KABUL: The United States will have about 20,000 troops in Afghanistan after handing control of the southern quarter of the country to a Nato-led force, the US ambassador to Kabul said on Monday.

There are roughly 23,000 US troops in Afghanistan, most of them serving with a US-led coalition that has been here since helping to topple the Taliban government weeks after the September 11, 2001 attacks by al-Qaeda.

Ambassador Ronald Neumann told reporters it was difficult to be precise because the number of US troops would fluctuate. However, ‘right now I would estimate that US forces will remain in around the 20,000 level’.
thenews.com.pk

Afghan police kill 7 comrades, defect to Taliban

Roadside bomb kills 2 US soldiers in Afghanistan

Israeli army generals have been calling for massive raids and operations in the West Bank in a bid to destroy militants infrastructure there before Israel’s further pullout from the region, Israel’s Jerusalem Post reported on Tuesday.
peopledaily.com.cn

Dangerous dirty tricks in Palestine
…The reality behind the referendum threat is that Abbas and his allies inside and outside the country are looking for a way to undermine Hamas’ legitimacy which was won fair and square at the ballot box. It would appear that the plan is to call a referendum on an uncontroversial issue — given the broad Palestinian consensus in favor of the two-state solution — and then if it passes by the expected large majority, claim that this is specifically an endorsment of Abbas and his discredited faction, and a rejection of Hamas. If the Hamas-led authority tries to prevent the referendum, Abbas may use this as a pretext to dissolve the legislative council and declare an “emergency” or call new elections which Fatah would make sure to win.

The great divide
…Under the shadow of Blackpool’s famous tower, lecturers voted for a motion condemning “continuing Israeli apartheid policies, including construction of the exclusion wall, and discriminatory educational practices”, and called for a boycott of any Israeli academics who did not dissociate themselves from their government’s policy in the occupied territories.

Military commanders in the field in Iraq admit in private reports to the Pentagon the war “is lost” and that the U.S. military is unable to stem the mounting violence killing 1,000 Iraqi civilians a month.

Even worse, they report the massacre of Iraqi civilians at Haditha is “just the tip of the iceberg” with overstressed, out-of-control Americans soldiers pushed beyond the breaking point both physically and mentally.

“We are in trouble in Iraq,” says retired army general Barry McCaffrey. “Our forces can’t sustain this pace, and I’m afraid the American people are walking away from this war.”
capitolhillblue.com

War outlasting attention spans
…The amount of time devoted to Iraq on the three biggest television networks’ weeknight newscasts has dropped by nearly 60 percent from 2003 to the first four months of 2006, according to the independent Tyndall Report tracking service.

Even before Monday’s attack in a relatively placid section of Baghdad, some network TV correspondents had reached the conclusion that, even as they were risking their lives in the war zone, audiences and producers in America had grown weary of much of the coverage from Iraq.

ABC correspondent John Berman in Baghdad wrote in his blog recently that he and his colleagues felt like the castaways on the network’s prime-time drama Lost — “We have come to the conclusion that no one knows we are here.”

Earlier, he wrote, “There is definitely a sense that the public feels like it knows what is going on here, and doesn’t want to hear anymore about it.”

Marines staged Iraq killing
WASHINGTON, June 6 (UPI) — Evidence has emerged U.S. Marines deliberately killed an unarmed Iraqi civilian in April in the town of Hamdaniya, CNN reported Tuesday.

A military source with knowledge of a U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigation told the network the victim, identified by Knight Ridder as Hashim Ibrahim Awad, was dragged from his home and shot by Marines, who placed a shovel and AK-47 next to him to make it appear he was an insurgent.

Unblinking Observer: Photographs Show a War Beyond Investigations
…Again and again throughout this war, amateur photographs have exposed the flaws of the military’s carefully constructed image of discipline. Photographs made Abu Ghraib a symbol of shame throughout the world. And photographs and video images are again undermining the military’s cherished reputation for calm under fire and heroic self-restraint.

