Hundreds of thousands of people were warned to flee southern Lebanon today as Israeli military officers indicated that final preparations were being made for a ground offensive.

Israeli planes dropped leaflets telling residents to clear the zone after officials met to decide how big a force to send in, according to senior military officials.

They said Israel would not stop its offensive until Hizbullah was forced behind the Litani river, 20 miles north of the border - creating a new buffer zone in a region that saw Israeli occupation between 1982 and 2000. Reservists in northern Israel were ordered to report for duty later today.

"It's possible that in the coming days our ground operations will increase," Brigadier General Alon Friedman told the Maariv newspaper. "We have many forces, we will carry out a massive recruitment of reserves and it's possible that many more forces ... will reach the border in the next few days."

The Lebanese defence minister said Lebanon's army was ready to defend the country against any land offensive by Israel. Elias al-Murr, when asked if the Lebanese army would fight alongside Hizbullah against any land incursion by Israel, told al-Arabiya: "Our constitutional duty is to defend Lebanon as a Lebanese army. This is our role."

This morning Israeli warplanes launched a sustained aerial attack on Tyre. Television pictures showed numerous plumes of smoke rising above the southern Lebanese port city. Shortly after, Hizbullah fighters retaliated, launching a volley of at least five missiles at the Israeli city of Haifa. Ten people were injured in the attack, Israeli authorities said.

At least 319 people have been killed in Lebanon by the Israeli campaign, according to Lebanese security officials. At least 34 Israelis have been killed, including 19 soldiers - two of them killed in yesterday's fighting. Early today, one air force officer died and three were injured when two Israeli helicopters collided near the Lebanese border.

Hizbullah said two of its fighters had been killed in the latest fighting with Israeli troops, bringing to five the number of guerrillas killed since Israel launched a massive military campaign against Lebanon and the militant Shia Muslim group on July 12.

Meanwhile, the evacuation of foreigners from Beirut continued. The Royal Navy assault ship HMS Bulwark was today expected to head back to the area after it dropped off around 1,800 Britons evacuated yesterday in Cyprus.

It also emerged that the radical Muslim preacher, Omar Bakri Mohammed, who abruptly left Britain last summer, had been barred from boarding HMS Bulwark in Beirut. The founder of the hardline al-Muhajiroun group asked to be allowed to leave on humanitarian grounds to see his family who still live in the UK. Mr Bakri's indefinite leave to remain in Britain was revoked by the former home secretary Charles Clarke after he left the country.

Around 2,200 evacuated Americans were also arriving in Cyprus today as the island's foreign minister, Georgios Lillikas, said authorities were braced to receive 20,000 Canadians among the tens of thousands of evacuees.

US Brigadier General Carl Jensen, who is in charge of the operation to remove Americans from Lebanon, told Reuters that a second country may offer to take evacuees and help ease the burden on Cyprus.

"It's another country in the area. We may know as early as today or tomorrow," he said. US diplomatic sources said it was most likely to be Turkey, where a Canadian ship with evacuees had already docked, according to Reuters.

The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, who yesterday denounced Israel for "excessive use of force", is due to meet the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, later today to discuss the crisis. The Bush administration - which has resisted calls for it to press Israel to halt the fighting - is likely to send Ms Rice to Israel on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Lebanese people continued leaving the south of the country, streaming north to Beirut and other regions, where they crowded into schools, homes of relatives or hotels. Taxi drivers in the south were charging up to $400 (£215) per person for rides to the capital, more than 40 times the usual price. In remote villages of the south, cut off by air strikes, residents made their way out over the mountains by foot.

The UN estimated that about a half a million people had been displaced in Lebanon, with 130,000 fleeing to Syria and about 45,000 believed to be in need of assistance.

A World Food Programme official in Lebanon, Amer Daoudi, expressed concern about getting food to the displaced, saying "damage to roads and bridges has almost completely disrupted the food supply chain, hurting large numbers of the displaced".

The Lebanese prime minister, Fuad Saniora, said more than 55 bridges across the country had been destroyed, and that Israeli forces had also targeted ambulances and medical convoys. "This attack is no longer against Hizbullah; it is an attack against the Lebanese and Lebanon," Mr Saniora told CNN.

With the Israelis blockading ports and bombarding roads to Syria, it has been almost impossible to replenish Lebanon's food and fuel supplies. The cost of goods was therefore rising steeply, with the price of cooking gas nearly doubling to $20 (£11) and that of some vegetables nearly quadrupling.

The UN and Red Cross said the humanitarian situation in Lebanon was deteriorating rapidly as the country became more isolated.

A large explosion shook Beirut shortly after daybreak today. Media reports said the strike had hit the Lebanese capital's southern suburbs, a Hizbullah stronghold. Al-Jazeera reported that one person had been killed and another wounded. Israeli aircraft hit the town of Nabi Sheet in the eastern Bekaa valley, witnesses said.

More than 300,000 people are believed to live south of the Litani - which has twice been the borderline for Israeli buffer zones. In 1978, Israel invaded as far as the Litani to drive back Palestinian guerrillas, withdrawing from most of the south months later.

Israel invaded Lebanon again in a much bigger operation in June 1982, when its forces seized parts of Beirut. It eventually carved out a buffer zone that stopped at the Litani. That zone was reduced gradually but the Israeli presence lasted until 2000, when it withdrew its troops completely from the country.

Comment: Hey, there's nothing like a little ethnic cleansing to get "greater Israel" on the map. The Lebanese civilians have been given a choice, leave you land, or the Israeli military will blow you apart. And the greatest democracy on earth is supporting Israel 100%! These people are psychopaths.

Comment on this Article

---

'Real suffering has started' in Lebanon

CNN
Friday, July 21, 2006

BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) -- The price of food, medical supplies and gasoline rose by as much as 500 percent in parts of Lebanon on Thursday as Israel's relentless bombardment destroyed roads, bridges and other supply routes.

"Real suffering has started," Acting Interior Minister Ahmed Fatfat told The Associated Press.

The World Food Program said dwindling supplies and unsafe roads were compounding the problem of access to food. It said estimates of basic food supplies ranged from one to three months, but infrastructure damage, growing insecurity and rapidly rising prices made access to food difficult.

"All across the country, large numbers of people are fleeing the conflict zones in dangerous circumstances. There has also been widespread destruction of public infrastructure," the International Committee of the Red Cross said in a statement.
"The first priority today is to ensure that the wounded and sick can be evacuated, that medical teams obtain access to the victims and can work safely," said Pierre Krähenbühl, the agency's director of operations.

The government was opening schools to house those fleeing the attacks in southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley and other Hezbollah strongholds. Fatfat said 86,000 refugees were living in schools.

Ghassan Sweidan, a 40-year-old businessman in the northern city of Tripoli, said he was offering an apartment, free of charge, to a family of seven "for humanitarian reasons."

Some, like, the al-Jammal family, fled their village of Insariyyeh on foot because they had no car.

Relatives took turns pushing 40-year-old Sikna al-Jammal in a wheelchair over shards of glass and rubble in the sweltering heat. About three miles from their village, the al-Jammals, waving a white blanket to signal they were civilians to Israeli warplanes overhead, still had not found someone to give them a lift to Sidon, five miles away.

U.N. organizations expressed concern about Lebanese trapped in villages that have been cut off because of Israel's destruction of roads and bridges and are trying to rush supplies to them.

"The developing scenario is one of a country divided into small, isolated compartments, with populations in the south unable to access vital humanitarian assistance," UNICEF said.

By Thursday the price of vegetables, fruit, dairy products, gasoline and other essentials had risen by as much as 500 percent.

Two pounds of lemons, which cost 50 cents before the offensive, were selling for $3.30. The price of green beans tripled from about 25 cents a pound to 75 cents. And the price of gasoline rose from $2.60 a gallon to $3.79 a gallon.

Fatfat said there was enough fuel and flour for a few weeks.

"But we need mattresses and blankets for the refugees. There will soon be food and drug shortages," he said. "We need urgent assistance."

Trucks are targets

Only a handful of takeout restaurants were open in Beirut, and their fare was limited.

"There are no buns, cheddar cheese, nachos, turkey, ham, avocado, chicken strips, chocolate pancakes," said an operator at an American-style fast food outlet.

ATM machines stopped giving dollars and banks set a withdrawal limit of $1,000 a day.

Gyms that remained open scaled back on lighting and air conditioning to save fuel. At one health club, use of the pool was banned for fear the glass skylight would break from the impact of shelling.

Trucks have become a target of Israeli shelling, because Israel fears Hezbollah is using the vehicles to transport missiles.

Sahfiq al-Qassis, head of the union of truck owners, said he has asked drivers to keep their vehicles away from residential neighborhoods, according to Al-Balad newspaper. But he said if Lebanon's 16,500 trucks remain paralyzed, this will affect supplies.

In the mountain resort of Bhamdoun, Mayor Osta Abu Rjeily was making sure the thousands who fled to his town get water, soap and shampoo.

"We insist that parents wash their children every day to prevent the outbreak of disease," he said.

He has also instructed boutique owners in the town, a favorite haunt of rich Kuwaiti tourists, to replace the chic, designer outfits in their stores with cheaper clothes to cater to the newcomers.

"We're dealing with two faces of this tragedy," he said. "The sad situation of the refugees and the fleeing tourists."

Comment: The real suffering began when Lebanese civilians were first blown apart by Israeli munitions.

Comment on this Article

---

Lebanese Army may join forces with Hizbullah

By JPOST.COM STAFF
Jul. 20, 2006

The Lebanese Minister of Defense warned Israel Thursday that if IDF ground forces are sent into southern Lebanon, Lebanese troops will fight along with the Hizbullah against Israel.


Comment: Israel's leaders know exactly what they are doing. They claim they are trying to eliminate Hizbullah, but they have destroyed much of Lebanon's infrastructure and killed countless civilians. So, it is natural that the Lebanese military would defend against the Israeli invasion. If the army does fight against Israel, however, then the Zionists can claim that Hizbullah is obviously in control of the whole country, and further attacks would then be "justified". The Lebanese are damned if they do, and damned if they don't...

Comment on this Article

---

UN observation post struck in Middle East fighting

21/07/2006
Reuters

A UN-run observation post just inside Israel was struck today during fighting between Israel and Hezbollah militants.

The army blamed Hezbollah rockets, but a UN officer said it was an artillery shell fired by the Israeli Defence Force.

A UN officer said an artillery shell fired by the IDF "impacted a direct hit on the UN position overlooking Zarit."
The post is part of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon.

But an IDF spokesman said the position, located just inside Israel, was hit by rockets fired by Hezbollah that fell short of their targets in northern Israel.

The UN official said the facility was severely damaged, but none of the Ghanaian troops inside the bomb shelters inside were injured.

In 1996, during an Israeli air and artillery offensive against Lebanon, artillery blasted a UN base at Qana in southern Lebanon, killing more than 100 Lebanese civilians who had taken refuge with the peacekeepers.

The mission of UNIFIL, which has nearly 2,000 military personnel and more than 300 civilians, is to patrol the border line, known as the Blue Line, drawn by the United Nations after Israel withdrew its troops from south Lebanon in 2000, ending an 18-year occupation.

Since its deployment in 1978 after an Israeli invasion, Palestinian guerrillas and later Lebanon's Hezbollah have ignored it. Israel invaded southern Lebanon and swept through to Beirut to occupy it, slicing unhindered through the peacekeepers' lines.

The force is made up of more than 1,990 troops from China, France, Ghana, Ireland, India, Italy, Poland and Ukraine.

Comment: Well, whaddaya know! Israel is lying through its teeth again! Wonders will never cease!

Comment on this Article

---

U.S. opposed to cease-fire with Hezbollah

By ANNE GEARAN
AP Diplomatic Writer
Thu Jul 20, 2006

WASHINGTON - The United States held the line Thursday against a quick cease-fire deal in the Middle East, increasingly isolated as world powers and the United Nations demanded an immediate end to fighting between Israel and Hezbollah militants.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was meeting Thursday night with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who earlier in the day denounced both Israel and Hezbollah and called for both sides to stop fighting immediately.

"He was talking about a cessation of violence in the context of a lasting, durable solution, which is exactly what we have been talking about," said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.

The Bush administration is playing down expectations for Rice's upcoming trip to the Mideast, saying she will not shuttle among capitals to broker a deal.

"You're not going to see a return to the kind of diplomacy, I think, that we've seen before where you try to negotiate an end to the violence that leaves the parties in place and where you have status quo ante," McCormack said.

Administration officials also questioned whether a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah is even feasible.

"We'd love to have a cease-fire," White House spokesman Tony Snow said. "But Hezbollah has to be part of it. And at this point, there's no indication that Hezbollah intends to lay down arms."



John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said it was time for the Security Council to start considering a response, but he, too, ruled out a cease-fire.

"I think it's a very fundamental question how a terrorist group agrees to a cease-fire," Bolton said. "How do you hold a terrorist group accountable? Who runs the terrorist group? Who makes the commitments that the terrorist group will abide by a cease-fire? What does a terrorist group think a cease-fire is?"



Hezbollah is an Islamic militant group that does not recognize Israel as a state. It holds effective military and political control over southern Lebanon, and is the most potent political force on Lebanon's fractured political landscape.

The Bush administration has repeatedly said that a temporary or quickly negotiated cease-fire would leave Hezbollah able to regroup and rearm after more than a week of Israeli missile attacks.

Israel, and Washington as its closest ally, insist that any settlement must deal with the underlying threat posed to Israel by Hezbollah's control of southern Lebanon. The Bush administration is trying to hold off international pressure for as long as possible, while also asking Israel to consider the consequences of its actions for civilians.

More than 300 people have died in Lebanon, most of them civilians, since Israel began retaliatory rocket attacks after Hezbollah abducted two Israeli soldiers last week.

The House voted 410-8 on Thursday to support Israel in its confrontation with Hezbollah guerrillas. The resolution also condemns enemies of the Jewish state.

House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, cited Israel's "unique relationship" with the United States as a reason for his colleagues to go on record swiftly supporting Israel in the latest flare-up of violence in the Mideast.

Little of the political divisiveness in Congress on other national security issues was evident as lawmakers embraced the Bush administration's position.

So strong was the momentum for the resolution that it was steamrolling efforts by a small group of House members who argued that Congress's pro-Israel stance goes too far.

The nonbinding resolution is similar to one the Senate passed Tuesday. It harshly condemns Israel's enemies and says Syria and Iran should be held accountable for providing Hezbollah with money and missile technology used to attack Israel.

Comment: We just have to wonder: if Israel's Zionist leadership decided to attack the US, would US leaders support the Middle-Eastern nation 100%? Oh wait, that already happened on 9/11...

Comment on this Article

---

Israel Attacks its Christian "Friends" in Lebanon

Kurt Nimmo
July 20, 2006

It should be obvious by now that the Israelis not only have it out for Nasrallah and Hezbollah but all Lebanese, including their "friends," the Christian Maronite Lebanese.

"Israeli warplanes targeted for the first time a Christian area [the Ashrafiyah neighborhood] of eastern Beirut on Wednesday morning," reports Adnkronos International.

"During the night the Israeli air and naval forces also targeted another prevalently Christian area, the southern suburb of Hadeth. The junction that takes to the closed Semaan tunnel was struck and a fire broke out in a shrine with a votive cross on top. The areas of Shweifat and Choueifat were targeted in the south-eastern suburbs," adds Spero News.

"Lebanese believe that not a single inch of their country is beyond the whir of Israeli warplanes, the hiss of a falling bomb or the devastating explosion when one hits," explains the Mercury News.

Meanwhile, the Brits are taking issue with the Israelis, not for bombing Lebanon per se but rather because "right-wing Israelis" are celebrating killing British.

"The rightwingers, including Binyamin Netanyahu, the former Prime Minister, are commemorating the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the headquarters of British rule, that killed 92 people and helped to drive the British from Palestine," reports the Times Online. "They have erected a plaque [in tribute to the terrorist group Irgun] outside the restored building, and are holding a two-day seminar with speeches and a tour of the hotel by one of the Jewish resistance fighters involved in the attack.... The controversy over the plaque and the two-day celebration of the bombing, sponsored by Irgun veterans and the right-wing Menachem Begin Heritage Centre, goes to the heart of the debate over the use of political violence in the Middle East. Yesterday Mr. Netanyahu argued in a speech celebrating the attack that the Irgun were governed by morals, unlike fighters from groups such as Hamas."

In other words, terrorism is moral when it is unleashed by Zionists. Likewise, we are told ad nauseam by the pro-Israel corporate media, Israel's mass murder campaign in Lebanon is moral because it is "self defense," never mind that the babies and grandmothers slaughtered never lifted a hand against Israel. Obviously, it is a punishable offense to be born Arab. The fact one is a Christian does not serve as a hall pass.

