He didn't like it all," Batiste said.

But something had changed in Batiste's youngest offspring about the time his mother, Audrey Batiste, died in 2000 after complications from surgery.

"All of my kids took that so hard," Batiste said. "It has a lot to do with his actions, I can tell you that."

Batiste, a Christian preacher at a nondenominational church, said his son also developed an interest in Islam after studying the Bible for years. The pastor said his son was determined to study the Quran despite his urging to remain with Christianity.

"I didn't agree with it but he was a man by then and I didn't think I could argue with him about it," Batiste said.

Narseal Batiste's sister and two of his brothers also are Christian ministers, his father said.

During Narseal Batiste's childhood, the family moved back and forth between Marksville, a small town in central Louisiana and Chicago where the elder Batiste earned money doing bricklaying and other construction work - trades that he said he taught all of his sons.

Narseal Batiste attended Catholic school in Chicago and a public school near Marksville, playing the saxophone in the high school marching band and excelling in English and art, according to his father.

Narcisse Batiste said he believed his son and his wife, Minerva, were operating a construction business in Miami. His son has three boys and a girl, he said.

A phone message left at the couple's Florida business was not immediately returned Saturday.

Narseal Batiste seemed normal the last time they met, the father said.

"He showed love. He was friendly. That's the way he left me," he said.

A federal magistrate on Friday appointed lawyers for Batiste and the four other defendants, but contact information for the lawyers was not immediately known.



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Miami "terror" arrests-a government provocation

2006-06-25
By Bill Van Auken – World Socialist Web Site


There are many incongruities surrounding the arrest of seven men from the impoverished Liberty City neighborhood of Miami on charges of conspiracy to "wage war on the United States" that suggest it, like so many previous "terrorist plots" announced by the Bush administration, is a government-inspired provocation mounted for reactionary political ends.

None of the claims made by the government and repeated uncritically by the media concerning the arrest of these young working-class men can be accepted as good coin. Both the flimsiness of the criminal indictment and the lurid headlines surrounding it mark this event as an escalation in the anti-democratic conspiracies of the Bush administration.

There is every indication that this latest purported terrorist threat-described by some media outlets as "even bigger than September 11"-was manufactured by the FBI, which used an undercover agent posing as a terrorist mastermind to entrap those targeted for arrest.

While the Justice Department declared that the arrests had foiled a plot to blow up the tallest building in the US, the Sears Tower in Chicago, authorities in that city assured its residents that there had never been any threat to the structure.

The four-count indictment presented by the Justice Department in a Miami federal court on Friday contains not a single indication of an overt criminal act or even the means to carry one out. The brief 11-page document consists almost entirely of alleged statements made by the defendants to the FBI informant, referred to in quotes throughout the indictment as "the al Qaeda representative."
The government chose to consummate its entrapment plan by unleashing dozens of combat-equipped federal agents, dressed in olive drab fatigues and carrying automatic weapons, on the predominantly African-American Liberty City neighborhood, one of the poorest in the country. Liberty City was the scene of riots that broke out in 1980 after the acquittal of white police officers for the beating death of a black motorist.

On Thursday, the government's paramilitary squads confronted residents with pictures of the accused, demanding to know their whereabouts. The seven defendants are representative of the impoverished working class population of Miami, including Haitian immigrants.

It appears they were targeted by the FBI because they had formed a religious group, calling themselves the "Seas of David," which reportedly incorporated elements of Christianity and Islam. One of their crimes, according to the FBI's deputy director, John Pistole, was that the Seas of David "did not believe the United States government had legal authority over them."

According to some residents of the neighborhood, the group lived together in the warehouse that was raided by the FBI, using it for religious worship and as a base of operations for a construction business.

Elements of the federal indictment are so self-incriminating as to border on the ludicrous. Among the charges are that the defendants "swore an oath of loyalty to al Qaeda." Who administered this oath? The "al Qaeda representative," AKA, the paid informant of the FBI.

Aside from this "loyalty oath" solicited by the FBI, only one of the seven defendants is accused of any overt act, outside of driving the FBI informant to meetings.

The only action with which this one individual is charged-all else is words-is taking pictures of the FBI headquarters in Miami. Who supplied the camera? The "al Qaeda representative"-i.e., the FBI agent provocateur.

The indictment further charges two of the accused with driving "with the 'al Qaeda representative'" to a store in Dade County, Florida to purchase a memory chip for a digital camera to be used for taking reconnaissance photographs of the FBI building. The document does not say who paid for the chip, but there is hardly room for doubt.

In one of the more curious sections of the indictment, one of the accused, Narseal Batiste, is accused of asking the FBI informant to provide various items for his group, including footwear, for which he provided a "list of shoe sizes." Apparently the FBI delivered the shoes.

