Papers in the Arabic world recoil at remarks attributed to President Bush by a Palestinian official, to the effect that God had told him to invade Iraq.

The White House denied the alleged comments were ever made, and Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian official who said the president had told him he was “driven with a mission from God”, later said he never thought that Mr Bush’s remarks should be taken literally.

Other papers in the region comment on Mr Bush’s assertion, at a speech in Washington, that Islamic radicals were seeking to establish an empire of terror from Spain to Indonesia.

Editorial in pan-Arab Al-Quds Al-Arabi:
US President Bush told his Palestinian guests that he was driven with a mission from God… Had those statements come from an ordinary person, he would have been arrested straight away and taken to a lunatic asylum for treatment… Such statements cannot be made by someone who is mentally sound.

Editorial in Saudi Arabia’s Al-Jazirah:
The statements attributed to US President Bush on God’s message to fight terrorists in Afghanistan and end the tyranny in Iraq… indicate that America is striving to practise a series of firm ideological principles, even if this is a major source of detriment to US interests and the interests of the Middle East… The fallacy of Bush’s ideology lies in the fact that Bush thinks it is America’s right to decide people’s fate.

Editorial in Egypt’s Al-Ahram:
US President Bush has warned of “a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia”… This is simply a preposterous statement… It is illogical to rely on the views of small radical groups that have neither weight nor influence to create such a phantom called “radical Islamic empire”.

Editorial in Saudi Arabia’s Al-Watan:
Bush might have been right about the expansion of the base of the terrorist network to span from Spain to Indonesia. This corresponds with reality and the statements of the Indonesian investigator about indications the Bali bombers belonged to a new generation of terrorists. After four years of war on terrorism and two consecutive wars that Bush dragged the world into, here we are reaping the benefits of these efforts represented in a new generation of terrorists.

Commentary by Farah Maamar in Algeria’s Le Soir d’Algerie:
Bush has just discovered “Islamist imperialism”! All the same, this awakening is late, all the more so since it has been more than a dozen years that Algeria has been struggling all alone against “the bogeyman” that is now being waved about by the White House!… Bin Ladin-style imperialism, we’ve experienced it!
bbc.co.uk

Reggae star Buju Banton is to go on trial next month in Jamaica for his alleged role in an attack on a group of six gay men, a judge said on Friday.

Banton, 31, and another man, Horace Hill, are accused of beating the men at a house in Jamaica, in June 2004.

Both men have pleaded not guilty. The trial is due to begin on 19 October.
bbc.co.uk

St Johns, US Virgin Islands:
…”On August 30, I was raped by three white men. After they finished raping me they threw me overboard. I was bound, my lips were glued, I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t scream.”

“Two construction workers found me and they took me to the clinic,” she said.

Mrs Fretts said the men who allegedly raped her were “heavily masked” and wore gloves.

She believes she was targeted because she was the only black business owner in a certain part of the island.

Prejudice

“From the beginning when I got there, I was told that ‘my kind’ don’t have business for long,” she said. “They used to throw garbage, broken bottles, they wrote racial slurs on my door.”

Dr Chenzira Kahina is a member of the group We The People For Justice which organised the weekend protest.

She explained that explained that there was a lot of racism on St John’s and blamed the territory’s leadership for the situation.

“While we would like to say that we have control of our own destiny and we do have predominantly African leaders representing us, they do not focus on the needs of the people of the Virgin Islands,” Dr Kahina said.

“They focus on the tourists and they also focus on the predominantly minority white investors.”
bbc.co.uk

Scientists in Bucharest discovered flu antibodies in three domestic ducks found dead in a remote village late last month, the government said.

The exact strain is to be determined by a lab in the UK in the next few days.

Turkey has also confirmed its first case of bird flu at a turkey farm in the west of the country.

Turkish Agriculture Minister Mehdi Eker said that all the birds in the village in Balikesir province had been destroyed and the area had been disinfected.

Officials have told the Turkish media that initial tests have identified the virus as belonging to the H5 type of flu.
bbc.co.uk

The Front Lines in the Battle Against Avian Flu Are Running Short of Money
HONG KONG, Oct. 8 – As the Bush administration and Congress prepare to spend billions of dollars to improve America’s ability to combat avian flu, crucial needs are being left unmet on the front lines of the world’s defenses against the disease, in some cases for lack of a few million dollars, international health officials said Saturday.

A previously reliable source tipped authorities to a terror plot involving 15 to 20 people, one official said.

The source of the information had trained at a terrorist camp in Afghanistan and passed parts of a polygraph test, the official said.

The threat mentioned Friday and Sunday as possible dates, the official added.

The tipster in Iraq failed some sections of the polygraph test, but passed the section pertaining to the information about the New York threat, the official said.

That information, sources said, led to a military operation Wednesday night in Musayyib, about 45 miles south of Baghdad, where, military officials said, three al Qaeda suspects were arrested.
cnn.com

O WHATever…all I can see here is that the more Bush and Co. get sweated, the more likely they are to blow something up. Maybe this was a warning for some.

