Iran is “the most active state sponsor of terrorism”, according to the US state department’s annual report on world terrorism.

It finds that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and intelligence ministry are directly involved in planning and supporting terrorist acts.

There was no immediate response from Tehran which is locked in a row with the US over its nuclear programme.

The report also argues that al-Qaeda had been weakened.

The US report says other state sponsors of terrorism include Libya, North Korea, Sudan, Syria and Cuba.
bbc.co.uk

WASHINGTON – The former head of the CIA unit hunting Osama bin Laden unit said Wednesday that US policy in the Middle East has given a boost to Al-Qaeda and its leader.

“Today, bin Laden, Al-Qaeda and their allies have only one indispensable ally: the US foreign policy towards the Islamic world,” said Michael Scheuer, who led the bin Laden unit from 1996-1999.

“Time is not on America’s side. We’re clearly losing,” Scheuer told a government security conference in Washington.
middle-east-online.com

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 28 Ñ The military announced the death of one American soldier on Friday, bringing the death toll so far in April to 69, the highest in five months. The monthly figure disrupted a trend of steadily falling American fatalities that had begun in November.
nytimes.com

The death toll in two days of fighting around Baqouba climbed to 58, including seven Iraqi soldiers, Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Awad said today.

Iraqi police continued to fight insurgents in the streets of the city, 30 miles north-east of Baghdad, and witnesses saw at least two wounded police officers being carried to police vehicles for evacuation.
eecho.ie

WASHINGTON Ð In the boxing ring of international diplomacy and influence, Azerbaijan punches above its weight.

Coming at the White House’s invitation, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev will meet Friday with top administration officials – including President Bush – in his first official visit to the US since taking office in a widely criticized election in October 2003

The visit, analysts say, is part of a broader effort by the Bush administration to gain support in a key region in the face of a growing confrontation with Iran, particularly from Muslim countries.

But Azerbaijan’s history of corruption and its poor human rights record have raised eyebrows about strengthening ties with the Central Asian country, and many point to oil as another driving factor in the relationship.

The visit is “a little anomalous,” admits Cory Welt, deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, though he adds that there are “a number of reasons why Azerbaijan is of particular interest to the US now.”

The predominantely Shiite Muslim country of 8 million shares a 380-mile border with Iran, with whom it retains close economic and cultural links, though it maintains its political distance. That geographical position makes Azerbaijan a natural ally for the US, said Azeri Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov on a recent visit to Washington.
csmonitor.com

JERUSALEM Ð Amid the soaring rhetoric over Western efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear program, Israel has been moving into a more proactive position in the campaign to contain Tehran.

This week, Israel launched a satellite to spy on Iran, and its leaders have called on the international community to stop that country from acquiring nuclear weapons. It also accused Tehran of backing Palestinian terrorists.

And as concern here grows over Iran’s defiant nuclear drive, one of Israel’s leading newspapers reported Thursday that Iran has purchased ground-to-ground missiles from North Korea, extending its range for delivering warheads.

“The Israelis are making a statement that Israel has its own ways and means of defending itself,” says Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-born Middle East analyst based in Tel Aviv.

Given the charged atmosphere in the region, many have questioned whether Israel, which maintains its own unofficial nuclear program, would make some kind of “preemptive strike” on Iran.
csmonitor.com

AUSTIN, Texas — One of the consistent deformities in American policy debate has been challenged by a couple of professors, and the reaction proves their point so neatly it’s almost funny.

A working paper by John Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, called “The Israel Lobby” was printed in the London Review of Books earlier this month. And all hell broke loose in the more excitable reaches of journalism and academe.

For having the sheer effrontery to point out the painfully obvious — that there is an Israel lobby in the United States — Mearsheimer and Walt have been accused of being anti-Semitic, nutty and guilty of “kooky academic work.” Alan Dershowitz, who seems to be easily upset, went totally ballistic over the mild, academic, not to suggest pretty boring article by Mearsheimer and Walt, calling them “liars” and “bigots.”

Of course there is an Israeli lobby in America — its leading working group is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). It calls itself “America’s Pro-Israel Lobby,” and it attempts to influence U.S. legislation and policy.

Several national Jewish organizations lobby from time to time. Big deal — why is anyone pretending this non-news requires falling on the floor and howling? Because of this weird deformity of debate.
workingforchange.com

GAZA – Where will the next blow land? That is the question. Not if it will come, but rather when, and on whom will it land, and what kind will it be?

Five-year-old L. believes the solution is to sleep every night in his parents’ bed, and in that way to be protected from the shelling. But even there he is not able to fall asleep because he is so worried and afraid. In the kindergarten in the yard outside the house, the children speak all the time about the “booms” that fill their day. Booms from the sea and booms from the land. Day and night. Sometimes three per minute, sometimes three per hour. Sometimes simultaneously from the land and from the sea. The air quivers, a flock of birds takes off in fear, and for a minute the silence of terror reigns. Are there casualties? Who, where, how many? If the parents succeed in hiding from their children pictures of the other children who have been killed or wounded by the shells, the older children fill in the gory details from what they saw on TV or read in the papers. They strengthen each other’s fears.
palestinechronicle.com

Head of the Palestinian water resources management Ahmad Al-Yaqoubi said Israel is stealing more than 80 percent of the Palestinian water and that the separation wall will give Israel the control on water resources.

Al-Yaqoubi said in a report presented at a forum organized by the Arab League here that Israel is also stealing water sources in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.

An individual’s consumption of water in Israel is three to four times more than it is in Palestine where people pay five times the price paid by Israelis, he said.

Israel is controlling 500 million cubic meters of water reserves in the West Bank, which equals to one third of consumption in Israel, Al-Yaqoubi added.
kuna.net.kw

The bodies of more than 200 dolphins have washed up on the beaches of the Indian Ocean island of Zanzibar, in what experts say are mystery deaths.

Hotel owner Ahlaam Mehle told the BBC she found countless carcasses on the shore of the Tanzanian island.

The fisheries department has warned local inhabitants, who have begun to cut up the meat, not to eat it.

Dolphins are populous in the waters around Zanzibar and attract thousands of tourists each year.

“It is a very sad sight,” Zanzibar-based marine life expert Nariman Jidawi told the BBC’s Focus on Africa programme.

The dolphins – the tursiops truncatus bottlenose species that usually live in deep offshore waters – had totally empty stomachs, which rules out poisoning or oil pollution for the mass fatalities, she said.

The more you go along the beach towards the north-west the more you see. They are floating on the sea as well
Hotel owner Ahlaam Mehle

“It’s a mystery to us. We know strandings occur, but we don’t know what causes them. Maybe they got lost.”
bbc.co.uk