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(05/09/07 11:01pm)
BAGHDAD – Vice President Dick Cheney and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki acknowledged problems in the pace of reducing violence in Iraq on Wednesday, but both pledged their governments would continue working together toward a solution.\nThe Iraqi leader said he and Cheney discussed “practical steps ... to support our efforts working on both the security front as well as the domestic political issues.” He and Cheney made brief remarks to reporters, with al-Maliki speaking through an interpreter.\nAl-Maliki is coming under increasing pressure from Washington to demonstrate progress in easing sectarian violence, and Cheney’s unannounced visit to Iraq was depicted by U.S. officials as an attempt to press al-Maliki and other Iraqi leaders to do more to achieve reconciliation among factions.\nCheney said he and al-Maliki “talked about the way ahead in terms of our mutual efforts to help build an Iraq that is safe and secure, is self-governing and free of the threats of the insurgency and al-Qaida.”\nEarlier, Cheney got a firsthand briefing on conditions in Iraq and the effectiveness of the U.S. military buildup from the top U.S. commander in Iraq.\n“There’s a lot going on. This is a very important time. There’s a lot to talk about,” Cheney said as he met with Gen. David Petraeus and the new U.S. ambassador here, Ryan Crocker.\nPetraeus said recently that conditions in Iraq may get harder before they get easier and will require “an enormous commitment” over time by the United States.\nCheney made Iraq the first stop on a weeklong tour of the Middle East that will also include stops in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. The Baghdad stop had not been announced publicly.\nCheney also met with Iraq’s Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani, Sunni and Shiite vice presidents, and other government and political leaders.\nAides said the vice president wanted to emphasize that ending the conflict in Iraq cannot done by military means alone and that his mission was to get a sense of the situation on the ground in Iraq and to deliver a message that more work is needed on the political front to overcome divisions and \ndelays.\nThe visit follows a secure video conference earlier this week between al-Maliki and President Bush about the need to move forward on legislation to help repair the rift between majority-party Shiite Arabs and minority Sunni Arabs.\nSunni legislators have been threatening to pull out of the government.\nCheney also was likely to renew a U.S. request that the Iraqi parliament not take a scheduled two-month break during these troubling times, said Crocker.\n“For the Iraqi parliament to take a two-month vacation in the middle of summer is impossible to understand,” said Crocker, who traveled with Cheney from Washington. He has only been on the job since March.\nCheney’s message with Iraqi leaders, according to a senior administration official who briefed reporters, was to be: “We’ve all got challenges together. We’ve got to pull together. We’ve got to get this work done. It’s game time.”\nThe official spoke on condition of anonymity since he talked before Cheney’s meetings and did not want to upstage the vice president.
(05/09/07 10:58pm)
PARIS – The leader of France’s defeated Socialists appealed for calm Tuesday after post-election violence left cars burned and store windows smashed.\nWhile the unrest has been relatively minor, it sent a message to Nicolas Sarkozy: He may have won the presidency, but he hasn’t won over the many French who consider him, his free-market reforms and tough line on crime and immigration frighteningly brutal.\nSarkozy, who beat Socialist Segolene Royal in a runoff Sunday, is a divisive figure whose tough language and crackdowns on crime and immigration have angered many on the left and in the immigrant-heavy suburban housing projects that erupted in riots in 2005.\nTuesday night, the third night after the election, appeared calmer than the previous nights, with only a few reports of violence. Vandals set fire to a center belonging to Sarkozy’s UMP party in the central town of Villeurbanne, causing minor damage, said local official Xavier de Furst.\nA scuffle with riot police was also reported in the Paris suburb of Grigny. Police patrolled the Place de la Bastille in Paris, where hundreds of people had gathered on previous nights, breaking windows in shops and starting street fires.\nSome 730 cars were burned nationwide Sunday night and 592 people were arrested. The following night, 373 vehicles were torched and 160 people were taken in for questioning across France, police said.\n“To all those who can hear me, I ask them to immediately stop all this behavior,” Socialist Party chief Francois Hollande said Tuesday on RTL radio.\n“We are in a republic, where universal suffrage is the only law we know. There can be disappointment, there can be anger, there can be frustration. But the only way to react is to take up your ballots, not other weapons,” he said.\nRoyal had warned of renewed violence in case of a Sarkozy victory, and had sought to make the campaign a referendum on Sarkozy’s polarizing persona.\nBut voters favored Sarkozy anyway, handing him a mandate for reforms that includes tax cuts and new labor rules making it easier to hire and fire to revive the sluggish economy. He faces a big challenge in carrying out his plans in a country that cherishes its generous social safety net.\nThe troublemakers this week have been mostly white, whereas the 2005 riots involved many black and Arab youth angry over discrimination and alienation from mainstream society. This week’s protesters resembled some of the young people who helped bring down a minor labor reform last year through mass demonstrations.\nSarkozy’s reforms promise to be tougher, and are certain to meet similar street protests.\nSarkozy himself was on a yacht in the Mediterranean, taking time to rest before he takes over from Jacques Chirac on May 16.\nCritics on the left assailed him for his high-budget retreat – the yacht belongs to prominent magnate Vincent Bollore and was outfitted with huge plasma TVs and a whirlpool bath.\nHollande was more understanding, though he said he wanted to know who paid for the vacation. “I find it normal that after a campaign that was also difficult for him, he needs rest,” he said.\nThe Socialists and Sarkozy’s UMP party are now looking ahead to parliamentary elections June 10 and 17. The UMP needs a majority to keep his mandate for reforms. A win by the left would bring “cohabitation,” an awkward power-sharing with a leftist prime minister, which would put a stop to his plans.
