NEW YORK (Reuters) - The dollar hovered near record lows on Wednesday as unexpectedly weak data showed orders for long lasting U.S.-made goods fell the most in five months, cementing expectations for further U.S. interest rate cuts.
The dollar slid to an all-time low versus a basket of currencies earlier in the global session as investors grew more convinced the Federal Reserve will cut rates yet again.
By Ahmed Rasheed and Mariam Karouny
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Turkey said on Wednesday it had "no timetable" to withdraw troops fighting Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq, resisting pressure from the United States and other allies to end the offensive quickly.
'Dozens of police officers have voiced concern over a security stand down order issued by federal officials at Barack Obama's rally in Dallas yesterday afternoon.
Security details at Barack Obama's rally Wednesday stopped screening people for weapons at the front gates more than an hour before the Democratic presidential candidate took the stage at Reunion Arena, reports the Star-Telegram.'
'The Government has today been forced to publish the secret first draft of the infamous dodgy dossier which led the country into war with Iraq.'
Read More...
'Paul Burrell, the former butler of Princess Diana, has been captured on a secret camera admitting that he knowingly lied to the inquest and that he "did a deal" with the Queen to keep quiet the real facts behind Diana's death. The video, obtained by the Sun newspaper shows Burrell spilling his guts about not telling the whole truth and throwing in “red herrings” to mislead the coroner, a crime punishable by up to ten years imprisonment.'
Click to read ...
Click here to watch ...
Mr. Obama appears to be copying speeches
Related Links
Obama's copied speeches
I have a dream becomes Obama's I have a con
Obama's international Socialist connections
Links to blogs reporting from Pakistan, commenting on the election and the results as they arrive.
Teeth Maestro
Allegra Stratton @ the Guardian
Report from guardianfilms canvassing opinion as Pakistan goes to the polls.
Watch film here
'American icon Willie Nelson says he supports efforts to impeach President Bush and "throw the bastards out," adding that the administration will do anything to stay in power, including staging an event to cancel the election.'
Read More...
'Country music icon Willie Nelson said it would have been “one of the dumbest things” he could have ever done to accept an invitation from the state of Texas to have a toll road named after him.'
Read More...
Here's some of articles i promised relating to the BNP member caught with rocket launchers, large amounts of chemicals, explosives and a biological suit.
Notice how he becomes 'ex bnp' man in the second to last article. (He was originally reported as a fully fleged member who had run as a potential candidate for the party in the past).
The final article is when the BBC picked the story up, around a year after the initial arrest. Perhaps because many minority groups had by now openly questioned the BBC's reasoning in not reporting the story.
The Truth Will Set You Free | October 11 2006
See 'Blair spoke of need for' article on this link
Media whiteout following possible BNP bomb plot
Explosive Court Case
BNP candidate was 'stockpiling chemicals for civil war'
Ex-BNP man faces explosives charges.
Ex-BNP man jailed over chemicals
BBC
February 17, 2008
Kosovo’s parliament has unanimously endorsed a declaration of independence from Serbia, in an historic session.
The declaration, read by Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, said Kosovo would be a democratic country that respected the rights of all ethnic communities.
The US and a number of EU countries are expected to recognise Kosovo on Monday.
Serbia’s PM denounced the US for helping create a “false state”. Serbia’s ally, Russia, called for an urgent UN Security Council meeting.
Remove The Blindfold
COMMENTS:
The following report was recently published by the Scotsman. The whole idea that Muslims are being recruited to extremist groups via facebook is ridiculous. It seems that today, reading things makes you a terrorist.
People, if a white british person read neo-nazi sites discussing skull sizes, destryoing britsh mosques using explosives etc...would they become a terror suspect? I think not. Surely, even if a neo-nazi was arressted under such charges the whole story would be kept away from the masses. No?
You dont even have to take my word for it, it's already happened. In fact what happened was actually much worse!
David Jackson and Robert Cottage from Nelson, Lancashire were caught with chemicals, explosives, rocket launchers, biological suits, BNP literature, recipes for making bombs excerpted from the anarchists handbook (which alone is evidence enough to get a young british muslim 28 days in Belmarsh prison these days) and much more. It was said to be the largest find of its kind in the UK.
The two were NOT charged under any terrorism laws. (I will post some links relating to this asap).
It is also worth noting that the story was reported only in small regional papers, local to the area in which the incident occured. The only other people who picked up the story were even smaller papers aimed at minority groups. The most exposure the story found was probably when Alex Jones posted the story on Infowars.com
That aside in my opinion being a young British Muslim, the majority of other Muslims who read these Facebook pages will be looking to find an insight into why fellow 'muslims' feel this way and will have no intentions to take over the west as many in the government and media would now have us believe.
