Colombo: The Sri Lanka air force bombed targets in the northern part of the country after guerrillas dropped four bombs close to fuel tanks in the suburbs of Colombo, triggering panic and pandemonium among residents.

Air Force spokesman, Group Captain Ajantha Silva said fighter jets shelled targets in the Vishvamadu and Iranamadu areas, including guerrilla air strip located in the northern Wanni region.

He said the aircraft involved in dropping bombs at the oil installations at Kolonnawa, 6 kilometres east of the capital and at Muthurajawela, 10 kilometres north, had landed in Iranamadu, prompting them to bomb the area.

Downplayed

In Colombo the Defence Ministry downplayed air raids by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) saying they had "missed the target", but residents in Colombo and the outskirts have expressed fears that more attacks could follow.

Finding a way

"It may take a couple of months for us to find a way to overcome the air attacks by the LTTE," Acting Media minister Lakshman Yapa Abeywardena said.

The night sky was set aglow with flares and anti-aircraft gun fire for more than 45 minutes as electricity was switched off as a precaution in Colombo city and outskirts.

The surprise attack by the LTTE and the retaliatory attacks by the military meant that cricket fans were deprived of witnessing the live coverage of the World Cup cricket finals in the Caribbean between Sri Lanka and Australia.

Those watching the coverage on giant screens in open grounds within the city were seen running towards the gates amidst rumours the port or airport had been bombed.

Unidentified men fatally shot a reporter for a Tamil-language newspaper in Sri Lanka’s troubled northern Jaffna peninsula yesterday.

Selvaraja Rajivarman, 24, worked for the Jaffna-based Uthayan newspaper, which is considered neutral but has good access to information from Tamil Tiger rebels fighting a separatist war with the government.

The identity of the attackers and their motive were not immediately known. There have been a growing number of unsolved killings and abductions in Jaffna, regarded as the heartland of Sri Lanka’s 3.1 million ethnic-minority Tamils.

The Defence Ministry’s information centre said it was unaware of the killing.

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Manila: The Philippine air force grounded its Vietnam War-era Huey helicopters yesterday after one crashed on a busy street while landing in a central city after combat training, killing nine people, officials said.

The UH-1H plummeted out of control while landing and crashed on a street outside an air base in Lapu-Lapu city on the central island of Mactan on Saturday afternoon, pinning a motorcycle taxi and hitting another near a public market, air force officials said.

All seven people riding the motorcycle taxi with a sidecar were killed while a driver and a commuter were wounded in the other. The crash killed one of two veteran pilots and one of two crewmen of the helicopter. It had been involved in advanced combat training in a nearby mountainous area, the officials said.

Most of those who died on the ground were commuters on their way home, and included a fresh college graduate looking forward to starting her first job. The air force said it would shoulder the cost of their burial and extend other help to their families.

TV footage showed the wreckage of the helicopter lying in the middle of a street as ambulances, their sirens wailing, arrived. Nearby, a man covered with newspapers a pile of bodies near a flattened motorcycle as throngs of residents watched.

Brigadier General Arthur Mancenido, commander of the 205th Helicopter Wing in Mactan, said 41 Hueys nationwide - the air force’s work horses - were indefinitely grounded pending an investigation to determine the cause of the crash.

Officials refused to speculate on the cause of the crash but an air force officer said the pilots suddenly encountered engine trouble at an altitude of about 122 metres.

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WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that President Bush will reject any attempt by Congress to require the Iraqi government to meet benchmarks as a condition for US troops remaining in Iraq, in a blow to emerging efforts to craft a compromise war-funding bill.

Bush, who plans this week to veto a measure that would require a troop withdrawal to begin by this fall, wants a bill that gives American officials complete flexibility in conducting military and diplomatic efforts in Iraq, Rice said.

"What we don’t want to do . . . is to tie our own hands so that we cannot act creatively and flexibly to support the very policies in Iraq that we’re trying to enforce," she said on ABC’s "This Week."

Though Democratic leaders in Congress are not yet sure how they will respond to the president’s veto, Rice’s comments represent an effort by the Bush administration to shape that debate.

Bush is scheduled to meet with Democratic leaders at the White House on Wednesday, shortly after he vetoes a $124 billion measure that would require troop withdrawals by Oct. 1 as a condition of keeping funding flowing to troops. The appropriations bill includes more than $90 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Democrats say they are determined not to cut off funding to troops, but they face strong pressure from the party’s liberal base to fund the war only in conjunction with binding efforts to hasten a troop withdrawal.

With few Republicans now supporting their efforts to attach conditions to war funding, Democratic leaders know they are far short of the two-thirds majorities needed to override a presidential veto in the House and Senate.

Some party leaders have expressed hope that they could get larger numbers of Republicans to agree to requiring benchmarks for progress, in place of a specific timetable for troop withdrawal.

The president cited the need for clear benchmarks — agreed to in consultation with the Iraqi government — when he announced his troop "surge" plan earlier this year, but Rice made clear yesterday that the White House believes such benchmarks should not be made law.

"The problem is that if you try and make consequences about these benchmarks, you’re tying the hands of General [David] Petraeus and the hands of Ambassador [Ryan C.] Crocker," Rice said.

Still, Democrats showed no signs yesterday of backing down in their high-profile confrontation with the president. Representative John P. Murtha, the chairman of the subcommittee that oversees defense spending, said the president should have no problem with agreeing to the same benchmarks for political progress that his administration has offered.

"The benchmarks — the Iraqis agreed to it, the president agreed to it," Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat, said on CBS’s "Face the Nation." "We’re saying to them, ‘Well, let’s put some teeth into the benchmarks.’ "

Murtha said that if the president refuses to compromise with Democrats, Congress should approve a measure that would fund the war for only a limited period of time. That would force the president to come back to lawmakers soon for additional funds — at a time when the political environment could be different if fewer Republicans remain strongly supportive of the war.

"Fund it for two months instead of a year, and then look at it again," Murtha said.

With public support for the war waning in polls , Rice appeared on three Sunday talk shows — on ABC, CBS, and CNN — to deliver a message that while the president is eager to find common ground with Democrats, he won’t capitulate on the issue of attaching strings to war funding.

The president and the administration are still prodding the Iraqi government to meet its goals for political progress and quelling sectarian violence, but the Bush camp does not want deadlines for them to be enshrined into law, she said.

"The benchmarks that are anticipated here, of course, [are] benchmarks that the Iraqis themselves have adopted. They are benchmarks that they need to meet," Rice said on CNN’s "Late Edition." "We are telling them all of the time that their national reconciliation is moving too slowly [and] needs to move more quickly."

Yet Democrats are clearly growing impatient, and say they are no longer willing to hand the president all the money he is asking for without strict limits that influence policy.

Senator Russell D. Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat and a fierce critic of the war, said on ABC that he was stunned that the administration is continuing to ignore the will of the public and the Congress to start to bring the war to a close. "The American people want us to provide the funds the president has asked for, but they want us to end this war," Feingold said. "I don’t think we should back down. . . . American troops are dying for no good reason at this point. They are in a situation where they are being sacrificed because people want political comfort in Washington."

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Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh

President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen has arrived on Sunday in Washington for talks with the White House on how to deepen bilateral relations.

Saleh is to meet with President Bush and other U.S. officials to discuss ways of increasing cooperation between the two countries, the Yemen news agency Saba reported Monday.

Saleh would hold talks with senior officials in the Senate, the Congress and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) regarding the situation in the Middle East, the efforts to support the Arab Peace Initiative, the USA’s role as member of the Four-member Committee in dealing with the latest developments in Palestine, Iraq, Sudan and Somalia.