TEHRAN, Oct 2 (Reuters) – Investors are bailing out of Iran’s stock market, preferring gold and foreign bourses while international pressure ratchets up against Tehran’s disputed atomic programme, traders said on Sunday.

The total bourse capitalisation had dropped to $38.2 billion dollars on Sunday, down from $45 billion in late June when conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won a landslide presidential election victory.

The TEPIX all-share index stood at 10,151 points on Sunday, down 27 percent in the 14 months from August 2004, when it stood at 13,880.
news.yahoo.com

Madrid: African immigrants attempting to reach Spain are being deported by Morocco to the Sahara Desert without food or drink, Spanish Press reports said yesterday.

Non-governmental organisations in Spain are critical of Madrid’s decision to start expelling illegal migrants from west and central Africa back over the Moroccan border, saying they risk dying in the desert or being mistreated by Moroccan police.

Spain expelled a first group of 70 Malians to the Moroccan city of Tangier on Thursday in an attempt to discourage Africans from storming the border fences surrounding the Spanish enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta on Morocco’s Mediterranean coast.

Six immigrants died on Thursday in an attempt by hundreds of migrants to storm the Melilla border, bringing to 14 the death toll along the borders of the two enclaves within a little over a month.Morocco said its security forces had fired in self-defence, killing some of the migrants while others were trampled to death.

More than 13,000 would-be immigrants have participated in massive, coordinated attempts to storm the Melilla border so far this year.
The Spanish government said the expelled Malians would return to their home country, but press reports said Morocco was rounding up large numbers of sub-Saharan Africans near Melilla and other places and then taking them by bus to the desert near the Algerian border.

Formerly, Morocco deported migrants to the region of Oujda, from where they returned to the border area of Ceuta or Melilla and made a fresh attempt to enter Spain, according to the daily El Pais. Morocco has now started taking illegals to the desert 500 kilometres south of Oujda, where there is no food or drink available, according to the daily.
“In front of us, there is nothing but sand, rocks, hills and a lot of sun,” Congolese Philippe Tamouneke told El Pais by telephone.

Tamouneke said he was handcuffed, put on a bus for nine hours and left in the desert. His group included a pregnant woman and three children, he added.
bahraintribune.com

It is no secret that the government of the United States is carrying out a program of operations in favor of the Venezuelan political opposition to remove President Hugo Chávez Frías and the coalition of parties that supports him from power. The budget for this program, initiated by the administration of Bill Clinton and intensified under George W. Bush, has risen from some $2 million in 2001 to $9 million in 2005, and it disguises itself as activities to “promote democracy,” “resolve conflicts,” and “strengthen civic life.” It consists of providing money, training, counsel and direction to an extensive network of political parties, NGO’s, mass media, unions, and businessmen, all determined to end the bolivarian revolutionary process. The program has clear short, medium, and long-term goals, and adapts easily to changes in the fluid Venezuelan political process.

The program of political intervention in Venezuela is one more of various in the world principally directed by the Department of State (DS), the Agency for International Development (AID), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) along with its four associated foundations. These are the International Republican Institute (IRI) of the Republican Party; the National Democratic Institute (NDI) of the Democratic Party; the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) of the US Chamber of Commerce; and the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS) of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the main US national union confederation. In addition, the program has the support of an international network of affiliated organizations.

The various organizations carry out their operations through AID officials at the U.S. Embassy in Caracas and through three “private” offices in Caracas under the Embassy’s control: the IRI (established in 2000), the NDI (2001), and a contractor of AID, a U.S. consulting firm called Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI) (2002). These three offices develop operations with dozens of Venezuelan beneficiaries to which they contribute money originating from the State Department, AID, NED, and, although no proof is yet available, most probably the CIA. The operations of the first three are detailed extensively in hundreds of official documents acquired by U.S. journalist Jeremy Bigwood through demands under the Freedom of Information Act, a law that requires the declassification and release of government documents, although many are censured when released.

Venezuelan associates of the U.S. intervention programs participated in the unsuccessful coup against President Chavez in April 2002, in the petroleum lockout/strike of December 2002 to February 2003, and in the recall referendum of August 2004. Having failed in their three first attempts, the U.S. agencies mentioned above are currently planning and organizing for the Venezuelan national elections of 2005 and 2006. This analysis seeks to show how this program functions and the danger it represents.
globalresearch.ca

Invasion allegation based on war game
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s claim that the United States plans to invade his country stems from a military exercise put together by Spain’s armed forces. The U.S. government denied the charge.

…A document outlining the war game, obtained by The Herald from a leftist Internet website and confirmed by Spanish officials, says that the exercise is “a product of imaginary events even though they may seem like they’ve been adapted from reality.”

Similarities with Venezuela clearly do exist. The exercise’s map for three of the countries involved, named after colors, match exactly the maps of Venezuela, Colombia and Panama.

The country ”Brown” is rich in natural resources but politically unstable — just like oil-rich and unstable Venezuela — and several of the selected targets in the war game correspond to real Venezuelan places.

The country ”Blue” seems like the United States — with a mighty military and a need for Brown’s resources — but the exercise map shows the outline of Austria and sets it as an island in the Atlantic.