While the Brits whine about "right-wing" (in a word, fascist) Israelis killing their colonial officers and celebrating it, few talk about the crimes perpetuated against the Lebanese.

In 1982, during "Operation Peace for Galilee" (as in the tombstone epitaph, rest in peace), Lebanon was not only a killing ground, it was also systematically looted. "Twenty thousand Palestinians and Lebanese died, 25,000 were wounded and 400,000 were made homeless during the first months of the 1982 Israeli invasion. The tonnages dropped on Beirut alone surpassed those of the atomic bomb which devastated Hiroshima. Schools and hospitals were particularly targeted," writes Ralph Schoenman (The Hidden History of Zionism).

Virtually all rolling stock and heavy equipment from Lebanese factories were looted and taken to Israel. Even the lathes and smaller machine tools from the U.N.R.W.A. vocational training centers were pillaged.

The citrus and olive production of Lebanon south of Beirut was destroyed. The Lebanese economy, whose exports had competed with Israel's, became moribund. The south of Lebanon became an Israeli market even as the headwaters of the Litani River, like the Jordan River before it, were diverted by the Israelis.

The author of this book experienced the bombing and siege of West Beirut in 1982, lived with Palestinians in the ruins of Ain El Helweh during Israeli occupation and witnessed the devastation in the Palestinian camps of Rashidya, El Bas, Burj al lamali, Mieh Mieh, Burj al Burajneh, Sabra and Shatila, as well as the destruction of the Lebanese towns and villages throughout the south.

The accounts of Israeli enactment of the massacre of Sabra and Shatila have been substantiated by this author, who was present in the camps on the final day of slaughter. He and Mya Shone photographed Israeli tanks and soldiers in Sabra and Shatila and spoke to the survivors over a period of four days.

Israel is currently revisiting these horrors on Lebanon as I write. Lebanon, an example of a modern and multi-ethnic Arab society that works, must be destroyed, as the Arabs, according to the vile ideology of "right-wing" Israelis such as Binyamin Netanyahu, must never be allowed to prosper.

Moreover, Lebanon serves as the template for the larger Zionist plan to balkanize the neighborhood. "Lebanon was the model, prepared for its role by the Israelis for thirty years, as the Sharett diaries revealed. It is the expansionist compulsion set forth by Herzl and Ben Gurion even as it is the logical extension of the Sharett diaries. The dissolution of Lebanon was proposed in 1919, planned in 1936, launched in 1954 and realized in 1982," Schoenman continues, and then quotes the late Israel Shahak:

Lebanon's total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula and is already following that track. The subsequent dissolution of Syria and Iraq into ethnically or religiously unique areas, as in Lebanon, is Israel's primary target on the Eastern front in the long run. The dissolution of the military power of these states serves as the primary short-term target.

"Each Arab state is examined with a view to assessing how it may be disassembled. Wherever minority religious groupings are present in the army, [Oded Yinon] sees opportunity," Schoenman explains.

Yinon's plan for Arab and Muslim balkanization, drafted at the precise time Israel was bombarding Lebanon in 1982, was "shared by many people in power" in Israel, according to its author.

"But the article clearly doesn't represent any official Israeli view. Instead, it's an example of the contentious internal debate about Israeli policy that goes on daily in the Hebrew press. Moreover, the Arab reaction to the article may indicate more about Arab fears than the article itself does about Israeli intentions," opined a dismissive Wall Street Journal on December 8, 1982. "Still, given the current fragile situation in the Middle East, in which some Lebanese leaders are accusing Israel of encouraging religious strife between Lebanon's Christian and Druse Moslem sects, Mr. Yinon's article makes interesting reading."

"Every Arab state ... especially those with cohesive and clear nationalist directions, is a real target sooner or later," writes Khalil Nakhleh in the publisher's note of Israel Shahak's translation of Yinon's A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties. "This is not a new idea, nor does it surface for the first time in Zionist strategic thinking. Indeed, fragmenting all Arab states into smaller units has been a recurrent theme," as revealed by Livia Rokach.

In her book, Israel's Sacred Terrorism, Rokach argues that the "inter-Lebanese conflict," invented by Ben Gurion "from scratch," was "attributed, shamelessly, to Israeli security needs," a cynical effort to exploit "terror and aggression to provoke or create the appearance of an Arab threat to Israel's existence" in order to force the "partition and subordination of that country to Israel." According to Rokach, "a detailed blueprint... was elaborated by Israel more than fifteen years before the Palestinian presence became a political factor in Lebanon," that is well before Israel used Palestinian "terrorism" (resistance to occupation and brutality) as an excuse to decimate its neighbor in 1982.

Now the excuse is Hezbollah. Lebanese PM "Siniora told Milan-based newspaper Corriere della Sera that the Shi'ite militia has been doing the bidding of Syria and Iran, and that it can only be disarmed with the help of the international community and once a cease-fire has been achieved in the current Middle East fighting," reports Haaretz. "It's not a mystery that Hezbollah answers to the political agendas of Tehran and Damascus," Siniora was quoted as saying by Corriere. "The entire world must help us disarm Hezbollah. But first we need to reach a cease-fire."

Of course, attempting to disarm Hezbollah-that is to say set the resistance organization up to be slaughtered by Israel-will result in yet another Lebanese civil war, as Shi'ites will once again turn against Christians, with international "peacekeepers" caught in the middle, and this will further reduce the country, as long planned.

Finally, the corporate media, working feverishly to blame Hezbollah for Israel's provocations, admits Hezbollah is a military force to be reckoned with.

"Hezbollah's ability to use relatively advanced weapons in the last week of fighting against Israel, as well as the variety of its armaments, has surprised U.S. military experts, current and former officials involved in Middle East policy said," writes the Los Angeles Times, making sure to blame the next target on the neocon hit list. "The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because intelligence matters are involved, said Hezbollah fighters, once viewed as a ragtag group of guerrillas, appear to have received training by Iran in sophisticated missile technologies. Some of the training may have taken place in Iran, they said.... Israeli intelligence officials said assistance, including basic weapons and supplies, continues to flow from Iran. One Israeli intelligence official said there was new evidence that Iran had stepped up arms shipments through Camp Zabadani, a longtime base that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard maintains in Syria, near the Lebanese border."

In other words, in order to take out Hezbollah, according to these Israeli "analysts," Syria and Iran must be attacked. Of course, even if Israel or the United States attack Syria and Iran, this will not end the resistance in Lebanon.

"The Israelis believe they have had some effect, but Hezbollah remains in this fight," Jon B. Alterman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and a Bush neocon, told the LA Times. "They can sustain this for quite some time," thus providing the criminal and genocidal state of Israel all the reason more to attack the innocent and defenseless, including their erstwhile "friends," the Maronite Christians of Lebanon.



Comment on this Article

---

Belgian doctors accuse Israel of using chemical weapons in Lebanon

July 20, 2006
IRNA

Eight bodies of victims killed by the use of chemical weapons have been found in Lebanon, a group of Belgian doctors of Lebanese-origin told a press conference in Brussels Thursday.

Professor Bachir Cham, a Belgian surgeon of Lebanese origin, addressed the press conference via mobile phone direct from Beirut.

He said all the eight bodies bought to the hospital in Sidon turned black but bore no burn marks and chemical substances were found on their bodies.

Cham said the chemical bombs were dropped by Israeli planes.
Dr. Mohammad Farran, an heart specialist, said they had sent letters to the United Nations and the European Union drawing their attention to the use of chemical weapons by Israel in Lebanon.

Michel Aoun, former Lebanese prime minister and current head of the 'Free Patriotic Movement' also spoke directly from Lebanon by mobile phone.

He said 650 people have been killed till now and over 1,000 injured by the Zionist aggression in Lebanon.

Aoun, a Christian Maronite, said a church was also attacked and damaged by Israel.

He said the crisis will not be resolved even if Hizbollah released the two Zionist soldiers and called for a comprehensive settlement of the Middle East problem.

Professor Rudolf Al Kareh of the Belgo-Lebanese society urged the international community to put pressure on Israel for an immediate ceasefire.

He showed a picture displaying Israeli children writing 'gift from Israel' on artillery shells which were fired on Lebanon.

"This is their gift to our children," said al-Kareh.

Jean Abboud, a senior priest representing Tripoli and North Lebanon, said he was ready to go to Israel to mediate a ceasefire and exchange of prisoners between Hizbollah and the Zionist state, but he added that the time was not ripe as yet.

Meanwhile, for the fourth consecutive day Thursday, Arab, Lebanese and Belgian peace activists held a gathering in front of the EU headquarters in Brussels to against the Israeli aggression in Lebanon.

'Israel today is committing a deliberate crime against Lebanon' and 'Stop Israeli terrorism', read placards carried by the demonstrators.




Comment on this Article

---

Dead left to rot in the rubble

Times Online
21/07/2006

UN armoured convoys in Lebanon are unable to retrieve bodies or deliver food, water and other basic supplies, for fear of being shelled by Israeli forces

Yelling for people to move aside, medics burst into the emergency room of the Jabel Amel hospital in Tyre carrying a woman, her head lolling and her body daubed in blood. "Allahu akbar," moans the latest victim of Israel's onslaught on southern Lebanon.

The woman was one of five people - four women and one young man - whose car had been targeted by an Israeli jet on a road near Bourgheliyeh, a tiny, ramshackle village off the coastal road four miles north of Tyre. "Two bombs fell next to each other 15 metres in front of the car," Jihad Daoud, 22, said as he watched his relatives being treated by doctors.
The woman was fortunate. She made it to the hospital. But out in the hinterlands between the Israeli border and the Litani River, the heart of the war zone where the bombardment is most relentless, witnesses say casualties are dying untreated.

UN armoured convoys cannot retrieve the dead and wounded for fear of being shelled themselves and because the roads are so badly cratered. The dead are being left to rot beneath the rubble of their homes. Nor can the UN force, Unifil, deliver food, water and other basic supplies to either its own observation posts near the border, or to scores of Lebanese villages cut off by the fighting.

Unifil is unable even to retrieve its own casualties. Two civilian staff members, a husband and wife from Nigeria, are thought to have been killed in an Israeli raid on Horsh, just south of Tyre, on Tuesday. A convoy of Chinese engineers was unable to reach the scene that day because of Israeli shelling. Yesterday Unifil could not send out any armoured convoys because of the intensity of the shelling and air raids around Tyre.

Ahmad Mrowe, director of the Jabel Amel hospital, said that one casualty who arrived yesterday had been ferried from the village of Siddiqine by eight cars, each driving from one crater to the next. It took eight hours to cover a distance that usually takes 20 minutes.

In the hospital's intensive care unit lay Alia Alieddine, 30, one of only two casualties to reach the hospital from the village of Srifa, ten miles east of Tyre. Israeli jets flattened four homes there overnight. Villagers recovered ten bodies but another twenty-five are thought to be under the rubble.

Connected to breathing tubes and her head heavily bandaged, Ms Alieddine stared blankly at the ceiling. "She suffered major head wounds. Her arm is broken and she lost a lot of blood," Abdullah Abbas, a doctor, said. "Her chances are not good. It is in God's hands."

With Tyre almost cut off from the north, the hospital is running short of supplies. Dr Mrowe said: "We only have enough food and drinking water to last another five or six days. We will stay anyway. We'll never leave."

The Israeli military has broadcast warnings before its raids and hundreds of villagers fled before the shells and missiles struck. The Israelis are also hitting targets that they believe have links to Hezbollah.

But among the refugees in the Rest House hotel in Tyre, few blamed Hezbollah for their misery. When the TV said that Haifa had been struck again by the group's rockets yesterday, one man said to general assent: "Let them suffer as we are suffering."



Comment on this Article

---

The Politics of War

---

Russia Criticizes Israel for Offensive

By ANTON TROIANOVSKI
Associated Press
Jul 20, 2006

MOSCOW - Russia on Thursday sharply criticized Israel for its offensive against Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon, saying it went "far beyond the boundaries of an anti-terrorist operation" and repeating calls for an immediate cease-fire.

The Foreign Ministry said Russia affirms the need to fight terrorism and called for the immediate release of captive Israeli soldiers, but it added that "the unprecedented scale of the casualties and destruction" in Lebanon indicates that Israel is using too much force.

The comment echoed a statement by President Vladimir Putin, who said while hosting a summit of the Group of Eight nations Saturday that Russia had the impression Israel was "pursuing wider goals" than the return of abducted soldiers.
While G-8 leaders cobbled together a statement on the Mideast conflict in a bid to display unity, the criticism of Israel and the cease-fire call contrasted with the U.S. stance. Washington has rejected calls for an immediate cease-fire and blamed Hezbollah for the conflict's intensity.

Russia's Foreign Ministry said "international humanitarian law" demands that strikes be launched only against military targets, even if there are suspicions that civilian facilities could be used to support military actions.

Russia has consistently rejected Western accusations that it has used too much force during its wars against rebels in Chechnya, in which thousands of civilians have been killed. The Kremlin refers to the conflict in Chechnya as an anti-terrorist operation.

The statement also echoed Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's calls for an immediate cease-fire, saying it was a "first step that cannot be delayed." The United States has said Israel has the right to defend itself and that what is needed is a "meaningful" cease-fire.

A cease-fire would allow civilians to safely leave areas affected by the fighting, the ministry said.

Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Saltanov met Thursday in Damascus with Syrian President Bashar Assad, who said Syria was prepared to help promote a cease-fire, according to another Foreign Ministry statement.

But Israel's ambassador to Russia rejected the notion of an immediate cease-fire, saying it would not end the Hezbollah threat.

"Let's say a cease-fire is declared tomorrow - 8,000 rockets will continue to threaten Israel," Ambassador Arkady Mil-Man told a news conference. "The essence of Hezbollah won't change overnight."

Mil-Man also underscored Israel's friendship with Russia, while criticizing Russia for not recognizing Hezbollah and Hamas as terrorist organizations.

"We believe it's wrong and it's not helping things," Mil-Man said of Russia's position.

Russia is prepared to provide Lebanon with urgent humanitarian aid, the Foreign Ministry said.

It also said that Russia hoped the U.N. Security Council would take a broad approach to the growing crisis, warning that "it is unlikely to be successfully overcome" if efforts to tackle the problem do not encompass all its aspects.



Comment on this Article

---

Asia calls for Mideast intervention, mulls sending troops

AFP
July 21, 2006

JAKARTA - Indonesia and Malaysia said they could send troops as part of a UN deployment to the Middle East as Asia showed mounting concern and urged the international community to intervene.

With the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon well into its second week, countries in the region warned of spiralling violence if world powers failed to check the current conflict.
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono wrote to UN General Secretary Kofi Annan to express concern over the conflict and pledge Jakarta's readiness to contribute to a possible UN force there, his spokesman said.

"The president expressed support for the formation of an international force under a UN mandate and Indonesia is willing to participate in such a force by contributing at least a battalion," spokesman Dino Patti Djalal said.

The letter followed his call Tuesday for a ceasefire between
Israel and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah militia, whose capture of two Israeli soldiers 10 days ago triggered the violence.

Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation, has no diplomatic ties with Israel.

More than a week of Israeli airstrikes and incursions into Lebanon have left more than 330 dead in Lebanon and hundreds of thousands had fled their homes fearing that the Jewish state could mount a full-scale ground offensive.

Annan has called for an immediate cessation of hostilities and for an expanded contingent of peacekeeping troops to be deployed in the region.

G8 leaders -- from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Russia and the United States -- have also proposed an international stabilisation force for Lebanon, where the UN currently has a 2,000-strong contingent.

Muslim-majority Malaysia said it was also considering sending troops, pending UN Security Council approval.

Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak said that Malaysia, the current chair of the world's largest grouping of Islamic countries, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, was well placed to send soldiers.

Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar added: "The international community ... should make every effort to ensure that these aggressive military actions by Israel do not lead to a widening of the conflict involving other countries."

"It is no good for the United Nations to say they are concerned about the humanitarian catastrophe. What are they doing about the humanitarian catastrophe? That is important," he said.

Asian newspaper editorials also called for the international community to act swiftly to prevent an escalation.

Japan's most-read paper, the conservative Yomiuri Shimbun, commented: "Before it becomes too late, the international community must take quick actions to prevent the situation from deteriorating."

The Asahi Shimbun, an influential liberal daily, said in an editorial: "Isn't it a time to establish a framework in which extremists would take part in dialogue? It is the role of the international community to build the foundation for it."

Australia's Financial Review criticised world leaders for taking too long to respond to the crisis, singling out the United States.

"The international community led by the United States, has been slow to respond to what is becoming an extraordinarily destructive regional conflict that threatens a wider war.

"This tardiness reflects poorly on the US's international leadership role and is partly a consequence of the fact that its energies have been dissipated on a war in Iraq gone awry."

