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Paris: Scientist accused of plotting to blow up 'city size of London'
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-Short Attention Span Theater-
World's first nuke plant for home use





Based on technology originally developed for the exploration of Mars, the KUBE X-15 uses newer clean nuclear energy.

Of course, this amazing breakthrough will disrupt markets around the world. Especially in the Middle East. Thus the secrecy of this message.
Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 || 04/01/2012 19:38 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:


Caribbean-Latin America
Ex Mexican president Miguel de la Madrid dies at 77

Link is in Spanish.

By Chris Covert
Rantburg.com

Ex Mexican president Miguel de la Madrid died Sunday morning at a Mexico city hospital after a long battle with emphesyma, according to Mexican news accounts.

De la Madrid served as president of the republic from 1982 to 1988. His term was tainted by his response to the 1985 earthquake in Mexico, seen as too slow. The Dirty War was also ended on his watch.

De la Madrid presided over some of the worst inflation and unemployment in modern Mexican history. His policies helped reduced the number of state owned enterprises and encouraged foreign investment in Mexico.

He is survived by his wife, Paloma Cordero Tapia.

Chris Covert writes Mexican Drug War and national political news for Rantburg.com
Posted by: badanov || 04/01/2012 12:49 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  in his defense, the Mexico City quake was quite a bit more than they could handle at the time
Posted by: Frank G || 04/01/2012 14:13 Comments || Top||


-Short Attention Span Theater-
Queen plants tree in Tidal Basin
Posted by: Besoeker || 04/01/2012 12:01 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:


-Lurid Crime Tales-
Springfield, Lorton, Woodbridge, Alexandria youths charged in Human Trafficing
This is simply shocking!
Posted by: Besoeker || 04/01/2012 11:43 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:


Economy
Justices flip rocks, find many other mandates
Posted by: Besoeker || 04/01/2012 11:36 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:


Home Front: Culture Wars
Recent emergence of Trayvians proves religion in America is not in decline
Posted by: Besoeker || 04/01/2012 11:32 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:


-Short Attention Span Theater-
Details About Olbermann’s Firing Emerge: Complained Car Drivers ‘Smelled’ and ‘Talked to Him’
Alleged details surrounding Keith Olbermann's Friday dismissal from Current TV are beginning to depict the man as quite a prima donna.

According to Mediaite, a source at Current TV said the former Countdown host went through eight different car services while working at the network, complaining that the drivers "smelled" and "talked to him."

Furthermore, though Olbermann's $250,000 studio was built to his exact specifications, he allegedly refused to use the set when there were lighting problems back in December.  Not only that, but he refused to let guest hosts use the elaborate studio.

Current TV is also claiming that Olbermann refused to publicize the network and the show when he wasn't hosting his program (and he took about half of January and February off).  They say he even barred his staff from sending out related Twitter updates, and prevented guest hosts from promoting the show. (Jealous that they would get better ratings, perhaps?)

Network co-founders Al Gore and Joel Hyatt explained in a letter to viewers: “We created Current to give voice to those Americans who refuse to rely on corporate-controlled media and are seeking an authentic progressive outlet. We are more committed to those goals today than ever before...Current was also founded on the values of respect, openness, collegiality, and loyalty to our viewers. Unfortunately these values are no longer reflected in our relationship with Keith Olbermann and we have ended it.”

Keith Olbermann responded: “The claims against me implied in Current’s statement are untrue.”  He added that the network didn’t keep its “promises and obligations and investing in a quality news program.”

Perhaps "quality" for Olbermann means eight different car services, but Mediaite notes that the network is "no worse off without him, and a good deal more flush."

Better days for Olbermann, when he was naming the "Worst Person in the World":
Posted by: Beavis || 04/01/2012 11:30 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:


Home Front: Politix
Dispute among Senate Dems may derail postal reform
Posted by: ryuge || 04/01/2012 07:41 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  It's not "postal reform".

it is yet another profligate government agency which has overspent and now, because of it very nature, can't make a cogent decision on what to cut.
Posted by: badanov || 04/01/2012 8:22 Comments || Top||

#2  As government entities go, it's actually pretty efficient (though that's not necessarily saying much), and unlike most, they actually provide a useful service. However, their business model is obsolete. Not enough high revenue First Class mail anymore to pay for personal daily delivery, and without it paying the fixed costs of the system, the marginal cost for lower classes is too high to maintain volume, and bulk ad revenue is down anyway due to economic downturn and web competition. Overall, a lot like the newspaper business.
Posted by: Glenmore || 04/01/2012 8:40 Comments || Top||

#3  The USPS refuses to raise their rates to keep up with inflation. I wonder why.
Posted by: gorb || 04/01/2012 10:53 Comments || Top||

#4  They have, however, managed to fund the postal retirement fund enough that they could let off for a while.

But I think it's time to consider that in 10 to 25 years we won't need a post office at all. Letters, bills and finances will be all but completely electronic. Packages can be delivered by private couriers (if UPS won't go to Fumbuck, Montana, create an incentive system). And who needs the junk mail?

Ben Franklin had a great idea for 1760. But he wouldn't invent the post office today.

Might be time for a forward thinking (you know, 'progressive') society to think about winding it down.
Posted by: Steve White || 04/01/2012 11:40 Comments || Top||

#5  Chamber pots! Where did they all GO?
Posted by: Besoeker || 04/01/2012 11:47 Comments || Top||

#6  Postal service does not want government health care, they was the civilian equivalent. The USPS went bankrupt not to their actions, but the actions of Congress that tied their hands. And yes.. Democrats.
Posted by: newc || 04/01/2012 14:12 Comments || Top||

#7  Junk mail is most of what they deliver. Ban that and let UPS / FedEx develop a service to deliver essential mail.
Posted by: M. Murcek || 04/01/2012 14:51 Comments || Top||

#8  Letters, bills and finances will be all but completely electronic.

Depends on where you live. Remote areas and settlements still blanket America. There are portions of the Navajo Res in AZ and NM that are still awaiting that marvel of modern technology known as a telephone. Won't even get into the backwoods of Alaska. We all too often view America from our urban or suburban eyes.

Unlike Social Security or Medicare, the Constitution actually addresses the function under Article I, Section 8:
Powers of Congress
"To establish Post Offices and Post Roads;"
Posted by: Procopius2k || 04/01/2012 17:02 Comments || Top||

#9  Thank you P2K.

I'd bet I pick up 95% of my fdx/ups packages at the post office; they worked out a deal so that my package would get delivered in a timely manner but they would not have to pay a guy and gas to drive 60 miles one way to deliver a cookbook.

What some call junk mail some businesses call affordable advertising. It also generates income for usps keeping regular stamps cost down.

It is also the face of the fed in every town. Not that I disagree it could be run better, but this is government union so can't easily trim down to appropriate size. It also does not help that places like the KC hub has a tendency to theft.
Posted by: swksvolFF || 04/01/2012 17:33 Comments || Top||

#10  Congress has the power to establish Post Roads, but is not obliged to do several other things:

  • provide deliver to every remote cabin in the USA

  • bind the USPS to a no-layoff policy (but that is the policy)

  • oblige the USPS to pre-pay retirees health care costs to the tune of billions of dollars (but they did)

Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 || 04/01/2012 19:29 Comments || Top||

#11  if they promise the retirement bennies, but don't fund them (to at least 80% is considered prudent), they're kicking the can down the road on a dying enterprise
Posted by: Frank G || 04/01/2012 19:38 Comments || Top||

#12  Honestly, I live in the suburb of a good-sized big city, and I think I could do very well with delivery two or three times a week. I do most of my banking and bill-paying on line, through direct deposit, bill-pay or PayPal, half the time books and merchandise I order comes through UPS or Fed-Ex. There's nothing I really look for in the mail any more. What arrives in my mailbox every day is essentially the printed equivalent of what I empty out of my spam email folder every day. I empty both kinds into the trash can without a second look.
I could give up all that every day that so that people in the far corners of the US could keep their USPS mail delivery. I understand that they truely and honestly have few and unsatisfactory alternatives. I'd be OK with the USPS refocusing their mission to serve them ... instead of sending out a guy to my neighborhood who has a truck loaded with junk that practically no one looks at.
Posted by: Sgt. Mom || 04/01/2012 19:47 Comments || Top||

#13  Lots of places in backwoods Alaska are using Hughes Net for internet communications. However, the first priority is always Dish Network, where they can pickup the sports channels---hear that, Commodore Frank?
Posted by: Alaska Paul || 04/01/2012 19:51 Comments || Top||

#14  What some call junk mail some businesses call affordable advertising.

I believe (corrections welcome) the reason for that affordability is because it is subsidized by 1st class mail.

The basic problem for the post office is the world has changed and their cash cow - first class mail - has gone away. For reasons mentioned elsewhere, they are unable to change and adapt.

Posted by: SteveS || 04/01/2012 19:58 Comments || Top||

#15  heh - I have Cox..but I would do whatever I have to to keep my sports nets
Posted by: Frank G || 04/01/2012 20:03 Comments || Top||

#16  The Postal Union would never allow the reduction in delivery schedules.
Posted by: CrazyFool || 04/01/2012 23:45 Comments || Top||


Israel-Palestine-Jordan
Hunger striker Shalabi to be exiled to Gaza soon
Hana Shalabi, an Islamic Jihad terrorist held in Israel who ended a 43-day hunger strike on Thursday, is expected to be deported to the Gaza Strip on Sunday, the PA Ministry of Prisoner Affairs said in a statement.

Shalabi stopped eating after Israeli troops arrested her in the West Bank on February 16, but she agreed to three years' exile in Gaza in return for ending her hunger strike and being freed.
In return for being freed?
Last month, Israel struck a deal with Khader Adnan, another Islamic Jihad terrorist, persuading him to end his 66-day fast after assuring him that he would be released in April from his detention without trial.
Posted by: ryuge || 04/01/2012 07:24 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:


Home Front: Culture Wars
Anti-Muslim discrimination claims spike in York County
Paraphrase: "Some blame 9-11, others blame the Republican presidential primary."
*eyeroll*
I guess "reporters" these days don't even have to pretend to know the difference between an editorial and a news article.
Posted by: ryuge || 04/01/2012 07:02 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  How about we post guards of a sect that doesn't like any of them in their neighborhood and arm them with their much loved Sharia law. Fence in the whole place also.
Posted by: Lonzo Ebbusons7548 || 04/01/2012 8:53 Comments || Top||

#2  York, PA, not York, England, in case I was not the only one who wondered.
Posted by: trailing wife || 04/01/2012 9:11 Comments || Top||

#3  I was hoping for a little excitement in York, VA.
Posted by: Glaitch Bucket5471 || 04/01/2012 10:00 Comments || Top||

#4  An article that says that one guy claims 12 people wanted to make complaints but didn't make them for fear? So basically no complaints were made so we have no idea if the one guy is lying or if not if the complaints are legitimate or not. This story is constructed out of nothing.
Posted by: rjschwarz || 04/01/2012 10:05 Comments || Top||

#5  "Dr. Ramy Nasr, a York surgeon and a practicing Muslim, was appalled by Cain's comments. But he was more dismayed at the general reaction to them by the media and the general public.
"The fact that such comments are allowed and not sharply rebuked (by the media) shows you the hostile climate we are in today toward Islam and Muslims," he said via email."

Yeah Doctor, the world feels that way about Islam. Foul words every Friday are never rebuked (by the media or people). And don't get me started by the lackluster and almost zero condemnation of terrorism by the same community.
Posted by: rjschwarz || 04/01/2012 10:08 Comments || Top||

#6  Please don't let the door hit you in the ass as you head for more friendly climes jacka**. Look up ingrate in Webster's some day.
Posted by: NoMoreBS || 04/01/2012 12:19 Comments || Top||

#7  Herman Cain said he would make Muslims take a loyalty oath before hiring them for his cabinet.

There are some fundamental conflicts between Western values as embodied in the US Constitution and Sharia law. You don't get to choose both.
Posted by: SteveS || 04/01/2012 12:51 Comments || Top||

#8  Herman Cain displays his ignorance. no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.
Posted by: Nimble Spemble || 04/01/2012 13:48 Comments || Top||

#9  no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States

IMHO, one of the best things the Founder Fathers did was the whole 'no official religion' thing. However, people from Presidents to soldiers take an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution.
Posted by: SteveS || 04/01/2012 14:23 Comments || Top||


Africa North
Hardline Islamism quietly flourishes in Sinai
Posted by: ryuge || 04/01/2012 06:44 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:


Africa Subsaharan
Mali rebels surround Timbuktu
Tuareg separatists in Mali say they have surrounded Timbuktu after a rapid advance through the north part of the country.

Witnesses in the town say they have heard heavy weapons and machine-gun fire, apparently being directed at a military base. A local resident said troops appear to have deserted the base.

Two other important towns, Kidal and Gao, have fallen to the rebels and their Islamist allies recently.

One local resident said the Malian army had fled but a Malian Arab self-defense militia, backed by businesses in the community, was still defending Timbuktu. He said that there was no fighting inside the town.
Posted by: ryuge || 04/01/2012 06:36 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  I say free Tourigistan.
Posted by: phil_b || 04/01/2012 11:08 Comments || Top||


Southeast Asia
MILF calls for united front with MNLF
Posted by: ryuge || 04/01/2012 06:30 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  See also WAFF > MUSLIMS SET OFF BOMBS IN THAILAND.

VARIOUS BLOGGERS = rehashed the historical conquest of southern Thailand's Muslim Malays by the SIAMESE, + later SIAMESE + BRITS; argue that the only real accomodation Muslim Malays will accept from Bangkok is SOVEREIGN INDEPENDENCE???

"BATTLE FOR CONTROL OF THE [Sino-Thai proposed] KRA CANAL"???

Wid Turkey + Pakistan + Iran desiring to expand their Air-Sea = strategic reach into the SCS + PACOAS, China could end up having to face off agz BFFS Pakistan + Iran. SOME MEDIAS ARE ALREADY REFERRING TO IRAN AS A DE FACTO "NUCLEAR POWER".
Posted by: JosephMendiola || 04/01/2012 20:33 Comments || Top||


Aung San Suu Kyi said to have won parliamentary seat
Posted by: || 04/01/2012 06:19 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  This is a good sign.
Posted by: newc || 04/01/2012 14:06 Comments || Top||


-Signs, Portents, and the Weather-
Climate Change Skepticism a Sickness That Must be "Treated," Says Professor
Comparing skepticism of man-made global warming to racist beliefs, an Oregon-based professor of sociology and environmental studies has labeled doubts about anthropogenic climate change a "sickness" for which individuals need to be "treated".