Thats assuming those who created these groups actually were radical muslims.
It seems as one person noted on Infowars.com, this could well be 'another government move to control the internet'.
-----------------------------
ARTICLE:
Miles Johnson
The Scotsman
February 17, 2008
RADICAL British Jihadist groups are using Facebook and other social networking sites to recruit members and distribute extremist literature.
A private Facebook group called Ahlus Sunnah wal Jama’ah, the name of a successor organisation to the banned extremist group Al Muhajiroun, has been operating since early 2007.
The Facebook group has links posted to extremist literature by the jailed radical preachers Abu Hamza al-Misri and Abu Qutada calling for the waging of armed jihad against the British and American governments. There is also literature demanding the expulsion of any Muslim who votes in elections or “provides assistance” to the ‘kuffar’, or non-believer.
Five young British Muslims were freed last week after their conviction for downloading and sharing literature from extremist websites was quashed by the Appeal Court.
The Lord Chief Justice said there was no proof of terrorist intent. The Home Office is still considering the landmark case, which lawyers for the men say has huge implications for counter-terrorism prosecutions.
UK’s Big Brother Talking Cameras
George Orwell, Big Brother is watching your house
Tens of thousands of CCTV cameras, yet 80% of crime unsolved
CCTV: Does it work?
Watching you watching me
CCTV in London
London Congestion Charge CCTV privacy concerns
CCTV cameras get upgrade at police request
How London became the world’s CCTV capital
Oxford Street CCTV Surveillance Cameras
'Talking' CCTV scolds offenders
CCTV cameras don't solve crimes, say London politicians
'The British government recently released a report that found that London’s police force is rife with “pernicious and institutionalized racism.” The report was a response to the 1993 killing of Stephen Lawrence, a Black man who was stabbed to death by a gang of racist white youths in the Eltham section of Southeast London. A botched police investigation of the murder and a failure to bring Lawrence’s killers to justice has resulted in a massive public outcry throughout the U.K'.
Listen to or watch this interview here.
'The call for the creation of a fully fledged independent agency to investigate complaints against police brutality in England and Wales by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (ECPT) should be taken seriously by the UK Government, Amnesty International said.
Amnesty International has been concerned for many years about allegations of ill-treatment and excessive use of force by police officers in the UK and has in the past expressed concern over shortcomings in the investigation of such cases'.
Amnesty International - Police brutality must be addressed
A suicide bomber has killed 37 people after a meeting of supporters of murdered ex-PM Benazir Bhutto's party, Pakistan's interior ministry says.The attack, on the last day of campaigning ahead of general elections on Monday, also wounded 90.It took place in Parachinar, the main town of the tribal region of Kurram in north-west Pakistan.
Read More...
People in the UK who go online and illegally download music and films may have their internet access cut under plans the government is considering.
A draft consultation suggests internet service providers would be required to take action over users who access pirated material via their accounts.
A commuter was arrested at gunpoint and had his DNA and fingerprints taken simply for listening to his MP3 player while waiting for a bus.
Darren Nixon was surrounded by armed police after his music player was mistaken for a gun.
When a passer-by saw the 28-year-old get out his black Philips machine to change tracks, she panicked and dialled 999.He was then put in a cell and his fingerprints, DNA and mugshot were taken before he was released.
Although police realised it was a false alarm, Mr Nixon, from Stoke-on-Trent, now has to live with his DNA stored on a national database.
The force will also keep on record that he was arrested on suspicion of a firearms offence.
Read More...Last year, the number of human cases of avian flu dropped rather than rose for the first time -- from a paltry 115 in 2006 to an even more insignificant 86 in 2007. Frightening headlines warning of a pandemic that could kill 150 million people have all but vanished.
Read More...
Was the final assault in the 1993 Waco siege, which resulted in the deaths of 76 people including 21 children and 2 pregnant women ordered by Hillary Clinton?
Wikipedia entry for Waco Siege
Rense.com - Hiliary ordered the final massacre at Waco
On June 8th 1967 armed Israeli forces attacked the USS Liberty. It was quickly dismissed as an accident, however witnesses and survivors claimed differently. With the recent release of official government documents we are now certain this was a false flag attack. Yet another in a long list of government controlled false flag attacks.
USS Liberty memorial
USS Liberty Info
National Security Archive Links
USS Liberty Enquiry
Chronology of US Military Engagements Since the Second Indochina War
Wikipedia Entry
USS Liberty - Israeli pilot speaks up
What Really Happened - BBC documentary video link
BBC - Why did Israel attack the USS Liberty?
