Since Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the USA, he has largely remained out of sight, getting high-level government briefings and conferring with his transition team. But he eventually surfaced, alongside his wife Michelle to give 60 Minutes his first post-election interview.
Palestinians read a sign on the gate of the United Nations distribution center at the Jabalia refugee camp. The camp was established after the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict for 35,000 refugees who had fled from villages in southern Palestine.
>> Photo by AP
This list features the websites for key political party websites based on US Internet usage. This ranking list has been customized to feature only select websites.Note: Hitwise data is based on US market share of visits, which is the percentage of online traffic to the Lifestyle - Politics category, from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US Internet users. Hitwise measures more than 1 million unique websites on a daily basis, including sub-domains of larger websites.
- The Huffington Post
- BarrackObama.com
- CNN Political Ticker
- Free Republic
- RealClearPolitics
- HilaryClinton.com
- Politico
- Elections: Fox News
- Daily Kos
- Election: MSN
Hitwise categorizes websites into industries on the basis of subject matter and content, as well as market orientation and competitive context.
Source - Hitwise - week ending March 8, 2008 - based on market share of visits.
There are two distinct versions of the operation mounted by the US Navy to shoot down a crippled military satellite over the Pacific. The official version, expounded in mind-numbing detail by Pentagon officials yesterday, is that the US had no choice but to launch a missile to bring down the satellite.
It had been out of control since its launch 13 months ago.
A supplementary argument, not broached by the Pentagon, was that the military technology loaded on to the satellite was not anything that America wanted another country to find on its territory.
The other interpretation of the mission is not incompatible with the first but far more worrying. While acknowledging that the satellite was in trouble and a missile strike was one way of dealing with it, this version has it that the operation was in fact a covert test of a space weapon.
Such tests were outlawed by the US-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty of 1972. By abrogating the treaty in one of his first acts as President, George Bush opened the way for tests of the "son" of Reagan's "Star Wars".
Since then, the US has conducted a series of experiments in which missiles have been launched to intercept other missiles, with varying degrees of success.
A year ago, China surprised America when it shot down a satellite at a very high altitude. It was the most glaring demonstration yet of China's steady rise as a military power. It is hard not to regard this week's show of missile prowess by the US as directed towards China. Beijing, for one, was in no doubt.
Via The-Independent
Alex-Jones provides evidence pointing towards the involvement of the British government in the 7/7 London Bombings in this extract from Terror-Storm.
Britain and India should step up cooperation in the fight against terrorism and work together to isolate militants, prime-minister Gordon-Brown said on Sunday.Brown, on his first visit to India as prime minister, said he would like to see India join an international body that fights money laundering and terrorist financing, the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force.
"What I would like to see is greater contact between our two countries in winning the battle of hearts and minds, isolating extremist ideologies who try to poison young people," Brown told a news conference.
Aid-Pledge
Brown arrived bearing promises of hundreds of millions of dollars of development aid to combat poverty in India, where 400 million people live on less than $1 a day despite the country's rapid economic-growth.
Britain said that over the next three years it will give India £825 million in development aid, with more than half spent on health and education.
Via Box-UK
Make your voice heard on the issues in UK politics that matter most to you.
Via Box-UK
India's linguistic, religious, ethnic, and cultural diversities are proverbial. So are the political mobilizations and the violent conflicts and antagonisms which have arisen from time to time among and between persons from its distinctive cultural groups.
Residents in the Gaza-Strip are facing the closure of the territory's only power plant as Israel continues a shutdown of its border crossings. "There is no fuel coming in and we have no reserves," Kanaan Abeid, deputy chairman of the Palestinian Energy Authority in the Gaza Strip, said.
However, Arye-Mekel, the Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, said that supplies of petrol used in cars, as well as diesel, had been halted but not essential-fuel.
The UN organisation supporting Palestinian refugees, warned that the shortages would drastically affect hospitals and water facilities. "The logic of this defies basic humanitarian standards," Christopher Gunness, UNRWA spokesman, said.
Via Al-Jazeera
After a look at recent NewsHour interviews with Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan experts and former colleagues of the late prime minister reflect on her political career, including her election as the first female prime-minister in 1988.