Professor Kari Norgaard, who is currently appearing at the 'Planet Under Pressure' conference in London, has presented a paper in which she argues that "cultural resistance" to accepting the premise that humans are responsible for climate change "must be recognized and treated" as an aberrant sociological behavior.

Norgaard equates skepticism of climate change alarmists -- whose data is continually proven to be politicized, agenda driven and downright inaccurate -- with racism, noting that overcoming such viewpoints poses a similar challenge "to racism or slavery in the U.S. South."
Check out her home page at U of O. Looks like she took "publish or perish" a bit too seriously.
Her vitae is here(PDF) and is quite extensive
All the right studies, too: race and environment, gender and environment, climate change, 'sociology of emotions' (whatever the heck that is). Card-carrying member of the progressive 'elite'...
Posted by: gorb || 04/01/2012 01:53 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  "There comes a time in the affairs of men when they must prepare to defend, not their homes alone, but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments and their very civilization are founded."
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 04/01/2012 3:23 Comments || Top||

#2  P
R
O
J
E
C
T
I
O
N
Posted by: Bright Pebbles || 04/01/2012 7:19 Comments || Top||

#3  2007 “The Politics of Invasive Weed Management: Gender Race and Risk Perception in Rural California.”

What more needs to be said?
Posted by: Bobby || 04/01/2012 7:34 Comments || Top||

#4  From The RealREVO:

Professor Kari Norgaard is a winner of the first ever Real Revo Trofim Denisovich Lysenko Award! Congratulations Professor Norgaard!

Professor Norgaard’s demand that promoters of scientific theories that are in contradiction with politically approved theories be declared insane is in the highest tradition of Comrade Lysenko’s work in promoting the agenda of the State. Professor Norgaard has beautifully captured the essence of the December 1929 speech of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in which he praised “practice” above “theory” and the service of science to the state.

In his scientific research in service to the state, Comrade Lysenko caused the expulsion, imprisonment, and death of hundreds of scientists and eliminating all study and research involving any theory in contradiction with those he promoted. Professor Norgaard has taken Comrade Lysenko’s dedication in serving the Party and adapted it to American politics and climate science in a way that reflects glory on science in the service of ideology.

Congratulations Professor Norgaard. May you receive all of the glory and honor Comrade Lysenko received right up to the end of his career.
Posted by: Besoeker || 04/01/2012 7:46 Comments || Top||

#5  Why is it always the pretty ones who are so crazy?
Posted by: regular joe || 04/01/2012 7:47 Comments || Top||

#6  Don't worry Mister Blue, we'll take good care of you.
Just think of it as sense and not surrender.
But never think again, that you can think again,
Or you'll get something you'll remember.
What will it take to whip you into line?
A broken heart?
A broken head?
It can be arranged.
It can be arranged.
Posted by: Choluse Graling8806 || 04/01/2012 7:49 Comments || Top||

#7  She looks like she's been french kissing five pound hammers.
Jes' sayin', ya know.
Posted by: AlmostAnonymous5839 || 04/01/2012 10:12 Comments || Top||

#8  While being swung.
Aurrgh! Sometimes proofreading is your friend.
Posted by: AlmostAnonymous5839 || 04/01/2012 10:13 Comments || Top||

#9  This is clearly a cry for help. Its sad that nobody at the university is willing to help her (psychologically and stylishly).
Posted by: rjschwarz || 04/01/2012 10:15 Comments || Top||

#10  2007 "The Politics of Invasive Weed Management: Gender Race and Risk Perception in Rural California."

What more needs to be said?


How about: tl;dr
Posted by: badanov || 04/01/2012 10:15 Comments || Top||

#11  And if that don't work, what's next, perfesser?
The People's Firing Squad?
Posted by: tu3031 || 04/01/2012 10:47 Comments || Top||

#12  "Scientists from multiple disciplines from around the world are at the conference to assess where they stand before the June 4-6 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro — also known as "Rio+20" since it is occurring 20 years after 1992's Rio Earth Summit that drew officials from 172 governments."

The carbon emissions of the elites don't stink like ours do.
Posted by: Black Bart Pelosi9180 || 04/01/2012 10:47 Comments || Top||

#13  We integrate research on relational trust, social normative beliefs and cultural and political-economic constraints on pro-environmental action.
Kari Marie Norgaard
Meeting the challenge: essential psychological and social concept for collective response


Sound familiar?

What exists in the social world are relations – not interactions between agents or intersubjective ties between individuals, but objective relations which exist 'independently of individual consciousness and will'.

Karl Marx
Posted by: DepotGuy || 04/01/2012 11:20 Comments || Top||

#14  I just got done reading Applebaum's Gulag: A History. One of the last chapters is dedicated to the Soviet confinement of political opponents in psychiatric facilities - and I use that term loosely, as they were basically quack torture camps.

Do you think Professor Norgaard would support the same thing for us. You don't have to think. She's basically said it.
Posted by: Secret Master || 04/01/2012 13:00 Comments || Top||

#15  People are taking Kari's comments out of context. 'Planet Under Pressure' is part of a world famous comedy festivaal held annually. Kari's (professionally known as Jaws) spot is to provide the babble, as in "psych-babble" in between those other famous comedians Bozo the Chimp and Al "chackras" Gore.
Posted by: tipper || 04/01/2012 19:10 Comments || Top||


-Lurid Crime Tales-
CO man sentenced after shooting woman with mohawk he mistook for a bird
A Colorado man was sentenced to five years' probation after accidentally shooting a woman whose red mohawk he mistook for a fowl that had been harassing his cats.

Derrill Rockwell, 49, told police that he grabbed his .22-caliber rifle and set out from his home Oct. 5 to fire at the bird after spotting it at the top of a hill about 90 feet away, the Daily Sentinel reported Friday.

"His intent was to spook it away," Deputy District Attorney Jason Conley told District Judge Richard Gurley on Friday, according to the newspaper.

But after shooting at the bird, the man said he noticed it didn't fly away and he reported hearing a woman moaning in pain.

Rockwell soon discovered that he had shot a 23-year-old woman in the head, mistaking her red mohawk for the menacing bird.

Conley reportedly told the judge that the woman may have passed out from alcohol before being shot. Police officers also found a bag of suspected methamphetamine near where she was shot.
Didn't they test them, or did they forget to Mirandize the methamphetamines and had to release them?
The woman survived the shooting, but has since moved from Colorado and could not be reached by the newspaper Friday.
Maybe you could ask the local barber shop if they know her whereabouts.
Rockwell was sentenced to serve five years probation after pleading guilty to felony possession of a weapon by a prior offender, the newspaper reported.

"In 15 years in law enforcement, this was one of the more interesting cases I've worked," Grand Junction Police Department detective Sean Crocker told the judge, according to the newspaper.
Posted by: gorb || 04/01/2012 01:37 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  "In 15 years in law enforcement, this was one of the more interesting cases I've worked,"

I'd say.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 04/01/2012 3:11 Comments || Top||

#2  Meanwhile, the bird claims that the man's cats were harassing him.
Posted by: ryuge || 04/01/2012 7:17 Comments || Top||

#3  Rockwell was sentenced to serve five years probation after pleading guilty to felony possession of a weapon by a prior offender, the newspaper reported.

Felinious activities?

Go Derrill!
Posted by: Besoeker || 04/01/2012 7:57 Comments || Top||

#4  I might have seen that woman in the airport recently. On second thought, must have just been somebody who looked like her, she looked older than 23.
Posted by: Glenmore || 04/01/2012 8:29 Comments || Top||

#5  If she were a drunk on meth for any length of time, Glenmore, she would look older. A lot older.
Posted by: Barbara || 04/01/2012 10:57 Comments || Top||

#6  At least it was only a woman and not a bald eagle. Although if the guy was an Arapaho it would be OK. Eagle-shooting, I mean.
Posted by: SteveS || 04/01/2012 13:24 Comments || Top||


Israel-Palestine-Jordan
Fatah claims PFLP plans to assassinate Abbas
Money is getting tight, the Children's Crusade March on Jerusalem was a laughable fizzle, there's not a chance East and West Palestine will reunite, and now this. It's as if the Big Guy upstairs didn't like them very much.
The leader of a Syrian-based radical Paleostinian PFLP group is planning to assassinate Paleostinian Authority President the ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas
... a graduate of the prestigious unaccredited Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow with a doctorate in Holocaust Denial...
, Fatah claimed on Saturday.

The claim followed statements made by Ahmed Jibril, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Paleostine
... Paleostinian Marxist movement, founded in 1967. It is considered a terrorist organization by more than 30 countries including the U.S., European Union, Australia, Canada, and Antarctica. The PFLP's stated goal is the establishment of a socialist State in Paleostine. They pioneered armed aircraft hijackings in the late 60s and early 70s...
- General Command, in which he strongly denounced Abbas and his predecessor, Yasser Arafat, for signing the Oslo Accords with Israel.

"Ahmed Jibril is a hired agent," Fatah said in a statement released in Ramallah. "He is operating on instructions from his handlers in the region who seek to eliminate President Abbas."

The statement did not name the "handlers." However,
some people are alive only because it's illegal to kill them...
a Fatah official in Ramallah told The Jerusalem Post that the statement referred to Syria and Iran.

According to Fatah, Jibril's attacks on the PA leadership came after he "failed to exploit 'Land Day' to achieve political gains."

Fatah accused Jibril of planning to dispatch Paleostinians to the borders of Israel as part of the Global March to Jerusalem, an event that was organized last Friday by a coalition of pro-Paleostinian organizations around the world.

"Ahmed Jibril is a merchant for Paleostinian and Arab blood," Fatah charged. "He is desperately trying to appease outside parties in an attempt to destroy the political achievements of our people and their wise leadership."

Jibril belongs to a group of Syrian-based terror organizations that are strongly opposed to peace with Israel.

His close ties with the Syrian authorities have won him many enemies among the Paleostinians, especially the PA leadership.

The PA recently accused Jibril's supporters of killing 14 Paleostinians in a refugee camp near the Syrian capital of Damascus
...Capital of the last remaining Baathist regime in the world...
.
Posted by: || 04/01/2012 00:53 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Promises, promises.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 04/01/2012 2:54 Comments || Top||

#2  Is there somewhere we can donate?

I realize these things take money.
Posted by: phil_b || 04/01/2012 7:52 Comments || Top||


Good morning!
Posted by: Steve White || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Happy Birthday/Daily Gam Shot

Jane Powell aka Ellen Bowen in "Royal Wedding (1951)" aka Milly in "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)" aka Nancy Barklay in "Nancy Goes to Rio (1950)" aka Penny Weston in "Three Sailors and a Girl (1953)" aka Susan Smith in "Hit the Deck (1955)" (age 83)



"D or 4"
Posted by: GolfBravoUSMC || 04/01/2012 4:31 Comments || Top||


Europe
French Police: Detained Islamists Plotted Kidnap
[AFP] Seventeen people jugged by French police in a crackdown on suspected Islamist networks might have been plotting a kidnap, the head of the police intelligence's unit said Saturday.

"They appeared to be preparing a kidnap," Bernard Squarcini of the Central Directorate for Domestic Intelligence (DCRI) told La Provence newspaper.

He did not elaborate on the alleged plot, but said the group was made up of "Frenchies" who were involved in "collective war-like training, linked to a violent, religious indoctrination."

Some of those incarcerated belonged to a suspected cut-throat group called Forsane Alizza,
...Knights of Pride, they are were a soft jihad organization which aimed by public spectacle to remind the kufrs of France of their approaching dhimmitude. First noticed by the public when they invaded a Limoges McDonalds to shout antisemitic slogans in 2010, they subsequently got in the habit of leading prayer services in the streets, to block traffic. It is estimated there are only about 100 cadres, though recently they have been advertising for new members. The interior ministry banned them in February of this year for encouraging their fellow citizens to join the jihad in Afghanistan, as a result of which they seem to have decided to move on to more exciting pursuits...
he said.

"The group was dissolved as of February 29 and the funds of 26 of its members were frozen, but they continued to carry out physical training exercises in parks and woods and sought weapons," Squarcini told the Marseille-based newspaper. They were involved in paintball gun games, he said.

The arrests on Friday took place in several cities, including Toulouse, where cut-thoat gunman Mohamed Merah was rubbed out by police last week after a series of cold-blooded shootings that left seven dead, including three Jewish children.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy
...23rd and current President of the French Republic and ex officio Co-Prince of Andorra. Sarkozy is married to singer-songwriter Carla Bruni, who has a really nice birthday suit...
said the arrests were not directly linked to the Merah case, but he has called on police to increase its surveillance of "radical Islam" in what the opposition has described as a vote-catching move just a month ahead of a presidential election.

In the course of the latest arrests, police recovered "several computers, sim cards, weapons, money, 10,000 euros in small notes, four Kalashnikov rifles, eight rifles, seven or eight handguns, a taser, tear gas grenades," Squarcini said.

Those jugged were still being held on remand Saturday, police said.
CNN reports their lawyer says they're all innocent of everything.