Pistole, the FBI deputy director, admitted that the supposed plots to blow up buildings had been "more aspirational than operational." In the raids carried out by the FBI squads, no weapons and no explosive substances were found.

"We preempted their plot," declared Pistole. But the indictment and the facts of the case indicate that the alleged plot would never have existed had the government not planned and instigated it in the first place.

At a Washington press conference, US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales acknowledged that the alleged plot had posed no actual danger. He claimed this was because the authorities had intervened "in its earliest stages.

"So early" was the preemption that officials associated with the supposed targets of the plot dismissed the government's indictment. Barbara Carley, the managing director of the Sears Tower, told the press, "Federal and local authorities continue to tell us they've never found evidence of a credible terrorism threat against Sears Tower that's ever gone beyond just talk."

Her remarks were echoed by Chicago Police Superintendent Phil Cline, who said, "There never was any credible threat to the Sears Tower at all."

In his press conference, Attorney General Gonzales asserted that the Miami group represented a "new brand of terrorism" created by "the convergence of globalization and technology."

What these words mean is anyone's guess. There is no indication that those charged, who were living in a warehouse in the poorest city in America, had access to any technology, and their supposed contact to the wider world was an informer planted by the FBI. The suggestion that the seven men were a "home-grown" terrorist group inspired by contact with Al Qaeda elements over the Internet is supported neither by evidence nor the charges contained in the government's own indictment.

R. Alexander Acosta, the United States attorney in South Florida, told the media that the defendants had "lived in the United States for most of their lives, but developed a hatred of America." This is presented as though it constituted evidence of a crime.

It is hardly surprising for someone living in Liberty City to hate the poverty and oppression that prevail there, or for Haitian immigrants to despise the imprisonment and repression that Washington metes out to those attempting to escape the brutal conditions imposed by US imperialism upon their homeland.

What is highly noteworthy is that the federal government decided to intervene in this situation to concoct a phony Al Qaeda connection and trumped up "terror plot."

What is the government's motive in manufacturing such a plot? Whose interests are served? Under conditions in which the majority of the American people have turned against the Iraq war and support the withdrawal of American troops, the Bush administration is desperately attempting to once again link its neo-colonial venture in Iraq with a supposed "global war on terror" waged to defend the American people against another 9/11.

To sustain such a fiction, fresh evidence of terrorist threats is periodically required. And it has been forthcoming on a regular basis. Every several months another "conspiracy" is unveiled, invariably involving an FBI informant and hapless individuals ensnared in a plot orchestrated by the government.

Until now, these "sting" operations have been targeted at Muslim immigrants. Last month, for example, Pakistani immigrant Shahawar Siraj in New York City was found guilty of plotting to blow up the Herald Square subway station in a "plot" that the evidence indicated was based entirely on suggestions from an FBI informant.

The FBI agent provocateur taunted the defendant with photographs of Abu Ghraib torture victims and demanded to know how, as a Muslim, he could fail to take action.

Similarly, in Albany, New York two years ago, the FBI recruited a Pakistani immigrant, promising him leniency on minor fraud charges, to ensnare two other immigrants in a fictitious scheme to help a non-existent person buy a weapon for a fake terrorist plot.

These provocations and conspiracies are symptomatic of a government that is both ruthless and desperate. Confronting a population that is increasingly hostile to its political agenda of reaction at home and war abroad, it is driven to manufacture an endless series of terrorist threats aimed at disorienting and intimidating public opinion.



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Terror Suspects Had No Explosives and Few Contacts

Washington Post
June 24, 2006

MIAMI -- Federal authorities announced charges here Friday against seven men they described as "a homegrown terrorist cell" that planned to blow up Chicago's Sears Tower and other buildings. But officials conceded that the group never had contact with al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups and had not acquired any explosives.

The group, which operated from a small, warehouse-like building in Miami's impoverished Liberty City neighborhood, adhered to a vague and militant Islamic ideology, claimed the U.S. government had no authority over it, and was led by a charismatic Haitian American named Narseal Batiste, according to officials and the four-count indictment. All but one of the members were citizens or legal residents of the United States.

The case underscores the murkiness that has been common to many of the government's terrorism-related prosecutions since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, cases that often hinge on ill-formed plots or debatable connections to terrorism. It is also the latest in a series of FBI-run stings involving informants or government agents who pose as terrorists to build a case.
The indictment, which charges the men with seeking support from al-Qaeda to wage a "ground war" on the United States, is based primarily on Batiste's interactions with an unidentified government informant who posed as an al-Qaeda "representative" and discussed plans for bombings and assaults on the Sears Tower, the FBI office in Miami and other targets. Batiste and the six others also allegedly swore an oath of loyalty to al-Qaeda during meetings with the informant, according to the charges.

