NABLUS, West Bank (Reuters) – Israeli troops killed five Palestinians on Thursday during the biggest raid against West Bank militants for months, stoking tension as Hamas Islamists held talks to form a new Palestinian government.

“This is a war crime aimed at continuing the escalation and undermining Hamas efforts to form a government,” said Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri. “We are committed to resistance and the occupation will pay the price for these crimes.”
reuters.com/news

Israel and Hamas united on ditching road map
Kadima and Hamas, the ruling parties of Israel and Palestine, united at the weekend in burying the international road map, the blueprint for peace that was previously endorsed by the governments of Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat.

Since Hamas won the Palestinian election and refused to recognise the Jewish state, renounce violence or accept previous agreements, Ehud Olmert, Israel’s acting Prime Minister, is no longer even paying lip service to the road map presented by the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia.

Instead, Kadima is drafting a four-year plan to evacuate at least 17 outlying West Bank settlements. If, as the polls suggest, it wins the general election on 28 March, it will unilaterally draw a new border that will keep major settlement blocks under Israeli rule.

In Moscow on Saturday, Khaled Meshal, the exiled head of Hamas’s political bureau, rejected a Russian request to accept international terms for a dialogue. Although Hamas is floating the possibility of an extended ceasefire, its long-term objective remains an Islamic state from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. “We believe that Israel has no right to exist,” said Mr Meshal, the target of a failed Israeli assassination attempt in Amman in 1997.

MIR ALI, Pakistan (AP) – Authorities imposed a curfew in this tribal region’s main town Monday as thousands of people fled a third day of clashes between Pakistani security forces and al-Qaida and Taliban supporters. An official said at least 100 militants may have been killed.

Clerics tried to mediate a cease-fire to the fighting, most of which has been in Miran Shah. Security forces conducted mop-up operations Monday after artillery and helicopter gunships targeted militant strongholds in the town.

More than 100 militants might have died, based on intelligence reports and questioning of injured and arrested fighters, army spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan said. Security forces had yet to regain control of all compounds in Miran Shah, so he could not give an exact toll. Journalists were barred from the town.

The fighting in Pakistan’s lawless tribal regions along the Afghan border is the bloodiest in more than two years and marks an escalation in President Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s campaign to crack down on al-Qaida and Taliban militants and their local sympathizers.

It also underscored Islamabad’s failure to establish governmental control in the rugged region – a possible hiding place of Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri – where fiercely independent Pashtun tribesmen have resisted outside authority and influence for centuries.
guardian.co.uk

Bloody, fierce, lawless, tribal…ooga booga boo.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency today said he was optimistic that the crisis over Iran’s nuclear programme could be resolved without the intervention of the UN security council.
Speaking as the 35-nation IAEA board prepared to meet, Mohamed ElBaradei told reporters he was hopeful that an agreement could be reached with Iran “in the next week”.

The meeting of the UN’s nuclear watchdog will forward a report on Tehran’s nuclear activities to the security council, which will then have to decide whether to impose sanctions.

EU-led diplomacy has been geared towards persuading Iran to stop making nuclear fuel, but calls for a tougher response have intensified since the country resumed some enrichment work.

Mr ElBaradei did not elaborate on the reasons for his optimism that the crisis could be resolved.

However, diplomats told the Associated Press that Iran’s recent talks with Russia and the EU trio of negotiators, France, Britain and Germany, had touched on the possibility of allowing Tehran to run a scaled-down uranium enrichment programme.
guardian.co.uk

Bolton warns Iran of ‘painful consequences’
WASHINGTON – Iran faces “tangible and painful consequences” if it continues its nuclear activities and the United States will use “all tools at our disposal” to stop this threat, a senior U.S. official said Sunday, ahead of a crucial international meeting on Iran.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, speaking at a convention of Jewish-Americans, said it is too soon for the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran but other countries are talking about doing so and Washington is “beefing up defensive measures to cope with the Iranian nuclear threat.”