The talks would focus on developing the cooperation between Yemen and USA in several fields such as economic, trade and investment.

Saleh arrived at Andrews Air Force Base Sunday night and was greeted by the base commander, the chief of protocol for the White House and various representatives of Yemeni diplomats serving in Washington.
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BARQUISIMETO, Venezuela (AP) — President Hugo Chavez said Sunday that Venezuela hopes to gradually sell off its refineries in the United States and build a new network of refineries in Latin America, part of a plan to offer his leftist allies in the region a stable oil supply.

Chavez also raised the idea of issuing a regional bond to raise funds for social spending as he hosted a summit of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, or ALBA, a leftist bloc and trade group that includes Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia and Nicaragua.

"I proposed that we issue an ALBA bond. I hope that we can do it…. And that we issue it here in Venezuela, like we did with Argentina, and bring in $1 billion," said Chavez, addressing leaders Sunday on final day of their talks. Chavez said the money acquired would be put in a fund to provide credit for ALBA nations.

Chavez and other leaders signed accords for Venezuela to supply fuel under preferential terms and join up with other countries for cooperative projects in education, telecommunications, mining and other areas.

He said Venezuela will guarantee to supply 100 percent of the energy needs for ALBA members as well as Haiti. ALBA was created in 2004 by Cuba and Venezuela as a counterproposal to U.S. backed free-trade plans.

Chavez said Venezuela eventually plans to help build a network of refineries in Nicaragua, Haiti, Ecuador, Bolivia and Dominica, as well as refurbishing Cuba’s Cienfuegos refinery, to provide a stable supply of oil - and the earnings it generates - to countries in Latin America.

He noted that Venezuela’s Citgo Petroleum Corp. has seven refineries in the U.S. and said that "part of our plans is to sell those refineries."

Under special oil deals offered by Venezuela, ALBA member nations will be able to finance 50 percent of the bill for fuel under low-interest loans, and 25 percent of the total bill will go into a special "ALBA Fund" to support local projects through loans, he said.

Leaders attending included Haitian President Rene Preval, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, Bolivian President Evo Morales and Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage, as well as officials from Uruguay, Ecuador, Dominica, St. Kitts and Nevis, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

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Blind microlight pilot Miles Hilton-Barber of Great Britain reacts after landing at Sydney’s Bankstown Airport after completing his flight from England to Australia, Monday April 30, 2007. Hilton-Barber, 58, who has been blind for 25 years, and his co-pilot Richard Meredith-Hardy left London on March 7 on their 13,200 miles journey to Australia. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) — A blind British adventurer touched down in Sydney Monday to end an epic 13,500-mile flight by microlight aircraft from London.

Miles Hilton-Barber braved snowstorms, freezing temperatures and torrential downpours during his 54-day journey under the supervision of sighted co-pilot Richard Meredith-Hardy.

"It’s the fulfillment of an amazing dream," Hilton-Barber, 58, told reporters at Sydney’s Bankstown airport. "I’ve wanted to be a pilot since I was a kid. Now I’m totally blind and I’ve had the privilege of flying more than halfway around the world."

Hilton-Barber, who lost his eyesight to a hereditary condition about 20 years ago, is hoping the trip will raise $2 million for the charity Seeing is Believing, which works for the prevention of blindness in developing countries.

He took to the skies from Biggin Hill air base in south London on March 7 in a microlight aircraft, which looks like a cross between a tricycle and a motorized hang-glider, with the aid of an audio device that reads out navigational information such as air speed and altitude.

Hilton-Barber also has conquered Mount Kilimanjaro and Mont Blanc, run marathons in the Sahara and Gobi deserts, and even attempted to reach the South Pole, hauling a sledge over 250 miles of Antarctic ice.

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—

On the Net:

Miles Hilton-Barber’s blog

Seeing is Believing

NEW YORK (AP) — Robert Rosenthal, a World War II bomber pilot who twice survived being shot down in raids over Europe and later served on the U.S. legal team that prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, has died at age 89.

Rosenthal, who lived in Harrison, N.Y., died April 20 of multiple myeloma, according to a son, Steven Rosenthal, of Newton, Mass.

With 16 decorations including the Distingushed Service Cross, the nation’s second-highest award for heroism, Rosenthal was a quintessential example of the young Army pilots, some barely out of their teens, who defied seemingly hopeless odds to carry out daylight strategic bombing raids against Germany’s industrial war machine from 1942 to 1945.

Despite being able to absorb punishment, the B-17 Flying Fortresses, carrying 10 crew members, took staggering losses over Germany, especially when flying raids beyond the range of their England-based fighter escort.

Rosenthal’s 52 missions included one, on Oct. 10, 1943, in which his aircraft was the only one of 13 to return from a raid on Munster, the rest having been downed by anti-aircraft fire and waves of Luftwaffe fighters. Rosenthal’s B-17 reached England with two of its four engines gone, severe wing damage and two wounded crew members.

His bomber was dubbed "Rosie’s Riveter," a play on both his name and the sobriquet given to women working in U.S. defense factories. He also flew other B-17s, including "Royal Flush," when "Rosie’s Riveter" was being repaired, Steven Rosenthal said in a telephone interview.

Rosenthal’s plane was disabled by flak over France in September 1944 and he suffered a broken arm and other injuries in a forced landing, but was helped to safety by French resistance fighters. Five months later, he was shot down again during a raid over Berlin, and got home with the aid of Russian troops, via Poland, Russia, Iran, Egypt, Greece and Italy.

Born in Brooklyn on June 11, 1917, Rosenthal was football and baseball team captain at Brooklyn College, a summa cum laude graduate of Brooklyn Law School and was working at a Manhttan law firm when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. He enlisted the next day and insisted on being trained for combat.

"I couldn’t wait to get over there," he told Donald Miller, author of the 2006 book, "Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany."

He was assigned to the 100th Bomb Group, based at Thorpe Abbott air base near Norwich, East Anglia. The unit would become known as the "Bloody Hundredth," and the base today has a museum, maintained by local residents and dedicated to the deeds of the WWII airmen, Steve Rosenthal said.

Rosenthal shrugged off reports that he had relatives in German concentration camps as "a lot of hooey." "A human being has to look out for other human beings or there’s no civilization," he told author Miller.

After Germany surrendered, Rosenthal was training to fly B-29 Super Fortresses over Japan when the war ended in August 1945. He returned home to a law practice but soon returned to Germany as part of the American legal team chosen for the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

Aboard the ship bound for Germany he met Phillis Heller, another attorney whom he married in Nuremberg. During the trials he interviewed ex-Luftwaffe commander Herman Goering, the highest-ranking Nazi defendant, who would evade the hangman by committing suicide, and former general Wilhelm Keitel.

"Seeing these strutting conquerers after they were sentenced … was the closure I needed," he said. "Justice had overtaken evil."

Rosenthal is survived by his wife, son Steven and a second son, Daniel, of Weston, Conn.; a daughter, Peggy Rosenthal, of Manhattan; four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

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La Paz: Bolivian President Evo Morales said he was "sure" Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who has been recovering from intestinal surgery, will resume power during May Day celebrations in Havana on May 1, a Bolivian television station reported on Saturday.

"I’m sure, my Cuban brothers, that on May 1 comrade Fidel will return to governing Cuba and Latin America," Morales said, according to the private Unitel network. "I’m convinced that comrade Fidel will return to continue governing and leading the Cuban people."

No official word

The Bolivian president said he had not received any official word from Cuban authorities about plans for Castro to return to power or that he might make his first public appearance in nine months at a workers parade on May 1.