"On or about December 16, 2005, Narseal Batiste provided the 'al Qaeda representative' (actually the FBI informant) with a list of materials and equipment needed in order to wage jihad, which list included boots, uniforms, machine guns, radios and vehicles," the indictment said. The indictment said the group's aim was to " 'kill all the devils we can' in a mission that would 'be just as good or greater than 9/11.' "

But officials said the plot never progressed beyond the early planning stages and the group had no known contact with al-Qaeda. Batiste allegedly recorded video of the U.S. courthouse and other federal buildings in Miami as part of a casing operation, but the camera was provided by the government informant, the indictment said.

Deputy FBI Director John S. Pistole said at a news conference in Washington that the talk of attacking the 110-story Sears Tower -- the tallest building in the United States -- was "aspirational rather than operational." He said none of the men appeared on U.S. terrorism watch lists.

But Pistole and other U.S. officials said aggressive policing and early arrests were necessary to ensure that potential terrorist attacks -- no matter how improbable they may seem -- are thwarted. Prosecutors say that the group's alleged actions, including the video recordings and the requests for weapons and explosives, amounted to overt acts that can be prosecuted under federal anti-terrorism laws.

"Our philosophy is that we try to identify plots in the earliest stages possible, because we don't know what we don't know about a terrorism plot, and that once we have sufficient information to move forward with the prosecution, that's what we do," Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said at the Washington news conference.

Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert who heads the Washington office of the Rand Corp., said that the Miami plot appears to be "embryonic at best" but that "amateur terrorists can kill as effectively as the professional kind."

"It seems clear that their ambitions were serious; what's not clear is whether they had any real capabilities to pull it off," Hoffman said. "This is the difficult balance that we're trying to strike between being vigilant and not overreacting and equating this with 9/11 or something."

The group came to the attention of authorities when its members began to seek the aid of foreign agents who could help them, federal officials said at a Miami news conference. One of the people the group sought aid from tipped terrorism investigators. A federal informant then presented himself to the group as an al-Qaeda representative, officials said.

On Dec. 16, 2005, Batiste met in a hotel room with the informant and, around the same time, said he was trying to build an "Islamic Army" to wage jihad, according to the indictment. He also asked for boots, uniforms, machine guns, radios, vehicles and $50,000 in cash.

But the suspects received little other than military boots and the video camera from the false al-Qaeda representative, according to the indictment. By May, the indictment suggests, the plan had largely petered out because of organizational problems.

Batiste appeared in federal court in Miami on Friday along with four other defendants who had been arrested during the FBI raids Thursday: Patrick Abraham, Naudimar Herrera, Burson Augustin and Rotschild Augustine. Another defendant, Lyglenson Lemorin, was arrested in Atlanta, while the seventh, Stanley Grant Phanor, was already in custody on a probation charge.

Five of the men are U.S. citizens. Abraham is a Haitian illegally in the country, and Lemorin is a Haitian with legal residency here, officials said. At least six of the seven appear to have faced criminal charges before, according to records, for marijuana possession, battery, assault and concealed weapons.

Phanor had worked in construction, his family said, and took up studying Islam at the warehouse-like building a year ago. He called it "the temple."

"He does not have the heart to kill people," his disbelieving mother, Elizene Phanor, said, falling to her knees. "I swear to God."

The men gathered daily at the building, neighbors said. It used to be a sandwich shop, but less than a year ago the men moved in and remodeled, a neighbor said.

The men sported a variety of dress -- sometimes they were seen in black fatigues, sometimes in ski masks, sometimes in fezzes and dashikis -- and at one point they arranged flags from a number of nations, including Jamaica, Haiti and Cuba, around the building, according to neighbors.

They were not well funded: Neighbors said the men drove old cars and some of them made money by selling shampoo and hair tonic on the street. At Friday's hearing, the defendants said they were self-employed, and all qualified to be represented by a public defender. Batiste, who did stucco work, told the judge he made about $30,000 a year.

"We used to wonder, 'What are they doing? Who are they?' " said Babalu Nesbitt, 67, an immigrant from the Bahamas who collects cans for recycling for a living and who lives close to the building. "But they were the kind that only wanted to talk to their own."

They held readings of the Koran at times, and at others could be seen practicing martial arts outside. After Hurricane Wilma knocked out the electricity in the area for days last fall, the group passed out water from a silver van, some neighbors recalled.

Christopher Johnson, 37, a bodyguard and former Navy SEAL, said he recalled watching the martial arts they were using and being surprised that it seemed to be less about self-defense and more about attack. "A little bell went off," he said. "I thought, 'There's got to be a bigger purpose.' But I let it ride."

In Chicago, Police Superintendent Philip J. Cline told reporters that Batiste used to live in Chicago and was once arrested on a misdemeanor property damage charge. But he said the Miami group never came close to mounting an attack there.

"There was never any imminent danger to the Sears Tower or Chicago," Cline said.


