Peru’s president has warned against damaging the country’s stability, ahead of presidential elections in April.

“If you are not interested in building economic, political, legal stability then we will not have investment,” Alejandro Toledo told the BBC.

His warning came amid polls showing rising support for nationalist former army officer Ollanta Humala.

In January Peru withdrew its ambassador to Venezuela after “interference” by President Hugo Chavez in its election.

Peruvian authorities were outraged when Mr Chavez praised Mr Humala and hit out at the conservative front-runner in the poll, Lourdes Flores, who he said was the candidate of the Peruvian oligarchy.

The diplomatic row erupted when Mr Humala attended a news conference in Caracas with the Venezuelan leader and Bolivia’s President-elect Evo Morales.

Mr Chavez praised Mr Humala for “joining the battle” against the Free Trade Area of the Americas backed by Washington and a number of countries in the region.
bbc.co.uk

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is stepping up efforts to counter leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as he builds opposition to U.S. influence in Latin America.

U.S. diplomats have sought in recent years to mute their conflicts with Chavez, fearing that a war of words with the flamboyant populist could raise his stature at home and abroad. But in recent months, as Chavez has sharpened his attacks — and touched American nerves by increasing ties with Iran — American officials have become more outspoken about their intention to isolate him.

Signaling the shift, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Congress last month that the United States was actively organizing other countries to carry out an “inoculation strategy” against what it sees as meddling by Chavez.

U.S. officials believe Chavez uses his oil wealth to reward governments that share his anti-American views and to foment change in those that don’t.

“We are working with other countries to make certain that there is a united front against some of the things that Venezuela gets involved in,” said Rice, who called Venezuela a “sidekick” of Iran.

Rice leaves today on an eight-day trip to Latin America, Indonesia and Australia, including a stop in Chile for the inauguration of President-elect Michelle Bachelet. Rice said pointedly Thursday that she did not plan to see Chavez, who is expected to attend the inauguration Saturday.

As part of the administration’s new view of Venezuela, U.S. defense and intelligence officials have revised their assessment of the security threat Venezuela poses to the region. They say they believe Venezuela will have growing military and diplomatic relationships with North Korea and Iran, and point with concern to its arms buildup. Of equal worry to them is Venezuela’s overhaul of its military doctrine, which now emphasizes “asymmetric warfare” — a strategy of sabotage and hit-and-run attacks against a greater military power, much like that used by Iraqi insurgents.
latimes.com

The Nigerian Armed forces yesterday recorded heavy casualties in two separate battles with Ijaw militias along the waterway of Warri, Delta State with 13 soldiers feared dead.

This comes as the Chief of Naval Staff (CNS), Vice Admiral Ganiyu Adekeye, yesterday advised the Federal Government to adopt a proactical political measure to the current crisis threatening to tear down the Niger Delta region.

Defence Headquarters, however, confirmed the death of four of its personnel in yesterday’s renewed hostilities with militants in the region.

Speaking with THISDAY in Abuja, Acting Director of Defence Information, Group Captain Eniola. O. Akinduro, said, “Four soldiers were killed and an unspecified number of militants were equally killed in the exchange of firearms in the Niger Delta yesterday.”

Akinduro, who could not disclose the actual cause of yesterday’s shoot out, however, assured Nigerians that, “investigations is currently being carried out to determine the possible cause of the shooting.”

He denied claims that the military was re-enforcing troops in the region, stating that, “Movement of military troops from one end of the area to the other are often construed to mean military re-enforcement. But I can tell you that there is no military re-enforcement in the area now.”
allafrica.com

Join The ExxonMobil War Boycott – Buy Citgo –
ExxonMobil has been selected for boycott because of its apparent active involvement in U.S. policy in the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular, and its power to help change these policies.

Campbell Soup, Carlson Companies (Radisson Hotels, TGI Friday’s), Corning Inc., Metlife, Novartis, Pfizer, Verizon, Wells Fargo and Wyeth are also selected for boycott because these firms can influence ExxonMobil through board members they share in common with ExxonMobil.

When governments and/or corporations perpetrate gross injustice and war – or do nothing to stop it – we, the people, must take action to end the violence and exploitation.

Through the power of information and boycott, Consumers For Peace offers you a non-violent way, every day, to act on behalf of justice and peace. Our focus is the Iraq War.

