LouisJalouzot/EN-EWT-UD huggingface dataset:
Although the announcement was probably made to show progress in identifying and breaking up terror cells, I don't find the news that the Baathists continue to penetrate the Iraqi government very hopeful.
He is no longer in the dominant Shiite list, the United Iraqi Alliance, and won't have many seats in the new parliament.
Baghdadis don't venture much out of their neighbourhoods any more, you never know where you might get stuck.
Even the IP and ICDC have abandoned the neighbourhood, and those are trained and armed, so don't expect scared civilians to do anything except to hide inside and pray a helicopter or a tank doesn't bomb them, and also how are American soldiers going to distinguish the brave and valiant civilians from the Fedayeen?
Most people haven't gone to work the last few days, although it seems that the rest of Baghdad is 'normal' (if you can define what normal is).
There are rumours about preparations by slum dwellers for another looting spree against banks, governmental and public property similar to the one that took place last April, and I have already overheard youngsters in my neighbourhood joking about it and saying things like "This time we will be the first to loot, we didn't get anything the last time".
I guess it's just the old new Arab 'Me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against my enemy', or 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend' thing going on again.
Elena's motorcycle tour through the region around Chernobyl has revived interest in one of the most serious nuclear disasters in history.
...a drop in the birth rate, a deterioration in women's reproductive health, an increase in complications during pregnancy and birth, and a deterioration in neonatal health....
The Chernobyl Children's Project (http://www.adiccp.org/home/default.asp) offers several ways to help the children of that region.
I'm sorry to say Elena's story has been revealed to be a fake.
Al-Zawahiri attempted to use Musharraf's lack of progress in helping the Muslims of that Indian state as a justification for his overthrow.
But Sharon's iron fist is simply not working as a means of establishing general peace, and the Bush administration will have to finally apply effective pressure on Sharon to stop his outrages in and colonization of the West Bank and Gaza.
Sharon's hard line has worked in tandem with Hamas's terrorism to ratchet up tensions further and further, which spill over into the Muslim world and serve as a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda in its search for agents willing to hit the United States.
3) Make Iraq another Afghanistan, using the Republican Right's own tactics against them.
Getting the Spanish out of Iraq isn't nearly as good a rallying cry for al-Qaeda in the Arab world as getting the Americans and British out.
The thing to keep in mind is that Sunni Arab nationalists and Baathists and local Sunni radicals are likely to remain far more dangerous to the US in Iraq than al-Qaeda infiltrators, and it would be dangerous to take one's eyes off the former ball.
Let's just remember a seminal Bush moment in 1999:
' Bush fails reporter's pop quiz on international leaders
Hiller replied: "No, it's four questions of four leaders in four hot spots." . . .
Bush, in answering the question about the leader of Pakistan, also said: "The new Pakistani general, he's just been elected -- not elected, this guy took over office.
It appears this guy is going to bring stability to the country and I think that's good news for the subcontinent."
Gore released a statement Friday taking Bush to task for his comments on Pakistan's recent coup.
"I find it troubling that a candidate for president in our country -- the world's oldest democracy -- would characterize the military takeover as "good news," Gore said.
A spokesman for President Clinton also criticized Bush's comments.
Not only did Bush not know who General Pervez Musharraf was, he seems to have confused coup-making with "taking office," and moreover went on to suggest that the overthrow of an elected prime minister and the installation in power of the Pakistan military, then the world's strongest supporter of the Taliban, would bring "stability!"
Musharraf made his coup in part because of the military's anger over Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's willingness to back down from confronting India over Kashmir, so that he explicitly came to power as a warmonger.
I can't tell you how ominous I found Bush's performance in that interview.
I still remember him stuttering about "the General," unable to remember Musharraf's name.
And, he didn't think he needed to know anything about South Asia, with its nuclear giants and radical religious politics--the latter a dire security threat to the US.
He couldn't tell when things were becoming more unstable as opposed to less.
So, one answer to Bush's charge about Edwards is that if it had any merit, Bush should have declined to run himself.
This is what Edwards' campaign literature said about his positions: "Edwards believes that the U.S. must be an active leader to help resolve conflicts, from reducing tensions between India and Pakistan to the peace process in Northern Ireland.
