Condoleezza Rice on Thursday raised the diplomatic temperature over the nuclear stand-off with Iran, accusing the country of lying about its activities and again calling it a “central banker to terrorism”.

The US secretary of state was speaking in Sydney at the start of a three-day official visit to Australia, which will include talks with Canberra and Japan over the vexed Iranian issue.

Ms Rice described Iran as a “troubled state” where an “unelected few repress the desires of its population”.
ft.com

ah sweet irony…

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) – Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar vowed a ferocious offensive against U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, saying on Thursday they would soon face unimaginable violence.

An insurgency that has killed more than 1,500 people since the start of last year has intensified in recent months with a wave of suicide bombings, including at least 12 this year.

Ten U.S. troops have been killed in combat this year and U.S. commanders have said they expect violence to increase in coming months as the weather warms, snow on mountain passes melts, and Afghanistan’s traditional fighting season begins.

“With the arrival of the warm weather, we will make the ground so hot for the invaders it will be unimaginable for them,” Omar said in his message, read by Taliban spokesman Mohammad Hanif over the telephone from an undisclosed location.

The fugitive Taliban leader, who carries a $10 million reward, also said a stream of young Afghans were volunteering for suicide missions, the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press news agency said.
reuters.com

…The ongoing dialogue between the U.S. and the Sunni insurgency is based on a shared wariness about the influence of Iran and its supporters in Iraq. U.S. officials are now saying bluntly that it’s time to bring back the Baath Party, excluding only those that are guilty of specific crimes. That reflects a growing acceptance among U.S. officials that the military and bureaucratic know-how in the Sunni community is badly needed, even to help run the security forces that the U.S. is standing up.

Senior Baathist insurgent commanders are responding positively to the U.S. outreach on the political and military level. One senior commander I spoke to praised the U.S. for the release of some key Baathist officers who had been imprisoned, and later, when I asked a senior U.S. intelligence officer about the releases, he said the men had been freed as part of a calculated effort to demonstrate good faith in dealing with the insurgents. Of course, both sides share the objective of avoiding a civil war.
time.com

yeah of course

U.S. launches largest air assault since invasion of Iraq
BAGHDAD, Iraq — In a well-publicized show of force, U.S. and Iraqi forces swept into the countryside north of the capital in 50 helicopters today looking for insurgents in what the American military called its “largest air assault” in nearly three years.

The military said the assault — Operation Swarmer — detained 41 people, found stolen uniforms and captured weapons including explosives used in making roadside bombs. It said the operation would continue over several days.

There was no bombing or firing from the air in the offensive northeast of Samarra, a town 60 miles north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said. All 50 aircraft were helicopters — Black Hawks, Apaches and Chinooks — used to ferry in and provide cover for the 1,450 Iraqi and U.S. troops.

Residents in the area reported a heavy U.S. and Iraqi troop presence and said large explosions could be heard in the distance.

Operation Swarmer came as the Bush administration was attempting to show critics at home and abroad that it is dealing effectively with Iraq’s insurgency and increasingly sectarian violence.

UNITED NATIONS — The U.S. stood nearly alone today as it voted against the creation of a new U.N. Human Rights Council, saying the reform did not go far enough in keeping abusers off the panel.

However, U.S. officials did not carry through on a threat to block the new body’s funding, and pledged to work with other nations to make the council “as strong as it can be.”

Jan Eliasson, president of the General Assembly called the vote “a historic moment for human rights” as 170 member-states backed the new council. Israel, the Marshall Islands and Palau joined the U.S. in voting against, while Iran, Venezuela and Belarus abstained.

After the applause faded in the General Assembly hall, U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said that the assembled diplomats had missed an historic opportunity to help those most in need.
latimes.com

…In the 1970s, the average number of intense Category 4 and 5 hurricanes occurring globally was about 10 per year. Since 1990, that number has nearly doubled, averaging about 18 a year.

Category 4 hurricanes have sustained winds from 131 to 155 mph. Category 5 systems, such as Hurricane Katrina at its peak, feature winds of 156 mph or more. Wilma last year set a record as the most intense hurricane on record with winds of 175 mph.

