ABUJA, Nigeria – Sudanese rebels rejected a proposal to end the bloodshed in the Darfur region on Sunday, throwing into question the outcome of yet another series of talks to put a stop to fighting that has left tens of thousands of people dead.

African Union mediators brokering the talks said they would extend by 48 hours the deadline for the peace parley’s end.

Salim Ahmed Salim said the talks would continue till midnight on Tuesday, pushing back a scheduled Sunday end to talks that have gone on for two years but so far failed to halt the violence.

Earlier, the rebels called for changes to the deal – after the Sudanese government indicated it would accept the proposal.
thestate.com

WASHINGTON – As the Bush administration has dramatically accelerated the classification of information as “top secret” or “confidential,” one office is refusing to report on its annual activity in classifying documents: the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

A standing executive order, strengthened by President Bush in 2003, requires all agencies and “any other entity within the executive branch” to provide an annual accounting of their classification of documents. More than 80 agencies have collectively reported to the National Archives that they made 15.6 million decisions in 2004 to classify information, nearly double the number in 2001, but Cheney continues to insist he is exempt.

Explaining why the vice president has withheld even a tally of his office’s secrecy when such offices as the National Security Council routinely report theirs, a spokeswoman said Cheney is “not under any duty” to provide it.
mercurynews.com

ZANZIBAR, Tanzania (AP) — Scientists tried to discover Saturday why hundreds of dolphins washed up dead on a beach popular with tourists on the northern coast of Zanzibar.

Among other possibilities, marine biologists were examining whether U.S. Navy sonar threw the animals off course.
cnn.com

04/29/06 “The Independent” — – In Syria, the world appears through a glass, darkly. As dark as the smoked windows of the car which takes me to a building on the western side of Damascus where a man I have known for 15 years – we shall call him a “security source”, which is the name given by American correspondents to their own powerful intelligence officers – waits with his own ferocious narrative of disaster in Iraq and dangers in the Middle East.

His is a fearful portrait of an America trapped in the bloody sands of Iraq, desperately trying to provoke a civil war around Baghdad in order to reduce its own military casualties. It is a scenario in which Saddam Hussein remains Washington’s best friend, in which Syria has struck at the Iraqi insurgents with a ruthlessness that the United States wilfully ignores. And in which Syria’s Interior Minister, found shot dead in his office last year, committed suicide because of his own mental instability.

The Americans, my interlocutor suspected, are trying to provoke an Iraqi civil war so that Sunni Muslim insurgents spend their energies killing their Shia co-religionists rather than soldiers of the Western occupation forces. “I swear to you that we have very good information,” my source says, finger stabbing the air in front of him. “One young Iraqi man told us that he was trained by the Americans as a policeman in Baghdad and he spent 70 per cent of his time learning to drive and 30 per cent in weapons training. They said to him: ‘Come back in a week.’ When he went back, they gave him a mobile phone and told him to drive into a crowded area near a mosque and phone them. He waited in the car but couldn’t get the right mobile signal. So he got out of the car to where he received a better signal. Then his car blew up.”

Impossible, I think to myself. But then I remember how many times Iraqis in Baghdad have told me similar stories. These reports are believed even if they seem unbelievable. And I know where much of the Syrian information is gleaned: from the tens of thousands of Shia Muslim pilgrims who come to pray at the Sayda Zeinab mosque outside Damascus. These men and women come from the slums of Baghdad, Hillah and Iskandariyah as well as the cities of Najaf and Basra. Sunnis from Fallujah and Ramadi also visit Damascus to see friends and relatives and talk freely of American tactics in Iraq.
informationclearinghouse.info

NW:You blamed the Askariya shrine bombing on the Americans, in part. Can you explain your thinking?

There is only an incomplete sovereignty in Iraq, which means that the occupation is the decision maker. Any attack is their responsibility. The U.S. ambassador and Rumsfeld have ignited the sectarian crisis here.
msnbc.msn.com

As the U.S. military struggles against persistent sectarian violence in Iraq, military officers and security experts find themselves in a vigorous debate over an idea that just months ago was largely dismissed as a fringe thought: that the surest — and perhaps now the only — way to bring stability to Iraq is to divide the country into three pieces.