I don't see Bush doing any of this.
From Friday's Daily Star
Any thorough assessment of the impact of the Iraq war and its aftermath on Israel's security environment must, therefore, closely examine its likely effect on the conduct of asymmetrical warfare.
The more radical Shiites, who generally follow the theocratic notions of Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, routinely chant and demonstrate against Israel.
These Shiite movements had been suppressed by Saddam Hussein's regime, but have now organized and armed themselves.
Whereas Saddam Hussein's dictatorship ensured that such populist currents were kept firmly under control, they are now free to organize.
If even a modicum of normality and security can be returned to Iraq, its citizens will be able to benefit from the country's petroleum reserves.
Israel's security interests are best served by peace with its neighbors, which can only be achieved by trading land for peace with the Palestinians.
Ariel Sharon's aggressive near annexation of almost half of the occupied West Bank and his indefinite postponement of any Palestinian state have created unprecedented rage and violence.
Apart from the 1,200 Indian lives lost in 1987, the Indian peacekeeping force was immensely unpopular not only in Tamil Nadu and the Jaffna peninsula but also among the Sinhalese majority who considered it a violation of their country's sovereignty.
While India is ready to enter into a "defense cooperation agreement" with Sri Lanka, it is wary of being drawn into any military involvement in the island nation's two decades-old civil war that has seen violent strife between ethnic Tamils and the Sinhalese majority - leaving over 60,000 dead on both sides.
And that explains the delay in the signing of a formal defense agreement that was at the heart of Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga's four-day visit to India recently.
For that reason, he said, Kumaratunga's government was keen to beef up military preparedness with Indian support.
Kumaratunga's India tour preceded a three-day visit to Sri Lanka by Norwegian Foreign Minister Jan Petersen in a new bid to revive the peace talks that were supposed to follow a ceasefire that Oslo successfully brokered in February 2002.
A veteran of India's military intervention in the Jaffna peninsula to help implement the 1987 Indo-Sri Lanka Peace Accord - which ambitiously provided for the disarming of the formidable LTTE - Kalkat said the new defense deal would essentially be a reiteration of the older one minus its military commitment.
Japan's special envoy, Yasushi Akashi, who called for tangible progress in the peace process before the money would be released, came back from visits to Colombo and Kilinochchi in early November a frustrated man.
She added that recent visits to the island by India's top military brass including army chief General Nirmal Chander Vij have "caused apprehension among Tamils that preparations are under way for another war in the island".
But Kalkat pointed out that India would be ill-advised to be involved again, militarily, with Sri Lanka if only because it still had to consider the sentiments of 45 million ethnic Tamils in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu - separated from Sri Lanka's Jaffna peninsula by the narrow Palk Straits.
As Pakistan's president had been telling the United States he was "forced" into taking a hawkish line on India precisely by the likes of Rahman, this was an embarrassment.
This, Pakistan's lobbyist in Washington Christina Rocca has been told, is the "minimum" that the Pakistan army will accept.
This writer has for years regarded the best solution to the Kashmir problem as being the trifurcation of the Indian part of the state into a Hindu-majority Jammu, a Buddhist-dominated Ladakh and the overwhelmingly Muslim Kashmir Valley, with the third state given little of taxpayers' money but substantial autonomy.
Unfortunately for them, the general has decided to take seriously Colin Powell's frequent boasts that it was on his nudging that the Indians made conciliatory gestures toward Islamabad.
Unfortunately for those eager to indefinitely carry on with the lucrative business of conflict resolution in South Asia, Pervez Musharraf has now called Colin Powell's bluff, challenging him to deliver on his frequent statements implying that the Indians jump to his commands.
And, let's remember, flying supersonic fighter jets is dangerous!
They don't let just anybody do it.
Some reporters (you know, the ones with journalistic ethics) have actually uncovered the truth about George Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard.
Bush's National Guard years
Before you fall for Dems' spin, here are the facts
What do you really know about George W. Bush's time in the Air National Guard?
That he didn't show up for duty in Alabama?
News coverage of the president's years in the Guard has tended to focus on one brief portion of that time — to the exclusion of virtually everything else.
