TEHRAN (Reuters) – Iran’s Hizbollah, which claims links to the Lebanese group of the same name, said on Tuesday it stood ready to attack Israeli and U.S. interests worldwide.

“We have 2,000 volunteers who have registered since last year,” said Iranian Hizbollah’s spokesman Mojtaba Bigdeli, speaking by telephone from the central seminary city of Qom.

“They have been trained and they can become fully armed. We are ready to dispatch them to every corner of the world to jeopardise Israel and America’s interests. We are only waiting for the Supreme Leader’s green light to take action. If America wants to ignite World War Three … we welcome it,” he said.

Iranian religious organisations have made great public show of recruiting volunteers for “martyrdom-seeking operations” in recent years, usually threatening U.S. interests in case of any attack against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme.

But there is no record of an Iranian volunteer from these recruitment campaigns taking part in an attack.

Iran’s Hizbollah (Party of God) says it is spiritually bound to Shi’ite Muslim guerrillas in Lebanon but its command structure and funding are unclear.
netscape.com

NAIROBI, Kenya – Ethiopia is prepared to invade neighboring Somalia to defend its U.N.-backed government against what appeared to be an imminent attack by Islamic militiamen, a government spokesman said Wednesday.

The militiamen, who hold most of southern Somalia, deployed hundreds of fighters outside the town where the largely powerless government is based and said they planned to seize it.

“We have the responsibility to defend the border and the Somali government. We will crush them,” Ethiopia’s Minister of Information, Berhan Hailu, told The Associated Press.

Seizing the town of Baidoa would give the Islamic militia „ which the United States has linked to al-Qaida „ the uncontested authority over most of Somalia.

Somali transitional President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed is allied with Ethiopia, and has asked for its support. Ethiopia has intervened militarily in Somalia in the past, and hundreds of Ethiopian troops have been spotted along the countries’ border in recent weeks.

The Somali Islamist militants are allied with Muslim separatists in the Oromo region of Ethiopia.
news.yahoo.com

A civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims is spreading rapidly through central Iraq, with each community seeking revenge for the latest massacre. Yesterday a suicide bomber driving a van packed with explosives blew himself up outside the golden-domed mosque in Kufa, killing at least 59 and injuring more than 130 Shia.

In the past 10 days, while the world has been absorbed by the war in Lebanon, sectarian massacres have started to take place on an almost daily basis, leading observers to fear a level of killing approaching that of Rwanda immediately before the genocide of 1994. On a single spot on the west bank of the Tigris river in north Baghdad, between 10 and 12 bodies have been drifting ashore every day.

In Kufa, a city on the Euphrates 90 miles south of Baghdad, the suicide bomber drove his vehicle into a dusty square 100 yards from a Shia shrine at 7.30am. He knew that poor day-labourers gathered there looking for work. He reportedly said: “I need labourers” and they climbed into his van, which exploded a few moments later, killing them and other workers near by. “Four of my cousins were killed,” said Nasir Feisal, who survived the blast. “They were standing beside the van. Their bodies were scattered far apart by the blast.”

The severe escalation in sectarian killings started nine days ago when black-clad Shia militiamen sealed off the largely Sunni al-Jihad district in west Baghdad and slaughtered every Sunni they identified, killing more than 40 of them after glancing at their identity cards. Since then there has been a tit-for-tat massacre almost every day.
independent.co.uk

nytimes.com
…The American energy secretary, Samuel W. Bodman, who met with Iraq’s oil and electricity ministers in Baghdad, had a rosy view of progress here since his last visit in 2003.

‘The situation seems far more stable than when I was here two or three years ago,’ he said in an interview in the fortified Green Zone. ‘The security seems better, people are more relaxed. There is an optimism, at least among the people I talked to.’

Turkey Announces Readiness for Iraq
Turkish officials announced today that their country is now fully prepared to go into Iraq, if American, as well as Iraqi, forces do not combat Turkish Kurdish guerilla troops in the area. However, many analysts have stated that such a political and military move would force Turkey to be at odds with the United States.

This decision comes amid growing pressure placed on Turkey to act according to the critical situation currently unfolding, after 15 soldiers, police officers and guards, had been killed in armed clashed with Kurdish guerilla troops in the southeastern part of Turkey in the past week.

The pharmaceutical industry is beginning to reap a windfall from a surprisingly lucrative niche market: drugs for poor people.

And analysts expect the benefits to show up in many of the quarterly financial results that drug makers will begin posting this week.

