Both of these are from AP articles an hour apart bearing the above title:

Version 1: 7:17amET

JERUSALEM – British police told the Israeli Embassy in London minutes before Thursday’s explosions that they had received warnings of possible terror attacks in the city, a senior Israeli official said…
Full: news.yahoo.com

Version 2: 8:17amET

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was on his way to a hotel near the scene of one of the London blasts Thursday when he received a call to stay put, the foreign minister said.

”After the first explosion, our finance minister received a request not to go anywhere,” Finance Minister Silvan Shalom told Israel Army Radio.

Netanyahu was to have been the scheduled keynote speaker at an Israeli corporate investment conference at the Great Eastern hotel near the Liverpool Street subway station.
Full: nytimes.com

Version 3: 8:14pmET
Full: washingtonpost.com
…Police said there had been no warning and that the blasts at three subway stations went off within 26 minutes, starting at 8:51 a.m. in an Underground train just outside the financial district. Authorities initially blamed a power surge but realized it was a terror attack after the bus bombing near the British Museum at 9:47 a.m. _ less than an hour after the first explosion.

Pretty astonishing that the Israeli government was warned, and not the police.

Chancellor Gordon Brown says progress has been made in tackling poverty but it will take more than one G8 meeting to determine Africa’s long-term future.

He told the BBC: “It is a lifetime’s work where we empower the people of Africa and the developing countries to make decisions for themselves.”

…And he said the Live 8 events were an example of Britain at its best.

They were proof that “people can have power if they make their views felt”.

…But he stressed: “It is not a week’s work at the G8 that is going to determine the long-term future of Africa or the developing countries.”

The Pope has also joined in calls for world leaders to take action to stamp out poverty in Africa.

He urged them to take concrete measures to eradicate starvation and help poorer countries to develop.

…EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson said that trade was the only way to convert humanitarian assistance into economic sustainability in Africa.

But he added: “It’s not a simple we throw a switch, we pull a lever and we have reform overnight for the benefit of all developing countries.

“Different developing countries have different interests and different needs and we have to accommodate them all.”
Full: bbc.co.uk

‘Determining Africa’s long-term future”…feels so nice they had to say it twice. Check those muscular verbs baby. “We” are so so goood… Only ‘we’ have the power to ’empower’. And which ‘people’ have the power? Why ‘ours’ of course. “‘We’ [sigh] have to accomodate ‘them’ all…whiteman’s burden is a bitch…
I’m reminded of what Eduardo Galeano said, that in ‘developing countries’ we do not see a lack of capitalism, but indeed capitalism in its “vicious senility.” Why are “they” poor? Simple. Because “we” are rich. Mr. Brown makes sure to say this is all going to take a very long time, since the fruits will be invisible, being non-existent.

It was, as Chris Martin of Coldplay put it, “the greatest thing that’s ever been organised probably in the history of the world”, and although veterans of the two world wars might have disagreed, for once the drift-net rock statement captured the mood.

…In the end, this is what saved the concert from mawkishness: the possibility of failure put steel in the atmosphere at Live 8.

“Come Monday morning, most people here will have probably forgotten a lot of what was said,” said David Smithey, 26, a manager from south London, when it was all over. “But that’s not the point. It’s not us, now, who’ve got to remember.”

At midday the approach to the park was a familiar pre-rock concert landscape of men weeing under trees, jocular police and a revivalist with a megaphone: “I used to be a sinner like you, now I’m a winner.”

And then you heard the conversations. “Bono gets all his merchandise made in a cooperative factory in South Africa,” said a girl in Top Shop’s finest, made-up for a chance appearance on telly.

“Surely the key issue is debt cancellation,” said a man waving an Arsenal flag. “Bob can get things done,” said another.

A girl dragging a suitcase of provisions said: “I feel bad, I just bought a load of stuff from Harrods food hall when there are, you know, people in Africa … ” Her friends reassured her that this was precisely the issue they were there to confront.

“Tony Blair can’t actually do anything,” came the voice of a lone cynic, to which her companion fairly screamed: “YES HE CAN, he’s got a percentage.”

At the entrance, fans without tickets pleaded for spares, but apologetically, lest they be mistaken for touts and beaten to death.

