PARIS (Reuters) – Yasser Arafat’s nephew said on Monday that medical records released by France showed no trace of known poisons in the late Palestinian leader but the cause of death remained a mystery.

Nasser al-Kidwa, Palestinian envoy to the United Nations, said the 558-page medical report gave “no clear diagnosis” of what caused his uncle’s death in a French military hospital on Nov. 11 and he refused to rule out foul play.

The question of what killed Arafat at age 75 is likely to keep the rumor mill churning and to fuel conspiracy theories for years to come. Strict privacy laws prevent French doctors from releasing details.

“Toxicology tests were made, and no poison known to the doctors was found,” al-Kidwa said, basing his comments at a news conference on the medical dossier released to him by the French military.

“Because of the lack of clear diagnosis, a question mark remains there (about why Arafat died). Personally I believe it will remain there for some time to come,” he added.
Full Article: nytimes.com

HOUSTON (AP) – A private jet that was en route to Houston to pick up former President Bush clipped a light pole and crashed Monday as it approached Hobby Airport in thick fog, killing all three people aboard.

The Gulfstream G-1159A jet, coming into Houston, went down about 6:15 a.m. in an undeveloped area 1 miles south of the airport, officials said. The former president had been scheduled to travel to Ecuador for a conference.

“I was deeply saddened to learn of the plane crash this morning,” Bush said through spokesman Tom Frechette. “I’d flown with this group before and know them well. I join in sending heartfelt condolences to each and every member of their families.”

…Eduardo Maruri, president of the Guayaquil Chamber of Commerce, said that Bush suspended his visit until next month.
Full Article:guardian.co.uk

Good decision, I’d say.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) – Malnutrition among Iraq’s youngest children has nearly doubled since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq despite U.N. efforts to deliver food to the war-ravaged country, a Norwegian research group said Monday.

Since the March 2003 invasion, malnutrition among children between the ages of 6 months and 5 years old has grown from 4 percent to 7.7 percent, said Jon Pedersen, deputy managing director of the Oslo, Norway-based Fafo Institute for Applied Social Science, which conducted the survey.

The U.N. Development Program and Iraq’s Central office for Statistics and Information Technology also took part in the survey.

“It’s in the level of some African countries,” Pedersen told The Associated Press. “Of course, no child should be malnourished, but when we’re getting to levels of 7 to 8 percent, it’s a clear sign of concern.”

Figures from different countries are hard to compare, said Caroline Hurford, a U.N. World Food Program spokeswoman in Rome, noting that surveys may be out of date or apply different sampling methods.

A UNICEF survey of Middle Eastern and North African states in 2003 found 7 million children suffering from malnutrition.

Before the invasion, the level of malnutrition among children in Iraq was about 4 percent.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

WINDHOEK (Reuters) – A former comrade-in-arms hand-picked by former guerrilla leader Sam Nujoma won election on Sunday to succeed him as Namibian president.

Hifikepunye Pohamba, who won 76.4 percent of the vote, is widely expected to remain in the shadow of Nujoma, who will retain the leadership of his SWAPO party after stepping down as president in March.

Pohamba, 69, who spent three decades in exile as Nujoma’s confidant before Namibia won independence from apartheid South Africa in 1990, has made redistribution of land from white farmers to blacks a key plank of his campaign.

While he promises to cut poverty, critics say the election of another liberation veteran will do little to show that SWAPO is moving on from that struggle, or change the picture for foreigners who have been slow to invest in Namibia.

SWAPO, which turned from guerrilla movement to political party after independence, also won 55 out of 72 parliamentary seats, according to official results released on Sunday. The election ended on Tuesday.

“I’m gratified and humbled by the five-year mandate entrusted to me to continue the social-economic struggle for our country and its people,” the Soviet-educated Pohamba said at an official ceremony announcing the result.

Pohamba, who lacks Nujoma’s charisma, is not believed to have sought the presidency until Nujoma tapped him to become vice president of SWAPO in 2002.

He said he wanted to encourage foreign investment — very limited before 1990, when South Africa was subject to sanctions because of apartheid, and now concentrated in large mines.

He has served as lands minister, leading a campaign to distribute land from minority whites to poor blacks, and said this would be among his top priorities as president, along with crime, corruption and the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Land reform is a hot topic across southern Africa, where centuries of white domination have left much of the productive land in the hands of white minorities.
Full Article: nytimes.com

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (Reuters) – Used to hearing U.S. calls for support against Middle Eastern terrorism, Latin American leaders on Saturday added their own warning by condemning lesser-known terrorist acts against anti-American governments in the region.

Cuba and Venezuela won the backing of their neighbors, many of whom have swung to the left in recent years, to censure terrorism in all its forms, not just attacks aimed at the United States.

It was a rare diplomatic victory for Cuba, which persuaded an Ibero-American summit in Costa Rica to denounce the pardon of four dissidents who tried to assassinate President Fidel Castro in 2000.

Panama’s outgoing President Mireya Moscoso released the four, jailed for their involvement in a failed bomb plot at a summit in Panama, just before leaving office in August.

