JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Elder statesman Shimon Peres will announce on Wednesday he is quitting the Labour Party and supporting Ariel Sharon in Israel’s March 28 election without joining the prime minister’s new party, Channel 10 TV said.

Channel 10 said Peres, attending an Israeli-Palestinian soccer match in Barcelona, conveyed his decision to one of its reporters accompanying him on the visit.

There was no immediate confirmation from Peres’ advisers, who said earlier on Tuesday he may leave Labour and could announce his decision on his return to Israel on Wednesday.

Channel 10 correspondent Gilad Yadin, reporting from Barcelona, said Peres had decided to quit Labour, which ousted him as leader in a November 9 election, and “embark on a new political path”.

Peres, he said, would announce his support for Sharon and the prime minister’s new party, Kadima, on Wednesday but would not become one of its members.

Peres, 82, would also not run for parliament in the March 28 poll, the reporter said.

“Upon my return I shall announce it. In my eyes it’s not a problem of parties but a problem of peace — how to create a strong coalition for peace,” Peres told reporters in Barcelona on Monday.
reuters.co.uk

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw Tuesday told the House of Commons that it was an “incontrovertible” fact that Iran was developing long-range missiles.

He told MPs that he believed that Iran was “at the very least developing options for a nuclear weapons programme” but added that the current approach to controlling this was best.

Straw was speaking during a brief foreign affairs debate after the main opposition Conservative MP Brian Binley said that evidence suggested that Iran was rapidly developing systems which could see a weapon reaching the Channel coast (southern England).

He asked what plans were in place to deal with this “doomsday situation”.
kuna.net.kw

ROME (Reuters) – Your heartbeat accelerates, you have butterflies in the stomach, you feel euphoric and a bit silly. It’s all part of falling passionately in love — and scientists now tell us the feeling won’t last more than a year.

The powerful emotions that bowl over new lovers are triggered by a molecule known as nerve growth factor (NGF), according to Pavia University researchers.

The Italian scientists found far higher levels of NGF in the blood of 58 people who had recently fallen madly in love than in that of a group of singles and people in long-term relationships.

But after a year with the same lover, the quantity of the ‘love molecule’ in their blood had fallen to the same level as that of the other groups.

The Italian researchers, publishing their study in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology, said it was not clear how falling in love triggers higher levels of NGF, but the molecule clearly has an important role in the “social chemistry” between people at the start of a relationship.
news.yahoo.com

…The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, we live in very sad times, and, if you reflect long and hard on the reality of the issue, as I’m sure everyone in this room does, not just sad times but depressing times. I’m not going to say much here tonight that’s going to give you hope because there’s not much to be hopeful about. We are in a war that shows no inclination of ever ending. Yes, there’s a lot of rhetoric in congress now about ‘let’s create new benchmarks that need to be fulfilled in Iraq so that we can have a time table of bringing the troops home.’ But, ladies and gentlemen, that’s just political rhetoric because the benchmarks they talk about putting in place are unrealistic. Therefore, there will never be a time line. And let’s keep in mind that this is a congress that voted for the war, Republican and Democrat alike, and they are trapped by that vote to the extent that they cannot meaningfully interfere with the Bush administration’s plans on Iraq, and the plans of the Bush administration regarding Iraq was most recently articulated by Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, when she told the congress of the United States that we will be in Iraq for at least ten years. All right, this is the reality. See, I told you that it wasn’t going to be very uplifting. This is the reality, and we have to deal with the reality, because if we don’t deal with the reality, if we don’t have a true grasp of what is happening as we speak, there cannot be a solution. Now one of the things that they pounded in my head early on when I joined the Marine Corps was that, before we talk about solving a problem, Lieutenant (because every Lieutenant has a solution to every problem in the world. We were the smartest people on the face of the Earth. I’m sure you businesspeople see that with your young executives. High school teachers see that with every new student that comes in. They’re the smartest, the brightest. They have the answer to everything. ) But the answer to what? What problem are we solving? Don’t talk to me about a solution until you’ve defined the problem, and right now, In Washington, D.C. and right across the country, we’ve got a whole host of people now that suddenly are anti-war. It’s amazing how many anti-war people have come out of the woodwork now that President Bush’s popularity ratings have plummeted down to an all-time low. Where were these people of courage when we needed them? Where were they when they could have made a difference, when they could have stopped the war? Well, they weren’t anti-war back then because it wasn’t convenient to be anti-war.
traprockpeace.org

