US preparations for an air strike against Iran are at an advanced stage, in spite of repeated public denials by the Bush administration, according to informed sources in Washington.
The present military build-up in the Gulf would allow the US to mount an attack by the spring. But the sources said that if there was an attack, it was more likely next year, just before Mr Bush leaves office.
Neo-conservatives, particularly at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, are urging Mr Bush to open a new front against Iran. So too is the vice-president, Dick Cheney. The state department and the Pentagon are opposed, as are Democratic congressmen and the overwhelming majority of Republicans. The sources said Mr Bush had not yet made a decision. http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,2010086,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=1
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. The Munich security conference was born in the 1960s - the height of the Cold War. Forty years on, there been talk of a new chill. Given the tone and content of Russian President Vladimir Putin's address to the gathered defence ministers, parliamentarians and pundits, it is not, perhaps, hard to see why.
Warming quickly to his task after only the briefest of greetings, President Putin accused the US of establishing, or trying to establish, a "uni-polar" world.
"What is a uni-polar world? No matter how we beautify this term, it means one single centre of power, one single centre of force and one single master," he said. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6350847.stm Envoys from the United Nations and the African Union are visiting Sudan on a joint mission to re-energise the peace process for Darfur. Jan Eliasson and Salim Ahmed Salim also want to secure Khartoum's permission for the deployment of UN troops.
Despite a peace agreement and numerous ceasefires the conflict in Sudan's far west shows little sign of ending.
More than 200,000 people have been killed and more than two million made homeless since war broke out in 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/6352181.stm Climate of Opinion Last week's headlines about the United Nations' latest report on global warming were typically breathless, predicting doom and human damnation like the most fervent religious evangelical. Yet the real news in the fourth assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) may be how far it is backpedaling on some key issues. Beware claims that the science of global warming is settled.
The document that caused such a stir was only a short policy report, a summary of the full scientific report due in May. Written mainly by policymakers (not scientists) who have a stake in the issue, the summary was long on dire predictions. The press reported the bullet points, noting that this latest summary pronounced with more than "90% confidence" that humans have been the main drivers of warming since the 1950s, and that higher temperatures and rising sea levels would result. More pertinent is the underlying scientific report. And according to people who have seen that draft, it contains startling revisions of previous U.N. predictions. http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009625
The latest U.N. report shows the "warming" debate is far from settled.