In Havana, senior Cuban officials preparing for the mass rally in Revolution Square could not confirm whether Castro would show up, but said he was involved in all major government decisions.

"If it is possible he will be there, if it is not, he won’t be there," Economy Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez said at a news conference. "We all would like his fast recovery to be even faster so that he can be back with us," he said.

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Patna, India: Villagers at a wedding in eastern India decided the groom had arrived too drunk to get married, and so the bride married the groom’s more sober brother instead, police said on Monday.

"The groom was drunk and had reportedly misbehaved with guests when the bride’s family and local villagers chased him away," Madho Singh, a senior police officer told Reuters after Sunday’s marriage in a village in Bihar state’s Arwal district.

The younger brother readily agreed to take the groom’s place beside the teenage bride at her family’s invitation, witnesses said.

"The groom apologised for his behaviour, but has been crying that word will spread and he will never get a bride again," Singh said by phone.

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Fred Thompson

Washington: Ronald Reagan’s closest allies are throwing their weight behind the bid by the late president’s fellow actor, Fred Thompson, for the White House.

The film star and former Republican senator from Tennessee will this week use a speech in the heart of Reagan country, in Southern California, to woo party bigwigs in what insiders say is the next step in his coming out as a candidate.

A key figure in the Reagan inner circle has now given his seal of approval to Thompson, best known as a star of the television crime drama Law and Order.

As deputy Chief of Staff, Michael Deaver was a key member of the "troika" of aides who kept the Reagan White House on track. With the then Chief of Staff James Baker and special assistant Ed Meese, he was the master of image and presentation.

Deaver sees the same raw material in Thompson as was perceived in Reagan, describing him as someone "that could really make a difference". He added: "He is very popular in his party. He could change this whole thing and turn this primary system upside down.

"As Ronald Reagan used to say, after he stole a line from Al Jolson, ‘Stay tuned, you ain’t seen nothing yet’."

Thompson’s political and acting careers have been closely interwoven for more than 20 years. He originally worked as a lawyer and Republican campaign manager, and was a key legal counsel in the Watergate scandal.

He was then asked to play himself in a 1985 film about a real-life judicial corruption scandal in Tennessee, supposedly because the producers could not find a professional actor who could portray him plausibly. That launched his acting career, which he has maintained alongside stints as a senator and continued Republican campaigning.

Deaver voiced the views of many Republicans that the current crop of declared candidates is unsatisfactory. Of the front runner, the former New York mayor Rudi Giuliani, he said: "His popularity may be a mile wide and an inch deep. I’m sure that lead will shrink."

On Friday Thompson will address the 45th annual dinner of the Lincoln Club, which is billed as the "largest and most active political club in the United States". The invitation was one that other Republican candidates had tried to secure.

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Kabul: Over 130 Taliban fighters were killed in Afghanistan by US-led coalition troops over the past few days, the coalition said on Monday.

The deaths signify the heaviest reported rebel losses this year amid increasing violence in the country.

Backed by air support, the Taliban were killed in two separate battles in the western province of Herat, the US military said in a statement.

Herat, which borders Iran, had been considered safe compared to other areas where the Taliban are more active.

A total of 87 Taliban fighters were killed during a 14-hour battle with US-led troops and Afghan forces on Sunday.

Another 49 Taliban, including two of their leaders, were killed two days earlier after a group of Taliban fired at a joint coalition and Afghan patrol in another part of the valley.

A statement said one US soldier was killed, but did not say if there were any casualties among the Afghan forces. There were no reported injuries among civilians.
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…Now Iran bans Western hair cuts

Tehran: Iranian police have warned barbers against offering Western-style hair cuts or plucking the eyebrows of their male customers, Iranian media said on Sunday.

The report by a reformist daily, later confirmed by an Iranian news agency, appeared to be another sign of the authorities cracking down on clothing and other fashion deemed to be against Islamic values.

"Western hair styles … have been banned," the newspaper Etemad said in a front-page headline.

It came a week after police launched a crackdown against the growing numbers of young women testing the limits of the law with shorter, brighter and skimpier clothing ahead of the summer months.

Under Iran’s Islamic sharia law, imposed after the 1979 revolution, women are obliged to cover their hair and wear long, loose-fitting clothes to disguise their figures.

Violators can receive lashes, fines and imprisonment. The student news agency, ISNA, quoted a police statement as saying: "In an official order to barber shops, they have been warned to avoid using Western hair styles and doing men’s eyebrows."

Iranian young men have in recent years started paying more attention to the way they look and dress, especially in affluent parts of the capital Tehran. Spiked up hair, by using gel, is known as the khorusi (rooster) style and some also use make-up.

Several hairdressers for men in Tehran offer cuts in the style of Hollywood movie stars and other Western celebrities. Clients can also have their eyebrows plucked.

The head of the barbers’ union, Mohammad Eftekharifard, said police had instructed it to "exercise specific regulations in barber shops that work under its supervision."

Barbers who do not follow these rules might be closed down for a month and even lose their permits to operate, Etemad quoted him as saying.

"Currently some barber shops apply make-up and use hair styles that are in line with those in European countries and America," Eftekharifard said.

He added: "An official order has been sent to the union …  not to apply make-up on men’s faces (or) do eyebrows … and hence the barbers are not allowed to do these things."

Since hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the presidency in 2005 promising a return to the values of the revolution, hardliners have pressed for tighter controls on what they consider immoral behaviour.

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May 1^st is boycott Gringo America Day for the gabillion illegal aliens currently in Gringo land. My question is: will there be a mass exodus of these gabillion illegal aliens off of Gringo soil and back to their country of origin…even if just for the day? The mere thought excites me to no end. I think I may pass out.

Members of a bipartisan group of U.S. senators are pushing to reach agreement on immigration reform that would offer some illegal immigrants a chance to become citizens, and the coming month will prove critical to their efforts.

Lawmakers have been struggling to come up with a formula providing tougher border and workplace enforcement while addressing the status of some 11 million illegal immigrants who live and work in the shadows.

"I am really hopeful we can come up with something we can all live with," said Sen. Mel Martinez, a Florida Republican, who is among a bipartisan group that has been participating in the discussions.

The group is working to meet a mid-May deadline. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, has set aside the last two weeks of the month for the Senate to debate immigration legislation.

President George W. Bush backs a comprehensive approach but legislation last year that would have created a guest worker program and offered many illegal immigrants a shot at citizenship failed in the face of stiff opposition by a group of Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives.

This year lawmakers are engaging in a delicate balancing act to write a law supported by majority Democrats, who want a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants, while satisfying conservative Republicans, like Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, who do not want amnesty and say they do not want to reward illegal immigrants by giving them an easy path to citizenship.

"Legislative language is being drafted," said Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican. "No one has agreed to anything because we really haven’t seen anything in writing."

An aide to Sen. Ted Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat who is a leading player in the negotiations, said progress was being made although there was no agreement yet.

A Senate Republican leadership aide said there were still major sticking points. "The agreement is much further away than has been suggested," the aide said.

COMMON GROUND

Whether a liberal like Kennedy and a conservative like Kyl can agree is unclear. Negotiators have offered few details on the talks and analysts say common ground likely remains elusive.

"There are people in both parties who are not really going to be for the deal," said Tamar Jacoby, an immigration expert with the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

"I think I can see a sweet spot. But can they both stretch quite enough to get there, I don’t know," said Jacoby.

"There’s a lot of good will and determination to get to an agreement, but especially now that they are looking at the details it’s pretty difficult," said Angela Kelley, deputy director of the National Immigration Forum, an immigrant advocacy group.

"It’s hard to see right now how the dots are going to join up," she said.

