The latest UN proposals for Kosovo have been widely viewed in the international media as marking an important step towards independence. However, for many commentators, the plan put forward by the UN’s special mediator, Martti Ahtisaari, does not go far enough. Instead, it is seen as a sign of UN and EU weakness, in the face of Serbian and Russian reluctance to allow the people of Kosovo to have their freedom.

Under the UN plan, Kosovo would not have full sovereignty and would, for example, be ineligible to apply for membership of the UN. However, the government would be able to join some international institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and to have more of the formal trappings of sovereignty, such as its own security forces (1).

There is an air of déjà vu about these discussions. It seems that eight years after Kosovo was first ‘freed’ from the rump Yugoslav state – following a 78-day NATO bombing campaign and the establishment of an ‘autonomous’ regime under a United Nations-run administration – the same international parties are again attempting to free the tiny province from Serb rule.  http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2823/

A 1942 Nazi plot to wreck Britain’s economy with forged banknotes is detailed in a film shown in Berlin this weekend.

Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiters) sheds new light on one of the biggest currency forgery attempts in modern history. As the film tells it, the SS turned out notes with a face value of £134 million, much more than the total in the Bank of England. Had the fraud succeeded, the economy would have been crippled and the war lost.

The original idea was to drop the notes over remote parts of Britain, in expectation that few civilians would surrender the cash and that most of it would enter circulation. However, by 1943 Germany had lost control of the skies and it was decided to circulate the currency in Europe and the Middle East.

Adolf Burger, 89, a survivor of the team of concentration camp prisoners that made the notes, told The Times that Britain later kept silent about the operation. “They didn’t want it mentioned at Nuremberg because they didn’t want it known that a huge part of their currency was worthless. Instead, they slowly withdrew it from circulation.”  http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article1368626.ece

Earlier in March, the Bulgarian spy chief Kircho Kirov issued a more specific warning on presence of al Qaeda in the Balkans and bluntly stated that extremists with links to Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda network are present in the Balkans and are infiltrating other European countries. In a joint NATO-Bulgarian report published in March 2005, Kirov cities Kosovo as a direct source of regional instability and a hub for international terrorism.

Indeed, speaking by proxy is nothing new, so these broad and sweeping statements by Bulgaria are significant because it is the US with its FBI offices in Sofia that ultimately stand behind these statements. What is not new is that Washington itself, as usual, has elected to remain mute on the specific al-Qaeda presence among Kosovo Albanians so one is left to search for the terrorist dots elsewhere in order to connect them.

For example, Reuven Paz, who teaches at Haifa University and is regarded as one of Israel's leading researchers of radical Islamic movements, says that the Islamic countries and particularly Saudi Arabia view the conflicts in Kosovo as that of Islam against Christianity. "All of the Sunni Muslim groups as well as Iran are making lots of propaganda for Kosovo and see it as a symbol," Paz said. The reason for the propaganda is to attract Muslim volunteers to go to Kosovo and fight. Al-Qaeda then is the only well established network that can provide such a trip for a young prospective Muslim eager to do his Islamic tour of duty and willingly die for Allah.

While reports abound that Bosnian Jihadists simply swerved upon Kosovo during the 1995-1999 period, Jane's International Defense Review reported that some fresh Jihadists were entering Kosovo via Albania as well. In February 1999 Jane's cites that documents found on the body of a KLA member showed that he had escorted several volunteers into Kosovo, including more than a dozen Saudi Arabians.

A more specific case is that of a Syrian-German businessman, Mamoun Darkazanli, who was arrested in Hamburg in October of 2004 on charges that he “helped fund the al-Qaeda terrorist network for years and who is seen in a video at a mosque with some of the Sept. 11 hijackers.” According to the Hamburg authorities, “Darkazanli is alleged to have been involved in the purchase of a ship for bin Laden, handling administrative details, and paying bills. He also allegedly traveled to Kosovo in late 2000 on an al-Qaeda mission”.

In 2003, NBC News acquired a videotaped statement of Muhammad Talal al-Jafar al Tallani Ackbar al-Walid, described as al-Qaeda's Deputy Under-Emir for Defensive Intelligence and Holy War Operations, denouncing US and calling for world Jihad against the West. The report then goes on to describe Muhammad Talal as one that was “involved in noteworthy military operations in the past, serving in covert operations alongside the CIA in Afghanistan and in Bosnia and Kosovo before joining al-Qaeda.” The report cites that American soldiers Lt. Gen. William Boykin and Will Dunham contributed to the report.