Comment: While it is screamingly obvious even from their own reports, the mainstream media continues to ignore the elephant in the living room - this was very clearly a fake "terror cell" of intellectually challenged patsies, setup by the FBI to be used as proof of the reality of the war on terror.

But it was sloppy work. The Bushites must be getting desperate, or cocky.


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The Lobby


Does the Pro-Israel Lobby work against U.S. interests?

by Mohamed Elmasry
(Friday June 23 2006)

"The essence of the Mearsheimer-Walt paper is that the American pro-Israel lobby has so successfully influenced American foreign policy in the Middle East that Washington now places the security and interests of Israel ahead of the security and interests of the United States and its own people - a situation that the authors state "has no equal in American history."
In liberal democracies lobbyists are part of the system.

Special interest groups try to lobby governments to change policies, pass laws, or allocate funds to benefit their groups.

The more rich and powerful a given group is, the more effective its lobbying becomes. No lobby group should cross the legal line and bribe politicians or government officials, but an even more serious situation occurs when a group lobbying for a foreign country does so against its own country's national interests.

Recently two renowned American academics, John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, wrote a major research paper titled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," which reported on how powerful the American pro-Israel lobby is and how it is working against American national interests.

Both are leading American political scientists with a respected track record. Prof. Mearsheimer authored "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics" and Professor Walt wrote "Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy."

So you'd think that in free America, if two accomplished academics write an 83-page research paper on any topic, their findings would be evaluated objectively on their own merits. Yes, but with one glaring exception - not if the paper deals with the American pro-Israel lobby and has negative content to share!

The tactics traditionally employed by any influential lobbyists against its critics are basically twofold: first, try to suppress publication of the offending research (much harder now, thanks to the Internet), and secondly, to smear the researchers' reputations, harass them, have them fired from their jobs, etc.

In fact, Mearsheimer and Walt say the American pro-Israel lobby is so strong that they doubted their paper would be printed in any American-based publication. One clear reason why is found in their warning that the pro-Israel lobby has pushed to exaggerate to the media and public the importance of protecting Israel as a key part of American foreign policy.

The Mearsheimer and Walt report also calls AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the "de facto agent for a foreign government," and notes that AIPAC has now forged an ominous alliance with conservative evangelical Christian groups, many of whom believe that Jesus Christ will literally build a physical "New Jerusalem" at the biblical Second Coming.

"The thrust of U.S. policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the 'Israel Lobby'. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. interests and those of the other country -- in this case, Israel -- are essentially identical," Walt and Mearsheimer write.

"Saying that Israel and the U.S. are united by a shared terrorist threat," they continue, "has [placed] the causal relationship backwards: the U.S. has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around. Support for Israel is not the only source of anti-American terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror more difficult."

The authors also question the argument that Israel deserves American support as the only democracy in the Middle East, arguing that "some aspects of Israeli democracy are at odds with core American values."

For example; "Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship. Given this, it is not surprising that its 1.3 million Arabs are treated as second-class citizens."

Today the American pro-Israel lobby has become the most powerful pro-Israel lobby in the world, supplanting the British pro-Israel lobby that dominated there from the early 1900s through the mid-1970s.

In their excellent 1975 book, "Publish It Not," British MP Michael Adams and journalist Christopher Mayhew outline their suffering at the hands of the British pro-Israel lobby for speaking the truth. Their book is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of the international pro-Israel lobby, as much as Mearsheimer and Walt's paper is today.

The essence of the Mearsheimer-Walt paper is that the American pro-Israel lobby has so successfully influenced American foreign policy in the Middle East that Washington now places the security and interests of Israel ahead of the security and interests of the United States and its own people - a situation that the authors state "has no equal in American history."

St. Jerome said, "If an offence come out of the truth, better it is that the offence come than that the truth be concealed."

True and sobering words indeed, and not a moment too soon to act on them.



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NY's Havesi: Olmert plan better for investments

AVI KRAWITZ,
THE JERUSALEM POST
Jun. 25, 2006

As Prime Minister Ehud Olmert continues to seek international approval for his "realignment" program from strategic political partners, New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi gave his "investors'" stamp of approval for the plan to make further unilateral withdrawals.

"While having Hamas in charge of the government of the PA is a very unhappy circumstance ..... I am encouraged by Olmert's plan that says Israel is not going to wait for partners and will establish its own borders," Hevesi told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday. "Withdrawal from certain territories, which is incredibly painful, and completion of the security fence makes Israel more secure not less, and an even better investment."
Hevesi, who as the sole trustee of New York State's Common Retirement Fund oversees over $1b. of investments in Israel, added that he expects investments in Israel to continue to grow regardless of political circumstances.

"The investment community is not structured to issue a resolution of support [for political developments]. It speaks by its actions," he said. "The amount of investment has gone up and indications have been very strong from US investors that this will continue, politics not with standing."