Requests like that weren't unusual, says retired Col. William Campenni, who flew with Bush in 1970 and 1971.
In '72 or '73, if you were a pilot, active or Guard, and you had an obligation and wanted to get out, no problem.
Now, it is only natural that news reports questioning Bush's service — in The Boston Globe and The New York Times, on CBS and in other outlets — would come out now.
Democrats are spitting mad over attacks on John Kerry's record by the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
And, as it is with Kerry, it's reasonable to look at a candidate's entire record, including his military service — or lack of it.
Voters are perfectly able to decide whether it's important or not in November.
The Kerry camp blames Bush for the Swift boat veterans' attack, but anyone who has spent much time talking to the Swifties gets the sense that they are doing it entirely for their own reasons.
And it should be noted in passing that Kerry has personally questioned Bush's service, while Bush has not personally questioned Kerry's.
Now that the picture is clear, the two main competing lists seem to be the United Iraqi Coalition list and Allawi's Al-Iraqiya list.
Indeed, Sistani's agents all over the country have been quite active in educating Iraqi Shia on the merits of elections, which has led to the assassination of at least two of them.
Again there is no official written statement from Sistani's office confirming this allegation, which I think is intentional.
One remark made by Sha'lan on Al-Arabiya TV, that he couldn't say more about Chalabi because he would embarrass himself and the viewers almost made me roll on the floor.
After asking me which tribe I belong to (thus assessing my sectarian background) he started hurling abuses at the Shia, calling them Persians, Majoos (fire worshippers), rabid dogs and a handful of other descriptions that I can't mention here.
I didn't argue with him but I asked him what he believed would be a viable solution to this mess.
But I also see that as a fatal misconception, which is doing Sunnis harm, because I don't believe the US is going anywhere so soon.
Here's a Miami Herald interview with the relaxed terrorist and former CIA operative in a luxury condo, published yesterday.
I can't imagine they wanted to do this.
Authorities would likely have been happy answering questions about Posada's whereabouts with an indefinite shrug.
And though he'd been a faithful servant, he was not such a player that he could get away with that.
Posada should have told any inquisitive journalist at his doorstep something like Meiring told the single American reporter who bothered following his bloody trail from the Philippines, that "If this harms me in any way, you will find my power then, and you'll find out who I am."
But then, maybe that wouldn't have saved him either, because Posada is not Meiring.
Posada can be given up, but Meiring can't.
Meiring's crimes are fresh, and wave the false flag which is the "War on Terror."
Posada's crimes, on the other hand, must seem like ancient history, especially to a people who don't know their history.
And to those who don't even know their crimes, not even that.
But Posada's nearly 80 years old, and the Venezuelan people will ensure that's a vain hope.
I've read the book- it's a first person memoir with the ring of truth, especially since so much of the wider context has confirmed the allegations of Contra drug connections that led to Terrell becoming a target for discrediting by the TWIG counterintelligence group that ran interference for the Contra effort, staffed by covert ops types including Ollie North, Robert Owen, Vince Cannistaro and Buck Revell.
Peter Dale Scott includes an account of how Terrell's whistleblowing was stifled by them in his book Cocaine Politics.
Wilson had been able to show that he'd had more than 80 "non-social contacts" with the CIA since his retirement in 1971, leaving the prosecution's case in turmoil.
Last week, Federal District Judge Lynn Hughes in Huston, Texas, threw out Wilson's two-decades old conviction.
Sheriff's deputies in Louisiana made a third arrest Wednesday in the ongoing investigation of a case involving allegations of sexual abuse of children and animals at a Ponchatoula, La., church.
Tangipahoa Parish sheriff's deputy Christopher Blair Labat, 24, was booked Tuesday on one count of aggravated rape and one count of crime against nature.
On Monday, Louis Lamonica, 45, the former pastor of Hosanna Church, was booked with two counts of aggravated rape and one count of crime against nature after he walked in to the Livingston Parish Sheriff's Office and said he could implicate others in a situation at the church that reportedly occurred two years ago.
If I was Rummy I'd send Posada to Iraq to blow things up there.
Now that's a post I can relate to.