Reported al-Qaeda cells in Kosovo are indicated in red, resembling a satellite structure.

Yet, the most blunt admittance that al-Qaeda is in Kosovo comes from the big dogs themselves - Britain and the US.

Alarmed that al-Qaeda may hit Britain during the run-up to the May 5 general elections, UK says that "the main threat is posed by around 200 people based here who have been trained by al Qaeda in Afghan camps for conflict in places such as Chechnya, Bosnia and Kosovo."

Also stated as an inadvertent afterthought that al-Qaeda is in Kosovo came few weeks earlier by the FBI citing an arrest warrant for a certain Kifah Wael Jayyousi accused of "conspiring with two other men in the 1990s to finance, recruit and provide equipment to extremists fighting in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo and Somalia."

The question then is no longer whether al-Qaeda is in Kosovo, but rather how could al-Qaeda have infiltrated Albanian inhabited areas of the Balkans precisely during the period when the US was blanketing it with its own troops.

http://www.serbianna.com/columns/mb/035.shtml

FRENCH intelligence has produced a dossier alleging that al-Qaeda plans an attack on the country during forthcoming presidential elections.

The Arabic-language al-Hayat daily newspaper has reported there were "several indications of a plot to copy the Spanish scenario in France", a reference to the explosions that rocked Madrid in March 2004.

The London-based daily quoted mainly "messages posted on internet sites close to al-Qaeda carrying threats against France, accompanied by pictures from the campaigns for the presidential elections", which are slated for April and May.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/alqaeda-in-plot-to-attack-france/2007/02/10/1170524345165.html

The words from Senator Barack Obama as he formally announced his campaign for president on a frigid Saturday morning were not particularly new.

They included the familiar menu of Democratic causes, a call for universal health care, better pay for teachers and more protection for workers, along with a strong summons to end the war in Iraq.

But it was how he put the words together, the ease and optimism of his manner, and the symbolism built into the moment, that was more powerful and memorable, and why he passed an important first test in what will be the nation's longest campaign for the White House.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/obamas-road-to-white-house/2007/02/11/1171128797121.html

 While any snowfall recently has been light, a storm set to strengthen in the southern Plains will spread a swath of plowable snow from the northern High Plains to the Ohio Valley Monday into Tuesday. The Northeast will then be under the gun for a significant amount of snow for Valentine's Day.

After the weekend ends on a mainly calm note across the eastern half of the nation, stormy and wintry weather will impact areas from the Plains to the East Coast during the first half of the workweek. The culprit behind the snow, rain and thunderstorms, which has already prompted Winter Storm Watches across the Ohio Valley, is the storm that will make for an unsettled day across the Western states today.

 http://wwwa.accuweather.com/news-top-headline.asp?partner=accuweather&traveler=0

The U.S. military has detected a significant increase in the number of sophisticated roadside bombs appearing in Iraq and believes that orders to send components for them came from the "highest levels" of the Iranian government, a senior defense analyst said Sunday. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17097658/

A military judge in Fort Lewis, Washington, has declared a mistrial in the court-martial of Lieut. Ehren Watada, the first commissioned officer prosecuted for refusing to go to Iraq. A new trial is believed to be unlikely before summer, if at all. The mistrial represents a significant victory for Watada, for the rights of military resisters and for the movement of civil resistance to US war crimes in Iraq.

On the surface, the ruling by Lieut. Col. John Head appears to result from a procedural technicality, but in fact it is a defeat for the Army's central goal in prosecuting the 28-year-old officer. The judge had gone to extraordinary lengths to try to keep Watada from achieving his objective of "putting the war on trial," ruling that Watada's motivations for refusing to deploy with his unit were "irrelevant" and that no witnesses could testify on the illegality of the war.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070226/brechersmith

When politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works. We were treated to another dose of it recently when the experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the Summary for Policymakers that puts the political spin on an unfinished scientific dossier on climate change due for publication in a few months’ time. They declared that most of the rise in temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to man-made greenhouse gases.