CNN - USS Liberty attack tapes released
The Guardian - The Cover Up
BBC - In pictures: Attack on the USS Liberty
Pravda.ru - Attack on USS Liberty
Code-name Operation NORTHWOODS was a U.S. plan to sacrifice American citizens using covert operations whilst blaming Fidel Castro's Cuba.
Link to official government documents.
Link to National Security Archive.
Regarding plans to microchip newborns, Dr. Kilde said the U.S. has been moving in this direction "in secrecy."
She added that in Sweden, Prime Minister Olof Palme gave permission in 1973 to implant prisoners, and Data Inspection's ex-Director General Jan Freese revealed that nursing-home patients were implanted in the mid-1980s. The technology is revealed in the 1972:47 Swedish state report, Statens Officiella Utradninger.
Are you prepared to live in a world in which every newborn baby is micro-chipped? And finally are you ready to have your every move tracked, recorded and placed in Big Brother's data bank? According to the Finnish article, distributed to doctors and medical students, time is running out for changing the direction of military medicine and mind control technology, ensuring the future of human freedom.
"Implanted human beings can be followed anywhere. Their brain functions can be remotely monitored by supercomputers and even altered through the changing of frequencies," wrote Dr. Kilde. "Guinea pigs in secret experiments have included prisoners, soldiers, mental patients,handicapped children, deaf and blind people, homosexuals, single women, the elderly, school children, and any group of people considered "marginal" by the elite experimenters. The published experiences of prisoners in Utah State Prison, for example, are shocking to the conscience.
"Today's microchips operate by means of low-frequency radio waves that target them. With the help of satellites, the implanted person can be tracked anywhere on the globe. Such a technique was among a number tested in the Iraq war, according to Dr. Carl Sanders, who invented the intelligence-manned interface (IMI) biotic, which is injected into people. (Earlier during the Vietnam War, soldiers were injected with the Rambo chip, designed to increase adrenaline flow into the bloodstream.) The 20-billion-bit/second supercomputers at the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) could now "see and hear" what soldiers experience in the battlefield with a remote monitoring system (RMS).
"When a 5-micromillimeter microchip (the diameter of a strand of hair is 50 micromillimeters) is placed into optical nerve of the eye,", Dr. Kilde indicates "it draws neuro-impulses from the brain that embody the experiences, smells, sights, and voice of the implanted person. Once transferred and stored in a computer, these neuro-impulses can be projected back to the person's brain via the microchip to be re-experienced. Using a RMS, a land-based computer operator can send electromagnetic messages (encoded as signals) to the nervous system, affecting the target's performance. With RMS, healthy persons can be induced to see hallucinations and to hear voices in their heads. "
"Every thought, reaction, hearing, and visual observation causes a certain neurological potential, spikes, and patterns in the brain and its electromagnetic fields, which can now be decoded into thoughts, pictures, and voices, " Dr. Kilde adds. "Electromagnetic stimulation can therefore change a person's brainwaves and affect muscular activity, causing painful muscular cramps experienced as torture."
October 17, 2007 -- Who says Barack Obama doesn't have what it takes to be president? Turns out, he's a distant cousin of both Dick Cheney and George Bush.
The vice president's wife, Lynne Cheney, announced her discovery yesterday while hawking her new book, "Blue Skies, No Fences," on MSNBC.
When asked if she would support Hillary Rodham Clinton because she is a woman, Lynne Cheney said, "I have to admit to a certain bias here . . . Dick and Barack Obama are eighth cousins."
Mrs. Cheney said that it was "an amazing American story that one ancestor . . . could be responsible down the family line for lives that have taken such different and varied paths."
Then asked if she supported Obama she quickly said, "No."
Obama's camp made light of the family ties. "Every family has a black sheep," said spokeswoman Jen Psaki, with tongue firmly planted in cheek.
The Chicago Sun-Times revealed the genealogical link in early September, claiming that the shared ancestors were Mareen and Susannah Duvall, 17th century immigrants from France.
The newspaper, however, claimed that the senator from Illinois and the vice president were 11th cousins.
The Duvalls are Obama's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents, and Cheney's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents, the paper said.
George W. Bush and Obama, meanwhile, are 10th cousins once removed - linked through a 17th century Massachusetts couple, Samuel Hinckley and Sarah Soole, according to the Sun-Times.
Possibly another of the most relevent songs of the last decade that was slept on by the mainstream media due to its content...The song was originally written by a young Palestinian girl.
Missing You
Try not to cry
This track is one of the most politically relevent and powerful songs i have heard in a long time...Please pay attention & think seriously about this when you listen to it.