(05/09/07 10:54pm)
LAGOS, Nigeria – Gunmen seized four American workers as violence escalated in Nigeria’s southern petroleum-producing region, a Chevron spokesman said Wednesday.\nThe attackers, carrying assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, stormed a vessel carrying the workers in the southern Niger Delta minutes before midnight Tuesday, two industry officials told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because their company prohibits them from talking to the media.\nChevron Corp. spokesman Femi Odumabo said the four kidnapped workers were subcontractors with U.S. citizenship.\n“Four American employees of Global Industry Ltd. were taken hostage,” he said. “There is no current threat to production.”\nAnother vessel in the same area, the Walvis 6, was also attacked and robbed. A crew member reported missing was later found hiding on the boat.\n“This is just a piracy, robbery case,” Odumabo said. Despite last week’s attack, in which six Chevron employees were taken hostage, he said the company did not feel singled out as a target.\n“It’s not directed at any one company,” he said.\nEarlier Tuesday, militants staged coordinated attacks on three pipelines in the wetlands region, the most damaging assault on the country’s vital oil infrastructure in over a year, marking a heightening of hostilities.\nNigeria is Africa’s largest producer of crude oil, one of the top 10 exporters in the world and a leading supplier of oil for the United States.\nThe near-simultaneous blasts Tuesday followed the kidnappings of dozens of foreign oil workers last week, a sequence of events militants say is intended to shut down the continent’s largest crude exporter.\nAnalysts believe armed groups are heightening the tempo of attacks in a bid to demonstrate their relevance ahead of this month’s handover of power to a newly elected government. It was unclear if the Tuesday attacks were linked in the massive Niger Delta, roamed by various militant and criminal outfits.\nThe Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, one of the largest militant groups in Nigeria’s oil-rich region, claimed responsibility for the bombings and warned of more attacks ahead of a May 29 presidential inauguration meant to set up the country’s first-ever handover of civilian power. In an e-mail message on Wednesday, MEND said it did not kidnap the four Chevron workers on Tuesday but was encouraging all groups to launch attacks.\n“We have asked all groups to attack all facilities and oil workers,” it said.\nThe militants claimed to have taken out the entire network of pipes leading to an Agip-operated terminal, which can export 200,000 barrels a day. Nigeria has a total production capacity of 3 million barrels per day, but protests and militant attacks had reduced oil production by around 680,000 barrels before Tuesday’s bombings.\nIt was not immediately clear how much production had been cut by the attacks, since the Nigerian staff of Agip, a subsidiary of Italy’s oil giant Eni SpA, were on strike for a second day and company representatives in Italy said they were unable to comment.
(05/07/07 4:00am)
GREENSBURG, Kan. – Searchers went back to work after daylight Sunday, looking for anyone who might have been trapped since a tornado wiped most of this south-central Kansas town off the map.\n“At this point, it’s still a search and rescue mission,” Kansas state trooper Ronald Knoefel said. “We don’t want to give up hope.”\nAt least nine people were known dead from the Friday night storm, eight in the Greensburg area and one in a nearby county.\nIt was part of a weekend of violent weather, with other tornadoes dashing across the Plains states late Saturday. And on Sunday, the National Weather Service posted a new tornado warning for south-central Kansas, saying a funnel cloud was spotted near Corwin, 65 miles southeast of Greensburg.\nGreensburg remained off limits to its residents Sunday morning. Knoefel said a storm system that went through the area late Saturday blew debris from Friday night’s tornado back into the streets.\n“We’ll let people back in when it’s safe,” Knoefel said.\nPresident Bush declared parts of Kansas a disaster area, freeing up federal money to aid in recovery.\n“It’s going to take a long time for the community to recover,” Bush said Sunday, referring to Greensburg, after attending a morning service at a church in Washington. “And so we’ll help in any way we can.”\n“There’s a certain spirit in the Midwest of our country, a pioneer spirit that still exists, and I’m confident this community will be rebuilt,” Bush said.\nNational Guard engineers were being assigned to help with the search and assess the damage, said Maj. Gen. Tod Bunting, the state’s adjutant general.\n“Some of the rubble is just so deep,” Bunting said. “That’s really what our problem is.”\nAmong the few structures that survived was the Bar H Tavern. It was briefly converted into a morgue. Command operations for rescue efforts were moved into the town’s courthouse, which was damaged but also still standing. The massive concrete silos of a grain elevator still towered over what was left of the town.\nAll the churches were destroyed. Every business on the town’s main street was demolished. The town’s fire engines were crushed and other crumpled vehicles were thrown around. Tree trunks stood bare, stripped of most of their branches.\nThe fate of the town’s claim to fame, the world’s biggest hand dug well, was unknown because it was buried under a mountain of debris; the gift store at the well had disappeared.\nFor decades, meteorite hunters from around the world have been drawn here to hunt for meteorites. The town’s extensive meteorite collection, including one weighing 1,000 pounds , was one of the casualties of the storm.\n“It is very scary right now,” said Greensburg Administrator Steve Hewitt, who lost his home in the storm.\nHewitt estimated 95 percent of the town of 1,500 was destroyed and predicted rescue efforts could take days as survivors could be trapped in basements and under rubble.\n“This is one of the most devastating tornadoes we have had in Kansas,” said U.S. Rep. Jerry Moran.\nThe twister that struck Greensburg late Friday was part of a storm front that spawned tornadoes in parts of Illinois, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Nebraska, though damage was minimal, officials said.
(05/07/07 4:00am)
BAGHDAD – A car bomb ripped through a wholesale food market in western Baghdad on Sunday, flattening cars and shops and killing at least 30 people in the deadliest of a wave of attacks across Iraq that killed at least 50 people.\nThe attack came amid an 11-week-old crackdown by U.S.-led forces intended to bring stability to Baghdad.\nAs part of that crackdown, U.S. and Iraqi forces raided the Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City early Sunday, uncovering a weapons cache, a torture room and killing at least eight insurgents in a gunbattle, the military said.\nIn other violence, three U.S. troops were killed in separate attacks, the military said Sunday.\nTwo Marines were killed Saturday in fighting in Anbar province, a Sunni insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad, and a roadside bomb killed a soldier and wounded four others Friday in western Baghdad, the military said. The deaths raised the count of U.S. military members who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003 to at least 3,365, according to an Associated Press count.\nThe market blast Sunday erupted around noon in the mixed Sunni-Shiite Baiyaa neighborhood and devastated the area, reducing cars and trucks to their charred skeletons and ripping the roofs and exteriors from shops. In addition to the dead, dozens were injured.\nBlood pooled in the dirty streets. Hospital officials said two pickup trucks filled with body parts were brought to the morgue.\n“I was waiting near a shop to lift some boxes when I saw the owner of the shop fall down,” said Satar Hussein, 22, a worker in the market. “I helped him inside the shop, but he was already dead. The next thing I felt was pain in my left shoulder and some people rushing me to the hospital.”\nAli Hamid, 25, the owner of a food store, said he was selling boxes of Pepsi when he was hit with shrapnel in his hand.\n“I fainted, and the next thing I remember is some people putting me in a pickup with two dead bodies and rushing me to the hospital,” he said, condemning the attack as “a terrorist act aiming at creating more sectarian tension and strife.”\nNo one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack in Baiyaa, the scene of frequent sectarian violence including a bombing and mortar attack last week that killed seven people.\nIn an effort to strike at insurgents, U.S. troops led an early morning raid into Sadr City and were attacked by militants armed with rifles and rockets who were hiding in a building. Four other armed men attacked them from behind a car, and the troops again returned fire, destroying the car, the military said.\nThe troops had targeted four buildings in the area based on intelligence indicating the presence of an insurgent cell that smuggled weapons, including powerful roadside bombs known as “explosively formed penetrators,” from Iran, sent fighters to the neighboring country for training and was involved in a kidnapping network, the military said.\nThe target of the raid was not found, said Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, the chief U.S. military spokesman.