The small print explains “very likely” as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90% sure about it. Older readers may recall a press conference at Harwell in 1958 when Sir John Cockcroft, Britain’s top nuclear physicist, said he was 90% certain that his lads had achieved controlled nuclear fusion. It turned out that he was wrong. More positively, a 10% uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for any latterday Galileo or Einstein to storm through with a better idea. That is how science really works.

Twenty years ago, climate research became politicised in favour of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers. And while the media usually find mavericks at least entertaining, in this case they often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported.

Enthusiasm for the global-warming scare also ensures that heatwaves make headlines, while contrary symptoms, such as this winter’s billion-dollar loss of Californian crops to unusual frost, are relegated to the business pages. The early arrival of migrant birds in spring provides colourful evidence for a recent warming of the northern lands. But did anyone tell you that in east Antarctica the Adélie penguins and Cape petrels are turning up at their spring nesting sites around nine days later than they did 50 years ago? While sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978, it has grown by 8% in the Southern Ocean.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1363818.ece

MARTIN McGUINNESS, the Sinn Fein MP, is facing allegations that he ran IRA operations in the late 1980s despite stating under oath that he had left the terrorist organisation more than a decade earlier.

He has been accused in a new book by a former IRA colleague of ordering a wave of attacks that culminated in the killing of eight terrorists by the SAS during a failed attempt to storm a police station in 1987.

In a separate development, police are planning to interview him about an IRA inquiry that he conducted into the murder of a hostage in 1990.

The disclosures cast doubt on McGuinness’s statement under oath in November 2003, at the tribunal investigating the Bloody Sunday killings of 1972, that: “I left the IRA in the early part of the 1970s.”

They also put pressure on McGuinness to come clean about his IRA past in the run-up to Northern Ireland elections on March 7. He hopes to be deputy first minister, but he must first satisfy the Democratic Unionist party of Ian Paisley, the likely first minister, of his support for the police.

However, in an interview with a Spanish academic, Brendan Hughes, a former senior Provo, describes attending an IRA meeting with McGuinness in Co Donegal in the Irish Republic in 1986. Hughes claims McGuinness authorised a “major push” by the IRA that culminated in the death of eight members and a civilian at Loughgall, Co Armagh, in 1987.

Hughes told Rogelio Alonso, a politics lecturer at King Juan Carlos University, Madrid, that McGuinness believed the attacks would protect himself and Gerry Adams, now Sinn Fein president, against internal criticism as they tried to change the party’s rules.

The interview is included in Alonso’s book The IRA and Armed Struggle, which has recently been translated into English. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1364718.ece

THE top Catholic official on Chinese soil has lashed out at Beijing, saying the ordinations last year of three bishops without Vatican approval were illegitimate and "acts of war".

Hong Kong Cardinal Joseph Zen, who travelled to the Vatican last month to map out the Holy See's China strategy, told the BBC on Friday: "These three illegitimate ordinations ... are acts of war against the church.

"So how can you say that we opt for confrontation? They are waging a war, they want to destroy the church," said Cardinal Zen, the head of Hong Kong's Catholic dioceses and a Vatican adviser on Chinese affairs.

A battle between Beijing and the Vatican over control of church posts flared as China's state-backed Catholic church installed bishops without papal blessing last year.  http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,,21204059-5005961,00.html

"Environmentalism as Religion"

by Michael Crichton
Commonwealth Club
San Francisco, CA
September 15, 2003



I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.

We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.

As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism. And in order not to be misunderstood, I want it perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment. I believe it is important to act in ways that are sympathetic to the environment, and I believe this will always be a need, carrying into the future. I believe the world has genuine problems and I believe it can and should be improved. But I also think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immensely difficult, and the consequences of our actions are often difficult to know in advance. I think our past record of environmental action is discouraging, to put it mildly, because even our best intended efforts often go awry. But I think we do not recognize our past failures, and face them squarely. And I think I know why.

I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.  http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote05.html

FOUR British citizens have been deported from Kenya to Somalia where they face terrorism charges carrying the death penalty for allegedly fighting alongside Al-Qaeda-linked terrorists.

Their lawyer, Louise Christian, said their families had been assured by the Foreign Office that they would be returned to the UK this weekend, and accused it of “failing abysmally in its responsibilities.”

“They face torture, arbitrary detention and capital punishment,” she said. “This is the first time there’s been evidence of direct participation in an act of extraordinary rendition by the British government.” The Foreign Office said it was powerless to intervene because it was the decision of the Kenyan government.

