Hours after an exotic dancer was allegedly raped by members of the Duke University lacrosse team, a player apparently sent an e-mail saying he wanted to invite more strippers to his dorm room, kill them and skin them. It was not clear whether the message was serious or a joke.

Investigators did not return calls seeking comment about the nature of the e-mail. But a lawyer for the player who purportedly wrote it said the content suggests his client is innocent.

“While the language of the e-mail is vile, the e-mail itself is perfectly consistent with the boys’ unequivocal assertion that no sexual assault took place that evening,” said attorney Robert Ekstrand. The e-mail “demonstrates that its writer is completely unaware that any act or event remotely similar to what has been alleged ever occurred.”
breitbart.com

A mobile phone salesman was hauled off a plane and questioned for three hours as a terror suspect – because he listened to songs by The Clash and Led Zeppelin.
Harraj Mann, 24, played the punk anthem London Calling and classic rock track Immigrant Song in a taxi before a flight to London.

The lyrics to both tracks made the driver fear his passenger was a terrorist.

The words of the Clash track begin: “London calling to the faraway towns, now war is declared and battle come down.” And Led Zep’s Immigrant Song goes: “The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands, to fight the horde, singing and crying: Valhalla, I am coming!”

Mr Mann, of Hartlepool, Teesside, had boarded the plane at Durham Tees Valley Airport when the flight to Heathrow was stopped and he was arrested by police.

He said he was told he was being questioned under the Terrorism Act and his choice of music had aroused suspicions.

Mr Mann said yesterday: ‘The taxi had one of those tape deck things that plugs into your digital music player.

“I played Procol Harum’s Whiter Shade Of Pale first, which the taxi man liked. I figured he liked the classics so put on a bit of Led Zeppelin – Immigrant Song – which he didn’t like. Then, since I was going to London, I played the song by The Clash and finished up with Nowhere Man by The Beatles.”

Mr Mann said he was ‘frog-marched off the plane in front of everyone, had my bags searched and was asked ‘every question you can think of’.
dailymail.co.uk

The deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security was arrested last night on charges that he used the Internet to seduce an undercover Florida sheriff’s detective who he thought was a 14-year-old girl, the Polk County Sheriff’s Office said.

Brian J. Doyle, 55, was arrested at his Silver Spring home at 7:45 p.m. and charged with seven counts of using a computer to seduce a child and 16 counts of transmitting harmful materials to a minor, according to a sheriff’s office statement.

Agents with the department’s Inspector General’s Office, the U.S. Secret Service, the Montgomery County police and the Polk County Sheriff’s Office served a search warrant and seized his home computer and other materials, the statement said.

Doyle was online at the time awaiting what he thought was a nude image of a girl who had lymphoma, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said in an interview with Fox News’ “On the Record With Greta Van Susteren.” “We wanted to make sure he was using that computer and talking to detectives at the time of the arrest,” Judd said.
washingtonpost.com

Six months after Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf Coast struggles with a new challenge-who will do the rebuilding? The region is awash in clean-up and reconstruction projects, but with more than 1.5 million people displaced by the hurricane, ready hands are in short supply.

In many areas, the tight post-Katrina labor market has already had stunning effects-construction jobs regularly advertise starting pay of $15 an hour or more, and a gig at Burger King might land you a $6,000 bonus.

But even with tight labor markets, workers in the region are finding conditions-and organizing against those conditions-challenging.

The hurricane has created enormous problems for the Gulf Coast’s union workers. Waste Management Inc.-one of the largest waste services companies in the United States-is one such example. The company handled trash pick-ups for the city of New Orleans before Katrina.

But after the storm, FEMA took over garbage collection for the city and Waste Management secured several lucrative subcontracts for debris removal. In the process, the company dumped its unionized workers and replaced them with temps. Waste Management even set up a camp just north of the Huey Long Bridge for its temp laborers.
counterpunch.org

NAIROBI, April 4 (Reuters) – Somalia’s worst fighting in years suggests the failed Horn of Africa state may become a new proxy battleground for Islamist militants and the United States.

Washington sees Somalia as a terrorist haven and backs the warlords in Mogadishu, which may have galvanised the Islamists against them both, analysts say.

A battle in March pitted warlords calling themselves the Anti-Terrorism Coalition against Islamic fighters backed by the influential Islamic courts. As many as 90 people were killed in the fighting.

A widely held perception that the United States backs the warlords with weapons, money and surveillance prompted Islamist hardliners to start a fight that killed 37 people in February, hours after the coalition announced its presence.
What has many worried is that these two battles were seen as a fight between the United States and Islam.

