The report by the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq, which was released today, said most of the victims were killed in Baghdad.
rferl.org

200 dead, wounded in south Baghdad car explosion, Maliki vows justice

One Day In Iraq — As Viewed By Iraqi Press
…–Al-Mashriq carries on page 2 a 60-word report that Ahmad Chalabi is still the head of the de’Ba’thification Commission.

–Al-Sabah carries on page 15 a 700-word report citing an official source at Health Ministry saying that over 8,000 persons, most of whom are children, need to be treated abroad.

–Al-Basa’ir on 12 July carries on the front page a 300-word report on the statement issued by Iraqi National Troops group condemning US ‘occupation’ forces’ crimes in Iraq.

–Al-Sabah carries on page 2 a 110-word report on a statement by the cabinet that security forces in Dhi Qar arrested a gang trying to smuggle oil in the governorate.

–Al-Mashriq carries on the front page a 1,000-word report on the Israeli attack against Lebanon. The report says that the Iraqi parliament has condemned the attack and demanded the Iraqi people stand beside Lebanese people.

–Al-Adalah carries on page 3 a 500-word article by Dr Ali Khulayf criticizing Harith al-Dari for his seditious statements that encourage sectarian violence.

–Al-Sabah carries on page 3 a 200-word report citing an official source at Health Ministry saying that the morgue received 1,600 bodies in June. . .

–Al-Mashriq carries on page 3 a 450-word report that hundreds of university professors are leaving the country to save their lives from assassination.

–Al-Basa’ir on 12 July publishes on page 4 a 400-word report entitled ‘Defense Ministry Official Holds Interior Ministry Responsible for Hay al-Jihad Massacre.’ .

–Al-Mashriq carries on page 4 a 300-word report that women have demanded to change item number 41 of the Iraqi permanent constitution. . .

–Al-Basa’ir on 12 July runs on page 2 a 500-word report on Statement 288 issued by Association of Muslim Scholars denouncing Iraqi and ‘occupation’ forces for imposing a tight siege around Arab Jubur and other villages in Al-Muqdadiyah District and the random arrest of dozens of Sunnis.

–Al-Basa’ir on 12 July publishes on page 2 a 500-word report on Statement 293 issued by Association of Muslim Scholars condemning sectarian militias for attacking Sunni mosques in Al-Ghazaliyah and Al-Durah Districts.

–Al-Basa’ir on 12 July carries on page 2 a 500-word report entitled ‘Association of Muslim Scholars Condemns ‘Occupation’ Forces for Taking Over Al-Ramadi Public Hospital. . .

–Al-Mashriq carries on the front page a 600-word report citing Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr accusing Sunnis of failing to respond to his calls to better Sunni-Shiite relations. .

–Al-Basa’ir on 12 July runs on page 3 a 200-word report citing a medical source in Tikrit confirming the discovery of nine bodies.

–Al-Basa’ir on 12 July carries on page 3 a 230-word report entitled ‘Civilian Killed and Three Injured in Large-Scale Military Operation in Al-Ramadi.’

–Al-Zaman publishes on page 5 a 1,000-word report entitled ‘Merchant and His Sons and Grandson Assassinated in Mosul; British Patrol Release Hostage and Arrest Kidnappers in Basra.’

–Al-Mashriq carries on the front page a 400-word report that about 50 families have left al-Jihad quarter in Baghdad to stay in tents installed on the airport road.

–Al-Sabah carries on page 14 a 200-word report citing legal professors criticizing the Red Crescent International Committee’s decision to withdraw its employees from Iraq.

KABUL, Afghanistan – Taliban militants seized two towns in tumultuous southern Afghanistan, forcing police and government officials to flee, officials said Monday.

The Taliban operate freely in large areas of southern Afghanistan and police presence there often is virtually nonexistent, but insurgents only were known to have completely seized one town since their hard-line regime was toppled by U.S. forces in 2001. They were quickly driven out of that town, Chora, in Uruzgan province.

The attacks came with thousands of U.S.-led troops involved in an offensive against Taliban holdouts and allied extremists in remote southern and eastern provinces to curb the deadliest upsurge in violence since the hard-line militia was ousted in late 2001.