(05/07/07 4:00am)
LAKEHURST, N.J. – At 87, Robert Buchanan says he sometimes has trouble remembering what he did 10 minutes ago. But he can recall in vivid detail the day 70 years ago when he watched the luxurious airship Hindenburg erupt into a fireball.\nFlames roared across the surface of the mighty German dirigible only 100 or so feet above him, singeing his hair as he ran for his life.\n“It was a piff-puff, just like someone would leave the gas on and not get the flame to it,” said Buchanan, one of the last living members of the ground crew waiting to help the Hindenburg land.\nSeventy years ago Sunday, the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg ignited while easing toward its mooring mast at the U.S. Navy base in Lakehurst. The blaze killed 35 people on board and one person in the ground crew; 62 passengers and crew members survived.\n“I ran quite a distance because the heat; the flame kept shooting out ahead of me,” said Buchanan, of nearby Tuckerton. “And I really didn’t think I was going to make it, frankly.”\nThe huge airship, more than three times longer than a Boeing 747, was engulfed in flames and sank to the ground in less than a minute. Photographers and newsreel crews on hand for the landing captured the scene, and a shocked radio station broadcaster recorded the often replayed phrase, “Oh, the humanity and all the passengers!”\nThe 804-foot-long Hindenburg was cutting-edge technology, with its fabric-covered, metal frame held aloft by more than 7 million cubic feet of lighter-than-air hydrogen. Flammable hydrogen had to be used because of a U.S. embargo on nonflammable helium.\nIt was “the Concorde of its day back in 1936 and ‘37,” said Carl Jablonski, president of the Navy Lakehurst Historical Society. But after the fire, he said, it would be called the “Titanic of the sky.”\nThe historical society planned a private 70th anniversary memorial service Sunday at the crash site in Lakehurst, about 40 miles east of Philadelphia.\nThe Hindenburg was a swastika-emblazoned billboard for Nazi Germany, providing travel across the Atlantic in less than half the time of the standard four- to five-day ocean liner trip, said Rick Zitarosa, a vice president of the historical society. It carried more than 1,000 passengers on 10 successful round trips between Germany and Lakehurst in 1936, in addition to trips to Brazil the same year.\n“It was the most luxurious experience in the air, before and since,” Zitarosa said.\nHindenburg passengers ate gourmet meals off fine china and drank French and German wines.\nOn May 6, 1937, more than 1,000 sightseers had gathered at Lakehurst to see the Hindenburg arrive with 61 crew and 36 passengers after its first trans-Atlantic flight of the year.\nBuchanan, 17 at the time, was among more than 200 ground crew members waiting in rainy weather.\n“The blessing is that I wore a sweater and I was soaking wet, absolutely wringing wet. And that’s what I think saved us,” Buchanan said.\nAs the Hindenburg came in and started dropping mooring lines, Associated Press photographer Murray Becker raised his camera.\n“He was just going to make a nice picture of a dirigible coming in. And then it blew, right when he had his finger on the shutter,” recalled Marty Lederhandler, 89, an AP photographer of 66 years who was working in the news service’s New York darkroom when the Hindenburg crashed.
(05/04/07 4:00am)
LOS ANGELES – A day of mostly calm immigration rallies around the nation ended with a clash in Los Angeles, where officers fired rubber bullets and used batons against demonstrators. The police chief said officers may have used inappropriate force and promised a review.\nSeveral people, including about a dozen officers, were hurt during skirmishes at MacArthur Park west of downtown late Tuesday. About 10 people were taken to hospitals for treatment of injuries including cuts, authorities said. None of the injuries was believed to be serious.\nAt least one person was arrested, Officer Mike Lopez said late Tuesday.\nMay Day marches in Los Angeles brought out about 25,000 people, only a fraction of the 650,000 who rallied last year. Turnout nationwide was also light compared with a year ago.\nOrganizers said fear about raids and frustration that the marches haven’t pushed Congress to pass reform kept many people at home. They said those who did march felt a sense of urgency to keep immigration reform from being overshadowed by the 2008 presidential elections.\nThe clash at MacArthur Park started after 6 p.m. when police tried to disperse demonstrators who had moved off the sidewalk onto the street. Authorities said several people of the few thousand still at the rally threw rocks and bottles at officers, who fired rubber bullets and used batons to push the crowd back onto the sidewalk.\n“(Police) started moving in and forcing them out of the park, people with children, strollers,” said Angela Sambrano, director of the Central American Resource Center.\nMaria Elena Durazo, the executive secretary-treasurer at the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, said the trouble was instigated by “a group of anarchists, not associated with the rally.” She also criticized the police response, saying the rubber bullets were fired on a peaceful crowd with little warning.\nPolice Chief William Bratton said “certain elements of the crowd” started the disturbance, but the “vast, vast majority of the people who were here were behaving appropriately.”\nLate Tuesday he promised an investigation to “determine if the use of force was appropriate.”\nIn an interview early Wednesday with KNX radio, Bratton said “some of what I’ve seen as chief of the department does not look appropriate.”\nSpanish-language TV station Telemundo said one of its reporters and three camera operators had been injured and taken to the hospital by police. Fox 11 aired video of a station camerawoman apparently being struck by a baton-wielding police officer in riot gear.\nThe Radio and Television News Association of Southern California called for an investigation into “violent treatment of journalists.”\nMayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who was traveling in El Salvador during a trade mission, said the incident was “a most unfortunate end to a peaceful day.”\nThough fewer in number, protesters marched in cities from Miami to Detroit to San Antonio. Many of those waving flags, chanting, and carrying hand-painted signs said they were frustrated by what they see as little progress.\nIn Chicago, where more than 400,000 swarmed the streets last year, police put initial estimates at 150,000, by far the country’s largest turnout.