The U.S. backing for the warlords has, in fact, strengthened the position of the Islamists and “helped extreme elements to get the Somali public behind them,” an official involved with Somalia told Reuters.

While the Islamic courts are not viewed as extremists, they and their supporters are seen as sympathetic to al Qaeda and foreign fighters who operate in Somalia, the official said.

Others say the Islamic courts, whose leaders have blamed the United States for supporting warlords, want to fight any attempt to create a government that would undermine their authority.
alertnet.org

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip – Israeli warplanes fired three missiles into the presidential compound of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday, wounding two people and leaving deep craters in the ground. Abbas was not there at the time.

The Israeli airstrike came in response to homemade Palestinian rocket attacks on southern Israel, though it was not immediately clear why Abbas’ compound was targeted. Abbas has been a strong critic of the rocket fire and has urged the new Hamas Cabinet to accept peacemaking with Israel.

The missiles landed at Ansar 2, a largely abandoned base of the presidential guard and about 100 yards from Abbas’ office. The Palestinian leader was at his main office in the West Bank.
news.yahoo.com

That’s right, kill the only Palestinian you say you’re willing to talk to.

U.S. looking to increase Palestinian humanitarian aid
The United States wants to increase humanitarian assistance to Palestinians and help them control an outbreak of bird flu even though it will not give aid to a Hamas-led government, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Tuesday.

Rice is close to concluding a review of U.S. aid to Palestinians as she seeks to balance efforts to prevent suffering among Palestinians while avoiding any U.S. dealings with Hamas, which Washington considers a terrorist group despite having won a parliamentary election in January.

“One thing we are reviewing is how we can even increase our humanitarian assistance because we don’t want to send a negative message to the Palestinian people about their humanitarian needs,” Rice told a congressional budget hearing.

Oh I don’t think the Palestinians are getting the wrong idea, not at all.

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey – For Ramazan, an elderly Kurdish businessman, the recent battles between masked Kurdish youths and Turkish police have rekindled a dream – the creation of an autonomous zone for his people in Turkey, much like the one carved out of Iraq. But that dream is Turkey’s worst nightmare.

While Kurds look to northern Iraq for inspiration, Turks see it as an example of what the future could bring: a collapsed central state and a brewing ethnic civil war.

Iran and Syria also are concerned that Kurds in Iraq’s oil-rich north could set up an independent state if the Iraqi central government collapses – serving as a rallying call for their own restless Kurdish minorities and destabilize the entire region.

Iran’s ambassador to Turkey, Firouz Dowlatabadi, warned in an interview published Tuesday that Turkey, Iran and Syria need a joint policy on the Kurdish issue or “the U.S. will carve pieces from us for a Kurdish state.”
thestate.com

While President Bush vows to transform Iraq into a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, his administration has been scaling back funding for the main organizations trying to carry out his vision by building democratic institutions such as political parties and civil society groups.

The administration has included limited new money for traditional democracy promotion in budget requests to Congress. Some organizations face funding cutoffs this month, while others struggle to stretch resources through the summer. The shortfall threatens projects that teach Iraqis how to create and sustain political parties, think tanks, human rights groups, independent media outlets, trade unions and other elements of democratic society.

The shift in funding priorities comes as security costs are eating up an enormous share of U.S. funds for Iraq and the administration has already ratcheted back ambitions for reconstructing the country’s battered infrastructure. While acknowledging that they are investing less in party-building and other such activities, administration officials argue that bringing more order and helping Iraqis run effective ministries contribute to democracy as well.

Jennifer Windsor, executive director of Freedom House, an advocacy group that hosted a Bush speech last week, called the situation “a travesty” and said she is “appalled” that more is not being done. “This is the time to show that democracy promotion is more than holding an election. If the U.S. can’t see fit to fund follow-up democracy promotion at this time,” then it is making a mistake, she said.

“The commitment to what the president of the United States will say every single day of the week is his number one priority in Iraq, when it’s translated into action, looks very tiny,” said Les Campbell, who runs programs in the Middle East for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, known as NDI.

NDI and its sister, the International Republican Institute (IRI), will see their grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development dry up at the end of this month, according to a government document, leaving them only special funds earmarked by Congress last year. Similarly, the U.S. Institute of Peace has had its funding for Iraq democracy promotion cut by 60 percent. And the National Endowment for Democracy expects to run out of money for Iraqi programs by September.