I don't know how others feel, but I'm definitely looking into immigration to Canada as an option.
hey that's a great blog, I also have a site about los angeles online dating
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And It's Not Hard To Do.... IF You Know HOW.
Don't Let This Pass You By Without At Least Taking A Look.
Trouble on India's islands
Correspondents who flocked in to cover the tsunami found they also had another story - the miserable security situation surrounding the Indian navy's Far Eastern Naval Command, now being established along with India's "blue water navy".
"Port Blair, Havelock Islands, Diglipur, Middle Nicobar, Campbell's Bay, Neil Islands and Rangott are mostly overrun by foreigners," he said.
Considering the islands' huge strategic importance, it is amazing how lax New Delhi has been.
In fact, it would tend to encourage more organized anti-India outfits, such as the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and outside-linked Maoists, to exploit these networks and weaken India's eastern flank.
Indian intelligence's lackluster performance in dealing with the LTTE is startling.
On its journey across the Bay of Bengal the freighter was tracked by the Indian navy and Orissa-based spy planes of India's Aviation Research Center; it was intercepted by Indian naval vessels off Sri Lanka's east coast.
Four persons were arrested, reportedly belonging to the Manipur Revolutionary People's Front.
The boat was heading toward Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh.
Subsequently, Phuket became the LTTE's main backup base.
It is widely acknowledged that the Pakistani ISI has nurtured a number of extremist Islamist groups, such as the Harkat-ul-Jehad-al-Islami, in the port city of Chittagong, and put a number of secessionist rebels from India's northeast in touch with this terrorist network.
The route from Kalikhola in Bhutan to Cox's Bazar passes through northern Bengal, Assam and Meghalaya, and on into Chittagong.
India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands comprise more than 500 islands lying 1,000 kilometers east of Sri Lanka in the Bay of Bengal.
He also writes for Aakrosh, India's defense-tied quarterly journal.
‘'Should Pakistan show us any evidence of an Indian hand using Afghan soil to work against our neighbours we will take it very seriously,” says Amrullah Saleh the head of Afghanistan's National Security Directorate. ]
The neighbours are still interfering, but there are signs that rather than undermining Afghanistan's stability they may now be trying to strengthen it.
‘'Where are Mullah Omar, Mullah Usmani and Gulbuddin Hikmetar?''
‘'It was the first time that Bush totally focused on the Taliban threat rather than Al Qaeda with the Pakistanis,'' says a Western diplomat.
‘'Bush was very well briefed before the meeting,'' the diplomat said.
An Afghan official at the meeting added, ‘'The Americans now realise that the Taliban are a bigger threat to our security than Al Qaeda.''
‘'President Musharraf promised to help us and cooperate with us on curbing terrorist activity by the Taliban,'' says Karzai.
Until then he had said Pakistan's options were open.
US and NATO military officers in Kabul say it is too early to say whether Bush's tough message was instrumental in persuading Musharraf and the ISI to pressure the Taliban to restrain from disrupting the elections.
‘'Pakistan now has a large force deployed in Baluchistan which was not there before,'' says Lt. General David Barno.
‘'There is much better tactical cooperation between our forces on both sides of the border, but the movement of Taliban still goes on both ways,'' he adds.
‘'Should Pakistan show us any evidence of an Indian hand using Afghan soil to work against our neighbours we will take it very seriously,” says Amrullah Saleh the head of Afghanistan's National Security Directorate.
With the US military presence posing a threat on their borders in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran's moderate leadership is keen to help stabilise Karzai so that the US presence in Afghanistan is reduced.
Iranian officials are deeply concerned about the US occupation of Shindand, a massive Soviet-era airbase just 30 kilometres from Iran's border.
Iranian officials say they made no objections to Khan's ouster because they want to strengthen Karzai's campaign against warlords.
At a time of heightened tensions between Tehran and Washington over Iran's nuclear weapons program and calls by neo-conservatives in Washington that a second Bush term should deal with Iran aggressively, the Iranians fear that Shindand could be used as a listening post, spying facility and even a launching pad for any future US actions against Iran.
‘'We have a very small number of forces in Shindand with a few helicopters,'' says Barno.