This article starring:
Forsane Alizza
Posted by: trailing wife || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:


Caribbean-Latin America
Oogo Returning To Cuba For Treatment
This cannot possibly be enjoyable for him.
Posted by: trailing wife || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Well, there's always the whiskey/revolver option...
Posted by: PBMcL || 04/01/2012 0:25 Comments || Top||

#2  Again?
The Cubans must have flubbed it.
Posted by: Redneck Jim || 04/01/2012 0:45 Comments || Top||

#3  Hey, Hoogo, why don't you just nationalize your cancer? It's always worked before.
Posted by: gorb || 04/01/2012 2:14 Comments || Top||

#4  He did. It's called Bolivarianism.
Posted by: Pappy || 04/01/2012 9:45 Comments || Top||

#5  Maybe he's trying to cash in his frequent flier miles before HE cashes in......
Posted by: USN, Ret. || 04/01/2012 17:44 Comments || Top||


-Short Attention Span Theater-
Earth Hour observed all over the world
It just kinda sneaks up on ya every year, doesn't it?
What does it look like when the world turns out all the lights?
Ummmmmmmmmmmmmm...dark?
It only makes sense that Sydney would be one of the first to celebrate the darkness, since Earth Hour began in the Australian capital in 2007, when the World Wildlife Fund inspired residents to show their commitment to the planet. As the organization's Web site states: "There's more to it than switching off lights for one hour once a year. It's about giving people a voice and working together to create a better future for our planet."
By living in the dark...
Earth Hour co-founder Todd Sampson, chief executive of advertising firm Leo Burnett Sydney told AFP, "We never would have predicted that it would be as big as it is now. And it is even bigger overseas than it is locally. It's not designed, and it would be foolhardy to believe, that switching a light switch is going to save the planet," he told reporters near the Sydney Harbor Bridge on Saturday. "It was originally done to raise awareness, to get people to think about it and then take action in many different ways. I think skepticism is part of the debate. It moves everything forward."
Unless, of course, you disagree with us...
In the United States, five states are participating — Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Montana and New Hampshire -- and almost 60 cities and towns not to mention many more landmarks, buildings, colleges, businesses, and organizations. Elsewhere, the Savoy hotel in London will use candlelight for an hour to light its front hall, bars and restaurants. In Berlin, the Brandenburg Gate will go dark, lit only by 5,000 blue and green candles in the form of a globe, courtesy of WWF members.
Awwwwwwwww...
Posted by: tu3031 || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  That pic of NK is funny but also a warning - the watermelons would be very happy to do that (or worse) to all of us.
Posted by: PBMcL || 04/01/2012 0:22 Comments || Top||

#2  Courtesy of What's Up With That?, a dissenting view many here will appreciate. A taste:

"Earth Hour: A Dissent
by Ross McKitrick

In 2009 I was asked by a journalist for my thoughts on the importance of Earth Hour.

Here is my response.

I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity.

Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. Getting children out of menial labour and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading."

There's lots more - RTWT at WUWT. (I don't have a link for the original source.)
Posted by: Barbara || 04/01/2012 2:27 Comments || Top||

#3  And it just happens to coincide with the Pagan festival of Oestara when various cults of dirt-worshipers traditionaly use candles and crystals to enhance their spring fornication activities. What are the odds?
Posted by: DepotGuy || 04/01/2012 10:01 Comments || Top||

#4  Anybody tell Todd that with only 5 states participating, that's what, something like 10%, unless you use Bambi's map???
that is not a real landslide of support there, buckwheat.
Posted by: USN, Ret. || 04/01/2012 17:42 Comments || Top||

#5  These symbolic activities are just so much crap. You can do some serious lowering of electricity use without being candleheads. But it takes rational thinking with some technical background to put your effort where it will count. Those of us know it do it now without some goofy 1 hour bruhahahahahahaha.
Posted by: Alaska Paul || 04/01/2012 19:42 Comments || Top||

#6  The WWF and their enablers need to cough up every dollar they’ve ever extorted from the US Treasury and then be scourged and flogged back to the Dark Ages with no 0bama-care/ DOJ getoutofjailfree commie-chits. And, no “Right of Return” to civilized modernity.
Last night at our home, we turned on anything and everything that uses electricity; including the stove burners, clothes dryer, hair dryers all the device chargers, etc., and let ‘em all cook for one guilt-free hour.
We’ll let the guilt-ridden progressives take on our non-existent eco-guilt (small “e”)… Enjoy!
This "One's for You..."

The WWF and their enablers need to cough up every dollar they’ve ever extorted from the US Treasury and then be scourged and flogged back to the Dark Ages with no 0bama-care/ DOJ getoutofjailfree commie-chits. And, no “Right of Return” to civilized modernity.
Last night at our home, we turned on anything and everything that uses electricity; including the stove burners, clothes dryer, hair dryers all the device chargers, etc., and let ‘em all cook for one guilt-free hour.
We’ll let the guilt-ridden progressives take on our non-existent eco-guilt (small “e”)… Enjoy!
-------------------------------------------------
"In A Yugo" By: Paul Shanklin c/o El Rushbo

(Parody of In The Ghetto by Elvis Presley)


As the snow flies...

At a used car lot on the edge of town
A liberal guy and a liberal gal
Buy a Yugo
And they drive with pride

'cause if there's one thing that this world needs
It's environmental friends who'll take the lead
In a Yugo

They say, "People don't you understand?
Those Suburbans are ruining the land!"
But they'll wish they had a full-size van one day

They're pointing fingers at you and me
They say we're too blind to see
But do we simply use our heads
And choose a better way
As those small wheels turn

Fifty miles to the gallon and their knees on their chests
We're gonna save enough gas for all the rest
In a Yugo
Then one day on the interstate
They suddenly lose control
They swerve to miss a baby duck
And are squashed beneath a produce truck
But they drove with pride

And as the crowds drive past the little flat car
You know they saved a lot of gas but they didn't get far
In a Yugo
And as they're trapped inside

At a used car lot on the other side of town
A liberal guy and a liberal gal
Buy a Yugo
And they drive with pride...(tsk-tsk. Sniff.

Posted by: canalzone || 04/01/2012 22:19 Comments || Top||

#7  My Bad. Here's the Oscar Award nominee (Read Loser)for Best Musical Score for A Spoofed/Punked Lyrical Parody:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz2eCFoafXk
Posted by: canalzone || 04/01/2012 22:36 Comments || Top||


Syria-Lebanon-Iran
Syria says revolt over, but army still shooting
That's a good time to shoot, when the other side has been crushed...
BEIRUT - Syria says the year-old revolt to topple President Bashar al-Assad is over, but the army again shelled opposition areas on Saturday and rebels said they would not cease fire until tanks, artillery and heavy weapons are withdrawn.

Washington and Gulf Arab states urged peace envoy Kofi Annan to set a timeline for "next steps" if there is no ceasefire, and Saudi Arabia repeated a call for rebels to be armed. Annan has said neither measure would be helpful.
Certainly not to Pencilneck, and the whole goal of Kofi's mission is to protect Pencilneck. That's why Kofi is going through the UN; Russia and China ginned this mission up. The longer Kofi drags it on, the more time Pencilneck has to stomp the rebels without facing any consequences.
The former U.N. chief's mission has brought no respite in the killings.
By design.
Syria also said it would keep its forces in cities to "maintain security" until it is safe to withdraw in line with the peace deal, which Assad has said he accepts.

Annan's plan says the army must stop violence immediately and be the first to withdraw forces.

"We cannot accept the presence of tanks and troops in armored vehicles among the people," a spokesman for Free Syrian Army commanders inside Syria said.

"We don't have a problem with the ceasefire. As soon as they remove their armored vehicles, the Free Syrian Army will not fire a single shot," Lieutenant Colonel Qassim Saad al-Din told Reuters by telephone from Homs.

A rebel officer in Damascus said separately: "When Assad's gangs stop the shelling and killing of civilians, then our leaders can issue an order to stop operations and we will commit to it to show our good intentions."

Despite the violence, Damascus says it has the upper hand.

"The battle to topple the state is over," Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad al-Makdissi told Syria TV late on Friday. "Our goal now is to ensure stability and create a perspective for reform and development in Syria while preventing others from sabotaging the path of reform."
By reform, he means keeping Pencilneck in power.
Assad's opponents have not yet formally accepted the plan. They were due to meet the foreign ministers of allied Western powers, including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on Sunday at a "Friends of Syria" conference in Turkey, which provides a safe haven for Syrian rebels.

After Clinton met Gulf foreign ministers in Riyadh on Saturday, they said Annan should set a timeline for unspecified measures should his efforts fail to halt the bloodletting.
A long timeline with lots of 'unspecified' measures...
"Given the urgency of the joint envoy's mission, (U.S. and Gulf ministers) urged the joint envoy to determine a timeline for next steps if the killing continues," a statement said.

Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal told a news conference with Clinton: "The arming of the opposition is a duty, I think, because it cannot defend itself except with weapons."
So arm them. You don't need our permission, and you've got plenty of money.
Assad has endorsed Annan's six-point peace plan, which has the U.N. Security Council's unanimous backing, but Western leaders say the 46-year-old Syrian leader has broken similar promises before and must be judged by actions not words.
Of course he endorsed it. Russia and China wrote it.
Syria's Makdissi said Annan, who met Assad in Damascus on March 10, had acknowledged the government's right to respond to armed violence during the ceasefire phase of the peace plan.

"When security can be maintained for civilians, the army will leave, he said. "This is a Syrian matter."
Thus justifying anything Pencilneck wishes to do.
A sustained end to violence by all sides would be supervised by a U.N. team of around 250 monitors, diplomats said.
And nothing shows a spine like a bunch of diplomats monitoring a ceasefire...
Western diplomats say the key to any ceasefire deal lies in the sequencing of the army pullback and ending rebel attacks. They say the opposition won't feel safe negotiating before the army stops shooting, but also note it would be impractical to expect a complete government pullout before rebels respond.

Western and Arab foreign ministers backing Syrians trying to topple Assad will seek clear endorsement of the Annan plan from the Syrian National Council (SNC), although they themselves doubt whether Assad will genuinely try to implement it. There is also little chance they will agree to arm rebels.
To borrow from Rambo, if you don't arm the rebels, you aren't helping...
If Assad fails to keep his word, Annan would have to decide whether to call time and tell the United Nations he has failed to make peace through a "Syrian-led process".

The issue would then return to the U.N. Security Council, with increased pressure on Assad's allies Russia and China, which have endorsed Annan's mission, to get tough with Damascus.
With a strongly-worded message, no doubt...
Posted by: Steve White || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [1 views] Top|| File under:


India-Pakistan
Karachi Korpse Kount
KARACHI: Another eight people lost their lives on Saturday in different parts of Karachi.

In overnight raids across the city, police and rangers arrested as many as 150 suspects, including political workers. The law-enforcement agencies also claim to have recovered heavy cache of weapons from suspects. Situation remained tense due to firing incidents across the city and people preferred to stay indoors and public transport remained off the roads.

Meanwhile, Sindh Home Minister Manzoor Hussain Wassan said some elements were creating law and order situation under the garb of political parties in the city. Talking to a delegation of prominent citizens, he said that he had ordered the police and rangers to take action against the miscreants and arrest them without any discrimination.

A fresh wave of violence gripped Orangi Town and its adjoining areas where as many as seven people were shot dead on Saturday.

Reports revealed that unidentified gunmen killed four people in Banaras, including three of a family. Police said the assailants had opened fired on people at Metro Cinema Bridge, injuring five people. The injured were rushed to Abbasi Shaheed Hospital where three of them succumbed to their injuries. The deceased were identified as Hasan, Waseem and Kamaluddin. Nadir, Jamal and Nadeem sustained bullet injuries.

In another incident, on Banaras Bridge unidentified attackers opened fire on the residents of Orangi Town. Two people, Arif and Kamal, lost their lives, while another five sustained bullet injuries. The firing incidents took place after the killing of two political workers in the surrounding areas of Orangi Town.

In Frontier Colony, another man Sami Kamal was gunned down and several others were wounded.

The funeral prayers of Waseem and Hasan were offered in Liaquatabad and were laid to rest in Paposh Nagar graveyard. A large number of people, including the Muttahida Qaumi Movement leaders, took part in the funeral prayers.

Separately, a coach driver Janan Khan (36) was gunned down near UP Mor. He was a resident of Landhi.
Posted by: Steve White || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:


Europe
Police Get Right To Stop 'foreign-Looking' Travelers
While much of Europe has done away with passport checks, German police received judiciary approval to demand official ID of "foreign-looking" people. Human rights groups call the ruling discriminatory and illegal.
The Germans are getting nervous, it appears, and being a decisive people, they are acting upon it.
Passengers on trains travelling from Germany to La Belle France don't have to show their passports to cross the border, but a ruling from a German administrative court this week allows police to require "foreign-looking" passengers traveling on German trains to produce identification papers regardless of whether they are under suspicion of any wrongdoing.

The ruling stems from the case of a dark-skinned German placed in long-term storage by federal police after he refused to show his identification papers while traveling in a regional train. The man, who was not identified by the court in the western German city of Koblenz, had a verbal confrontation with the uniformed officers and later sued them for discrimination after he was forced to identify himself because of his skin color.

During the court hearing, one of the officers said he approached people who looked foreign to him. The court ruled the officer was within his rights to use appearance, including skin color, as the only reason to check a person's identity. The plaintiff had argued that police only had the right to demand papers of someone they suspected posed an "immediate danger."

The court said police had authority to check people's identity and residency status based on their appearance to fight illegal immigration. The ruling added that such checks were permitted only on rail lines that could be used to provide illegal entry to Germany or lead to breaches of Germany's Aliens Act.

"For reasons of capacity and efficiency, the federal police are limited to conducting spot checks," the court said in its ruling, adding that the officers were within their rights to use appearance in deciding whom to check.

Police said the ruling would make it easier for them to do their jobs.

"In just the last year, illegal immigration has increased by 20 percent to more than 20,000 confirmed cases," said Josef Scheuring of the German police union, adding that fighting this crime justified stricter controls.

Rights groups, however, voice their strong opposition to the court's ruling, saying that no German court had ever allowed skin color to be the deciding factor in whether police could demand to check a person's identity.

"The federal police have exceptional powers to initiate checks without suspecting wrongdoing," said Petra Pollmar-Otto of the German Institute for Human Rights. "But what this ruling confirms is a breach of a human rights
...which often intentionally defined so widely as to be meaningless...
ban on racial discrimination."

In response to an official inquiry by the Green Party, the German government in July 2011 wrote that legal checks of people not under suspicion of wrongdoing could not be conducted based on a person's origin, skin color or religion.

Karl Kopp of the rights group Pro Asyl said, "The court's ruling was not in accordance with the understanding of how police work in a democratic, constitutional state."

Alexander Klose, a Berlin-based lawyer who focuses on cases of discrimination, said he was surprised by the ruling.

"We now have legal evidence from a court showing that the federal police have regularly been practicing so-called ethnic profiling, that's something we did not know before," he said. "Such practices - that people can be selected for an identity check based on their appearance - have been denied until now by those responsible in the German Interior Ministry as well as the federal police."

Ahead of being taken into custody, the plaintiff in the case accused the police of using Nazi tactics by demanding to know his identity and searching his backpack after he refused to produce identity documents.

It has not been decided if an appeal will be lodged, but Klose said he saw grounds to do so.

