A bumper crop of opium poppies in Afghanistan has raised fears that an influx of cheap and dangerously pure heroin could flood the UK within the next few months.

Drug experts have warned that, with the price of a heroin wrap already £20 or less, they are concerned supply will outstrip demand, forcing dealers to try to attract new customers with low prices and create the biggest drug epidemic in the country for 20 years.

Some campaigners are worried there will be a rash of drug-related deaths because the heroin heading for the UK is likely to be stronger and more pure than many users are accustomed to.

“The heroin is heading our way and we have to be prepared for it,” warned Tom Wood, former deputy chief constable at Lothian and Borders Police and now chairman of the Edinburgh Drugs and Alcohol Action Team.

“It will be getting cheaper. If enough comes in, then supply will outstrip demand.

“The bigger concern is that it will become more powerful. We’re talking about extra strong, pure heroin. If it is pure it will be more dangerous.”
independent.co.uk

April 6 (Bloomberg) — Gold rose in London, approaching $600 for the first time since 1980, as investors bought bullion to hedge against rising oil prices amid concern over disruption to energy supplies.

Crude oil gained for a second day in New York as declining gasoline stockpiles before the peak U.S. summer-driving season added to concern about reduced supplies from Nigeria and Iran. Money in index-linked commodity funds will rise 38 percent this year to $140 billion, according to Barclays Capital.

“Rising oil prices and the political concerns are flowing into gold prices,” Gerard Burg, a commodity economist at National Australia Bank Ltd., said in Melbourne. “Investors are the real factor driving the gold prices.”

Gold for immediate delivery in London rose as much as $8.45, or 1.4 percent, to $596.95 an ounce, the highest since January, 1981. It traded at $594.80 at 12:49 p.m. local time. The metal rose to $602.50 on Dec. 23, 1980.

Funds have been the biggest buyers in 2006, outpacing purchases by jewelers, who accounted for 73 percent of demand last year, the London-based World Gold Council said in a March 29 newsletter.

Some investors buy gold to preserve purchasing power as inflation increases. The precious metal surged to $873 an ounce in New York in 1980, when consumer prices jumped more than 12 percent.
bloomberg.com

A man has vowed to go to prison rather than pay taxes which he believes would fund a “blatantly illegal war” in Iraq.

Robin Brookes, 52, appeared at Swindon County Court for refusing to pay a £580 income tax bill. Describing an imminent seizure of his goods as “blood money”, the doll’s house designer, from Market Lavington in Wiltshire, said: “I don’t want to break the law, and I want to contribute to education and health, the law and the police force, but I cannot pay for a government’s killing machine.

“The Iraq war is illegal and it is against the will of the people, which was amply demonstrated by people marching in London. I have been withholding taxes since the March 2003 invasion.”

Mr Brookes, who believes that 10 per cent of all tax is used by the Government to fund the military, was told by magistrates on Monday that bailiffs would seize his goods on 5 May unless he paid up.
independent.co.uk

Since the Iraqi elections in January, US foreign service officers at the Baghdad embassy have been writing a steady stream of disturbing cables describing drastically worsening conditions. Violence from incipient communal civil war is rapidly rising. Last month there were eight times as many assassinations committed by Shia militias as terrorist murders by Sunni insurgents. The insurgency, according to the reports, also continues to mutate. Meanwhile, President Bush’s strategy of training Iraqi police and army to take over from coalition forces – “when they stand up, we’ll stand down” – is perversely and portentously accelerating the strife. State department officials in the field are reporting that Shia militias use training as cover to infiltrate key positions. Thus the strategy to create institutions of order and security is fuelling civil war.

Rather than being received as invaluable intelligence, the messages are discarded or, worse, considered signs of disloyalty. Rejecting the facts on the ground apparently requires blaming the messengers. So far, two top attaches at the embassy have been reassigned elsewhere for producing factual reports that are too upsetting.