He explained that given its stable democracy, stable currency, government that is encouraging private investment, and a regulatory system that is fair and smart and rational, Israel was an attractive arena for investors based purely on financial considerations.

Hevesi arrived in the country, on his 26th visit, as part of the World Pension Forum mission to Israel last week. During his stay, he also received the IVA Israel Hi-tech award at the Israel Venture Association Annual Hi-tech conference 2006.

The award comes against the backdrop of a commitment the New York State fund made earlier this year to create a private equity fund that would invest $100m. in Israeli hi-tech through venture capital funds. The fund is being managed by financial consulting firm Hamilton Lane, which recently opened an office in Tel Aviv for that purpose and to enhance its contact with Israeli clients for whom it invests in the US.

And while Hevesi stressed that the $100m. million is "a done deal," no investments have yet been made.

Erik Hirsch, Chief Investment Officer at Hamilton Lane, said the company was in the process of interviewing fund managers and that it would be making its first investment shortly.

This latest commitment would bring New York's investments in Israel to $1.55b., about 1% of its total $128b. holdings.

Just over half the fund's Israeli investments are in government bonds, while it also holds shares in top companies such as Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Aladdin Knowledge Systems, which provides information-technology security products, and Nice Systems, a developer of digital- recording technology.

In addition, the fund has put $250m. into Markstone Capital Group, making it the anchor investor in Israel's largest private equity fund.

Looking ahead, and provided he is reelected to office later this year, Hevesi hinted at a possible collaboration between New York and Israel, "to connect Israeli brain power with the US investment capacity and New York brain power," he said, noting the enormous potential that lies in the nano-technology field.

Hevesi was elected New York State Comptroller in 2003 and is running for a second term on the Democratic ticket.

Comment from Jess Blankfort: This is one of the insidious ways that Jewish American supporters of Israel help Israel at a potential expense to the constituents to whom they are legally and fiscally responsible. Since for last fifteen years, the Israeli economy has relied on at least $2 billion a year in US taxpayer guaranteed loans, what those in the US to make such investments, which includes the purchase of State of Israel Bonds by at least 23 states and 1700 labor unions (over $5 billion!) will be sure to lobby their respective members of Congress as well as whoever is president to make sure the US keeps the Israeli economy from collapsing. It would be interesting if some economist would measure the amount of potential US job losses have been caused by such investments in Israel.

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Jew admits hate crime 'as bad as theirs'

Fri, June 23, 2006
By SAM PAZZANO, COURTS BUREAU

A Toronto man admitted yesterday he committed hate crimes by spreading anti-Muslim posters and graffiti on the Ryerson University campus in a misguided form of revenge.

Kevin Haas, 23, confessed to police that he committed the crimes two years ago as retaliation for anti-Semitic incidents involving graffiti and the toppling of tombstones at a Jewish cemetery.

Haas was caught by campus police putting up "Death to Muslims" posters and other derogatory signs around the campus on Oct. 18, 2004.
Haas, who's Jewish, expressed his "genuine" remorse and conceded his hate-mongering actions were "just as bad as theirs," court heard.

Haas was given a six-month conditional sentence, 12 months probation and was ordered to write a letter of apology to the Arab and Muslim associations at Ryerson and perform 100 hours of community service.



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Wandering Jew - Propaganda for the Insipid

2006-03-31
by Alice Ollstein

I've been working as teacher's assistant at my temple's religious school for the past four years. I love teaching my second-graders their first Hebrew letters. I love watching my sixth-graders find Israel on a map. But what I love most is the connection my job gives me to Judaism and to Israel, where I hope to travel during college. That is why I jumped at my grandfather's invitation to attend the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference in Washington D.C., where I could join more than 1,000 students and 4,000 adults in discussing the future of Israel. I returned from the conference, however, feeling manipulated, disturbed and disgusted with a great deal of what I witnessed there.
The first thing I noticed about the conference, besides the sheer volume of participants, was the carefully manufactured atmosphere of fear and urgency. The cavernous hall that hosted all our meals and plenary sessions was always filled with dramatic classical music, red lighting and gigantic signs reading "Now Is The Time." That, combined with the montages of terrorism footage projected onto six giant screens, whipped the audience into a "Save Israel" fervor that most found inspiring. By the time we finished our meal, the audience seemed eager to agree to anything that would protect Israel - even war.

The conservative slant of the conference became obvious as I chose "Policy Perspectives: How the Democrats and Republicans View Foreign Affairs" for my first breakout session. The Republican speaker, John Podhoretz of The New York Post, got to have the first word and the last word on almost every question. Podhoretz insulted the Democratic Party, calling it "schizophrenic" and "weak" because of its division on certain issues, and calling Democratic protests about the Iraq war "inappropriate and dangerous."

