Yahoo News
DOHA (AFP) – Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani warned that Iran might launch a preemptive strike against US forces in the region to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities.

“We will not sit (with arms folded) to wait for what others will do to us. Some military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly,” Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera TV when asked if Iran would respond to an American attack on its nuclear facilities.

“America is not the only one present in the region. We are also present, from Khost to Kandahar in Afghanistan; we are present in the Gulf and we can be present in Iraq. full article

US: Iran Says Can Have Nuclear Weapons in 3 Years New York Times

Reuters
FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters) – U.S. warplanes bombed targets in the restive Sunni Muslim town of Falluja west of Baghdad, witnesses said.

The raid on Falluja coincided with heavy aerial and ground U.S. bombardment in the Shi’ite holy city of Najaf.

U.S. warplanes have bombed Falluja almost daily over the past week. The city of 200,000 people is a hotbed of anti-U.S. insurgents.
Sunni insurgents. Shi’a insurgents. What happens when they band together?

AP
WASHINGTON (AP) – The Senate Judiciary Committee heard this morning from one of its own about some of the problems with airline “no fly” watch lists. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., says he had a close encounter with the lists when trying to take the U.S. Airways shuttle out of Washington to Boston. The ticket agent wouldn’t let him on the plane. His name was on the list in error.

After a flurry of phone calls, Kennedy was able to fly home, but then the same thing happened coming back to Washington.

Kennedy says it took three calls to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge to get his name stricken from the list. The process took several weeks, in all.

commondreams.com
LA HIGUERA, Bolivia – Revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, an atheist, has been reborn a saint in the desolate Bolivian village where he was captured and executed nearly 37 years ago. Like many a saint, he’s also a tourist draw.

Today his handsome mug appears on the walls of homes and in market stalls in remote La Higuera, where he died, and in Vallegrande, where he was secretly buried. In many homes, his face competes for wall space with Jesus, the Virgin Mary and a host of Roman Catholic saints.

“They say he brings miracles,” said Susana Osinaga, 70, who was a young nurse on Oct. 9, 1967, when she washed the blood off Guevara’s corpse in Vallegrande’s small hospital.

A grocery owner now, Osinaga frowns on curious tourists and journalists who seek her out. But like other locals she keeps a photo of Guevara, known throughout Latin America by his nickname, Che, on her grocery’s wall.

Osinaga may soon get more unwanted visits. The international relief agency CARE is administering $300,000 in British government and private aid to promote what CARE calls Che Tourism. The project includes hostels for backpackers, road construction and infrastructure improvements to promote tourism in rural southeastern Bolivia. The hope is that Che will mean money. full article

commondreams.org
The Alternative to Armed Intervention in Darfur is not Passive Resignation, but Support for an African Union-led Solution

by Peter Hallward in the Guardian

What is exceptional about the violence of the government-backed Janjaweed militia in Darfur, is less its scale than the intense – if belated – international attention it has received.

To oppose direct western intervention in Sudan is not to downplay Khartoum’s crimes during this latest twist in the catastrophic war that has cost perhaps two million lives since 1983. Over the last 20 years, in order to shore up their exclusive and authoritarian rule, Sudan’s succession of military rulers have done everything possible to sustain an often imaginary distinction between “Arabs” and “Africans”, pitting Muslims against Christians and herders against farmers .

Before we jump to the conclusion that benevolent invasion, however, is the natural consequence of our new-found humanitarian duties, we should remember that this won’t be the first time that either Britain or the US has intervened in Sudan. An earlier moral crusade, the “war against slavery”, provided much of the ostensible justification for British colonization of the region at the end of the 19th century. Britain’s disastrous southern policy, inaugurated in 1929, made permanent the long-standing division between a relatively prosperous (mainly Muslim) northern territory and a much poorer (mainly animist or Christian) southern territory. The war that began between these two territories even before the British abandoned the colony in 1956 entered its most violent phase shortly after the Americans began backing, in the late 70s, the flagging regime of Sudan’s increasingly reactionary General Gaafar Nimeiri.

The resulting chaos created the conditions for the Taliban-style reaction whose effects continue to shape the situation even today. full article

Guardian UK
Brian A Smith didn’t know the two women who were shoplifting. They were caught on security cameras stealing sheets at the Los Cerritos mall in Los Angeles and received a two-year sentence.

But Smith was seen standing near the shoplifters as they committed their crime. Despite having no stolen goods, he was convicted of aiding and abetting them.