…Meanwhile, as the debate over troop reductions continues, the covert war in Iraq has expanded in recent months to Syria. A composite American Special Forces team, known as an S.M.U., for “special-mission unit,” has been ordered, under stringent cover, to target suspected supporters of the Iraqi insurgency across the border. (The Pentagon had no comment.) “It’s a powder keg,” the Pentagon consultant said of the tactic. “But, if we hit an insurgent network in Iraq without hitting the guys in Syria who are part of it, the guys in Syria would get away. When you’re fighting an insurgency, you have to strike everywhere—and at once.”
informationclearinghouse.info

Cambodia anyone?

Since Sept. 11, we’ve been living under a “clash of civilizations” doctrine that can be summed up this way: Over there, dogma, orthodoxy, Islam; over here, democracy, pluralism, Constitution. Over there, dark continents, dark ages, terrorism; over here, enlightened West, enlightenment, freedom.

The doctrine has been used to justify two wars (so far) and a wholesale shift in the way the United States deploys its aims abroad and projects them at home. The doctrine draws its power from the language of freedom — the language of enlightenment — both in the way we’ve gone about defining ourselves as a culture and in the way we’ve gone about defending our right to fight the war on terror on our terms, but on other people’s turfs.

The doctrine is fatally flawed, and its consequences are lethal, both to American principles at home and to American interests abroad. There’s no connection between the language we’re using in defining ourselves and the reality being imposed at home and abroad. The language itself has become the mask of its very opposite. If you want absolutes, if you want black and white, if you want orthodoxy, look no further than the way American culture politically and legally has been evolving in the past several years.

That’s not to say that those orthodoxies don’t exist in the Muslim world. They do in spades. But the enlightenment ideal is not under attack from outside our culture. It is under attack from within it, in a context that increasingly fears pluralism, scorns dissent and erodes democracy. The very ideas of rational, critical thinking, of progress by way of challenging assumptions, is being replaced by a faith-based approach in policy-making and a fundamentalist approach in legal thinking (what some people call originalism) that is diametrically opposed to the ideals of enlightenment. If a battle for freedom is being waged, it is being waged on the wrong front.
commondreams.org

Like I’ve said, this situation is the inevitable consequence of hundreds of years of white supremacist patriarchal discourse that flies in the face of reality.

ImpeachPAC, a political action committee launched earlier this month to support candidates in next year’s congressional election who favor impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney, today announced its first endorsement.

ImpeachPAC has contributed $2,500 to Democratic congressional candidate Tony Trupiano in his bid to unseat Republican incumbent Thaddeus McCotter in Michigan’s 11th District. Trupiano has already been endorsed by Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) and by the Michigan Teamsters Union Joint Council 43. Trupiano has had a national radio audience for over a decade as host of the Tony Trupiano Show.

Trupiano held a “Take Back the House” rally last Monday in Michigan as the first event of his campaign. During a Q&A session, he was asked to name the first three pieces of legislation he would introduce if elected to Congress. The first that Trupiano named was a bill to restore value to the federal minimum wage. He never got to the third, because the second issue he named received such a huge response that the conversation took a new turn. That second issue was impeachment.

“The crowd went crazy,” Trupiano said in an interview. “I mean the crowd absolutely went nuts. Some people who are consulting for the campaign said they cringed when I said impeachment, but when they saw how the crowd reacted they breathed easier. You know, we shouldn’t be afraid of impeachment. Impeachment is there for a reason. If the President has not lied to us, if he is innocent of all of these charges, give us a chance to investigate. Impeachment is a non-partisan idea. It is the way to hold the government accountable.”
impeachpac.org

Israeli Scholar: Impeach Him

…For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president’s men. If convicted, they’ll have plenty of time to mull over their sins.