"Employers, for example, are bound by the anti-discrimination laws and previous bad experiences with particular individuals cannot be an argument in the future," he said. "And what we rightfully demand of private employers and landlords we should also demand of the police as an organ of the state."

"Of course it is important that this ruling is corrected," said Kopp. "But it is just as important that the federal government clarifies laws dealing with suspicion-free identity checks so that a racial color code no longer plays a role in a country with millions of citizens who don't have pink skin."
Posted by: trailing wife || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  I've very mixed feelings about this.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 04/01/2012 3:07 Comments || Top||

#2  I think they're sensing the end-game for the EUSSR.
Posted by: Bright Pebbles || 04/01/2012 8:12 Comments || Top||

#3  Ja, ja, another hefeweizen bitter and turn up the volume on that old Herms Niel's tune on the victrolla. This may become quite interesting.
Posted by: Besoeker || 04/01/2012 8:17 Comments || Top||

#4  The court ruled the officer was within his rights to use appearance, including skin color, as the only reason to check a person's identity.

Fortunately for him, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are busy right now...
Posted by: Raj || 04/01/2012 9:32 Comments || Top||

#5  Grom, me too. On the one hand, there's good reason to be concerned about many of the 'foreigners.' But on the other hand, Germans have a history of carrying things a little too far when dealing with population groups they consider problematic.
Posted by: Glenmore || 04/01/2012 12:11 Comments || Top||


Syria-Lebanon-Iran
Former Iran negotiator says nuclear deal possible
UNITED NATIONS: An end to a nearly decade-long nuclear standoff between Iran and major world powers will be possible if the United States and its European allies recognize Tehran’s right to enrich uranium, a former Iranian negotiator said in an editorial.
Um, no...
“Talks between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1), scheduled for next month, provide the best opportunity to break the nine-year deadlock over Iran’s nuclear program,” Hossein Mousavian, Iran’s former chief nuclear negotiator, wrote in an editorial in the Boston Globe.

Mousavian, now a visiting scholar at Princeton University in New Jersey,
Nice work if you can get it...
had been seen as a moderate when in the Iranian government. Although he is not currently a policymaker, such public presentations of Iranian thinking is rare.
But he's not part of the government and he's safe at the People's Enclave of Princeton, so it's not really 'Iranian thinking', but rather what the reporter wishes 'Iranian thinking' should be when viewed in the proper progressive (rose-colored) lens...
Iran has rejected Security Council demands that it halt enrichment and other sensitive nuclear work, saying it has a sovereign right to atomic energy. This has led to four rounds of increasingly stringent UN Security Council sanctions, mostly focusing on its nuclear and missile industries, but also targeting some financial institutions, a few subsidiaries of its major shipping firm, and companies linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

For the talks, expected to take place in mid-April, to open the door to a resolution of the standoff with Iran, Mousavian said the United States and its European allies must make clear that war and coercion are not the only options.
Nothing else seems to have worked. 'Engagement' has been a joke, and sanctions don't seem to be convincing the Mad Mullahs™ to change their minds much.
They should seek enhanced engagement with Tehran, as US President Barack Obama has repeatedly called for.

“This could work - since 2003, Iran has been looking for a viable and durable solution to the diplomatic standoff,” wrote Mousavian.
Completely on the terms of the Mad Mullahs™, of course...
Mousavian was Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator from 2003 to 2005 before conservative President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took over from his reformist predecessor Mohammad Khatami. According to Western envoys familiar with Mousavian, he appeared at the time to be genuinely interested in reaching a deal with the West.
Which is why the following occurred...
After he was removed from the nuclear negotiating team, Mousavian was arrested and briefly jailed in 2007 on accusations of espionage. He was acquitted of that charge, which could have carried the death penalty, but was found guilty of “propaganda against the system.”

Analysts and diplomats said the charges against Mousavian were really a reflection of an internal Iranian dispute over how to handle Iran’s atomic dispute with the West. Some Iranians favor the moderate line adopted by Mousavian while the ones in charge others have backed Ahmadinejad’s more confrontational approach.

Mousavian writes that if a deal that is acceptable to both parties is to be reached, the two sides’ “bottom lines” should be identified.

“For Iran, this is the recognition of its legitimate right to create a nuclear program - including enrichment - and a backing off by the P5+1 from its zero-enrichment position.”

“For the P5+1, it is an absolute prohibition on Iran from creating a nuclear bomb, and having Iran clear up ambiguities in its nuclear program to the satisfaction of the International Atomic Energy Agency,” Mousavian writes.
Eyewash. The mullahs want the bomb, and they believe the best way to get it is to enrich and at the same time to deceive us as to their intentions. The latter is Mousavian's job, and he's working hard for a living...
The West also needs to abandon calls for regime change and accept that “crippling sanctions, covert actions, and military strikes might slow down Iran’s nuclear program but will not stop it.”
Yup, nothing works, so we might as well fold and start the evacuation of Tel Aviv...
“In fact, it is too late to demand that Iran suspend enrichment activities,” Mousavian writes. “It mastered enrichment technology and reached break-out capability in 2002 and continues to steadily improve its uranium-enrichment capabilities.”
We were assured by a National Intelligence Estimate in 2007 that such things had not occurred. Wonder what happened to the writers of that report?
The so-called “break-out” capability refers to the ability of a country to construct a nuclear weapon.

A US think tank, the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS),
Who have all the correct funding sources...
has said that capping Iranian uranium enrichment at 5 percent purity level compared with the 90 percent needed for a bomb could form part of an interim deal that would give time for more substantial negotiations. This and other priority measures would “limit Iran’s capability to break out quickly,” ISIS said in a report.

Among the things the West should offer to Iran is a package that includes recognition of its nuclear rights, ending sanctions, and “normalization of Iran’s nuclear file.” In return, Iran should offer the IAEA full transparency and permit the most intrusive inspections possible.
Posted by: Steve White || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [1 views] Top|| File under:

#1  IIRC TOPIX, DEFENCE.PK/FORUMS > WEST WANTS IRAN TO GIVE UP 20% ENRICHMENT, or higher iff Tehran hopes to receive any kind of UNO + Western approval, $$$ support, etc. for a Civilian NucEnergy Program.

versus

* TOPIX > [US SecState Hillary] CLINTON TO IRAN: PROVE THAT NUCLEAR ARMS ARE NOT [covertly being] SOUGHT.

* SAME > CLINTON: TIME RUNNING OUT FOR SYRIA, IRAN TALKS/DIPLOMACY.

Intehwesting - iff Iran per se accedes, our former "Madame President" may had just removed an important "talking/election point" per the GOP Candidates for 2012, + Iran will now also have more reason to support a Bammer re-election campaign this November.

* FYI SAME > IRAN [+ only Iran] WILL PROTECT SYRIA, as Iran rejects any + all US plans or proposals ala Syria, be they diplomatic or other due to inherent mistrust of the USA.
Posted by: JosephMendioloa || 04/01/2012 22:17 Comments || Top||

#2  WORlD NEWS > US WANTS [concrete] "RESULTS" AT APRIL 13 INSTANBUL TALKS WID IRAN.

Hillary hopes that Iran recognizes that it is not in any "open-ended negotiation".
Posted by: JosephMendiola || 04/01/2012 23:52 Comments || Top||


Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
US general holds talks with Tajik president
DUSHANBE: US Central Command head, General James Mattis, on Saturday held talks with Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon as Washington seeks continued support for its military operation in next-door Afghanistan.

"Tajikistan would like to see further strengthening of the development of ties with the United States in the sphere of security and the establishment of peace and stability in the region," Rakhmon told the visiting US general in comments released by his office. Mattis for his part thanked Tajikistan for its support of the NATO-led operation in Afghanistan, saying Washington would continue providing assistance to the impoverished Central Asian nation's army and border guards, the Tajik statement said.

"The need to ramp up such cooperation is increasing, especially from 2014, that is upon the withdrawal of international coalition forces from Afghanistan," said the statement. Tajikistan, which shares a porous 1,340-kilometre border with war-torn Afghanistan, agreed in 2009 to permit the overland transit of non-military supplies intended for NATO operations in Afghanistan. Under NATO's strategy, Afghan army and police are due to assume security for the whole of the country by the end of 2014, while the United States hopes to keep a small force in place post-2014 pending negotiations with the Kabul government. On Friday, Mattis held talks with Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the leader of isolated but energy-rich Turkmenistan. On Thursday, he met with Uzbek President Islam Karimov.

The office of Karimov, whose country also provides Washington with logistical support for the war in neighbouring Afghanistan, said the two countries had recently improved cooperation in political, economic, and regional security matters.
Posted by: Steve White || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:


India-Pakistan
Plot to bomb Pak parliament foiled
ISLAMABAD: Interior Minister Rehman Malik revealed on Saturday that police foiled a plot to attack parliament during a presidential address and said a Finance Ministry official had also been arrested.

“I commend the Islamabad Police. They have foiled a plot to attack the parliament during president’s address to the joint session,” Malik told reporters. “ ... an official of the Finance Ministry [was] involved in the plot.”

Malik said the arrested terrorists belonged to Miranshah, North Waziristan Agency. An employee of the Finance Ministry had also been arrested for assisting the terrorists.

To a question, Malik said “foreign hand” was involved in creating law and order situation in Karachi. Suggestions given by the Muttahida Qaumi Movement and the Awami National Party for improving security situation in the city, will be taken into consideration, he added.

The minister directed Islamabad Police inspector general (IG) to further beef up security of the city and take steps to ensure safety of the citizens. He also asked the IG to take necessary measures to curb car theft.
Posted by: Steve White || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:


Africa North
El-Shater resigns from Muslim Brotherhood to run for Egypt's presidency
Khairat El-Shater resigned from Muslim Brotherhood to run for presidency, said Mohamed Badie, the MB leader, in a press conference Saturday night, Ahram Online reported.
The MB doesn't want to be involved in politics, nope, nope, they'll just have their leaders run the country.
Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood has chosen El-Shater as the presidential candidate for the Islamist group's Freedom and Justice Party, "informed sources" within the faction told Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram earlier.

The decision was made by a majority vote among the party's members. Fifty six member's of the FJP's 108-representative council voted in favor of Shater, while 52 voted against.
Posted by: Steve White || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  *** cough **** cough **** cough *** ...

D *** NGED AM DONUTS AGAIN!
Posted by: JosephMendiola || 04/01/2012 22:00 Comments || Top||


Syria-Lebanon-Iran
Syria rebels: We’ll cease fire if tanks, artillery leave
BEIRUT: Syrian rebels are ready to stop fighting the moment the Syrian army withdraws its tanks, artillery and heavy weapons from opposition areas, a spokesman for Free Syrian Army commanders inside Syria said on Saturday.

“We cannot accept the presence of tanks and troops in armored vehicles among the people. We don’t have a problem with the cease-fire. As soon as they remove their armored vehicles, the Free Syrian Army will not fire a single shot,” Lt. Col. Qassim Saad Al-Din told Reuters by telephone from Homs.

A rebel officer in Damascus said separately: “When (President Bashar) Assad’s gangs stop the shelling and killing of civilians, then our leaders can issue an order to stop operations and we will commit to it to show our good intentions.”
Posted by: Steve White || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  And if Alawites believe you---they deserve to become extinct.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 04/01/2012 2:52 Comments || Top||

#2  And if Alawites believe you---they deserve to become extinct.

Preach it, brother...
Posted by: Zhang Fei || 04/01/2012 13:31 Comments || Top||


Iraq
Iraq Anti-Qaeda Fighter Killed With Wife, Son
[AFP] Unknown gunnies rubbed out a member of the Sahwa anti-Qaeda militia forces along with his wife and son on Saturday north of Storied Baghdad
...located along the Tigris River, founded in the 8th century, home of the Abbasid Caliphate...
in Iraq's Diyala province, a security official said.

"Unknown gunnies broke into the house of Atia Khalil, a member of the Sahwa (Awakening) forces in Al-Sadat area, and opened fire on him," killing him, said the official in the Diyala Operations Command.

"The gunnies, who were carrying silenced weapons, also killed his wife, and his son," the official said.

The Sahwa are made up of Sunni rustics who joined forces with the US military against Al-Qaeda from late 2006, helping turn the tide of the insurgency.
Posted by: trailing wife || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  When AQ kills innocent women and children on purpose, it seems to cause no indignation, either among Muslims or infidels. But if an American kills an 'innocent child' (whose gun may have been picked up by his brother) in a battle, the whole world wants the American on trial as a war criminal.
Posted by: Glenmore || 04/01/2012 7:45 Comments || Top||

#2  At least they kept the noise down.
Posted by: Besoeker || 04/01/2012 7:49 Comments || Top||


Bangladesh
BNP settles for 2-day agitation
The BNP-led four-party alliance yesterday announced a two-day programme instead of a fresh date for its postponed March 29 hartal. The opposition will organise processions and rallies in all upazilas, districts and cities on April 11 and 25 to protest the increase in electricity prices, the government's “failure to address water and gas crises” and the incidents of “forced disappearances.”

“We planned our programmes for April keeping people's interest in mind. Since the HSC examinations will be held in April, we announced a two-day programme so that people do not suffer,” acting BNP secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir told a four-party alliance rally in front of BNP's Nayapaltan office in Dhaka.

BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia at a grand rally on March 12 in the capital declared a countrywide dawn-to-dusk hartal for March 29 to protest the government's “obstructions” to holding the rally.

The opposition on Sunday called it off as the hartal day coincided with “Astami Snan,” a religious observance of the Hindus.
And because few showed up. But mostly because few showed up.
Fakhrul at yesterday's rally urged the government to create a level playing field for all for the next general election.
Translation: "we don't have a chance!" Next step is a boycott.
Meanwhile, the Opposition Chief Whip Zainul Abdin Farroque said that Speaker Abdul Hamid lost his neutrality by criticising Khaleda Zia in the House. Farroque said the party would rethink whether it should return to the next parliament session.
Like I was saying...
Posted by: Steve White || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:


Afghanistan
US Envoy Warns of 9/11-Style Attack if Mission Quitted
The US Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker has told a British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, that Al Qaeda would be able to increase its presence if the West leaves Afghanistan prematurely. His comments come as the US is preparing to withdraw the bulk of the surge this year and plan to end transition to Afghan forces next year.

"If we decide we're tired, they'll be back," Ambassador Crocker has warned.

"Al Qaeda is still present in Afghanistan. If the West decides that 10 years in Afghanistan is too long then they will be back, and the next time it will not be New York or Washington, it will be another big Western city," he further said.