The windfall, which by some estimates could be $2 billion or more this year, is a result of the transfer of millions of low-income people into the new Medicare Part D drug program that went into effect in January. Under that program, as it turns out, the prices paid by insurers, and eventually the taxpayer, for the medications given to those transferred are likely to be higher than what was paid under the federal-state Medicaid programs for the poor.
nytimes.com

As is turns out huh? Go figure.

MIAMI, FL, United States (UPI) — The arrest of suspected al-Qaida member Jose Padilla in 2002 was not the FBI`s goal, but rather to recruit him as an inside informant, an agent testified.

The testimony came at a Miami hearing where U.S. Magistrate Stephen Brown will determine whether Padilla`s statements to federal agents during his interrogation at Chicago`s O`Hare International Airport should be kept out of his criminal trial because Padilla was not first advised of his constitutional rights.

‘I didn`t want to arrest him,’ said Special Agent Russell Fincher said. ‘I needed his cooperation.’

Fincher said after Padilla talked about growing up in Chicago and becoming involved in gangs and converting to Islam, Padilla abruptly stopped talking and demanded a lawyer.

Fincher said at that point, he advised Padilla of his right to remain silent and arrested him.

He said the agency had hoped Padilla could provide information about an al-Qaida plot to detonate a radioactive device, or so-called ‘dirty bomb’ on U.S. soil, and needed an insider, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported.

Padilla has been held for 3 1/2-years military detention as an ‘enemy combatant.’
monstersandcritics.com

UNITED NATIONS (AFP) – US Ambassador John Bolton said there was no moral equivalence between the civilian casualties from the Israeli raids in Lebanon and those killed in Israel from “malicious terrorist acts”.

Asked to comment on the deaths in an Israeli air strike of eight Canadian citizens in southern Lebanon Sunday, he said: “it is a matter of great concern to us …that these civilian deaths are occurring. It’s a tragedy.”

“I think it would be a mistake to ascribe moral equivalence to civilians who die as the direct result of malicious terrorist acts,” he added, while defending as “self-defense” Israel’s military action, which has had “the tragic and unfortunate consequence of civilian deaths”.
news.yahoo.com

Israeli children sign their missiles ‘with love’
Never have I witnessed such an appalling display of utter contempt for human life. And they’re not even ashamed to beam it across the globe, for all the world to see.

Israel’s Path to Total War
As the tide of war intensifies, it is increasingly obvious that Israel’s hidden objective is to inflict such mortal wounds on the weak nation of Lebanon as to bring it to its knees and thus take a giant step toward its grandiose objective of a Pax Israelica.

A big regional superpower, bounded in a small physical space and bloody, ill-defined borders, Israel’s warmongering is not a result of its absence of policy, as claimed by The Nation’s recent editorial. Rather, it is the result of a sedimented power dynamism better understood from the prism of the (Michel) Foucaultian theoretical framework, which shows how the operation of (sacred) knowledge/power of Zionist ideology has now manifested itself in the deadly form of military regression that Israel has opted for in Lebanon and the occupied territories.

Indeed, Gideon Levy and other Israeli liberals currently bemoaning Israel’s “war of choice” miss this crucial point that long ago was articulated by the likes of Maxime Rodinson in his writings on Israel as a post-colonialist, expansionist state, for the very motif of this state militates against anything short of a “Greater Israel”.

United States to Israel: you have one more week to blast Hizbullah
The US is giving Israel a window of a week to inflict maximum damage on Hizbullah before weighing in behind international calls for a ceasefire in Lebanon, according to British, European and Israeli sources.

The Bush administration, backed by Britain, has blocked efforts for an immediate halt to the fighting initiated at the UN security council, the G8 summit in St Petersburg and the European foreign ministers’ meeting in Brussels.

“It’s clear the Americans have given the Israelis the green light. They [the Israeli attacks] will be allowed to go on longer, perhaps for another week,” a senior European official said yesterday. Diplomatic sources said there was a clear time limit, partly dictated by fears that a prolonged conflict could spin out of control.

Tel Aviv plans 4-tier, intensifying offensive
JERUSALEM — The fierce Israeli attack in Lebanon is part of a carefully orchestrated plan — not yet half-completed — that calls for four stages of mounting intensity, culminating in the movement of ground troops into Lebanon, according to Israeli reports.