The Bush administration’s preferred response to increasing disintegration is to act as if it has a strategy that is succeeding. “More delusion as a solution in the absence of a solution,” said a senior state department official. Under the pretence that Iraq is being pacified, the military is partially withdrawing from hostile towns in the countryside and parts of Baghdad. By reducing the number of soldiers, the administration can claim its policy is working going into the midterm elections. But the jobs the military doesn’t want to perform are being sloughed off on state department “provisional reconstruction teams” (PRTs) led by foreign service officers. The rationale is that they will win Iraqi hearts-and-minds by organising civil functions.

The Pentagon has informed the state department it will not provide security for these officials and that mercenaries should be hired for protection instead. Internal state department documents listing the PRT jobs, dated March 30, reveal that the vast majority of them remain unfilled by volunteers. So the professionals are being forced to take the assignments in which “they can’t do what they are being asked to do”, as a senior department official told me.

Foreign service officers, as a rule, are self-abnegating in serving any administration. The state department’s Intelligence and Research Bureau was correct in its scepticism before the war about Saddam Hussein’s possession of WMDs, but was ignored. The department was correct in its assessment in its 17-volume Future of Iraq project about the immense effort required for reconstruction after the war, but it was disregarded. Now its reports from Iraq are correct, but their authors are being punished. Foreign service officers are to be sent out like tethered goats to the killing fields. When these misbegotten projects inevitably fail, the department will be blamed. Passive resistance to these assignments reflects anticipation of impending disaster, including the likely murder of diplomats.

Amid this internal crisis of credibility, the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, has washed her hands of her department. Her management skills are minimal. Now she has left coercing people to fill the PRTs to her counsellor, Philip Zelikow, who, by doing the dirty work, is trying to keep her reputation clean.
guardian.co.uk

John Reid demanded sweeping changes to international law yesterday to free British soldiers from the restraints of the Geneva conventions and make it easier for the west to mount military actions against other states.
In his speech, the defence secretary addressed three key issues: the treatment of prisoners, when to mount a pre-emptive strikes, and when to intervene to stop a humanitarian crisis. In all these areas, he indicated that the UK and west was being hamstrung by existing inadequate law.

Mr Reid indicated he believed existing rules, including some of the conventions – a bedrock of international law – were out of date and inadequate to deal with the threat of international terrorists.

“We are finding an enemy which obeys no rules whatsoever”, he said, referring to what he called “barbaric terrorism”.

The conventions, he said, were created more than half century ago “when the world was almost unrecognisable”. They dealt with how the sick and injured and how prisoners of war were treated, “and the obligations on states during their military occupation of another state”, he said.

Given the big changes undertaken by the military over the past 50 years, he added, “serious questions” must be asked about whether “further changes in international law in this area are necessary”.

Mr Reid declined to say whether he had come round to the US view that detainees at Guantánamo bay should not be allowed the protection of the conventions or the courts. Similarly, he would not say if he thought Britain should support the US practice of extraordinary rendition, the transferring of prisoners to secret camps where they risk being tortured. However, he said, it was not “sufficient just to say [Guantánamo] is wrong”.
guardian.co.uk

Charismatic televangelist John Hagee thinks that the Rev. Pat Robertson’s suggestion that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke was payback from God for withdrawing from Gaza was “insensitive and unnecessary.” But he nevertheless appears to share Robertson’s concern that Israel may be giving up too much land to the Palestinians.

To prevent the George W. Bush administration from pressuring the Israelis into turning over even more land, Hagee, the pastor of San Antonio’s Cornerstone Church and the head of a multimillion-dollar evangelical enterprise, recently brought together 400 Christian evangelical leaders – representing as many as 30 million Christians – for an invitation-only “Summit on Israel.”

The result was the launch of a new pro-Israel lobbying group called Christians United for Israel (CUFI).

By 2002, a number of veteran Christian conservative evangelical leaders and Republican Party power brokers had joined forces with conservative Jewish leaders to launch several pro-Israel organizations. But the history of Jewish-evangelical involvement goes back several decades.