I saw this article being looked at on BBC News 24's newspaper roundup. The article even forced the BBC reporter to remark 'it makes you want to leave the country'. Yet more sickening suggestions from the eugenics crowd. This time brought forward by government minister Dawn Primarolo.
Primarolo suggested we should steer girls toward seeking a "long-term contraception".
Read the full article here.
Michael Carmichael
Global Research
February 9, 2008
“Clinton will be the Democrat, and I don’t know who the Republican will be, but the election will be about the war on terror and the Republican will win.”
Karl Rove, Fox News, December 2007
Many astute Republicans believe that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the salvation of their party. On Super Tuesday, it is time that the American people take a serious look at why the opposition party favors the nomination of the former First Lady.
For months, the leading Republican strategists and tacticians have been salivating at the thought of running their presidential campaign against Senator Clinton. The senior Republican political consultants: Karl Rove and Dick Morris have predicted that Senator Clinton will be the Democratic candidate who will be defeated by the Republican nominee this November. Their theory of the self-destructive candidacy of Senator Clinton has been the idée fixe of Republican strategy since she formally became a candidate for the presidency.
Overt Republican operations to ensure Senator Clinton’s victory have ranged from destructive email campaigns against her opponents to massive direct financial support to her campaign from corporate lobbyists loyal to the neoconservative and corporate ideals of the Republican Party.
Serious question marks have been raised over the role of heavyweight Republican contributors, Alan Quasha and Hassan Nemazee, who have been described as “Hillary’s mystery money men.” These two valuable political assets have records of financial backing for both George W. Bush and former Senator Jesse Helms. In a suspicious transaction, Quasha acquired Harken Oil from George W. Bush providing the future president with a financial windfall that launched him into his career as an owner of a team in minor league baseball. Bush bought the Texas Rangers and financed his campaign for governor with the capital provided by Quasha, who is now backing Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency.
With his longstanding relationship with George W. Bush, there is little wonder why Quasha is referred to as “Hillary’s mystery man.” But, Quasha’s ties to Hillary are not as simple as that, because his family is linked to both: the former dictator of the Phillipines, Ferdinand Marcos, and the international intelligence community – a linkage that brought him into the charmed circle of George Bush, Sr. over two decades ago. Hillary’s other “mystery man,” Hassan Nemazee is the employer of the long-serving Clinton apparatchik: Terry McAuliffe, a former head of the Democratic National Committee.
According to Bill Maher and a growing number of people, covert Republican operations included the rigging of the New Hampshire primary via secret manipulation of the Diebold voting machines to produce the startling “upset” only a few weeks ago – in order to enhance Hillary Clinton’s chances of becoming the Democratic nominee. Maher had the courage to voice the suspicion that is on millions of lips - that the Republicans want to manipulate the outcome of the Democratic nomination to rig it for Clinton, whom they deem to be an easy mark.
Underscoring Maher’s opinion that is becoming more popular as the campaign develops, Peter Wehner provided a column for the Washington Post titled: “Why Republicans Like Obama.” Wehner writes,
“A number of prominent Republicans I know, who would wage a pitched battle against Hillary Clinton, like Obama and would find it hard to generate much enthusiasm in opposing him.”
The important point in Wehner’s thesis echoes the opinions of Karl Rove and Dick Morris: Clinton would be easy prey, while Obama would be extremely difficult to defeat because of his message of change – and his formidable political and rhetorical gifts.
For some Democratic Party members, it is troubling that Mark Penn is Senator Clinton’s top political advisor. Some Democratic strategists find it bizarre that Penn was brought into the Clinton’s political operations by Dick Morris, the strident Republican political consultant who is known to loathe the Clintons. This was not always the case. Morris has a long and complicated history with the Clintons. Morris began serving them in the 1980s, but fell out of favor one icy evening in 1990 when an argument between Morris and both Clintons degenerated into fisticuffs – with the towering ex-footballer, Bill Clinton, soundly beating the nerdish Morris to a pulp. After suffering his humiliating beating by Bill Clinton, in the wee hours Morris rang the senior consultant in the Clinton campaign sobbing, “He beat me up!” This priceless gem of Clintoniana is recorded for posterity in Ray Strother’s autobiography, Falling Up.
After 1990, the Clintons replaced their consultants with a new team led by James Carville who had been a factotum for Strother in the early 1980s. While the Carville team led the Clintons to victory, success was short-lived. The Republicans struck back with the extremist Contract with America of Newt Gingrich to obtain a majority in Congress in 1994, and the Clintons had another house-cleaning.
In the mid-1990s, Clinton sacked Carville and company and re-hired Dick Morris who would mastermind the devastating 1996 campaign before his involvement in a prostitution scandal that led to his ignominious downfall. Prior to Morris’ dalliances with the prostitute, he engineered the insertion of the pollster Mark Penn into the Clintons’ circle of political experts.