Monday’s meeting of the 35-nation International Atomic Energy Agency governing board is expected to take stock of Iran’s continued defiance of U.S. and European demands to end sensitive weapons-related uranium enrichment activity and then hand the case over to the security council.

ABU DHABI — The U.S. Navy has deployed its latest aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf.

The U.S. Fifth Fleet said the USS Ronald Reagan has been deployed for maritime security operations in the Gulf region. The nuclear-powered surface vessel headed a carrier group that contains a guided missile cruiser, two destroyers and support ships.

The Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier was assigned to patrol the Fifth Fleet area of operations, which includes the Arabian Gulf, Red Sea, Gulf of Oman and parts of the Indian Ocean, Middle East Newsline reported. “Our past nine months of training have been in preparation to support our troops on the ground in Iraq and carry out maritime security operations,” Carrier Strike Group Seven Commander Rear Adm. Michael Miller said.

Officials said the arrival of the Reagan Carrier Strike Group, which contains more than 6,000 sailors, was part of a routine rotation of U.S. ships in the Gulf. The strike group consists of the USS Reagan; USS Lake Champlain missile cruiser, USS McCampbell and USS Decatur destroyers; USS Rainer fast combat support ship; and Explosives Ordnance Disposal Unit 11 Det 15.
worldtribune.com

* MAHMUDIYA – Three people were killed, including two Iraqi soldiers, and five wounded when two car bombs, about 10 minutes apart, one driven by a suicide bomber, detonated in the town of Mahmudiya, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.
One civilian was killed and five people were wounded, including two policemen, when a car bomb went off in Mahmudiya earlier in the day, police said.
* BAGHDAD – Mubdir al-Dulaimi, a senior Iraqi Army official, was assassinated while travelling in his convoy in the western Ghazaliya district of the capital, police said.
BAGHDAD – Three policemen were killed and one was wounded when a car bomb went off near their patrol in central Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD – Three civilians were wounded when a car bomb went off in central Baghdad, police said. The target was not known.
BAGHDAD – Ali Hussein al-Khafaji, the dean of the college of engineering, was abducted by gunmen while going to work in Baghdad, police said.
BAQUBA – A car bomb exploded in a busy market in Baquba northeast of Baghdad on Monday, killing six people, including two girls under four, and wounding 23, police said, adding most of the casualties were children.
BAGHDAD – One civilian was killed and 10 were wounded when a car bomb went off in northern Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD – One civilian was wounded when four mortar rounds landed in Sadr city in eastern Baghdad, police said.
ANBAR PROVINCE – A U.S. soldier was killed by “enemy action” on Sunday in western Anbar province, a Sunni insurgent stronghold, the U.S. military said.
BAGHDAD – Two civilians and two policemen were wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up near a bank in Baghdad’s Doura district, police said.
BAGHDAD – Two policemen and four civilians were wounded when a car bomb exploded as their patrol passed by in northern Baghdad, police said.
BAQUBA – Three civilians were killed by gunmen in separate attacks in Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.
alertnet.org

Expert on Iraq: ‘We’re In a Civil War’
“We’re in a civil war now; it’s just that not everybody’s joined in,” said retired Army Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, a former military commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina. “The failure to understand that the civil war is already taking place, just not necessarily at the maximum level, means that our counter measures are inadequate and therefore dangerous to our long-term interest.

“It’s our failure to understand reality that has caused us to be late throughout this experience of the last three years in Iraq,” added Nash, who is an ABC News consultant.

Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told ABC News, “If you talk to U.S. intelligence officers and military people privately, they’d say we’ve been involved in low level civil war with very slowly increasing intensity since the transfer of power in June 2004.”

What a stupid semantics game. When ‘we’ finally decide that this is indeed a civil war, what then? What’s different for people on the ground?

Hundreds of Iraqi academics and professionals assassinated by death squads
Hundreds of Iraqi academics and professionals have been assassinated since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to a petition to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Summary Executions from the European peace group BRussells [sic] Tribunal on Iraq.

The petition has been signed by Nobel Prize winners Harold Pinter, J. M. Coetzee, José Saramago, and Dario Fo, as well as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Cornel West, and Tony Benn. A Green party member of the European Parliament from Britain, Caroline Lucas, has called for support for the investigation.