According to Rabbi James Rudin, writing in his recently published book, The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of U.S., “the first [modern] evangelical-Jewish meeting” took place in New York in 1975.

A bevy of issues including “the meaning of Messiah in both traditions, Jesus the Jew, biblical theology, and the meaning of modern Israel and Jerusalem for Christian conservatives and Jews” were discussed.

Rudin points out that “the evangelical commitment to Israel creates some … ambivalence” in the Jewish community, since that “commitment” is built on the biblical belief that “without an Israel, an ingathering of Jewish exiles, [the] major event in Christian eschatology [the Second coming of Jesus to Jerusalem] cannot take place.”

“That is why some evangelicals are dismayed at any Israeli withdrawal or disengagement from any area of the biblical ‘Holy Land.’ That is also why the strong Christian conservative support of Israel is not linked to Middle East realpolitik or America’s growing thirst for Arab oil,” Rudin says.

Although not as well known on the national political scene as some of his evangelical brethren, Hagee has built an impressive evangelical empire and developed strong political ties to the Republican Party.

Since his 1978 “conversion” to Zionism, he has emphasized establishing and maintaining good relations with Israeli leaders and conservative sectors of the U.S. Jewish community. Over the years, he has met with Israeli heads of state and carved out a special relationship with former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose Likud Party performed dismally in the recent elections in Israel.

“Think of CUFI as a Christian version of American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC],” the powerful pro-Israel lobby, Hagee told The Jerusalem Post in an interview a few days before his February summit. “We need to be able to respond instantly to Washington with our concerns about Israel. We must join forces to speak as one group and move as one body to [respond to] the crisis Israel will be facing in the near future.”
antiwar.com

Iran’s persistent refusal to end its illicit nuclear programs is a direct threat to countries around the world. Iranian ballistic missiles are currently capable of delivering a nuclear warhead more than 1,200 miles. The video and maps below are intended to help you better understand the escalating threat that is Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.
aipac.org

While gauging public opinion can be a tall order in Iran, many of those who have spoken out so far say they are keen to maintain their independence, and this includes American money to continue their efforts to promote democracy in Iran.

The Bush administration has US$75 million in emergency funding to promote democracy in Iran, in addition to $10 million already budgeted.

Mohammad Ali Dadkhah is a co-founder of the Center for Human Rights Defenders. Dadkhah tells RFE/RL that democratic changes should come from inside the country – without outside interference. “Democracy is not a product that we can import from another country,” Dadkhah said. “We have to prepare the ground for it so that it can grow and bear fruit – especially because independent and national forces, and also self-reliant forces, in Iran will never accept a foreign country telling them what to do and which way to take.”

The proposed US aid would include $25 million to support “political dissidents, labor union leaders, and human-rights activists” in additional to non-governmental groups outside Iran. The declared aim is to allow them to build support inside the country.

The US administration also wants $50 million to set up round-the-clock television broadcasting in Persian to beam into Iran. Another $5 million is aimed at allowing Iranian students and scholars to study in the US. And $15 million is earmarked for other measures, such as expanding Internet access, which is tightly controlled in Iran.
asiatimes.com

KABUL (AFP) – A mortar blast near the main US military base in Afghanistan left a civilian dead while coalition forces killed an insurgent and dropped 2,000-pound bombs on a band of Taliban, officials said.

Police were investigating whether the explosion a few hundred metres from Bagram Airfield north of Kabul was the work of insurgents from the ousted Taliban government, local police commander Abdul Rahman Sayedkhili said.
news.yahoo.com

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Pakistani forces killed at least 40 pro-Taliban militants in a troubled tribal region near Afghan border, the military said on Thursday, sharply raising the tally from the previous day’s fierce fighting.

“Latest information shows that at least 40 miscreants were killed,” military spokesman Major-General Shaukat Sultan told Reuters, raising the tally from 16.
reuters.com