Both Morris and Penn have curious histories of advising foreign politicians most of whom lean to the right. According to astute observers, Penn is closely aligned with heavyweight Republican operatives linked to Karl Rove. Penn’s client list contains prominent right-wingers including Joseph Lieberman, and he is only one of the major polling figures behind the right-leaning Democratic Leadership Council. Now the head of the controversial corporate public relations giant, Burston Marsteller, Mark Penn is fabulously wealthy with a lengthy client list of major right-wing corporations including Rupert Murdoch’s News International and Bill Gates’ Microsoft. For many Democrats, Penn’s right-wing and archconservative client list seems odd for the chief political advisor to a major contender for the Democratic nomination for the presidency.
While Hillary enjoys the support of Republican contributors and right-leaning Democratic operatives, the Republicans have their own Hillary agenda. At the same time that they have been maneuvering on behalf of Senator Clinton to help ensure her supremacy in the primaries, Republican strategists have been laying the foundation to swiftboat her political momentum shortly after she accepts the Democratic nomination in Denver this August. A bewildering network of websites have been erected to dissect, dismember and detonate Hillary Clinton’s candidacy before it really takes off – with peak operations scheduled to launch before, during and after the Democratic National Convention in Denver this August. One of these online sources provides verbatim quotes attributed to the Senator that are disturbingly anti-semitic.
Senator Clinton really has two intractable and virtually insurmountable political problems: her image and that of her husband, the former president: William Jefferson Clinton.
The Clinton Era remains a controversial and puzzling epoch in American history, one that is, at times, described in glowing terms as a progressive presidency and at others as the final breakdown of America’s commitment to the New Deal and the social democratic ideology that preserved capitalism while other nations were abandoning it. Pride of place in the Clinton museum of progressive ambiguities is occupied jointly by:
• the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) a trade pact that was hailed as a landmark in free trade but is now regarded as little more than a gift to major corporations that out-sourced millions of American jobs to cheaper foreign labor most of whom work for slave wages and
• the dissolution of Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the cornerstone of American social security since the 1930s.
Let us not forget Bill Clinton’s greatest achievement in foreign policy: frequent military interventions and the flagrant abuse of the military as an instrument of policy while laying the foundation for neoconservativism and the troubling vision of the so-called Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Most voters can still remember another Clinton contribution to his own historical legacy – the abuse of the military for public relations in the putrescent ‘wag the dog’ bombing of Baghdad that came in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky revelations in 1998 and led to the production of the Hollywood movie with Dustin Hofmann and Robert De Niro.
Other Republican attempts to destroy Senator Clinton’s political viability have taken a darker and decidedly more sinister complexion: the compilation of Clinton death lists. While the validity of these lists has been discounted by Snopes, a lingering miasma of doubt swirls around many of the less publicized aspects of the Clinton era. Some of these death lists are so detailed that they could only emanate from informed sources in Arkansas law enforcement – a relatively inexhaustible reservoir for damaging tittle-tattle about the Clinton couple. Due to his lengthy service to the Clintons when they were in Little Rock, some of these highly informed security personnel are personally known by Dick Morris and other political operatives inimical to the Clintons.
While the time bombs planted within Hillary Clinton’s candidacy outlined above are troubling, the definitive analysis of her vulnerability is found in a memo that is now enjoying broad circulation to Republican and right-leaning Americans via the internet. Attributed to her arch-nemesis, Dick Morris, the memo is titled simply: “Democrats are coming.”
In Morris’s inimitable style, the author reveals his glee at the very thought that Hillary Clinton would become the Democratic nominee. The ‘Morris’ memo surfaced on the internet shortly after Hillary Clinton’s unexpected resurgence in the mysterious New Hampshire primary that a growing number of people believe to have been rigged in her favor via covert political operatives who attacked the Diebold optical scanners – because they wanted to blunt the surging upward trend of Senator Barack Obama - whom they see as the most dangerous threat to neoconservativism.
Presented as a deconstruction of Bill Clinton’s now well-worn five minute commercial that is little more than a hagiography of his wife, ‘Morris’ reveals what the major Republican strategists refer to as the “soft white underbelly” of Hillary Clinton’s claims on the presidency.
In his forensic dissection of Bill Clinton’s message in favor of Hillary, ‘Morris’ argues that Hillary Clinton:
In this explosive memo, ‘Morris’ makes other points designed to discredit Clinton with those Democrats who support the concept of a “war on terror.” (See Appendix below)
Senator Hillary Clinton’s vulnerabilities present an extremely attractive target for Republican strategists. Enticed by the very thought of her presidential candidacy, Republican operatives will stop at nothing to ensure her nomination and the devastation of her primary opponents. On Super Tuesday, 2008 - only one opponent to Hillary Clinton remains: Senator Barack Obama.