The Muslim Human Rights Forum in Nairobi warned that foreign alleged jihadists recently sent back to Somalia have been executed.

The four Britons, sent to the southern Somalian town of Baidoa, were captured by SAS troops working with the Kenyan antiterrorist police on January 20. They are alleged to have “good links” to Al-Qaeda, one defence source said.

The SAS have been acting as a “screen” on the Kenyan border to trap terrorists fleeing American special operations forces in Somalia after the defeat of the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) militias. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1364761.ece

The United States is trying to fabricate Iran’s involvement in attacks on US troops in Iraq, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations said in a radio interview aired on Friday.

Javad Zarif told National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” program that Iran has “no interest” in providing weapons to any insurgent group in Iraq.

“But the problem is that the United States has decided on a policy and is trying to find or fabricate evidence if it cannot find one — and I believe it hasn’t been able to find an evidence — in order to substantiate and corroborate that policy,” Zarif said. 

McConnell was the Pentagon's top intelligence officer during the first Iraq war and later headed the National Security Agency, an information-protection and intelligence-gathering organization.  He made his comments February 1 to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Senator Jay Rockefeller.

If confirmed by the full Senate, McConnell said he would push reforms suggested by Congress emphasizing "integration of the intelligence community."

"We know that terrorist organizations today are making plans for attacks on our citizens inside our borders," McConnell testified.  Previously, the intelligence community "focused almost exclusively on foreign threats outside our borders.  What is new is the need to focus on these threats inside our borders."

To counter that security challenge, McConnell said he would use his new job as overall director of most U.S. intelligence operations, including the CIA, to push reforms aimed at improving "collecting and processing information ... consistent with our Constitution, our laws and our values to respect the rights and privacy of our citizens."  http://usinfo.state.gov/xarchives/display.html?p=washfile-english&y=2007&m=February&x=200702061103421EJrehsiF0.1179926

The U.S. State Department's top official on Africa went to Capitol Hill Tuesday to defend U.S. policy in Somalia. In December, Somali forces, backed by Ethiopian troops, drove out the Islamist government that had gained control of much of the country last year. In the weeks since then, U.S. has offered support to the transitional government that is now in control in Mogadishu. VOA's Marissa Melton reports from Washington.

Jendayi Frazer (undated photo)

State Department Assistant Secretary for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer came under tough questioning Tuesday by senators who were seeking a clearer outline of administration policy in Somalia.

Senator Russ Feingold began by asking Frazer why the Bush administration had missed a congressional deadline to submit a plan for Somali stabilization.

Frazer replied:

"What we're trying to do is develop, as you have asked and the Congress has asked, a comprehensive strategy," she said. "Let me just state that part of building a comprehensive strategy is actually responding to the events on the ground and actually implementing the strategies we have in place."

http://www.voanews.com/english/2007-02-06-voa81.cfm

The Afghan government is mulling the ways to dislodge Taliban militants from Musa Qala in the southern Helmand province, Presidential spokesman Mohammad Karim Rahimi said Tuesday.

"Afghan government is considering the ways to regain the control of Musa Qala without inflicting casualties on civilians," Rahimi told newsmen at a news briefing here.

However, he did not give more details, only saying the government is planning to solve the problem with minimum casualties.

Hundreds of Taliban fighters overran the far-flanged district early Friday.  http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200702/07/eng20070207_348109.html

An Iranian government-sponsored body set up to probe the veracity of the Holocaust on Tuesday challenged Europe to hand over documents about the mass slaughter of Jews in World War II, the IRNA state news agency reported.

Mohammad Ali Ramin, head of the World Holocaust Foundation created after Iran's controversial Holocaust conference last year, said Austria, Germany and Poland in particular should supply documents.

"They should hand over the proof for the dossier on the organised massacre of Jews in Europe during World War II to the independent international fact-finding committee affiliated to this foundation," the agency quoted him as saying.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ordered the creation of the foundation after inviting a number of controversial revisionist Holocaust researchers to a conference in Tehran in December that caused an international outcry.