China's People's Daily called for both sides to sit down and talk.

"History tells the peoples of the Middle East that armed force does not solve the enmity between the Arabs and the Israelis.

"Only if a political road is followed will it be possible to replace war with talks, fighting with consultation, extremism with reason, and hostility with tolerance."

Hong Kong's South China Morning Post also said more needed to be done.

"Only a multinational stabilising force will bring peace to the region, but those capable of making that happen -- the UN, the US and Britain among them -- are watching and commenting instead of taking action," it said.



Comment on this Article

---

Ministers accused of giving Israel green light to bomb

Ben Russell and Colin Brown
UK Independent
21 July 2006

Ministers faced strong criticism from across the House of Commons yesterday as MPs accused the Government of helping to fuel the crisis in the Middle East.

Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, faced angry claims from Labour and Opposition benches that the Government had given diplomatic cover to continued Israeli bombing by failing to call for an immediate ceasefire.

In the Commons, Labour MPs led by Clare Short, the former international development secretary, attacked the Government for its stance on Israeli attacks.

Ms Short warned that "massive killing of innocent Lebanese civilians and destruction of infrastructure" amounted to a war crime. She said: "We are heading for further violence and catastrophe. And I'm sad to say that our Government is following President Bush's errors and pouring petrol on the flames."
Privately some senior ministers said they were "appalled" that Mrs Beckett had failed to visit the region to demonstrate British concern at the scale of the Israeli bombardment. Mrs Beckett told the Cabinet that those calling for a halt to hostilities, including the French government, were in effect demanding a one-sided ceasefire.

She told MPs Britain was committed to ending the conflict and maintained that Britain had urged restraint on all sides, and said she "regretted" loss of life.

But MPs queued up to criticise the Government. Joan Ruddock, Labour MP for Lewisham Deptford and a former minister, asked Mrs Beckett: "There can be no doubt that Hizbollah started this conflict. But would she not agree that the response by Israel with 300 Lebanese civilians dead, 1,000 injured, and half a million people dispossessed, is utterly disproportionate?"

Michael Ancram, the former shadow foreign secretary, asked: "Does she believe that the action taken by the Israeli government, understandable initially as a response against terrorism, is proportionate or disproportionate?"

Chris Mullin, a former Foreign Office minister, said: "Is it not just a tiny bit shameful that although we rightly condemn Hizbollah for what they have done, we can find nothing stronger than the word regret to describe the slaughter and misery and mayhem that Israel has unleashed on a fragile country like Lebanon?"

Mrs Beckett insisted that Syria and Iran were "giving support" to Hizbollah. She said: "Syria finances Hizbollah and facilitates the transfer of weapons including thousands of weapons which appear to be supplied by Iran."

Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat leader, said: "Both myself and others have repeatedly asked for the Prime Minister to support an even-handed response. We all accept the Hizbollah should be condemned.

"Tony Blair must now accept that Israel's actions are disproportionate and amount to collective punishment. There should be an immediate ceasefire as Kofi Annan has now confirmed."



Comment on this Article

---

British Anger At Terror Celebration

Timesonline
20/07/2006

As Israel wages war against Hezbollah "terrorists" in Lebanon, Britain has protested about the celebration by right-wing Israelis of a Jewish "act of terrorism" against British rule 60 years ago this week.

The rightwingers, including Binyamin Netanyahu, the former Prime Minister, are commemorating the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the headquarters of British rule, that killed 92 people and helped to drive the British from Palestine.

They have erected a plaque outside the restored building, and are holding a two-day seminar with speeches and a tour of the hotel by one of the Jewish resistance fighters involved in the attack.

Simon McDonald, the British Ambassador in Tel Aviv, and John Jenkins, the Consul-General in Jerusalem, have written to the municipality, stating: "We do not think that it is right for an act of terrorism, which led to the loss of many lives, to be commemorated."
In particular they demanded the removal of the plaque that pays tribute to the Irgun, the Jewish resistance branch headed by Menachem Begin, the future Prime Minister, which carried out the attack on July 22, 1946.

The plaque presents as fact the Irgun's claim that people died because the British ignored warning calls. "For reasons known only to the British, the hotel was not evacuated," it states.

Mr McDonald and Dr Jenkins denied that the British had been warned, adding that even if they had "this does not absolve those who planted the bomb from responsibility for the deaths". On Monday city officials agreed to remove the language deemed offensive from the blue sign hanging on the hotel's gates, though that had not been done shortly before it was unveiled last night.

The controversy over the plaque and the two-day celebration of the bombing, sponsored by Irgun veterans and the right-wing Menachem Begin Heritage Centre, goes to the heart of the debate over the use of political violence in the Middle East. Yesterday Mr Netanyahu argued in a speech celebrating the attack that the Irgun were governed by morals, unlike fighters from groups such as Hamas.

"It's very important to make the distinction between terror groups and freedom fighters, and between terror action and legitimate military action," he said. "Imagine that Hamas or Hezbollah would call the military headquarters in Tel Aviv and say, 'We have placed a bomb and we are asking you to evacuate the area'."

But the view of the attack was very different in 1946 when The Times branded the Irgun "terrorists in disguise". Decades later, Irgun veterans are unrepentant. Sarah Agassi, 80, remembers spying in the King David Hotel.

She and a fellow agent posed as a couple. They danced tangos and waltzes, sipped whisky and wine while they cased out the hotel.

On the day her brother and his fellow fighters posed as Arabs delivering milk and brought seven milk churns, each containing 50kg of explosives, into the building. Ms Agassi waited across the street until her brother rushed out. She said that she then made the warning call to the British command in the hotel.

Sitting in the luxurious hotel lobby, she expressed no regret. "We fought for our independence. We thought it was the right way . . . If I had to fight for Israel, I swear even now I would do anything."

Comment: It is a little 'rich' is it not, for the British to feel "annoyed" by Israeli government glorification of an act of Israeli state terrorism 60 years ago when the British state has been at the forefront of state-sponsored terrorism for much longer than 60 years.

This story, from the traditionally right-wing paper the London Times is strange. Note the first sentence and the use of quotation marks which calls into question whether Hizb'allah attacks against Israel really are "terrorism". We can't remember a time when the British establishment and it's media questioned whether Arab attacks on Israel really is "terrorism". Is the tide turning against Israel? Was this the plan all along? Time will tell, or maybe the London Times will tell us first.

Comment on this Article

---

'Why is there not a murmur of protest from Washington?'

UK Independent
Kim Sengupta in Nicosia
21 July 2006


Outside the cavernous US government-run holding centre in Nicosia, Mohammed Shami shook his head. "I feel embarrassed to be an American. They have given Israel the green light to destroy Lebanon. What they are doing is wrong; it is immoral."

Mr Shami, who is of Lebanese-American descent, arrived here with 1,000 fellow Americans early yesterday, part of the exodus to Cyprus expected to reach more than 80,000 people fleeing the ferocity of the conflict in Lebanon.

For Mr Shami and others from the successful and settled Lebanese community in the US the relief at escaping the violence is mixed with deep feelings of anger and guilt at the actions of their government.

"My father is of Lebanese birth and my mother is American", said Mr Shami, a 21-year-old student from Michigan. " I am very proud of my mother and the American people. All I can say is that most American people are not like Condoleezza Rice, they are not like George Bush; they have a sense of decency."
There are 25,000 US nationals in Lebanon and they will arrive in Cyprus at 2,000 a day. The 2,300-strong 24th Marine Expeditionary Force is offshore with assault ships and destroyers. The purported reason for such a heavy military presence is to "help the civic powers" in the evacuation. But US diplomats privately acknowledge fear of an attack by Hizbollah. The first batch of Americans who came, on chartered ferry, the Orient Queen, are staying at the International State Fair complex in Nicosia, two huge halls with 1,152 orange camp-beds.

For many, the 10-hour journey out was fraught. More than 100 had forced their way out of the ship at the port of Larnaca after waiting more than an hour in stifling heat. Some objected to the barrack-like accommodation and the basic facilities. "I was hungry and when I tried to get food at four in the morning they stopped me," said a tearful woman. "Now I am told I am not on the list to go out tonight. We have to put up with more of this."

Mona al-Makki, 48, from Chicago, holding her three-year-old niece, Samira, on her knees, added: "I know they are having to look after a huge number of people, but this is not a place you want to spend any amount of time.

"I guess our attitudes are coloured because while we are sitting here, good homes belonging to our relations in Beirut have been destroyed by the Israelis without a murmur of protest from our President. I was asking, 'Why the hell is no one in Washington doing anything about this?' "

Gabriel Mansouraty left Beirut in 1981 during fierce fighting that led to an Israeli invasion. He settled in El Paso, Texas, as a manager of a plastics company, and took his American wife and two sons to Lebanon to show how the land of his birth had made a success of itself after years of strife.

"None of my family had seen Lebanon and I have not been back for 25 years," said 53-year-old Mr Mansouraty. "I was amazed by what has been achieved, the new buildings, the restaurants, the roads the great lifestyle. One only really appreciates that if one knew how devastated the place was. And now this.

"The Israelis have destroyed the buildings, the roads and that lifestyle. They have put the country back 30 years. I cannot believe this all happened because of the capture of two soldiers. This must have been months in planning.

"The only good thing is this; back in 1981 it was Christians fighting Muslims with the Israelis instigating much of it. This time the Israelis have united the people. I stayed in a Christian neighbourhood and people there opened up their homes to the Muslims."

Emile Maroud, also a Christian, believes there is an Israeli agenda aimed at stopping Lebanon making progress. He said: "I had no time for the PLO and I have no time for Hizbollah. But this is about more than that. Israel does not want to see another modern, progressive state in the region."

A Royal Navy assault ship, HMS Bulwark, has evacuated more than 2,000 British and dual-nationals. Martin and Denise Carlin, from Burnley, in Lancashire, were visiting their daughter, son-in-law and three grandchildren.

Mrs Carlin, 48, said "It has been a nightmare. It was a war zone. I won't be back for a long time, if at all. This has really put me off."

The conflict: Day nine

* US marines land on Lebanese soil for the first time in 20 years to assist with evacuation of more than 1000 Americans. The US military pulled out of Lebanon in 1983 after a suicide bomber destroyed a barracks in Beirut killing 241 service personnel. British citizens continue to be evacuated.

* Fierce fighting breaks out on the Lebanese side of the border after an Israeli patrol is ambushed by Hizbollah fighters. Al-Jazeera says four Israeli soldiers were killed. Israeli military says it sustained six casualties.

* Hizbollah fire 30 rockets into northern Israel but no casualties are reported. Israeli jets drop 23 tonnes of explosives on a bunker in south Beirut hoping to assassinate Hizbollah's leader.

* Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen, whose country holds the EU presidency, calls for a ceasefire to the conflict and expresses 'grave concern' over humanitarian situation. EU gives Lebanon €10m in aid.

* UN Secretary General Kofi Annan calls for immediate cessation of violence and condemns Israel for using excessive force. Hizbollah's actions are holding "an entire nation hostage," he says but Israel's actions are weakening the Lebanese government and putting civilians at risk.

* A Palestinian teenager is killed in central Gaza's Mughazi refugee camp as militants and troops exchange fire. Israel carries out a series of air strikes on Mughazi, killing two militants and injuring dozens of civilians. A 10-year-old Palestinian girl dies from wounds sustained in an air strike on Wednesday.

* Washington refuses to pressure Israel into declaring an immediate ceasefire. "We seek a long-term cessation of hostilities that's part of a comprehensive change in the region and part of a real foundation for peace but no one has explained how you conduct a ceasefire with terrorists," says US Ambassador John Bolton.

Comment: Yes indeedy, most Americans are not like George and Condi. Listen to this week's podcast for more information.

Comment on this Article

---

U.S. Congress takes on cheerleader role for Israel

North Korea Times
Thursday 20th July, 2006

The U.S. House of Representatives, in a 98% vote in favor, has dramatically thrown its weight behind Israel in its conflict with Lebanon.

House Republican leader, John Boehner, pointed to Israel's 'unique relationship' with the United States as a reason for his colleagues to swiftly go on the record supporting Israel in the latest flare-up of violence in the Mideast.

A resolution solidy backing Israel was passed 410 votes to 8.
The overwhelming endorsement was a positive boost to the Bush administration which has exclusively backed Israel in the conflict, blaming Hezbollah, Syria and Iran.

The resolution follows a similart unanimous vote by the Senate on Tuesday, which together with the House delivers a virtual 100% endorsement of Israel's policies in the Middle East.

Senator John McCain said the Lebanese people and government must pay a price for Hezbollah attacking Israel from its territory.

He and others were attacked by the minute number of reprsentatives who voted against the resolution, saying it went too far, and was supported as a result of the Israeli lobby,and the self-interest of members who were pandering to Jewish voters.

'I'm just sick in the stomach, to put it mildly,' said Rep. Nick J. Rahall.

Rahall, together with a small band of others opposing the resolution, submitted a draft alternative that left out reference to holding Lebanon responsible for Hezbollah's actions, and called for restraint from all sides. Rahall said the proposal was 'politely swept under the rug,' which he says reflects the influence Israel has in Congress.

'There's a lot (of lawmakers) that don't feel it's right, but vote yes, and get it the heck out of here,' Rahall said.

Rep. Darrell Issa, who co-sponsored the alternative resolution was in agreement. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobby 'throws in language that AIPAC wants. That isn't always the best thing for this body to endorse,' Issa said.

'This is the usual problem with any resolution that talks about Israel, there are a lot of closet naysayers up there in Congress, but they don't want to be a target of the lobby' of Israel, said Eugene H. Bird, president of the Council for the National Interest, a group that harshly condemns Israel's military campaign.

'These guys aren't legislating. They're politicking,' said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute.

According to The Associated Press, an AIPAC spokeswoman said Congress's overwhelming support for Israel reflects the support of U.S. voters and not any pressure applied by lobbyists. 'The American people overwhelmingly support Israel's war on terrorism and understand that we must stand by our closest ally in this time of crisis,' said Jennifer Cannata.



Comment on this Article

---

Diplomacy in Slow Motion

By TONY KARON
Time
July 20, 2006

If warfare is a violent contest of political will, then cease-fire agreements are its scoreboards. And the Bush Administration wants to make sure that when hostilities are halted in Lebanon, Hizballah's score is a round zero. That's why even as most of the international community clamors for an immediate cease-fire to end the fighting that has so far killed 300 Lebanese (mostly civilians) and 29 Israelis (15 of them civilians), the U.S. is dragging its feet - as a matter of policy. While other Western and Arab powers will engage players from Hizballah and the Lebanese government to Iran and Syria, the U.S. remains key to the diplomatic process - for the simple reason that it is the only one capable of persuading Israel to accept a truce. But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice won't head for the region until early next week, a delay calculated to give Israel more time to succeed in its objective of eliminating Hizballah as a military threat. A senior Administration official told CNN Wednesday that the U.S. was giving Israel's military operation time to "defang" Hizballah, saying Rice would press for an end to the fighting only "when conditions are conducive to do so."
The Administration recognizes that anything short of what it calls "a permanent cessation of hostilities," in which Hizballah is deprived of the means of restarting them, will be counted as a victory for the radical Shi'ite movement. Having acknowledged that the Lebanese government is too weak to disarm Hizballah, as required by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559, the Administration views Israel's military campaign as the best way to achieve the same outcome, by pummeling Hizballah until it is ready to put down its weapons and allow the Lebanese army to take control of the border.

But Secretary Rice, who heads for New York Friday to coordinate activities with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, will face pressure from diplomatic allies who want an immediate cease-fire. European, Arab and U.N. diplomats share the goal of a deal that not only frees the two captive Israeli soldiers and stops Hizballah rocket fire, but also puts the Lebanese army in control of its southern border, protects Israel from further provocations and pursues the disarmament of Hizballah. But they're not convinced those goals can be achieved through a military campaign that has destroyed much of Lebanon's communication infrastructure and energy supplies, and looks likely to send hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring into an already tense and overburdened Beirut. The Israelis are hoping their retaliation for Hizballah's blatant provocation will turn the majority of Lebanese more forcefully against the Iran-backed group, which retains massive popular support among Lebanese Shi'ites. Even if that were to occur - which is far from certain - it could threaten a resumption of civil war, particularly if the Israeli offensive has weakened the already shaky central government.

Implicitly criticizing the U.S. delay in starting a peace mission, Annan's deputy, Mark Malloch Brown, on Wednesday stressed the need for an immediate cessation of hostilities. "The Middle East is littered with the results of people believing there are military solutions to political problems in the region," he told reporters.

But analyst Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies sees Rice's late entrance into the diplomatic fray as prudent: "At this point, both Hizballah and the Israelis feel they can advance their cause by turning the screw a few more times," he says. "That's not where you want to start a negotiation. You want to start when both sides are starting to look around and say, where's this really going?"