We propose a boycott of ExxonMobil Corporation products and the products and services of nine firms that are in a position to influence ExxonMobil through its board of directors to achieve these goals:

Immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops and mercenaries from Iraq; and reparations for the loss of Iraqi lives and property.
Impeachment of George W. Bush; and criminal prosecution of executive branch officials who have lied to congress about the war and/or have commited war crimes and crimes against humanity.

What about Angola and Nigeria?

Richard Rogers, the noted British architect, was recently summoned to the offices of the Empire State Development Corp. to explain his connection to a group called Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine. Empire State is overseeing the redesign of New York’s $1.7-billion Javits Convention Center, and Rogers is the architect on the job.

According to media reports, Rogers has sparked the anger of various New York politicians and Jewish organizations for what he now claims was only a fleeting association with Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine. The group has taken the “outrageous” position that Israel’s West Bank barrier (sometimes referred to euphemistically as a “security fence”) is, well, problematic–because most of it is built not on Israel’s 1967 border but within the West Bank; because it violates international law; because it separates farmers from their land, one town from another, people from their doctors, children from their schools; and because it generally wreaks havoc on Palestinian life.

Members of the group have proposed a boycott of Israeli architects and construction companies working on the barrier, saying their involvement in such a project makes them “complicit in social, political and economic oppression” and is “in violation of their professional code of ethics.”

Apparently anyone associated with such a position–in other words, anyone taking a principled stand in favor of human rights and international law–may have to count himself out of a contract for the Javits Center.

This is only the most recent example of Israel’s American defenders–who will not tolerate any criticism of Israel–using their political clout to punish or silence dissident voices. Last month, the New York premiere of a play based on the words of Rachel Corrie, a young American who was crushed by an Israeli Army bulldozer while protesting the demolition of a Palestinian home, was indefinitely postponed for fear that some might find her words “offensive.”

Naturally, Rogers has been desperately trying to distance himself from anything that might stand in the way of his retaining the Javits project, including severing his ties with the group and stating that he does not back a boycott.

Israel’s barrier is fine, Rogers now says. In fact, he’s now in favor of it. Further, “Hamas must renounce terrorism,” he told the New York Post. “Hamas must recognize Israel’s right to exist. Just making a statement is not enough. They have to back it up.”
counterpunch.org

On the top floor of a commandeered Palestinian home in the West Bank city of Hebron, Yehuda Shaul, a former Israeli soldier, stood at the centre of a group of rapt German tourists and told them about the time he unleashed his grenade launcher on local gunmen.

“I was trained with the grenade gun. That was my mission,” he said. “But we were shooting at houses 800 metres away, so of course you hit innocent targets too.”

When Mr Shaul talks about innocent targets, he means Palestinian civilians. Yet he is not afraid to tell stories from his 14 months service in the Israeli army in Hebron.

“Could we fire grenades at areas where Palestinians lived? Sure. Why not?” he asked, describing many Israeli army actions breaking the army’s own rules of engagement. “It was fun. It was cool. Could we shut 2,000 Palestinian shops with a curfew on a whim? Why not?”

In the past nine months, Mr Shaul and the Breaking the Silence group he founded has led more than 40 groups totalling 1,200 people around the divided city of Hebron, where 500 Jewish settlers live at the heart of a Palestinian population of more than 100,000.

The tourists pay nothing bar transport costs, but they are given a no-holds-barred insider view of the effect that Israel’s Hebron settlements – and the hundreds of combat troops which protect them – have on the city’s Palestinian population.
telegraph.co.uk

NEW DELHI — Indian intelligence agencies have identified terror outfit Lashkar-e-Toiba as the prime suspect behind the Varanasi blasts.

The Indian Express newspaper said Friday the intelligence agencies told the cabinet committee on security, a key security committee of the federal government, that the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba militant outfit was the prime suspect in the Varanasi blasts and had most probably used operatives from Bangladesh and local elements to carry out the bombings.

“The status report presented to the CCS pointed out that the evidence collected so far indicated that LeT was the mastermind behind the bomb blasts though LeT men were not on the ground to personally set off the bombs. For that, the LeT is believed to have used Bangladeshis living illegally in Uttar Pradesh,” said a news report quoting an unidentified Indian intelligence official.