The exact figure of deaths is unknown; estimates range from about 300 to more than 1,000. According to Iraqi novelist Haifa Zangana, writing in the Guardian last month, Baghdad universities alone have lost 80 members of their staffs. These figures do not include those who have survived assassination attempts.

‘14,000 detained without trial in Iraq’
US and UK forces in Iraq have detained thousands of people without charge or trial for long periods and there is growing evidence of Iraqi security forces torturing detainees, Amnesty International said today.
In a new report published today, the human rights group criticised the US-led multinational force for interning some 14,000 people.

Around 3,800 people have been held for over a year, while another 200 have been detained for more than two years, the report – Beyond Abu Ghraib: detention and torture in Iraq – said.

“It is a dangerous precedent for the world that the US and UK think it completely defensible to hold thousands of people without charge or trial,” Amnesty spokesman Neil Durkin said.

The detainee situation in Iraq was comparable to Guantánamo Bay, he added, but on a much larger scale, and the detentions appeared to be “arbitrary and indefinite”.

Breathtaking views high above Rio de Janeiro’s beaches and mountains can be yours for just a few dollars a day – if you skip the pricey hotel favoured by the Rolling Stones and sleep in a slum.

Rio’s favelas are infamous for drug and gang violence. But a new hostel called Pousada Favelinha (“the little slum inn”), is attracting adventurous tourists, mainly from Germany, France and the US.

You can only get to the Pousada Favelinha, in the jungle-covered hillside slum of Pereira da Silva, on foot. Most of its 1,900 residents live in unpainted brick hovels they built themselves, but the hostel owners say staying in the slum is safe. It has gained a reputation as one of Rio’s calmest favelas since police killed a neighbourhood drug lord in a shoot-out seven years ago. A police squad also trains there, so criminal gangs avoid it.

Even though the tiny inn has no telephone and only accepts reservations by email, its five rooms were booked solid during Rio’s famous carnival. Each room in the white, three-storey inn has expansive terraces overlooking Rio’s bay.
independent.co.uk

The newest thrill in ‘adventure travel’: forget the wild; instead, visit exotic and dangerous locales where people actually LIVE. How about spending a few days with an Iraqi policeman? Make sure you have the unique and unforgettable experience of standing in line.

Firebrand director Spike Lee has found an unlikely new target for his latest spray: the secretary of state.

Says Lee: “I dislike Condoleezza Rice more than [President] Bush. The thing about it is that she’s gotten a free ride from black people.”

Oh no, he didn’t.

“People say, ‘She’s so successful’ and ‘Look at her position as a black woman.’ She is a black woman who grew up in Birmingham, Ala., and said that she never experienced a day of racism in her life,” Lee tells the April issue of Stuff magazine.

“Condi, stop smoking that crack!”

“I know you love your Ferragamo shoes, but come on. While people were drowning in New Orleans, she was going up and down Madison Ave. buying Ferragamo shoes. Then she went to see ‘Spamalot.'”

You heard the man, Madame Secretary. Put down the crack pipe.
nydailynews.com

Around 500,000 Venezuelans will start a four-month military training programme today to turn them into members of the country’s territorial guard. They are the first group of a total of 2m Venezuelan civilians who have so far signed up to become armed reservists.

By the summer of 2007, Venezuela is likely to have the largest military reserve in the Americas, which is expected to be almost double the size of that in the United States.
guardian.co.uk

Bush administration lawyers, fighting a claim of torture by a Guantanamo Bay detainee, yesterday argued that the new law that bans cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees in U.S. custody does not apply to people held at the military prison.

In federal court yesterday and in legal filings, Justice Department lawyers contended that a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, cannot use legislation drafted by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to challenge treatment that the detainee’s lawyers described as “systematic torture.”

Government lawyers have argued that another portion of that same law, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, removes general access to U.S. courts for all Guantanamo Bay captives. Therefore, they said, Mohammed Bawazir, a Yemeni national held since May 2002, cannot claim protection under the anti-torture provisions.

