The mandate is solid: the Solomons Government has officially asked for help and passed a law permitting the peacekeepers to use reasonable force to disarm the militias and restore order.
So why, you wonder, did Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer feel compelled to issue a chest-pounding statement that "sovereignty in our view is not absolute. Acting for the benefit of humanity is", as though Australia was doing this without the Solomons' consent.
And although this is a classic United Nations-style peacekeeping operation, the UN is not involved - because Australia does not want it involved. Australia, under Prime Minister John Howard's conservative Government, has joined the small club of English-speaking industrial countries that have granted themselves the right to act unilaterally, allegedly in the best interests of all.

Glenview State Bank executives apologized to Jewish people on the bank's Web site Tuesday night, after a bank newsletter to customers praised Adolf Hitler as an economic leader of the 1930s.

. We are under siege out here, without supplies, without a mission and we can only roll the dice so many times and not get our (expletive) shot. More and more body bags and amputees will be coming home.

Mr Cook, the former foreign secretary, said he was "baffled" why the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, continued to stick by the allegation when it had been dismissed by the government of Niger, the French intelligence services and the administration in Washington.

What I see now is ESCAPE. Nobody's protesting -- Americans are just escaping.

America's new super weapon, according to plans recently disclosed by the Pentagon, will be launched from a space vehicle sent up less than two hours earlier. The "bunker breaker" released by such a "hypersonic cruise vehicle" (HCV) will accelerate to many times the speed of sound solely by virtue of gravitational force and will be steered to its destination by satellite.

Future generations and even people in ten years are going to face massive public deficits and huge government debt. Then we have a choice. We can be like a very poor country with problems of threatening bankruptcy. Or we're going to have to cut back seriously on Medicare and Social Security. So the money that is going overwhelmingly to the wealthy is going to be paid by cutting services for the elderly.
I think this is the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history. It has engaged in extraordinarily irresponsible policies not only in foreign and economic but also in social and environmental policy. This is not normal government policy. Now is the time for people to engage in civil disobedience.


Today, says Sheikh Subeir, he would not hesitate for an instant before taking back the deposed dictator, and his men enthusiastically jump up from their chairs. The sheikh tells them to quiet down and calls for his son Mustafa. A seven-year-old boy emerges from the crowd. His father places a hand on Mustafa's head and pulls his son toward him. Then he says, in a voice filled with hate: "I would have this child slaughtered for Saddam!"

You have to understand the importance of documents in a regime of Saddam’s sort. The order comes down from on high saying ‘make me three tons of VX’. You do not go back and say, ‘Sir, we tried and failed’ because if you do, you disappear. Instead, you send back a memo saying, ‘Sir, we have produced your three tonnes of VX’.

In 1998 Hatch told MSNBC that he would support the fundamentalist Afghan rebels again even if he knew that it would create another bin Laden. "It was worth it", Hatch said.

Alastair Campbell is in a "disturbed and dangerous psychological state" and is "out of control", according to the Mail on Sunday deputy editor Roderick Gilchrist, who was speaking after a bruising face-to-face encounter with the Labour spin chief.

A Pentagon committee led by Paul Wolfowitz advised President Bush to include a reference in his January State of the Union address about Iraq trying to purchase 500 tons of uranium from Niger to bolster the case for war in Iraq, despite the fact that the CIA warned Wolfowitz’s committee that the information was unreliable, according to a CIA intelligence official and four members of the Senate’s intelligence committee who have been investigating the issue.

The Mosul shoot-out serves to "reduce the heat" and conceal the lies: "The death of the two sons was greeted with jubilation in Washington, where President George Bush has been under growing political pressure..." (Washington Post, 24 July 2003)

It's the kind of plausible scenario which might well occur to a senior police officer investigating the murder of Dr. Kelly. But there is no such officer investigating murder.
Last year, while sitting as a Law Lord, Lord Hutton ruled that the former MI5 agent and whistle-blower, David Shayler, did not act in the public interest when he disclosed state secrets alleging illegal activities and incompetence in the security services.
Now he is to investigate another whistle-blower in the intelligence arena.

For the hundredth time since the US invaded Iraq, the predictions made by those with access to intelligence have proved less reliable than the predictions made by those without.

So American soldiers are no longer merely terrestrial combatants; they have become missionaries. They are no longer simply killing enemies; they are casting out demons
George Bush recalled a remark of Woodrow Wilson's. "America," he quoted, "has a spiritual energy in her which no other nation can contribute to the liberation of mankind."