While some scientists believe this trend is just part of natural ocean and atmospheric cycles, others argue that rising sea surface temperatures as a side effect of global warming is the primary culprit.

According to this scenario, warming temperatures heat up the surface of the oceans, increasing evaporation and putting more water vapor into the atmosphere. This in turn provides added fuel for storms as they travel over open oceans.
livescience.com

Four back-to-back storms over the last three weeks have dumped more rain on parts of the islands than they normally would have seen in months, and drenched Kauai with up to six times more rain than normal for all of March, the National Weather Service said yesterday.

…Over the last three weeks, Mount Waialeale has seen more than 106 inches, and Lihue Airport has gotten 28.9 inches.

“Kauai has taken the brunt of the most widespread, excessive rainfall,” the weather service said. “Even the normally drier leeward sides have been much wetter than normal.”

On Oahu, Poamoho saw the biggest rainfall total over the three-week period, with 63 inches. Wilson Tunnel got 39.1 inches — a far second, but a more than six-fold increase from 2005. Punaluu, Luluku and the Waihee Pump rounded out the top five rainfall totals for Oahu.

Waiakea Uka and Glenwood topped the totals for the Big Island, getting 43.6 inches and 42.9 inches, respectively — up to four times higher than normal. Mountain View saw 37.8 inches, compared with 4 inches last year.
starbulletin.com

A new study suggests Canadian baby boomers are more likely to fall asleep watching television than after having sex with their partner at night.

The Ipsos-Reid survey published Thursday found Canadians between 40 and 64 years old dedicate an average of just 15 minutes a day to sex and romance.

They said they were too stressed or too tired or simply did not have enough time for a romp in bed.

But, the protagonists of the 1960s sexual revolution said they spent about four or five hours per day watching television or surfing the Internet, more than 30 hours per week in total.

Almost half found sex intimate and tender, maybe a bit predictable now, but 80 percent agreed it made them feel “loved and appreciated” and said it deepened intimacy in their relationship.

A majority also said sex is no less enjoyable now than in their twenties. Only 28 percent of those surveyed said their sex life was not as “wild and hot” or less fun.
breitbart.com

Normally new rivers, seas and mountains are born in slow motion. The Afar Triangle near the Horn of Africa is another story. A new ocean is forming there with staggering speed — at least by geological standards. Africa will eventually lose its horn.

Geologist Dereje Ayalew and his colleagues from Addis Ababa University were amazed — and frightened. They had only just stepped out of their helicopter onto the desert plains of central Ethiopia when the ground began to shake under their feet. The pilot shouted for the scientists to get back to the helicopter. And then it happened: the Earth split open. Crevices began racing toward the researchers like a zipper opening up. After a few seconds, the ground stopped moving, and after they had recovered from their shock, Ayalew and his colleagues realized they had just witnessed history. For the first time ever, human beings were able to witness the first stages in the birth of an ocean.

PHOTO GALLERY: HIGH-SPEED GEOLOGY IN AFRICA
service.spiegel.de

Interests: The Prince and the Citizen

About 500 years ago modern political thinking began. Its enticing surface was the idea of “realism.” Its ruthless center was the idea that with a worthwhile end one could justify any means. Its spokesman was Nicolo Machiavelli.

In the year 1498 Machiavelli became adviser on foreign and military affairs to the government of Florence, one of the great Italian cities of that time. After fourteen years of service, a change of government led to his dismissal, and he spent the rest of his life in exile in the countryside outside of Florence. During that time he wrote, among other things, a little book called The Prince, which became the world’s most famous hand book of political wisdom for governments and their advisers.

Four weeks before Machiavelli took office, something happened in Florence that made a profound impression on him. It was a public hanging. The victim was a monk named Savonarola, who preached that people could be guided by their “natural reason.” This threatened to diminish the importance of the Church fathers, who then showed their importance by having Savonarola arrested. His hands were bound behind his back and he was taken through the streets in the night, the crowds swinging lanterns near his face, peering for the signs of his dangerousness.