Havana broke diplomatic relations with Panama in anger at the pardon and accused the United States of double standards in its war against terror for allowing three of the plotters to fly to Miami.

“We observe with deep concern the recent freeing of four known terrorists of Cuban origin,” the leaders from Latin American countries plus Spain and Portugal said in a statement.

Panama’s new President Martin Torrijos has criticized the pardon, and Cuba and Panama restored consular relations at the summit on Friday, in a step toward renewing full ties.

Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque represented his country at the gathering instead of Castro, who has rarely traveled to summits in recent years.

VENEZUELA CAR BOMB

The leaders also condemned Thursday’s killing of Venezuelan prosecutor Danilo Anderson, who was probing a 2002 coup against President Hugo Chavez.

Anderson was killed by a car bomb, and Venezuela blamed radical opponents it said were training in the United States.

“The heads of state and government expressed a radical condemnation of the terrorist attack suffered by the special prosecutor in Venezuela,” Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero told journalists.
Full Article: nytimes.com

CARACAS, Venezuela, Nov. 19 – A day after a prosecutor investigating adversaries of President Hugo Chávez was killed in a car bombing, leaders of the country’s opposition movement on Friday condemned the attack even as it raised the specter of violence by militant elements among the president’s foes.

The prosecutor, Danilo Anderson, 38, was killed Thursday at about 11 p.m. when a remote-controlled bomb hidden in his jeep was detonated as he drove in a middle-class Caracas neighborhood, the police said.

Andrés Izarra, the government’s communications and information minister, called the killing a “political assassination” and said the motive was to sideline Mr. Anderson’s investigations of 400 opposition figures accused of taking part in a coup that briefly toppled Mr. Chávez in 2002.

“This attack against Danilo represents the barbarity of those who want to spread fear in Venezuela,” Mr. Izarra told reporters on Friday. “We will not let them frighten us, and we will not let them overturn the climate of peace that we now have in Venezuela.”

The bombing stunned the government, prompting top officials like Vice President José Vicente Rangel and Interior and Justice Minister Jesse Chacon to rush to the scene of the blast.

Some officials in the government and allies of the president suggested that the country’s demoralized opposition had begun resorting to violence after failing to oust Mr. Chávez in a recall referendum in August.

“We cannot allow minority groups that do not accept the legitimacy of the government to impose a violent agenda on the citizens of this country,” Juan Barreto, the mayor of Caracas and a close ally of the Mr. Chávez, told reporters.

Still, the streets of Caracas were calm on Friday, and the usually supercharged rhetoric of both the opposition and the government was toned down. Several officials called for composure and patience as the government began its investigation.

Leaders in the country’s wide but disjointed opposition movement repudiated the attack. They also denied that anyone in their ranks could have been involved and called on the government to refrain from seeking scapegoats among its adversaries.

“This is a criminal and terrorist act with no justification at all, and the government must investigate the incident thoroughly to find the responsible parties,” Andrés Velásquez, an antigovernment legislator, said Friday in an interview. “The worst thing that can happen is for the government to seek political gain.”
Full Article: nytimes.com

Please.

NAIROBI, Kenya, Nov. 19 – The newly installed president of Somalia, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, used a rare appearance before the United Nations Security Council here on Friday to request an international peacekeeping force to help secure the country.

Reiterating a plea he made to the African Union recently, Mr. Yusuf said he needed outside financial support – and as many as 20,000 foreign troops – to disarm the gunmen who have ruled over the country since the last real government fell in 1991. Mr. Yusuf, who is in exile in Kenya, said he would supplement that outside force with an even larger contingent of newly recruited Somalis acting as police officers and soldiers.

“Restoration of peace and security is one of the first challenges of the new Somali government,” Mr. Yusuf said.

But Council members, some of them hesitant to put Mr. Yusuf on the agenda at all, rebuffed the request for outside troops and called on the Somali leader to work to unite the country first. They did back the idea of an African observer mission to assess the situation on the ground.

“The Security Council stresses that it is the responsibility of all Somali parties to work together to consolidate the gains made so far and to achieve further progress,” John C. Danforth, the American ambassador to the United Nations, said in a statement approved by the rest of the Council.

The British ambassador, Sir Emyr Jones Parry, was more blunt. Addressing the possibility of a peacekeeping force, he asked: “What peace are we going to keep?” As for a stabilizing force, he said: “To stabilize what?”
Full Article: nytimes.com

Apparently Somalia doesn’t have anything anybody wants.

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast, Nov. 15 – When the chanting mob descended on the strip mall that Jean Bobue Nguessam is paid to guard, he stood his ground, though not out of courage.

“If the French all leave, I will have no job,” Mr. Nguessam said as he stood a lonely watch over the pillaged remains last week, in the wake of riots that followed an airstrike on French peacekeepers and brought this country to the brink of war.

Nightstick in hand, he had tried to reason with the crowd, but he was easily outnumbered. The mob made its way down the row of shops, stripping the shelves of a liquor store, then a video rental shop, a cellphone store and finally a hair salon.

“People can shout about the French,” said Mr. Nguessam, 29, who works for the French owner of the strip mall. “But many people are unemployed, and it will only be worse when they go.”