The official said in both cases, pressure cookers with timer devices were used to store improvised explosive devices which were triggered in the evening, when people crowd market places and religious shrines.
wpherald.com

NEW DELHI (AFP) – Officials from India, Pakistan and Iran will meet in Tehran next week to discuss a pipeline project for the export of Iranian natural gas to South Asia, an Indian oil ministry official said.

The 2,600-kilometre (1,600-mile) pipeline, valued at over seven billion dollars, was first proposed in 1994 but progress has been slowed by tensions between India and Pakistan, neighbours and nuclear-armed rivals.

“Petroleum Secretary M.S. Srinivasan will lead the Indian delegation, which will arrive in Iran on Monday for three days of official talks,” the official said on Friday.

India, which imports 70 percent of the oil it consumes, is keen to import natural gas to meet growing energy needs.
news.yahoo.com

THE United States is pushing the United Nations Security Council to give Iran a two-week deadline to halt nuclear work that could be related to the making of weapons.

The ultimatum to Iran to step down from its nuclear defiance or face sanctions could come as soon as Friday when the 15 members of the Security Council meet in New York.

A draft text prepared for the council by European nations yesterday said Iran should “without delay re-establish full, sustained and verifiable suspension of all enrichment-related and reprocessing [for plutonium] activities” with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Prime Minister John Howard has said Iran’s program should be referred to the UN and it would be a test of the UN’s effectiveness. But he believes it is too early to talk of sanctions.

With Russia and China opposing direct action, the Security Council is unlikely to rush into sanctions. It is likely first to urge Iran to accept IAEA demands that it halt all uranium enrichment work.

But the US is increasing the pressure to force Iran to step back from its refusal to co-operate with the IAEA.
smh.com.au

The new Zogby poll gauging the opinions of American troops in Iraq has drawn attention mostly because it finds that 72 percent believe the United States should withdraw in a year or less and only 23 percent favor George W. Bush’s plan to “stay the course.”

But the poll also illustrates the power of propaganda.

Shockingly, 85 percent of the troops questioned believe they are fighting in Iraq “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks” – one of the key Iraq War myths built by Bush’s frequent juxtaposition of references to Osama bin-Laden and Saddam Hussein.

This subliminal message has stuck with the vast majority of U.S. troops even though Bush eventually acknowledged publicly that there is no evidence linking Saddam to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

In other words, more than eight in 10 of the U.S. soldiers and Marines in Iraq think they are there avenging the 3,000 people killed on Sept. 11, even though the U.S. government lacks evidence of the connection.

The poll also found that 77 percent think that a major reason for the war was “to stop Saddam from protecting al-Qaeda in Iraq” – another myth nurtured by the Bush administration even though Hussein’s secular government was a bitter enemy of al-Qaeda’s Islamic fundamentalists.

Traitorous Troops?

Despite this confusion over the reasons for the war, the poll exploded another myth promoted by the administration and its media allies – that Americans are unpatriotic if they criticize Bush’s policies, because to do so would damage troop morale.

It turns out the troops want the war brought to a quick end because they have concluded it’s unwinnable based on their own experiences, not from the carping of home-side naysayers, often denounced as “traitors” by Bush’s supporters.

It seems somehow that 72 percent of the U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq have become “traitors,” too.
consortiumnews.com

FALLUJA – Three civilians, one Iraqi soldier and a U.S. soldier were killed when a suicide car bomb detonated near the western city of Falluja on Friday, the U.S. military said.
BAGHDAD – The body of American hostage Tom Fox was found with gun shot wounds and his hands tied behind his back near a railway line in western Baghdad on Thursday, police said on Saturday.
BAGHDAD – A director of Al-Iraqiya state owned television Amjad Hameed was killed and his driver wounded when gunmen ambushed his car in western Baghdad, police said.
BALAD – A roadside bomb exploded near a mosque killing two people and wounding one in the small town of Yathrib near Balad 85 km (55 miles) north of Baghdad on Friday, police said on Saturday. In a separate incident a U.S. military unit raided a house and killed a 25-year-old man in al-Thuluya near Balad on Friday, police said on Saturday.
alertnet.org

No One Knows How Many Iraqis Have Died
BAGHDAD, Iraq – Three years into the war, one grim measure of its impact on Iraqis can be seen at Baghdad’s morgue: There, the staff has photographed and catalogued more than 24,000 bodies from the Baghdad area alone since 2003, almost all killed in violence.