Democratic speaker Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of the New Democratic Network, responded: "Debate, besides being a sign of health in a party, is important to any democracy." He addressed the "mishandling" of the Iraq war: "The Republican Party only cares about winning the war militarily, which isn't enough. We need to win culturally as well. We need to win the war and win the peace. The Republicans have won the war, but lost the peace."

Podhoretz interrupted, saying that the Democrats should have been "loyal and responsible" by supporting the war, instead of "hostile."

The mealtime plenary sessions taught me the most about the mindset of our country and about the art of rhetoric. Each speaker played upon the audience's deepest fears and greatest hopes. Even after four days, it never ceased to amaze me how easy it was to get a standing ovation out of the crowd. Even platitudes such as "I believe in democracy" or, even better, "I believe in Israel" had the crowds on their feet. How much political integrity and courage does it take to say "I will defend Israel" to thousands of pro-Israel activists? Flattery seemed to work as well, which acting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proved by saying, "Thank God we have AIPAC."

Overall, I felt the conference made every issue black and white. You're either for Israel or against it. You're either pro-Democracy or pro-evil regimes, as Israeli candidate for prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it, "The world is split between those who oppose terror and those who appease it."

The speakers and "informational" videos left no grey area, no place for dialogue or debate, and certainly no place for dissent. I especially squirmed at the parallels AIPAC drew between Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hitler. To the tune of more dramatic classical music, the six enormous screens flashed back and forth between Hitler giving anti-Jew speeches and Ahmadinejad giving anti-Israel speeches. The famous post-Holocaust mantra "Never Again" popped up several times. Everything was geared toward persuading the audience that another Holocaust is evident ... unless we get them first. Now, I don't dispute that Iran's leader is a Holocaust denier or even that he could attack Israel, but I mind very much being forced to think he's pure evil through clever sound bites and colorful images.

The screens faded to black and the speeches began, and I recognized, beneath the rhetoric, a battle cry. As U.N. Ambassador John Bolton promised "painful and tangible consequences for Iran," and as Vice President Dick Cheney said, "The terrorists have declared war on the civilized world, but we'll declare victory," I noted the scariest division of all: You're either pro-war or pro-Holocaust.

Despite all this madness, I did enjoy some aspects of the conference. First of all, picture the hilarity of thousands of Jews staying in the same hotel. Phrases like "Could you shlep this bag up to my room, please?" or "I'm shvitzing like a pig" were common in the lobby. I also loved meeting students from around the country, regardless of whether I agreed with them politically. The chance to hear all three candidates for Israeli prime minister via satellite was also priceless. But in reflection, after returning from the belly of the conservative beast, I support Israel with all my heart, but I do not support AIPAC.

Alice Ollstein is a senior at Santa Monica High School.



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Fidel Castro to light Menorah

Ofer Petersburg

Cuban ruler Fidel Castro will use an official state ceremony to inaugurate Israel's symbol - the seven-branch menorah - in a central Havana square, in memory of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

Attending the event will be Castro's associate, Israeli Minister Rafi Eitan (Pensioners Party).

Eitan said the idea to set up the memorial was suggested by the Havana Mayor, who is renovating the city's old quarter.
Eitan said the idea to set up the memorial was suggested by the Havana Mayor, who is renovating the city's old quarter.

The mayor is a professor of history and teaches at the University of Havana. For years, he researched the history of the Jews of Havana, and renovated a series of hotels which were in Jewish ownership. He also renovated the Rachel hotel, which offers its guests Israeli meals.

Eitan has enormous citrus lands in Cuba, amounting to around the size of Gaza.

Castro's door always open

He set up an enormous real estate project in the country, together with an associate, including 18 residential buildings and a commercial shopping center, at around USD 200 million.

Until he became a minister in Israel, Eitan would frequently visit Cuba, where he lived in a beautiful villa, and where he would sculpt in the basement.

Recently, he flew to Cuba to cut off business activities there, as Israeli law demands for members of the government.

A photograph of Fidel Castro hangs in Eitan's office. The two met in 1994, when Eitan received a medal for agricultural investment, and from that time Castro's door has been open to Eitan.

Comment from Jeff Blankfort: Rafi Eitan, the large Israeli landowner mentioned in the story, was the former head of Mossad's European operations and the "handler" for convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. One wonders if he is carrying out espionage activities in Cuba and for which country?


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Odds 'n Ends


Harriet, 176-year-old giant tortoise, dies

AP
Sat June 24, 2006

SYDNEY, Australia - A 176-year-old tortoise believed to be one of the world's oldest living creatures has died in an Australian zoo.

The giant tortoise, known as Harriet, died at the Queensland-based Australia Zoo owned by "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin and his wife Terri. Irwin said he considered Harriet a member of the family.
"Harriet has been a huge chunk of the Irwin family's life," Irwin said Saturday. "She is possibly one of the oldest living creatures on the planet and her passing today is not only a great loss for the world but a very sad day for my family. She was a grand old lady."