The cover story on a recent edition of Newsmax, a Republican Party magazine that frequently features the writings of Dick Morris, is adorned with a large and flattering photograph of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton while the headline proclaims: “She can save our party.” She probably can.
SOURCES
The Foulmouthed & Lying Clintons (anti-semitic comments)
A partial list of deaths of persons connected to President Clinton
DAVID GARDNER
Daily Mail
February 11, 2008
British Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing caused uproar last night by predicting the assassination of Barack Obama if he becomes the first black U.S. president.
The 88-year-old novelist’s remarks came as the Democratic candidate toasted the most successful day in his White House campaign.
Mr Obama, the 46-year-old son of a black Kenyan man and a white American, dismissed Mrs Lessing’s comments.
Miss Lessing said: “He would probably not last long, a black man in the position of president. They would kill him.”
She said it would be better if Mrs Clinton, 60, became America’s first woman president with Obama as her running mate.
“Hillary is a very sharp lady. It might be calmer if she wins,” she told a Swedish newspaper.
But one Democratic analyst said: “Suggesting Obama is in danger if he wins the election in November is not only divisive, it is insulting to the American people.”
Princeton University political science professor-Melissa Harris-Lacewell raised assassination fears last month, saying: “For many black supporters, there is a lot of anxiety that he will be killed. It is on people’s minds.
“You can’t make a prediction like this - like he has a 50 per cent chance of getting shot.
“But the greater his visibility and the greater his access to people, there is a danger.”
Last month, TV host Harry Smith caused an outcry, asking Ted Kennedy, brother of assassinated President John F. Kennedy: “Sometimes agents of change end up being targets. Doesn’t it make you at all fearful?”
Black presidential candidate Jesse Jackson received death threats during his campaigns in the Eighties and former Secretary of State Colin Powell ruled out a White House run after his wife feared he would be killed.
Illinois senator Mr Obama chalked up a clean sweep in voting on Saturday to win fresh momentum in his deadlocked race with
He easily won the Louisiana primary and caucuses in Nebraska and Washington state, as well as a victory in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The gains cut into the former first lady’s slim lead, leaving Mr Obama ahead in a Newsweek poll by 42 per cent to 41 per cent.
Mr Obama was expected to do well again in tomorrow’s primaries in Washington DC, Virginia and Maryland, which all have a high black population.
Mr Obama is battling behind the scenes to persuade the “super delegates”, the elected Democrat officials who can make up their own minds who to back, to switch allegiance to him, particularly those representing states where he was clearly the popular choice. Mrs Clinton has kept a comparatively low profile, focusing her energies on the next big states to vote on March 4 in Ohio and Texas, where she is leading in the polls.
But she hit out angrily last night over claims that she was “pimping out” her daughter Chelsea, 27, to win votes, insisting she was a mother first and a politician second.
Responding to a comment by American TV reporter David Shuster, she said: “I found the remarks incredibly offensive.”
Shuster was suspended by cable channel MSNBC on Friday despite apologising on air.
Republican front-runner John McCain suffered a setback at the weekend when his only remaining challenger, former Arkansas governor and preacher Mike Huckabee, 53, beat him in Louisiana and Kansas.
But with almost two-thirds of the Republicans delegates wrapped up, it would take a calamity for the 71-year-old Arizona senator to lose the nomination.
'Presidential frontrunner Barack Obama is pushing a bill that will lead to the implementation of a UN global tax, costing the U.S. at least $845 billion dollars over thirteen years in the name of fighting worldwide poverty, as well as banning "small arms and light weapons".'
Read the full article here
Daniel Obachike is a survivor of the 7/7 attacks in London. He is interviewed here by Alex Jones. You can visit Daniel's site by clicking here.
Pt.1
Pt.2
Pt.3
Pt.4
Pt.5
Ludicrous Diversion is a documentary which examines the attacks of 7/7 in London.
Ludicrous Diversion Pt.1
Ludicrous Diversion Pt.2
Ludicrous Diversion Pt.3
Below are a list of articles relating to UK Police brutality:
Delbo King - Beaten gratuitously after resisting arrest in Manchester.
Christopher Adler - Died in police custody in Hull, 1998.
Nuur Hussain - Who fell from a flat balcony during a police raid.
Michael Powell - Who also died whilst in police custody in Birmingham.