‘'Afghanistan has had the benefit of cooperation from both the US and Iran.
So far what they have done together has been good for us and that's how we would like to keep it'', says Karzai.
Nobody can claim that the interference of Afghanistan's neighbours is over, but the elections will do much to strengthen Karzai and deal more firmly with neighbours' interference.
The debate that a handful of Texas multi-millionnaires close to the Bush family have cleverly manufactured over John Kerry's war record is absurd in every way.
Or they weren't eyewitnesses and are just lying.
If some of John Kerry's wounds were superficial, Bush received no wounds.
(And, a piece of shrapnel in the forearm that caused only a minor wound would have killed had it hit an eye and gone into the brain; the shrapnel being in your body demonstrates you were in mortal danger and didn't absent yourself from it.
Kerry saved a man's life while under fire.
The history of alcoholism and possibly other drug use is a key issue because it not only speaks to Bush's character as an addictive personality, but may tell us something about his erratic and alarming actions as president.
This little-noted interview with Blount's nephew Murph Archibald, which appeared on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered on March 30, 2004, gives a devastating insight into what it was like to have to suffer through Bush in that period.
NPR's Wade Goodwyn has this report about Mr. Bush's time on that campaign.
Groom was Republican Red Blount's scheduler, and in that job, she was the hub in the campaign wheel.
Blount's support of the party led him to be appointed Richard Nixon's postmaster general.
In Washington, Blount became friends and tennis partners with Mr. Bush's father, then Congressman Bush.
That was how 26-year-old Lieutenant Bush came to Montgomery, at his father's urging . . .
It was Mr. Bush's job to organize the Republican county chairpersons in the 67 Alabama counties.
Back in 1972 in the Deep South, many rural counties didn't have much in the way of official Republican Party apparatus.
It was the young Texan's job to find out what each county leader needed in the way of campaign supplies and get those supplies to them.
. . . Murph Archibald is Red Blount's nephew by marriage, and in 1972, he was coming off a 15-month tour in Vietnam in the infantry.
GOODWYN: Archibald says that two months before the election, in September of '72, Red Blount's campaign manager came to him and asked that he quietly take over Mr. Bush's job because the campaign materials were not getting out to the counties.
Mr. ARCHIBALD: George certainly didn't seem to have any concerns about my taking over this work with the campaign workers there.
My overall impression was that he didn't seem as interested in the campaign as the other people who were working at the state headquarters.
GOODWYN: Murph Archibald says that at first, he didn't know that Mr. Bush was serving in the Air National Guard.
Mr. ARCHIBALD: George didn't have any interest at all in talking about the military.
He wasn't unpleasant about it, but he just changed the subject and wouldn't talk about it.
Archibald says Mr. Bush would come into the office and, in a friendly way, offer up stories about the drinking he'd done the night before, kind of as a conversation starter.
They're going to talk about their kids, they're going to talk about football, they're going to talk about the weather.
Archibald, a middle-class Alabama boy--who, by the way, is now a registered Democrat--didn't like that story.
Goodwyn dutifully notes that Baba Groom didn't remember George telling drunk stories.
But that means nothing, since they weren't the sort of things guys like Bush told the "girls".
Afraid I don't have time today to discuss these, but some stories need attention:
From Wednesday's Mirror the headline, "Have 200,000 AK47s Fallen Into the Hands of Iraq Terrorists?"
It follows a separate probe claiming that thousands of guns meant for Iraq's police and army instead went to al-Qaeda .
Amnesty chief spokesman Mike Blakemore said: "It's unbelievable that no one can account for 200,000 assault rifles.
If these weapons have gone missing it's a terrifying prospect."
A NATO spokesman said: "There's no tracking mechanism to ensure they don't fall into the wrong hands.
The Moldovan airline is Aerocom, and yes , it's one of Victor Bout's .
It's always a bang-your-head-against-the-wall moment, reading again the play the incompetence theory receives, even from some of the Administration's harshest mainstream critics.
Like the tens of billions of dollars that have been "lost" in Iraq, planeloads of arms don't just "vanish"; not when the Pentagon contracts the work to an international criminal of Bout's untouchable stature.