On Monday, large numbers of militants chased out police after a brief clash in the town of Naway-i-Barakzayi, in Helmand province near the Pakistan border.

Scores of Taliban forces overran police holed up Sunday in a compound in the nearby Helmand town of Garmser. The security forces and a handful of government officials fled.
A local official said Taliban forces were now “moving freely” around the Garmser and the surrounding district.

“We have heard reports of two districts in southern Helmand being under control of the Taliban, and we are in contact with lots of people to build an accurate picture,” said coalition spokesman Maj. Scott Lundy.

“The Taliban are a credible threat, but the coalition is more than a match for them when and wherever we encounter them,” he said.

British military spokesman Capt. Drew Gibson confirmed enemy “activity” in both areas.
registerguard.com/news

KINSHASA, Congo – Congo’s least likely presidential candidate says it’s time for Africa to let go of its gun-toting dictators and elect people who can think.

Dr. Oscar Kashala, a Harvard-educated cancer researcher and political novice, has left his laboratory in Cambridge, Mass., to hit a rocky campaign trail as his homeland emerges from what has been called “Africa’s world war.”

At a rally Saturday, Kashala belatedly kicked off his campaign for Congo’s July 30 presidential and legislative elections, despite bloody clashes with political opponents, government harassment and threats to companies that work with him.

“He is a son of Congo,” thousands of supporters sang with gusto at the rally. “He never killed; he never looted; his hands are clean.”

Kashala brushes aside criticism that he has not lived in the country he would govern for half his life. The hefty 51-year-old is counting on his frequent trips home since he moved to the United States in 1987, his history as a student activist and his many good works, building laboratories, getting donations for medical equipment and training doctors in the nation once known as Zaire.

He says Africa’s renaissance must be led by people like him and fellow Harvard alum Ellen Sirleaf Johnson, the new president of Liberia, not the gun-toting guerrillas and socialist ideologues who fought for the continent’s liberation from colonizers and dictators.

“The skills you need to do that (fight) are a very different skill set from what you need once you become free and need to develop,” Kashala said Saturday night in an interview with The Associated Press.
news.yahoo.com

I highly doubt that Africans need to go to Harvard in order to become thinkers. Scary.

Children at risk of turning to violence or criminality are to be identified at birth and assigned “supernannies” to steer them away from a life of lawbreaking.

Midwives, doctors and nurses are to be asked to identify “chaotic” families whose babies are in danger of growing up to be delinquents, drug addicts and violent criminals.

In a bid to end the cycle of social exclusion, the Government’s early warning system will give problem families professional help as soon as their children are born, according to internal Whitehall documents seen by The Independent on Sunday.
independent.co.uk

Racial profiling from the womb.

Atrocities in the Promised Land

By KATHLEEN CHRISTISON
former CIA analyst

Words fail; ordinary terms are inadequate to describe the horrors Israel daily perpetrates, and has perpetrated for years, against the Palestinians. The tragedy of Gaza has been described a hundred times over, as have the tragedies of 1948, of Qibya, of Sabra and Shatila, of Jenin — 60 years of atrocity perpetrated in the name of Judaism. But the horror generally falls on deaf ears in most of Israel, in the U.S. political arena, in the mainstream U.S. media. Those who are horrified — and there are many — cannot penetrate the shield of impassivity that protects the political and media elite in Israel, even more so in the U.S., and increasingly now in Canada and Europe, from seeing, from caring.

But it needs to be said now, loudly: those who devise and carry out Israeli policies have made Israel into a monster, and it has come time for all of us — all Israelis, all Jews who allow Israel to speak for them, all Americans who do nothing to end U.S. support for Israel and its murderous policies — to recognize that we stain ourselves morally by continuing to sit by while Israel carries out its atrocities against the Palestinians.

A nation that mandates the primacy of one ethnicity or religion over all others will eventually become psychologically dysfunctional. Narcissistically obsessed with its own image, it must strive to maintain its racial superiority at all costs and will inevitably come to view any resistance to this imagined superiority as an existential threat. Indeed, any other people automatically becomes an existential threat simply by virtue of its own existence. As it seeks to protect itself against phantom threats, the racist state becomes increasingly paranoid, its society closed and insular, intellectually limited. Setbacks enrage it; humiliations madden it. The state lashes out in a crazed effort, lacking any sense of proportion, to reassure itself of its strength.
counterpunch.org

Lebanon: the world looks on
. EU criticism of Israel removed
‡ Statement diluted following British pressure
‡ Death toll passes 200

Western leaders remained paralysed yesterday as Lebanon suffered one of its bloodiest days since Israel began its bombardment a week ago.

