Conservative Evangelicals Discuss Backing McCain
http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/mccain_evangelicals/2008/07/02/109459.html
-- Conservative evangelical leaders, who have been slow to warm to John McCain, met privately this week to discuss coalescing around the Republican's presidential bid.
Mathew Staver, a conservative Christian activist, convened a meeting of about 90 conservative evangelical leaders Tuesday night in Denver. Many evangelicals have been wary of McCain's commitment to their causes and his previous criticisms of movement leaders, among other things.
"Our shared core values compel us to unite and choose the presidential candidate that best advances those values," said Staver, who heads the Florida-based legal advocacy group Liberty Counsel and originally backed the candidacy of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. "That obvious choice is Sen. John McCain. I think people left the meeting in unity the likes of which have not been evident through the primaries."
Staver said the result will be more leaders "energizing their base" and targeted efforts in battleground states and states with anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives this fall such as Florida and California.
According to Staver, those in attendance included Phyllis Schlafly, head of the Eagle Forum; pastor and "Left Behind" co-author Tim LaHaye and his wife, Beverly, founder of Concerned Women for America; David Barton, founder of WallBuilders; Rick Scarborough of Vision America; and Don Hodel, a former interior secretary and former president of Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family.
James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family and a fan of neither McCain nor Democratic candidate Barack Obama, did not attend. Dobson has been in California working on a new book, aides have said.
Obama has been courting religious voters. On Tuesday, he called for expanding White House efforts to steer social service dollars to religious groups.
Staver said enthusiasm is building for McCain, in part because of the Republican senator's recent meetings with movement leaders like Phil Burress, who also attended the Denver summit. Burress helped pass an anti-gay marriage measure in Ohio that was credited with helping President Bush win the state in 2004.
Asked whether it was opposition to Obama or enthusiasm for McCain that motivated the group, Staver said: "Obama is a considerable threat to our values. At the same time, Sen. McCain recently has been reaching out to evangelicals and conservative voters that we represent."
Time magazine first reported on the meeting on its Web site Wednesday.
Obama Strikes First
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,376392,00.html
The campaign of 2008 started on July 1 when Obama launched his first national advertising buy of the season. How McCain responds and whether or not he does, will have a big impact in determining whether Obama can solidify or expand his current lead in the polls. As always, the media fails to cover the significant events of the campaign — but this is one of the most critical.
The Obama ad, which introduces him as someone who worked his way through college, fights for American jobs, and battles for health care also seeks to move him to the center by taking credit for welfare reform in Illinois which, the ad proclaims, reduced the rolls by 80%.
But there's one problem - Obama opposed the 1996 welfare reform act at the time. The Illinois law for which he takes credit, was merely the local implementing law the state was required to pass, and it did, almost unanimously. Obama's implication — that he backed "moving people from welfare to work" — is just not true.
With Obama running the ad in all the swing states (Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Virginia), this gross usurpation of credit affords the McCain campaign an incredible opportunity for rebuttal.
For the past two weeks, Obama has moved quickly toward the center. He has reversed his previous positions for gun control, against using faith based institutions to deliver public services, against immunity for tele-communications companies that turn records over to the government in terror investigations, for raising Social Security taxes, for imposing the fairness doctrine on talk radio, and a host of other issues.
McCain has watched passively as his rival repositions himself for November. Indeed, he has watched from afar as he took the time out to travel to Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, even though they have no electoral votes.
But now, there is a heaven-sent opportunity for McCain to strike. In his effort to move to the center, Obama has distorted his own record, meager though it may be, and is taking credit for a program he strongly opposed. McCain should immediately run an ad in all of the states in which his opponent is advertising setting forth the facts and explaining Obama's distortion.
A good tag line for the ad would be: "John McCain: when you have real experience, you don't need to exaggerate."
