WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Al Qaeda will be replaced by increasingly decentralized Muslim militants over the next 15 years who will feed on globalization to find recruits and stage attacks, a new U.S. intelligence report said on Thursday.

The report by the National Intelligence Council, the U.S. intelligence community’s think tank, also said the Iraq conflict could provide recruitment for a new class of militants, who would disperse and gradually replace the al Qaeda members who had earned their stripes in Afghanistan.

“We expect that by 2020 al Qaeda will have been superseded by similarly inspired but more diffuse Islamic extremist groups,” said the report, called “Mapping the Global Future.”
Full Article: nytimes.com/reuters

Well, since it’s them doing the mapping, they should know.

GAZA (Reuters) – Israel sealed off the Gaza Strip on Friday but said it would try to bolster new Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas after militants, defying his call for non-violence, killed six Israelis at a border cargo terminal.

Three Palestinian gunmen were also killed in the bombing and shooting attack late on Thursday at the Karni crossing point, a commercial lifeline for Gaza.

Abbas, due to be sworn in as president on Saturday, condemned the assault and deadly raids Israel has mounted against militants.

Three militant groups said they jointly took part in the operation: Hamas, the Popular Resistance Committees and al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of Abbas’s Fatah movement.

Israel signaled it would weigh its response carefully to avoid weakening Abbas, a leader it has said it could do business with after shunning his predecessor Yasser Arafat for years.

But Israel shut down Karni and the Erez border crossing to the north, effectively sealing off the Gaza Strip following the closure of the Rafah terminal on the Egyptian frontier last month after a bombing there killed five Israeli soldiers.
Full Article: nytimes.com/reuters

WASHINGTON (AP) – Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, an architect of the U.S. war with Iraq in 1991, is advising the Bush administration to consider a phased withdrawal of some of the 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

Otherwise, Baker says, the United States risks being suspected of having an “imperial design” in the region.

A protracted U.S. military presence in Iraq is probably unavoidable since attacks on U.S.-led coalition forces and on Iraqi security forces are likely to continue, Baker said Tuesday in a speech at Rice University in Houston.

“Even under the best of circumstances, the new Iraqi government will remain extremely vulnerable to internal divisions and external meddling,” he said.

Still, former President George H.W. Bush’s secretary of state said, “any appearance of a permanent occupation will both undermine domestic support here in the United States and play directly into the hands of those in the Middle East who – however wrongly – suspect us of imperial design.”
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

Mr. Brimstone knows that appearances are everything.

Comedian Sasha Baron Cohen has escaped a near-riot at an American rodeo while filming his satirical Da Ali G Show.

According to a report in the Roanoke (Virginia) Times, a man who was introduced as Boraq Sagdiyev from Kazakhstan – in reality a Cohen character named Borat – appeared at the rodeo over the weekend after organisers agreed to have him sing the national anthem.

After telling the crowd he supported America’s war on terrorism, he said, “I hope you kill every man, woman and child in Iraq, down to the lizards … And may George W Bush drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq.” He then sang a garbled version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The Roanoke Times reported that the crowd turned “downright nasty.” One observer said “If he had been out there a minute longer, I think somebody would have shot him.”

Cohen and his film crew were escorted out of the Salem Civic Center and told to leave the premises.

“Had we not gotten them out of there, there would have been a riot,” rodeo producer Bobby Rowe told the paper. “They loaded up the van and they screeched out of there.”

It is not the first time Cohen has wooed controversy with his show, which airs on Channel 4 in the UK and on HBO in the United States. In one episode last year, Borat sang an anti-Semitic song called “Throw the Jew Down the Well” at a US country music bar, prompting protests from the US-based Anti-Defamation League.
Full Article: xtramsn.co.nz

He’s a Jew! Does no one have a sense of humor anymore?

Linked by blood but twice divided by war, the royal family’s relationship with Germany, its people and its troubled history has long been a sensitive one. The photograph of Prince Harry wearing a swastika has echoes of one particularly disturbing incident involving the family, one which seared itself into the British collective memory – that of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor meeting Adolf Hitler in 1937.

The ex-King Edward VIII and his wife were known sympathisers of the Nazis and their policies, a feeling shared by a large number of British aristocrats who admired the way Hitler was dealing with the Communists.

The Nazis regarded the duke, who had abdicated over his affair with divorced American Wallis Simpson, as a potential ally and a possible head of state for a subjugated Britain.

But his flirting with Hitler’s regime threatened to undermine years of work by the royal family to distance themselves from their German roots.

The modern royal family was founded in 1840 when Queen Victoria married Albert of Saxe-Coburg, a Germany duchy, creating The House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Such was the ill-feeling towards all things German during the First World War that in 1917 Victoria’s grandson King George V – an honorary Field Marshal in the German army – thought it prudent to renounce the German name and titles and adopt that of Windsor.

It was a masterful PR exercise, replacing the Teutonic surname with that of a quintessentially home counties town.

His son Edward VIII once declared: “There is not one drop of blood in my veins that is not German.” Both he and George VI were bilingual in German and English.
Full Article: thisislondon.com/news

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia – An official document posted here says that nearly 210,000 people in Indonesia are dead or missing from the Dec. 26 tsunami, a death toll that appears to be far higher than officials have reported publicly. Rescue workers think even that number may be low.

The larger Indonesia toll would bring the total of dead and missing from the tidal surge across the Indian Ocean to nearly 272,000, ranking the tsunami as the fifth or sixth deadliest natural disaster in about 250 years.

