…The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Israelis staying at the Radisson on Wednesday had been evacuated before the attacks and escorted back home “apparently due to a specific security threat.”

Amos N. Guiora, a former senior Israeli counter-terrorism official, said in a phone interview with The Times that sources in Israel had also told him about the pre-attack evacuations.

“It means there was excellent intelligence that this thing was going to happen,” said Guiora, a former leader of the Israel Defense Forces who now heads the Institute for Global Security Law and Policy at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “The question that needs to be answered is why weren’t the Jordanians working at the hotel similarly removed?”
informationclearinghouse.info

Palestinian Spy Chief Killed in Blast

Lordy lord, you could not make this stuff up…

WASHINGTON – Most Americans say they aren’t impressed by the ethics and honesty of the Bush administration, already under scrutiny for its justifications for an unpopular war in Iraq and its role in the leak of a covert CIA officer’s identity.

Almost six in 10 — 57 percent — said they do not think the Bush administration has high ethical standards and the same portion says President Bush is not honest, an AP-Ipsos poll found. Just over four in 10 say the administration has high ethical standards and that Bush is honest. Whites, Southerners and evangelicals were most likely to believe Bush is honest.

Bush, who promised in the 2000 campaign to uphold “honor and integrity” in the White House, last week ordered White House workers, from presidential advisers to low-ranking aides, to attend ethics classes.
news.yahoo.com

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. – Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson warned residents of a rural Pennsylvania town Thursday that disaster may strike there because they “voted God out of your city” by ousting school board members who favored teaching intelligent design.

All eight Dover, Pa., school board members up for re-election were defeated Tuesday after trying to introduce “intelligent design” — the belief that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power — as an alternative to the theory of evolution.

“I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God. You just rejected him from your city,” Robertson said on the Christian Broadcasting Network’s “700 Club.”
news.yahoo.com

WASHINGTON (AP) – The Senate voted Thursday to bar foreign terror suspects at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from challenging their detentions in American courts, despite a Supreme Court ruling last year that granted access.

In a 49-42 vote, senators added the provision by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., to a sweeping defense policy bill.

“For 200 years, ladies and gentlemen, in the law of armed conflict, no nation has given an enemy combatant, a terrorist, an al-Qaida member the ability to go into every federal court in this United States and sue the people that are fighting the war for us,” Graham told his colleagues.
guardian.co.uk

‘Your dad’s dead.’ For most of my adult life I’d lived in dread of hearing those words. Even before he became a global icon of social justice I was keenly aware that my father’s death, whenever it came, would have a profound impact on my life. Years before they killed him I would imagine what it would be like to receive the news. I would rehearse scenarios in my head; how would I feel, how would I react? I never imagined, not even in my wildest calculations, that my father’s death would have such an impact well beyond my personal universe.
On the day they killed him I remember walking up a hilly street in Auckland. I was 25 years old and had flown to New Zealand to try to lobby the Commonwealth Heads of State to intervene on behalf of my father, who had been sentenced to death at the end of October. At the top of the street I turned to view the sunset. Looking out over the city centre below me and out into the harbour in the distance, I watched the sun sink into the sea, casting a pale orange glow against the sky. I remember the exact moment he died. I was sitting in a restaurant chatting and laughing with friends when I felt a brief palpitation in my chest – it felt like a vital connection had been ruptured inside me and I just knew. It was midnight in Auckland and midday in Nigeria and my father had just been hanged; his broken body lay in a shallow sand pit in a hut at the condemned prisoners block at Port Harcourt Prison.
guardian.co.uk

Nov. 10 (Bloomberg) — U.S. House Republican leaders removed from a $50.5 billion budget-cutting plan a provision that would have opened an Alaska wildlife refuge to oil drilling in an effort to win support from dissenting members in their party.

The House Rules Committee approved the change last night. The drilling proposal, which the Senate approved last week, would allow oil companies such as Irving, Texas-based Exxon Mobil Corp. and London-based BP Plc to drill on 1.5 million acres in the 19 million-acre Alaska Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. House leaders also removed a provision to allow more offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

A group of 26 Republicans objected to inclusion of the drilling provisions in legislation, which is designed to reduce the federal deficit by cutting government spending over five years. The House is scheduled to vote on the package today.
bloomberg.com

Of all the scribbled sentences that have converged to create the Valerie Plame affair the most remarkable, in literary terms, may belong to Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’ recently deposed chief of staff. “Out West where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work—and life,” he wrote in a jailhouse note to Judith Miller. Meant as a waiver of confidentiality, the letter touched off the sort of fevered exegesis more often associate with readings of “The Waste Land” than of legal correspondence. For even more difficult prose, however, one must revisit a earlier work. “The Apprentice”—Libby’ 1996 entry in the long and distinguishe annals of the right-wing dirty novel—tell the tale of Setsuo, a courageous virgin innkeeper who finds himself on the brink of love and war.

Libby has a lot to live up to as a conservative author of erotic fiction. As an article in SPY magazine pointed out in 1988, from Safire (“[She] finally came to him in the bed and shouted ‘Arragghrrorwr!’ in his ear, bit his neck, plunged her head between his legs and devoured him”) to Buckley (“I’d rather do this with you than play cards”) to Liddy (“T’sa Li froze, her lips still enclosing Rand’s glans . . .”) to Ehrlichman (“ ‘It felt like a little tongue’ ”) to O’Reilly (“Okay, Shannon Michaels, off with those pants”), extracurricular creative writing has long been an outlet for ideas that might not fly at, say, the National Prayer Breakfast. In one of Lynne Cheney’s books, a Republican vice-president dies of a heart attack while having sex with his mistress.
newyorker.com

Another diplomatic incident threatens to taint U.S.-Israeli relations: The American government has recently demanded Israel clarify how five U.S.-made helicopters sold to Israel in the mid-70s found their way into the hands of a Columbian drug cartel.

…According to American sources, the military copters currently serve the drug mafia in the South American country.
ynetnews.com

China’s insatiable demand for proteins as well as oil is turning Brazil into the takeaway for the workforce of the world. In the second part of our series, we reveal how the soya trade is creating a gold rush which is deforesting the Amazon.
guardian.co.uk

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, took a rare swipe at the United States, saying he was puzzled why residents in the capital of the world’s oldest democracy have no Congressional voting rights.

The Tibetan leader said it was “quite strange” that people in Washington DC had no voting Representatives and no Senators, an issue that has dogged the United States for the last 200 years.

It cropped up again when the Dalai Lama, on a visit to a public school in the US capital, was asked by a student why US citizens in DC were denied the right, and what would he do if his citizens were deprived of such a privilege.

The 70-year-old leader pondered for a while and shot back the same question to Bernard Igbedian, a 17-year-old pupil of Booker T. Washington Public Charter School for Technical Arts.

When Igbedian said he saw no reason for the denial of voting rights, the Dalai Lama, himself battling Chinese authorities for greater autonomy for Tibetans, said the people should speak up and find out why.

“Then you should find out. If there are sufficient reasons, we have to think more carefully, but if there is no reason, then shout,” the maroon-robed leader told the student, drawing laughter among the 200 odd students and visitors.
news.yahoo.com

Geez, when the Dalai Lama starts criticizing you you KNOW you’re in trouble…