The fear of anti-climax made the crowd initially jittery and the organisers seemed to feel it too; the outline of Richard Curtis could be seen hovering anxiously in the wings on stage. It took a while for people to find their voice. When Bono said “eight of the most powerful men on earth are meeting in Gleneagles in Scotland”, a huge cheer went up and then abruptly stopped, as people wondered if they should rather be booing. “God bless you, Africa,” said Bono, more straightforwardly, and so it began.

…The weirdest sequence of the night was Jon Bon Jovi live from Philadelphia to Brian Wilson in Berlin to Snoop Dogg in London, and then a short film about starving children in Africa. The crowd could not shift registers quickly enough and ragged cheers spilt over as horrendous imagery flashed up on the giant screens. “No,” chided Sir Bob, coming on stage afterwards, “I don’t think we clap that, do you?”, before telling off the press for being a bunch of dirty cynics.

“Fock off, Bob!” someone called out, fondly.

…There were, of course, lots of warm, fuzzy and nonsensical statements from the stage, and it fell to Ms Dynamite, never one to shirk her duty, to remind everyone that “at the end of the day, we as a nation have robbed, killed, stolen and tortured the third world”, and that if there was a debt to be paid, we owed it.
Full: guardian.co.uk

Except for the ‘nonsensical statement’ at the end which is the only thing that made any sense to me, this sounds like that harrowing “10 Minutes Hate” scene from 1984. Hitting the reptile brain button. The reptiles, of course, are fine, it’s us humans that’re the problem.

Gordon Brown made an impassioned call on Saturday night for the “greatest moral crusade of our times … to tackle the greatest evil of our time”.
Speaking to an invited audience of Christian Aid supporters and Scottish and African church leaders, the chancellor said the reason governments were acting on Africa and aid was because of pressure from churches and faith groups.

An estimated 250,000 people, many of them members of British charity and faith groups, joined the protest march through Edinburgh, making a symbolic ring around the city’s castle. It was believed to be the largest political demonstration in Scottish history.

In what yesterday was being called Brown’s Sermon on the Mound – it was delivered in the Methodist assembly hall on the Mound – he said Africa had become the test of the world’s humanity.

“It is because of your moral outrage against poverty … that nations have come together. Through your campaigns from churches and faith groups, 13 countries have now declared a [timetable] for 0.7% income devoted to aid.

“Is it not a moral sense in each of us that feels the pain of others and believes in something bigger than themselves, that calls us to answer the needs of the needy, the suffering of the sick?

“We are one moral universe and ours must become the greatest moral crusade of our times. It is our duty to answer your call for action,” he said to cheers.

Mr Brown quoted Christian, Jewish, Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist and other religious doctrines, as well as political heroes including Gandhi, Mandela, Adam Smith and Abraham Lincoln as justification for immediate action.

He pledged that Britain would write off its share of the debt payments of 70 countries, that 38 countries would have complete debt forgiveness and that European aid would be doubled to $80bn (£45bn) a year by 2010.

In words echoing those of Bob Geldof to the Hyde Park crowd, the chancellor said: “Live Aid 20 years ago was about charity for the poor. Our aim [is] justice for the poor … How long until the world can achieve justice for the poor? Let us say not long … because weeping may spend the night but joy comes in the morning,” he said in conclusion.

There was some heckling from the audience. Hector Christie, the son of Sir George Christie, the founder of Glyndebourne Opera, raised his kilt to flash a grinning Tony Blair codpiece and questioned the chancellor’s enthusiasm for the privatisation and liberalisation of developing countries’ economies.

“When will you stop the rape of the poor’s resources? Why are there so many conditions on aid?”
Full: guardian.co.uk

Africa is always ‘becoming’ something for some European. Whose ‘universe’? Whose ‘moral crusade’? Who is ‘we’? This is indeed the ‘greatest evil of our time,’ the crude banality and reptilian emotionality and cynical hypocrisy. This is the devil.
Mark him well.

Ultra-right parties from across Europe have caused uproar in Greece after announcing plans to stage a festival in a Peloponnesian town in the autumn.
The three-day event, organised by some of the continent’s leading neo-Nazi groups and billed officially as a camping trip to “Hellas, land of the heroes”, is intended to become a recruiting ground for young people.