But it's more complicated than that, because there are many more with a stake in the outcome of the crisis than the two sides fighting. They include:

- The U.S., which finds itself balancing its desire to see Hizballah "defanged" with some of its other regional interests that may be damaged by the fighting, and the rising pressure from most of its allies to expedite its intervention.

- The Lebanese government - a fragile coalition at the best of times, whose leaders, though outraged at Hizballah's dragging them into war, nonetheless see Israel's campaign as threatening the democracy they've tentatively been constructing since a U.S.-led international campaign forced Syria to leave.

- The pro-Western Arab regimes, who have, uncharacteristically, largely avoided criticizing the Israeli offensive - because they see the Hizballah provocation as an Iranian power play in their backyard - but whose citizenry hail HIzballah as a champion of the battered Palestinians. Nowhere will the street-level passions stoked by Israel's campaign be more fierce than in Iraq, where Shi'ite followers of Muqtada al-Sadr are already rallying in support of Hizballah.

- Iran and Syria, the key regional sponsors of Hizballah, who each arguably have their own reasons for wanting to see the crisis first escalated, then resolved on terms favorable to Hizballah.

- Washington's European allies, many of whom fear the U.S. is gambling recklessly on Israel's being able to achieve its military objectives, at risk of the crisis spiraling out of control and creating a humanitarian and political disaster.

If the gamble pays off, and Hizballah is crying uncle a week from now, the U.S. will have vindicated itself in the eyes of allies, and inflicted a stinging defeat on the likes of Iran and Syria. If not, the Bush Administration may find itself drawn into some hitherto unthinkable diplomatic minuets to untangle a dangerous mess in southern Lebanon.



Comment on this Article

---

Rice to Present U.S. Peace Plan

By ANNE GEARAN
AP Diplomatic Writer
July 21, 2006

WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will lay out U.S. plans for a diplomatic solution to the Israeli-Hezbollah fighting Friday, an administration official said.

Rice plans a trip to the Mideast as soon as early next week, and will carry the U.S. strategy for ending the 10-day-old warfare and establishing stability in southern Lebanon, a senior Bush administration said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because Rice has not yet made her plans public.

The secretary is expected to detail her itinerary and agenda in Washington later Friday.
The plans emerged following two days of meetings in New York with United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and envoys he sent to the region this week. Although Annan called Thursday for an immediate cease-fire, that is opposed by the United States. The Bush administration says the United States and the U.N. agree on the wider diplomatic goals for the region.

Earlier, White House press secretary Tony Snow said the administration is working hard to end violence in the Mideast and that criticism of its measured response is coming from people who want "egg-timer diplomacy."

"Nobody has been more active than we have," said Snow, defending administration policy amid continuing U.S. opposition to a quick cease-fire without built-in steps for longer-term stability in both Israel and Lebanon.

Making the rounds of the morning network news shows a day after Rice went to the U.N., Snow said most of the peacemaking efforts have been behind the scenes.

Meanwhile, Israel resumed airstrikes Friday and prepared for a possible ground invasion, warning people in the south to flee.

Asked on NBC's "Today" show whether Washington was trying to discourage Israel from any notion of a ground invasion, Snow replied: "We have not been doing military collaboration or planning with the Israelis. But what we have been doing instead is urging the Israelis to use restraint."

Also, the White House announced on Friday that British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a leading U.S. foreign policy ally, will meet with Bush next Friday at the White House. The Middle East crisis will be high on the agenda.

The administration also made plans to press for another Senate vote on U.N. ambassador John Bolton, whose temporary appointment expires at the end of the year.

A key Republican who had opposed Bolton's confirmation before, Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, said he would now support Bolton for the post, citing the tense Middle East situation and what he said was Bolton's good performance.

Bolton's nomination remains before the Senate. Snow said White House officials are discussing with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, R-Ind., how to proceed - whether to begin committee hearings again or to try to bring Bolton's nomination up directly for a Senate vote without new hearings.

Bush appointed Bolton during a congressional recess in 2005 after Senate Democrats and Voinovich blocked a vote.

On the Middle East violence, Snow on Friday urged patience with the administration's methodical approach.

"The people who are talking about too little, too late, they may not be keeping the diplomatic scorecard," he told NBC.

"Everybody who wants this kind of egg-timer diplomacy, who thinks, OK these things ought to happen quickly, you don't understand human nature," Snow said. "Terrorists are not going to say, 'You know, that's right, I'm going to pick another career.' "

"Many times, they're going to fight to their death, and we hope that doesn't happen in Lebanon."

Comment: Luckily, our roving reporter Ignacious O'Reilly was able to obtain a copy of Condi's Top Secret peace proposal:

- All members of Hezbollah will be required to surrender to the Israeli military. Rice is expected to state that she has been reassured by the Israeli Prime Minister that no harm will come to the Hezbollah members; Israeli forces just want a chance to talk peace with their neighbors over tea and cookies.

- The land now known as Lebanon will become part of Israel.

- In exchange, any remaining Lebanese civilians will NOT be mercilessly slaughtered by the Israeli army.

Rice is expected to announce that the Bush administration believes that this is the only way toward a "free and peaceful and democratic" Middle East, and that anyone who disagrees is quite obviously "with the terrorists".

Comment on this Article

---

Australia flies in reinforcements for 'chaotic' Middle East evacuation

AFP
Friday July 21, 2006

Australia has despatched 65 military personnel to the Middle East to help thousands of citizens flee Israel's bombing of Lebanon, as the government rejected charges of bungling the evacuation.

The unarmed soldiers will handle logistics operations and will join an extra 29 diplomatic staff who have been sent to the region to help process some 7,000 Australians trying to escape the violence, officials said.

The government announced it had arranged for six ships to arrive in Lebanon from Friday to transport up to 6,000 people to safety by Sunday evening.
Prime Minister John Howard said he was satisfied with the progress of the evacuation plans and defended the government's handling of the situation.

"It could be the largest movement of Australians overseas ever in our history, and I think the Department of Foreign Affairs has done a remarkable job in very difficult circumstances," he told national radio.

"And I think some of the criticism is quite unfair and I reject it."

Some leaders of Australia's large Lebanese community have complained that the government's response has been slow and uncoordinated compared to the evacuations organised by countries such as the United States and Britain.

More than 160,000 Australians claim Lebanese ancestry, making them one of the largest ethnic groups after Britons, Italians and Greeks. There are also some 25,000 dual Lebanese-Australian nationals living in Lebanon.

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer rejected as "absolutely, completely and utterly untrue" suggestions that Australia was making less effort in evacuating its citizens because those at risk were of Arab descent.

"We don't discriminate between people on the basis of their ethnicity, we focus very much on just getting Australians out," he said.

It was hoped every Australian citizen who wanted to get out of Beirut would be out by Sunday, he said.

"We can't give any guarantees because it's going to depend on the situation in the port there in Beirut which is fairly chaotic," Downer said.

Australian taxpayers would cover the cost of the rescue effort and those evacuated would not be asked to contribute.

Downer said the government faced fresh problems on what to do with the evacuees once they were out of the danger zone.

"Having got them out, to either Turkey or Cyprus, which is basically the situation, then of course there becomes a question about what happens to them next," he told ABC Radio.

"In the case of Cyprus, there just isn't going to be the infrastructure to support all these foreigners arriving there.

"So we are going to have to get people out of Cyprus to hubs, probably hubs in the Middle East and Europe, but we haven't finalised the details."

Several hundred Australians have managed to get out of Lebanon on ships operated by other nations, including Britain and Greece.

But Australia's own rescue efforts have suffered several setbacks, including the double-booking of a ferry chartered via a Turkish company which failed to arrive at Beirut's increasingly crowded port on Wednesday.

"I stress it's very chaotic," Howard said. "Arrangements have broken down in the past, not only for Australia but for other countries, and there's no guarantee that won't happen in the future."



Comment on this Article

---

El Al flight from New York brings 220 American immigrants TO Israel

By Ira Moskowitz
Haaretz.com
Fri July 21, 2006

SHARON, Massachusetts - A special El Al flight from New York brought 220 American immigrants to Israel yesterday. The flight was the second of seven Jewish Agency/Nefesh B'Nefesh charters planned for this summer, and the first to arrive since warfare erupted on Israel's northern front. According to the Nefesh B'Nefesh organization, 20 prospective immigrants who had signed up for yesterday's flight decided to postpone their arrival at least for a week or two.

On the eve of the flight, Haaretz visited with Joel and Debbie Wine in Sharon, Massachusetts as they struggled to finish packing their belongings, complete a list of last-minute errands, tend to their three young children and say good-bye to friends and family. "Yes, it's crazy globally and crazy in our little world, getting everything done," Joel acknowledged, sitting on a folding chair among the open suitcases and sprawl of unpacked items.

After the war in the north began, people started asking them whether they still planned to move to Israel. "With what's going on now, we're being made out to be some sort of heroes," Joel said. "But this is Israel, and if you think of yourself as Israeli, you realize there's really not a choice. We've mentally, psychologically, emotionally made the commitment to be part of the people of Israel in the Land of Israel, and unfortunately, this [war] is part of the reality." When he received an email from Nefesh B'Nefesh this week confirming that the flight was still on, he sent a one-word reply: "Good."
Moving to Israel is something Joel and Debbie have talked about for years. "It was really part of our dialogue ever since courtship," Joel said, adding that Debbie was more of the driving force behind their decision to finally come. Joel, 37, and Debbie, 36, met during their student days at Columbia University. After marrying, they lived for several years in Riverdale, New York before settling in Joel's hometown of Sharon, a wooded community of some 18,000 people about 22 miles southwest of Boston.

Sharon is known for its strong Jewish presence. According to the web site of the local Catholic church, the town?s population is 75 percent Jewish. Joel was not sure of the exact numbers, but recited a list of the local Jewish congregations: three Orthodox, two Conservative, one Reform and one Reconstructionist.

For a committed Jew, the town is about the best place one can imagine in the Diaspora, Joel said. He made it clear that the family's decision to relocate to Modi'in was not because they were unhappy in Sharon. "It's an amazing community. We enjoyed a wonderful suburban lifestyle, with three kids and a dog, a wonderful house [about 2,400 square feet], a two-car garage, eight-tenths of an acre, and it's close to my parents."

Debbie, originally from Los Angeles, has also come to love New England and said that she will especially miss the fall, when the leaves change colors and the family goes apple picking. Israel may lack this verdant charm, but it offers a different kind of beauty, she explained. More importantly, the Israeli landscape is imbued with a deeper sense of purpose for her: "You sense not only the physical history of the land, but also the history of all the people who have died to protect it and worked so hard to build up this incredible gift for the Jewish people, and I feel like I have to accept it if I'm able to do that."

American history fails to engage Debbie in the same personal and profound way. "I don't feel that same connection, and it's ironic, because I'm a seventh-generation American and that's pretty rare."

Joel and Debbie hope their children - Noam (7), Meirav (5) and Liron (four months) will develop the same type of ties toward Israel. "We're hoping that they'll look to Israeli soldiers as heroes rather than the commercial superheroes and princesses that seem to dominate American children's media," Debbie said.



Comment on this Article

---

Israelis Adopt Poison Gas "Fashion"

Kurt Nimmo
Thursday July 20th 2006

"It is absurd to consider morality on [using poison gas] when everybody used it in the last war without a word of complaint from the moralists or the Church. On the other hand, in the last war bombing of open cities was regarded as forbidden. Now everybody does it as a matter of course. It is simply a question of fashion changing as she does between long and short skirts for women," wrote Winston Churchill during the Second World War, long after the Geneva Protocol had outlawed the use of poison gas. The Brits used mustard gas against Bolsheviks in 1919 and Kurdish rebels in Iraq. As to the latter, Churchill wrote: "I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas.... I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes" (see Winston Churchill's Secret Poison Gas Memo).

If Wayne Madsen's sources are correct, the Israelis are now using poison gas against the "uncivilized tribes" of Lebanon. "According to a former U.S. weapons expert who served in Iraq, the artillery shell in a photo taken in Lebanon (see photo here) is a chemical weapon delivery device. It is being handled by an Israeli Defense Force soldier and Hebrew lettering can be clearly seen on the armored vehicle. Another chemical weapons shell of the same type can be seen lying on the ground to the right. It is not known what type of chemical is in the chemical canister, however, gas dropped by the Israelis in villages in southern Lebanon has resulted in severe vomiting among the civilian population" (see as well this schematic). "Media commentators have scoffed that Israel, with its relatively unique history, would ever use chemical weapons or poison gas in any war. It is precisely because of that perception that they are using such weapons. The deniability factor prevents the media from taking seriously the credible reports of banned weapons being used by the Israelis."

Of course, the stenographers laboring diligently for the corporate media would not dare to mention Israel's well-documented history of biological and chemical terrorism against innocent and unwitting Arab non-combatants.

In 1948, as the Zionists ethnically cleansed Palestine, the Acre aqueduct was targeted. "The Zionists injected typhoid in the aqueduct at some intermediate point which passes through Zionist settlements," writes Salman Abu-Sitta, president of Palestine Land Society in London. According to Abu-Sitta, a report issued by the Lebanese Red Cross

stated that there are at least 70 known civilian casualties, others may not be reported. It was determined that the infection is "water borne", not due to crowded or unhygienic conditions as claimed by the Israelis. It was decided that a substitute water supply should now come from artesian wells or from the agricultural station, just north of Acre (see map), not from the aqueduct. Water chlorine solution was applied, inoculation of civil population started, movement of civil population was controlled (lest refugees heading north towards Lebanon will carry the typhoid epidemic with them, as intended by the Zionists)....

The city of Acre, now burdened by the epidemic, fell easy prey to the Zionists. They intensified their bombardment. Trucks carrying loudspeakers proclaimed, "Surrender or commit suicide. We will destroy you to the last man." That was not a figure of speech. Palumbo, in The Palestinian Catastrophe, notes the "typical" case of Mohamed Fayez Soufi. Soufi with friends went to get food from their homes in a new Acre suburb. They were caught by Zionist soldiers and forced at gun point to drink cyanide. Soufi faked swallowing the poison. The others were not so lucky, they died in half an hour.

In addition, the Zionist state attempted to poison a water system in Gaza. The commander of the Egyptian Forces in Palestine communicated the following to General Headquarters in Cairo:

15.20 hrs, 24 May [1948] Our Intelligence forces captured two Jews, David Horeen and David Mizrahi, loitering around army positions. They were interrogated and confessed they had been sent by Officer Moshe to poison the army [and the peoples'] water supply. They carried with them water bottles divided in the middle. The top part has potable water and the bottom part has a liquid contaminated with typhoid and dysentery, equipped with a rear opening from which the liquid can be released. They confessed they were members of a 20-strong team sent from Rehovot for the same purpose. Both have written their confession in Hebrew and signed it. We have taken the necessary medical precautions.

Salman Abu-Sitta also suspects two cholera outbreaks, one in Egypt and a second in Syria, claiming the lives of over 10,000 people, were caused by the Israelis, although the evidence is less convincing.

In a report entitled Bioterrorism and Biocrimes: The Illicit Use of Biological Agents since 1900, Dr. W. Seth Carus of the Center for Counterproliferation Research, National Defense University, stated under a subtitle, Case 1947-01: "Zionist" Terrorists 1947-1948, "Jews plan to use this inhuman weapon against the Arabs in the Middle East in their war of extermination." Carus also documents the comments of David Horeen's sister, Rachel Katzman: "I met one of [my brother's] commanders in a lecture in Jerusalem. I asked him whether my brother had really attempted to poison wells. 'These were the weapons we had', he said, 'and that's that.'"

Israel has plenty of other weapons, gratis the United States and its own burgeoning weapons program, but it appears it prefers to augment its arsenal with chemical weapons. "The Palestinian ministry of health revealed on [July 11, 2006] that the Israeli army has used a new type of explosive in its offensive on the Gaza Strip. These explosives contain toxics and radioactive materials which burn and tear the victim's body from the inside and leave long term deformations.... The ministry showed that most of the injuries which the hospitals receive result from huge explosions which cause burning and severing of limbs, including the inner parts of the body. This causes long term deformations.... It is added that doctors in Gaza have been forced to amputate limbs of at least 12 injured Palestinians as a result of injuries sustained in the current Israeli offensive on the Strip," reports Electronic Intifada.

In an earlier instance, the IOF apparently used an "unidentified gas" in the Khan Younis refugee camp. "Medical sources at Nasir Hospital in Khan Yunis have announced that more than 40 Palestinians suffered a strange case of hysteria and nervous breakdown because they inhaled a toxic gas fired for the first time by the occupation army during the bombing of Palestinian areas," the Voice of Palestine in Ramallah reported (see the script for the documentary film, Gaza Strip, a PDF document). "Specialists believe that this is an internationally banned nerve gas. Dr Muhammad Abdallah Abd-al-Mun'im, official in charge of medical teams who treated the injured, said that the gas bombs fired last night on the western camp of Khan Yunis gave off heavy yellowish and highly-concentrated smoke. Those who inhaled it, he said, suffered a nervous breakdown and vomited blood. Abd-al-Mun'im said this gas is not the same kind that was fired by the occupation forces previously and that it is the first time that the doctors have seen this."