(05/04/07 4:00am)
WASHINGTON – Young adults beginning treatment with antidepressants should be warned about an increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior, federal health officials said Wednesday.\nThe Food and Drug Administration proposed labeling changes that would expand a warning now on all antidepressants including Prozac, made by Indianapolis’ Eli Lilly and Co. The current language applies only to children and adolescents. The expanded warning would apply to adults 18-24 during the first month or two of treatment with the drugs, the FDA said.\nThe proposed labeling changes also would note that studies have not shown this increased risk in adults older than 24, and that adults 65 and older taking antidepressants have a decreased risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior, it said.\nThe proposed expanded warnings emphasize that depression and certain other serious psychiatric disorders are themselves the most important causes of suicide.\n“Antidepressant medications benefit many patients, but it is important that doctors and patients are aware of the risks,” said Dr. Steven Galson, director of FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.\nThe proposed changes came with the endorsement of FDA expert advisers. Some experts have argued that the changes are overdue while others maintain they could keep drugs from those who need them.\nLast month, a comprehensive analysis of antidepressants for children and teenagers found that the benefits of treatment trump the small risk of increasing suicidal thoughts and behaviors in some patients. The Journal of the American Medical Association study also found that risk is lower than what the FDA identified in 2004, the year the agency warned the public about the risks of the drugs in children.\nThe proposed label changes would apply to all antidepressants, including Lexapro (Forest Laboratories Inc.), Paxil (GlaxoSmithKline PLC), Prozac (Eli Lilly and Co.) and Zoloft (Pfizer Inc.). Some of the drugs are available in generic form as well.\nMessages left with the companies were not immediately returned.\n___
(05/04/07 4:00am)
BANGKOK, Thailand – There’s no shortage of ideas for high-tech measures to combat global warming: develop clean biofuels made of corn or palm oil, build more nuclear power stations or bury harmful carbon emissions in underground vaults.\nBut those are the last solutions many environmentalists want to hear about.\nFor the green lobby pushing this week for forceful action at a U.N. conference on limiting the rise in global temperatures, such answers either cost too much, delay an inevitable weaning from fossil fuels or get in the way of the real solutions, such as renewable energy and greater efficiency.\n“There are a lot of technologies that are mentioned ... that are not exactly the most sustainable options,” said Catherine Pearse, international climate campaigner for the Friends of the Earth environmentalist group. “We may be replacing one existing problem with new ones.”\nFinding effective mitigation measures at the meeting in Bangkok is crucial to ensuring the world is able to cut greenhouse gas emissions and keep the atmosphere from warming more than 3.6 degrees.\nThe Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. network of 2,000 scientists that has produced two landmark reports on global warming this year, was working on a third study, this one on mitigation measures, for release on Friday.\nA draft of the report features a lengthy list of possible solutions: improved energy efficiency like hybrid vehicles, renewable sources such as solar and hydropower, cleaner-burning coal and biofuels, reforestation and even nuclear energy – an option the United States is pushing to give greater emphasis in the final document.\nBut not all the proposals are equal, environmentalists argue, saying some, such as nuclear power, are dangerous, while technologies such as renewable energy sources are not given proper emphasis.\nThe green lobby is a varied group, but the lion’s share of them insist concern over global warming should not lead to increased reliance on nuclear energy.\n“For us, nuclear power is definitely not a solution. It’s dangerous, it’s expensive,” said Shailendra Yashwant, a climate and energy campaign manager for Greenpeace. “The costs involved, the dangers involved, they want us to forget all of that.”\nEven less controversial energy sources have generated opposition among environmental groups.\nBiofuels are seen by many as an excellent option. The U.S. Congress, for example, is working on a proposal that would increase production of biofuels, predominantly ethanol, by seven times by 2022. Such fuels are made from corn, palm oil and other agricultural products.\nBut where some see a profitable way to wean the planet from gasoline, others see even more damage to the environment.\nThe rapidly increasing interest in biofuel production is already driving corn prices beyond the budgets of the world’s poor and leading to an acceleration of deforestation – one of the causes of global warming – as lands are cleared to grow oil palm in places like Indonesia, critics say.\n“You should not be cutting down forests to create fuels,” said Yashwant.\nCoal is increasingly taking center stage in the global warming debate, and for good reason: global hard coal production has increased nearly 80 percent from 1980 to 2005, the World Coal Institute says. China is by far the largest producer.\nCoal, however, is an extremely dirty fuel, and scientists are trying to develop technology to capture the carbon emissions before they are released into the atmosphere, and store them underground or under the ocean.\nBut critics argue the technology is as yet unproven, the storage vaults could leak and that money spent on developing such measures, which would prolong the world’s reliance on fossil fuels, would be better spent making solar and wind power viable.\nNot everyone in the green lobby is opposed to so-called carbon storage. Such a system could be a stopgap measure to cut emissions while the globe converts to non-carbon fuels over the next 50 year, said Stephan Singer of the World Wildlife Fund.\n“It’s like an emergency exit,” Singer said of the storage idea. “The world is running on coal ... If you look at the U.S. and China, you see it.”\nThe United States and others are arguing for a wide diversity of mitigation measures and are especially keen on steps that reap profits and high-tech spin-offs, such as biofuels, and avoid cutting into economic growth.\nStill, some say the world needs to decide which measures should be pursued, otherwise governments will take the cheapest, easiest paths rather than the ones that would cut carbon emissions the most.\n“This is a report that is moving away from the science and moving into the political,” said Pearse. “They’re looking for a silver bullet, and we don’t believe that such a thing exists, not for climate change.”