“This unique gathering will combine comradeship with sport activities by the sea and, most importantly, an open congress with speeches on the descent of our national identity,” the extremists say on their website.

“Turkey, out of Europe” is expected to be the main slogan of the September 16-18 meeting.

Germany’s National Democratic party (NDP), Italy’s Forza Nuova, Spain’s La Falange, Romania’s Noua Dreapta (the New Right) and Greece’s Chryssi Avgi (Golden Dawn) have all pooled resources for the youth gathering. Old-guard fascists, including Udo Voigt, who heads the NDP, and Roberto Fiore of Forza Nuova plan to address the crowd.
Full: guardian.co.uk

Gosh these guys are irritating…when are the they going to get with this 21st century thing? You know, the iron fist in the velvet glove, the kinder gentler machine-gun hand…

Zimbabwe is being hypocritically vilified by the west for forced slum clearances that are routine throughout the developing worlld.

For a month now, the BBC, CNN, ITV and others have been reporting what has been portrayed as one of the greatest humanitarian and human rights disasters in years. At least 200,000 people – sometimes this figure grows to 250,000 or even 300,000 – are said to have been forcibly evicted from slum areas of Harare in Zimbabwe. The figure peaked last week at 1.5 million, but yesterday the BBC reckoned that bulldozers were now “crashing through the homes of 500,000 people”.

In fact, only about 1.2 million people live in Harare and no one is suggesting that half the population has fled in terror or that most of the city has been wrecked. So where are all these allegedly terrorised people? A few thousand have been filmed in makeshift camps but not many more. Who is trying to count the numbers? They are almost always attributed to an unnamed person in an unnamed UN agency. But read the only UN statement on the evictions and it says nothing of 200,000 people.
The evictions – which are clearly happening on a wide scale – have been seized on by the west, and the former colonial power Britain in particular, as another reason to demonise President Mugabe and further humiliate long-suffering Zimbabwe. It’s open season on the Harare regime and it appears that anyone can say anything they like without recourse to accuracy or reality. Whipped into a frenzy of hypocritical outrage, the EU, Britain and the US, as well as the World Bank – all of which have been responsible for millions of evictions in Africa and elsewhere as conditions of infrastructure projects – have rushed to condemn the “atrocities”.

The vilification of Mugabe is now out of control. The UN security council and the G8 have been asked to debate the evictions, and Mugabe is being compared to Pol Pot in Cambodia. Meanwhile, the evictions are mentioned in the same breath as the genocide in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans – although perhaps only three people have so far accidentally died. Only at the very end of some reports is it said that the Harare city authority’s stated reason for the evictions is to build better, legal houses for 150,000 people.

Perspective is needed. The summary removal of people at gunpoint from their homes is indefensible, almost certainly unnecessary, and probably economically counter-productive, but it is not unusual in the developing world. Every year millions of poor people are evicted to make way for tourism, dams, roads and airports, for events like the Olympics, and for the gentrification and beautification of cities, national parks and urban redevelopments.

…Mugabe is unacceptable to Britain and the west mainly because he has chosen to evict whites and redistribute land grabbed in colonial times. The fact that the African Union and other African leaders are not prepared to condemn him for the Harare evictions reflects the fact that they, too, recognise the injustice of the colonial land ownership inheritance and do not want to see Africa bullied again by the west.
Full: guardian.co.uk

Aside from the very real questions about the veracity of Western reportage on Zimbabwe, India, for example, our great democratic ally, engages in this sort of actviity every single day. But India is an obedient client/child.

…What we are seeing now in this unprecedented media focus on Africa is a very old theme. In 1787 the slogan of the Quaker abolitionists was “Am I not a man and a brother?” But the radicalism of this rallying cry was belied by the image on the Anti-Slavery Society’s seal of the African slave – he was on his knees. His liberty and dignity was ours for the giving, not his for the taking. The relationship at this G8, more than 200 years later, is similarly framed: African as supplicant to the (mostly) white men.

