MASERU, Lesotho, May 16 (Reuters) – The World Bank, in a much anticipated decision, said on Tuesday it will establish a permanent office with a country director in Iraq to play a more central role in coordinating donor assistance.

In documents obtained by Reuters, the bank’s director for Iraq, Joseph Saba, said up to three other international employees would be appointed for the office, which has until now been managed by a consultant contracted through the British development agency DFID. He said all appointments would be on a voluntary basis.

“With the advent of a permanent Iraqi government, the Bank sees opportunities for increased stability, more fruitful cooperation, and enhanced program effectiveness that warrant a further incremental strengthening of the Bank’s presence in Iraq,” Saba said in the statement to the board of member countries.

The move comes nearly a year after Paul Wolfowitz left his job as the No. 2 official at the Pentagon, where he was one of the main architects of the U.S. war in Iraq, to take the reins of the World Bank.

Saba said the World Bank’s offices would be in the same building as the Iraqi Planning Ministry and Ministry of Finance and any staff travel would be limited.
alertnet.org

In fact, he is also warning that oil prices could easily ‘plummet’ in the near future.

Ali al-Naimi said prices could plummet if an economic crisis drives industrialized nations to find other sources of energy, citing the 1980s, when oil prices dropped by 80 percent after such nations reduced their dependency on oil and turned to alternative energy sources.

”Global economic growth may not continue at the same good momentum for years to come,” al-Naimi said at the opening of a four-day conference of Arab energy ministers in Amman. ”We should be careful and not take expectations as indisputable, especially the continuation of big demand for oil and its prices remaining at the same level or increasing,” he said.

As you may know, Financial Intelligence Report, a sister publication of NewsMax and MoneyNews, has already issued the same warning to our investors. We also have revealed how investors can profit from the coming oil price drop.

Our track record on oil is impressive. In April 2004, Financial Intelligence Report predicted that oil prices would skyrocket from $29 per barrel to over $60 within 12 months. That forecast was dead on.

Today we feel that oil prices will continue to dramatically fall in the next 12 months to as low as $40 a barrel!
newsmax.com

…”Imagine this: you are deep in debt but every day you write cheques for millions of dollars you don’t have — another luxury car, a holiday home at the beach, the world trip of a lifetime. Your cheques should be worthless but they keep buying stuff because those cheques you write never reach the bank! You have an agreement with the owners of one thing everyone wants, call it petrol/gas, that they will accept only your cheques as payment. This means everyone must hoard your cheques so they can buy petrol/gas. Since they have to keep a stock of your cheques, they use them to buy other stuff too. You write a cheque to buy a TV, the TV shop owner swaps your cheque for petrol/gas, that seller buys some vegetables at the fruit shop, the fruiterer passes it on to buy bread, the baker buys some flour with it, and on it goes, round and round — but never back to the bank. You have a debt on your books, but so long as your cheque never reaches the bank, you don’t have to pay. In effect, you have received your TV free. This is the position the USA has enjoyed for 30 years.”
pravda.ru

(IsraelNN.com) Former US President Jimmy Carter has called Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s unilateral Convergence Plan “illegal” and a violation of the Camp David Accords he brokered between Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1978. Carter further characterized the plan to retain large Jewish communities under Israeli sovereignty as a “confiscation of land”.

The former American president wrote in USA Today on Tuesday, “It is inconceivable that any Palestinian, Arab leader, or any objective member of the international community would accept this illegal action as a permanent solution to the continuing altercation in the Middle East.”

Instead of unilateral moves, Carter called on Israel to negotiate with Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), regardless of the Palestinian Authority’s current Hamas legislature. He claimed such an agreement “would also remove one of the major causes of international terrorism and greatly ease tensions that could precipitate a regional or even global conflict.”
israelnn.com

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran is enlisting Syria and the militant Palestinian Hamas group Ñ both also deeply at odds with the United States, Israel and some in western Europe Ñ as allies in the battle over its disputed nuclear program.

The move has prompted Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Dan Gillerman to declare that “a dark cloud is looming above our region, and it is metastasizing as a result of the statements and actions by leaders of Iran, Syria and the newly elected government of the Palestinian Authority.”
news.yahoo.com

A US lawmaker and former Marine colonel accused US Marines of killing innocent Iraqi civilians after a Marine comrade had been killed by a roadside bomb.

“Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood,” John Murtha told reporters. The November 19 incident occurred in Haditha, Iraq.

“There was no firefight” that led to the shootings at close range, the Vietnam war veteran said, denying early official accounts, which said that a roadside bomb had killed the Iraqis.