Israel continues to target Lebanon’s infrastructure and bomb civilian neighborhoods. The United Nations is warning of a looming humanitarian disaster and the World Health Organization expects the number of Lebanese residents displaced to reach 900,000 by the end of today. Just before the program we reached Anthony Shadid in Beirut. He is a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter for the Washington Post. He spoke about the mounting crisis in Lebanon.
DEMOCRACY NOW!

Israel will probably not send ground troops into Lebanon to confront Hezbollah. Israel realizes it cannot decisively defeat Hezbollah, as its experience prior to 2000 made painfully obvious.

In fact, the mass murder campaign currently underway in Lebanon has little to do with Hezbollah, as our pro-Israel corporate media tells us, ad nauseam.

Instead, it has to do with ‘order out of chaos,’ rendering Arabs and Muslims helpless, destroying their societies. It has to do with balkanizing the Middle East, reducing once organized societies to mutually hostile tribal and ethnic factions, forever at each others throats, and thus exploitable and malleable. It is an updated version of British colonialism, the time-tested divide and conquer strategy.

If you require and example of this, look no further than Iraq where ‘civil war,’ externally imposed, works like an acid on the political and social fabric of the country, if indeed you can characterize what remains of Iraq a country. It is devolving into a patchwork of mutually antagonistic factions, tribes, religious sects, a situation created by false flag terrorism straight out of the neocon Pentagon.

Syria is next.

Enter James ‘World War IV’ Woolsey, former CIA spook and Booz Allen Hamilton VP.

Following on the heels of Newt Gingrich and William Kristol, Woolsey told Fox News loudmouth John Gibson that Syria needs a heaping dose of shock and awe (see video excerpt on the Crooks and Liars website) and this will serve as a prelude to doing likewise to Iran. The irascible Gibson asked why the United States simply does not go after Iran now and Woolsey admitted such things are done incrementally, in steps.

First Syria, and then Iran, along with North Korea.

As Juan Williams told ‘General’ Kristol on Fox the other day, the neocons ‘want war, war, war,’ an obvious enough fact, although Williams may now be reassigned to doing weather reports in Anchorage, Alaska.
kurtnimmo.com

Last night, CNN told us Cynthia McKinney ñenjoys solid support as she heads into the July 18 Democratic primary in Atlanta, Georgia.

However, in America, 2006, it does not matter if a politician is supported by her constituency because elections are little more than smoke and mirrors, a crumbling facade slapped over the ugly face of dictatorship. Democratic Underground posted the following press release this afternoon:

FOR IMMEDITATE RELEASE Contact: Jocco Baccus
July 18, 2006
678-520-2088

DIEBOLD ELECTRONIC MACHINES MALFUNCTION, VOTE FOR OTHER CANDIDATE

(Decatur) After one hour of voting, the McKinney campaign has received numerous calls that the voting machines are malfunctioning. Voters casting votes for McKinney are reportedly having their votes switched by the machines for Hank Johnson. This is not a new problem with Diebold machines. Lawyers for the campaign have been alerted and said that If this situation is not corrected, Cynthia McKinney for Congress will be forced to take additional measures.

“A McKinney representative confirmed for me that these reports have been coming in all morning,” adds the blogger Joseph Cannon. ñBy every account, votes for Congresswoman McKinney have ‘morphed’ into votes for Johnson. So far, nobody has heard one anecdotal report of an intended vote for Johnson turning into a vote for McKinney.”

Anecdotal or not, this is how elections work in America now, same as they work in any other dictatorship.
kurtnimmo.com

MEXICO CITY – Compromise seemed more elusive than ever in Mexico’s bitter presidential election dispute on Monday, one day after leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador mounted the largest protest in Mexican history.

Analysts said the demonstration, during which more than 1 million people jammed this city’s main square and the surrounding streets, didn’t change anything – the dispute still must be resolved by the Federal Electoral Tribunal, known as TRIFE.

But the rally sparked an unusually indignant response from the July 2 election’s apparent winner, conservative Felipe Calderon, and many of the capital’s commentators, promising more acrimony in the weeks ahead.

Cesar Nava, a Calderon spokesman, said that the election would be decided “by votes, not by marches,” and that the National Action Party, or PAN, wouldn’t succumb to the “blackmail” of street protests.

One Mexico City newspaper, Milenio, dubbed the demonstration “the great yellow beast,” referring to the swarms of yellow-clad Lopez Obrador supporters – many of them elderly and poor – who believe the election was stolen.

“OK, so you’ve put a million people in the streets,” said Mexican political observer Jorge Chabat. “So what’s the conclusion? Nothing.”
realcities.com