Those who see the partitioning of Iraq as increasingly attractive argue that separating the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds may be the only solution to the violence that many experts believe verges on civil war. Others contend that it would simply lead to new and dangerous challenges for the United States, not least the possibility that al-Qaeda would find it easier to build a new base of operations in a partitioned Iraq.

One specialist on the Iraqi insurgency, Ahmed S. Hashim, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College who has served two tours in Iraq as a reservist, contends in a new book that the U.S. government’s options in Iraq are closing to just two: Let a civil war occur, or avoid that wrenching outcome through some sort of partition. Such a division of the country “is the option that can allow us to leave with honor intact,” he concludes in “Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq.”
washingtonpost.com

Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said Sunday that his country refused a request from the United States to attack Iran from its Air Force base in Incirlik, despite the U.S. offer of a nuclear reactor, according to a report in Al Biyan.

In an interview for the United Arab Emirates newspaper, Gul noted that Americans efforts to attack Iran are imaginary and that Turkey’s stance is strategic and refuses the use of its land for any belligerent activity against neighboring countries.
ynetnews.com

Iraq has accused Iranian forces of entering Iraqi territory and shelling Kurdish rebel positions in the north.
Iranian troops bombed border areas near the town of Hajj Umran before crossing into Iraq, the defence ministry in Baghdad said on Sunday.

It said the Iranians targeted the PKK, a Kurdish group that has waged a 15-year insurgency against Turkey.

The PKK is believed to have links with anti-Iranian Kurdish fighters. There are no details on casualties.

The Iraqi defence ministry also says Iran launched a similar attack on Kurdish rebel positions in the same area on 21 April.

There are no reported comments from Tehran on either of the alleged incidents.
bbc.co.uk

May 8, 2006 issue – Could another front be opening in the Iraq war? Over recent weeks, some 200,000 Turkish troops, backed by tanks and helicopter gunships, have massed along the mountainous border with Iraq. Trucks passing from Turkey, ferrying the imported goods and foodstuffs that are the lifeblood of the Kurdish economy, have slowed from 1,000 a day to just a couple of hundred. The Turkish military says its troops are there only to prevent armed insurgents of the Kurdish PKK rebel group from crossing into Turkey from their bases on Iraq’s Kandil Mountain. But last week, according to angry Foreign Ministry officials in Baghdad, Turkish commandos briefly crossed 15 kilometers into Iraqi territory in pursuit of PKK rebelsÑa move that could signal dangerous new frictions to come.
msnbc.msn.com

SULAYMANIYA, Iraq Ñ As they attempt to secure their hold on a semi-independent slice of Iraq and rebuild its economy, Kurdish leaders have turned in a surprising direction Ñ toward Turkey.

For much of the last century, Turks and Kurds have been bitter enemies. Starting in the 1930s, Turkey banned the language of its Kurdish minority and violently suppressed Kurdish independence movements on its soil. Just in recent weeks, Turkish security forces and Kurdish protesters clashed in riots that claimed more than a dozen lives.

Across the border, the Turkish government has opposed Kurdish moves toward self-rule in Iraq’s three northern provinces. And Turkish leaders have accused the Kurds of harboring bases for militant groups that have attacked civilians and military targets in Turkey.

But today, Kurdish leaders are seeking investment from Turkish firms. To date, 314 Turkish companies have signed contracts for projects valued at more than $1 billion, officials of Iraqi Kurdistan have said.

Visitors to Kurdistan can fly into one of two airports built by companies based in Turkey, drive Turkish-built roads and see Turkish-built housing developments and university buildings.

“Turkish companies are everywhere in Kurdistan and doing everything,” said Ilnur Cevik, a Turkish businessman whose Cevik Ler company claims more than $100 million in Kurdish government construction contracts.
washingtonpost.com