The legislation will likely include a path to citizenship for many illegal immigrants who pay fines and meet other qualifications.

Kelley said some progress had been made in addressing the status of illegal immigrants living in the United States. But sticking points remain over concessions for family members seeking to join relatives living stateside and over residency rights for participants in a new guest worker program that would be created. 

Activists have called for nationwide demonstrations on Tuesday in support of immigrant rights similar to the huge gatherings that took place in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and other cities a year ago on May 1. But organizers say they expect the turnout to be lower in part because of tougher enforcement by U.S. officials.

"A lot of migrants may be afraid to take part because of the immigration raids in recent months …. there’s a lot of fear," said Lizette Olmos of the League of Latin American Citizens.

Others say the turnout is likely to be lower because there has been less attention to the rallies in Spanish language media.

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A routine inspection uncovered more than 700 pounds of cocaine in the cargo hold of an airplane at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

The drugs, with an estimated street value of about $6.7 million, were aboard an Aeromex flight from Guadalajara, Mexico, which landed Friday night, the Chicago Tribune reported Sunday.

The cocaine was found during an inspection of the cargo hold by officers from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

About 330 bricks of cocaine were wrapped in cellophane, soaked in grease and covered with tape, authorities said. The four boxes containing the cocaine were not listed on the cargo manifest.

No arrests had been made as of late Saturday, the Tribune reported.

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Check out this outstanding US helicopter video

Caught in the middle of the Helmand river, the fleeing Taliban were paddling their boat back to shore for dear life.

Smoke from the ambush they had just sprung on American special forces still hung in the air, but their attention was fixed on the two helicopter gunships that had appeared above them as their leader, the tallest man in the group, struggled to pull what appeared to be a burqa over his head.

As the boat reached the shore, Captain Larry Staley tilted the nose of the lead Apache gunship downwards into a dive. One of the men turned to face the helicopter and sank to his knees. Capt Staley’s gunner pressed the trigger and the man disappeared in a cloud of smoke and dust.

By the time the gunships had finished, 21 minutes later, military officials say 14 Taliban were confirmed dead, including one of their key commanders in Helmand.

The mission is typical of a new, aggressive, approach adopted by American forces in southern Afghanistan and particularly in Helmand, where British troops last year bore the brunt of some of the heaviest fighting since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.

American commanders believe that the uncompromising use of airpower in recent weeks has been a key factor in preventing the Taliban from launching their expected full-scale spring offensive against coalition forces and forcing them to rethink their tactics.

Aircrews say they have been told to show no mercy, but to press home their advantage until all their targets have been destroyed. The Apache attack was one of five in three days in -Helmand, where British troops operate alongside a much smaller contingent of American infantry and special forces.

Capt Staley, the commander of the Apache unit based at Kandahar airfield, described how his helicopters had arrived just after an ambush by Taliban fighters with rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns, on a detachment of American special forces and an infantry unit. In the second Apache, 1st Lt Jack Denton, 26, was in radio contact with the special forces unit, Scorpion 36, on the ground.

The soldiers said they had information that the Taliban were escaping across the river. "Look out for any boats," they said. He spotted a small aluminium fishing boat pushing out from the eastern shore of the 200-yard-wide river. In it were six or seven people. When they caught sight of the Apaches, they started to paddle back towards shore.

The aircrew hesitated. "It seemed a little premature," said Lt Denton. "We didn’t have hostile intent or a positive ID from the ground commander." But the special forces soldiers were adamant that, although they could not themselves see the men on the boat, they must be the Taliban who had attacked them. That, said Lt Denton, was good enough for the Apache crews.

By then, most of the men were ashore, walking quickly towards the tree line. They appeared to be pulling clothing over their heads - burqas, Capt Staley thought, and Lt Denton concurred. As the helicopters came in to attack, Lt Denton said, one of the men turned to face him and dropped to his knees. "I think he knew that there was no hope," he said. "He was making his peace."

Capt Staley’s helicopter hit them with its rockets while Lt Denton, the gunner in the other helicopter, opened up with his 30mm cannon. Three or four of the Taliban died where they stood and the rest made a dash for the trees. "They were trying to get to their bunkers," Capt Staley said. "We started a diving run and destroyed four of the six people we could see, including the Taliban commander."

From 500ft up, Lt Denton said: "You can see the person but you can’t see the features of his face. The 30mm explode when they hit and kick up smoke and dust. You just see a big dust cloud where the person used to be."

As the Apaches came in for another run, Capt Staley said, he saw the muzzle flashes of automatic weapons among the trees. A rocket-propelled grenade screamed towards his helicopter, but it passed by harmlessly.

The Apaches made eight attacking runs and, by the end, the bodies of 14 Taliban littered the shore. Another two were spotted floating down the river. Any survivors did not hang about. "They usually extricate their dead but this time they left them there," Capt Staley said.

American intelligence named the dead commander as Mullah Najibullah, who, they said, had been responsible for leading attacks against British forces in and around the town of Sangin, in Helmand.

The attack, and four other missions against suspected Taliban compounds, are clearly effective, but the stakes are high. Coalition attacks on mistakenly identified targets here, as in Iraq, have left dozens of civilians dead and wounded and can act as a recruiting sergeant for the terrorists.

But Capt Staley said he had no qualms about pressing home such attacks until no one was left standing and claimed that American pilots were more effective than their British Apache counterparts, who he said flew higher and were less ruthless in finishing off their targets. "The Brits are good but they don’t have the extreme aggression that we do."

Lt Denton, too, believed they were striking the right balance.

"Usually, right before the engagement, you stop and think, ‘Are you sure?’, because you are going to be taking someone’s life, but everything happens so fast you have to make quick decisions."

On Monday, the Apaches struck again, killing 12 Taliban whom they had caught in the open near Qalat, in Zabul province.

Lt Denton and Capt Staley were in one of the two-man aircraft, escorting two Black Hawk helicopters, when they spotted eight motorcycles, with a rider and passenger on each. It seemed unusual and the Apache broke away to take a closer look.

Dropping to 200ft, it swooped close to the motorcyclists - and the two men could not believe their luck: some of the passengers were holding the parts of a long-barrelled heavy machine-gun.

Six of the bikes slewed to a stop, their passengers leaping off and aiming their weapons at the helicopter in what appeared to be a well-practised drill, while the others took off across country. The Apache banked away to begin its attack run.

"Some of them were trying to get the heavy machine-gun up a small hill to engage us," Lt Denton said. "Capt Staley used the 30mm gun to take out the two guys who had taken off, and then we fixed on the ones with the heavy machine-gun. They were huddled around a large boulder and we shot them. We put as many rounds around it as we could, because if they got to it they could cause us trouble. But they never had a chance to set it up."

Using its cannon and then its rockets, the Apache finished off all the Taliban fighters it could find, then launched nail-filled rockets and dropped white phosphorous to destroy the motorcycles and the machine guns. After the shooting stopped, 12 Taliban were confirmed dead.

Not surprisingly, the Apache assaults have forced the Taliban to adopt a lower profile. For the coalition to continue to be successful, commanders must hope that the Taliban do not get their hands on the weaponry that has made life so perilous for pilots in Iraq, where more than 50 helicopters have been shot down since the start of the war.

But for now, the American airmen are not losing any sleep over it. "When you are on top of the enemy you look, shoot and it’s, ‘You die, you die, you die’," Lt Denton said.

"The odds are on our side. I really enjoy it. I told my wife, if I could come home every night then this would be the perfect job."

Source

ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP) — At least 300,000 Turks waving the red national flag flooded central Istanbul on Sunday to demand the resignation of the government, saying the Islamic roots of Turkey’s leaders threatened to destroy the country’s modern foundations.