The report said that Al Qaeda gunnies have returned to Afghanistan and will use the country as a base to launch September 11-style attacks on Western cities.

US military and intelligence officials have said that nearly 100 Al Qaeda operatives are in Afghanistan.

Mr Crocker said that Al Qaeda remained a potent threat despite suffering setbacks. "We have killed all the slow and stupid ones. But that means the ones that are left are totally dedicated," he said.

"We think we've won a campaign before our adversaries have even started to fight. They have patience, and they know that we are short on that," he said.

Last month, President B.O. said Al Qaeda had suffered severe damages in the last two years.
Posted by: trailing wife || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under: al-Qaeda


Europe
Paris: Scientist accused of plotting to blow up 'city size of London'
Click on the gentleman's name to see the other stories about him in Rantburg's archive.
A NUCLEAR scientist accused of plotting an kaboom that would have destroyed "a city the size of London" went on trial in Gay Paree yesterday.

Alleged al-Qaeda agent Adlene Hicheur is accused of compiling a "hit list" of targets that included French president Nicolas Sarkozy
...23rd and current President of the French Republic and ex officio Co-Prince of Andorra. Sarkozy is married to singer-songwriter Carla Bruni, who has a really nice birthday suit...
and his former interior minister, Brice Hortefeux.

The 35-year-old French-Algerian was tossed in the calaboose in a joint MI5 and French intelligence sting three years ago while researching the Big Bang theory at the CERN nuclear laboratory near Geneva.

Officials said they intercepted e-mails he exchanged with al-Qaeda's North African branch, in which he plotted to blow up a Total oil refinery and a French military base.

In one e-mail to suspected Islamic terror chief Mustapha Debchi, Hicheur said he would "propose possible objectives in Europe and particularly in La Belle France".

He wrote in March 2009: "Concerning the matter of objectives, they differ depending on the different results sought after the hits.

"For example: if it's about punishing the state because of its military activities in Moslem countries -- Afghanistan -- then it should be a purely military objective. For example: the airbase at Karan Jefrier near Annecy in La Belle France. This base trains troops and sends them to Afghanistan."

In June 2009, Debchi asked Hicheur: "Don't beat around the bush: are you prepared to work in a unit becoming active in La Belle France?"

Hicheur replied: "Concerning your proposal, the answer is of course YES but there are a few observations. If your proposal relates to a precise strategy -- such as working in the heart of the main enemy's house and emptying its blood of strength -- then I should revise the plan that I've prepared."

French intelligence sources said money transfers had also taken place between the pair.

One security source said at the time: "He [Hicheur] had offered his services to strike with an active service unit based in La Belle France.

"He had started to compile a precise list of intended targets, including a Total oil refinery which would have caused an kaboom which would have destroyed a city the size of London.

"Assassination targets including the president and interior minister were also on the list."

Magistrates investigating the case said Hicheur's e-mails "crossed the line of simple debate of political or religious ideas to enter the sphere of terrorist violence".

At CERN -- the European Organisation for Nuclear Research -- Hicheur worked on the large hadron collider, a device designed to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang.

Hicheur's lawyer now fears his trial for "criminal association as part of a terrorist enterprise" could be jeopardised by the seven murders committed by in Toulouse by Mohamed Merah.

Patrick Baudouin said: "There is not the least proof against Mr Hicheur of any terrorist intention. He has since the beginning been painted as the ideal guilty party. When the justice system gets going it finds it difficult to admit its mistakes."

Hicheur, who denies the charge, faces ten years in prison if convicted.
This article starring:
Adlene Hicheur
Posted by: trailing wife || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Hmmm, lets see now? You could use an asteroid, or possibly three Plutonium Nukes, barring that, just Mouthy Hot air.

Clap hin in the Loony Bin where he belongs, Don't
ket him NEAR any Air Bases and we should be safe.

Posted by: Redneck Jim || 04/01/2012 1:08 Comments || Top||

#2  Seems like enough evidence for me....burn him at the stake!
Posted by: Fat Bob Unotch3711 || 04/01/2012 2:19 Comments || Top||

#3  ....wrapped in bacon...
Posted by: Fat Bob Unotch3711 || 04/01/2012 2:19 Comments || Top||

#4  Mmmmmmm - bacon. ;-p
Posted by: Barbara || 04/01/2012 2:29 Comments || Top||

#5  Al Qaeda, several affiliates and other groups have been trying for some time to get hold of one or more tactical nukes, as well as chem and bio weapons and radiological materials for dirty bombs. FWIW

And yes, I know about delivery systems, aerosol dispersal issues w/ bioagents etc. The threat is real, difficulties notwithstanding.

And then there are the more standard kaboom plans, such as setting off a refinery. Also effective, if managed.
Posted by: lotp || 04/01/2012 9:08 Comments || Top||

#6  Hicheur's lawyer now fears his trial for "criminal association as part of a terrorist enterprise" could be jeopardised by the seven murders committed by in Toulouse by Mohamed Merah

Ya think?
Posted by: Pappy || 04/01/2012 9:30 Comments || Top||

#7  I remember refinery fires on the southside of Chicago. Huge plumes with soot falling tens of miles away.

Now that would be a prime dispersal engine with a misting system to insert the agent into the rising smoke.
Posted by: Skidmark || 04/01/2012 12:50 Comments || Top||


Home Front: WoT
US denies leaking info on Israeli access to Azeri airbases
White House source tells Ynet DC had nothing to do with leaking information alleging Baku granted IAF access to its airbases in case of strike on Iran

A top White House official denied Saturday that the US Administration was responsible for leaking information, alleging that Israel has secured access to airfields in Azerbaijan ahead of a possible strike on Iran's nuclear facilities, to the press.
 
On Thursday, Foreign Policy Magazine reported that Baku had granted Jerusalem permission to use four abandoned, Soviet-era airbases, where IAF fighter jets could refuel in case of a strike against the Islamic Theocratic Republic.
 
The sources said that the White House had "no interest" in leaks of this kind, adding that the administration would "gladly prosecute" the people behind it -- if they knew who they were.
There is the outlet that originally published the report...Foreign Policy Magazine, I b'lieve it was...
Israel, as well as pro-Israel elements in the United States, blamed the White House for the leak, but according to the official, the US is "crawling with thousands of intelligence and former intelligence officials," and the White House has no way of stopping them from offering information to the media as anonymous sources.
The White House could refuse to accept the publishing outlet's journalists in the White House pool, to be sure, but actually punishing the perpetrator seems to be going a bit far, what?
The official stressed that it was wrong to claim that there was a concentrated media effort within the administration against Israel.
 "They're just doing what comes naturally. They can't be blamed for that."
qJerusalem and Washington, he added, are making "tremendous efforts" on Iran and are working more closely than ever. "Leaks on strategic matters are never good," he said.
 Except when they are, of course, though opinions may differ on specific items. Aren't glittering generalities fun!
The white house stressed that US President Barack Obama's
B.O....
stance on Iran has been made clear in his interview with Atlantic Magazine and his AIPAC address, in which he made clear that as far as the US was concerned, a "nuclear Iran is not an option."
Our beloved president did indeed say a great many things on those two occasions. And other things on other occasions. The Memory Hole isn't what it used to be, what with Google Cache and all.
Posted by: trailing wife || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [2 views] Top|| File under:

#1  If you can't believe a top White House official, who can you believe in this administration?
Posted by: SteveS || 04/01/2012 0:11 Comments || Top||

#2  And we believe you.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 04/01/2012 3:07 Comments || Top||

#3  Additional supporting data. I will of course permit permit you to decide whom it supports:

Link
Posted by: Besoeker || 04/01/2012 7:36 Comments || Top||

#4  A little while ago I commented that I thought that Champ was capable of betraying the Israeli's to forestall any attack that he didd't permit. Seems this might well be the proof of that tragic observation and further, the proof that he is a strong supporter of Israel is yet another in an unbroken string of lies and outright misinformation as he pursues the radical agenda of his "transformative" Presidency.
Posted by: NoMoreBS || 04/01/2012 12:11 Comments || Top||

#5  And in spite of all this, I'm pretty sure that The One will still get 80% to 90% support from the Jewish community.
Posted by: Thumble Angeasing5463 || 04/01/2012 14:56 Comments || Top||

#6  And in spite of all this, I'm pretty sure that The One will still get 80% to 90% support from the Jewish community.  

Are you willing to put money on that bet, Thumble Angeasing5463? Fifty dollars from me to Fred if you're right, from you to Fred if it's less than 75%.
Posted by: trailing wife || 04/01/2012 17:20 Comments || Top||

#7  Fifty dollars from me to Fred if you're right, from you to Fred if it's less than 75%.

An interesting bet. My understanding was the Jewish community was pretty solid for the Democrats.
Posted by: SteveS || 04/01/2012 19:51 Comments || Top||

#8  they are. One would hope they see where the current admin's been/going and realize they've been lied to, but...
Posted by: Frank G || 04/01/2012 20:05 Comments || Top||

#9  but...

Back in the day, Gil Scott Heron had a sort of jazz poem with the refrain "Wake up {persons of Afro-American extraction}, or you're all through". I'd say that pretty much applies to everybody at this point.
Posted by: SteveS || 04/01/2012 21:25 Comments || Top||

#10  "The One Won will still get 80% to 90% support from the Jewish suicide community"

FTFY, TA.
Posted by: Barbara || 04/01/2012 21:42 Comments || Top||

#11  FYI TOPIX > IRAN CLAIMS AZERBAIJAN EMERGED FROM HISTORIC IRAN LAND: EXPERT.

Iranian Pert Armen Israelyan.

D *** NG, DO THE TURKS KNOW???

versus

* SAME > AZERBAIJAN FEARS ARMENIAN ATTACK.

Read, MAMA RUSSIA.

Not unlike Rising China + elsewhere in East Asia, the recovery of ancient or "lost" Muslim territories is deemed as proof of the return of Islamic glory, hence has long been a part of the Radical Islamist agenda, includ as per Regional, Global Jihad. NEO-OTTOMANISM + NEO-PERSIANISM TO NORTH AFRICA ALL THE WAY EASTWARD TO NEO-MOGUL/MOGHUL INDIA + MALAYA-INDONESIA.

Eliminating or subjugating the non-Muslim Countries,Regions in-between.

* CHINESE MILITARY FORUM > SAUDI ARABIA AWAITS ITS "SPRING" | [Guardian.UK] ARABIA AWAITS ITS "SPRING". WITH STAGGERING CORRUPTION + REPRESSION, SAUDI ARABIA IS RIPE FOR REVOLUTION, BUT FEAR DETERS REFORMERS FROM DECLARING THEIR VIEWS.
Posted by: JosephMendioloa || 04/01/2012 22:39 Comments || Top||


Syria-Lebanon-Iran
Iranian Minister: Israel Behind Recent Blasts In Syria
Iran's Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi said Saturday that according to intelligence obtained by Tehran, Israel was behind a recent series of kabooms in Syria.
Operation Lemony Snickett isn't just for Iran, anymore. Check under your bed and in the closet to make sure you're alone before you go to sleep.
Posted by: trailing wife || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  That's eight, trot out the Boogyman, Israel's yours.
BOO BOO BOO WHOOOO
Posted by: Redneck Jim || 04/01/2012 1:12 Comments || Top||

#2  "Check under your bed and in the closet to make sure you're alone before you go to sleep."

Of course, that won't guarantee you'll remain alone after you go to sleep. :-D
Posted by: Barbara || 04/01/2012 2:31 Comments || Top||


The Grand Turk
Syria Refugee Crisis Lands On Turkey's Doorstep
[AFP] Turkey is grappling with a refugee crisis stemming from the Damascus
...Capital of the last overtly fascist regime in the world...
regime's military offensive against opponents as the country braces for a new influx of people fleeing the violence.

More than 17,000 Syrians have decamped across the border into Turkey to escape Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneck al-Assad
Before going into the family business Pencilneck was an eye doctor...
's brutal crackdown on anti-government protests since the uprising erupted in mid-March last year.

The traumatised refugees are welcomed in camps described by local officials as "social life centres," which unlike those in Afghanistan and Somalia are aimed at boosting morale.

Menal, 33, who decamped to Turkey in June 2011, went into shock after hearing that her house had been bombed and her relatives were killed by Syrian troops.

"I was taken to hospital every day and received intravenous drips," she said as she did embroidery work at a handicraft course in Yayladagi camp in Hatay province, only five kilometres (three miles) from Syria's northwestern border.

"I feel some sense of consolation here."

Turkish camps provide humanitarian aid including three meals a day, health services, clean water, and prayer rooms.

Gendarmes are deployed at the camps in charge of security, but refugees are allowed to go outside to do shopping and visit their relatives in nearby Turkish towns.

The camps also offer schooling for children with Arabic-speaking teachers giving lessons in maths, Turkish, computer science and Koranic studies. The sick and injured are treated at hospitals and women join handicraft courses.

While it says it is ready to extend any help for Syrians, Turkey also fears the number of arrivals could soar to the level of the half-million Iraqi Kurds who poured across the border to escape Saddam Hussein's repression during the 1991 Gulf War.

Turkish officials have contingency plans in the event of a larger-scale incursion as regime forces storm opposition towns near the Turkish border.

Currently, the government has set up nine locations including eight tented camps and a "container city" in Kilis, some 150 kilometres (95 miles) east of the Hatay camps, to deal with the influx.

Inhabitants of some camps in Hatay province have already been transferred to Kilis, where the prefabricated homes will initially receive 10,000 people.

East of Kiflis in Sanliurfa province, near the halfway point of Turkey's 910-kilometre (560-mile) border with Syria, another massive camp is under construction that can house up to 20,000 people.

While the mass influx is bound to have lasting consequences, Turkey is clear it does not want to see the Syrians as permanent residents and refuses to call them refugees.

"We call them Syrians under temporary protection, not refugees," Suphi Atan, head of the foreign ministry's task force in Hatay province, told AFP.

"They are deprived of the right to apply for refugee status. We expect them to voluntarily return to their country once the situation is secure," he said. "But we cannot compel any Syrians to go back."

Initially, the government had described them as "guests" to emphasise the temporary nature of their asylum in Turkey but later dropped the term because "there is no guest status in international law," Atan said.

Some of the Syrians have already applied for asylum in Turkey, Metin Corabatir, front man for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Turkey Office, confirmed.