But, if McCain doesn't answer, or just replies with his own positive ad, he will let Obama move to the center, a key mistake from which he may never recover. If Obama can hold his 5-10 point lead until the conventions, he will have set in place a pattern that will be very hard to change. With his new ad, Obama could even elevate his lead to double digits.
On the other hand, if McCain calls him on his distortion, he can do grave damage to Obama on three fronts: credibility, centrism, and experience. By catching Obama in a lie, he can undermine the effectiveness of any subsequent ads the Democrat runs. By showing that he opposed welfare reform, McCain can do much to force Obama back to the left and cast doubt on his efforts to move to the middle. And by emphasizing Obama's limited experience, he can strike at a soft spot --- made softer by Hillary's attacks in the primary.
The move is right there for McCain. Now lets see how good his campaign really is.
Fmr. NC Senator Jesse Helms Dead at 86
http://www.cbn.com/CBNnews/403946.aspx
CBNNews.com - RALEIGH, N.C. - Former Sen. Jesse Helms, who built a career along the fault lines of racial politics and battled liberals, Communists and the occasional fellow Republican during 30 conservative years in Congress, died on the Fourth of July.
He was 86.
"It's just incredible that he would die on July 4, the same day of the Declaration of Independence and the same day that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died, and he certainly is a patriot in the mold of those great men," said former North Carolina GOP Rep. Bill Cobey, the chairman of The Jesse Helms Center at Wingate University.
Helms died at 1:15 a.m, the center said. He died in Raleigh of natural causes, said former chief of staff Jimmy Broughton.
"He was very comfortable," Broughton said.
Funeral arrangements were pending, the Helms center said.
His Professional Life
"America lost a great public servant and true patriot today," White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said few senators could match Helms' reputation.
"Today we lost a Senator whose stature in Congress had few equals. Senator Jesse Helms was a leading voice and courageous champion for the many causes he believed in," McConnell said in a statement.
Helms, who first became known to North Carolina voters as a newspaper and television commentator, won election to the Senate in 1972 and decided not to run for a sixth term in 2002.
"Compromise, hell!. If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?" Helms wrote in a 1959 editorial that foretold his political style.
As he aged, Helms was slowed by a variety of illnesses, including a bone disorder, prostate cancer and heart problems, and he made his way through the Capitol on a motorized scooter as his career neared an end.
In April 2006, his family announced he had been moved into a convalescent center after being diagnosed with vascular dementia, in which repeated minor strokes damage the brain.
Helms' public appearances had dwindled as his health deteriorated. When his memoirs were published in August 2005, he appeared at a Raleigh book store to sign copies, but did not make a speech.
In an e-mail interview with The Associated Press at that time, Helms said he hoped what future generations learn about him "will be based on the truth and not the deliberate inaccuracies those who disagreed with me took such delight in repeating."
"My legacy will be up to others to describe," he added.
Helms served as chairman of the Agriculture Committee and Foreign Relations Committees over the years at times when the GOP held the Senate majority, using his posts to protect his state's tobacco growers and other farmers and place his stamp on foreign policy.
His opposition to Communism defined his foreign policy views. He took a dim view of many arms control treaties, opposed Fidel Castro at every turn, and supported the contras in Nicaragua as well as the right-wing government of El Salvador. He opposed the Panama Canal treaties that then-President Carter pushed through a reluctant Senate in 1977.
Early on, his habit of blocking nominations and legislation won him a nickname of "Senator No." He delighted in forcing roll-call votes that required Democrats to take politically difficult votes on federal funding for art he deemed pornographic, school busing, flag-burning and other cultural issues.
In 1993, when then-President Clinton sought confirmation for an openly homosexual assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Helms registered his disgust. "I'm not going to put a lesbian in a position like that," he said in a newspaper interview at the time. "If you want to call me a bigot, fine."
After Democrats killed the appointment of U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle, a former Helms aide, to a federal appeals court post in 1991, Helms blocked all of Clinton's judicial nominations from North Carolina for eight years.
