Iran Says It Has 100 Vessels For Each US Warship
The former naval chief for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said the country has set aside 100 military vessels to confront each warship from the U.S. or any other foreign power that might pose a threat, an Iranian newspaper reported Saturday.
Such a military confrontation in the vital oil lanes of the Persian Gulf would be of major global concern. The warning builds on earlier threats by Iran to seal off the Gulf’s strategic Strait of Hormuz — through which 40 percent of the world’s oil passes — in response to any military attack.
”We have set aside 100 military vessels for each (U.S.) warship to attack at the time of necessity,” Gen. Morteza Saffari was quoted as saying by the conservative weekly Panjereh. Read more
Pigeons Being Captured In Abu Dhabi, Residents Say
In a quiet Abu Dhabi neighbourhood around Khalifa Street, pigeons are lured by feed scattered on the pavement. In the hot afternoon sun, the food is a welcome sight for them and they fly down in droves. But they are unaware of the four men lurking around, waiting to ensnare them in nets and take them away in cages.
These men allegedly lay a net for the birds, and wait for a number of them to collect in the area. They then capture these birds with the net, put them in cages after freeing them and drive away in a white van.
Madhu Malini, 30, a resident in the area, said she had seen this happening twice, and was concerned about what was happening to the birds.
“I love animals and I was upset at the birds being taken away in this manner. These men hurt the pigeons, especially as many of their bodies get ensnared in the net and their wings break. They should be stopped, especially if they are not licensed by the government,” Malini said. Read more
US To Pay Taliban To Switch Sides
The US military in Afghanistan is to be allowed to pay Taliban fighters who renounce violence against the government in Kabul. The move is included in a defence bill which President Obama is set to sign.
Such payments have already been widely used by US commanders in Iraq, but it is the first time the system is being formally adopted in Afghanistan.
Early on Wednesday, Afghan troops were engaged in a shootout with suspected militants at a house in Kabul.
A day earlier eight US soldiers were killed in bomb attacks in southern Afghanistan.The deaths make October the deadliest month for American forces in the eight-year war in Afghanistan.
President Obama is yet to decide whether to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan. Mr Obama has said he will not risk their lives “unless it is absolutely necessary”.
The latest attacks come amid heightened tension in Afghanistan in the run-up to the second round of a presidential election marred by widespread fraud in favour of incumbent President Hamid Karzai.
‘Re-integration’ programmes
The Commander’s Emergency Response Programme, or Cerp, was set up to give the US military the means to clear roads, dig wells and provide other urgent humanitarian assistance to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, the BBC’s Richard Lister in Washington says.
But in Iraq, the money can also be given to insurgents provided they switch sides. Backers of the Cerp scheme say it enabled some 90,000 formerly hostile Iraqis to form local militias and protect their towns from militants, our correspondent says. He adds that now the same authority is being given to US commanders in Afghanistan.
A clause in the annual defence appropriations bill says they can use the money to support the “re-integration into Afghan society” of those who have renounced violence against the Afghan government.
Although $1.3bn (£691m) has been authorised for the fund as a whole, no specific sum has been allocated to the re-integration programmes, our correspondent says.
The Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, Senator Carl Levin, has said he envisages the money being used to pay former Taliban fighters to protect their communities. BBC News
Humble Beginning
Barack Hussein Obama was born August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was born of Luo ethnicity in Nyanza Province, Kenya. He grew up herding goats with his own father, who was a domestic servant to the British. Although reared among Muslims, Obama, Sr., became an atheist at some point. Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, grew up in Wichita, Kansas. Dunham’s mother went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, they studied on the G.I. Bill, bought a house through the Federal Housing Program, and moved to Hawaii. Obama’s parents were separated when he was 2 years old and later on divorced.