Despite such snapshots, the overall number of Iraqi civilians and soldiers killed since the U.S.-led invasion in spring 2003 remains murky. Bloodshed has worsened each year, pushing the Iraqi death toll into the tens of thousands. But no one knows the exact toll.

President Bush has said he thinks violence claimed at least 30,000 Iraqi dead as of December, while some researchers have cited numbers of 50,000, 75,000 or beyond.

The Pentagon has carefully counted the number of American military dead — now more than 2,300 — but declines to release its tally of Iraqi civilian or insurgent deaths.

The health ministry estimates 1,093 civilians died in the first two months of this year, nearly a quarter of the deaths government ministries reported in all of 2005.

The Iraqi government, however, has swung wildly in its casualty estimates, leading many to view its figures with skepticism.

At the Baghdad morgue, more than 10,000 corpses were delivered in 2005, up from more than 8,000 in 2004 and about 6,000 in 2003, said the morgue’s director Dr. Faik Baker. All were corpses from either suspicious deaths or violent or war-related deaths — things like car bombs and gunshot wounds, tribal reprisals or crime — and not from natural causes.

By contrast, the morgue recorded fewer than 3,000 violent or suspicious deaths in 2002, before the war, Baker said. The tally at the Baghdad morgue alone — one of several mortuaries in Iraq — thus exceeds figures from Iraqi government ministries that say 7,429 Iraqis were killed across all of Iraq in 2005.

Stop your meddling, Iraqi minister tells US
AMID rising American frustration with the political deadlock in Iraq, the National Security Minister, Abdul Karim al-Enzy, has rebuked Washington for interfering in Iraq’s domestic affairs.

In a remarkable broadside against the US, Mr Enzy charged that it was deliberately slowing Iraq’s redevelopment because of a self-serving agenda that included oil and the “war on terror”.

The attack came as the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, told a Senate inquiry in Washington that Iraq’s political leaders needed “to recognise the seriousness of the situation and form a government of national unity that will govern from the centre, and to do it in a reasonably prompt manner”.

To that end, US diplomats have demanded a more generous sharing of key portfolios among Iraq’s religious and ethnic populations than the dominant Shiite religious parties are willing to concede.

In particular, they are urging the dismissal of the hardline Interior Minister, Bayan Jabr.

But in an interview with the Herald, Mr Enzy snapped: “The last time I checked, Bayan Jabr was Interior Minister of Iraq – not of the US or the UN. He is one of our best and this is interference in our business.”

Mr Enzy argued that if the US-led coalition in Iraq had been more serious about rebuilding the country’s security forces in the first year of the occupation, it could now be making substantial cuts in foreign troop numbers in Iraq. “We don’t want foreign forces here, but it’s impossible for them to leave now, because we’re on the edge of civil war,” he said.

“The truth is the Americans don’t want us to reach the levels of courage and competence needed to deal with the insurgency because they want to stay here.

“They came for their own strategic interests. A lot of the world’s oil is in this region and they want to use Iraq as a battlefield in the war on terror because they believe they can contain the terrorism in Iraq.”

Iraqi Shi’ite cleric calls U.S., Britain and Israel a ‘Triad of Evil’
In a television interview Friday night, radical Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr described the United States, Israel and Britain as a “Triad of Evil”.

Speaking on state-run Iraqiya television, the anti-American al-Sadr also said last month’s attack on a Shi’ite shrine in the central city of Samarra was carried “in collusion with the occupiers and the Zionist Entity of Israel,” meaning for the U.S. and Israel. Hundreds of Iraqis died in the subsequent sectarian violence, much of which Sunni Muslims said was the work of al-Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi Army.

The Triad of Evil reference was an obvious play on words U.S. President Bush used in his 2002 State of the Union address, when he labeled Iraq, Iran and North Korea an “axis of evil.”

Al-Sadr, whose militia launched two uprisings against U.S. troops in 2004, refused to name any group that he believed was behind the bombing of the Askariyah shrine in Samarra but hinted at members of Saddam Hussein’s former regime or Sunni Muslim extremists.

“Those who carry arms could be takfiri extremists, Saddamists or others. But those who control arms are the Triad of Evil that are Israel, America and Britain,” said the black-turbaned cleric during the one-hour interview.