Indeed, the corporate media, faithfully pro-Israel, may "scoff" at the allegation Israel is now using chemical weapons in Lebanon. However during the 1982 invasion the Soviet Union accused Israel of using "barbarous" weapons, including chemical weapons (see this timeline posted on the Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel website).

When it comes to using biological and chemical weapons, Israel is a junior partner to the United States, most recently accused of using chemical weapons in Fallujah, Iraq. According to Dr. Khalid ash Shaykhli, an Iraqi health ministry official, "the US military had used internationally banned chemical weapons, including nerve gas," according to the Christian Science Monitor.

Of course, the corporate media scoffed at this allegation, too.

Chalk it up to the deniability factor.



Comment on this Article

---

Amerika the Beautiful

---

Bush to meet Blair at White House July 28

Reuters
Fri Jul 21, 2006

WASHINGTON - President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who have a difference of opinion about a multilateral force for southern Lebanon, will next week hold their second face-to-face talks this month.

Bush and Blair have been strong allies on the Iraq war and many other foreign policy challenges. But Bush has yet to sign on to Blair's call for deploying an international security and monitoring presence along the border of Lebanon and Israel.
In a private conversation picked up by an open microphone during a Group of Eight summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Monday, Blair said the force was essential to stopping violence between Israel and Hizbollah guerrillas.

"I think the thing that is really difficult is you can't stop this unless you get this international presence agreed," Blair told Bush.

Bush's position is that he wants to hear the report of a U.N. mission to the region on whether such a force would be worthwhile.

He has declined to endorse calls for a ceasefire from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and others, insisting Israel has a right to defend itself and blaming Syria and Iran for supporting Hizbollah.

The White House said in a statement on Friday announcing Blair's July 28 visit that the United States has no closer ally than Britain and Bush appreciates Blair's leadership.

An ample agenda for their talks was laid out that reflected a panoply of international crises.

"The two leaders will consult on efforts to secure a lasting peace in the Middle East, consolidate democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, prevent Iran from obtaining the means to build nuclear weapons, end the genocide in Darfur, and promote free and fair trade," White House spokesman Tony Snow said.

Comment: Bush and Blair intend to discuss the sizes of various countries, swear words, their favorite candy bars, and which action figures they are hoping Santa Claus will bring them this Christmas.

Comment on this Article

---

Bush's back rub magnified in cyberspace

By JAKE COYLE
AP Entertainment Writer
Thu Jul 20, 2006

NEW YORK - An impromptu back rub that President Bush gave German Chancellor Angela Merkel is now massaging millions of funny bones.

A 5-second video and series of photographs recently posted on YouTube.com and various blogs show Bush surprising Merkel at the G-8 Summit by quickly rubbing the back of her neck and shoulders. The chancellor immediately hunches her shoulders, throws her arms up and grimaces, though she appears to smile as Bush walks away.
The video has been one of the most popular clips on the Web and spawned countless remarks on the particulars of etiquette for world leaders. Coupled with Bush's use of an expletive at the summit and a U.S. senator comparing the Internet to a "series of tubes," the incident reveals anew the power of the Web - and YouTube, specifically - to beam embarrassing political gaffes around the world.

Larry Sabato, professor of politics at the University of Virginia, agrees that today, public figures have to be more careful in "a thousand ways." But he maintains sites like YouTube can be revealing.

"If they're not doing something that's embarrassing, they have nothing to worry about," he says. "A president ought to know enough not use an expletive in a fairly open meeting and almost any male alive today knows that you don't offer uninvited massages to any female, much less the chancellor of Germany."

Many writers saw a sexist aspect to Bush's back rub. "This isn't a Sigma Chi kegger, it's the G-8 Summit," wrote blogger Christy Hardin Smith on Firedoglake.com.

(Bush was actually in Delta Kappa Epsilon. Another Web 2.0 truism: Blogs are not always friendly with the facts.)

Earlier this week, Bush was recorded using the s-word while discussing the Mideast with British Prime Minister
Tony Blair. An mp3 of Bush's line, posted by The New York Times, has been a popular download - ranking two spots ahead of Justin Timberlake's "SexyBack" on The Hype Machine, a Web site that charts the most-linked audio tracks by blogs.

No one need remind former presidential hopeful Howard Dean of the political ramifications of the Web - nor Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska.

The 82-year-old Republican, chairman of the Senate Committee on Science, Commerce and Transportation, has been parodied mercilessly by bloggers after referring to the Internet as a "series of tubes" and for mistakenly calling an e-mail "an Internet." A music video for the "DJ Ted Stevens Techno Remix" is currently playing on YouTube.

Like Bush's closed-door G-8 meeting, a speech by Stevens was once unlikely to reach many people. But now sites like YouTube can strike anytime, anywhere.

Even when you're getting a massage.



Comment on this Article

---

Bush may seek new term for Bolton

AFP
Fri Jul 21, 2006

WASHINGTON - The White House, revisiting a pitched battle with the US Senate, signaled it might seek to revive John Bolton's dormant nomination as ambassador to the United Nations.

US President George W. Bush installed Bolton at the United Nations in August 2005 using a recess appointment, an executive power available when the US Congress is not in session, but quickly renominated him in September 2005.

And on Thursday, one of Bolton's opponents, Republican Senator George Voinovich, announced that he would now reverse course and support the controversial diplomat if the matter were to come up again.
The Senate's top Republican, Majority Leader Bill Frist, said he would seek to put Bolton's nomination on the Senate agenda right away.

"I encourage swift action on the confirmation of John Bolton, and have asked that Chairman (Richard) Lugar and the Foreign Relations Committee hold hearings as soon as possible, so that we can ensure that he continue the important work that he has started at the UN."

Asked earlier Thursday whether the White House would seek Bolton's confirmation by the US Senate, Bush spokesman Tony Snow told reporters that "there are conversations going on" with Lugar, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee.

"And obviously the op-ed piece by Senator Voinovich was a welcome bit of prose," said Snow.

One White House official said that Democrats who thwarted Bolton's confirmation last year might insist on new hearings before any fresh vote.

Another option, Snow said later, would be to try to bypass the committee and go directly to a vote by the full Senate.

Comment: Bolton is doing such a good job alienating the US from the rest of the world that there's simply no way Bush will allow him to be replaced by the pesky Senate.

Comment on this Article

---

RFK Jr. Blows the Whistle on Diebold

By John Ireland
In These Times
July 21, 2006

The environmental lawyer-turned voting-rights advocate has found Diebold employees who may link the company to election fraud.

On July 13, the Pensacola, Fla.-based law firm of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filed a "qui tam" lawsuit in U.S. District Court, alleging that Diebold and other electronic voting machine (EVM) companies fraudulently represented to state election boards and the federal government that their products were "unhackable."

Kennedy claims to have witnesses "centrally located, deep within the corporations," who will confirm that company officials withheld their knowledge of problems with accuracy, reliability and security of EVMs in order to procure government contracts. Since going into service, many of these machines have been linked to allegations of election fraud.

In the wake of alleged vote count inconsistencies and the "hanging chad" debacle of 2000, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002. HAVA appropriated $3 billion to replace voting equipment and make other improvements in election administration. Diebold, Election Systems & Software and Sequoia Systems secured the lion's share of nearly half that sum in contracts to purchase EVMs. All 50 states have received funds and many are hurriedly spending it on replacing lever and punch card machines in time for November.
According to the Election Assistance Commission, more than 61 percent of votes in the 2004 presidential election were cast and/or tallied by EVMs. Election Data Services, a Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm, estimates that the figure will jump to 80 percent by November, which will see elections for all 435 seats in the House of Representatives.

Matt Schultz, an attorney with Kennedy's law firm, Levin Papantonio, describes the process of competition for HAVA's $300 million of contractor funds as "a race to the bottom." "There is no question in my mind that these companies sacrificed security and accuracy, mass-producing a cheap product to cash in on tons of federal money," Schultz says. "It's an industry-wide problem."

Qui tam lawsuits stem from a provision in the Civil False Claims Act, which Congress passed in 1863 at the behest of President Abraham Lincoln to respond to price gouging, use of defective products and substitution of inferior material by contractors supplying the Union Army. The provision allows private citizens to file a suit in the name of the U.S. government charging fraud by government contractors and other entities that receive or use government funds.

Long known as "Lincoln's Law," it is now commonly referred to as the "Whistleblower Law." Since the mid-'80s, qui tam recoveries have exceeded $1 billion, mostly after exposing medical and defense overcharging.

Mike Papantonio, partner in the law firm and co-host with Kennedy on "Ring of Fire," a weekly radio show on the Air America Network, explains the value of the qui tam approach. "The problem with injunctive relief, or [a writ of] mandamus, or prohibition-type writs, is it all comes down to politics. ... How do you bring injunctive relief with [Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth] Blackwell? How do you get [Florida Governor] Jeb Bush to do anything? They won't. You have to move outside of that political realm."

In 2004, Blackwell was in charge of implementing state and federal election laws, while, at the same time, co-chairing the state's 2004 Bush/Cheney Campaign. Under his watch, election officials neglected to process registration cards from Democratic voter drives, purged tens of thousands of voter registrations and distributed EVMs unevenly, leaving some voters waiting up to 12 hours. According to Kennedy, "at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted." Ohio was decided by 118,601 votes.

The contents of the suit could be under judicial seal for at least 60 days while the U.S. Department of Justice considers whether or not to join the suit. If U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales decides not to join the suit, Levin Papantonio may approach individual state attorneys general. If no one joins, the firm is free to, as Papantonio puts it, "stand in the shoes of the Attorney General and fight on behalf of the taxpayers and the nation."

"The single greatest threat to our democracy is the insecurity of our voting system," warns Kennedy. "Whoever controls the voting machines can control who wins the votes."



Comment on this Article

---

Democratic group outraising Republicans

AP
Thu Jul 20, 2006

WASHINGTON - Senate Democrats had twice as much cash on hand as their Republican counterparts at the end of June, four months before elections that will determine which party controls the Senate for the remainder of President Bush's term.

According to data submitted to the Federal Election Commission Thursday, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee raised $8.8 million in June and had $38 million in the bank. The National Republican Senatorial Committee raised $4.8 million and had $19.8 million in the bank.
The numbers give Democrats a surprising money edge going into a crucial period in the congressional campaigns. Republican Party strategists, however, say GOP candidates as a whole are better financed than their Democratic challengers.

In House races, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee also had more cash on hand than the National Republican Congressional Committee, according to their FEC filings. But the Democratic edge is much slimmer - $31.9 million to $26.5 million for the Republicans.

Comment: Does anyone actually believe that the Democrats will change anything?

Democrats supported the invasion of Iraq. Democrats continue to support the occupation of Iraq. Democrats supported the fascist laws passed by the Bush administration, as well as the illegal imprisonment and torture of US citizens. Democrats support Israel's invasion of Lebanon and Gaza.

The problem goes WAY beyond just George W. Bush and the Republicans.

Comment on this Article

---

A New War Frenzy

by Robert Parry
opednews.com
July 20, 2006

Just as Saddam Hussein was cast as the monster whose elimination would transform Iraq into a democratic oasis, Hezbollah and its allies in Syria and Iran are presented now as the crux of all evil in the Middle East whose military defeat will bring a new day.

Inside the United States, many of the same politicians and pundits who stampeded the nation into Iraq are back again urging the application of even more violence. While George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisers may be leading the herd, influential Democrats - like Hillary Clinton and Alan Dershowitz - are running with this pack, too.
But the ease with which these Middle East hawks tolerate the slaughter of Arabs in Lebanon - as well as in Iraq and in the Palestinian territories - has a flavor of racism that has poisoned U.S. policy as far as many Muslims are concerned and indeed has strengthened popular support for Islamic extremists on the Arab street.

On July 17, New York Sen. Clinton shared the stage in a pro-Israel rally with Dan Gillerman, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations who has espoused anti-Arab bigotry in the past and now proudly defends Israel's "disproportionate" violence against Lebanese civilians.

"Let us finish the job," Gillerman told the crowd. "We will excise the cancer in Lebanon" and "cut off the fingers" of Hezbollah. Responding to international concerns that Israel was using "disproportionate" force by bombing Lebanon and killing hundreds of civilians, Gillerman said, "You're damn right we are." [NYT, July 18, 2006]

In other public statements, Gillerman has been even more disdainful of Muslims. At the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference in Washington on March 6, Gillerman virtually equated Muslims with terrorists.

"While it may be true - and probably is - that not all Muslims are terrorists, it also happens to be true that nearly all terrorists are Muslim," Gillerman quipped to the delight of the AIPAC crowd. [Washington Post, March 7, 2006]

Despite Gillerman's professed uncertainty about whether "all Muslims are terrorists," this crass case of anti-Muslim bigotry didn't generate any noticeable protest. It would have been hard to imagine any other ethnic or religious group being subjected to a similar smear without provoking a noisy controversy.

Not only did U.S. officials and politicians - both Republican and Democrat - avoid criticizing Gillerman or almost anything else about AIPAC, they bowed to its legendary power to make or break American political leaders.

Clinton's Stance

Four months later, Sen. Clinton and other Democrats joined Gillerman at the New York rally to endorse Israel's devastating military attacks on Lebanon in response to a July 12 cross-border raid by Hezbollah guerrillas who captured two Israeli soldiers in an effort to distract Israel from an offensive in Gaza and in support of a proposed prisoner exchange.

Clinton, who is considered a Democratic presidential frontrunner in 2008, pleased the crowd by denouncing Hezbollah and Palestinian militants in Hamas as "the new totalitarians of the 21st Century" who believe in neither human rights nor democracy. (As for the democracy part, Hamas won the last round of Palestinian elections and Hezbollah has become a political force in Lebanon, holding seats in parliament.)

Clinton was joined by two Democratic congressmen who also endorsed Israel's bombing raids on Lebanon.

"Since when should a response to aggression and murder be proportionate?" said Rep. Jerrold Nadler.

"President Bush has been wrong about a lot of things," said Rep. Anthony D. Weiner. "He's right about this."

Similarly, attorney Alan Dershowitz, a frequent TV commentator, posted at the liberal HuffingtonPost.com blog site that Israel's killing of large numbers of Lebanese civilians was justified by the need to take out Islamic radicals operating in civilian neighborhoods. He wrote:

"My argument is that by hiding behind their own civilians, the Islamic radicals issue a challenge to democracies: either violate your own morality by coming after us and inevitably killing some innocent civilians, or maintain your morality and leave us with a free hand to target your innocent civilians. This challenge presents democracies such as Israel with a lose-lose option and the terrorist with a win-win option."

In challenging HuffingtonPost readers to respond to his logic, Dershowitz appears oblivious to the racist element in his thinking, that killing large numbers of Muslim civilians to eliminate a few of Israel's enemies is justifiable. If the situation were reversed - armed Muslims slaying large numbers of Israeli civilians to get at a few Israeli leaders - Dershowitz would surely call the killings acts of terrorism or even genocide.

9/11 Logic

Osama bin-Laden justified the 9/11 attacks, which involved the murders of nearly 3,000 civilians, as a way to attack the military and financial centers of the United States, the Pentagon and the World Trade Towers.

Though terrorism is classically defined as violence against civilians to achieve a political goal, the concept has always carried with it the notion of proportionality. For instance, an assault against a genuine military target in wartime may cause civilian casualties - so-called "collateral damage" - but that is not usually considered terrorism.

If, however, civilian deaths are wildly disproportionate to the military target, the attack could constitute terrorism, say, the destruction of a residential high-rise or some other civilian building to kill a couple of enemy targets.

In that sense, one could argue that George W. Bush acted as a terrorist at the start of the Iraq War when he ordered U.S. military aircraft to blow up a residential restaurant in Baghdad based on faulty intelligence that Saddam Hussein might be eating there.

Though Hussein wasn't present, 14 civilians, including seven children, died. One mother collapsed when her headless daughter was pulled from the wreckage.

Similarly, during the Israeli fight for independence, Zionist extremists, including later national leaders Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, were members of terrorist groups that attacked Palestinian civilians and British authorities. In one famous case, Jerusalem's King David Hotel, where British officials and other foreigners lived, was blown up.

But many Americans have come to regard terrorism as a strictly Muslim phenomenon. They hold that view despite well-known evidence to the contrary in large part because neoconservatives and other politically powerful forces drum this false idea into the heads of the U.S. population.