Helms occasionally opted for compromise in later years in the Senate, working with Democrats on legislation to restructure the foreign policy bureaucracy and pay back debts to the United Nations, an organization be disdained for most of his career.
And he softened his views on AIDS after years of clashes with gay activists, advocating greater federal funding to fight the disease in Africa and elsewhere overseas.
But in his memoirs, Helms made clear that his opinions on other issues had hardly moderated since he left office. He likened abortion to the Holocaust and the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
"I will never be silent about the death of those who cannot speak for themselves," he wrote in "Here's Where I Stand."
Never Lost a Senate Race
Helms never lost a race for the Senate, but he never won one by much, either, a reflection of his divisive political profile in his native state.
He knew it, too. "Well, there is no joy in Mudville tonight. The mighty ultraliberal establishment, and the liberal politicians and editors and commentators and columnists have struck out again," he said in 1990 after winning his fourth term.
He won the 1972 election after switching parties, and defeated then-Gov. Jim Hunt in an epic battle in 1984 in what was then the costliest Senate race on record.
He defeated black former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt in 1990 and 1996 in racially tinged campaigns. In the first race, a Helms commercial showed a white fist crumbling up a job application, these words underneath: "You needed that job. but they had to give it to a minority."
"The tension that he creates, the fear he creates in people, is how he's won campaigns," Gantt said several years later.
National Political Scene
Helms also played a role in national GOP politics - supporting Ronald Reagan in 1976 in a presidential primary challenge to then-President Ford. Reagan's candidacy was near collapse when it came time for the North Carolina primary. Helms was in charge of the effort, and Reagan won a startling upset that resurrected his challenge.
"It's not saying too much to say that had Senator Helms not put his weight and his political organization behind Ronald Reagan so that he was able to win North Carolina, there may have never been a Reagan presidency," Cobey said. "Most people feel like there would have never been a President Reagan had it not been for Jesse Helms."
During the 1990s, Helms clashed frequently with Clinton, whom he deemed unqualified to be commander in chief. Even some Republicans cringed when Helms said Clinton was so unpopular he would need a bodyguard on North Carolina military bases. Helms said he hadn't meant it as a threat.
Asked to gauge Clinton's performance overall, Helms said in 1995: "He's a nice guy. He's very pleasant. But. Ronald Reagan used to say about another politician, `Deep down, he's shallow."'
Helms went out of his way to establish good relations with Madeleine Albright, Clinton's second secretary of state. But that didn't stop him from single-handedly blocking Clinton's appointment of William Weld - a Republican - as ambassador to Mexico.
Helms clashed with other Republicans over the years, including fellow Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana in 1987, after Democrats had won a Senate majority. Helms had promised in his 1984 campaign not to take the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee, but he invoked seniority over Lugar to claim the seat as the panel's ranking Republican.
He was unafraid of inconveniencing his fellow senators - sometimes all of them at once. "I did not come to Washington to win a popularity contest," he once said while holding the Senate in session with a filibuster that delayed the beginning of a Christmas break. And he once objected to a request by phoning in his dissent from home, where he was watching Senate proceedings on television.
North Carolina Roots
Helms was born in Monroe, N.C., on Oct. 18, 1921. He attended Wake Forest College in 1941 but never graduated and was in the Navy during World War II.
In many ways, Helms' values were forged in the small town where his father was police chief.
"I shall always remember the shady streets, the quiet Sundays, the cotton wagons, the Fourth of July parades, the New Year's Eve firecrackers. I shall never forget the stream of school kids marching uptown to place flowers on the Courthouse Square monument on Confederate Memorial Day," Helms wrote in a newspaper column in 1956.
He took an active role in North Carolina politics early on, working to elect a segregationist candidate, Willis Smith, to the Senate in 1950. He worked as Smith's top staff aide for a time, then returned to Raleigh as executive director of the state bankers association.