The new death toll came as Indonesian officials restricted the movements of foreign relief workers, U.N. employees and journalists in devastated north Sumatra, the Indonesian island that took the brunt of the tsunami’s force, and said foreign military units would be allowed to work in the country for only a limited time.
Full Article: realcities.com

AQAA REFUGEE CAMP, Jordan, Jan. 11 – A ragged banner dangling outside the central bus station of this squalid refugee camp outside Amman underscores the trepidation many Palestinians here feel about the landslide election of Mahmoud Abbas as president of the Palestinian Authority on Sunday.

“The right of return,” the banner says, “is sacred.”

For over half a century, Palestinians – especially in refugee camps like this one in Jordan, with 180,000 residents – have said the right of return to their former homes in what is today Israel is nonnegotiable. Israel rejects such a huge immigration, saying it would compromise the Jewish character of its nation.

With the election of Mr. Abbas, a moderate who is expected to negotiate aggressively with the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel, many here fear the loss of this most cherished demand.

“This camp is full of people who have lost blood in the struggle, and they will not forget,” said Haitham Abu Saeed, leader of the Baqaa Youth and Sports Club. “So neither Abbas nor anyone else can give away Jerusalem or the right of return.”

Mr. Abbas’s election was well received by world leaders. And many Palestinians see him as a means to breaking the stalemate after four years of the intifada. But residents here in Baqaa are far less hopeful.

With Jordanian passports and homes now made of brick and plaster rather than the tents they once lived in, Palestinians here say they stand to lose the most if a final settlement drops the right of return.

“There’s a general impression that Yasir Arafat was adamant on the right of return but the others around him were not,” said Mustafa Hamarneh, director of the Center for Strategic Studies at Jordan University. “This is the last card the Palestinians have, and if they give it up, their chapter will be closed.”

Mr. Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, has asserted his commitment to keeping the issue of repatriating Palestinians a priority. But in negotiations after the peace framework signed in Oslo in 1993, no agreement on the issue was reached.

In 2000, President Clinton suggested guidelines to end the conflict that called for Palestinian refugees to be given a choice between being rehabilitated in the country they are now in, moving to the new Palestinian state, resettling in a third country or moving to Israel if Israel agreed. Israel accepted the guidelines with reservations; Mr. Arafat rejected it.
Full Article: nytimes.com

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 – The Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that federal law prohibits the open-ended detention of Cubans who entered the United States during the Mariel boatlift in 1980 and who, despite crimes later committed in the United States, cannot be deported because the Cuban government refuses to take them back.

Voting 7 to 2, the court applied to the deportable group of Mariel Cubans the same rights it found in federal law in a decision four years ago that barred the indefinite detention of a stateless immigrant, lawfully admitted to the United States, whose criminal record made him deportable but who had no place to go.

The Bush administration had argued that the decision in the earlier case did not apply to the Mariel group because, unlike the immigrant, Kestutis Zadvydas, admitted as a refugee from post-World War II Europe, the Cubans had never been granted formal admission to the United States. Instead, they received a humanitarian parole, which the administration said did not entitle them to the same protection when they violated the country’s hospitality by committing crimes.

But writing for the majority on Wednesday, Justice Antonin Scalia said that because the immigration statute itself made no such distinction, the court could not create one.
Full Article: nytimes.com

There are Marielitos who have been in ‘indefinite detention’ for 25 years after committing petty crimes.

WASHINGTON – American troops will begin leaving Iraq (news – web sites) this year as the Iraqi army, national guard and police force take on a larger security role, says Secretary of State Colin Powell.

“But I cannot give you a timeline when they will all be home,” Powell told National Public Radio in an interview released Wednesday by the State Department.

There are some 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, many of them under fire, and casualties have been mounting.

Powell also ruled out any U.S. move to postpone elections scheduled Jan. 30 in Iraq to choose an interim legislative assembly.

The interim government in Baghdad and the Iraqi election commission want to move ahead with the election and so do the people, Powell said in the interview, which was conducted on Tuesday.

“We cannot delay the election because there are terrorists and murderers and former regime elements who are trying to keep that election from happening, to delay it,” he said.

Full Article: news.yahoo.com

Well we know someone who will be going home on January 2oth of this year- Secretary Powell. He keeps talking about ‘former regime elements’ as if we don’t know Saddam’s Republican Guards (and Kurds-which will lead to years of mess) form the backbone of this security force of theirs.

NAIROBI (Reuters) – British finance minister Gordon Brown visited one of Africa’s largest slums on Wednesday at the start of a tour of the continent aimed at making the fight against poverty a top priority for the world’s richest nations.

Brown, starting his trip in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, toured classrooms and met teachers at Olympic Primary School on the edge of Kibera slum, a huge swathe of tin-roof shacks where barefoot children play beside trenches clogged with sewage.

Aides said he wanted to learn about the education policies of the Kenyan government, which launched free primary schooling in the country of 30 million on taking power in early 2003.

“I am very proud of what you are doing,” Brown told the teachers. “We want to work with you to provide universal primary education of the highest standard. We are delighted you are making such progress and we want to help you do more.”

In Kibera, home to about 800,000 people, as in many of the settlements that house up to 2 million of Nairobi’s 3 million people, home often means a house of mud, scrap metal and cardboard where piped water and flushing toilets are unknown.

Amid buzzing flies, plastic bags and roving stray dogs, he walked along a nearby dirt road and greeted shopkeepers tending fruit and meat stalls. He did not enter the heart of the slum, where poverty is at its most desperate.
Full Article: nytimes.com/reuters