The most horrifying images are not published or shown on TV, though they’re easy to find on the Web. But the ones we are confronted with are bad enough: A small child, a victim of a devastating and controversial U.S. airstrike in Ishaqi, is dressed in baby-blue, his eyes are closed, and his tiny, gently clenched hand rests by his side. He might be asleep, except that the photograph, which ran in Newsweek, shows a mangled, bloody arm next to him. The unidentified, shredded limb (does it belong to yet another child?) reaching into the center of the image might well stand for all the rest of these photographs that prick the conscience: They seem to come from the margins of our attention, they reach in and put their bloody imprint on a war that we wish had more innocence and calm to it.

The military has concluded that there was no U.S. wrongdoing in the March 15 Ishaqi attack that left the child dead.

Yeah the big story is the death of our innocence, not the death of somebody’s baby.

Venezuela is beefing up its troop strength along the Colombian border, negotiating with Russia to set up arms factories, and preparing for a possible invasion, the army commander said Friday.
forbes.com

LEFTIST Bolivian President Evo Morales has launched a sweeping land reform plan by handing over about 20,000 square kilometres of state-owned land to poor Indians.

Thousands of Indians gathered in the eastern city of Santa Cruz to receive land titles.
theage.com

Bolivia landowners vow self-defense as talks fail
LA PAZ, Bolivia (Reuters) – Angry Bolivian landowners vowed to form land-defense groups as talks with the leftist government broke down over plans to redistribute a fifth of the impoverished South American country’s land.

Counter-terrorism officials conceded yesterday that lethal chemical devices they feared had been stored at an east London house raided on Friday may never have existed.

Confidence among officials appeared to be waning as searches at the address continued to yield no evidence of a plot for an attack with cyanide or other chemicals. A man was shot during the raid, adding to pressure on the authorities for answers about the accuracy of the intelligence that led them to send 250 officers to storm the man’s family home at dawn.
guardian.co.uk

An Islamist militia has taken control of Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, after weeks of intense fighting against an alliance of warlords.
guardian.co.uk

Islamic militia capture key Somalia town, 18 killed
MOGADISHU (Reuters) – Militia loyal to Somalia’s Islamic courts seized a strategic town outside Mogadishu on Sunday, dislodging a key member of a warlord coalition in fierce fighting that left 18 people dead, officials and residents said.
The town of Balad, 30 km (20 miles) north of Mogadishu, fell to the Islamic militia after two hours of intense battle.

Role of warlords in anti-terror war reconsidered
… “When looked at in the glare of reality, America’s state-building record in the post-Cold War era is dreadful because of our reflexive antipathy for warlords and our unwillingness to co-opt them.”

MAASIYAHU PRISON, Israel – Standing behind bars and begging to tell of families murdered and homes destroyed, the Sudanese in Maasiyahu Prison are confronting their Israeli jailers with a quandary that taps deep into the trauma of the Holocaust.

The Sudanese, some 220 men and women, say they fled massacres and religious persecution in the war-torn Darfur region and in southern Sudan. But they are not eligible for asylum here because Israel considers their country, an Arab League member, to be an “enemy state.”
news.yahoo.com

…If the trend of recent events continues, it won’t be Bush-style democracy that is spreading, but rather, Russian and Chinese influence over major oil and gas energy supplies.

The quest for energy control has informed Washington’s support for high-risk ‘color revolutions’ in Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Belarus and Kyrgystan in recent months. It lies behind US activity in the Western Africa Gulf of Guinea states, as well as in Sudan, source of 7% of China oil import. It lies behind US policy vis-a-vis Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela and Evo Morales’ Bolivia.

In recent months, however, this strategy of global energy dominance, a strategic US priority, has shown signs of producing just the opposite: a kind of ‘coalition of the unwilling,’ states who increasingly see no other prospect, despite traditional animosities, but to cooperate to oppose what they see as a US push to control it all, their energy future security.
globalresearch.ca

China envoy defends Africa policy
A top Chinese diplomat has vigorously defended his country’s growing economic involvement in Africa, including close trade links with Zimbabwe and Sudan.

Turkish Kurd teenagers turn to the PKK after enduring years of brutality.

…”Going into the mountains” is a common phrase in Diyarbakir. It means going to join the PKK fighters, thought to number around 5,000, in their bases in nearby northern Iraq.

At least 100 local youths have gone into the mountains in the past month, says Mr Ozsoy. “Guys I know have just disappeared. They’re like ghosts. You would see them in the cafes and now they’re not here.”
guardian.co.uk