Cheney Speech

Take, for example, the speech that Vice President Dick Cheney gave to the same AIPAC conference at which Gillerman wondered whether or not "all Muslims are terrorists." Cheney substantively agreed that terrorism was almost exclusively a Muslim tactic - one that flourished because it didn't draw a sufficiently harsh U.S. response.

"Over the last several decades, Americans have seen how the terrorists pursue their objectives," Cheney said. "Simply stated, they would hit us, but we would not hit back hard enough.

"In Beirut in 1983, terrorists killed 241 Americans, and afterward U.S. forces withdrew from Beirut. In 1993 we had the killing of American soldiers in Mogadishu, and the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. Then came the attack on the Saudi National Guard Training Center in Riyadh in 1995; the killings at Khobar Towers in 1996; the attack on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; and, of course, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000."

However, Cheney's one-sided recounting of history reflected an anti-Muslim bias on two levels. First, it ignored the long history of terrorism practiced around the world by people of nearly all religions and ethnic backgrounds.

In 1976, for instance, Chile's U.S.-backed dictatorship sponsored a terrorist bombing on the streets of Washington, killing Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier and an American co-worker, Ronni Moffitt, yet then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush protected Chile's leaders from exposure and prosecution. [See Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]

Even today, the current Bush administration is blocking attempts to bring another anti-communist terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles, to justice over his alleged role in blowing a civilian Cuban airliner out of the sky, also in 1976 when George Bush Sr. was CIA director. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Bush Family's Terrorism Test."]

Cheney's speech also ignored more recent acts of terrorism committed by non-Muslims. For instance, there was no reference in his speech to home-grown right-wing terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, who was convicted and executed for blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.

For that matter, Cheney offered no self-criticism of the "shock and awe" violence that the Bush administration inflicted on Iraq, killing thousands of civilians in a war launched over false claims about Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction.

For Vice President Cheney and Ambassador Gillerman, these examples don't seem to count, presumably because the perpetrators weren't Muslim.

Not Terrorism

A second point undermining Cheney's argument was that some of the cases he cited weren't acts of terrorism.

In the case of the 1983 bombing in Beirut, for instance, the attackers targeted the Marine barracks because the Reagan-Bush administration's mission creep had led U.S. forces to intervene militarily against some Muslim elements in the civil war then raging in Lebanon. Muslim villages were even shelled by a U.S. warship. So, while the killing of the Marines was horrible, it wasn't terrorism.

Similarly, the "Black Hawk Down" incident in the Somali city of Mogadishu wasn't an act of terrorism; it was a battle between U.S. Special Forces units and militia troops loyal to a local warlord. Indeed, the Somali militia was reacting to a surprise attack by the American troops, not vice versa.

What Cheney appeared to be saying was that anytime American troops are killed in a conflict whatever the factual circumstances, they are the victims of "terrorism" - with all that word's emotional and propagandistic value. Conversely, acts ordered by President Bush and U.S. allies can never be considered "terrorism" whatever the facts may suggest.

There has been a similar blurring of lines in regard to attacks by Iraqi insurgents against U.S. occupation forces in Iraq. While some incidents, such as the destruction of mosques and the killing of civilians, do constitute terrorism, bombs directed at U.S. troops as they patrol Iraqi territory are military ambushes or sabotage, not terrorism.

While some Americans might want Iraqi insurgents who are responsible for killing U.S. troops to bear the opprobrium of the disgraced title of "terrorist," the selective application of the word - as favored by Cheney and Gillerman - carries its own danger.

Since U.S. policy forbids negotiations with "terrorists," peace talks with Iraqi insurgents would be barred. That, in turn, could lead to an indefinite war in Iraq and vastly more death and destruction on all sides.

That might serve the goals of some neoconservative ideologues - and ironically the interests of Osama bin-Laden - but it is almost certainly not in the interests of U.S. troops in Iraq - nor of the American people.

Further, when a loaded charge like "terrorism" is leveled against a specific ethnic or religious group - but not against others who have engaged in comparable practices - that kind of selective outrage is generally called bigotry or racism.

Those ugly tendencies have been part of many war fevers in the past. Now, as the Bush administration prepares the American people for even a wider war in the Middle East, this pernicious form of bigotry will surely play a big part again. [For more, see Consortiumnews.com's "The Abyss Beckons."]



Comment on this Article

---

PAC tied to DeLay fined, shutting down

By SUZANNE GAMBOA
Associated Press
Thu Jul 20, 2006

WASHINGTON - The fundraising organization that helped vault former Rep. Tom DeLay to GOP leadership and distributed election money to numerous fellow Republicans has been fined for campaign finance violations and is shutting down.

Under an agreement with the Federal Election Commission, Americans for a Republican Majority's political action committee agreed to pay a $115,000 fine and close. The agreement, reached July 7, was made public late Wednesday.
The agreement resulted from an audit by the FEC of the committee's records for Jan. 1, 2001 to Dec. 31, 2002. The audit found DeLay's committee had not properly reported contributions, disbursements and cash on hand.

It also found the committee failed to properly report outstanding debts and obligations and did not follow federal rules for paying for shared federal and nonfederal activities.

The audit was conducted last August. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group, had filed a complaint calling for enforcement action against the committee.

"The reason DeLay became so powerful was all about the money, the amounts of money he could pull in and could distribute to his colleagues," said Melanie Sloan, the watchdog group's executive director. "Nearly every Republican in Congress received money from ARMPAC, thus consolidating his power base. They loved him because he kept them flush. Now we find out, they brought in huge amounts of money, but they did it illegally."

Dani DeLay Ferro, DeLay's spokeswoman and his daughter, said the fine and shutdown of ARMPAC were voluntary. The audit "concerns highly technical FEC reporting rules, which due to their complexity, the commission has since reformed and simplified," Ferro said in a statement.

The FEC said ARMPAC corrected financial errors in its fundraising reports and refunded $111,913.19 to its nonfederal account. ARMPAC officials told the FEC that some of the mistakes were the result of misinterpretation or failure to understand the agency's regulations. The group disagreed with FEC counting some transactions as debts and obligations.

The FEC audit found that ARMPAC:

- Failed to report $74,295 in financial activity in 2001 and $166,340 in 2002.

- Failed to report debts and obligations totaling $322,306 to 25 vendors.

- Failed to separate expenses between its federal and nonfederal account, resulting in the nonfederal account paying $203,483 more than its allowable expenses.

ARMPAC officials told the FEC they can't raise the money to refund $91,569.81 to the nonfederal account and agreed to use any contributions exceeding $5,000 to pay the debt and will not spend more than $5,000 until the debt is paid. DeLay's campaign fundraising committee bought ARMPAC's donor list for about $34,000.

The political committee also provided seed money for DeLay to launch Texans for a Republican Majority, the fundraising committee at the center of a Texas election fundraising investigation. DeLay was charged with money laundering in connection with that investigation, triggering Republican House rules that forced him to relinquish the majority leader post while the charges were pending. DeLay denies the charges.

DeLay resigned from Congress June 9 after more than two decades in the House. He had planned to withdraw from the race for his District 22 House seat, but a judge's ruling in a Democratic lawsuit forced DeLay to remain on the Texas ballot. The state's Republican party leader is appealing that decision, which DeLay has criticized.



Comment on this Article

---

Lawmakers, White House clash over Pakistan fighter jet sales

AFP
Friday July 21, 2006

The Bush administration defended its sale of fighter jets to Pakistan, while key members of Congress accused the White House of making an end-run around Congress to seal the deal.
Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs John Hillen told lawmakers that the sale of up to 36 F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan would help bolster a key US ally in the global fight against terrorism.

"This sale is a presidential priority and a key element of the administration's South Asia strategy unveiled in March 2005, aimed at broadening our strategic relationships with our key regional partners: India, Afghanistan and Pakistan," Hillen said at a hearing of the House of Representatives International Relations Committee.

However the committees leaders -- both Democratic and Republican -- were irate over the sale.

"What we can say for the public record is that a sequence of actions and inactions by the State Department recently resulted in a host of serious national security and compliance issues," said the panel's Republican chairman Henry Hyde at the hearing, accusing the administration of "flouting of Congress' role."

"This insolence flies in the face both of custom and the intent of the Constitution," added his Democratic counterpart, Tom Lantos.

To avoid being circumvented in the future, the two lawmakers on Thursday introduced HR 5847, a bill that would require quarterly updates on possible upcoming arms sales and would enforce a 20-day consultation period before a proposed sale could go forward.

Lawmakers expressed concerns that the fighter jets' sophisticated technology could fall into the wrong hands.

"While I support the substance of the sale, we have had long-standing concerns over the security plan to protect the US technology in these aircraft and missiles in sales to a country that produced the A Q Khan nuclear proliferation network," Lantos said.

But the administration insisted that the sale not only was not a security risk, but would make America safer.

"The sale will send a very clear signal of our commitment to a long-term relationship with Pakistan ... and it will strengthen the hand of President (Pervez) Musharraf and his government in supporting us in the war on terror and in continuing to make other politically difficult, yet strategic choices," Hillen said.

US President George W. Bush's administration notified the Congress of the five billion dollar aircraft sale late last month.

Washington had blocked the sale of F-16s to Pakistan for 15 years to protest its nuclear weapons program, but gave the green light in March 2005 to reward the South Asian ally for its help in the "war on terror."

Pakistan already has more than 30 multi-role F-16s made by US aerospace giant Lockheed Martin Corp.

India has in the past expressed concern about weapons sales to its arch-rival and neighbor Pakistan.



Comment on this Article

---

EU stalls on US visas

Reuters
July 21, 2006

BRUSSELS - New eastern members of the European Union are angry that the European Commission has again stalled retaliation against the United States for continuing to impose visa requirements on their nationals, diplomats say.

The United States does not require visas for citizens of 15 of the 25 countries in the EU.

The Commission has warned Washington the EU could impose a visa requirement on U.S. diplomats and government officials if it does not extend its visa waiver scheme to Greece and nine mostly ex-communist states that joined the EU in 2004.
The EU executive was due to present a report to justice and interior ministers next Monday recommending such steps, but the document has been delayed for two months, prompting threats of unilateral action by the Czech Republic, normally one of Washington's most faithful allies on foreign policy.

"We received the information from Canada and the United States too late to present it at the Council next week," European Commission spokesman Pietro Petrucci confirmed.

He said the report would be issued in the second week of September. The Commission said in January it wanted progress before it reported in July and warned it had the power to recommend sanctions.

The United States, which tightened immigration measures after the September 2001 attacks on U.S. cities, cites security concerns and worries about overstays for maintaining the requirement, which it would require legislation to change.

"We have very close relations with the United States and we cannot understand why we are subject to such discrimination," a Czech diplomat said, noting Czechs could travel freely anywhere in the world except for the United States and Canada.

He said Prague was disenchanted that the EU had not invoked a clause under which all member states are bound to act in support a member that is subject to discriminatory treatment.

"This has been going on for two years and the Union has still not invoked the solidarity clause," the diplomat said.

"Either the EU helps us on this or we will get out of the system and introduce visas unilaterally, which of course will bring an (EU) infringement procedure against us."

U.S. officials say talks are continuing to overcome the problem, a source of embarrassment with countries which are generally supportive of Washington in EU and NATO councils, but no time frame can be set for a resolution.

One noted the timing was awkward in the run-up to mid-term congressional elections in November.



Comment on this Article

---

Mother Nature

---

Rising temperatures extend record year: govt

Reuters
Thu Jul 20, 2006

NEW YORK - Temperatures will average above normal in most of the United States in August, extending what has been the warmest year on record so far, the U.S. National Weather Service said on Thursday.

"We've had record average warmth in 2006, and the outlook for August is above-normal for much of the country," said Edward O'Lenic, meteorologist for the NWS.

The heat in August will be focused on the southern and central parts of the country, with temperatures well-above normal over eastern Texas, according to the monthly forecast.
The outlook could mean additional pressure on the U.S. electrical grid, which held up to bouts of record demand for air conditioning during a heat wave this month.

The Northeast and the eastern Midwest, big population centers, will have equal chances of getting hotter or cooler temperatures during the month, the NWS said.

Much of the Texas cotton-growing region and the U.S. Northwest will also see below-normal precipitation in August, the NWS said in its 30-day forecast.

"The existing drought in Texas will likely continue or deepen," said O'Lenic.

The dry outlook could have implications for the Texas cotton industry, already facing problems from thin rainfall in July.



Comment on this Article

---

25,000 Queens customers without power for 5th day

ASSOCIATED PRESS
July 21, 2006

The blackout in parts of Queens is 10 times worse than the power company had previously reported, Con Edison said Friday.

After inspecting damage to cables in northwest Queens block by block on Thursday night, "Con Edison crews estimates that 25,000 customers in the area are without power," the utility said in a statement. "Previous estimates were based on the number of customers who had called the company to say they were without electricity."

The blackouts started Monday evening in a handful of neighborhoods in Queens. Two LaGuardia Airport terminals lost power Tuesday, hundreds of businesses remained idle on Friday, and the city's jail complex on Rikers Island had to operate on backup generators.
"This is outrageous," City Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr. said Thursday. "When is this going to be fixed? If it's going to be days, they should tell people it is going to be days."

The blackouts were at their worst on Wednesday, when 10 of the 22 feeder cables that supply the area with power were down simultaneously, delaying subways. The temperature had hit 100 degrees in the neighborhood the day before.

Spokesman Chris Olert said the power company was making every effort to get the situation fixed but couldn't estimate when that might happen. He said the company didn't know why things went wrong.

"Chances are fair, but not firm, that it was heat related, but right now that is just a hypothesis," he said.

That was little consolation for Gianni DellaPolla, 26, a baker at Gian & Piero Bakery.

"We probably lost $25,000 in business in three days," DellaPolla told the Daily News. "Everything like wedding cakes, eggs, creams, we had to throw all that out."

The company has more than 500 splicers, troubleshooters, mechanics and support personnel working around the clock to restore power. In an effort to locate damaged equipment, crews are inspecting thousands of manholes and service boxes, as well as transformers and miles of cable.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has demanded that the utility investigate and deliver a report on the cause within two weeks.



Comment on this Article

---

Power Outage Sends Guard to St. Louis

By CHERYL WITTENAUER
Associated Press
Jul 20, 2006

ST. LOUIS - The governor sent in the National Guard to evacuate people from their sweltering homes Thursday after storms knocked out power to nearly half a million St. Louis-area households and businesses in the middle of a searing heat wave that has killed at least 17 people across the country.

With forecasters expecting another day of 100-degree heat, utility crews raced to restore electricity, and Gov. Matt Blunt declared a state of emergency, granting the mayor's request to send in 250 troops to take people to air-conditioned public buildings and to clear debris.
"We can't overemphasize the danger of this heat," Mayor Francis Slay said. "The longer the heat goes on and the power is out, the riskier it is."

Police used public-address speakers from their squad cars to announce locations of the community centers and other places designated as cooling centers. Volunteers went door to door, checking on people with no power to run fans or air conditioners.

Utility workers urged customers to find a cool place to stay. They warned that power could be out in some areas for three to five days.

By midmorning, the temperature was 90, with a predicted high of 103. The region could get some relief on Friday, when the high was expected to drop to 88.

The storms tore through the city a day earlier, ripping off a section of airport roof and dumping it on a highway. Windows were blown out of a hotel restaurant and a press box at baseball's Busch Stadium. At least three buildings collapsed, and more than 30 people were injured.

"I've never seen this many people without power, this much debris, buildings collapsed, lines down," the mayor said.

By midday, power had been restored to just over 100,000 customers, but new reports of outages kept coming in.

St. Louis-based AmerenUE, the utility serving Missouri and Illinois, said it would restore power to hospitals, nursing homes, water- treatment plants and other "critical facilities" first.

"If you're out of power, go to family, a friend or a cooling shelter," Vice President Richard Mark said. "Take whatever means necessary, but stay out of your home."

City Health Director William Kincaid cautioned that the city's older housing, much of it made of red brick, can heat up like furnaces in the summer heat.

John Swapshire, 39, grabbed the next-to-last window fan at a hardware store for $14.99. The electricity at his home was out, but he had a gas-powered generator.

"I had to go to six stores to get this. They were either closed because of the electricity or sold out," Swapshire said. "I don't think you can buy a cube of ice in all of St. Louis, either."

Stanley Shelton, 53, found a cool spot under a tree in a downtown park where piles of broken limbs and branches covered the grass.

"I've never experienced anything like this. I don't know anyone with power," Shelton said. "I'll just sit in my yard with a big jug of water and wait for it to pass. Maybe I'll take a couple cold showers. That works too."

The death toll from the heat wave that has gripped much of the country for the past week rose to at least 17 people in seven states. Four more people died in the Chicago area, bringing the total number there to seven, officials said. Two have died in the Philadelphia area, two in Oklahoma City, two in Arkansas, two in Indiana and one each in South Dakota and Tennessee.