• Overall visa applications dropped from 10.4 million in 2001 to 8.3 million in 2002. Visa approvals fell from 7.5 million in 2001 to 5.7 million in 2002.

for the first time in American history, the government is keeping two sets of books about the number of war dead. There's the ones they say died from hostile fire and there's the ones who died from other causes.
More than a half dozen American servicemen have committed suicide in Iraq, for example, and they're not included in the official count.
Incidents of fragging, in which enlisted men murder their superior officers, are likewise not included.
Nor are deaths due to highway accidents, many of which are caused by vehicles going too fast in order to avoid being lit up by enemy small arms and rocket-propelled grenade fire.
They also don't count the guys who've been blown up clearing enemy minefields.

The first sign came last week in a little-noticed article in Stars and Stripes, reporting that the 3rd Infantry Division will no longer accommodate embedded reporters—or, with few exceptions, reporters period.
soldier on network television, faces exposed, names on the record—in startlingly stark language. "I've got my own 'Most Wanted' list. … The Aces in my deck are Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush, and Paul Wolfowitz."
The second, and more intriguing, sign was the news over the weekend that President Bush is asking James Baker, his father's old secretary of State, to go to Baghdad and help supervise Iraqi reconstruction.

Rice said when she read the line in the State of the Union address she at the time thought it was "completely credible," but added: "What I feel, really, most responsible for is that this has detracted from the very strong case that the president has been

John Poindexter, the retired Navy admiral who spearheaded two sharply criticized Pentagon projects, intends to resign from his Defense Department post within weeks, a senior U.S. defense official said on Thursday.

The family of a Palestinian boy killed in an accident has helped save the lives of four Israeli children by donating his organs, a rare act after 34 months of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Colin Powell, US secretary of state, was advised that the evidence he cited in his speech to the United Nations in February concerning Iraq's nuclear weapons programme was questionable.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson predicts the situation in Iraq will deteriorate so much over the next year Bush may resort to start another war in order to win the 2004 election.

former CIA director John Deutch : "If no weapons of mass destruction or only a residual capacity (is) found, the principal justification enunciated by the U.S. government for launching this war will have proven not to be credible," Deutch said.

the problem of Poindexter remains. He is a man of dubious background and dubious ideas. A retired rear admiral, he served as President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser and helped devise the plan to sell arms to Iran and illegally divert the proceeds to the rebels in Nicaragua. He was sentenced to six months in jail for lying to Congress, a conviction overturned on appeal. He resurfaced under the second Bush administration at the Pentagon. His first big brainstorm post-9/11 was a program known as Total Information Awareness

An Immigration Service spokesman has apologised for comments he made suggesting an agreement among officials to "lie in unison" about the detention of a suspected Algerian terrorist, Immigration Minister Lianne Dalziel said today.

The United States will not seek a death sentence against an Australian terror suspect held at Guantanamo Bay if he is convicted, Australia's justice minister said Wednesday.

In any case, both versions of the story make clear that the White House has lost some confidence in Bremer. And if Baker does not get a job after all this, it might fairly be inferred that the neo-cons are still on top.

Random searches at airports would catch more terrorists than the current system of passenger profiling.
The system profiles passengers and identifies those who should get extra security screening. While the parameters of the system are classified, anyone who is flagged for extra screening knows it as soon as they are pulled aside for special treatment. Chakrabarti and Strauss show, through computer modeling, how the terrorists can easily defeat the system. Put simply, it's all about trial and error. For example, let's say a terrorist cell sends 20 different guys through the airport (with no weapons and no intent to harm), the person who consistently passes through security without extra scrutiny is the best person to send on a destructive mission in the air. The terrorists basically conclude this guy is "profile proof."

Democratic presidential hopefull Lynton LaRouche Jr. has posed this stark question to vice-president Dick Cheney. "Are you going to organize a terrorist incident, of the type you've been discussing, just as your friends organized September 11?"

Time to leave the Washington world of media spin for a moment here, and briefly touch base with reality. Uday and Qusay do not get along at the best of times, and in any event, for security reasons travel independently with separate highly-trained teams of special forces bodyguards front and rear.

Now go search the archives, and try to find media video footage taken after the "arrest" of any of the other 34 “wanted criminals” on the Deck of Cards that America claims to have in custody. No media footage? What a surprise…

"A civilian car came up with American soldiers in it. Then more soldiers in military vehicles. I told them I didn't understand what had happened, that I was a scientific researcher. But they made me lie down in the street, tied my arms behind me with plastic-and-steel cuffs and tied up my feet and put me in one of their vehicles.
"After 10 minutes in the vehicle, I was taken out again. There were journalists with cameras. The group of Americans untied me, then made me lie on the road again. Then, in front of the cameras, they tied my hands and feet all over again and put me back in the vehicle." It was “show and tell” time for the American media, despite the fact that Qais al-Salman was in Iraq specifically to help repair Baghdad’s bomb-damaged water purification plants.
This is what the Americans do to a single Danish civil engineer they just happen to shoot up on the streets of Baghdad.