Helms became a member of the Raleigh city council in 1957 and got his first public platform for espousing his conservative views when he became a television editorialist for WRAL in Raleigh in 1960. He also wrote a column that at one time was carried in 200 newspapers. Helms also was city editor at The Raleigh Times.
Helms and his wife, Dorothy, had two daughters and a son. They adopted the boy in 1962 after the child, 9 years old and suffering from cerebral palsy, said in a newspaper article that he wanted parents.
One New Crime a Week
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,376202,00.html
It used to be easy to avoid committing a federal crime. If you avoided murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, assault, battery and theft, there were few options left.
But today you might want to consider hiring a small team of researchers if you want to be confident you won’t end up in federal prison. And even then you couldn’t be sure.
There are at least 4,450 offenses in federal criminal law. That’s the number Louisiana State University law professor John S. Baker Jr., and his researchers came up with in a just-published report.
Baker’s work updates a 1983 count conducted by the Justice Department itself. That tally found more than 3,000 criminal laws — meaning that in just 25 years Congress has created some 1,400 criminal offenses.
Both Baker and the Justice Department cautioned that they couldn’t be sure they had found them all. Congress has scattered criminal offenses throughout the tens of thousands of pages of the United States Code.
Baker’s study also found that at least 454 federal crimes were added from 2000 to 2007. That’s an average of about 56 new federal crimes a year.
In short, Congress has been creating one new crime a week.
Why should you care? Because more and more law-abiding citizens are winding up in a federal net. Hundreds and hundreds of these new offenses criminalize conduct that no one but a government lawyer would imagine is criminal.
An Alaskan inventor who never had so much as a traffic ticket was arrested, indicted and prosecuted by the feds because he failed to put the right sticker on a UPS package. He had no idea the sticker was required, and everything else about his shipment was perfectly legal.
But after being arrested and handcuffed, face-down on the pavement, by a half-dozen SWAT-team officers aiming assault rifles at him, he’s now spending almost two years in federal prison.
Fisherman David McNab, a seafood importer, and a seafood distributor are serving eight-year sentences in three U.S. prisons because McNab packed his catch in a manner that allegedly violated a Honduran regulation. It made no difference to the American courts that the highest officials of the Honduran government certified that McNab had, in fact, violated no Honduran law.
And a recent federal prosecution suggests that anyone who violates the rules of an online social networking site, such as MySpace or Facebook, by registering with a false name could spend up to five years in federal prison.
Making matters worse, few Americans charged with a federal crime ever get their day in court. Even if you are accused of a non-violent crime that doesn’t involve guns or drugs, chances are extremely high that you will plead guilty without getting an opportunity to tell your side of the story to a judge or jury.
The definitions of non-violent crimes are so broad — and federal prison sentences today are so long — that it’s usually far too risky to go to trial even if you never intended to do anything wrong. You’re better off pleading guilty to try to get a shorter sentence.
And ironically, more and more federal criminal laws mean you may be at greater risk of becoming a crime victim. When Congress federalizes violent crimes that are inherently local in nature — carjacking, for example — your local prosecutors and investigators often conclude that they should turn their attention elsewhere and leave that particular crime to the feds.
But the FBI doesn’t have an office in every city, much less agents patrolling every city street. And it’s simply not the job of the feds to keep street crime out of your neighborhood.
If over-federalizing crime is so bad, why does Congress keep doing it? According to the American Bar Association, "new federal laws are passed not because federal prosecution of these crimes is necessary but because federal crime legislation in general is thought to be politically popular."
Even when new criminal laws are "misguided, unnecessary and even harmful," the ABA stated, "it is not considered politically wise to vote against crime legislation."
The political benefits to incumbents of rampant criminalization may explain why from 2000 to 2007 Congress passed three times as many crimes in election years as it did in non-election years. No member of Congress wants to be labeled "soft on crime" for voting against a bill touted as the answer to the most high-profile crime du jour.
