(CBS/AP) Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Thursday he will call a national referendum on accepting a Palestinian state alongside Israel if Hamas does not agree to the idea within 10 days.

Abbas’ surprise announcement was a political gamble that could either help resolve the Palestinians’ internal deadlock or lead them into a deeper crisis with the militant Hamas group.

Such a vote would effectively ask Palestinians to give implicit recognition to Israel by accepting a Palestinian state on land occupied by Israel in 1967. Approval of the 18-point plan would provide a way out of the impasse over acceptance of Israel, which has led to an international freeze on aid to the Hamas-led government.
cbsnews.com

Israelis kill 3 civilians, wound at least 50 more in Ramallah raid

In Afghanistan, more than 330 people have died over the past week in some of the heaviest fighting since the war began almost five years ago.

On Monday U.S. A-10 fighter jets and Apache helicopter gunships bombed homes in the village of Azizi, west of Kandahar.

The air strikes, which lasted for hours, killed about 100 people including as many as 30 civilians. U.S. officials said the raids targeted Taliban fighters who were involved in a series of deadly attacks last week.

The increase in fighting comes just two months before the United States is scheduled to hand over command of southern Afghanistan to NATO forces.

Fighting has greatly increased in Southern Afghanistan as the Taliban have moved out of the mountains and seized large areas of the region.

Last week the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Army Gen. Karl Eikenberry, admitted that the Taliban are now better trained, armed and organized than in the past. He said the Taliban has adopted tactics used in Iraq including suicide attacks and roadside bombs.

Meanwhile the Afghan government has accused Pakistan of recruiting, training and coordinating attack missions for the Taliban.

Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, said, “Pakistani intelligence gives military training to people and then sends them to Afghanistan with logistics.” The Pakistani government has rejected the charge.

For more we are joined by Habib Rahiab – he is an Afghan-born human rights activist. Up until two years ago he lived in Afghanistan where he helped “Human Rights Watch” document human rights abuses committed by U.S. forces — including some similar to those that later surfaced in the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq. He is now a fellow at Harvard Law School.
democracynow.org

About 3000 flee Afghan Fighting

Bin Laden on the Move; New Sightings in Pakistan
Pakistani government sources tell ABC News they have “credible reports” that Osama bin Laden and his entourage have moved down from high mountainous peaks along the Afghan border to a valley area 40 miles inside the Pakistan border.

The officials say the reports put bin Laden around Kohistan’s Kumrat Valley.

Officials said the reports were validated by the release of bin Laden’s audio tape yesterday, which appears to have been recorded only two weeks earlier.

Such a quick turn-around suggests, say the officials, that bin Laden is much closer to civilization than he had been previously.

JOHANNESBURG, May 24 — Three Americans were among at least 26 security workers arrested and jailed last week in Congo on suspicion of plotting a coup in advance of national elections in July, officials and news services reported Wednesday.

Fifteen of the suspects are employed by a South African security company, Omega Security Solutions, whose parent company has offices in Pretoria, the South African capital. A company official said the detained Americans work for two U.S. companies that are arranging security and logistics for the campaign of a presidential candidate in Congo. The other suspects are Nigerians.

From Kinshasa, the capital of Congo, Interior Minister Theophile Mbemba said 32 men with military gear were arrested, but he offered few other details, the Associated Press reported. “It is clear that they were military personnel with political plans. . . . They were part of a coup attempt, and they will face justice in Congo,” he said.
washingtonpost.com

ORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) – New Orleans, still down and out from last year’s assault by Hurricane Katrina, is the U.S. city most likely to be struck by hurricane force winds during the 2006 storm season, a researcher said on Wednesday.

The forecast gives New Orleans a nearly 30 percent chance of being hit by a hurricane and a one in 10 chance the storm will be a Category 3 or stronger, meaning sustained winds of at least 111 miles per hour (178 km per hour), said Chuck Watson of Kinetic Analysis Corp., Savannah, Georgia a risk assessment firm.
reuters.com

“De la Cruz lives a hundred meters from a Coca Cola bottler that extracts 1.7 million liters of water each year from the local aquifer, leaving 70% of the households in Ecatepec without running water. The bottler’s yearly extractions are equivalent to what five indigenous villages in the highlands are allotted each year.”
axisoflogic.com

Bolivia is South America’s poorest country. Every night, 615,000 Bolivian children under 13 years of age go to bed hungry, according to a recent report by the United Nations World Food Program. Life in the countryside has changed little since colonial times, and cities lack basic public services. Clearly, there is an urgent need for infrastructure investments to help raise the living standards of the people in the Andean country.