Ahmadinejad has repeatedly questioned the scale of the Holocaust, described the mass killing of six million Jews in World War II as a "myth" and also called for Israel to be "wiped from the map".  http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__international_news/&articleid=298138

Spanish police warned yesterday that the country was becoming a base for Pakistani terrorists, after detaining a Moroccan suspected of belonging to a terrorist outfit involved in recruiting suicide bombers for Al Qaeda.
Morocco had issued an international arrest warrant for Moroccan Mbark el-Jaafari, who was captured in Reus, near Spain’s eastern city of Tarragona, Spain’s Interior Ministry said.
El-Jaafari was charged with belonging to a terrorist structure, allegedly run by the Algerian-based Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC), which is believed to co-ordinate Al Qaeda-related organisations in northern Africa.
The network was thought to have recruited 32 people for suicide bombings in Iraq and for preparing attacks in Morocco since May 2006. The network allegedly used Algerian camps of the GSPC for training terrorists.  http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=131333&version=1&template_id=39&parent_id=21

Last week, under pressure from US Ambassador to Kenya Michael Ranneberger, Kenyan authorities released from prison Sheikh Sharif Ahmad, one of the leaders of the ousted al-Qaida-linked Islamic Courts Union (ICU) in Somalia.

In late December, with US backing and support, Ethiopian forces invaded Somalia with forces from the recognized Somali Transitional Federal Government, (TFG). The invasion came a month after the ICU declared jihad against Ethiopia and Kenya. ICU forces, which had set up a Taliban-style tyranny throughout the country, fled before the Ethiopian advance. In just six days, the ICU was overthrown and the recognized Somali government had retaken control over Mogadishu.

From the outset of the Ethiopian invasion, the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) both demanded an immediate Ethiopian retreat.

This is not surprising because the ICU has been the beneficiary of generous support from Arab League and OIC member states Eritrea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, Djibouti, Yemen and Libya. According to respected military analyst Bill Roggio, US intelligence officials maintain that the so-called Saudi “Golden Chain” of al-Qaida financiers have given $200 million to the ICU since last spring. The EU also demanded that Ethiopia withdraw its forces and that the TFG negotiate an accord with al-Qaida’s front organization in the Horn of Africa. Today EU humanitarian aid commissioner Louis Michel has linked EU assistance to the TGF to its acceptance of ICU elements in its government.

THE US was the only country that backed Ethiopia, and with good reason. Shortly after Ethiopian forces took control of Mogadishu, US aircraft pursued fleeing al-Qaida terrorists in southern Somalia after intelligence reports indicated that among the fleeing ICU leaders were the masterminds of the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

Disturbingly, the US seems to have abandoned the fight.  http://commonsensewonder.com/?p=1780

My secret talks with Syria, by Israeli envoy

The ambassador, Hassan Kazemi Qumi, said Iran was prepared to offer Iraqi forces training, equipment and advisers for what he called “the security fight.” In the economic area, Mr. Qumi said, Iran was ready to assume major responsibility for the reconstruction of Iraq, an area of notable failure on the part of the United States since American-led forces overthrew Saddam Hussein in the invasion nearly four years ago.

Mr. Qumi also acknowledged, for the first time, that two Iranians seized and later released by American forces last month were security officials, as the United States had claimed. But he said that they were engaged in legitimate discussions with the Iraqi government and should not have been detained.

Mr. Qumi’s remarks, in a 90-minute interview over tea and large Iranian pistachio nuts at the Iranian Embassy here, amounted to the most authoritative and substantive response the Iranians have made yet to increasingly belligerent accusations by the Bush administration that Iran is acting against American interests in Iraq. President Bush has said the American military is authorized to take whatever action necessary against Iranians in Iraq found to be engaged in actions deemed hostile.

The Iranian ambassador abruptly agreed to a longstanding request for the interview — made repeatedly after the first American seizure of Iranians here on Dec. 21 — and seemed eager to rebut the accusations and assert Iran’s legitimate interests in its neighbor. How much direction, if any, he was taking from his government was unclear. http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/sf/nyt1_29_7.htm

Sinn Fein, the main Catholic republican party in Northern Ireland, voted Sunday to endorse the police force in the divided province, opening the way toward restoring local rule through a government shared by Protestants and Catholics.

Sinn Fein’s leaders, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, won approval to support a police force that would move over the next 15 years from being a Protestant-dominated body to one where Catholics and Protestants are represented in proportion to the makeup of the province’s population.

An overwhelming majority of the 900 delegates who had gathered here voted to endorse the force after six hours of discussions.

The vote signals a shift in the thinking of the Irish republicans, who since 1922 have distrusted the police, courts and prisons in Northern Ireland as institutions of British rule.