No one should become a criminal under the many crazy federal laws criminalizing seemingly innocent conduct. And federal law enforcement shouldn’t be taxed with the job of fighting crime that should be handled by state and local law enforcement.
The proliferation of federal criminal law puts everyone at risk. Congress needs to kick its one-new-crime-a-week habit.
Georgia Gets Green 'Justice'
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,376082,00.html
Vicki Lawrence’s 1972 hit "The night the lights went out in Georgia" may become the official state song thanks to what passes for justice in the court of Fulton County, Ga., Judge Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore.
Acting on a petition from the Sierra Club and the Friends of the Chattahoochee, Moore invalidated a permit issued by the Georgia Environmental Protection Division allowing Longleaf Energy Associates to build a 1,200-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Early County.
The key issue in the case is the emission of carbon dioxide from the proposed plant. The permit granted to the plant did not limit CO2 emissions from the plant for the simple reason that the federal Clean Air Act does not include CO2 as an "air pollutant" to be regulated.
While Moore observed that the permit could be upheld if CO2 was not an "air pollutant" subject to the Clean Air Act, she concluded that the Supreme Court had already decided the matter to the contrary in its 2007 decision Massachusetts v. EPA.
"Faced with the ruling in Massachusetts that CO2 is an 'air pollutant' under the Act, [Longleaf] is forced to argue that CO2 is still not a 'pollutant subject to regulation under the Act.' [Longleaf’s] position is untenable," Moore wrote.
If anything is untenable, however, it is Moore’s misreading of the Supreme Court’s decision. The court did not, in fact, rule that CO2 was an air pollutant that must be regulated under the Clean Air Act.
The court wrote that, "we hold that EPA has the statutory authority to regulate the emission of [greenhouse] gases from new motor vehicles."
So the court only ruled that the EPA may regulate CO2, not that CO2 is an "air pollutant" for purposes of the Clean Air Act. Although the 5-4, Justice John Paul Stevens-penned decision bloviated a great deal about carbon dioxide's causing global warming, in legal parlance this is known as "dicta," a sort of judicial editorializing.
The court’s decision and legal significance was strictly limited to the majority’s disapproval of the EPA’s process for declining to regulate CO2.
"In short, EPA has offered no reasoned explanation for its refusal to decide whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute to climate change. Its action was therefore ‘arbitrary, capricious … otherwise not in accordance with the law. … We need not and do not reach the question whether on remand the EPA must make an endangerment funding. … We only hold that EPA must ground its reasons for action or inaction in the statute," the court concluded.
Moore, unfortunately, based her decision on the court’s non-legally binding musings about CO2 rather than the court’s actual ruling. Building on her gross misapplication of the law, Moore went on to essentially impose an impossible-to-meet technology standard on the proposed plant.
In contrast to the traditional method of burning coal to generate steam that drives an electricity-producing turbine, the technology called "integrated gasification combined cycle" converts coal to a gas that is burned to drive the turbines.
IGCC is used by only a few power plants around the world on essentially a demonstration project basis with good reason since an IGCC plant costs nearly three times as much as a conventional coal plant.
The alleged "advantage" of IGCC, if it can be so labeled, is that it reduces CO2 emissions. Because the Clean Air Act requires that air pollutants be regulated by "best available [pollution] control technology," or BACT, the Sierra Club and Friends of the Chattahoochee persuaded Moore that any permit for the Longleaf plant must be based on emissions limits that could be achieved by IGCC despite that the technology is not really commercially available.
But even if IGCC were commercially available, it’s not at all clear that it would be considered BACT since one of the factors in determining whether a technology is BACT is cost. While IGCC may reduce power plant CO2 emissions, it would substantially increase the emissions of dollars from consumer and taxpayer pockets.