Bawazir’s attorneys contend that “extremely painful” new tactics used by the government to force-feed him and end his hunger strike amount to torture.

U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler said in a hearing yesterday that she found allegations of aggressive U.S. military tactics used to break the detainee hunger strike “extremely disturbing” and possibly against U.S. and international law. But Justice Department lawyers argued that even if the tactics were considered in violation of McCain’s language, detainees at Guantanamo would have no recourse to challenge them in court.
washingtonpost.com

Pro-Israel Lobbying Group Roiled by Prosecution of Two Ex-Officials
WASHINGTON, March 4 — The annual gathering of the nation’s top pro-Israel lobbying group, which starts here on Sunday, will be addressed by Vice President Dick Cheney and United Nations Ambassador John R. Bolton. Politicians are lined up to warn of the threat from Iran and Hamas. Workshops will offer advice on winning the legislative game on Capitol Hill.

But the official program omits a topic likely to be a major theme of corridor chatter: the explosive Justice Department prosecution of two former officials of the group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, that is ticking toward an April trial date.

The highly unusual indictment of the former officials, Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, accuses them of receiving classified information about terrorism and Middle East strategy from a Defense Department analyst, Lawrence A. Franklin, and passing it on to a journalist and an Israeli diplomat. Mr. Franklin pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 12½ years in prison, though his sentence could be reduced based on his cooperation in the case.

The prosecution has roiled the powerful organization, known as Aipac, which at first vigorously defended Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman and then fired them last March. And it has generated considerable anger among American Jews who question why the group’s representatives were singled out in the first place.

Aipac would appear to be an unlikely target for the Bush administration; it is a political powerhouse that generally shares the administration’s hawkish views on the potential nuclear threat from Iran and the danger of Palestinian militancy.

It doesn’t simply ‘share’ the views, but in large part generates them.

Bush Plan Would Raise Deficit by $1.2 Trillion, Budget Office Says
WASHINGTON, March 3 — President Bush’s budget would increase the federal deficit by $35 billion this year and by more than $1.2 trillion over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office reported on Friday.

The nonpartisan budget office said that Mr. Bush’s tax-cutting proposals would cost about $1.7 trillion over the next 10 years and that his proposals to partly privatize Social Security would cost about $312 billion during that period.

The office also said Mr. Bush’s proposals to save money on Medicare, Medicaid and most nonmilitary programs would offset about one-third of the cost of his other proposals.

The Bush administration should stop pretending Russia is a genuine strategic partner and adopt a new policy of “selective cooperation” and “selective opposition” to the authoritarian government of President Vladimir Putin, a bipartisan task force has concluded.

In a grim assessment of the recent “downward trajectory” under Putin, the Council on Foreign Relations reports that in Russia democracy is in retreat, corruption on the rise and the Kremlin an increasing obstacle to U.S. interests. The goodwill that developed between President Bush and Putin, particularly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has eroded.

“U.S.-Russian relations are clearly headed in the wrong direction,” the task force wrote. “Contention is crowding out consensus. The very idea of ‘strategic partnership’ no longer seems realistic.”
washingtonpost.com

Leader of Pro-Kremlin Militia Is New Chechen Premier
MOSCOW, March 4 — The leader of a pro-Kremlin militia accused of major human rights violations was confirmed Saturday as the new prime minister of Chechnya, the strife-torn southern Russian republic that has been the scene of two brutal wars in the past 11 years.

Ramzan Kadyrov, 29, the son of an assassinated Chechen president, was unanimously approved by the republic’s People’s Assembly to replace Sergei Abramov, who was injured in a car accident in Moscow in November and resigned this week. The Chechen president, Alu Alkhanov, immediately signed a decree ratifying the appointment.

As first deputy prime minister, Kadyrov was regarded as the real power in Chechnya. He controlled local security services, disbursement of federal funds that support the republic, and its political institutions, including the newly elected parliament. He is expected to ascend to Chechnya’s presidency shortly after he turns 30, the minimum age for the office, in October.