Savonarola was interrogated and tortured for ten days. They wanted to extract a confession, but he was stubborn. The Pope, who kept in touch with the torturers, complained that they were not getting results quickly enough. Finally the right words came, and Savonarola was sentenced to death. As his body swung in the air, boys from the neighbor hood stoned it. The corpse was set afire, and when the fire had done its work, the ashes were strewn in the river Arno.

In The Prince, Machiavelli refers to Savonarola and says, “Thus it comes about that all armed prophets have conquered and unarmed ones failed.”

Political ideas are centered on the issue of ends (What kind of society do we want?) and means (How will we get it?). In that one sentence about unarmed prophets Machiavelli settled for modern governments the question of ends: conquest. And the question of means: force.
Machiavelli refused to be deflected by utopian dreams or romantic hopes and by questions of right and wrong or good and bad. He is the father of modern political realism, or what has been called realpolilik. “It appears to me more proper to go to the truth of the matter than to its imagination…for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather learn to bring about his own ruin than his preservation.”

It is one of the most seductive ideas of our time.
informationclearinghouse.info

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraqi police detained an American private security contractor working at a U.S. military base in northern Iraq for several hours on Tuesday, a U.S. military spokesman said.

The spokesman said the man was arrested at a checkpoint in the northern town of Tikrit. He denied initial reports that explosives were found in the car, but said two AK-47 assault rifles were in the vehicle.

“He was picked up by Iraqi police after being detained at a checkpoint in Tikrit,” the spokesman said, adding police later released him. “We are looking at why he left the base unescorted.”

Abdullah Jebara, deputy governor of Salahaddin province, earlier told Reuters the man was arrested in Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit on Monday and that U.S. forces removed him from the provincial government building on Tuesday.

The man was stopped by police for violating a daytime curfew in Tikrit, a security source said. American security personnel rarely travel alone.

A spokesman for the major crimes unit in Tikrit said he was first brought to their headquarters but they refused to take him into custody, adding police were told to take the man to the provincial council building.
yahoo.com

A pretty euphemism, calling a paid mercenary a ‘security contractor.’

Mass grave find fuels sectarian tension in Iraq
Iraq moved closer to sectarian civil war as police found the bodies of 87 men killed in Baghdad, many of them showing signs of torture. The dead appear to be Sunni Muslims killed in retaliation for the bombs that slaughtered 58 people and wounded 200 when they exploded in crowded markets in the strongly Shia area of Sadr City.

Some 29 dead men were found yesterday buried in a pit in a playing field. “Some children were playing soccer and they smelt something strong and the police were notified,” said a police spokesman. Members of a Shia militia dug in a pit to unearth the bodies. They found that the men had been gagged and bound and were in their underwear. Many of them had been tortured before being shot dead.

The Interior Ministry spokesman, Lt-Col Falah al-Mohammedawi, said that the men appeared to have been killed in Kamaliyah, a mostly Shia district in east Baghdad, about three days ago. Local residents offered sheets to cover the bodies as they were dragged from the earth.

A photographer for the Associated Press agency who took pictures of the grave was warned not to publish them. The location of the grave suggests that the dead men were Sunni.

The fear now in Baghdad is that the bombs detonated by Sunni insurgents in Shia neighbourhoods are leading to immediate retaliation against Sunnis.

Until a bomb attack destroyed the holy Shia shrine in Samarra on 22 February, Shias had been restrained in their reaction to repeated attacks on them since 2003. They were also cautioned against being provoked into seeking vengeance by influential Shia clerics such as the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Since the Samarra bomb the Shia willingness to heed his calls for patience is much reduced.

In another atrocity, 15 bodies of men who had been strangled were found in an abandoned minibus parked between two Sunni districts in west Baghdad. In Sadr City, a further four men were shot in the head and their bodies hanged from electricity pylons. Elsewhere in Baghdad another 40 bodies, both Shia and Sunni, were found said Lt-Col Mohammedawi.

…”May God damn you,” said Mr Sadr of Mr Rumsfeld. “You said in the past that civil war would break out if you had to withdraw, and now you say that in face of civil war you won’t interfere.”

Humanitarian situation remains critical in Kirkuk as ethnic tensions rise
BAGHDAD, 14 March (IRIN) – The oil-rich city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq has been the scene of ongoing displacement and rising ethnic tensions in the past six months, according to local officials.