An entire continent has been reduced to a “scar on the conscience of the world”, stripped of its dignity and left more powerless than at any intervening point since 1787. The images we saw of Africans at Live 8 on Saturday were the dying, the starving and the desperately impoverished. Postcolonialism in a globalising economy is proving even more humiliating for Africa than colonialism: its huge wealth in natural resources sequestered in secret bank accounts; its commodities commanding ever-smaller prices; its vicious wars with the exported arms of the industrial world; its government policies dictated from Washington and Geneva. Even its suffering exploited to jerk us into attention and to supply our emotional self-gratification. To the partying Hyde Park crowd, Kofi Annan said “thank you”. But for what?

Blair’s Africa agenda is yet another expression of what Professor John Lonsdale, the Cambridge historian of Africa, described in a lecture last week as “the self-righteously civilising mission of the past two centuries” of Europe towards its neighbour. He concluded that “it is a construction that infantilises not only Africans, unable to fend for themselves, but us too, like babies demanding the instant gratification of self-importance”.
Full: guardian.co.uk

…What we are seeing now in this unprecedented media focus on Africa is a very old theme. In 1787 the slogan of the Quaker abolitionists was “Am I not a man and a brother?” But the radicalism of this rallying cry was belied by the image on the Anti-Slavery Society’s seal of the African slave – he was on his knees. His liberty and dignity was ours for the giving, not his for the taking. The relationship at this G8, more than 200 years later, is similarly framed: African as supplicant to the (mostly) white men.

An entire continent has been reduced to a “scar on the conscience of the world”, stripped of its dignity and left more powerless than at any intervening point since 1787. The images we saw of Africans at Live 8 on Saturday were the dying, the starving and the desperately impoverished. Postcolonialism in a globalising economy is proving even more humiliating for Africa than colonialism: its huge wealth in natural resources sequestered in secret bank accounts; its commodities commanding ever-smaller prices; its vicious wars with the exported arms of the industrial world; its government policies dictated from Washington and Geneva. Even its suffering exploited to jerk us into attention and to supply our emotional self-gratification. To the partying Hyde Park crowd, Kofi Annan said “thank you”. But for what?

Blair’s Africa agenda is yet another expression of what Professor John Lonsdale, the Cambridge historian of Africa, described in a lecture last week as “the self-righteously civilising mission of the past two centuries” of Europe towards its neighbour. He concluded that “it is a construction that infantilises not only Africans, unable to fend for themselves, but us too, like babies demanding the instant gratification of self-importance”.
Full: guardian.co.uk

President George W Bush has ruled out US backing for any Kyoto-style deal on climate change at the G8 summit.

Speaking to British broadcaster ITV, he said he would instead be talking to fellow leaders about new technologies as a way of tackling global warming.

But he conceded that the issue was one “we’ve got to deal with” and said human activity was “to some extent” to blame.

Tony Blair is hoping for agreements on climate change and Africa when he hosts the summit in Scotland this week.

Mr Bush said he would resist any packet of measures that are similar to the 1997 UN Kyoto protocol, involving legally binding reduction on carbon emissions, that Washington never ratified.

“If this looks like Kyoto, the answer is no,” he said in an interview with ITV’s Tonight With Trevor McDonald programme to be broadcast on Monday evening.

“The Kyoto treaty would have wrecked our economy, if I can be blunt.”

He said he hoped the other G8 leaders would “move beyond the Kyoto debate” and consider new technologies as a way of tackling global warming.
Full: bbc.co.uk

yes, well… we will acknowledge the existence of global warming once we find a way to make money from it.

President George Bush’s right hand man, Karl Rove, yesterday found himself at the centre of the controversy over who revealed the name of a secret CIA agent, after Newsweek revealed that he was a source for a story that appeared in Time magazine and for which two reporters are facing prison.

In a development that could prove extremely damaging to the Bush administration, two lawyers close to the case say that emails between the Time reporter who wrote the story and his editors indicate that the reporter spoke to Mr Rove.

Mr Rove’s lawyer, Robert Luskin, confirmed that his client had been interviewed by Matthew Cooper for the article, but denied that Mr Rove provided the crucial information that exposed the identity of the agent.
Mr Luskin told Newsweek that Mr Rove “never knowingly disclosed classified information”.

But the two lawyers who spoke to Newsweek said there was growing concern that prosecutors now have their sights set on Mr Rove, the architect of Mr Bush’s rise.
Full: guardian.co.uk

Well, a rise is normally accompanied by a leak. Sorry! Silly this morning.