Like the protesters - who gathered for the second large anti-government demonstration in two weeks - Turkey’s powerful secular military has accused Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of tolerating radical Islamic circles.

"They want to drag Turkey to the dark ages," said 63-year-old Ahmet Yurdakul, a retired government employee who attended the protest.

More than 300,000 people took part in a similar rally in Ankara two weeks ago.

Sunday’s demonstration was organized more than a week ago, but it came a day after Erdogan’s government rejected the military’s warning about the disputed presidential election and called it interference that is unacceptable in a democracy.

The ruling party candidate, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, failed to win a first-round victory Friday in a parliamentary presidential vote marked by tensions between secularists and the pro-Islamic government. Most opposition legislators boycotted the vote and challenged its validity in the Constitutional Court.

The military said Friday night that it was gravely concerned and indicated it was willing to become more openly involved in the process - a statement some interpreted as an ultimatum to the government to rein in officials who promote Islamic initiatives.

Sunday’s crowd chanted that the presidential palace was "closed to imams."

Some said Parliament Speaker Bulent Arinc was an enemy of the secular system, because he said the next president should be "pious."

In the 1920s, with the Ottoman Empire in ruins, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk imposed Western laws, replaced Arabic script with the Latin alphabet, banned Islamic dress and granted women the right to vote.

The ruling party, however, has supported religious schools and tried to lift the ban on Islamic head scarves in public offices and schools. Secularists are also uncomfortable with the idea of Gul’s wife, Hayrunisa, being in the presidential palace because she wears the traditional Muslim head scarf.

"We don’t want a covered woman in Ataturk’s presidential palace," said Ayse Bari, a 67-year-old housewife. "We want civilized, modern people there."

The military, one of the most respected institutions in Turkey, regards itself as the guardian of the secular system and has staged three coups since 1960.

"Neither Sharia, nor coup but fully democratic Turkey," read a banner carried by a demonstrator on Sunday.

Source

This excellent piece was first published on October 26^th 2006 and is certainly relevant today:

By Jeff Osonitsch

Kevin Tillman has taken it upon himself to indict the Bush Administration, the U.S military and law-enforcement communities for their conduct in the Iraq War.

On October 19, 2006, ex-Army Ranger Kevin Tillman wrote a bizarre, rambling op-ed piece for the “progressive” web-site truthdig.com in which he accused the Bush Administration of, among other things, engaging in an illegal war, tolerating torture, subverting the Constitution, and suspending Habeas Corpus. As is typical of the raving goofballs on the America-hating left, none of these charges were supported by a shred of evidence; nor do any of them stand up under even cursory scrutiny.  

Tillman, the brother of Pat Tillman, the ex-NFL great who was killed in a tragic “friendly-fire” incident in Afghanistan in 2004 while deployed there with the U.S. Army Rangers, is obviously and understandably bitter about the loss of his brother and especially angry about the manner in which the incident was subsequently bungled (ostensibly for public relations reasons) by the U.S. military.  My purpose here is not to defend the Pentagon’s actions vis-à-vis the handling of that incident, or to dishonor his brother’s noble sacrifice, but rather to refute the scurrilous charges for which Kevin Tillman has taken it upon himself to indict the Bush Administration, the U.S military and law-enforcement communities.

In his piece Tillman blasts the war in Iraq as illegal, but in reality it was anything but:

• By the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the regime of Saddam Hussein was in direct and verifiable violation of no less than 16 U.N. Resolutions, including 1441 which warned of “serious consequences” for continued defiance of international law;

• The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Clinton states, “It should be the policy of the U.S. to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime;”

• Joint Resolution 114, which passed both houses of the U.S. Congress and was signed by President Bush, reads: “The President is authorized to use the U.S. armed forces as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq;”

• On February 28 1991, the ceasefire which halted the coalition’s offensive hostilities during Operation Desert storm took effect.  A ceasefire, it is important to stress, is a temporary stoppage of a war, pursuant to the adherence by both sides to the terms agreed upon therein. Legally speaking then, the 1991 Iraq war never ended and the 2003 campaign was, in part, a response to the Iraqi regime’s repeated violations of the ceasefire agreement.  These violations included Iraq’s shooting at U.S. jets patrolling the no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq. 

Tillman asserts that “our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them [sic].”  One would think he was describing the terrorists who kidnapped and beheaded Daniel Pearl or Nick Berg, but rather, he referred to the pseudo-scandals created by the leftist allies of international terrorists at the New York Times such as the C.I.A. prisons, Abu-Graib, and Guantanamo Bay.

The very idea that terrorists captured on foreign battlefields during war time and held on foreign soil are subject to the habeas corpus protections of the U.S. Constitution are as dangerous to our national security as they are absurd legally: By virtue of the Geneva Conventions, the U.S. Constitution (Article II), and all relevant Supreme Court decisions on the subject, The President, as Commander in Chief, has the authority to detain “unlawful enemy combatants” without arraignment, indictment, or trial for the duration of armed hostilities for the purpose of intelligence gathering and to keep said combatants off the battlefield.  Moreover, every war-time President in U.S. history has exercised this right.  This is not an attack on the Bill of Rights or an illegal innovation by the Bush Administration. 

And the odious slander about the U.S engaging in torture is not only patently false, but is also a propaganda boost for our enemies.  Apparently, Mr. Tillman could not focus his anger at those Islamic barbarians sawing off the heads of bound captives, torturing to death captured U.S. soldiers, or flying planes into buildings in the United States; rather, he reserved his indignation for the juvenile pranksters who placed women’s panties on the head of a captured terrorist; he not only calls this type of behavior torture but then blames the President for it to boot!

In a vulgar display of bitterness and cynicism, Tillman also criticizes the practice of “having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with a crayon and send it overseas . . .,” wondering why a “soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old.”  Perhaps he would prefer we parents bring our toddlers to the airport to spit on soldiers returning from battle overseas rather than teaching them to honor and support them in their brave endeavor.

I, like all Americans of good will, am truly sorry for the loss suffered by the Tillman family and grateful for the service they have provided to our country; however, by exploiting his brother’s death, much like Cindy Sheehan, and attacking, for political purposes, the very men and women whose policies have kept the terrorist menace from our shores for five long years, Kevin Tillman has chosen to undermine those very policies, thus endangering all of our lives.  In this, he must not go unchallenged.  And lest anyone should feel Mr. Tillman is above criticism for his subversive and borderline treasonous attack on the President and our brave men and women serving nobly overseas because he himself wore the uniform, I’ll remind you that Benedict Arnold was a hero in the Continental Army before he betrayed his country by siding with the enemy.  The truth is, by implementing the policies advocated by the likes of Kevin Tillman, the President would be not only unnecessarily endangering our troops on foreign battlefields but would also be exponentially increasing the risk of another catastrophic attack on the U.S. homeland by Islamic terrorists.

Jeff Osonitsch has a law enforcement background and writes from his home in New York.

BAGHDAD (AFP) - US forces captured at least 72 Al-Qaeda and seized bomb-making materials in a series of raids in two Iraqi provinces, the military said Sunday.

The raids were carried out in the restive Anbar and Salaheddin provinces of Iraq in an attempt to "disrupt the Al-Qaeda network," it said in a statement.

In the biggest raid, the military netted 36 suspects with links to Al-Qaeda in the town of Samarra in Salaheddin province, north of Baghdad, the military said.

Troops also found 20 five-gallon drums of nitric acid and other bomb-making materials near Garmah, close to the former rebel bastion of Fallujah in Anbar province of western Iraq.