Obama described how he struggled to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage. He saw his biological father (who died in a 1982 car accident) only once (in 1971) after his parents divorced. In his early teens, he was enrolled in the fifth grade at the esteemed Punahou Academy and graduating with honors in 1979. He was only one of three black students at the school. There, he worked as a community organizer with low-income residents in Chicago’s Roseland community and the Altgeld Gardens public housing development on the city’s South Side. During this time, Obama said he “was not raised in a religious household”. Obama entered Harvard Law School in 1988.
In February 1990, he was elected the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. Barack Obama graduated magna cum laude in 1991. On June 3, 2008 he won the Montana primary election giving him enough delegates to become the first Black American presidential candidate to win a major political party’s presumptive nomination for the office of President of the United States, which later on became the first African-American president in America. President Obama also became the first president to light a ceremonial Diya at the White House to mark the observance of Diwali, the “festival of lights.” And in that occasion he sign a new initiative aimed at expanding opportunities for Americans of Asian and Pacific Islander heritage. Gays and lesbians which are still struggling for acceptance and equal rights in the United States, and President Obama has told them “I’m here with you in that fight”.
Moreover, among of Obama’s policies were laid out during his weekly radio and Internet address, Mr Obama said too many small business owners remain unable to get credit despite administration steps to jump-start lending, which was virtually frozen when the financial crisis took hold last year. “These are the very taxpayers who stood by America’s banks in a crisis, and now it’s time for our banks to stand by creditworthy small businesses and make the loans they need to open their doors, grow their operations and create new jobs,” Mr Obama said. Further he stressed that “It’s time for those banks to fulfill their responsibility to help ensure a wider recovery, a more secure system and more broadly shared prosperity.”
Furthermore, President Barack Obama says overhauling the health care system, while helping millions of people, also will test whether policy makers can “serve the national interest despite the unrelenting efforts of the special interests.” The administration is building momentum for the president’s overhaul effort after the Senate Finance Committee voted 14-9 this week for a bill that would extend health care coverage to millions of people. One Republican, Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, supported the bill, and the measure faces considerable opposition from the health care industry, labor unions and large business organizations.
To date, there is no doubt that President Barack Obama deserves the Nobel peace award. His prominence as a world leader, with a distinct and clearly defined posture toward attaining some semblance of peace on this earth, is being recognized by the Nobel Committee. His efforts have been sincere and gallant, against fiercely formidable odds. Receiving a Nobel Peace award is not meant to be an indication that the recipient has attained peace throughout the world, but in recognition of the potential impact of that individual’s effort towards that end. To keep you abreast of recent developments, just visits the above mentioned for more details and information’s.
Illegal Attack By Georgia Launched War With Russia
An illegal military attack by Georgia on its breakaway region of South Ossetia triggered last year’s war with Russia, an international report said yesterday.
Russia was also guilty of breaking international law by invading deep into Georgian territory in response to the attack, the European Union-backed investigation into the causes of the five-day conflict concluded.
The report deals a severe blow to Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili, who has repeatedly argued that he ordered troops into South Ossetia as a defensive action in response to a Russian invasion. Moscow insisted that it sent forces to South Ossetia to repel a Georgian attack.
The nine-month inquiry led by a Swiss diplomat, Heidi Tagliavini, said that the war was triggered by “a large-scale Georgian military operation” against the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali late on August 7, adding: “Operations started with a massive Georgian artillery attack.”
Ms Tagliavini said in a written statement: “None of the explanations given by the Georgian authorities in order to provide some form of legal justification for the attack lend it a valid explanation.”
Her inquiry rejected as not “sufficiently substantiated” Georgian claims of a Russian incursion into South Ossetia prior to the outbreak of the war. But it noted “an influx of volunteers or mercenaries” into South Ossetia from Russia and said that some Russian troops were in the war zone earlier than the Kremlin had claimed.
The Russian air force also bombed targets in Georgia hours before Moscow said that it had begun military operations at 2.30pm on August 8.
The inquiry concluded: “There is the question of whether the use of force by Georgia in South Ossetia, beginning with the shelling of Tskhinvali during the night of 7/8 August 2008, was justifiable under international law. It was not.