Venezuelan Vice President José Vicente Rangel has insisted that the war game was designed ”with U.S. advice,” but offered no evidence. Yet many Venezuelans remain convinced that there is a threat.

”You don’t do a war game without any possibility of applying it,” said Alberto Mueller, a retired army general who consults for the Venezuelan government on military matters.

George Weah has been on the campaign trail for weeks, and the retired footballer who would be president of war-ravaged Liberia looks exhausted.
The convoy of four-wheel-drive cars tells the story of the journey. After setting out from the capital Monrovia last Friday with 32 vehicles, his campaign team bumped back towards the city yesterday in just five mud-spattered cars.

At a rest stop in the town of Ganta, Mr Weah clambered down from his car and walked wearily to a wooden bench in the shade. “I’m very optimistic,” he said. “I want to bring the basic necessities. Light, water and education. And I can see there’s a need for roads.”

With a small population – 3.3 million – and an abundance of resources, Liberia ought to be an African gem. But decades of bad government and a protracted civil war have left it one of the poorest countries in the world.
After sunset, the heart of Liberia’s capital is shrouded in darkness. In the dazzle of car headlights, prostitutes dance on street corners to lure customers and UN armoured cars gleam ghostly white.

The man who promises to bring light to this darkness, Mr Weah, 39, is a former world footballer of the year who grew up in a hut on reclaimed swampland in Monrovia. He is favourite to win Tuesday’s presidential vote.

“Liberians are ready to move the country forward,” Mr Weah told the Guardian, flanked by security men in camouflage gear. “We need stability, to reassure the world that we are ready to move forward.

“My career does not make much difference. I’m a human being that has contributed to my society.”

The super-rich sports star had witnessed extreme poverty on his journey through Liberia’s rainforest-clad interior. He had seen first hand the dirt roads where treacherous orange mud sucks at car tyres. On Thursday night, he slept in his car because the convoy had been unable to reach the nearest town.

“We live in Monrovia and think everything is OK, but our people in the hinterland are catching a hard time. I experienced that myself in the 1970s. Our people are still living in huts, in a country that has the resources. At least, we can get low-cost housing for our people.”

Football was the springboard out of poverty for Mr Weah, who was brought up by his grandmother. He started with local teams like Young Survivor and Invincible XI, then moved to Cameroon where the national squad’s coach recommended him to Arsène Wenger, then coach of Monaco.

Mr Weah became a star, playing for a string of Europe’s most prestigious clubs, including AC Milan and Chelsea.

But he was more than just a sportsman. He personally funded the Liberia team through an African Nations Cup campaign and became a goodwill ambassador for Unicef, returning to Liberia to encourage child soldiers to lay down their arms.

Two former presidents of Liberia have been murdered and a third lives in exile. Mr Weah is conscious of the danger he faces. “When it comes to African politics, everyone that runs for the highest office faces danger,” he said. “Life is a risk, and I’m taking a risk for my people. Anybody would be afraid. I have a beautiful life, and I’m putting it on the line for my people.”

The retired footballer lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with his American wife and three children. He also has a four-bedroom house in Monrovia, where he keeps a silver Porsche Boxster.

His wealth provokes admiration rather than jealousy. Dayton Sei Boe, 32, an official with his Congress for Democratic Change party, said fondly: “The young man is a star, and stars love big cars.”

Some believe his wealth and celebrity make him immune from the corruption which was rampant under Liberia’s past leaders. In Ganta’s marketplace, Madison Morpue, 21, a trader, said: “I will vote for George Weah because he has money of his own, and our money will be safe.”

Liberia’s election is a contest of the Yanna-boys and the book-men. The Yanna-boys are street traders, who overwhelmingly back Mr Weah. The book-men, the educated class, prefer Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, 66, a former World Bank economist. If elected, she will be Africa’s first female head of state.
guardian.co.uk

Prosecutors in Sicily opened a criminal investigation yesterday following the publication of a horrific account by a journalist who disguised himself as an illegal immigrant and spent a week in detention.
Fabrizio Gatti, of the centre-left news magazine L’Espresso, said he had seen immigrant detainees being humiliated and physically and verbally abused by paramilitary carabinieri officers.

His account, published yesterday, has disturbing echoes of the scandal involving the mistreatment of prisoners by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. It will anger those urging a clampdown on immigration as much as human-rights lobbyists.

After enduring seven days of dire conditions in a detention centre, he was simply let go. Despite the conservative government’s tough policy on immigration, the reporter’s alter ego, Bilal Ibrahim el Habib, was set free, “to go and work in any city in Europe as an illegal alien”.
His journey began when he jumped into the Mediterranean off the Italian island of Lampedusa and floated back ashore on a raft. Lampedusa, midway between Malta and Tunisia, is a favourite destination for would-be immigrants from north Africa.

Mr Gatti was picked up by a passing motorist and handed over to the carabinieri. One officer, he said, amused himself by showing a pornographic video on his mobile telephone to the mainly Muslim detainees in the reception centre on the island.
guardian.co.uk