Senior veterinarian Jon Hanger told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. on Friday that Harriet died of heart failure.

Harriet was long reputed to have been one of three tortoises taken from the Galapagos Islands by Charles Darwin on his historic 1835 voyage aboard the HMS Beagle.

However, historical records, while suggestive, don't prove the claim. And some scientists have cast doubt on the story, with DNA tests confirming Harriet's age but showing she came from an island that Darwin never visited.

According to local legend, Harriet was just five years old and probably no bigger than a dinner plate when she was taken from the Galapagos to Britain.

The tortoise spent a few years in Britain before being moved to the Brisbane Botanic Gardens in Australia's tropical Queensland state in the mid-1800s. There she was mistaken for a male and nicknamed Harry, according to Australia Zoo, which later bought the 330-pound tortoise in 1987.

Harriet was believed to be the world's oldest living tortoise, and one of its oldest living creatures. Despite her longevity, however, Harriet is not the world's oldest known tortoise.

That title was awarded by the Guinness Book of World Records to Tui Malila, a Madagascar radiated tortoise that was presented to the royal family of Tonga by British explorer Captain James Cook in the 1770s. It died in 1965 at the ripe age of 188.



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Heartburn common in Western countries

Reuters
Fri Jun 23, 2006

NEW YORK - Heartburn, resulting from gastro-esophageal reflux disease (GERD) in which stomach acid seeps into the esophagus causing burning and pain in the chest, is a common malady in Western populations, much more so than in other parts of the world, according to report in The Lancet this week.

Two doctors who reviewed 31 published studies reporting on the prevalence of heartburn symptoms estimate that 25 percent of people in Western countries suffer from heartburn at least once a month, 12 percent at least once per week, and 5 percent suffer daily with symptoms of heartburn.

In contrast, in east Asian countries, only 11 percent of people suffer heartburn at least once per month, 4 percent weekly, and 2 percent report daily symptoms of heartburn.
"There is a paucity of information about the prevalence of heartburn in other geographical regions, but symptoms of GERD are uncommon in non-Western populations," note Dr. Nicholas J. Talley from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota and Dr. Paul Moayyedi from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario note in the report.

The exact cause of heartburn remains unknown but genetic factors are thought to be involved. Obesity and lifestyle factors, such as eating certain foods, drinking alcohol and smoking also appear to increase the risk that a person will develop GERD.

Some studies have shown that losing weight and elevating the head of the bed at night may relieve heartburn caused by GERD, although it's less clear whether avoiding spicy foods, carbonated beverages, coffee or that late night meal, which are often recommended, will relieve GERD-associated heartburn.

"Unfortunately, most patients do not respond to lifestyle advice and require further therapy," Talley and Moayyedi note. Their options, at the moment, include, medications that suppress acid, such as proton pump inhibitors, endoscopic therapy, and anti-reflux surgery.

Drug therapy looks to be "better than placebo," Talley and Moayyedi report, although "most patients need long-term treatment because the disease usually relapses."

Endoscopic therapy to treat GERD may entail the use of suturing devices, the application of radiofrequency energy to the lower esophagus, or the injection of bulking agents. The authors say these approaches are of "great interest," but so far their value is uncertain.

Surgery seems to work as well as proton pump inhibitor therapy "although there is a low operative mortality and morbidity," the authors note.

GERD is also a costly problem for Western societies. In the United States, the annual direct cost for managing the disease is estimated to be more than $9 billion dollars.



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Barge loaded with sulfuric acid sinks off Philippines

AFP
Sat Jun 24, 2006

MANILA - A barge loaded with 1,270 tonnes of sulfuric acid has sank south of the Philippines capital, the coastguard said, sparking fears of environmental damage.

The sinking of the 150-ton Billy Star Saturday caused "minimal spill" on Batangas Bay and the coastguard's marine environmental protection crews had deployed in the area to contain the spill, a spokesman said.

The vessel had docked at a repair yard earlier after the right side of its hull was holed below the waterline, and the breach was apparently the cause of the sinking, the coastguard said.

There were no reports of casualties and the extent of the environmental damage was not immediately known.




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Hubble telescope main camera not working

By BRIAN WITTE
Associated Press
Sat Jun 24, 2006

BALTIMORE - The main camera on the Hubble Space Telescope, which has revolutionized astronomy with its stunning pictures of the universe, has stopped working, engineers who work on the camera said Saturday.

The Advanced Camera for Surveys, a third-generation instrument installed by a space shuttle crew in 2002, went off line Monday, and engineers are still trying to figure out what happened and how to repair it.

"It's still off line today," Max Mutchler, an instruments specialist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said Saturday.
Engineers are hopeful the problem can be fixed, said Ed Campion, a NASA spokesman at Goddard Space Flight Center outside Baltimore, which is responsible for managing the Hubble.