In Indiana, a 25-year-old woman taking medications that might have affected her body's ability to stay cool died from heat exposure when temperatures inside her apartment reached 100 degrees, officials said Thursday. In Wisconsin, a 6-year-old girl was killed Thursday when storms knocked part of a tree onto a tent at a park.

The storms also brought heavy rain, hail and 80 mph winds to Illinois on Wednesday night, and roughly 120,000 homes and businesses were without power Thursday.

Three people were injured in St. Louis when a residential building collapsed in a neighborhood south of downtown, police said. The historic Switzer building near the Mississippi River, once home to the famous licorice maker, also partially collapsed.

Many of the injuries were to baseball fans waiting for a St. Louis Cardinals-Atlanta Braves game. Winds blowing at nearly 80 mph blew out press box windows and ripped the tarp, injuring at least 30 people, five of whom were taken to hospitals, said Norm Corley, a supervisor with Accu-Care, which handles medical problems at the stadium.



Comment on this Article

---

Tropical Storm Beryl batters Massachusetts

AP
July 21, 2006

BOSTON - Tropical Storm Beryl made landfall on Nantucket early Friday, bringing a steady, driving rain to coastal Massachusetts.

The storm's center hit around 3 a.m., said Jack Beven, hurricane specialist with the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

The wind and rain started to pick up just after midnight, said Rocky Fox, owner of the Chicken Box bar there. But he wasn't scared: "It's the kind that puddles quick," he said. "To us it's just a big old Nor'easter."

Officials said the region was faring well. The Coast Guard said they hadn't heard of problems, and no power outages were reported.
Forecasters extended a tropical storm warning extended from Plymouth south and west to Woods Hole, including Cape Cod, Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami. Forecasters said the storm may bring in tides of 1 to 3 feet above normal.

"You don't go outside and watch the winds. You don't go and watch the waves," said Eric Blake, a hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center.

At 2 a.m. EDT, the storm had maximum sustained winds of about 50 mph. The storm was expected to weaken over the next 24 hours and lose tropical characteristics by Saturday morning.

The Coast Guard was monitoring about 50 commercial fishing vessels still on the New England waters near the storm's path late Thursday night, but had no reports of vessels in trouble, said Chief Petty Officer Scott Carr.

Seas were expected to build to 15 feet southeast of Cape Cod and Nantucket overnight.

Blake said forecasters expect heavy rainfall of about 2 inches on the southeast Massachusetts coast and islands through midday Friday, with tropical storm force winds over 40 mph.

A tropical storm watch was issued for eastern Long Island and parts of Connecticut, but was discontinued early Friday as the storm moved northeast.

Workers at Nantucket Moorings on Thursday were making sure their customers' boats were tied down securely, but they weren't panicking.

"That's all we can do for now - make sure lines are secure and people know that the storm is approaching," said Leigh Van Hoven, office manager of the company, which rents and sells moorings.

A record 28 named storms and 15 hurricanes, including destructive Katrina, occurred during last year's June-November Atlantic hurricane season.

The first named storm of the 2006 season, Tropical Storm Alberto, swept over Florida in mid-June, then plowed northward along the coast past the Outer Banks. It was blamed for one drowning.



Comment on this Article

---

Sahara Desert Was Once Lush and Populated

Bjorn Carey
LiveScience.com
Thu Jul 20, 2006

At the end of the last Ice Age, the Sahara Desert was just as dry and uninviting as it is today. But sandwiched between two periods of extreme dryness were a few millennia of plentiful rainfall and lush vegetation.

During these few thousand years, prehistoric humans left the congested Nile Valley and established settlements around rain pools, green valleys, and rivers.

The ancient climate shift and its effects are detailed in the July 21 issue of the journal Science.
When the rains came

Some 12,000 years ago, the only place to live along the eastern Sahara Desert was the Nile Valley. Being so crowded, prime real estate in the Nile Valley was difficult to come by. Disputes over land were often settled with the fist, as evidenced by the cemetery of Jebel Sahaba where many of the buried individuals had died a violent death.

But around 10,500 years ago, a sudden burst of monsoon rains over the vast desert transformed the region into habitable land.

This opened the door for humans to move into the area, as evidenced by the researcher's 500 new radiocarbon dates of human and animal remains from more than 150 excavation sites.

"The climate change at [10,500 years ago] which turned most of the [3.8 million square mile] large Sahara into a savannah-type environment happened within a few hundred years only, certainly within less than 500 years," said study team member Stefan Kroepelin of the University of Cologne in Germany.

Frolicking in pools

In the Egyptian Sahara, semi-arid conditions allowed for grasses and shrubs to grow, with some trees sprouting in valleys and near groundwater sources. The vegetation and small, episodic rain pools enticed animals well adapted to dry conditions, such as giraffes, to enter the area as well.

Humans also frolicked in the rain pools, as depicted in rock art from Southwest Egypt.

In the more southern Sudanese Sahara, lush vegetation, hearty trees, and permanent freshwater lakes persisted over millennia. There were even large rivers, such as the Wadi Howar, once the largest tributary to the Nile from the Sahara.

"Wildlife included very demanding species such as elephants, rhinos, hippos, crocodiles, and more than 30 species of fish up to 2 meters (6 feet) big," Kroepelin told LiveScience.

A timeline of Sahara occupation:

* 22,000 to 10,500 years ago: The Sahara was devoid of any human occupation outside the Nile Valley and extended 250 miles further south than it does today.

* 10,500 to 9,000 years ago: Monsoon rains begin sweeping into the Sahara, transforming the region into a habitable area swiftly settled by Nile Valley dwellers.

* 9,000 to 7,300 years ago: Continued rains, vegetation growth, and animal migrations lead to well established human settlements, including the introduction of domesticated livestock such as sheep and goats.

* 7,300 to 5,500 years ago: Retreating monsoonal rains initiate desiccation in the Egyptian Sahara, prompting humans to move to remaining habitable niches in Sudanese Sahara. The end of the rains and return of desert conditions throughout the Sahara after 5,500 coincides with population return to the Nile Valley and the beginning of pharaonic society.

Comment on this Article

---

War Economy

---

Congress notified six billion dlr arms sale to Saudis possible

AFP
Thu Jul 20, 2006

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon notified the US Congress of possible military sales to Saudi Arabia worth more than six billion dollars, including light armored vehicles, Black Hawk helicopters and other gear.

The biggest portion of the proposed sale would go to reequip the Saudi National Guard at an estimated cost of up to 5.8 billion dollars.

The proposal calls for the sale of 724 light armored vehicles, more than 2,300 vehicular long-range radio systems, nearly 2,200 handheld radios, more than 2,100 sets of night-vision goggles, 630 thermal weapons sights, and 162 84mm recoilless rifles.
"The SANG (Saudi Arabia National Guard) needs these defense articles so that it can effectively conduct security and counter-terrorism operations," the Pentagon's Defense Cooperation and Security Agency said.

The equipment would also serve to make Saudi Arabia "less reliant on the deployment of US combat forces to maintain or restore stability in the Middle East," it said.

The agency said the radios in particular would enable secure communications "and provide the critical VHF and HF links necessary for a large fast-moving force."

Principal contractors would be ITT Aerospace/Communications, Harris Corporation, General Dynamics Land Systems and Raytheon Corporation.

In a separate notification to Congress, the DSCA reported on the possible sale to Saudi Arabia of 24 UH-60L Black Hawk helicopters.

"The total value, if all options are exercised, could be as high as 350 million dollars," it said.

It said the Royal Saudi Land Forces have a long-term plan to use the Black Hawks to expand and modernize their helicopter fleet.

"Saudi forces have used rotary-wing assets in numerous anti-terrorism operations within their borders and view their ability to quickly move troops around the country as a critical capability," it said.

"The additional aircraft will primarily be used to move troops and light equipment over long distances within their kingdom for external defense and internal requirements, as needed," it said.

The principal contractors would be Connecticut-based Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation and General Electric.



Comment on this Article

---

Saudis buy artillery from France's GIAT

AFP
July 21, 2006

PARIS - Saudi Arabia has ordered 76 artillery howitzers from the French armaments manufacturer Giat Industries, sources close to the purchase told AFP Friday.

Giat Industries announced a sale of its 155-millimetre Caesar artillery systems but did not give the name of the client nor the amount of money to change hands.

The order came as Saudi Arabia's defence minister Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz was in France on a two-day visit.

He saw President Jacques Chirac on Thursday and was to hold talks with his counterpart Michele Alliot-Marie later Friday.




Comment on this Article

---

Spanish firm claims it can make oil from plankton

Reuters
Thu Jul 20, 2006

MADRID - A Spanish company claimed on Thursday to have developed a method of breeding plankton and turning the marine plants into oil, providing a potentially inexhaustible source of clean fuel.

Vehicle tests are some time away because the company, Bio Fuel Systems, has not yet tried refining the dark green coloured crude oil, a spokesman said.
Bio Fuel Systems is a wholly Spanish firm, formed this year in eastern Spain after three years of research by scientists and engineers connected with the University of Alicante.

"Bio Fuel Systems has developed a process that converts energy, based on three elements: solar energy, photosynthesis and an electromagnetic field," it said in a press dossier.

"That process allows us to obtain biopetroleum, equivalent to that of fossil origin."

Phytoplankton, like other plants, absorb carbon dioxide as they grow. Scientists have examined the possibility of stimulating growth of the single cell plants as a means of reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

CO2, liberated by burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas, is widely held responsible for global warming.

Bio Fuel Systems said its new fuel would reduce CO2, was free of other contaminants like sulphur dioxide and would be cheaper than fossil oil is now.

"Our system of bioconversion is about 400 times more productive than any other plant-based system producing oil or ethanol," it said, referring to currently available biofuels made from plants like maize or oilseeds.

Bio Fuel Systems is working with scientists at the University of Alicante on the project. It has drawn up industrial plans to make the fuel and says it will be able to start continuous production in 14 to 18 months.



Comment on this Article

---

Rates on 30-year mortgages edge up

By MARTIN CRUTSINGER
AP Economics Writer
Thu Jul 20, 2006

WASHINGTON - Rates on 30-year mortgages rose this week to the highest level since the spring of 2002.

Freddie Mac, the mortgage company, reported Thursday that rates on 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages increased to a nationwide average of 6.80 percent, up from 6.74 percent last week.
The increase pushed 30-year rates to the highest level since they stood at 6.81 percent the week of May 24, 2002.

The lowest mortgage rates in four decades powered a boom in housing which pushed sales of both new and existing homes to record levels for five consecutive years. But sales have slowed this year as mortgage rates have been rising.

Some economists have expressed fears that the housing boom could quickly turn into a bust with sales and prices both falling sharply. But Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress on Thursday that so far the slowdown in housing "appears to be orderly."

Bernanke said the Fed recognized that a slowdown in housing could have a more severe impact on the overall economy "and we are watching it very carefully."

The rise in mortgage rates this week was blamed in part on further increases in inflation, including a 0.3 percent increase in core inflation as measured by the consumer price index, which was reported on Wednesday.

Rates on 15-year, fixed-rate mortgages, a popular choice for refinancing, increased to 6.41 percent, up from 6.37 percent last week.

Rates on one-year adjustable rate mortgages rose to 5.80 percent, up from 5.75 percent last week.

Rates on five-year adjustable-rate mortgages rose to 6.36 percent, up from 6.33 percent last week.

The mortgage rates do not include add-on fees known as points. The 30-year and five-year mortgages carried a nationwide average fee of 0.5 point. The 15-year mortgage had a nationwide average fee of 0.4 point and the one-year ARM carried a fee of 0.6 point.

A year ago, 30-year mortgages averaged 5.73 percent, 15-year mortgages stood at 5.32 percent, one-year ARMs were at 4.42 percent and five-year ARMs averaged 5.26 percent.



Comment on this Article

---

US stocks drop on Intel and data, Microsoft up late

By Vivianne Rodrigues
Reuters
Thu Jul 20, 2006

NEW YORK - U.S. tech stocks fell on Thursday, with the Nasdaq dropping nearly 2 percent, as a disappointing forecast by Intel Corp., and a weaker-than-expected business activity report weighed on the market.
Shares of Intel, the world's largest chip maker, fell 7.5 percent to $17.10, a day after it reported the sales forecast and lower quarterly profit.

The Dow industrials were led lower by shares of heavy equipment maker Caterpillar Inc.

The Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank said its business activity index for the mid-Atlantic region fell to its lowest level since January as costs climbed. The Dow Jones Transportation Average tumbled 4.4 percent.

Setting the stage for Friday, Microsoft Corp. shares rose 6 percent to $24.23 after hours after the company reported fourth-quarter earnings and said its board authorized an additional $20 billion in an ongoing share-repurchase program. Microsoft closed on Nasdaq at $22.85.

Web search leader Google Inc. reported that its quarterly earnings doubled. Google shares rose 1.5 percent to $392.80 after the bell from a Nasdaq close at $387.12.

Meanwhile, Advanced Micro Devices shares fell 5.6 percent to $20.44 in trading after the close as the company said margins and operating income fell. AMD's shares closed at $21.65 on the New York Stock Exchange.

"Stocks lost some momentum after a couple of lackluster earnings reports and the weak Philly Fed," said Steve Neimeth, portfolio manager at AIG SunAmerica Asset Management in Jersey City, New Jersey.

"Earnings after the bell were mixed. Microsoft's buyback is meaningful, but AMD and Google were not stellar," he added.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell 83.32 points, or 0.76 percent, to end at 10,928.10. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index slid 10.68 points, or 0.85 percent, to finish at 1,249.13. The Nasdaq Composite Index dropped 41.29 points, or 1.98 percent, to close at 2,039.42.

Intel shares were the biggest drag on the Nasdaq and the S&P 500. UBS and AG Edwards both cut their price targets on the stock.

CATERPILLAR GETS COAL MINER'S BLUES

Shares of heavy equipment maker Caterpillar Inc. led the Dow's decline. The stock dropped 2.9 percent, or $2.04, to $69.08 on the New York Stock Exchange after Peabody Energy Corp., the world's largest private-sector coal producer, forecast a third-quarter earnings shortfall. Caterpillar's customers include major companies in the mining and energy sectors.

Analysts at Citigroup on Thursday downgraded the capital goods group to "underweight" from "market weight."

Peabody shares slid 10.4 percent, or $5.56, to $47.79.

Yum Brands Inc.'s shares fell 6.4 percent, or $3.13, to $46.00. The company reported earnings late Wednesday, which showed disappointing U.S. same-store sales growth.

POLISHING THE APPLE

But shares of Apple Computer Inc. jumped 11.8 percent, or $6.40, to $60.50 on the Nasdaq, a day after the maker of the iPod digital music player said quarterly profit topped Wall Street's expectations. Apple shares registered their biggest one-day percentage gain in nearly two years.

Analysts said investors were worried about making bets on stocks following strong gains on Wednesday when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's comments raised hopes for a pause in interest-rate rises.

In a second day of testimony on central bank policy, Bernanke told House members on Thursday he expected inflation to moderate and said a wage increase would not impede that.

Minutes of the Federal Reserve's last meeting had limited impact on the stock market, analysts said. The minutes showed policy makers saw "significant uncertainty" about the future path of interest rates.

Trading was heavy on the New York Stock Exchange, where about 1.69 billion shares changed hands, above last year's daily average of 1.61 billion. On Nasdaq, about 2.13 billion shares traded, above last year's daily average of 1.80 billion.

On the NYSE, declining shares outnumbered advancing ones by a ratio of more than 2 to 1, while on Nasdaq, about three stocks fell for every one that rose.



Comment on this Article

---

More Good News

---

Mosques bombed, tense Baghdad under curfew

By Ahmed Rasheed and Mariam Karouny
Reuters
July 21, 2006

BAGHDAD - Bombs killed two worshippers at mosques in
Iraq during Friday prayers and the authorities extended a daytime curfew on Baghdad after one of the bloodiest weeks this year.

On the eve of a high-profile meeting intended to demonstrate reconciliation among sectarian and ethnic factions ahead of a White House visit by the prime minister, senior leaders admitted to despair about the chances of averting all-out civil war.

"Iraq as a political project is finished," a top government official told Reuters -- anonymously because the coalition of Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki remains committed in public to a U.S.-sponsored constitution preserving Iraq's unity.
"The parties have moved to Plan B," the official said, saying Sunni, ethnic Kurdish and majority Shi'ite blocs were looking at ways to divide power and resources and to solve the conundrum of Baghdad's mixed population of seven million.

"There is serious talk of Baghdad being divided into east and west," said the official, who has long been a proponent of the present government's objectives. "We are extremely worried."