Martin van Creveld, a professor of military history at the Hebrew University, is author of “Transformation of War” (Free Press, 1991). He is the only non-American author on the U.S. Army’s required reading list for officers.

Miami police announced Monday they will stage random shows of force at hotels, banks and other public places to keep terrorists guessing and remind people to be vigilant.

Deputy Police Chief Frank Fernandez said officers might, for example, surround a bank building, check the IDs of everyone going in and out and hand out leaflets about terror threats.

“This is an in-your-face type of strategy. It’s letting the terrorists know we are out there,” Fernandez said.

The operations will keep terrorists off guard, Fernandez said. He said al-Qaida and other terrorist groups plot attacks by putting places under surveillance and watching for flaws and patterns in security.
breitbart.com

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 28 – Representative Randy Cunningham, a Republican from San Diego, resigned from Congress on Monday, hours after pleading guilty to taking at least $2.4 million in bribes to help friends and campaign contributors win military contracts.

Mr. Cunningham, a highly decorated Navy fighter pilot in Vietnam, tearfully acknowledged his guilt in a statement read outside the federal courthouse in San Diego.

“The truth is, I broke the law, concealed my conduct and disgraced my office,” he said. “I know that I will forfeit my freedom, my reputation, my worldly possessions and, most importantly, the trust of my friends and family.”

Mr. Cunningham, 63, pleaded guilty to one count of tax evasion and one count of conspiracy to commit bribery, tax evasion, wire fraud and mail fraud. He faces up to 10 years in prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and forfeitures.

Prosecutors said he received cash, cars, rugs, antiques, furniture, yacht club fees, moving expenses and vacations from four unnamed co-conspirators in exchange for aid in winning military contracts. None of this income was reported to the Internal Revenue Service or on the congressman’s financial disclosure forms, the government said.

Mr. Cunningham, who is known as Duke, lived while in Washington on a 42-foot yacht, named the Duke-Stir, owned by one of the military contractors that received tens of millions of dollars in federal contracts that prosecutors said Mr. Cunningham helped steer its way.
nytimes.com

Scandal could take in at least a dozen in Congress

Last week’s guilty plea by Abramoff’s onetime partner, a former top aide to the beleaguered Rep. Tom DeLay, darkened the skies further. Michael Scanlon’s admission he had conspired to bribe public officials and defrauded four Indian gaming casinos of millions in fees effectively makes him the government’s star witness in a probe that threatens to ensnare officials throughout the nation’s capital.

U.S. News has learned that the conduct of at least a dozen representatives and senators is now being scrutinized by a small army of federal prosecutors and FBI agents. According to sources familiar with the inquiry, a federal task force, which includes investigators from the Interior Department–which has authority to regulate Indian reservations–is examining the relationships between lawmakers and Scanlon and Abramoff. A key question is whether the lawmakers took official actions after receiving campaign contributions, free trips, or other gifts from the lobbyists, the sources say.

A “trophy” video appearing to show security guards in Baghdad randomly shooting Iraqi civilians has sparked two investigations after it was posted on the internet, the Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

The video has sparked concern that private security companies, which are not subject to any form of regulation either in Britain or in Iraq, could be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent Iraqis.

The video, which first appeared on a website that has been linked unofficially to Aegis Defence Services, contained four separate clips, in which security guards open fire with automatic rifles at civilian cars. All of the shooting incidents apparently took place on “route Irish”, a road that links the airport to Baghdad.

The road has acquired the dubious distinction of being the most dangerous in the world because of the number of suicide attacks and ambushes carried out by insurgents against coalition troops. In one four-month period earlier this year it was the scene of 150 attacks.

In one of the videoed attacks, a Mercedes is fired on at a distance of several hundred yards before it crashes in to a civilian taxi. In the last clip, a white civilian car is raked with machine gun fire as it approaches an unidentified security company vehicle. Bullets can be seen hitting the vehicle before it comes to a slow stop.
commondreams.org