Moore made no effort to do a cost-benefit analysis to see whether IGCC might qualify as BACT. While it may have seemed like a no-brainer to Moore to side with the local green elites against the out-of-state power company that applied for the permit, she actually wound up siding against the working people and economy of her own state.
For no good reason, Moore denied Georgia the many well-paying jobs associated with the $2 billion plant construction and permanent plant operations. There’s also the not-so-small matter of the much-needed energy the plant would have produced.
Watch for this sort of green justice to come your way. A lawyer for the activist group Environmental Defense told The New York Times she hopes other courts would pick up on Moore’s "reasoning."
Let’s hope, instead, that the next Judge Moore can be persuaded to apply the actual law to real-life facts rather than to impose fantasy emissions limits that can only be met by not-ready-for-prime-time technology.
Iraqi firms buying Israeli products “exposed”
http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=5407
Leaflets naming Iraqi firms doing business with Israeli exporters have been circulated in Iraq for the purpose of stopping the trade, which now amounts to between $800 and a million a year. DEBKAfile’s sources report that the leaflets are circulated anonymously. Some sources calculate that Tehran is behind the anti-Israel trade campaign in Iraq in reprisal for the international sanctions imposed on Iran. Others suggest that it represents an aggressive bid by rival international exporters to replace Israeli companies in the Iraqi market.
U.S. Envoy Plays Down Talk of Iran Attack
http://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/Envoy_iran_attack/2008/07/03/109714.html
JERUSALEM -- The U.S. ambassador to Israel played down speculation on Thursday that an attack by either country on Iranian nuclear sites was imminent, saying the allies agreed sanctions should run their course.
"I don't think any decisions have been made on any military action by any party, that I'm aware of," Richard Jones told reporters.
"I think a lot of people believe that the use of military force would be the last option and there are plenty of other options that need to be exercised beforehand -- and I think we are in the process of exercising those options," he said.
"We are working very closely with Israel on our diplomatic efforts."
U.S. President George W. Bush on Wednesday reiterated his administration's support for giving diplomatic pressure on Tehran a chance to work, but said "all options are on the table".
Speculation about a possible strike on Iran has lifted oil prices, which hit a new record high of above $145 a barrel on Thursday. Traders said the market now had $150 within reach.
Iran, which denies seeking nuclear weapons, has defied U.N. Security Council sanctions designed to curb its access to technologies with bomb-making potential.
A large-scale Israeli air force drill last month prompted speculation that the Jewish state, which is believed to have the region's only atomic arsenal, could be preparing to attack the Islamic republic.
The Israeli government, while hinting that it considers force a viable last resort against its arch-foe, has endorsed sanctions.
Iran: Attack on Nuclear Sites Means War
http://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/Iran_Nuclear_/2008/07/04/109994.html
TEHRAN — The head of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards has warned that any Israeli or US attack on its nuclear sites would mean the outbreak of war, the official IRNA news agency reported on Friday.
"Any action against Iran will be interpreted as the start of a war," General Mohammad Ali Jafari was quoted as saying late on Thursday. "Iran's response to any military action will make the aggressors regret their decision."
The United States has never ruled out an eventual resort to force against Iran over its contested nuclear programme, which the West fears is cover for a drive to build an atomic weapon.
Israel, which is widely believed to be the Middle East's sole if undeclared nuclear power, has said it will stop Tehran from developing a nuclear bomb at all costs.
US media reported that more than 100 Israeli warplanes staged a training exercise with Greece last month to prepare for a possible long-distance strike and as a warning to Tehran.
Jafari warned Israel last week not to attack the Islamic republic, saying that the Jewish state was well within range of Iranian missiles.
Iran insists that its nuclear programme is peaceful and aimed only at energy production, vehemently denying allegations that it wants atomic weapons.
Currently under three sets of UN Security Council sanctions for its refusal to suspend sensitive uranium enrichment, Iran is set to respond to an offer of incentives by world powers aimed at resolving the nuclear stand-off.