US and Iraqi troops carry out raids almost daily in flashpoint regions in a bid to quell the daily bloodshed in the war-torn country.

Insurgents have continued to attack both security forces and civilians. On Saturday, a car bombing in the Shiite shrine city of Karbala, central Iraq, killed 71 people.

 Source     

Drawing on a trove of private papers from Hillary Clinton’s best friend, the legendary Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein is to publish a hard-hitting and intimate portrait of the 2008 presidential candidate, which will reveal a number of “discrepancies” in her official story.

Bernstein, who was played by Dustin Hoffman in the film All the President’s Men, has spent eight years researching the unauthorised 640-page biography, A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“Bernstein reaches conclusions that stand in opposition to what Senator Clinton has said in the past and has written in the past,” said Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Knopf, which publishes the book on June 19.

With the thoroughness for which he is famous, Bernstein spoke to more than 200 of Clinton’s friends, colleagues and adversaries. He stops short of accusing the New York senator of blatantly lying about her past, but has unearthed examples of where she has played fast and loose with the facts about her “personal and political life”, according to Knopf.

The book could revive the explosive charge, made earlier this year by David Geffen, a former Clinton donor and Hollywood mogul, that “the Clintons lie with such ease, it’s troubling”.

Clinton remains the frontrun-ner for the Democratic presidential nomination, but Barack Obama, who is keeping pace with her fundraising juggernaut, is closing the gap in the polls.

The Sunday Times has learnt that Bernstein has been given unprecedented access to the private papers of Diane Blair, Clinton’s closest friend and confidante, who died of lung cancer aged 61 in 2000. The collection is still being sorted at the University of Arkansas library and is not yet available to the public.

Bernstein has been delving through Blair’s copious records of the 1992 presidential election campaign, which could offer tantalising insight into Bill Clinton’s war machine and Hillary’s reaction to news of her husband’s dalliance with the nightclub singer Gennifer Flowers in Arkansas.

Hillary denied all knowledge of the affair, but one writer who has followed her career closely said: “She always knew about her.” He added: “Anyone who has approached the subject of Hillary Clinton with a clear eye will run across many examples of stories that are not true.”

Blair, a professor of political science, crisscrossed the country with the Clintons in 1992, serving as a senior adviser and semiofficial historian of the campaign. She became friends with Hillary in the political backwater of Little Rock, Arkansas, in the 1970s, when the two East Coast-educated power women sought each other out as soulmates.

Hillary went on to serve as “best person” at her friend’s marriage to Jim Blair, who had a walk-on part in the scandals of the Clinton White House when it emerged he had helped the former first lady make $100,000 in cattle futures.

Joe Klein, the bestselling author of Primary Colors, recounted how Blair once witnessed a blazing row between Bill and Hillary Clinton. “They were really, really angry with each other,” she told him. “And then suddenly, the president took her in his arms and began kissing her all over her face and he said, ‘God, what would I do without you?’ I felt kind of embarrassed being there.”

When Blair was diagnosed with lung cancer, Clinton was running for the Senate in New York. In her memoir, Living History, she writes about seeing her friend for the last time in an Arkansas hospice. “She pressed my hand tightly and whispered to me, ‘Don’t ever give up on yourself and what you believe in. Take care of Bill and Chelsea. They need you. And win this election for me’.”

Bernstein is known as a liberal Democrat who fiercely opposes the war in Iraq and is likely to be critical of Clinton’s Senate vote to authorise the war. His marriage to Nora Ephron, the screen-writer, broke up when he had an affair with Baroness Jay, the daughter of former prime minister James Callaghan.

For years Bernstein suffered from writer’s block, but Knopf is promoting his biography as a triumphant return to form. Publisher Sonny Mehta said his portrait would “show us, for the first time, the true trajectory of Hillary Clinton’s life and career”. It will be published simultaneously in Britain by Hutchinson.

According to the publishers, it will cover everything from Clinton’s “complex relationship with her disciplinarian father” to “her courtship with Bill Clinton and the amazing dynamic of their marriage, during the most trying of circumstances”.

Clinton’s relationship with the truth has frequently come under scrutiny. William Safire, a conservative columnist in The New York Times, provoked a storm in the 1990s when he accused the first lady of being a “congenital liar”. Bill Clinton let it be known that if he were not president, he would punch Safire on the nose.

While the senator continues to lead Barack Obama, her nearest rival, in the polls - most recently by 36% to 31% in an NBC/Wall St Journal survey - she continues to be dogged by high ratings for “unfavourability”.

She is the most assured Democratic candidate on the campaign trail, as she proved in a televised debate with her rivals for president in South Carolina last week. But while Washington commentators declared her the obvious victor, television viewers in the state put Obama on top, suggesting there remains considerable voter-resistance to her charms.

In an effort to boost her campaign, Clinton said last week that she would appoint her husband ambassador to the world if elected to the White House. “I can’t think of a better cheer-leader for America than Bill Clinton, can you?” she said.

Bernstein’s biography is likely to touch some raw nerves. One writer who has crossed swords with Clinton advises Bernstein to watch his back. “She has the most powerful war machine that has ever been developed and it is led by people who have been to hell and back.”

THE road to riches is rarely straightforward — and it helps to have satellite navigation to guide you, as Harold Goddijn and his wife Corinne Goddijn-Vigreux have discovered after making £1 billion in only a few years.

The couple are behind the TomTom, which has become the world’s biggest maker of in-car sat-nav systems.

Aged 47 and 42, the newcomers to The Sunday Times Rich List zigzagged up various dead ends before hitting the super-highway to wealth.

Goddijn trained as an economist and worked for Psion, the handheld computer company that made neat gadgets but never hit the big time. Goddijn, however, built up some capital and met his future wife there.

They moved on to invest in Palmtop, another handheld computer company but some early products went nowhere. Then Goddijn alighted on car navigation systems, which at the time were luxury items.

“We installed it in our cars, we analysed the price and the route to market…we needed a lot of memory to store the map and we couldn’t get it, not at an affordable price,” he explained.

In 2001 the company had just 20 staff and revenues of £1.4m. But then computer chips rose in power and plummeted in price, sending TomTom roaring into the mass market. By 2005 the firm had sales of £490m and it floated as a public company, giving it a value of £1.2 billion. The growth has continued to be so explosive that the company is now worth £2.5 billion and the couple’s stakes make them billionaires.

Other pioneers of the electronic frontier include Michael and Xochi Birch, a husband and wife team in their mid-thirties. Both computer programmers, they spotted the potential of the internet for social networking.

Moving from London to San Francisco, the couple created the website Bebo in 2005 and saw its popularity skyrocket. Myspace, a similar site, was bought for $580m (£290m) in 2005 by News Corporation, parent company of The Sunday Times. Suitors are thought to have offered £300m for Bebo and the couple’s stake is an estimated £150m.

Tapping into technological and social trends is the key to the wealth of many newcomers to the list, the most prominent being computers, hedge funds, property, media and fashion.

But there are also mavericks such as Shwan al-Mulla, a London-based Iraqi Kurd. While the war in Iraq has blighted many lives, al-Mulla has profited from it. His business and construction interests have helped to rebuild the airport at Baghdad and hospitals and schools. With assets of £500m, he can live where he likes and has properties in Britain, France, Jordan and Florida.

More modest but youthful fortunes are being made in fashion. Kiera Chaplin, granddaughter of Charlie Chaplin, and Katie Price, better known as the model Jordan, have made £30m apiece. Chaplin is 24 and Price is 28.

Lily Cole, a model now acting in a new film of the St Trinian’s comedies about riotous schoolgirls, is estimated to have made £6m at just 18.