(05/04/07 4:00am)
THE HAGUE, Netherlands – The International Criminal Court issued its first arrest warrants Wednesday in the murderous Darfur conflict, seeking to try a government minister and a janjaweed militia leader on charges of mass slayings, rape and torture. Sudan immediately refused to arrest them.\nAfter studying prosecution evidence for two months, a three-judge panel decided to seek the arrests rather than to summon the suspects to surrender, saying the evidence supported 51 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.\nThe warrants against Sudan’s humanitarian affairs minister, Ahmad Muhammed Harun, and the janjaweed militia’s “colonel of colonels,” Ali Kushayb, could be a crucial step toward bringing atrocities in the Sudanese province to international justice.\nRichard Dicker of New York-based Human Rights Watch said it signaled “the days of absolute impunity ... for horrible crimes in Darfur are winding down.”\nSudan was defiant.\n“Our position is very, very clear: the ICC cannot assume any jurisdiction to judge any Sudanese outside the country,” Justice Minister Mohamed Ali al-Mardi told The Associated Press in the Sudanese capital. “Whatever the ICC does is totally unrealistic, illegal, and repugnant to any form of international law.”\nSudan was not party to the Rome convention that set up the court, he said, implying that it was not obliged to implement its warrants.\nAsked whether Sudan would continue its past sporadic cooperation with the court, al-Mardi answered, “What cooperation? It’s over.”\nThe court’s chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, said Sudan was legally bound to arrest the men.\nIn February, Moreno-Ocampo named Harun and Kushayb as suspects in the murder, rape, torture and persecution of civilians in Darfur.\nMoreno-Ocampo said the arrest warrants underscored the strength of his case, built during a 20-month investigation, even though the treacherous security situation prevented him from sending investigators into Darfur.\n“We transformed (witness) stories into evidence, and now the judges have confirmed the strength of that evidence,” he said.\nHarun is currently in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum.\nAl-Mardi has said a Sudanese investigation into Harun’s activities found “not a speck of evidence” against him. The Sudanese government says it has arrested Kushayb pending an internal investigation, but several witnesses told the AP that he was moving freely in Darfur under police protection.\nDicker, of Human Rights Watch, said the international community must press Sudan to arrest the men and send them to The Hague.\nFailure to do so “risks furthering Sudan’s isolation on the international stage,” he said, noting the 2005 U.N. Security Council resolution that authorized the Darfur investigation calls on Khartoum to cooperate fully with the court and the prosecutor.\nHowever, getting the suspects to the court, which has no police force of its own, “won’t be simple, won’t be quick,” he said.\nDicker called on China, as a permanent Security Council member, “to use its considerable influence to persuade the Sudanese leadership to cooperate.”\nAmnesty International joined in urging Sudan to arrest the suspects and suggested U.N. forces already in the country could detain them. The U.N. has a mission in southern Sudan following a peace treaty in an unrelated north-south war. But Sudan has so far resisted a large U.N. deployment in Darfur, where an undermanned, under-equipped African Union peacekeeping force is struggling.\nThe Darfur atrocities allegedly were committed in four towns and villages in West Darfur between August 2003 and March 2004.
(04/30/07 4:00am)
Some 700,000 Turks waving the red national flag flooded central Istanbul on Sunday to demand the resignation of the government, saying the Islamic roots of Turkey’s leaders threatened to destroy the country’s modern foundations.\nLike the protesters – who gathered for the second large anti-government demonstration in two weeks – Turkey’s powerful secular military has accused Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of tolerating radical Islamic circles.\n“They want to drag Turkey to the dark ages,” said 63-year-old Ahmet Yurdakul, a retired government employee who attended the protest.\nMore than 300,000 people took part in a similar rally in Ankara two weeks ago. Police, who said Sunday’s demonstrators numbered around 700,000, cordoned off the area and conducted body searches at several entry points.\nSunday’s demonstration was organized more than a week ago, but it came a day after Erdogan’s government rejected the military’s warning about the disputed presidential election and called it interference that is unacceptable in a democracy.\nThe ruling party candidate, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, failed to win a first-round victory Friday in a parliamentary presidential vote marked by tensions between secularists and the pro-Islamic government. Most opposition legislators boycotted the vote and challenged its validity in the Constitutional Court.\nThe military said Friday night that it was gravely concerned and indicated it was willing to become more openly involved in the process – a statement some interpreted as an ultimatum to the government to rein in officials who promote Islamic initiatives.\nSunday’s crowd chanted that the presidential palace was “closed to imams.”\nSome said Parliament Speaker Bulent Arinc was an enemy of the secular system, because he said the next president should be “pious.”\nIn the 1920s, with the Ottoman Empire in ruins, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk imposed Western laws, replaced Arabic script with the Latin alphabet, banned Islamic dress and granted women the right to vote.\nThe ruling party, however, has supported religious schools and tried to lift the ban on Islamic head scarves in public offices and schools. Secularists are also uncomfortable with the idea of Gul’s wife, Hayrunisa, being in the presidential palace because she wears the traditional Muslim head scarf.\n“We don’t want a covered woman in Ataturk’s presidential palace,” said Ayse Bari, a 67-year-old housewife. “We want civilized, modern people there.”\nThe military, one of the most respected institutions in Turkey, regards itself as the guardian of the secular system and has staged three coups since 1960.
(04/30/07 4:00am)
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told an Iranian envoy Sunday that the persistent attacks in Iraq are also a threat abroad, a pointed warning amid U.S. accusations that the government in Tehran is stoking the violence by supporting Shiite militias. Al-Maliki met with top Iranian envoy Ali Larijani in Baghdad as Iran agreed to attend a major U.S.-backed regional conference on Iraq set for this week in Egypt.