Toni Comer - Beaten by police outside Niche nightclub in Sheffield. (video link)
Article on police custody deaths
“Yes, I’m sure and hope that he is alive. We also hope Ambassador Tariq Azizuddin is safe and secure and every effort is being made but then he is still missing and we have no further information,” said a tight-lipped spokesman at the Foreign Office during the weekly press briefing.
The media, both print and electronic, was not interested in any other issue but the abducted ambassador, a fact not lost on the spokesman who commented: “He is a friend to a lot of you in this room and he is a dear colleague, so all of us are equally concerned.”
To countless queries, the spokesman said that so far no group had contacted the government regarding a swap or a demand from those who had abducted the ambassador. “No one contacted the government and neither has anyone claimed responsibility. All of us are equally concerned and every effort is being made to locate him. Several foreign governments have called to express concern and record their sympathy but at this stage we do not need any help,” said the spokesman.
Several queries were raised as to why the government had not advised its senior envoy to travel by air, especially given the fact that security was non-existent and several key kidnappings had occurred in the area.
“For the last 25 years, all Pakistani diplomats travelling to and from Afghanistan took this road through Torkham. Even foreign diplomats use this route and it is nothing new. All necessary precautions were taken and the standard precautionary methods were in place,” the spokesman told a questioner who wanted to know why under these circumstances the government had not issued fresh dictates to use air travel.
The spokesman, for reasons of security, refrained from commenting on reports about the ambassador’s car being seen in Tirah. Asked as to why when the envoy’s car was not stopping, officials did not chase it after they had sensed foul play. “I know this is frustrating (not giving direct replies) but for reasons of security we are not commenting,” he added.
When questioned again what gave the government confidence that the ambassador was alive, he replied: “My opinion is that he is alive.” The spokesman said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will establish an Election Information Cell to assist the International Elections Observers from Feb.16-19.
DG Europe Muhammad Nafees Zakaria will observe the Cell, which will function round the clock. The spokesman took exception to a news report that no important international observer was coming to monitor Pakistan’s general elections.
“Senator John Kerry and other congressmen and members of the British parliament amongst others will be arriving to observe the elections. I’m sure the congressmen will be very unhappy to learn that they are unimportant,” was the comment from the spokesman.
Five hundred foreign observers who will be present to observe the elections have been strengthened by eight from a Pakistani association in the US and four from Safma. Around five hundred foreign media persons will also be in Pakistan.
The spokesman said that Pakistan’s acute energy needs made the pipeline vital and it would go ahead with the project whether India joined it or not. Pakistan welcomes the interest that China has shown to join the project. He said that Pakistan had no objection to the reported Indo-Russian nuclear cooperation. “We have no objection to legal cooperation”, the spokesman said.
Meanwhile, Pakistan is hosting the third Regional Economic Conference (RECCA) on Afghanistan in Islamabad on March 26-27. All members of the Afghan Compact are included in RECCA.
A back-to-back business conference will also be organised jointly by the Board of Investment of Pakistan, the Federation of Pakistan Chamber of Commerce and Industry in association with the Afghanistan Investment Support Agency.
The Islamabad conference is likely to be attended by more than 300 participants from 20 regional countries, G-8 countries and international/ regional organisations, like the World Bank, the UN, the ADB, the ECO, the SCO, and CARE, etc.
We have not kidnapped Pak envoy: Taliban
Taliban militants said on Wednesday they would not attack next week’s general election and denied involvement in the disappearance of the country’s ambassador to neighbouring Afghanistan.
“Our central leadership have decided that as we have nothing to do with the elections, therefore, there would be no attacks from our people,” Pakistan Taliban spokesman Maulvi Omar told Reuters. “Neither do we support the process of the election nor do we have any opposition to it and if any attack takes place before or on election day, our Mujahid would not be involved in it,” he said by telephone from an undisclosed location.
Tariq Azizuddin, Pakistan’s ambassador in Kabul who went missing two days ago on his way to the Afghan capital from the Peshawar. “We have no links with it. We do not know anything about that,” Omar said.
Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry said it had no further information on the case and again denied media reports that the Taliban had demanded the release of captured Afghan Taliban commander Mullah Mansour Dadullah in exchange for the envoy.
End.
The possible kidnapping of the Pakistani ambassador to Afghanistan Tariq Azizuddin seems rather mysterious, especially given Pakistans current political climate. Benazir Bhuttos death, upcoming elections and US pressure in relation to both nuclear arms and the NWFP (North West Frontier Province) have kept Pakistan in the media spotlight for a number of weeks now.
The ambassador went missing in the Khyber Agency, an area not known to be frequented by militants.