But his office, in close coordination with Ankara, had to turn down the asylum requests because the temporary protection status is applicable in international law, he told AFP.

The concept developed in the 1990s when European Union
...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing...
countries maintained an open-door policy for thousands of refugees who poured in from Bosnia during the 1992-95 war during the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Syrian President Bashir al-Assad's year-long crackdown on anti-regime protestors has left more than 9,000 people dead according to the United Nations
...where theory meets practice and practice loses...
.
Posted by: trailing wife || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:


India-Pakistan
5.3 magnitude quake jolts northern areas
ISLAMABAD: A moderate intensity earthquake of magnitude 5.3 on the Richter Scale hit the country’s northern areas on Saturday. The tremors were felt in the northern parts, including Swat, Lower Dir, Mansehra, Abbottabad and surrounding areas, the Met Office said. However, no causality or damage had been reported, a private news channel reported.
Posted by: Steve White || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:


Israel-Palestine-Jordan
IPT: March on Jerusalem 2012 Fizzled
There was nothing "out of the ordinary" about Friday's annual Palestinian protest of Land Day, the Israeli Defense Forces [IDF] spokesman said, despite predictions that 2 million Palestinians and activists would swamp Israel's security forces. Many protests both in Israel and the territories were prevented or under attended...Only one violent protester was killed along the Gaza border, in comparison to 38 deaths that followed illegal infiltrations along the Syrian and Lebanese borders last year. The low turnout also thwarted attempts by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to draw more demonstrators to officially sponsored rallies.

The event was also a major failure internationally. Jordanian protesters were stopped before they reached the border...the ongoing Syrian government crackdown prevented any serious actions there. A rally in Berlin drew around 50 protesters...

Israeli police have already begun to prepare for other upcoming protest days, including Nakba and Naksa days.
Posted by: Lord Garth || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:


India-Pakistan
Nuggets from the Urdu press
America strong, Pakistain weak
Famous retired general Abdul Qayyum wrote in Nawa-e-Waqt that one reason America presented a resolution about Balochistan
...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it...
in US Congress with such daring and stubbornness (dhitai) was that Pakistain was being ruled by a weak (kamzor) government and a useless (nakara) parliament. The declaration against the resolution by Pakistain is good for raising the morale of the people but to act on this statement would require a strong government which Pakistain did not have.
Clever man, that famous retired general.
Army misled Bhutto
Writing in Jang Hamid Mir stated that Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
...9th PM of Pakistain from 1973 to 1977, and 4th President of Pakistain from 1971 to 1973. He was the founder of the Pakistain Peoples Party (PPP). His eldest daughter, Benazir Bhutto, would also serve as hereditary PM. In a coup led by General Zia-ul-Haq, Bhutto was removed from office and was executed in 1979 for authorizing the murder of a political opponent...
was misled by the Army to attack Balochistan. Later the Army compelled Bhutto to expel such genuine members of his party as Meraj Muhammad Khan and JA Rahim because they were critical of the anti-democracy thinking of the Army. When Bhutto went on obeying the generals the Army in February 1976 kidnapped the son of Baloch sardar Ataullah Mengal, Asad, from Bloody Karachi
...formerly the capital of Pakistain, now merely its most important port and financial center. It may be the largest city in the world, with a population of 18 million, most of whom hate each other and many of whom are armed and dangerous...
and killed him and buried him somewhere in Thatta.
 
Against Punjabi-Punjabi friendship
Editor of Punjabi magazine Sanjhan was quoted by Nawa-e-Waqt as saying that the creation of united Punjab was not acceptable to him as vehicle of friendship between India and Pakistain on the basis of Punjabi language. He said those who were promoting this were renegades of Pakistain and conspirators. He said Sikhs and Hindus of Punjab in India and Moslems of Punjab in Pakistain could not be one nation. He added that had this been true Pakistain could not have become a nuclear power.
Hamid Gul agent of American NGO
Daily Nawa-e-Waqt reported that famous Pak strategist and ex-ISI boss Hamid Gul
The nutty former head of Pakistain's ISI, now Godfather to Mullah Omar's Talibs and good buddy and consultant to al-Qaeda's high command...
was discovered to be honorary member of an American CIA-linked intelligence agency, Stratfor. Gul replied that Stratfor was not an intelligence agency but a think tank.
It is such deep thinking that has brought Pakistan to where it is today.
So there.
Much admired 'khatarnak' journalist
Famous Urdu columnist Abdul Qadir Hasan wrote in Express that Majeed Nizami owner-editor of Nawa-e-Waqt was an opposition journalist by nature. He was not only that but also dangerous (khatarnak) in the adherence of his ideology. These days Nizami was leading a movement against official and private institutions spreading propaganda of friendship with India. Nizami was a great support for lonely columnists like Abdul Qadir Hasan, he wrote.
 
Meera's marriage meanders
Famous filmstar Meera was reported by Jang as getting subjected to further meanderings of her forthcoming marriage to a pilot Pak residing in the US. The father of Captain Naveed - named as Raja Khalid -P told the press that Meera had deprived his son of 400,000 dollars and that he was totally opposed to the match. He said Meera could not marry his son as long as he was alive. Daily Express reported that Meera's earlier husband who claimed nikah with Meera jumped into the case and renewed his legal battle of getting Meera to consummate her marriage to him. Raja Khalid said he would consider marrying his son to her if she first took a divorce from her earlier husband.
 
English columnists who mislead the nation
Daily Express columnist Nusrat Javeed stated ironically that if you want to know the authoritative opinion about the 'real rulers' of Pakistain then read English columns usually written by retired diplomats and military officers who have spent their entire lives serving the establishment. If you want to know the real economy of Pakistain then read hired economists who once served the finance ministry or the planning commission. But had these wise men busy generously spreading their wisdom been genuine, Pakistain would not have become what it had become.
 
Rise of Allah Nazar in Balochistan
Columnist Hamid Mir wrote in Jang that it was wrong to say that the sardars of Balochistan were taking the province towards secession and terrorism. Allah Nazar Baloch the current leader of the violent movement belonged to a poor home in the poorest part of the province, Awaran, who had an MBBS degree with gold medal in the specialisation of Gynaecology. In 2005 Dr Allah Nazar was kidnapped and brought to Bloody Karachi where he was made naked and tortured and when he nearly died he was handed over to the police which made numerous terrorism cases against him. After he was released for lack of proof he went back and started his terrorist movement which contains no sardar and is purely made up of the poor classes of Balochistan.
 
Lahore Bar versus 'Qadiani' Shezan
Monthly Naya Zamana reported that the great wukla persons of Lahore had got together under the banner of Lahore Bar Association had done something that was ignored by the Urdu press because of sympathy but taken note of by English press. The wukla had resolved to ban the products of Shezan, maker of cold drinks and other products from the precincts of the courts in the city because Shezan was known to be owned by Qadiani minority. Chief of the Bar stated that the step was being taken after a request made by Khatm-e-Nabuwwat Lawyers' Forum organization.
 
Pakistain has got new friends!
 Let us wish her much joy of them.
Reporting for Nawa-e-Waqt Ramiza Nizami discovered in her survey that Pakistain was no longer isolated after breaking with the US because it had found new friends. She also discovered that by opposing the Iran-Pakistain gas pipeline America would not be able to maintain normal relations with Pakistain. Additionally she discovered that trade with India will create markets in Pakistain for India after which Pakistain will not be able to protect its national interest.
 
India is not 'pasandida'!
Daily Nawa-e-Waqt reported famous men like Hamid Gul, Moin Haider and Hafiz Saeed
...founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba and its false-mustache offshoot Jamaat-ud-Dawa. The United Nations declared the JuD a terrorist organization in 2008 and Hafiz Saeed a terrorist as its leader. Hafiz, JuD and LeT are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Pak intel apparatus, so that amounted to squat...
as saying that calling India pasandida (much liked) was against the ideology of Pakistain and meant betrayal of the Kashmire cause. They said India had already damaged Pakistain by stopping its river water; and by becoming a mandi (market) of India Pakistain will be destroyed.
Once the Americans leave, who then will give Pakistan money to live beyond its means? Not China, which is out for what it can take, not Iran, which doesn't have it to share, and not Saudi Arabia, which is only interested in financing madrassahs and mosques.
General Zia and sectarian slaughter
Writing in Jang Hamid Mir stated that General Zia in his 11 years of rule instigated the trend of sectarian violence against the Shia in Pakistain. It was a part of his strategy to weaken political parties and raise linguistic and ethnic organizations that caused the persecution of the Shia of Gilgit-Baltistan. Today the Shia of neglected Gilgit-Baltistan were being slaughtered and the region had a separatist organization of Balawaristan trying to create a new state near the Chinese border. Hence it was not only the Baloch sardars who were busy raising a separatist flag in Balochistan.
 
Shezan and Qadianis
Shoaib Adil wrote in Monthly Naya Zamana that Shezan had numberless non-Ahmadis working in the factory who will be affected by the lawyers' ban. But the wukla persons of Lahore Bar Association should have extended the ban to foreign drinks like Pepsi because they were owned by Jews
Juices!!! Oh noes!!
because the Jews were considered more dangerous by Moslems than the Qadianis, declared non-Moslems
Unpersons
by the Constitution after which they enjoyed the same rights as Moslems under the Constitution.
No doubt our Dear Readers caught that particular bit of cleverness.
The Lahore Bar website contained 16,000 members - many among them Qadiani - but the decision to ban Shezan was taken by a few fanatics. The upholders of law had ignored the legal principle of majority vote among its 16,000 members.
But it was a majority of those permitted to vote, so the proprieties were satisfied.
Posted by: trailing wife || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:


Africa North
Hundreds Of Tunisia's Mosques Held By Extremists
AFP - Tunisia's Religious Affairs Minister Nourredine al-Khademi on Saturday said the country will take stock of the hundreds of mosques now in the hands of Salafist bad turbans.

"This is a priority area for my administration," said the minister, who estimated that about 400 of Tunisia's more than 5,000 mosques
Or 8%, which doesn't sound so awful unless it marks an upward trend...
had fallen under the sway of ultra-conservative Salafists
...Salafists are ostentatiously devout Moslems who figure the ostentation of their piety gives them the right to tell others how to do it and to kill those who don't listen to them...
"Serious problems concern about 50 mosques, no more," he said, referring to cases where the original imams and worshippers had been forced out.

Khademi said that in the central city of Sidi Bouzid, for example, a major mosque was taken over by Salafists more than a year ago and was now known by locals as the "Kandahar mosque", after Afghanistan's Taliban stronghold.

"Hundreds of other places of worship are experiencing administrative problems: no imam or muezzin, no administrator," said Khademi, himself a holy man at the El Fateh mosque in Tunis, site of frequent Salafist protests.

A popular uprising in Tunisia early last year ousted long-standing dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali's regime and set off the Arab Spring. The moderate Islamist Ennahda party won October 2011 elections.

However,
some people are alive only because it's illegal to kill them...
Salafists, formerly banned, have become vocal, demanding that sharia or Islamic law form the basis of a new constitution.

Some secular and liberal groups have reacted angrily to the surge by religious hardliners, arguing that the democratic gains achieved by the January 2011 revolt risk being rolled back.

The religious affairs minister said his ministry has prepared to make an inventory of all the country's mosques, and a 20-member "Committee of Wise Men" to be chaired by the minister would be announced next week.

This commission -- to include imams, Islamic university lecturers and humanities teachers -- will be tasked with compiling the inventory.

"We are also looking at the recruitment of imams, who now have to hold at least a master's degree, preferably in Islamic studies, have a general education in the humanities, an openness to other religions, and be known for their morality in their neighborhood," said the minister.

By Ramadan -- the Mohammedan holy month, expected to start this year on July 20 -- "calm will have returned in our mosques," he said.

One of the Salafist leaders, Seif Allah Ben Hassine, insisted this week that the movement does not preach violence.

He said Tunisia "is not a land of jihad, but it is a land of religious preaching," according to the Friday edition of Tunisian daily Le Temps.

"We do not preach violence. All our actions may be summarized now in the moral preaching and works of charity," said Ben Hassine, known as Abu Yadh and considered one of the top leaders of the most radical Salafists.

Released during a post-revolution amnesty, Abu Yadh is the co-founder in 2000 of the Tunisian Fighting Group, which was listed in 2002 by the UN Security Council as linked to Al-Qaeda.

Abu Yadh fought in Afghanistan and was tossed in the slammer in 2003 in Turkey, before being extradited and sentenced to 43 years jail by the regime of Ben Ali.

"I am certain that Tunisia is not a land of jihad, but that it is a land of religious preaching... We only want good for our country and our countrymen," said Abu Yadh, adding that "the Salafist bogey" has been used to frighten the Tunisian people.
Posted by: trailing wife || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  And the rest stand empty?
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 04/01/2012 3:09 Comments || Top||

#2  The rest are used for Ammo Koran storage.
Posted by: Pappy || 04/01/2012 9:33 Comments || Top||

#3  "Committee of Wise Men"? I dunno guys. Sounds too...biblical.
Posted by: tu3031 || 04/01/2012 11:47 Comments || Top||


Southeast Asia
Coordinated attacks in southern Thailand kill 14, injure 340
An update on yesterday's coordinated attacks, including the bombing of a major tourist hotel in another province which was earlier believed to be a gas line explosion.
Suspected Muslim terrorists insurgents staged the most deadly coordinated attacks in years in southern Thailand, killing 14 people and injuring 340 with car bombs that targeted Saturday shoppers and a high-rise hotel frequented by foreign tourists.

The first batch of explosives planted inside a parked pickup truck tore through an area of restaurants and shops in a busy area of Yala city, a main commercial hub of Thailand's southern provinces.

Around 20 minutes later, while onlookers gathered at the scene, a second car bomb exploded, causing most of the casualties. Eleven people were killed and 110 wounded by the blasts.

Col Pramote Promin, spokesman for a regional security agency, said, "This is the worst attack in the past few years. The suspected insurgents were targeting people's lives. They (chose) a bustling commercial area, so they wanted to harm people."

Separately, a blast occurred at a high-rise hotel in the city of Hat Yai, in the nearby province of Songkhla, that officials initially attributed to a gas leak and believed to be unrelated to the attacks blamed on terrorists insurgents.