(04/30/07 4:00am)
BAGHDAD – U.S. forces detained 17 suspected insurgents in raids targeting al-Qaida in Iraq on Saturday, the military said, a day after the Pentagon announced the capture of one of the terror network’s most senior and experienced operatives.\nElsewhere, U.S. fighter jets destroyed a truck bomb discovered in Anbar province, and an American raid south of Baghdad netted insurgent weapons apparently imported from neighboring Iran, the military said Saturday.\nU.S. and Iraqi officials in Baghdad declined to comment about Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, 46, who was captured last fall on his way to Iraq, where he may have been sent by top terror leaders in Pakistan to take a senior position in al-Qaida in Iraq, officials said Friday in Washington.\nThe insurgent group has claimed responsibility for some of the deadliest attacks in Iraq, including the bombing last year of a revered Shiite mosque in Samarra, which touched off a cycle of sectarian killings.\nAfter being secretly held by the CIA for months, al-Iraqi – who was born in the northern city of Mosul and once served in Iraq’s military – has been shipped to the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, military prison for terror suspects, the Pentagon said.\nIt said the Iraqi militant is believed responsible for plotting cross-border attacks from Pakistan on U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and plotting to assassinate Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and U.N. officials.\nThe U.S. military in Baghdad said Saturday’s raids targeting suspected al-Qaida in Iraq insurgents netted four people in Mosul; six near Karmah, 50 miles west of Baghdad; two near the Syrian border; two in the Iraqi capital; and three near Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad. The statement linked some to al-Qaida in Iraq, including one who allegedly served as an intelligence officer.\n“We’re achieving a deliberate, systematic disruption in the al-Qaida in Iraq network,” Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a U.S. military spokesman, said in the statement.\nThe truck loaded with explosives was found early Friday near Fallujah, after Marines received information from a detained insurgent, the military said. After cordoning off and evacuating the area, the Marines called in U.S. fighter jets that destroyed the truck, causing an explosion large enough to damage some nearby buildings, the military said.\nIn Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad, U.S. and Iraqi forces detained eight suspected insurgents and confiscated three caches of weapons during a raid on an apartment complex on April 22, including mortars, rockets and ammunition. The weapons appeared to be new and “were stamped with recent dates and Iranian markings,” the military said.\nThe United States has frequently accused Iran of allowing insurgents to enter this country carrying weapons such as deadline roadside bombs used to attack U.S. and Iraqi convoys.\nAlso Saturday, the Danish military announced that it has sent an unspecified number of special forces to Iraq to reinforce its 460-strong contingent near the southern city of Basra.\nBut it stressed the troops were on a temporary mission and would not affect Denmark’s plans to withdraw its contingent from the area by August and replace it with a smaller helicopter unit.\nDanish and British forces in the area have faced stepped up attacks as Shiite militias have increasingly been competing for power since the British government announced in February that it would begin withdrawing troops in Iraq this summer.\n“I can confirm that the Iraqis, Danes and British are putting a great effort into finding the elements that are shooting at Danish and British soldiers day and night,” Defense Minister Soeren Gade told Danish broadcaster TV2.\nEleven British soldiers have been killed in the area this month, raising to 145 the number of British troops who have died in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. Six Danish soldiers have been killed in Iraq.
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BAGHDAD – Iran agreed Sunday to join the U.S. and other countries at a conference on Iraq this week, raising hopes the government in Tehran would help stabilize its violent neighbor and stem the flow of guns and bombs over the border.\nIn an apparent effort to drive home that point, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told an Iranian envoy that the persistent violence in Iraq – some of it carried out by the Shiite militias Iran is accused of arming – could spill over into neighboring countries, including those that are “supposed to support the Iraqi government.”\nIraq’s other neighbors as well as Egypt, Bahrain and representatives of the five permanent U.N. Security Council members have agreed to attend the meeting Thursday and Friday in the Egyptian resort of Sharm El-Sheik.\nThe conference will also include Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, raising the possibility of a rare direct encounter between high-level U.S. and Iranian officials.\nIn Washington, Rice would not rule out a meeting with the Iranians, whose delegation will be led by Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki.\n“But what do we need to do? It’s quite obvious. Stop the flow of arms to foreign fighters. Stop the flow of foreign fighters across the borders,” Rice told ABC’s “This Week.”\nHours earlier, al-Maliki’s office announced that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had telephoned to say a delegation from his country would attend the conference.\nIraqi leaders had been pressing for the Iranians to attend the Egypt meeting for weeks, but Iran refused to commit, in part because of fears that it would come under pressure from the U.S. and others about its nuclear program.\nIn addition, the Iranians have been lobbying for release of five Iranians held by the U.S. in Iraq since January. The U.S. has accused the five of links to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard unit that arms and trains Shiite extremists in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.\nThe decision to attend “came after consultations between Iraqi officials and the Iranian president,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said in an interview with Iranian state television.\nSenior Iranian envoy Ali Larijani flew to Baghdad on Sunday for talks with al-Maliki and other senior Iraqi officials – the highest-ranking Iranian official to visit Iraq since the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003.\nDuring their meeting, Larijani told al-Maliki that all countries that want stability in the region “have no choice but to support Iraq’s elected government.”\nAl-Maliki replied that terrorist attacks in Iraq would hurt all countries in the region, “including those that are supposed to support the Iraqi government,” according to a statement by the prime minister’s office. Although al-Maliki did not refer to specific terror groups, it appeared that his remarks were not limited to Sunni insurgents but included Shiite extremists, as well.\nOn Sunday, U.S. troops in Baghdad clashed with Shiite gunmen in north Baghdad, police said. There was no report on casualties but police said several gunmen were arrested.\nIn Tehran, the head of the Iranian parliamentary committee on national security and foreign policy, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, also said Iran’s failure to participate in Sharm el-Sheik would lay the Islamic republic open to criticism from the United States.\n“Iran should attend the conference, actively and powerfully,” Boroujerdi was quoted as saying by Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency.\nApart from security issues, the U.S. and Iraq hope the conference will produce an agreement to forgive Iraq’s huge debts and offer financial assistance in return for an Iraqi pledge to implement political and economic reforms.\nBut Iraq’s Arab neighbors are expected to demand that the Baghdad government, dominated by Shiites and Kurds, do more to reach out to its own disgruntled Sunni Arabs before they pledge substantial aid.\nOn Sunday, President Bush called Iraq’s Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, to discuss the importance of the reconciliation process and the need for all Iraqi parties to work together to stabilize the country, according to Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the White House National Security Council.\nThe Iraqis, for their part, were anxious for the Iranians to attend to give them leverage against their Sunni-dominated neighbors and to help press their case that Sunni extremists, including al-Qaida, pose the gravest threat to stability.\nUnderscoring the threat, Iraqi police reported at least 52 people were killed or found dead Sunday, a relatively low figure in recent weeks.\n– Associated Press writer Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report.