The country's top nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili on Thursday expressed optimism that nuclear talks could start with world powers, but also stressed the importance of a package put forward by Tehran.
Iran's own package is a more all-embracing effort to solve global problems, and notably suggests the setting up of a consortium in Iran to enrich uranium.
Iran Offers Surprise Nuclear Deal
http://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/iran_nuclear_enrichment/2008/07/03/109852.html
NEW YORK -- In what may be considered a breakthrough in Iran's standoff with the White House and the U.N. Security Council over its nuclear program, it is reported that Tehran will suspend its controversial uranium enrichment if the U.N. suspends the economic sanctions it has imposed.
The report, from Channel 2 News in Tel Aviv, does not identify the sources other than as "Western diplomats."
Iran has allegedly proposed a six-week time frame for the acceptance or rejection of its new proposal.
Coincidentally, Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, was in New York City concluding a series of meetings at United Nations headquarters.
Leaving Iran's U.N. mission Thursday afternoon, Mottaki refused to comment on the report other than to say that he "will have a written letter" to the U.N. "in a few days."
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Zalmay Khalilzad told Newsmax that he found the "conciliatory" tone taken by Mottaki during his New York visit "encouraging." But, Khalilzad asked: "Is Mottaki really a player back in Tehran? We don't know."
As such, the "feelers" being put out by Tehran have been taken very cautiously by U.S. diplomats.
However, the latest offer of a formal "suspension" by Iran has taken diplomats by surprise, so no reaction has yet been offered.
Uranium enrichment is a key procedure used in building an atomic weapon.
Washington wants it stopped. Iran insists that the enrichment it is currently proceeding with is for "peaceful" purposes.
The White House and the European Union have threatened to impose new sanctions if Iran does not heed demands to halt the enrichment.
Blast kills 4 and wounds 11 in southern Philippines
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/blast.kills.4.and.wounds.11.in.southern.philippines/20059.htm
At least four men were killed and 11 others wounded when a grenade exploded on Thursday at a bakery in the southern Philippines, a military spokesman said, blaming Maoist-led rebels for the attack.
Hours later, another group of communist New People's Army (NPA) guerrillas raided a town hall in a nearby province on the troubled southern island of Mindanao, wounding a police officer, and carted away three assault rifles and a handgun.
Major Armand Rico said two men and a woman on a motorcycle lobbed a grenade into the bakery in Nabunturan town at dawn on Thursday, killing three people on the spot.
"A dozen people were rushed to a nearby hospital, but one died while being treated," Rico said, adding NPA rebels were behind the attack.
"We believed the grenade attack was a punitive action for the failure of the business establishment to pay revolutionary taxes to the rebels."
Rico said several traders in Nabunturan, a mining town on Mindanao, have been getting extortion letters from the NPA, threatening to blow up their businesses if they ignored the demand.
In nearby Banay-banay town in Davao Oriental province, about 50 rebels on board two dump trucks raided the town hall, engaging a handful of police officers on duty in a fight.
"The rebels came pretending to apply for a rally permit, but disarmed some of the police officers guarding the town hall," Rico told reporters, adding soldiers were rushed to the area to reinforce some officers who put up a fight.
Rico said one police officer was wounded during a 30-minute firefight. The rebels took control of the town hall for a few minutes before fleeing with the guns and office equipment.
Last week, the rebels raided two town halls in Surigao del Norte province, stealing weapons and communications equipment, but soldiers caught up with the guerrillas, killing 15 of them and capturing a dozen others.
The Philippines has been battling communist rebels in 69 of 81 provinces across the country in a protracted conflict that has killed 40,000 people and stunted economic growth in one of Southeast Asia's poorest states.
You haven't seen it all if you haven't seen "GOD TO SAME-SEXERS: HURRY UP" (on Google etc.) which is the most effective and unusual way of making homosexuals think that I have ever come across. It is one super read! Irv
ReplyDelete