Sinn Fein has long regarded the Northern Ireland police force as an armed force that had allied with British soldiers to maintain British rule in the province.

The vote on Sunday allows the British and Irish governments to move ahead in coming days with plans to persuade the Northern Ireland Protestants, led by the Rev. Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, to share power with Sinn Fein Catholics in a Belfast-based government.

Tony Blair, the British prime minister, and Bertie Ahern, the Irish prime minister, praised the vote on Sunday. They are to meet Tuesday in London to discuss plans to restore local rule to the province.

Under the British-Irish plan to begin transferring power from Britain to local rule, known as the St. Andrews Agreement proposals, Sinn Fein’s pledge to endorse the Northern Ireland police force was necessary for the Democratic Unionists to consider giving their support to a shared government.

http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/fairenough/nyt847.html

It was a dispute in a university cafeteria that erupted into the worst sectarian violence in Lebanon in 15 years. How it started and who is to blame depends on which side tells the story.

But even as young Shiite and Sunni men on both sides armed themselves for a bloody face-off last Thursday, their parents begged them to stop – horrific images of Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war rekindling in their minds.

The political standoff between the government and opposition, simmering for two months, has taken an increasingly violent and sectarian turn in the past week, exposing long-dormant divisions between Lebanon's Sunnis and Shiites, and rival Christian factions.

At stake in the spiraling conflict is who will define the identity of Lebanon, a colonial-era construct that includes 18 confessions, and in recent decades has served as the proxy battlefield for broader regional struggles by Israel, Syria, Palestinians, and today, the US and Iran.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0129/p01s04-wome.html?s=itmthumb

Tribune special report: How the U.S. spread bomb-grade fuel worldwide and failed to get it back.

The urgent call reached Armando Travelli in Vienna.

Get to Romania as soon as possible, the voice on the phone told Travelli, a U.S. scientist-turned-diplomat. Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu is considering returning the bomb-grade uranium America had given him.

Within days, Travelli stepped inside a sprawling nuclear research reactor in the southern Romanian city of Pitesti. There he saw firsthand the chilling consequences of using highly enriched uranium to cement alliances with backwater dictators.

He watched as one worker reached into a pipe and nonchalantly pulled out a spaghetti-like jumble of electrical wires. Later, he learned that other workers had wedged a hunk of wood between two uranium-filled rods to keep them from jostling in the reactor pool. The makeshift repair backfired when the wood swelled and couldn't be removed.

But Travelli, who shuttled back and forth to the facility from Chicago for several years in the 1980s, didn't know the worst of it. When his mission bogged down, the Romanians not only held on to the highly enriched uranium, they secretly used it and the reactor to help separate plutonium--the first step in building an atomic bomb.

Ceausescu has long since faced a firing squad, and his successors disclosed the secret effort. But a quarter-century after Travelli's first visit to the reactor, some of the dangerous material remains there. http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/sf/trib1_28_7.htm

PRIESTS, PROSTITUTES, psychologists, cops, jazz musicians, poker players. Every trade has its jargon and "insider lingo."

Soldier slang, however, has a peculiar appeal. That's understandable. Waging war is a risky, all-encompassing endeavor — physically, emotionally and psychologically. War reveals humankind at its best and its worst, and war-fighter slang, reflects the bitter, terrifying, sometimes inspiring hell of it.

Every war adds something new — and often obscene — to the soldiers' vocabulary. World War II-era Hollywood dialogue glamorized (and often scrubbed) combat slang, but the warrior's rhetorical swagger, irony and biting humor predate film by several millenniums.

Often, new idioms and phrases describe old, difficult truths. Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz said that war is the realm of "friction." World War II veterans invoked Murphy's Law: "If something can go wrong, it will." As you'll see in the brief lexicon I've pulled together below, the New Greatest Generation (the generation fighting the war on terror) dubs it "the suck."

"Embrace the suck" isn't merely a wisecrack; it's an encyclopedic experience rendered as an epigram, gritty shorthand for "Face it, soldier. I've been there. War ain't easy. Now deal with the difficulty and let's get on with the mission."

That's sound advice for a nation at war.
Check out the new war slang here: http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/fairenough/latimes775.html

IRAQ'S Vice-President Abd al-Mahdi has noted that the US has two options in the war: either they stay or they withdraw.