“The humanitarian situation in the city is very bad and thousands of innocent people are still displaced,” said Nuri al-Salihi, a spokesman for the Iraqi Red Crescent Society (IRCS). “But nothing has been done to help them because of a recent increase in sectarian violence that has delayed the work of many local NGOs.”

According to IRCS officials in Kirkuk, located some 255 km north of Baghdad, little aid has come from the main IRCS branch in the capital in the past eight months. This, they say, is due to major displacements in the western Anbar governorate and recent flooding there that forced thousands of residents to flee their homes.

Ahmed Mashhdanny, a senior Kirkuk governorate official, said that more than 200,000 Kirkuk residents have been displaced since 2003 and more than 300 have been killed in ethnic fighting over land. “The return of the Kurds to the city left thousands of Arabs displaced in deteriorating conditions and has increased ethnic aggression between the two groups,” he said.

Under an “Arabisation” programme initiated under the former regime of Saddam Hussein, tens of thousands of Kurds and other non-Arabs were driven out of the city, to be replaced with pro-government Arabs from the impoverished south. After Hussein’s ouster by coalition forces in April 2003, however, Kurds began returning to the area to reclaim their property.

This, in turn, led to the displacement of thousands of Arabs, Mashhdanny explained. “Thousands of displaced people from different ethnic groups – mainly Arabs – can now be seen in improvised camps on the outskirts of Kirkuk, as well as in abandoned government buildings and schools,” he said. “Kurds, Arabs and Turcomans are suffering because measures haven’t been taken to secure their rights.”

Iraqis say US raid on home killed 11 family members
TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters) – Eleven members of an Iraqi family were killed in a U.S. raid on Wednesday, police and witnesses said. The U.S. military said two women and a child died during the bid to seize an al Qaeda militant from a house.

Television pictures showed 11 bodies in the Tikrit morgue — five children, two men and four women. A freelance photographer later saw the bodies being buried in Ishaqi, the town 100 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad where the raid took place.

The U.S. military said in a statement its troops had attacked a house in Ishaqi early on Wednesday to capture a “foreign fighter facilitator for the al Qaeda in Iraq network”.

“Troops were engaged by enemy fire as they approached the building,” U.S. spokesman Major Tim Keefe said. “Coalition Forces returned fire utilising both air and ground assets.

“There was one enemy killed. Two women and one child were also killed in the firefight. The building … (was) destroyed.”

Keefe said the al Qaeda suspect had been captured and was being questioned.

US ‘may want to keep Iraq bases’
he United States may want to keep a long-term military presence in Iraq to bolster moderates against extremists in the region and protect oil supplies, the army general overseeing US operations in Iraq has said.

While the Bush administration has downplayed prospects for permanent US bases in Iraq, General John Abizaid told a House of Representatives subcommittee on Tuesday he could not rule that out.

Abizaid said that policy would be worked out with a unified, national Iraqi government if and when that is established, “and it would be premature for me to predict”.

Many Democrats have pressed President George Bush to firmly state that the United States does not intend to seek permanent military bases in Iraq, a step they said would help stem the violence there.

Abizaid also told the Appropriations subcommittee on military quality of life that while an Iraqi civil war was possible, “I think it’s a long way from where we are now to civil war”.

Electricity Hits Three-Year Low in Iraq
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – Electricity output has dipped to its lowest point in three years in Iraq, where the desert sun is rising toward another broiling summer and U.S. engineers are winding down their rebuilding of the crippled power grid.

The Iraqis, in fact, may have to turn to neighboring Iran to help bail them out of their energy crisis – if not this summer, then in years to come.

The overstressed network is producing less than half the electricity needed to meet Iraq’s exploding demand. American experts are working hard to shore up the system’s weaknesses as 100-degree-plus temperatures approach beginning as early as May, driving up usage of air conditioning, electric fans and refrigeration.

If the summer is unusually hot, however, “all bets are off,” said Lt. Col. Otto Busher, an engineer with the U.S. Army’s 4th Infantry Division.