Germany felt it had been "led around" by Turkey and that the only reasonable response was to cut the financing. "We won't let them play games with us anymore," Stather said.
Guinea's army has announced it has dissolved the country's government and suspended the constitution, hours after the death of President Lansana Conte. An army captain said on state radio a "consultative council" of civilian and military leaders would be set up. The African Union has condemned the move.
All ministers and other top officials have been summoned to the main military camp "to guarantee their security".
Mr Conte had ruled the West African country with an iron fist since 1984. The precise circumstances of the president's death are not yet known, but he had been suffering from diabetes.
BBC West Africa correspondent Will Ross says it is important to see whether the army is united on the way forward for Guinea, as a power struggle could be extremely dangerous given the deep ethnic divisions there.
Posted by: john frum ||
12/23/2008 08:03 ||
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The United States will not support a unity government in Zimbabwe that includes President Robert Mugabe, a top American envoy told reporters in South Africa on Sunday.
Hope they've coordinated that with the B.O. regime and that he sticks to it.
He will. There's no upside to making nice with Bob. Bob's a thug and even the progressives know it. More to the point, he's an unimportant thug ...
A power-sharing agreement between Zimbabwe's opposition parties and Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe with increasing severity for 28 years, is "not credible with Mugabe as president" because he appears unwilling to share control, said Jendayi Frazer, U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs.
The comments, which came days after Frazer echoed calls by President Bush and other world leaders that Mugabe step down, indicated a shift in U.S. policy toward a power-sharing deal signed in September.
The United States, like other Western nations, initially expressed support for the agreement and pledged to ease sanctions and send aid dollars if the deal gave opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai true power. Under the terms of the pact, Tsvangirai was to become prime minister, and his party and a splinter opposition party were to hold 16 of 31 cabinet seats.
But implementation of the pact has stalled since then, as Zimbabwe's devastated economy has collapsed further and a cholera outbreak has killed more than 1,100 people.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/23/2008 00:00 ||
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#1
Reinstate Pat Robertson, and let him find the merc to pull the trigger.
Kill Mugabe.
There, was that so hard?
All of you idiots. All of you from congress, that fool UN, the "African Union", allowed this to happen, and Jimmah carter, man with no GOD.
YOU ALL ARE guilty. Rhodesia was not failed by anyone but that scum that took power.
Curse you Magabe, and Bles you who takes that ungodly tyrant away from the people he has destroyed.
DO IT NOW.
Assisinate that piece of dung before I have an anurism with the entire human"" race.
#2
There's no silver bullet, newc. There are thugs waiting to take Bob's place--and no doubt getting impatient with the old man's longevity. I doubt they'll represent any improvement.
Posted by: James ||
12/23/2008 23:59 Comments ||
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A foreign national volunteered the information the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) needed to get at bribery involving BNP Chief Khaleda Zia's younger son Arafat Rahman Koko, said ACC sources.
In a five-page statement, he said he would aid the anti-graft body in its probe on condition that his identity would be kept secret and safety ensured. Introducing himself as "a chartered secretary...married with two children", he also said he would not come to Bangladesh to testify against anyone for fear of reprisal.
"Please don't let them kill me!"
On this understanding, the ACC sent an official to Singapore to explore the official procedures there to investigate graft. It also consulted a local legal expert on how to go about the task.
At least three persons, including a Juba League leader and a child, sustained bullet wounds as armed criminals fired indiscriminately at an election camp in the city's Tejgaon area yesterday.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/23/2008 00:00 ||
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Venezuela's president says half of the country's voters will back his bid to run for re-election while penciling in Feb. 15 as referendum date.
Venezuela's constitution has already been changed once after Chavez came to power in 1998, to allow him to run for just one re-election. He won a new mandate in 2006.
Now Chavez, whose present term ends in 2012, wants to change the wording of the Constitution from "the president may be re-elected only once" to simply "the president may be re-elected."
"Two years ago (in the last presidential elections), 7.3 million voters voted for me. I don't expect any less than that. We are going towards 10 million (votes)," Hugo Chavez claimed in his weekly television broadcast on Sunday, according to AFP.
Chavez said, "The referendum could be in February ... a date of February 15. It is already actually being evaluated technically (as a date)."
But Chavez narrowly lost a referendum that included the same change last year and risks weakening his presidency if he is defeated again.
The opposition calls Chavez a dictator-in-the-making, but the Cuba ally and declared Bush administration enemy says he needs the constitution changed to be able to stand for office again in 2012 and to deepen his socialist reforms.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/23/2008 00:00 ||
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Hugo MUST be president for life, because hardcore Marxists are so hard to find in Latin America.
#3
Hugo has cut the foreign exchange allowance for travellers and internet purchases. He's completely written off the middle-class in the next election.
The decapitated bodies of 12 men were discovered early Sunday scattered in and around a state capital in southern Mexico. Nine of the corpses were strewn along a busy street, where the Guerrero state governor later appeared for a religious procession. Zarqawi is not dead. He is alive and living in Messico.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/23/2008 00:00 ||
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Russia is to increase sharply its production of strategic nuclear missiles, throwing down the gauntlet to the US president-elect, Barack Obama, who would have to deal with the Kremlin's response to US missile defence plans in Europe.