“Money keeps getting transferred away to security training. Democracy’s one of the things that’s been transferred,” said Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s project on democracy and the rule of law. “Without that, all the other stuff looks like just background work.”
washingtonpost.com

Gee should we cheer or boo?

WASHINGTON – Much of the money for rebuilding Iraq has already been spent, and Iraqi soldiers are gradually taking over for their American counterparts. So what can the United States still use as leverage? It may be that the strongest influence is the simple fear of what would happen if the US up and left.

“Most of Iraq’s leaders recognize that if the US were to pull out precipitously, things could get much worse,” says Phebe Marr, an Iraq expert at the US Institute of Peace who has spent considerable time with Iraq’s principal political factions. “All the talk about the US getting out, an exit strategy and so forth, has them worried. It’s having an impact.”

Yet even as the US shows signs of growing increasingly impatient with Iraqi leaders over their inability to name a new government, that doesn’t mean the US wants to look as if it is determining Iraq’s future. The result is a delicate balancing act: It’s applying pressure for political action even while encouraging a sovereign Iraq that appears to stand on its own two feet.
csmonitor.com

Iraq shelves political talks despite US pressure
BAGHDAD (AFP) – Iraqi leaders shelved talks on forming a government despite a warning from the United States and Britain against any further delay, as at least 23 were killed in violence across the country.

In another key development, Saddam Hussein was charged for genocide for the first time over his Anfal military campaign against Kurds from 1987-1988 that left around 180,000 people dead.

Talks on forming a national unity government were shelved despite stern warnings from US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her British counterpart Jack Straw who left Iraq Monday after an unprecedented two-day visit.

The formation of the first permanent post-Saddam government has been delayed due to bitter wrangling over key ministerial posts and the premiership, with non-Shiite factions opposing the candidacy of incumbent prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari.

The political vacuum saw Rice and Straw earlier this week voice their frustration at the lack of political progress, although the two refrained from any direct reference as to who should lead the cabinet.

Splits have appeared in the dominant conservative Shiite grouping, the United Iraqi Alliance, over the key sticking point of whether Jaafari should lead the new government.

And who caused this ‘split’?

Rice Dismisses Talk of U.S. Bases in Iraq
WASHINGTON – Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday brushed aside suggestions that the United States wants an indefinite troop presence and permanent military bases in Iraq.

“The presence in Iraq is for a very clear purpose, and that’s to enable Iraqis to be able to govern themselves and to create security forces that can help them do that,” Rice told the House Appropriations Committee’s foreign operations panel.

“I don’t think that anybody believes that we really want to be there longer than we have to,” the chief U.S. diplomat added.

However, Rice did not say when all U.S. forces would return home and did not directly answer Rep. Steven Rothman (news, bio, voting record), D-N.J., when he asked, “Will the bases be permanent or not?”

“I would think that people would tell you, we’re not seeking permanent bases really pretty much anywhere in the world these days. We are, in fact, in the process of removing base structure from a lot of places,” Rice replied.

A lie, like so many others.

“We need to make people feel the consequences of their actions.” Yikes.

The British Defence Secretary John Reid has called for changes in the rules of war in the face of “a deliberate regression towards barbaric terrorism by our opponents.”

He has put forward three areas for re-examination:

-The treatment of international terrorists

-The definition of an “imminent threat” to make it easier to take pre-emptive action

-When to intervene to stop a humanitarian crisis.

Perhaps the most controversial element was the first.

Although he framed his speech in the form of raising questions rather than proposing answers, he came close to suggesting that the way to end the “anomaly” of the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay was to change international law.

“Anomaly” is the word chosen by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair to describe Guantanamo and it has never really been defined. Mr Reid went some way towards doing that.

There are two ways of ending an anomaly – remove the anomaly or change the situation that makes it one. He appeared to favour the latter.

“On the one hand it is against our values,” he said during questions after a speech to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London.

“But we need to understand how we got to this unsatisfactory anomaly. It is not enough to say that it is wrong. We ought to discuss how it happened.”

How it happened, he suggested in his speech, was 11 September 2001 “proved beyond doubt that, while no one can be sure that the era of war between great powers is entirely over, we certainly now face a new enemy.”

Guantanamo Bay: how to end the ‘anomaly’?

“We now face non-state actors capable of operating on a global scale, crossing international borders, exploiting the teachings of a great, peaceful religion as justification for their murderous intent.”

…Mr Reid said the question was “to what extent we could impose on non-state actors the same constraints we apply to ourselves. We need to make people feel the consequences of their actions.”
bbc.co.uk