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BAGHDAD – A parked car exploded Saturday near one of Shiite Islam’s holiest shrines in the city of Karbala as people were headed to the area for evening prayers, killing 55 people and wounding dozens, officials said.\nThe explosion took place in a crowded commercial area near the Imam Hussein shrine in Karbala, 50 miles south of Baghdad, officials said. At least 55 people were killed and 70 wounded, said Salim Kazim, the head of the Karbala health department.\nA car bomb exploded in the same area on April 14, killing 47 and wounding 224.\nSaturday’s explosion occurred a few hundred meters from the Imam Abbas shrine, setting several cars on fire and causing chaos. The explosion took place as the streets were filled with people heading for evening prayers at the Abbas shrine and the adjacent Imam Hussein shrine, two of Iraq’s holiest Shiite sites.\nAn angry crowd gathered after the explosion, many of them searching frantically for missing relatives. Some threw stones at the police and at the office of the provincial governor, accusing them of failing to protect the people.\nPolice fired weapons in the air to disperse the crowds.\nIraqi television showed a plume of black smoke rising from the street as ambulances rushed to retrieve the wounded. One man carried the charred body of a small girl as he ran.\nQassim Hassan, 34, who was about 40 yards away from the explosion, said his brother and cousin were missing.\n“I saw dozens of people falling down on the ground and the same happened to me,” he said from his hospital bed. “I demand a trial for the people in charge of the security in Karbala. They failed to prevent the breaches. I regret that I voted for those traitors who only care about their posts, not the people who voted for them.”\nAli Mohammed, 31, who sells prayer beads, said he heard the blast and felt himself hurled into the air.\n“The next thing I knew I opened my eyes in the hospital with my legs and chest burned,” he said. “This is a disaster. What is the guilt of the children and women killed today by this terrorist attack?”\nOn Friday, a suicide truck bomber attacked the home of a city police chief in the Sunni insurgent stronghold of Anbar province, killing nine Iraqi security forces and six civilians, the U.S. military said Saturday. Police chief Hamid Ibrahim al-Numrawi and his family escaped injury after Iraqi forces opened fire on the truck before it reached the concrete barrier outside the home in Hit, 85 miles west of Baghdad.\n– Associated Press writer Louise Nordstrom in Stockholm, Sweden, contributed to this report.
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WASHINGTON – President Bush will not support a war spending bill that punishes the Iraqi government for failing to meet benchmarks for progress, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday.\nRice’s comments cast fresh doubt on a potential compromise between the Democratic-led Congress and the White House in getting money to U.S. troops.\nAlso, with a regional conference on Iraq set to begin Thursday in Egypt, Rice raised the possibility of a rare direct encounter between high-level U.S. and Iranian officials. Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki is expected to lead his country’s delegation.\n“I will not rule out that we may encounter one another,” Rice said. “But what do we need to do? It’s quite obvious. Stop the flow of arms to foreign fighters. Stop the flow of foreign fighters across the borders.”\nIran agreed Sunday to join the U.S. and other countries at the conference on Iraq this week, raising hopes the government in Tehran would help stabilize its violent neighbor and stem the flow of guns and bombs over the border.\nIn an apparent effort to drive home that point, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told an Iranian envoy that the persistent violence in Iraq – some of it carried out by the Shiite militias Iran is accused of arming – could spill over into neighboring countries, including those that are “supposed to support the Iraqi government.”\nIraq’s other neighbors as well as Egypt, Bahrain and representatives of the five permanent U.N. Security Council members have agreed to attend the meeting Thursday and Friday in the Egyptian resort of Sharm El-Sheik.\nIn Washington this week, Bush plans to veto a $124.2 billion war spending bill that includes a timeline for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq. In a second version, Democratic leaders may scrap the timetable but work with Republican lawmakers on benchmarks: ordering the Iraqi government to fulfill promises on allocating oil resources, amending its constitution and expanding democratic participation.\nRice said the president would not agree to a plan that penalizes Baghdad if the Iraqi government fall shorts. To do so, she said, would restrain the abilities of Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq.\n“That’s the problem with having so-called consequences,” Rice said.\n“To begin now to tie our own hands – and to say ‘We must do this if they don’t do that’ – doesn’t allow us the flexibility and creativity that we need to move this forward,” she said.\nBenchmarks have emerged as a possible rallying point as U.S. leaders seek to show they are holding the Iraq government accountable. But establishing goals without consequences may seem pointless to many Democratic lawmakers, who want an aggressive change in policy.\n“The benchmarks – the Iraqis agreed to it, the president agreed it,” said Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., who heads a House subcommittee that controls defense spending. “We’re saying to them, well, let’s put some teeth into the benchmarks.”\nIn their push to link U.S. money or troop support to Iraqi performance, however, Democrats must negotiate with Republicans. On their own, Democratic lawmakers do not have the votes to override Bush’s veto.\nRice said it makes sense to give Iraq’s leaders time to meet the goals they have set. She said Bush has made clear to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that people in the United States have limited patience.\nBush is expected the veto the existing war bill by Tuesday, then meet Wednesday with congressional leaders on the next steps.\nMeanwhile, Rice said will not appear in person before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to answer questions about the Bush administration’s prewar intelligence. Rice said she already has addressed claims that Iraq had sought uranium from the African nation of Niger.\nThe committee voted 21-10 last week to issue a subpoena to compel her testimony.\nAsked about the possibility of being held in contempt by the committee chairman, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., Rice said, “That’s the chairman’s prerogative. I respect the oversight – the oversight responsibilities of Congress _ but I frankly think this one has been looked at and looked at and looked at.”\nRice and Murtha appeared on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” Rice was also on “This Week” on ABC.