“It follows from the illegal character of the Georgian military assault that South Ossetian defensive action in response did conform to international law in terms of legitimate self-defence.”
The report said that there was also no justification for Georgian attacks on Russian peacekeeping forces based in South Ossetia. It went on: “There was no ongoing armed attack by Russia before the start of the Georgian operation. Georgian claims of a large-scale presence of Russian armed forces in South Ossetia prior to the Georgian offensive on 7/8 August could not be substantiated. It could also not be verified that Russia was on the verge of such a major attack.
“Consequently, the use of force by Georgia against Russian peacekeeping forces in Tskhinvali in the night of 7/8 August 2008 was contrary to international law.”
The inquiry condemned Russia’s response to the fighting, however, as going “far beyond the reasonable limits of defence”. It said that the Kremlin broke international law in justifying its actions and in recognising South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Georgia’s other breakaway region, as independent states after the war.
Initial Russian defensive actions in South Ossetia were legal, but subsequent military occupation of large parts of Georgia – tanks came within 25 miles of the capital Tbilisi – was not “even remotely commensurate” with the threat posed to its peacekeepers.
Russia’s invasion broke international law and continued destruction of Georgian territory after a ceasefire negotiated by President Sarkozy of France “was not justifiable by any means”. The report added: “In a matter of a very few days, the pattern of legitimate and illegitimate military action had thus turned around between the two main actors Georgia and Russia… It must be concluded that the Russian military action outside South Ossetia was essentially conducted in violation of international law.”
The report rejected the Kremlin’s assertion that it had acted in defence of Russian citizens in South Ossetia, most of whom hold Russian passports. It said that people in South Ossetia and Abkhazia remained Georgian citizens under international law and it condemned Russia’s “passportisation” policy as “an open challenge to Georgian sovereignty and an interference in the internal affairs of Georgia”.
The inquiry described Russian claims that Georgia was committing “genocide” against South Ossetians as “neither founded in law nor substantiated by factual evidence”. It noted that Russia reduced to 162 its initial claim that 2,000 South Ossetians had been killed by Georgian troops.
It accused Georgian and Russian soldiers as well as South Ossetian militias of committing atrocities that amounted to “war crimes”. But the similarity of weapons used by all sides made it difficult to attribute responsibility for particular acts.
The report condemned Russia for failing to control South Ossetian irregulars who it said were guilty of ethnic cleansing of Georgian villagers from their homes in the conflict zone. Georgia’s use of Grad missiles and cluster munitions in its night attack on Tskhinvali amounted to “indiscriminate attacks” on the civilian population.
While Georgia’s attack on Tskhinvali marked the start of the war, the inquiry said that it “was only the culminating point of a long period of increasing tensions, provocations and incidents” involving Russia and separatist leaders in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Assessments of the war had to consider “a great power’s coercive politics and diplomacy against a small and insubordinate neighbour, together with the small neighbour’s penchant for overplaying its hand and acting in the heat of the moment without careful consideration of the final outcome”.
The Kremlin welcomed the report. Vladimir Chizhov, Russia’s ambassador to the EU, said: “It confirms what we’ve know all along – who started the war and who bears responsibility.”
Georgia insisted that the inquiry proved that Moscow had been plotting a war for a long time. Temuri Yakobashvili, Georgia’s Minister for Reintegration, said: “The report proves that Russia was all the time preparing this war and August 7 and 8 were the culmination. The report is not about who started the war; the war did not start on August 7 or 8.”
The inquiry said that Georgia reported 228 civilians killed and 184 soldiers dead or missing in the war. Russia said that 64 of its troops died and 162 South Ossetian civilians.
More than 100,000 people became refugees during the conflict. Several thousand South Ossetians remain homeless and some 25,000 Georgians have been unable to return to South Ossetia. By Tony Halpin, The Times.