“There were no (roadside bombs) that killed these innocent people,” he said.

Time magazine reported the shootings on March 27, based on an Iraqi human rights group and locals, who said that 15 unarmed Iraqis died, including women and children, when Marines barged into their home throwing grenades and shooting.

“It’s much worse than reported in Time magazine,” Murtha said.
breitbart.com

One person is being assassinated in Basra every hour, as order in Iraq’s second city disintegrates, according to an Iraqi Defence Ministry official.

And a quarter of all Iraqi children suffer from malnutrition, a survey of 20,000 households by the Iraqi government and Unicef says.

The number of violent killings in Basra is now at a level close to that of Baghdad, and marks the failure of the British Army’s three-year attempt to quell violence there. Police no longer dare go to the site of a murder because they fear being attacked. The governor of Basra, Mohammed Misbahal-Wa’ili, is trying to sack the city’s police chief, claiming that the police have not carried out a single investigation into hundreds of recent assassinations.

The collapse of government authority in Iraq is increasing at every level and leaders in Baghdad have yet to form a cabinet, five months after parliamentary elections on 15 December.

Insurgent attacks on American and British troops are also proving more lethal, with 44 US soldiers and seven British killed so far this month, and with daily losses exceeding anything seen for more than a year.

Majid al-Sari, an adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Defence, describing the situation in Basra to the daily al-Zaman, said that on average one person was being assassinated every hour. Militiamen and tribesmen are often the only real authority. When Sheikh Hassan Jarih al-Karamishi was killed by men dressed in police uniforms at the weekend, Mr Sari said his heavily armed armed tribesmen stormed one police station in south Basra, killing 11 police, and burnt down two other buildings, headquarters for a political party.

Tribes who once lived in the marshlands outside Basra are engaged in constant feuds with other tribes. While militias owe allegiance to Shia parties, they are also suspected of receiving funds from Kuwaiti and Iranian intelligence.
indepependent.co.uk

BAGHDAD, 17 May (IRIN) – Sajida Youssef, a housekeeper, waited more than 24 hours for the body of her son, who had been murdered by thieves, to be released from Baghdad’s central morgue.

“Not only is there the suffering of having my son brutally killed, but now I must wait hours until the mortuary can examine his body,” said Sajida.

Lack of space, a shortage of doctors and an increase in the number of victims of daily violence countrywide has put pressure on Baghdad’s only mortuary, which used to release bodies in five hours or less. “We have a lack of equipment and professionals,” said Dr Fa’aq Ameen, director of the health ministry’s Forensic Medicine Institute.

“Our work is getting more difficult because more Iraqis are being brutally killed, requiring lengthy investigations and examinations that can take hours and sometimes days.”

An average of 70 civilians are killed in Baghdad every day, largely a result of the sectarian violence which has been on the rise since the 22 February attack on a revered Shi’ite shrine in Samarra city. Every month, the mortuary receives more than 1,500 bodies, not including the bodies of people killed in the north and south of the country.
alertnet.org

Unusual political stability in Turkey faces upheaval from Iraq’s impending fracture along sectarian lines. The birth of an independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq will end Turkey’s E.U. accession hopes. The collapse of the accession process will strongly undermine the legitimacy of the ruling Justice and Development Party (A.K.P.), making it increasingly vulnerable to political attacks from Turkey’s secular establishment. These attacks could prompt the disintegration of the Erdogan government as soon as the end of 2006.
pinr.com

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) — Islamic militants, some armed with machine guns, battled Afghan, U.S. and Canadian forces and exploded two suicide car bombs Thursday, some of the deadliest violence in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban.

More than 100 people were killed in the string of attacks that started late Wednesday: dozens of insurgents, at least 15 Afghan police, an American civilian training Afghan forces, and the first female Canadian soldier to die in combat.

The fighting concentrated in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar raised new concerns for the future of Afghanistan’s fragile democracy. The Taliban have stepped up attacks in recent months, with roadside bombs and suicide assaults, but this week’s fighting marked an escalation in a region where the U.S.-led coalition is to cede control of security operations to NATO by July.

President Hamid Karzai said the violence emanated from the mountainous border trial regions of neighboring Pakistan, populated by the ethnic Pashtuns who make up the majority of the Taliban militants and are believed to be hiding Osama bin Laden.

“We have credible reports that inside Pakistan, in the madrassas, the mullahs and teachers are saying to their students: ‘Go to Afghanistan for jihad. Burn the schools and clinics,”‘ Karzai said.

Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Tasnim Aslam, called the allegations “baseless.”
ksdk.com