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MOSCOW – Former President Boris Yeltsin, who hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union by scrambling atop a tank to rally opposition against a hard-line coup and later pushed Russia to embrace democracy and a market economy, died Monday at age 76.\nKremlin spokesman Alexander Smirnov confirmed Yeltsin’s death, and Russian news agencies cited Sergei Mironov, head of the presidential administration’s medical center, as saying the former president died Monday of heart failure at the Central Clinical Hospital.\nThe first freely elected leader of Russia, Yeltsin was initially admired abroad for his defiance of the monolithic Communist system. But many Russians will remember him mostly for presiding over the steep decline of their nation.\nMikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, summed up the complexity of Yeltsin’s legacy in a condolence statement minutes after the death was announced. He referred to Yeltsin as one “on whose shoulders are both great deeds for the country and serious errors,” according to the news agency Interfax.\nU.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates called Yeltsin “an important figure in Russian history.”\n“No Americans, at least, will forget seeing him standing on the tank outside the White House (the Russian parliament building) resisting the coup attempt,” Gates said while on a visit to Moscow.\nYeltsin was a contradictory figure, rocketing to popularity in the Communist era on pledges to fight corruption – but proving unable, or unwilling, to prevent the looting of state industry as it moved into private hands during his nine years in power.\nYeltsin steadfastly defended freedom of the press, but was a master at manipulating the media. His hand-picked successor, Vladimir Putin, has proven far more popular even as he has tightened Kremlin control over both Russia’s industry and its press.\nYeltsin amassed as much power as possible in his office – then gave it all up in a dramatic New Year’s address at the end of 1999.
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BLACKSBURG, Va. – Virginia Tech students somberly returned to campus Monday, pausing for a moment of silence to remember the classmates murdered a week ago in a gunman’s rampage.\nStudents and faculty gathered about 7:10 a.m. near the dormitory where the first victims, Ryan Clark and Emily Hilscher, were killed. They also gathered on the main campus lawn and held several impromptu memorials as the smell of scented candles filled the morning air.\nIn front of the dorm, a small marching band from Alabama played “America the Beautiful” and carried a banner that read, “Alabama loves VT Hokies. Be strong, press on.”\nBy the time the moment concluded, more than 100 people had gathered to remember the dead. Afterward, a group of students and campus ministers brought 33 white prayer flags – one for each of the dead, including the gunman, Seung-Hui Cho – from the dorm to the school’s War Memorial Chapel. They placed the flags in front of the campus landmark and adorned them with pastel-colored ribbons.\n“You could choose to either be sad, or cheer up a little and continue the regular routine,” said student Juan Carlos Ugarte, 22. “Right now, I think all of us need to cheer up.”\nUgarte, a senior from Bolivia, wrote a message on a yellow ribbon for one of the victims, Reema Samaha. “God will forever be with you. I will always pray for you, and remember.”\nAt 9:45 a.m. – the time of the second shooting – the university planned a moment of silence, with a single bell tolling from the tower of the main administration building. A minute later, the bell will toll 32 times – once for each of Cho’s victims – as 32 white balloons are released from the field below.\nClasses were to resume Monday, one week after Cho killed himself after his murderous rampage.\nUniversity officials were not sure how many students planned to be back Monday. Virginia Tech is allowing students to drop classes without penalty or to accept their current grades if they want to spend the rest of the year at their parents’ homes grieving last week’s campus massacre.\nBut whatever decisions they make academically, many students say they will do their mourning on campus – and that they can’t imagine staying away now.\n“I want to go back to class just to be with the other students. If you just left without going back to classes, you would just go home and keep thinking about it,” said Ryanne Floyd, who returned to campus after spending most of last week with her family and avoiding news coverage of the tragedy. “At least here, being with other students, we can get some kind of closure.”
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BAGHDAD – The American ambassador said Monday the U.S. would “respect the wishes” of the Iraqi government after the prime minister ordered a halt to construction of a three-mile wall separating a Sunni enclave from surrounding Shiite areas in Baghdad.\nAny plan to build “gated communities” to protect Baghdad neighborhoods from sectarian attacks was in doubt after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said during a visit to Sunni-led Arab countries that he did not want the 12-foot-high wall in Azamiyah to be seen as dividing the capital’s sects.\nHowever, confusion persisted about whether the plan would continue in some form: The chief Iraqi military spokesman said Monday the prime minister was responding to exaggerated reports about the barrier.\n“We will continue to construct the security barriers in the Azamiyah neighborhood. This is a technical issue,” Brig. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi said. “Setting up barriers is one thing and building barriers is another. These are moveable barriers that can be removed.”\nAl-Moussawi noted similar walls were in place elsewhere in the capital – including in other residential neighborhoods – and criticized the media for focusing on Azamiyah.\n“It’s exaggerated by the media. We expected this reaction by some weak-minded people,” he said.\nBut hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Azamiyah to oppose what they called “a big prison.”\n“The main aim of these barriers is to protect civilians and to guarantee that security forces are in control and prevent terrorists from moving between areas,” al-Moussawi said.\nThe U.S. military announced last week that it was building a three-mile long concrete wall in Azamiyah, a Sunni stronghold whose residents have often been the victims of retaliatory mortar attacks by Shiite militants following bombings usually blamed on Sunni insurgents.\nBut al-Maliki ordered construction halted on Sunday and U.S. officials said that the plans could change.\n“Obviously we will respect the wishes of the government and the prime minister,” U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker said Monday.\nHe said the barrier was aimed at protecting Azamiyah, not segregating it. Sunni leaders and residents of the neighborhood, however, complain that it is a form of discrimination that would isolate the community.\n“There are other methods to protect neighborhoods,” al-Maliki said Sunday in his first public comments on the issue, “but I should point out that the goal was not to separate, but to protect.”\n“This wall reminds us of other walls that we reject, so I’ve ordered it to stop and to find other means of protection for the neighborhoods,” he added during a televised live news conference during a state visit to Cairo, Egypt.
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The trust funds for Social Security and Medicare will last a year longer than previously estimated, trustees said Monday. That means 2041 for the Social Security trust fund to be exhausted and 2019 for Medicare. In their annual report on the financial health of the government’s two biggest benefit programs, the trustees said that slight reductions in projected benefits and slightly higher tax collections had extended the dates that the trust funds are projected to be depleted.