A senior government official in Moscow said the Russian military would commission 70 strategic missiles over the next three years. It was unclear whether sea-launched ballistic missiles were included in this figure, but military experts said it could represent up to a fourfold increase on the rate of production of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
The missiles would be part of a £95bn defence procurement package for 2009-2011, said Vladislav Putilin, a deputy head of the Russian cabinet's military-industrial commission in charge of weapons industries. Russia has produced only five to seven Topol-M ICBMs a year since the late 1990s and its stockpiles of several hundred heavy Soviet-era missiles such as the SS-19 Stiletto are rapidly reaching the end of their lifespan.
Putilin told a press conference the defence package represented a 28% increase on the previously announced procurement budget for 2009, with further increases in the following two years. "More than 70 strategic missiles will be bought and delivered to troops in the next three years, more than 30 short-range Iskander missiles and a large number of booster rockets and aircraft," he said.
Military experts said the increased procurement of ICBMs was an attempt by Russia's depleted armed forces to produce a bargaining chip in negotiations with Washington over signing a new arms reduction treaty to replace Start I.
The Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, has signalled his intention to take an aggressive stance with the new US administration. On the day Obama was elected Medvedev announced plans to station short-range Iskander missiles in Russia's Kaliningrad exclave if the US goes ahead with building a missile defence system in Europe.
Ruben Sergeev, an expert on disarmament issues, said Moscow was afraid of falling behind in a new arms race. "Russia is decommissioning its old liquid-fuel missiles from the Soviet era at a rate of several dozen every year," he said. "The Kremlin knows that if it doesn't increase production of ICBMs rapidly, then it will have no chance of getting a new arms reduction treaty out of the United States, which has much greater quantities of missiles."
The Start I treaty, signed between the Soviet Union and the US, expires in December next year, with negotiations on a new deal expected to start in the spring.
Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, said last week that the treaty needed to be "preserved and strengthened". He added: "Without the mutual control agreements embodied in the Start treaty, Russia, as the weaker partner, would lose all possibilities to keep tabs on the Americans' quickly developing strategic nuclear forces."
Posted by: john frum ||
12/23/2008 12:57 ||
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Anybody besides me think this is a great way for teh Russians to spend their money. The likelihood of these missiles ever being used is about nil. We are certainly not going to attack them. I'd rather have them spend the money on these things than improving their conventional forces, which they could use to create instability in several areas of the globe.
#2
Ditto, remoteman. The Russians are paranoid and think that their nuclear deterrent is the only thing between them and dissolution. More power to 'em, I say. However, their military exercises and popular press reveal a disturbing tendency to want to start a big war where they get to use their strategic nuclear weapons...not encouraging.
A planned $4.5 billion "Peace Canal" to bring water from the Red Sea to the fast evaporating Dead Sea could benefit the entire Middle East, an Israeli minister said in Jordan on Monday. "I think that all the region will benefit from the project," Israeli Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told reporters.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/23/2008 00:00 ||
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Ah yes, apply to Arabs' sense of enlightened self interest.
#2
"I believe 60 percent of desalinated water will go to Jordan," he said, noting that the project's environmental studies will take "about a year and a half."
The rest of the water would presumably go to Israel.
Presumably... if the Israeli government doesn't give the rest away in a misguided attempt to buy peace.
HIV carriers should not be allowed to marry, in order to avoid having sick children, a top Malaysian politician was quoted on Monday as saying. "Somebody who is very sick like that should not be allowed to get married," Mohammad Nizar Jamaluddin, chief minister of northern Perak state was quoted as saying by New Straits Times newspaper. "If there's any breeding, sorry for having to use that word, the embryo will also carry the same virus. So that is even more unfair because you are actually passing that disease on to the child."
He had been asked to comment on a statement by an official of the Department of Islamic Development Malaysia that Muslims who test positive for the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, would still be allowed to marry. An aide to Nizar, who is a member of the opposition Islamist party Parti Islam se-Malaysia (PAS), said the minister was referring to both Muslims and non-Muslims. Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak was quoted last week as saying all Muslim couples in peninsular Malaysia must undergo HIV screening before getting married.
The debate on the right of HIV/AIDS carriers, especially Muslims, to marry comes as mostly Muslim Malaysia is struggling to allay concerns of a rise in hard-line Islam.
Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said last month Muslims are allowed to do yoga but without chanting, reversing an outright ban that had caused a flap in the country. The government has also threatened to shut down a Catholic newspaper for using the word "Allah", saying it could inflame the country's Muslim population.
Politically dominant ethnic Malay Muslims form about 60 percent of the population of roughly 26 million, while the ethnic Indian and Chinese minorities include Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and Christians. While new HIV infections in Malaysia dropped to 3,452 in 2008, compared to 6,756 in 2003, infections among women through normal sexual intercourse rose from 5.02 percent of total cases in 1997 to 16.3 percent last year.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/23/2008 00:00 ||
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#1
In a sane world HIV carriers would marry each other and also have operations to prevent children.
I've long felt if the boys in San Francisco who were carriers did something to distinguish themselves as carriers and only messed with other carriers they could continue with their lifestyle and ended the spread of the disease long ago.
#2
but RJ, that would require some form of admitting responsibilty for their own actions, something that it appears the Granola State is incapable of doing. (See: budget mess)
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
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.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