Under California’s three strikes law, which marked its 10th anniversary on Sunday, the 30 year old received a 25-year-to-life sentence.

Smith’s crime was to have two previous convictions, one 11 years earlier and the second six years before the shoplifting incident. Those convictions, for purse snatching in 1983 and burglary in 1988, earned him the dubious honour of being one of the first criminals to be sentenced under the California law.

By September last year, California, the US state with the highest prison population, had 7,234 prisoners held under the three strikes rule.

Sitting in her Los Angeles home, Smith’s aunt, Dorothy Erskine, a retired schoolteacher, recalls the family’s reaction to his sentence. “We were, like, is this really happening? I’m sure he was in shock when he was sentenced and thought he could get it reduced on appeal.

“But he was advised not to appeal. And we were told that unless you have about $20,000 (£10,800) or $30,000 to pay for the right type of a lawyer, your chances are very, very slim. I did not have $30,000.” full article

Guardian UK
A jury acquitted the Haitian former paramilitary leader Louis-Jodel Chamblain of murder yesterday after a 14-hour trial that caused outrage among human rights groups, who have attacked the country’s US-backed government.

Mr Chamblain and his co-defendant, Jackson Joanis, were cleared of the murder of Antoine Izmery, a former justice minister and financier of the former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, according to Stanley Gaston, a defence lawyer.

Viles Alizar of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights, said eight witnesses had been called by the prosecution but only one had appeared, saying he knew nothing about the case. For the defence, two defence witnesses had been present, but they provided few details.

Jury selection began on Monday morning and journalists were told the day would likely be devoted to it.

Mr Chamblain was remanded to face another trial over the killings of several people in a pro-Aristide stronghold in northern Gonaives in 1994. Mr Joanis, a former police chief in Port-au-Prince, was also held to face murder charges over the killing of the Rev Jean-Marie Vincent, a pro-Aristide priest who was shot leaving his office in 1994. It could be another month before the pair’s next trial, Mr Gaston said.

Mr Chamblain was a co-leader of the paramilitary Front for the Advancement and Progress of the Haitian People, a group that was blamed for some 3,000 killings from 1991 to 1994, during the regime that followed Mr Aristide’s first ousting in 1991.

When US troops came to the country in 1994 to restore Mr Aristide, Mr Chamblain fled to neighbouring Dominican Republic. In 1995 he was convicted in absentia and given two life sentences for his alleged role in the 1993 assassination of Izmery and the 1994 killings of scores of Aristide supporters.

Haitian law provides that people judged in their absence have a right to a new trial if they return.

Guardian UK
WASHINGTON (AP) – The FBI anticipates violent protests at the upcoming Republican National Convention in New York but does not have enough evidence to move against any group or person, the bureau’s top terrorism official said Wednesday.

New York officials have said they expect hundreds of thousands of people to stage demonstrations around the convention, which begins Aug. 30.

Concern over the convention comes amid heightened security across New York over fears that foreign terrorists might strike the city again. New York remains on a “high” terrorism alert level, while most of the country is on elevated alert.

Federal investigators have infiltrated some organizations and are monitoring plans for protests being published on the Internet. The FBI also interviewed some protesters around the country before last month’s Democratic convention in Boston and in anticipation of the GOP convention.

“We don’t have any specific plot where we have all the variables we need to go out and take pre-emptive and judicial action,” said Gary Bald, assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division. full article

It used to be that when the FBI infiltrated organizations, they tried to keep it secret. But why bother? The vast majority seems to have no problem with the hijacking of our Constitutional rights.

Independent UK
The spectre of a new ethnic conflagration hung over central Africa last night as Burundi and Rwanda threatened to cross into neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo to hunt down the killers of 160 Tutsis.

Women, children and babies were among the Congolese Tutsis who were massacred in a UN refugee camp inside Burundi close to the Congo border last Friday. The victims were burnt, hacked and shot to death in one of the worst massacres in the troubled Great Lakes region in years.

The attack was claimed by Burundian Hutu extremists of the rebel National Liberation Forces (FNL), but the Burundian army chief yesterday accused Congolese soldiers of taking part. Remnants of the Rwandan Hutu extremist militias responsible for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda are also still based in Congo. full article

Guardian UK
Insurers worldwide yesterday began counting the cost of the damage wreaked by Hurricane Charley, but shares in Lloyd’s of London companies were helped by hopes of higher premiums next year. full article

Well then, the more deadly hurricanes the better.