A bad transistor could be causing the trouble, Campion said. If so, a backup could be used. Another suspicion is that some of the camera's memory was disturbed by a cosmic event. That could be fixed by reloading the memory.

"Both possibilities are things that can be resolved here on the ground," Campion said.

The loss of the camera has not shut down the telescope entirely, he said.

"The Advanced Camera for Surveys is regarded as sort of the workhorse for the telescope, but there are other instruments that are still working," Campion said.

The camera sent messages Monday indicating power supply voltages were above their upper limits and causing it to stop working.

"At this point, the ACS is in a safe configuration, and further analysis is ongoing," according to a statement by the Space Telescope Science Institute.

The Advanced Camera for Surveys consists of three electronic cameras and a complement of filters and dispersers that detect light from the ultraviolet to the near infrared.

It was installed on the Hubble during a servicing mission by the crew of the space shuttle Columbia. Development of the ACS was a joint operation among Johns Hopkins University, Goddard Space Flight Center, Ball Aerospace and the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Hubble, launched in April 1990, needs new batteries and gyroscopes if it is to keep working beyond next year.



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Huge, scary bird sighting in York County

Jun 19, 2006
York Daily Record

Pat Grether is a skeptical person.

The 53-year-old mother and grandmother doesn't believe in ghosts or goblins or monsters or UFOs or aliens or Bigfoot. As far as she's concerned Elvis is dead, and the Loch Ness Monster, infamous legend of her native Scotland, is a myth.

She's not crazy, nor does she drink or partake in the kinds of substances that would result in a person seeing a huge, scary bird in her backyard.

Which happened last Monday morning, she said.
Her dog, a 6-month-old chow named Bear, was in the backyard of her home on Leaf Street in Brandywine Crossing in Manchester Township. Beyond the fence is a grassy hill, home to a bunch of groundhogs. She has no neighbors to the back of her house.

It was about 10 when she heard Bear yelping and barking and generally carrying on like a bird large enough to carry her away had landed just on the other side of the fence.

Grether went outside to see what the problem was. It sounded like something had frightened Bear, she said, something big, scary and weird.

Pat saw it as soon as she walked out the door. At first, she thought it was one of those big kites kids sometimes fly in the field. But it wasn't.

It was a bird.

A huge bird.

"It looked like a Cadillac," she said.

If that's so, it was the avian equivalent of an Escalade.

Huge doesn't do it justice.

It was black, except for white feathers on the tips of its wings and what appeared to be a white ring around its neck. It didn't look like any bird she knew. She knows what eagles look like, and it wasn't an eagle. She knows what vultures look like, and it wasn't that either. "Vultures have that turkey face," she said. "It didn't have a turkey face."

Most striking was the bird's size.

By her estimation, the bird had a wingspan of 18 to 20 feet.

Considering that California condors - the largest bird in North America, which, of course, is not native to this region - has a wingspan that approaches 10 feet, that's a lot of bird.

The huge bird perched in the field, just beyond her fence.

"I was shaking," Grether said. "I was scared to move. It takes a lot to scare me. Nothing scares me. But this did."

Bear, brave creature that he is, crouched behind her. "Bear was scared to death," she said. "And chows aren't scared of anything. They hunt lions."

Had it been a lion behind her house, she would have been all set and would have been able to sic Bear on it, or at least she wouldn't have been as upset as she was by the sight of a bird of prehistoric proportions. (It didn't appear prehistoric, Grether said.)

"If it had been a lion, I would have said, a lion, OK," she said. "But this ..."

She froze, and after what seemed like a long time, the bird took to wing and flew off toward the south, toward York.

Then, she went inside and called her husband, Glenn, to tell him that she wasn't crazy, but she had just seen a huge bird behind their house. Her husband didn't think she was crazy. If she said she saw it, she saw it. She and her husband later checked the Internet and couldn't find any birds that resembled the one she says she saw. She has her video camera charged and ready to go in her kitchen in case it comes back.

"I know it sounds crazy," she said. "But I'm not crazy. I know what I saw."

And it was huge bird, bigger than any bird native to these parts.

Francis Velazquez, a naturalist at York County's Nixon Park, said he'd never heard of a bird that big. He said it could have been an immature eagle or a vulture, but neither of them have wingspans of 18 to 20 feet. A full-grown eagle, he said, may reach 9 feet, but that's about as big as it gets. He said sometimes, particularly with people not familiar with birds, it's difficult to judge a bird's size and wingspan.

But 18 to 20 feet? "I don't know of anything that big," he said. "That's monster-sized."

It wasn't a monster, Grether said. It was a bird.

And she hopes someone else saw it.

"It's impossible for a bird that size to be around and nobody else see it," she said. "I just want to know if anybody else saw it."

She hopes it won't become the York County version of the Loch Ness Monster.

Which she doesn't believe in anyway.



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