For decades, Ivory Coast was a sturdy patch on the fraying postcolonial quilt of West Africa, its peace and prosperity woven by the laissez-faire economic and immigration policies of its longtime dictator, Félix Houphouët-Boigny. Those policies attracted heavy investment from France, its former colonizer, with whom Ivory Coast maintained a friendly relationship, and millions of migrants from nearby countries to fill menial jobs unwanted by prosperous, educated Ivoirians.

But in the past two years, the ties that bound have frayed as the country’s fortunes have faded. Many Ivoirians have turned on the French businessmen, immigrant workers and one another.

The latest violence began Nov. 5, after the government broke a cease-fire with the rebels. Government aircraft attacked a French camp, killing nine peacekeepers and an American aid worker, and the French retaliated by destroying much of the tiny Ivoirian Air Force.

The events seemed destined to deepen a crisis that had already pitted Muslim against Christian, northerner against southerner, and Ivoirians with deep roots here against those whose parents and grandparents came here seeking work. But France is being made into the bogeyman.
Full Article: nytimes.com

“Bogeyman” yeah right. Europeans and Americans are in such deep denial about their imperialism. They expect subject peoples to be grateful and are shocked when they’re not.

China’s insatiable demand for energy is prompting fears of financial and diplomatic collisions around the globe as it seeks reliable supplies of oil from as far away as Brazil and Sudan.

An intrusion into Japanese territorial waters by a Chinese nuclear submarine last week and a trade deal with Brazil are the latest apparently unconnected consequences of China’s soaring economic growth.

Increased car usage in China is creating a high demand for petrol

The connection, however, lies in an order issued last year by President Hu Jintao to seek secure oil supplies abroad – preferably ones which could not be stopped by America in case of conflict over Taiwan.

The submarine incident was put down to a “technical error” by the Chinese government, which apologised to Japan.

But even before the incident the People’s Daily, the government mouthpiece, had commented that competition over the East China Sea between the two countries was “only a prelude of the game between China and Japan in the arena of international energy”.

The Brazil trade deal included funding for a joint oil-drilling and pipeline programme at a cost that experts said would add up to three times the cost of simply buying oil on the market.

The West, however, has paid little attention to these developments. For the United States and Europe are far more concerned with the even more sensitive issues of China’s relations with “pariah states”.

In September, China threatened to veto any move to impose sanctions on Sudan over the atrocities in Darfur. It has invested $3 billion in the African country’s oil industry, which supplies it with seven per cent of its needs.

Then, this month, it said that it opposed moves to refer Iran’s nuclear stand-off with the International Atomic Energy Agency to the United Nations Security Council.

A week before, China’s second biggest state oil firm had signed a $70 billion deal for oilfield and natural gas development with Iran, which already supplies 13 per cent of China’s needs.
Full Article: news.telegraph.uk

AMMAN, Jordan (Reuters) – The family of Sheikh Omar Jummah had no idea he was in Iraq until a midnight caller told them he had died fighting alongside al Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Omar, 35, a Jordanian like Zarqawi, fought for a year with other Islamic militants battling to expel U.S.-led forces from Iraq. But he kept his family in the dark.

“He told us he was leaving for Saudi Arabia to take up a teaching job,” said his 64-year-old father Youssef Jummah.

Jummah recalled that his son was deeply religious and had memorized the Koran by the age of 13. But no one in his family expected that his piety would drive him to militancy.

Zarqawi’s group has claimed responsibility for the beheading of foreign hostages and some of the bloodiest suicide attacks in postwar Iraq.

His followers are believed to form a hard core within a wider insurgency by Iraqi nationalists and Sunni Muslim fighters loyal to ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

With their religious fervor and ideological commitment, the U.S. military says Arab volunteers like Omar are behind some of the most audacious and lethal attacks.

Like the other Jordanian militants who kept their “jihad” plans secret, kick-boxing champion Bahaa Yahya, 23, told his family he was going to a tournament in Beirut.

When he arrived in Iraq, Yahya phoned his family to disclose where he had hidden a letter to be read after he died.

“I am in need of the prayers of my mother and brothers and to tell them the world is fighting our religion,” Yahya said in the letter which his family opened after his death in September.

…They say that for the new jihadists the appeal of Iraq has surpassed Afghanistan, a magnet for a generation of Islamic militants seeking to fight the Soviet communists in the 1980s.

“Iraq is an open battleground for jihadists to confront America directly. In the space of a few hours, volunteers can leave their countries and find themselves in the heat of battle (in Iraq),” said a top security official.

Iraq has given Islamic extremists the opportunity to secure a “ticket to heaven” through martyrdom. Easily accessible and with the enemy all around, it has overtaken the Palestinian territories and Chechnya as the battleground of choice.

“The Americans gave the militant extremists a chance they had long dreamt of … now their enemy has come to them,” said a Jordanian ex-intelligence officer.

…”It has turned many gentle clerics and young men with strong religious convictions, but who (previously) could not stomach the sight of blood, into eager suicide bombers and executioners,” said Sheikh Yusef Abu Kutaiba, a Muslim cleric.
Full Article: netscape.cnn.com