The midday bombing at the large Lee Gardens Plaza Hotel, where many Malaysian and Singaporean tourists spend their weekends, killed three people and caused about 230 injuries, mostly from smoke inhalation. After inspecting the hotel's underground parking lot, investigators found a severely damaged sedan and a hole created by the explosion.

Regional police chief Lt Gen Jakthip Chaijinda said the Hat Yai incident "is likely related to what happened in Yala and might have been plotted by the same group of insurgents."

Police said when the blast that occurred at the underground level of the hotel, it ruptured the building's cooking gas pipeline, causing a fire that sent smoke up into the upper floors and trapping many people in their rooms until rescuers came. One of the fatalities was identified as a Malaysian tourist.

The hotel was also targeted in 2006, when four people including a Canadian man were killed by six bombs that had been planted on Hat Yai's main street. Hat Yai and the rest of Songkhla province have generally been spared the violence that has wracked the three southernmost provinces.

In Saturday's third incident, suspected Muslim terrorists militants detonated a motorcycle bomb 50 meters away from a local police station in Pattani province's Mae Lan district, injuring one police officer.

The Yala bombings happened on a road that was previously heavily guarded by checkpoints and closed to traffic to ensure safety. But the security was lifted in 2011 after local vendors said the measures harmed their businesses.

Early accounts of the Yala attack cited three blasts with explosives planted in cars and motorcycles but officials later corrected themselves.
Posted by: ryuge || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Ypu want peopke dead, OK, we'llkill rou, satisfied?
We are.
Posted by: Redneck Jim || 04/01/2012 1:15 Comments || Top||

#2  That's how it usually works with Muslims. If a response to an attack is not brutal enough, they escalate.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 04/01/2012 2:51 Comments || Top||

#3  The Yala bombings happened on a road that was previously heavily guarded by checkpoints and closed to traffic to ensure safety. But the security was lifted in 2011 after local vendors said the measures harmed their businesses.

Attacks that kill civilians should probably be met with collective punishment. Assuming the perps can be identified, their homes should be demolished and their assets seized to compensate the victims.
Posted by: Zhang Fei || 04/02/2012 0:01 Comments || Top||


Syria-Lebanon-Iran
Assad's brutality continues unabated
DAMASCUS/BEIRUT/BAGHDAD: Violence across Syria killed at least seven people yesterday as security forces fired at a Damascus funeral for protesters who died the previous day during demonstrations, monitors said.

Syria's regime declared yesterday it has defeated those seeking to bring it down while reiterating support for a UN-Arab peace plan, as its troops reportedly shelled rebels in the city of Homs.

Meanwhile, forces opened fire as thousands paid tribute to two protesters in the capital's Kfar Sousa district after they were gunned down on Friday during anti-regime rallies, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

At Kafaroma, in the northwestern region of Idlib, security forces killed a civilian who chanted anti-regime slogans when they arrested his father and brother during a raid, the group said. The town was the site of a massive protest on Friday to denounce the Arab world's inaction in the face of Assad's bloody crackdown on the year-old uprising.

Elsewhere in the same province, scene of fierce clashes between troops and rebels in recent weeks, a civilian and his sister were killed during an assault on the town of Jisr Al-Shughur, said the Observatory.

In the central city of Homs, focus of the embattled Syrian regime's military campaign to crush armed rebels, rocket fire killed a child in the neighborhood of Bayada. Shells pounded the Homs district of Khaldiyeh, where most of the rebels are holed up, at the rate of around one a minute, it added.

Random gunfire killed two civilians in Talbisseh, a town about 10 km from the border with Lebanon, the Britain-based monitoring group said. In Daraa province, where the uprising broke out in March 2011, one soldier was killed in a rebel attack on an armored personnel carrier, triggering clashes between the two sides.

Heavy fighting was also reported at dawn in Jarmana, Damascus province, following hours of clashes in the district of Jobar, according to the monitors.
Posted by: Steve White || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:


Science & Technology
Defence cuts put US air superiority on razor's edge
Posted by: Frozen Al || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  "Access forbidden!

You don't have permission to access the requested directory. There is either no index document or the directory is read-protected."
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 04/01/2012 3:10 Comments || Top||

#2  The US Navy says its about 4 years away from having Laser Guns on its ships = Army? Marines?

I'll say it again - gaaawd, I miss my Lasers.
Posted by: JosephMendiola || 04/01/2012 3:24 Comments || Top||

#3  "Access forbidden!

The link works for me g(r)omgoru.
Posted by: trailing wife || 04/01/2012 6:54 Comments || Top||

#4  Sure it wasn't all the side deals from people within the government with foreign countries?
Posted by: Spitch Hupemble1442 || 04/01/2012 8:50 Comments || Top||

#5  Ah, Spring. I smell the aroma of DoD budget fights in the air.

However, one must ask is it the cuts or the out of control over budget fanciest toy on the block attitude of generals. How much different in the end is an unsustainable public employee pension plan than a unsustainable procurement system.

Throw in the inertia of maintaining old out dated overseas commitments for First World countries and you'll eat up a lot of funding that could be redirected or returned back to the budget.
Posted by: Procopius2k || 04/01/2012 8:54 Comments || Top||

#6  don't need the latest gee-whiz do-all swiss army knife airplane; just advanced enough to do one or two things really good.
lot of airframes are still good enough that it would be fairly cheap to re start the line and stuff them with latest avionics. F-22 comes to mind. and F-16 for the light attack/CAS role.
lots of 757/767 sitting in the desert that could become new generation AWACS or trash haulers.
Posted by: USN, Ret. || 04/01/2012 11:40 Comments || Top||

#7  Now it works for me too.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 04/01/2012 15:01 Comments || Top||

#8  The U.S. can establish uninterrupted Air Dominance over any area of the world the size of Texas or smaller within a week.

This is useful and the systems that would be used to achieve it should be sustained and kept operational. All current proposals do that.

However, to argue that under any existing plan not only would the U.S. lack the ability to achieve Air Dominance, or Air Supremacy, or even Air Superiority, is hogwash.

For that to occur the U.S. would have to retire virtually all of its F-22, F-15, B-1, B-2, and F-18 fleet. Even with all of that gone, F-16s, in flight refueling, precision munitions, and B-52s with cruise missiles would still be a formidable threat to any other nation's air space.
Posted by: rammer || 04/01/2012 19:27 Comments || Top||

#9  * OTOH INDIAN DEFENCE FORUM > USAF DOES NOT HAVE ENOUGH STEALTH AIRCRAFT TO FIGHT CHINA, + also North Korea in effective = sustained air campaign.

185 F-22's + 20 B-2's taint enuff - USAF may only be able to field six at a time iff based from faraway Milbases like Guam + Diego Garcia.
FYI US IS SUPPOSED TO PULL OUT OF DIEGO GARCIA COME 2015.

Prolly safe to add Iran next to China + DPRK.

US-IRAN MULTI-REGIONAL LAND WAR, versus US-CHINA MULTI-REGIONAL NAVAL WAR.

* SAME > NORTH KOREA CONFIDENT OF CHINA SUPPORT FOR ROCKET. Nippon defense advisor Hiroyasu Akutsu.

No reason for Beijing to NOT happily surrender like France to the DPRK's new SpaceProg.

* TOPIX > SOUTH KOREA TO STRIKE PYONGYANG INDEPENDENTLY [from US + UNCOM], IFF NORTH ATTACKS SEOUL, andor ROK Capital Region.

* SAME > NORTH KOREA SAYS US [unfairly + unilaterally] BREAKING NUCLEAR DEAL. Nukes-for-Food.

* DEFENCE.PK/FORUMS > PAKISTAN-INDIA NUCLEAR EXCHANGE STILL POSSIBLE IFF PAKISTAN CONTINUES TO SUPPORT MILITANTS [MilTerr Ops agz India]: MILLER.
Posted by: JosephMendiola || 04/01/2012 23:08 Comments || Top||


Arabia
10 17 30 soldiers die in raid in south Yemen
Per other news reports it's up to 30...
ADEN: Militants killed at least 10 Yemeni soldiers and seized an army checkpoint in the south of the country yesterday, a local official said, in an attack claimed by an Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group.

Local officials said heavy fighting broke out later between the terrorists militants and army reinforcements sent from the port city of Aden to retake the checkpoint, located on the road linking the southern provinces of Lahej and Abyan.

Yemeni war planes then bombarded the checkpoint, forcing some of the terrorists militants to retreat toward the city of Jaar, taking with them two tanks and other hardware.

The terrorist militant group Ansar Al-Shariah claimed responsibility for the attack. In a text message purporting to come from the terrorist group, it said it had killed 30 conscripts.

"The holy terrorist warriors of Ansar Al-Shariah this morning carried out the raid of dignity on the Al-Hurur military checkpoint in Abyan, resulting in the deaths of around 30," read the message, whose authenticity could not immediately be verified.

One witness said he saw the bodies of around 20 soldiers lying on the ground around the checkpoint.

Three terrorists militants were killed in an air strike on one of the tanks they had seized and four terrorists died in the clashes at the checkpoint, local and army officials said.

Residents said the army had begun distributing machine guns among them so they could help beat back the terrorists militants.
"Welcome to Hell, here's your machine gun. Welcome to Hell, here's your..."
Posted by: Steve White || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:


Afghanistan
Afghanistan wants answers on long-term US military bases
KABUL: Afghanistan wants the United States to clearly spell out what sort of military presence it will leave behind once most of its combat troops leave by the end of 2014, a senior Afghan official said.
Not likely to be any. The Taliban will once again rule almost all your country, and you'll be hard-pressed to keep your families alive. Afghan opium and heroin will flood Russia. But you won't have any Americans on your land kicking down doors and looking at your wimmin, so you'll be happy. Right?
It is also pressing Washington in talks over future cooperation to detail to be more forthcoming on what will be on offer for Afghan forces as they ready to take over responsibility security in the country that is still at war.
Think you're ready. Go for it. Bye.
“These are issues that concern us. We want to know how many bases will be there, how many soldiers and what will be their mission. And what will we get from the United States for our security forces,” Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s chief spokesman Aimal Faizi told Reuters, without specifying what levels he thought would be appropriate.
Zero, zero, none, and nothing.
In negotiations for a Strategic Partnership Deal on long-term cooperation, one of the stumbling blocks is the US plan for a limited military presence to ensure members of al Qaeda and other militant groups do not find a sanctuary again.
But we can do that from orbit if necessary...
Countries such as Russia, China and Pakistan are wary of an indefinite US military presence in the region. Neighbouring Iran strongly opposes the plan.

“Ultimately, it is we who are responsible for our security. We are moving towards taking full control. If there will be foreign military, then it has to be put clearly in a future security document,” another senior Afghan official said.
Posted by: Steve White || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [1 views] Top|| File under:

#1  High price for what? Look Inside at home for the real answer!
Posted by: Shitch Glomonter3410 || 04/01/2012 7:51 Comments || Top||

#2  Anybody know about a group of Federal government workers at all levels that believe in Nostradamus and are communists if not just brain dead and want to topple the country?
Posted by: Hupomons Sneating9582 || 04/01/2012 7:53 Comments || Top||

#3  "Ultimately, it is we who are responsible for our security.

Have at it you goat buggering SOB's!
Posted by: Besoeker || 04/01/2012 8:12 Comments || Top||

#4  translation: keep the troops, but send the cash. lots of cash.
and we probably will.
Posted by: USN, Ret. || 04/01/2012 11:31 Comments || Top||

#5  Yeah, that sounds about right.
Posted by: tu3031 || 04/01/2012 11:39 Comments || Top||

#6  Graveyard of Empires....but the other ones were at least aware when they left that it was a sucking sump of 9th century tribalism and a fetis swamp of Islamic lunacy. We on the other hand, will leave and continue to send these people money we borrow from the Chinese because we really are that stupid inside the beltway where our leaders exist in some kind of Twighlight Zone altered reality.
Posted by: NoMoreBS || 04/01/2012 12:16 Comments || Top||

#7  I vote for no bases after we leave, and we will just commute from Diego Garcia.
Posted by: Alaska Paul || 04/01/2012 19:35 Comments || Top||

#8  at least we have an environmentally safe weapons disposal area now....
Posted by: Frank G || 04/01/2012 20:01 Comments || Top||

#9  As per FREEREPUBLIC, the CPUSA is suing the Democratic Party for ideo + agenda theft.

OOOOOOOO, you just know you'll need to bring extra extra Popcorn to the Ninth Court.

LOL.

As for AFGHANISTAN ...

* DEFENCE.PK/FORUMS > REOPENING NATO SUPPLY ROUTES: US READY TO OFFER MORE COMPENSATION, + to pay more Taxes, to Islamabad.

ARTIC > US OFFICIAL [IIUC = paraph] = COST(S) QUESTIONS are beside the point because the Supply Routes thru Pakistan remain the most effective + cheapest for the US-NATO, ESPEC AS PER US-NATO SUPPORT + MAINTENANCE OF AGHANISTAN'S SECURITY.

versus

* SAME > CHINA AND PAKISTAN TO STAND BY EACH OTHER.

Gilani reiterates that "CHINA'S ENEMY IS PAKISTAN'S ENEMY".

* IIRC SAME > INDIA-PAKISTAN NUCLEAR EXCHANGE STILL POSSIBLE IFF PAKISTAN CONTINUES TO SUPPORT MILITANTS, i.e. MilTerr activities agz India.
Posted by: JosephMendiola || 04/01/2012 20:20 Comments || Top||

#10  at least we have an environmentally safe weapons disposal area now....

Plus a great lab for testing autonomous killbots in the air and on land.
Posted by: SteveS || 04/01/2012 21:10 Comments || Top||


Down Under
Australia must not repeat Europe's immigration mistakes
We must avoid fatal folly that helped to create Europe's 'leaderless jihad'
I didn't realize that the full article requires some sort of registration, since I was able to access the whole thing through a popular search engine's news site.
Posted by: ryuge || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  I got there just with "we must avoid fatal folly". Thanks for the hint, ryuge!
Posted by: trailing wife || 04/01/2012 6:47 Comments || Top||

#2  "Australia must not repeat Europe's immigration mistakes"

Too late. :-(
Posted by: Barbara || 04/01/2012 11:08 Comments || Top||

#3  Mistake sort of implies this wasn't what they had planned all along.