A 15-year-old detained near the Afghan border has confessed to joining a team of assassins sent to kill Benazir-Bhutto, officials said on Saturday.Police also announced they had foiled new suicide attacks against the country's Shiite-minority.
In the southern city of Karachi, meanwhile, the police chief said officers detained five men with explosives, detonators and a small quantity of cyanide intended for attacks on this week's Shiite Muslim festival of Ashura.
Via Time-Magazine
The ultra-orthodox anti-Zionist group, Neturei Karta, on Thursday condemned "the recent Zionist terrorist massacre" in Gaza.
The statement read, "Anti-Zionist Jews condemn the Zionists in no uncertain terms for their violent and bloodthirsty behavior."
"We cannot understand why great world powers seem to give the Zionists a free hand to commit such crimes against the indigenous Palestinian people from the comfort of their F-16 fighter jets, helicopter gun ships and Merkava tanks."
It went on to call on "great world powers" to "restore the rights of the Palestinians throughout historic Palestine."
The statement concluded: "Zionism is doomed!
Via Jerusalem-Post
The UN agency for Palestinian-refugees on Friday appealed to Israel to lift its lockdown of Gaza and open crossings into the impoverished territory where most of the residents depend on food aid.
"It is imperative that these crossings are opened so that the dire situation in Gaza does not deteriorate further, inflicting further misery on one and half million people" who live there, Christopher Gunness, the spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), told AFP.
Two Palestinians, including a woman, were killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza on Thursday. More than two dozen people have now been killed in the three days of military action. Al Jazeera's David Chater reports from Jerusalem.
Iranian President Mahmoud-Ahmadinejad has accused US President George Bush of "sowing the seeds of division" during his recent Middle-East visit.
"The Zionist entity is not lacking new weapons in its arsenal, but I believe it will not save it from its doomed collapse," - Ahmadinejad
Mr Ahmadinejad said Mr Bush had brought a "message of confrontation" during his tour, during which he warned Arab allies that Iran posed a threat.
Israel says Tehran could have a nuclear bomb by 2010 and has warned an Iranian nuclear weapon would threaten its existence.
Differences between Pakistan's Sunni-majority and Shia-minority go back to the schism following the prophet's death. But in the past two decades those differences have been manifest in repeated-violence.
Related-Verse >
Those who split up their Religion, and become (mere) Sects,- each party rejoicing in that which is with itself! (The Romans - Verse 32)
Zia's legacy >Most sectarian violence in Pakistan takes place in the province of Punjab and the country's commercial capital, Karachi.
There have also been outbreaks in Quetta.
Musharraf is not the only Pakistani leader to have such-problems. Most analysts agree it began in 1979, when Zia ul-Haq began Islamicising Pakistani politics.
Via In2Verses
President-Bush continues to beat a dead horse in his attempts to persuade the Arab world to take a hostile stance against Iran. The Arab states of the Gulf region are deeply tied to Iran by historical ethnic and economic ties.
The United Arab Emirates alone are the repository for hundreds of millions of dollars (and euros) of Iranian investment. Powerful bilingual trading families span the Gulf, with members in both Iran and Arab states.
The idea that a little jawboning by a United States president could change centuries-old patterns is patently absurd.
The United States would do well to first understand the culture of the regions in which it hopes to hold sway, and then work with the existing cultural-patterns, rather than trying to turn-nations against those with whom they have longstanding interdependent relations.
William O. Beeman
Minneapolis, Jan. 14, 2008
Chairman of the department of anthropology at the University of Minnesota.
Via NYT
The big-news is that Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni may be married now.
The second-biggest news is that, Nicolas-Sarkozy arrived in Saudi Arabia, one day before George-Bush himself arrived there.
“France wants to be Arabia’s friend, she wants to be the friend of the Arab world, a friend that does not preach-lessons, but that tells the truth.”
For the French president, “here in Saudi-Arabia the relationship of Islam to modernity is being tested.” This is why “France does not want to be just a strategic economic partner, but also a political partner for Saudi Arabia.”
Sakozy's remarks, Via Le Figaro
Post via The Brussels Journal