Officials and delegates from a range of political, tribal, regional and religious groups will meet in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone government compound on Saturday for the inaugural meeting of the National Reconciliation Commission.

Maliki, who meets President Bush on Tuesday, has described a 24-point reconciliation plan outlined a month ago as a "last chance" for peace.

So far, however, it is unclear what substance it has beyond vague promises of amnesty for former rebels and a call for political parties' militias to disarm.

U.S. Republicans hope better news from Iraq will help the ruling party at congressional elections in November and maintain hopes that American soldiers can start coming home soon.

MOSQUES BOMBED

Bombs outside Sunni mosques in Khalis, north of the capital, and in the mainly Shi'ite east of Baghdad, each killed one man and wounded two during weekly prayers, police said.

There were also new clashes in Mahmudiya, a violent town just south of the city where nearly 60 people were killed in a mass assault by gunmen on Monday. Three police and three Iraqi soldiers were killed in Friday's fighting, police said.

U.S. troops killed two women and a three-year-old girl during a raid that, they said, also killed two suspected al Qaeda militants in violent Diyala province northwest of Baghdad.

State television announced a four-hour traffic ban in force in the city every Friday would be extended until 7 p.m. A nightly nine-hour curfew from 9 p.m. also remains in effect.

U.S. commanders see a looming fight to the finish in Baghdad between the two-month-old unity government and Sunni Arab rebels with links to al Qaeda and ousted president
Saddam Hussein.

The U.S. ambassador has warned that a greater threat may be the mounting sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shi'ites.

That has brought a risk that millions of ordinary but almost universally armed Iraqis may be dragged into all-out civil war.

U.S., Iraqi and international leaders have sounded alarms this week as new data showed tens of thousands of people have fled their homes in fear of death squads and that some 6,000 civilians may have been killed in just two months.

U.S. data showed attacks on security forces in Baghdad averaged 34 a day over several days, compared to 24 in recent months. Baghdad morgue has taken in 1,000 bodies this month.

Describing the capital as a "must-win" for both the rebels and the government, U.S. military spokesman Major General William Caldwell conceded on Thursday that a month-old clampdown in Baghdad had achieved only a "slight downtick" in violence.



Comment on this Article

---

Thousands flee as Iraq violence surges

SMH.com
July 21, 2006


(US government-financed) Gunmen have kidnapped about 20 employees of a government agency that oversees Sunni mosques, grabbing them on their way home from work at ad hoc checkpoints north of Baghdad, an official said.

At least 49 people were killed or found dead on Wednesday, including an Interior Ministry official who was shot in his car.

Most of the attacks appeared to be sectarian, and came a day after a suicide car bomber killed at least 53 people and wounded more than 100 in the Shiite holy city of Kufa. Also on Wednesday, the Mujahideen Shura, an insurgent umbrella group that has often directed attacks against Shiite civilians, posted internet messages claiming responsibility for that bombing.

The increasing violence has pushed up the number of displaced people in Iraq to at least 162,000, the Ministry of Displaced and Migration said yesterday. A ministry spokesman, Sattar Nowruz, speaking a day after the United States and United Nations sounded alarm bells over a surge in sectarian bloodshed, said there was a "dangerous" rise of about 32,000 internal refugees over the past three weeks.

The abduction on Tuesday and Wednesday of workers from the Sunni Endowment, Iraq's most prominent association of Sunni mosques and shrines, continued a string of high-profile kidnappings of government officials and employees this month. Many of the attacks have been against Sunni officials, leading to speculation that Shiite militias or death squads are involved.

The abduction of Taiseer Najeh Awad al-Mashhadani, a prominent Sunni member of parliament early in the month led to threats from the main Sunni coalition that it would boycott the Government unless it did more to rein in Shiite militias and factions in the Interior Ministry's security forces.

On Saturday, in the most audacious kidnapping attack in recent weeks, 60 gunmen stormed a meeting of the country's top sports officials in Baghdad and abducted 30 people, including guards and the president of Iraq's National Olympic committee, Ahmed al-Hijiya. Six of the hostages were freed the next day, but the rest are unaccounted for.

In another high-profile abduction, the president of the state-owned Northern Oil Company, Adil Mohamed al-Qazaz, was kidnapped in Baghdad on Sunday.

In a carefully timed attack on Wednesday, five people were killed and 18 were wounded when two roadside bombs, followed by a car bomb, exploded near Baghdad's Technology University, police said.

Seven others died in a vegetable shop when a bomb inside a plastic bag exploded.

In the northern city of Kirkuk, a car bomb exploded beside a police patrol on Wednesday, killing two people and wounding eight, including five policemen.

In his first statement since this wave of killings began, the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, struck a defiant note, describing the attacks as an effort to "hinder the political process through thwarting the national reconciliation initiative".

But that effort would continue, he said, with the Government's reconciliation commission meeting tomorrow.

"These crimes do not indicate the power of al-Qaeda, but its weakness," he said, adding that the insurgents had hit areas formerly described as calm.

Comment: Do you see any connection between the fact that Iraqis are being forced to flee their country and Lebanese just happen to find themselves in the same position? The real reason for the Iraqi invasion and the current 'crisis' in Lebanon is plain for all to see, at least those with eyes to see it.

Comment on this Article

---

Iraq's police overwhelmed by violence

By Dan Murphy
The Christian Science Monitor
July 21, 2006

BAGHDAD - At her home in central Baghdad, Niran al-Sammarai frets over the fate of her husband, kidnapped Saturday with 30 of his colleagues from a conference hall in one of the most heavily patrolled parts of Baghdad.

In Rasafah district, a police captain says he and colleagues are contemplating mass resignations in frustration over mistrust from US forces and orders from Iraqi politicians to release known criminals.

In the once fashionable Mansoor shopping district, metal grates are drawn over half of the businesses. And in Karada, one of Baghdad's safest neighborhoods, many of the businesses are shuttered too. The remaining shopkeepers complain that poor security is driving customers away.
In Baghdad and across much of the center and south of the country, the rhythms of normal life and commerce are rapidly breaking down in a sign that US and Iraqi government plans to build an effective security force are faltering. Reports of police standing aside as civilians get attacked are common, as are claims by survivors that government security forces, infiltrated by sectarian militias, took part in the killings.

The United Nations estimates 14,338 Iraqis were killed in the first six months of the year, and there are indications the rate of bloodshed is rising; more than 3,000 Iraqis were killed in June, most after the June 7 killing of Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose death US officials had hoped would diminsh violence.

"The government promised security, but the increasing number of bombs in our neighborhood proves that they're failing,'' says Ibrahim Mohammed, who runs a leather-jacket store in Karada where sales have collapsed "to almost nothing" in the past few months.

The escalating violence induced the reclusive top Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani to call Thursday "on those who are keen for the unity and future of this country ... to exert maximum efforts to stop the bloodletting."

Members of the Shiite endowment board, which oversees Shiite mosques, suspended their work for five days in a sign of solidarity with their Sunni counterparts after 20 members of the Sunni endowment board were kidnapped. But despite such moves to bring unity, violence has continued largely unabated.

US military officials said Thursday that violence jumped in the capital over the past five days from an average of 24 attacks a day to 34 despite a security plan unveiled last month with much fanfare.

"We have not witnessed the reduction in violence one would have hoped for in a perfect world," said US spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell at a press conference. But he said the plan is "a start." Policemen interviewed across the capital say it's too dangerous to confront insurgents and militia groups. Recently in Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad, men, women, and children were killed in an insurgent assault that witnesses interviewed by Iraqi journalists say local police did nothing to stop.

The kidnapping of Ms. Sammarai's husband illustrates the extent of the problem. Her husband, Ahmed al-Hajia, who heads Iraq's National Olympic Committee, was leading a committee meeting on Saturday at the Oil Culture Center in Baghdad's Bab al-Sheikh neighborhood.

The center is next to Baghdad's busiest bank, a quarter-mile from Baghdad's Major Crimes Unit, and a half-mile from Tahrir Square, where Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled after US forces captured Baghdad.

The area is usually rife with Iraqi police and army checkpoints.

Nevertheless, at about 2 p.m. that day a group of more than 20 gunmen in the uniforms of police commandos roared up to the hall in about 20 white Toyota pickup trucks - the type used by Iraq's police. The men overpowered the few guards and burst inside, according to four witnesses, none of whom wished to divulge their names because they feared retribution.

The attackers were "very calm, very professional, not nervous at all," says a hall employee, pointing to four bullet holes in the ceiling from a rifle burst used to establish control over the hostages.

He and other witnesses say the gunmen spent a methodical 30 minutes separating Olympic Committee officials and journalists from waiters and other employees of the hall, cuffing them with plastic zip ties and blindfolding them. By 3 p.m. they had left with about 30 hostages, Mr. Hajia among them. Since the attack, 10 of the hostages have been released while two of the guards have been found dead.

"What this really proves is how far out of control Iraq is now,'' says an official from the Olympic Committee. "We know there are checkpoints in the area. But any group of men with uniforms, with guns, can just drive wherever they want and no one will dare stop them."

The witnesses refused to speculate on whether police were responsible or insurgents in uniform.

"Answering those kinds of questions is very dangerous,'' one man said. But some quarters seemed convinced the police were involved. Last Saturday US and Iraqi soldiers raided the Major Crimes Unit (MCU).

They arrived after dark without warning and policemen there opened up on the soldiers. A brief firefight ensued, injuring some bystanders. Eventually order was restored and US soldiers went inside saying they were looking for Mr. Hajia and others kidnapped but found nothing, according to a policeman who works there.

The MCU has been considered by US military trainers to be one of the most professional police units in Baghdad. It has managed to sidestep the sectarian loyalties that lead many Baghdad residents to view police as little more than Shiite militias. American Military Police working to improve the unit's effectiveness had gone home for the day shortly before the US raid.

"Clearly they got a bad tip, but I'm very, very angry,'' says the police officer. "We've worked closely with the Americans, we've taken a lot of risks and they couldn't have handled this in a different way?" For him, he says the raid was the last straw.

In recent months he says the unit has captured a number of men they believed were running Shiite death-squads in the city. But the Interior Ministry, which oversees the police, secured the alleged killers' freedom in all cases. "There's too much interference from politicians, from the Americans, to do this job properly." He says that he and five other senior members of the unit are likely to quit soon.

Sammarai says her husband's kidnapping was political, and not financially motivated. She charges there are opponents of her husband who wanted to drag the committee into sectarian politics and were angry at his insistence that "sports and politics shouldn't be mixed."

"Our country is bleeding. All my husband wanted to do was build something - he helped get us to Athens, he was putting the past behind us. This is so unfair," says Sammarai. Another official on the committee, who didn't attend the meeting, also says he believes the attack may have been undertaken at the behest of Hajia's rivals. He points out that the hostages released so far have included Shiites, Sunnis and Christians, which implies it wasn't motivated by sectarian hatred.



Comment on this Article

---

Drug mistakes injure 1.5 million every year

By Maggie Fox
Reuters
Thu Jul 20, 2006

WASHINGTON - Medication errors hurt 1.5 million people every year in the United States and cost at least $3.5 billion, according to a report issued on Thursday.

If hospitals, clinics and other providers owned up to each and every mistake, it would help to keep track of and eventually reduce them, and systems such as electronic prescribing would also help, the Institute of Medicine report said.

"Medication errors are among the most common medical errors, harming at least 1.5 million people every year," the Institute said in a statement.

Such mistakes kill at least 7,000 people a year, according to the institute, an independent, non-profit organization that advises the federal government on health issues.
"The extra medical costs of treating drug-related injuries occurring in hospitals alone conservatively amount to $3.5 billion a year, and this estimate does not take into account lost wages and productivity or additional health care costs," the institute added.

One example -- a Denver hospital gave a newborn infant a tenfold overdose of penicillin in case it had been infected with syphilis from its mother in 1996.

Nurses balked at giving the baby five injections so administered the medicine in what turned out to be an unusual and improper way -- intravenously. The baby died, and the autopsy showed it did not have syphilis and never needed the treatment in the first place.

"This case illustrates that medication errors are almost never the fault of a single practitioner or caused by the failure of a single element," the report read.

"According to one estimate, in any given week, four out of every five U.S. adults will use prescription medicines, over-the-counter drugs, or dietary supplements of some sort, and nearly one-third of adults will take five or more different medications," the report said.

ONE-A-DAY

"The committee estimates that on average a hospital patient is subject to at least one medication error per day."

Errors occur when prescriptions are written, filled, administered, when patients are monitored and when drugs interact with one another, according to the committee of experts who wrote the report.

"Our recommendations boil down to ensuring that consumers are fully informed about how to take medications safely and achieve the desired results, and that health care providers have the tools and data necessary to prescribe, dispense, and administer drugs as safely as possible and to monitor for problems," said J. Lyle Bootman, dean of the University of Arizona's College of Pharmacy and a committee chairman.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it was already working on some of the recommendations, including better patient education and labeling.

Health care providers typically do not inform the patient or the patient's guardians about errors unless injury or death results, the report said. But if they did, it would help make everyone involved more aware of the errors and would encourage them to take more care, the report said.

"Electronic prescribing is safer because it eliminates problems with handwriting legibility and, when combined with decision-support tools, automatically alerts prescribers to possible interactions, allergies, and other potential problems," the institute added.

It said that by 2010 all providers should be using e-prescribing systems and all pharmacies should be able to receive prescriptions electronically.

Comment: 3,000 people were killed on September 11th, and the subsequent "War on Terror" has resulted in the death, incarceration, and torture of thousands more. At least 7,000 Americans die each year due to "medication errors", and nothing is done about it. Go figure.

Comment on this Article

---

Maverick medic reveals details of baby cloning experiment

David Adam
Guardian Unlimited
Thursday July 20, 2006

A maverick fertility expert has revealed hard evidence of a controversial attempt to produce the world's first cloned human baby.

Panos Zavos, a reproductive scientist, created a storm in 2004 when he called a press conference in London to announce he had cloned a human embryo from the skin cells of an infertile man and transferred it to the uterus of the man's wife. He later said the transfer had failed and the woman did not become pregnant, but many scientists doubted whether he had performed the experiment at all.

Most cloning and fertility experts say such a move to create a clone baby would be unethical and dangerous for mother and child - few female animals implanted with cloned embryos carry them to term or give birth to healthy offspring. The idea could not be taken seriously, they said, until Dr Zavos, who is based at the University of Kentucky and runs a private fertility clinic in Cyprus, published his results and methods in a scientific journal.

Details have now appeared in this month's issue of the Archives of Andrology - effectively placing the experiments on the scientific record, albeit in a little-known specialist journal.
In the paper, Dr Zavos and his colleague Karl Illmensee described how they copied the technique used by UK scientists to make Dolly the sheep - known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). They said they took DNA from the man's skin cells and fused it inside three eggs taken from the woman's ovaries, which were given a burst of electricity to encourage them to develop as embryos.

After three days, the paper said, one of the embryos had reached the four-cell stage and "was subsequently transferred into the patient's uterus". Two weeks later, blood tests showed the 35-year-old woman was not pregnant.

The paper said: "This is the first evidence of the creation and transfer of a cloned human embryo for reproductive purposes. Even though no pregnancy was established, human reproduction via SCNT may be possible and applicable in the future." The paper did not say where the pair performed the experiments, which would be illegal in the UK.

Dr Zavos told the Guardian yesterday that he submitted the paper a year ago and had subsequently transferred cloned human embryos to another five women, including a 52-year-old Briton earlier this year. None had resulted in pregnancies.

He confirmed that each was an attempt to produce a cloned baby and said he accepted the risks involved.

"People are right to have concerns, we have those concerns ourselves. Our team is prepared to subject any pregnancy to a very strict scrutiny and make sure they are taken securely and safely to completion."

Richard Gardner, a cloning expert at Oxford University and chairman of the Royal Society's working group on stem cell research, said: "We wanted Zavos to publish his findings and now he has, but a four-cell embryo is very early stage and doesn't tell you anything about whether it would be able to develop further."

According to the paper, the couple involved in the research did not want the scientists to run invasive tests on the embryo to see whether it was healthy because of their religious beliefs. Dr Zavos said the subsequent transferred embryos were more advanced, up to 10-12 cells each.

Professor Gardner supported calls for a worldwide ban on reproductive cloning because he said the technology was currently unproven, but said the technique could possibly be used in future to treat infertility in rare cases where the man produces no sperm.

"It's always difficult to make the decision about when you should be able to transfer animal work into humans."

In a separate paper published in the journal Fertility and Sterility in April, Dr Zavos' group described experiments that created dozens of hybrid embryos made by fusing human DNA inside cow eggs. These embryos were not intended to be transferred to women, but to help improve the cloning process.



Comment on this Article

---

---

Remember, we need your help to collect information on what is going on in your part of the world!
Send your article suggestions to: sott(at)signs-of-the-times.org