We know from how Enoch Powell was treated that this is not true. Immigration was to destroy the nation state.
Posted by: Bright Pebbles || 04/01/2012 14:12 Comments || Top||


The Grand Turk
Erdogan Warns Against Israeli Strike On Iran
An Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities would have disastrous outcomes, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Saturday, according to the Turkish daily Hurriyet.

Hurriyet reported that Erdogan made these comments while talking to journalists aboard his airplane, as he was returning from a meeting with Iran's diminutive President Mahmoud Short Round Ahmadinejad.

"The entire region would be devastated if Israel strike Iran," Hurriyet quoted Erdogan as saying.

On Wednesday, Erdogan met Iranian leaders in Tehran, and spoke out against any attack on a country "pursuing a peaceful nuclear program," Iranian state news agency, IRNA reported.

IRNA quoted Erdogan as saying any wise man is against the use of nuclear technology as arms and there should be no opposition to peaceful nuclear activities.
Posted by: trailing wife || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Saturday, according to the Turkish daily Hurriyet.

Nice Immature threat.
Go play in your kiddie Crib, and leave the threats to the adults, who mean them.
.
Posted by: Redneck Jim || 04/01/2012 0:54 Comments || Top||

#2  An Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities would have disastrous outcomes

To Iran. Plus, it may encourage Turkish secularists to do something about Recep.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 04/01/2012 2:57 Comments || Top||


Syria refugee crisis lands on Turkey’s doorstep
Turkey is grappling with a refugee crisis stemming from the Damascus regime’s military offensive against opponents as the country braces for a new influx of people fleeing the violence. More than 17,000 Syrians have fled across the border into Turkey to escape President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal crackdown on anti-government protests since the uprising erupted in mid-March last year.
Put the UNHCR to work and we'll have Syrian refugees for the next hundred years. It'll be a growth industry...
The traumatised refugees are welcomed in camps described by local officials as “social life centres,” which unlike those in Afghanistan and Somalia are aimed at boosting morale.

Turkish camps provide humanitarian aid including three meals a day, health services, clean water, and prayer rooms. Gendarmes are deployed at the camps in charge of security, but refugees are allowed to go outside to do shopping and visit their relatives in nearby Turkish towns.

The camps also offer schooling for children with Arabic-speaking teachers giving lessons in maths, Turkish, computer science and Koranic studies. The sick and injured are treated at hospitals and women join handicraft courses.

While it says it is ready to extend any help for Syrians, Turkey also fears the number of arrivals could soar to the level of the half-million Iraqi Kurds who poured across the border to escape Saddam Hussein’s repression during the 1991 Gulf War.

Turkish officials have contingency plans in the event of a larger-scale incursion as regime forces storm opposition towns near the Turkish border.

Currently, the government has set up nine locations including eight tented camps and a “container city” in Kilis, some 150 kilometres (95 miles) east of the Hatay camps, to deal with the influx. Inhabitants of some camps in Hatay province have already been transferred to Kilis, where the prefabricated homes will initially receive 10,000 people.

East of Kiflis in Sanliurfa province, near the halfway point of Turkey’s 910-kilometre (560-mile) border with Syria, another massive camp is under construction that can house up to 20,000 people.

While the mass influx is bound to have lasting consequences, Turkey is clear it does not want to see the Syrians as permanent residents and refuses to call them refugees.

“We call them Syrians under temporary protection, not refugees,” Suphi Atan, head of the foreign ministry’s task force in Hatay province, told AFP.

“They are deprived of the right to apply for refugee status. We expect them to voluntarily return to their country once the situation is secure,” he said. “But we cannot compel any Syrians to go back.”

Initially, the government had described them as “guests” to emphasise the temporary nature of their asylum in Turkey but later dropped the term because “there is no guest status in international law,” Atan said.

Some of the Syrians have already applied for asylum in Turkey, Metin Corabatir, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Turkey Office, confirmed. But his office, in close coordination with Ankara, had to turn down the asylum requests because the temporary protection status is applicable in international law, he told AFP.
Just a minor setback, boys, I'm sure the white Land Cruisers are on order...
Posted by: Steve White || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:


Home Front: WoT
14 shot, 2 die in Miami shooting


By Chris Covert
Rantburg.com

A total of 14 individuals were shot, and two died Saturday night in North Miami, Florida, according to local and wire reports.

The shooting began at about 2130 hrs near the Funeraria Latina Emanuel funeral home on West Dixie Highway.

The funeral services were held for Morvin Andre, 21, an alleged petty thief who died attempting to escape Bloomington's store security personnel at the Aventura Mall parking lot March 16th. Police listed the death as a suicide.

The shooting took place as several members of local criminal gangs attended the services for Andre, who apparently had ties to gangs.

Reports say that one individual, identified as a gang member, had touched the deceased body inside the funeral home, and the act was considered disrespectful An argument ensued, which at that point was taken outside.

Several unidentified individuals went to a vehicle at the funeral, drew out assault rifles and handguns, and commenced firing on other presumably gang members.

The two fatalities were two unidentified men, 27 and 43 years old. A five year old girl was also hit in her leg by gunfire.

No one has been detained for the shooting.

Chris Covert writes news for Rantburg.com
Posted by: badanov || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Reverends Jackson and Sharpton were across town; no comment from either of them as of today.
Posted by: Pappy || 04/01/2012 13:00 Comments || Top||

#2  Were the victims "White Latinos" or "Black Latinos?"

Al
Posted by: Frozen Al || 04/01/2012 13:21 Comments || Top||

#3  Were the victims "White Latinos" or "Black Latinos?"

Pretty good one, and I'd laugh right along with you, except this is in our backyard.

Thugs are thugs whether they broadcast lies and misrepresentations to sell newsprint or advertising airtime, or whether they sell "social justice", or they subscribe to those insanities.

Thugs have no color, and they speak and understand only one language.
Posted by: badanov || 04/01/2012 13:37 Comments || Top||

#4  14 more members for Obama's extended brood.
Posted by: Shimble Guelph5793 || 04/01/2012 16:05 Comments || Top||

#5  drew out assault rifles and handguns

Of course these were legally purchased at legitimate gun dealers' stores. /sarc off
Posted by: Procopius2k || 04/01/2012 18:59 Comments || Top||

#6  Of course thugs have no color. What really matters is if they would look like Obama's son, if he had one. He hasn't spoken about this, so I guess they don't.
Posted by: AuburnTom || 04/01/2012 19:04 Comments || Top||


Arabia
Pro-democracy group office shut in Dubai
Apparently Egypt isn't the only country suspicious of a bunch of NGO Nosy Parkers tooling around town in white Land Cruisers...
WASHINGTON: The United Arab Emirates has closed the Dubai office of the National Democratic Institute, a US-funded pro-democracy group that was the subject of a crackdown in Egypt, the US State Department said Friday.

"We understand that the UAE government has closed the NDI office in Dubai," said State Department spokesman Noel Clay, offering no further details but defending the group's work. "NDI is a respected organization that has been working across the region and beyond to promote civil society, development and democratic values. The State Department is a firm supporter of NDI's activities," he said.

The UAE, one of the world's top five oil exporters, has escaped the upheaval that has shaken the Arab world, but the case of five activists convicted late last year of insulting the country's rulers suggests it is not immune to calls for reform.

UAE President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al-Nahyan in December pardoned the activists a day after they were sentenced to prison terms of two to three years. That case had been seen as a gauge of how the Gulf Arab state, which allows no political parties, responds to hints of dissent after the uprisings that have toppled four Arab heads of state, including former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

A US official said the United States had been in contact with the UAE authorities about the closure of the NDI office and argued in favor of allowing such groups to operate.

"We made clear that allowing NGOs to operate openly and freely is important to support political and economic development," said the official, who asked not to be named.
If you want the people to be protected, bring them back into the embassy and have them accredited as diplomats. They'll have to behave as diplomats, of course. But until then they're little more than tourists with agendas.
Posted by: Steve White || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  NGO = should be MGO Marxist Government officials.
Posted by: Bright Pebbles || 04/01/2012 15:07 Comments || Top||


India-Pakistan
14 terrorists killed in Orakzai
ORAKZAI: Army helicopters targeted terrorist hideouts in the Upper Orakzai Agency on Saturday, killing 14 terrorists, sources said. According to official sources, jetfighters pounded terrorist hideouts in Akhunkot area of Upper Orakzai Agency. They said that 14 terrorists were killed in the raids, while their four hideouts were destroyed.

Security forces said that the Pakistan Army was engaging in operations against Taliban led by Hakeemullah Mehsud. Security forces have killed hundreds of terrorists in the ongoing operations, where dozens of security personnel, including an officer, were killed in different clashes.
Posted by: Steve White || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:


Afghanistan
Haqqani Network Leader Captured in Afghanistan
A Haqqani network leader was captured in central Wardak province on Saturday, Isaf said.

The leader named Sayf-ul-Rahman was accused of launching several attacks on US troops and killing civilians in the country, Isaf said in a statement. Two of his comrades were also held during the operation in Sayed Abad district in Wardak province, it said.
This article starring:
Sayf-ul-Rahman
Posted by: trailing wife || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Let me guess, he was a #3 guy in the organization.
Posted by: crosspatch || 04/01/2012 3:05 Comments || Top||


Africa North
Tribal Clashes Kill 16 In Libya's Sabha
[AFP] At least 16 people were killed on Saturday in new festivities between the Toubou people and Arab rustics in the southern Libyan desert oasis of Sabha, local and medical sources told AFP.

A doctor at Sabha hospital, treating Arab casualties, said eight people were killed and another 50 maimed in fighting between the early morning and noon. A Toubou tribal source said eight of their people were also killed.

The fighting first erupted on Monday after Arab rustics accused the Toubou of killing one of their people. The first three days of festivities cost more than 70 lives, Libyan government front man Nasser al-Manaa said on Wednesday.
Posted by: trailing wife || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  That's what happens when you replace one tyrant with a 100 warlords.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 04/01/2012 2:53 Comments || Top||

#2  Eventually one warlord will beat or win the allegience of the other 99 and become the new tyrant. That's how it always works.
Posted by: Glenmore || 04/01/2012 7:37 Comments || Top||

#3  Perhaps we could get them to go at in in the east where all the oil is again. Why not get those suave sas people on it that were caught by farmers with pitch forks!
Posted by: Wheang Thert2641 || 04/01/2012 8:55 Comments || Top||


Great White North
More controversial Muslim books discovered for sale in Canada
An Islamic bookstore in east Toronto sells books that encourage Muslims to usurp the Western world and install an Islamic State in its place. The books, written by deceased Islamic scholar Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, are available at the Islamic Circle of North America bookstore.

In Jihad in Islam, Maududi wrote, "Islam wishes to destroy all States and Governments anywhere on the face of the earth which are opposed to the ideology and programme of Islam regardless of the country or the Nation that rules it. Islam requires the earth -- not just a portion -- but the whole planet."

Maududi was an influential Pakistani journalist, theologian and Muslim leader who wrote more than 120 books and pamphlets and lived from 1903 to 1979. In the preface to one of his books, he is described as an author who "provided the present-day revival of Islam with its intellectual foundations."

Maududi's books carry a common theme of Islam as a revolutionary "ideology and program which seeks to alter the social order of the whole world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals."

"Jihad," which he refers to in at least one book as a war against non-Muslims,
What?!? I thought jihad was all about the internal struggle for imorovement. Where'd he get that idea?
is in fact "undertaken for the collective well-being of mankind" to establish "God's order" in the world and create a "just and equitable social order among human beings," he wrote.

A request for the Islamic Society of Toronto to discuss the books was not immediately returned.

When one of the store's managers was asked by a reporter who posed as a customer whether he stocked "Jihad in Islam", he said he hadn't carried it for years because the RCMP had visited his store to ask questions about why it would carry such a book. Another manager said the store didn't carry any of the six books on the reporter's list.

Within 30 minutes, the reporter found Jihad in Islam and four of Maududi's other titles stacked on a bottom shelf in the middle of the store.

When it was revealed to the store manager that it was a Toronto Sun reporter who bought those books, he was irate, stating he "will say nothing" before he disappeared into an office at the back of the store.

In the The Process of the Islamic Revolution, Maududi wrote that Muslims "should be prepared to sacrifice all prospects of personal advancement in wordily life" including giving up friends and their own and their parent's expectations to further the expansion of Islam.

"Society, government, law, nation, country, whatsoever obstructs the achievement of their object [of an Islamic Revolution], they should be prepared to struggle against it," he wrote.

He wrote it is "impossible" for Muslims to live under an "alien State System" and observe Muslim beliefs.

In Jihad In Islam, Maududi wrote, "All rules which he considers wrong; all taxes that he deems unlawful; all matters which he believes to be evil; the civilization and way of life which, in his view, are wicked; the education system which seems to him as fatal -- all these will be so inexorably imposed on him, his and his children that evasion will become impossible."

As soon as Islam "captures" another state, it will ban gambling and prostitution, outlaw forbidden business dealings and "make it obligatory for non-Muslim women to observe the minimum standards of modesty in dress as required by Islamic Law."
Posted by: ryuge || 04/01/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || E-Mail|| [0 views] Top|| File under:



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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.

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Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has dominated Mexico for six years.
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Two weeks of WOT
Sun 2012-04-01
  Paris: Scientist accused of plotting to blow up 'city size of London'
Sat 2012-03-31
  Us Drone Strike Kills Four In Miranshah
Fri 2012-03-30
  France nabs at least 17 Islamists in raids across the country
Thu 2012-03-29
  Gunmen kidnap Saudi diplomat in Yemen
Wed 2012-03-28
  Syrian Troops Kill 57 amid Clashes near Lebanese Border
Tue 2012-03-27
  Terror plot uncovered when 11 suicide vests found at Afghan military HQ
Mon 2012-03-26
  Toulouse killings: Mohamed Merah brother charged
Sun 2012-03-25
  Syrian Rebel Chiefs Form Military Council to Unify Ranks
Sat 2012-03-24
  At Least 26 Dead as Tens of Thousands Rally in Syria
Fri 2012-03-23
  German court gives online terror recruiter five year sentence
Thu 2012-03-22
  Gunman dead as French siege ends
Wed 2012-03-21
  French police in standoff with Jewish school killing suspect
Tue 2012-03-20
  Turkish Diplomat Says Two More Syrian Generals Defect
Mon 2012-03-19
  Heavy Shelling Kills 16 'Qaida' Fighters in Yemen
Sun 2012-03-18
  Five Killed In Bali Terror Raids

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