Kate Moss is still the model most in demand, and has also branched out into designing for TopShop. Her fortune is now £45m and she is the 99th richest woman in Britain.

Two other less glamorous, but more lucrative trends dominate the new entries. The first is finance, in particular hedge funds. Robert Kauffman, 43, co-founded Fortress Investment Group, a US hedge fund and now heads its European operations. He’s worth £800m.

Alexander Knaster, a Russian investor, is worth £570m, and Steven Heinz, co-founder of hedge fund Lansdowne Partners, is said to be worth £350m.

Property is the other big factor among the newcomers. At least nine of the richest new entries have made £135m or more from property or related activities.

They include the architect Lord Foster, whose flamboyant designs contrast with his coy attitude to wealth. Foster, 71, has not previously appeared in the list because his spokesman rejected suggestions that he merited it because of his 90% stake in Foster & Partners. But the private firm is now up for sale for £300m to £500m. It would make Foster’s stake, and other assets, worth at least £295m.

Younger property millionaires are less worried about acknowledging their wealth. Brothers Steve and Clive Boultbee Brooks own shopping centres in Britain, Sweden and Finland, making them jointly worth £300m, and spend their wealth indulging in adventure. Steve, 46, is the first person to drive across the ice of the Bering Strait from America to Russia, and the first to fly from pole to pole by helicopter.

£100m giveaway

In the 1990s they set about making money; this year they have given £100m of it away, writes Richard Woods.

The extraordinary story of David and Heather Stevens, who top this year’s Sunday Times Giving Index, is a paradigm of how British philanthropy is gathering momentum.

Their rise began at a restaurant near Waterloo station in London in 1992, where they met and later set up Admiral, an insurance firm, with an acquaintance.

Fifteen years later the couple have set up a charitable trust called the Waterloo Foundation and earlier this year transferred £100m of shares into it. The move leaves them with a remaining stake in Admiral of £115m.

The foundation will focus on global issues and local community projects. “This is deeply personal to us,” Heather said.

David remains chief operating officer of Admiral but Heather is to run the foundation, which will have an income of about £4m a year from its endowment.

Source

 Via The Seattle Times Letters To The Editor:

We have no choice but to stay in Iraq, fight hard and win

Rudy Giuliani is correct: The war on terror is one we must fight and win before rabid jihadists — who profess they will enslave or kill us unless we convert to Islam — force us to do so. This has been going on for decades; 9/11 was but one skirmish.

Thoughtful people realize we have but three choices: 1. Fight them overseas. 2. Fight them here. 3. Convert to Islam.

And forget about "negotiations" or "political solutions," they simply don’t work with religious fanatics any more than they did with Hitler. Deny this and you deny reality! Moreover, Iraq is a superb place to fight jihadists because not only did we flush Saddam, who rewarded their suicide bombers, but it’s also a superb location. Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq is an Islamic Holy Land that fanatics are religiously compelled to defend. Where better to lure ‘em and kill ‘em?

This alleviates us from having to depose of them one by one throughout the world, and reflects a shrewd intellect and move on President Bush’s behalf, one that is apparently too shrewd for most Democrats to comprehend.

Americans stand and fight freedom’s fight. Democrats cut and run.

— Gerald Stiles, Sequim

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is the woman to watch today as she shuttles between news shows. Dr. Rice is guesting on ABC, CBS and CNN. She’s expected to discuss the president’s intentions to veto the Iraq war funding bill as well as revelations in the new book by George Tenet, former head of the CIA.

NEWS SHOWS

ABC’s “This Week” — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; Sens. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Sam Brownback, R-Kan.; actress Natalie Portman. 10:30 a.m.,

CBS’ “Face the Nation” — Dr. Rice; Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa. 10:30 a.m.,

CNN’s “Late Edition” — Dr. Rice; Reps. Adam Putnam, R-Fla., and Jane Harman, D-Calif.; Hoshyar Zebari, Iraqi foreign minister; European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso. 11 a.m.,

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi claimed that the West must stop involving itself in the Darfur crisis restating his opposition to international peacekeepers.

He reiterated that a quick solution to the standoff must be found as soon as possible and that disputing parties should be bypassed if they don’t respond to the suggested solutions.

Gaddafi made the remarks as he welcomed international envoys to Libya for talks on Darfur, where four years of fighting between rebels, government forces and Janjaweed militia have killed at least 200,000 people and displaced some 2.5 million, creating one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

"I call on (the world) not to finance them materially and to stop supporting them and not to send international forces," he said as he received the officials in his home town of Sirte.

Along with Britain, Washington demands Sudan accept a combined AU and United Nations force of more than 20,000 troops and police or face international sanctions that could include a complete arms embargo.

So far Khartoum has agreed to accept just 3,500 U.N. military and police personnel on top of the existing AU force of about 5,000 that is badly overstretched.

After meeting Gaddafi in Sirte, about 500 km (310 miles) east of Tripoli, delegates returned to a hotel in the capital and began talks there late on Saturday chaired by Libya’s Africa minister Ali Treiki.

A Western diplomat said the talks would leave aside the divisive peacekeeping issue and focus on trying to bring together a welter of separate initiatives on Darfur in "a process vigorously led by the AU and the U.N".

Political progress has been made much harder by the fact the Darfur rebels themselves are split. A peace deal in May last year was signed by only one of three rebel factions.

Treiki said a mechanism was needed to first bring together the neighbouring countries affected by the conflict — Sudan, Libya, Chad and Eritrea — and then the Sudanese factions which had not signed the peace deal.

He said a meeting with the parties that had not signed should happen in the next three weeks, without specifying where.

In his earlier comments, Gaddafi was critical of the rebels.

"I see that the rebel side in the region is the one which endeavours to implicate the world in this issue," he said. "It is not in the interest of the world to intervene in an issue in which one of the parties doesn’t want a solution."

The Darfur conflict has spilled over into Chad, which is housing some 200,000 refugees. Libya has been trying to broker a peace deal between Sudan and Chad..

The Tripoli talks, due to end on Sunday, bring together special Darfur envoys from the U.N., AU, the United States, European Union and Britain, and ministers or officials from Sudan, Eritrea, Chad, Egypt, France, Canada, Norway and Russia.

Egypt offers troops reinforcement for peacekeeping mission

Egypt has informed the United Nations of its readiness to contribute several hundred troops as part of a U.N. support package to bolster a struggling African Union peacekeeping force in Sudan’s war torn Darfur region.

Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said in a statement received on Saturday that Egypt had offered to contribute over 500 infantry, as well as between 200 and 300 signal and transport corps, 100 observers and 30 officers.

The statement added that Egypt was willing to consider contributing additional troops.

Sudan recently agreed to a "heavy support package" for the African Union troops in Darfur that includes some 3,500 military and police personnel.

But Khartoum has not approved a "hybrid" U.N.-AU force of more than 20,000 troops and police, which the council first authorised last August.

An 2006 peace agreement signed in Abuja, Nigeria between the government and one rebel group has failed to stop the violence in Darfur, where the United Nations says around 200,000 have died and 2.5 million displaced since the conflict began in 2003.

Aboul Gheit said in the statement Egypt believed the expansion of the peacekeeping force should coincide with Darfur’s non-signatory rebels acceding to the Abuja accord and an end to fighting, to facilitate the peacekeepers’ work on the ground.

Britain and the United States have been drawing up a sanctions resolution if Sudan continues to balk at U.N. demands, although no date has been set for its introduction.

Sudan says only 9,000 people have died in Darfur since the conflict flared in 2003, when rebels took up arms against the government, charging it with neglect.