There have however been a number of kidnappings in these areas within the past few weeks. On February 2 two Pakistani employees of the International Committee of the Red Cross were kidnapped by gunmen from the same area.
As Ibrahim Shinwari states, 'The Peshawar-Torkham Highway serves as the main trade route with Afghanistan and remains busy throughout the day.
It is also one of the most well-protected roads and the Khasadars are posted about every hundred metres. It also passes through the famous Khyber Pass that also houses the Shagai Fort, home to the Khyber Rifles of the Frontier Corps.
The route is frequently used by the United States and Nato to provide supplies to their forces in Afghanistan'
The BBC confirms this stating it is, 'one of the most protected of all the tribal roads, with a contingent of tribal police posted every 100m. The paramilitary Frontier Corps have a fort along the road'.
It is also worth noting that the Ambassadors car was reported to have passed through a checkpoint without stopping.
Although kidnappings are not a rarity in this part of the world, the military prescence only adds mystery to the disapearance of the ambassador. Especially in light of recent political events concerning Pakistan.
Even more concerning is the story that on the same day as Azizuddin's disapearance two employees of Pakistans nuclear atomic energy agency were kidnapped. Romail Akrama, a senior police official told Reuters that, 'The technicians were going to conduct some geological surveys within the area when they were kidnapped at gunpoint along with their driver'.
Akbar Nasir, another local police officer stated 'We don't know if the abductors were militants or members of some criminal gang.'
The atomic agency employees were kidnapped in the Dera Ismail Khan district which borders Afghanistans Southern Waziristan area.
It is worth noting however that the area from which the atomic agency employees were abducted is very close to the Baluchistan region.
Many people residing in Pakistani-Baluchistan have a shown much ill feeling toward the Pakistani government in recent years mainly in relation to unfair distribution of natural resources. Numerous separatist groups are also known to be operating within this large area.
It is also where Taliban commander Mansoor Dadullah was reportedly captured today.
More importantly perhaps for western media outlets, the Baluchistan area crosses borders into Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. Particularly important perhaps in relation to the current US - Iran nuclear standoff.
The kidnapping of the Ambassador has already been linked to the Taliban despite local claims that no militant groups operate in the area. According to the The News however, the Taliban have claimed responsibility. They have apparently asked for the recently captured Mullah Mansoor Dadullah to be released in exchange for Azizuddin.
Dadullah was a prominent member of the Taliban and according to the Times recently had a meeting with two high level UN officials. The Times states that Mervyn Patterson, a high-ranking UN official, and Michael Semple, the acting head of the EU mission to Afghanistan, 'held secret meetings with Mansoor Dadullah - a thorn in the side of British military in Helmand province - to try to persuade him to break with the Taliban and form his own political party and militia'.
The UN officials were expelled from Afghanistan after Hamid Karzai discovered that they had met with Dadullah.
There are three separate reports of what exactly happened when Dadullah was captured;
1) He was arrested after a swoop on house in the Baluchistan region of Pakistan.
2) He was injured in a gunfight and capured alive. The gunfight ensued after a car refused to stop at a checkpoint.
3) Perhaps the most likely option. The Paktribune reports that he attempted to cross the border, was chased by Pakistani military officials and took refuge in a house. The house was then raided as part of a military operation and Dadullah was captured.
It is worth noting, the Paktribune also reports Dadullah had previously been captured and exchanged for Italian journalist, Daniele Mastrogiacomo.
Dadullah's older brother was killed in 2007. According to a Wikipedia. 'Afghan officials reported on May 13, 2007 that Mullah Dadullah was killed the previous evening in a raid by Afghan and NATO forces, known to have included the Special Boat Service (SBS), a British special forces unit, in Helmand Province'.
It could eventually emerge that the real kidnappers of the agency staff were Anti-Iranian Baluchi separatists working on behalf of the CIA. Of course that would never be released to the masses. No, they would let the masses blame the Taliban or Iran. Thus creating an air of panic throughout western countries that Iranians or Taliban have kidnapped Pakistani atomic agency staff. All this seems possible in the lead up to an almost inevitable war with Iran. Or alternatively it could end up giving the US a reason to step in and take control of Pakistans nuclear stockpile and facilities.
Shortly after 9/11 ISIS (Institute for Science and International Security) released a report titled 'Securing Pakistan's Nuclear Weapons Complex' which clearly states that the US stepping in would be a last measure, perhaps in the event of a coup. Anybody got the election on their minds about now?
An article from December 2007 in The Herald states, military sources announced they had recently reviewed their protocols and assembled a Special Forces unit joined by volunteer scientists from America's Nuclear Emergency Search Team organisation to be able to take control of and maintain the nuclear facilties in Pakistan should the need arise.