This, ostensibly, is the role of international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Nevertheless, the head of the IMF’s mission to Bolivia, Antonio Furtado, made an announcement last week that the IMF will not extend new credits to Bolivia.
axisoflogic.com

Bolivia rebuts Bush’s accusations of undermining democracy
The Bolivian government on Tuesday rebutted U.S. President George W. Bush’s criticism that Bolivia is eroding democracy, according to reports from La Paz, capital of Bolivia.

Bush’s criticism was “barely credible,” said Alex Contreras, spokesman for the Bolivian government. He called on Bush to respect Bolivia’s dignity and sovereignty.

“The administration of President Evo Morales is promoting and strengthening democracy,” said Contreras, noting the Bolivia-U.S. diplomatic ties should be without interference.”

He said no nations can force Bolivia to take a direction which it does not want to.

“It would be truer to say that the United States is eroding democracy,” said the spokesman, accusing Washington of supporting dictatorship and interfering in other countries’ internal affairs.

The White House yesterday ruled out previously authorised direct talks between Tehran and the US ambassador in Baghdad, which were to have focused on the situation in Iraq. The move marks a hardening of the Bush administration’s position, despite pressure from the international community to enter into direct dialogue with Iran.

A White House official said that although the US envoy had originally been granted a mandate for talks with Iran, “we have decided not to pursue it.”
guardian.co.uk

KANDAHAR: Sixty Taliban and five Afghan security forces members were killed in a new clash in Afghanistan on Wednesday as the US-led coalition defended itself against mounting criticism of civilian deaths.

The suspected insurgents were killed in a ‘fierce’ six-hour battle and subsequent clean-up operation in Uruzgan late on Tuesday, said a top Afghan general and the coalition.

The Afghan army called in coalition air support, said Afghan General Rahmatullah Raufi. Four soldiers and a policeman also died, said he and a police spokesman.
dailytimes.com

A Taliban comeback? Ahmed Rashid
Musharraf is between a rock and a hard place. A fair election would most likely result in a parliament hostile to continued army rule. A rigged election endangers his grip on power and the army’s prestige. However, military rule has run its course in Pakistan. It is deeply unpopular and no longer has the credibility to resist Islamic fundamentalists

As unprecedented Taliban violence sweeps across southern Afghanistan, four players in the region, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the US and NATO, are locked in a tense standoff rather than cooperating to defeat the terrorists. At stake is the future survival of Afghanistan’s moderate government and stability in Pakistan.

To prop up Afghanistan and combat the Taliban, the US and NATO may have to make major concessions to Pakistan’s military regime, but any concessions would anger the Afghans, encourage the extremists and allow the unpopular military to dominate Pakistan’s political scene for another five years.

Taliban grows in strength, US admits
The Taliban are growing in strength, the US military admitted yesterday as it defended 16 civilian deaths inflicted by its bombers during southern Afghanistan’s most violent week in years.
Hundreds of insurgents have taken root in three key southern provinces at the heart of the current Nato deployment, said a US spokesman, Colonel Tim Collins.

“There’s no doubt the Taliban have grown in strength and influence in certain areas in Kandahar, Helmand and in southern Uruzgan,” he said. “That’s why we are going after them.”

In the latest violence a six-hour battle erupted in mountainous Uruzgan province yesterday when a joint coalition-Afghan patrol came under rocket and small arms fire at a village near the provincial capital, Tirin Kot, according to a military statement.

After cornering the Taliban inside a compound, the coalition forces called in air support, the statement said. British, French and American planes pounded the area with bombs and rockets.

Twenty-four Taliban and five Afghan security forces were killed, according to the report, which could not be verified.

A British military plane with the newly arrived ambassador, Stephan Evans, caught fire as it landed in Helmand, where 3,300 troops are deploying. Two passengers received minor injuries.

The US defended itself against Afghan criticism of an air strike on Sunday night that killed at least 16 civilians at Azizi in western Kandahar. The military did not know civilians were in the houses when A-10 “warthog” planes fired at buildings, said Col Collins.

But Col Collins also blamed the Taliban’s use of “human shield” tactics. “The Taliban knowingly, wilfully chose to occupy homes of these people,” he said.

The Iraqi Oil Ministry’s inspector general reported this week that $1 billion of Iraq’s oil is being illegally smuggled out of the country every month.

Smuggling on a large scale, coupled with increasing violence and the lack of basic services like water and electricity, has caused increasing tensions in the southern oil city of Basra. Over 100 civilians have been killed in Basra so far this month. Residents there are pointing the finger at the governor and the British military, which occupies the city.
antiwar.com

LONDON – The United States is riding roughshod over human rights by outsourcing key anti-terror work in Iraq to private contractors, who operate beyond Iraqi law and outside the military chain of command, Amnesty International said Tuesday.

It called for tighter rules on the use of contractors in a statement released with its 2006 annual report detailing human rights violations in 150 countries around the world. The rights watchdog said contracting for military detention, security and intelligence operations had fueled violations.
news.yahoo.com