Source

CAIRO — Reaching out to the fast-growing Muslim customers in the United States, major consumer companies and advertisers are adapting their products to fit the taste of the sizable Muslim minority, reported The New York Times on Saturday, April 28.

"United States companies don’t want to risk alienating their domestic consumers," said Nasser Beydoun, chairman of the American Arab Chamber of Commerce in Dearborn.

Many retailers are now looking into providing Muslim-like products like conservative skirts and pork-free food stuffs and drinks.

Companies in the Detroit area, where there is a dense population of Muslims, are championing the policy shift.

McDonald’s, the world’s largest chain of fast-food restaurants, is now serving halal chicken McNuggets for Muslim customers in the area.

Walgreens, a convenience pharmacy chain, has also Arabic signs in its aisles.

Ikea, a home products retailer, is also touring local homes in the suburb of Canton to talk to Muslim customers in an effort to figure out their needs.

It is also planning to sell decorations for the holy fasting month of Ramadan in September and is adding halal meat to its restaurant menu.

Catalogs in Arabic are also being planned, and hijab-wearing Muslim employees will be offered Ikea-branded hijabs.

"People would flock to it," said Daisy Khan, executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, a nonprofit group based in New York.

"They would say ‘I can’t believe I’m being validated by Macy’s. I can’t believe I’m being validated by Whole Foods.’ "

There are between 5-8 million Muslims customers in the US.

They spend about $170 billion on consumer products and are expected to grow rapidly as the population expands.

Muslim Ads

Leading advertising agencies in the US are also putting now American Muslim customers on their commercial agenda.

"These advertisers have been in the Middle East and in the Far East Muslim countries for decades, so they’re already dealing with the Muslim market," said Tayyibah Taylor, publisher and editor in chief of Azizah magazine, a Muslim-focused magazine in Atlanta.

"They just haven’t been dealing with the Muslim marketer here at home."

Giant advertising agency JWT is now planning to encourage the chief executives of all of its major clients, including Jet Blue, the Ford Motor Company and HSBC, to market to Muslims in the US and Britain.

Marian Salzman, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at JWT, said Muslims consumers felt excluded from mainstream advertising.

She said Muslims, in particular, wanted consumer companies to recognize, for instance, their holidays.

Appealing

American Muslims find it appealing and attractive from certain stores, who put into consideration religious sensibilities.

"If Ramadan starts, and you see an ad in the newspaper saying, ‘Happy Ramadan, here’s a special in our store,’ everyone will run to that store," Almas Abbasi told the Times.

Abbasi’s daughter agreed.

"It’d be really good to say, ‘Oh, there’s a Muslim on TV, and they’re portraying something good other than Muslims killing people,’ " said Shaheen Magsi, a senior at the New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury, N.Y.

Magsi said her family turned off their cable television three years ago after seeing too many negative stereotypes about Muslims.

She added that she had grown tired of distancing Islam from terrorism and clearing misconceptions circulated by the media.

Alia Fouz, a Palestinian-American who lives near the Ikea in Canton, said she never felt that ads were addressing her as a Muslim.

"We should be included," she said. "We live here."

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US Muslims Success Story: Chertoff

CAIRO — The US sees its Muslim population as a success story because they are well integrated into society, warning that 9/11-style attacks would likely be launched from Europe where immigrants feel second-class citizens. "Our Muslim population is better educated and economically better off than the average American," Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff told Britain’s The Daily Telegraph on Wednesday, April 4. "So, from a standpoint of mobility in society, it’s a successful immigrant population. "To some degree, the whole country is a country of immigrants, and therefore there’s no sense that we have insiders or outsiders." There are between six to seven million Muslims in the United States, making up less than three percent of the country’s 300 million population. Chertoff said the situation in Europe is quite different. "You had an influx of people that came in as a colonial legacy and may have always have felt, to some extent, that they were viewed as second-class citizens, and they’ve tended to impact and be kind of clustered in some areas," he added. The European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia has recently reported that Muslim minorities in Europe face deep-seated discrimination in jobs, education and housing in addition to myriad barriers that give rise to feelings of hopelessness and exclusion. It showed that Muslims are over-represented in low-paying sectors of the economy and that their educational achievement falls below average. It also indicated that unemployment rates among Muslims are higher than average and that they are often disproportionately represented in areas with poorer housing conditions. "Clean Skin" Chertoff fears a second 9/11 could be carried out by a European who can easily enter the US. "The fear has always been the so-called ‘clean skin’ - that’s a person whose documents are completely legitimate, are not forged," he said. European countries are among 27 states whose citizens benefit from a visa waiver scheme, which allows visitors to enter the US without a visa for up to 90 days. About 18 million people visit the US every year under the scheme. Chertoff said the US requires additional information from Europe, including email addresses and credit card details to vet European passengers. "We have an absolute right to get this, in the same way that if someone wants to be a guest in my house I have a right to ask them who they are and get identification." Ever since the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration has secretly been tapping into the comprehensive Passenger Name Record database which is created by global travel reservation services that handle reservations for most airlines as well as for Internet sites. An electronic file for each person who makes a reservation contains details on rental cars or hotels, credit card information, contact information for the passenger and next of kin, and at times even personal preferences, like a request for a king-size bed in a hotel. "We need to build layers of protection, and I don’t think we totally want to rely upon the fact that a foreign government is going to know that one of their citizens is suspicious and is going to be coming here."

The new M&M’s; Mexicans and Muslims. Destroying America, one bite at a time.

Orahovac, Serbia: UN ambassadors beat a hasty retreat yesterday from a town in Kosovo as police held back several hundred Serbs angry at a Western drive to give the province independence from Serbia.

Police hurried the Security Council delegation, which was on a fact-finding mission to the Albanian-majority province, onto a UN bus to jeers from a growing crowd in the crumbling Serb quarter of the town of Orahovac.

The 15 envoys of the current Council member states had arrived in four French Puma helicopters on the final leg of a two-day tour of the province before deciding, possibly within weeks, on a UN plan to grant it independence.

"We live in a ghetto," said Serb Vera Radic. "If Kosovo becomes independent, we will leave."

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Caracas: President Hugo Chavez said his government wants to develop short-range missiles to defend the country’s airspace and purchase other arms to safeguard Venezuela from foreign attack.

The leftist leader, who has repeatedly accused the United States of planning to invade his oil-rich nation, said Venezuela had test fired missiles on Thursday but it was not clear what kind of projectiles he was referring to.

"We’re going to have a tremendous air defence system, and with missiles capable of reaching 200km," Chavez said during a televised speech. "[It] will convert Venezuela into a nation truly invulnerable to any external threat, invulnerable to any plan of aggression."

Chavez first mentioned the idea following a world tour last August, describing it as a system with missiles capable of shooting down approaching enemy warplanes. He said the military was looking at systems produced by Russia, Belarus and Iran.

The US State Department had no immediate comment.

Chavez denied Venezuela was engaged in an arms buildup or posed a threat to regional stability as Washington has suggested, saying Venezuela was simply modernising its military after years of neglect.

"They are necessary investments. We’re not going to attack anybody," he said at the speech at a military academy in Caracas.

Chavez also announced spending of more than $561 million (Dh2,061 million) for factories to build automatic AK-103 assault rifles, munitions, and detonators; a facility to train pilots to fly Russian M-17, M-26 and M-35 helicopters, and another facility to overhaul F-5 fighter jets.

Venezuela was considering building a plant to maintain Russian helicopters, he added.

The government has also approved funds to set up bases in preparation for the launch of Venezuela’s Simon Bolivar satellite in August 2008, Chavez said.

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