For the second time in 48 hours western governments declined to intervene as Israeli forces, on the sixth day of aerial attacks, killed 47 people and wounded at least 53. Hizbullah, the Iranian-backed militia, also stepped up its attacks, launching 50 rockets against Israel, the highest number in a single day. The death toll since Israel began its attack has risen to 210 in Lebanon and 29 in Israel.

Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, dismissed hopes of a quick resolution to the conflict last night, vowing his military would continue operating at full intensity. He said Israel would not stop until two of its captured soldiers were freed, the Lebanese army deployed to protect Israel’s northern border and Hizbullah forced to disarm.

He said both Hizbollah and Hamas, the Palestinian group, were working with the support of “the axis of evil that stretches from Tehran to Damascus. When missiles rain on our cities, our response will be to wage war with greater determination, courage and sacrifice,” he said. “We don’t seek war or head-on confrontation but if necessary we shall not flinch from them.”

After the failure of the G8 meeting in St Petersburg at the weekend to step in, EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels yesterday also settled for a bland joint statement that exposed divisions between European governments.

EU foreign ministers called on Israel not to resort to “disproportionate action” but criticism of Israel in an original draft was diluted after pressure from Britain and Germany, Israel’s closest EU allies.

War in north: Support in New York, condemnation in Berlin
Thousands demonstrate in support of Israel in front of UN headquarters in New York, but in Berlin more than 1,000 Lebanese, Palestinians chant Ądeath to Israel, while some carry placards bearing the image of Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah

Thousands of people demonstrated in support of Israel in front of the UN headquarters in New York Monday.

Among the speakers at the demonstration were Senator Hillary Clinton and Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Gillerman.

Lebanon: U.S. blocking call for cease-fire
UNITED NATIONS ‹ Lebanon accused the United States on Saturday of blocking a U.N. Security Council statement calling for a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah, saying the impotence of the United Nations’ most powerful body sent the wrong signal to small countries and the Arab world.

Rice Defends Israel, Calls Criticisms of Bush Policy ‘Grotesque’
July 16, 2006 ‹ Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended Israel’s right to counter the terrorist group Hezbollah’s deadliest rocket attacks in a decade, and resisted calls for an immediate cease-fire.

She told “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” “We support, at this point, an effort to make certain that when there is a cease-fire that it is one that is sustainable.”

Rice rejected the notion that U.S. operations in Iraq have shaken Middle East stability, arguing, “Those hostilities were not very well contained, as we found out on Sept. 11, and so the notion that somehow policies that finally confront extremism are actually causing extremism, I find grotesque.”

“For all of those who believe that we somehow had stability in the Middle East over the last 60 years and it’s now been disturbed: Where do we think Hezbollah and Hamas and these other extremist forces came from?”

Some of us know very well where they come from.

Bush doubts Lebanon peace plan
…Mr Bush appeared to fault Mr Annan for pushing for an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon and for exercising insufficient pressure on Syria, which the US and many of its allies allege has colluded in Hizbollah’s actions.

‘I don’t like the sequence of it,’ Mr Bush said to Mr Blair before the G8 leaders sat down to lunch. ‘His attitude is basically ceasefire and everything else happens.’

‘What they need to do is get Syria to get Hizbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over,’ Mr Bush said. ‘I felt like telling Kofi to get on the phone with [Syrian president Bashar al-] Assad and make something happen.’

The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, Fatah’s armed wing, claimed Monday afternoon they had kidnapped a Border Guard officer in the West Bank.

An announcement published by the group claimed the abduction was carried out in the Judea and Samaria area and to prove the claim, the announcement included the name of the officer allegedly kidnapped.

The IDF responded that the name was not recognized, but added they were investigating the claims.

Monday morning, and IDF soldier was killed when an explosive device detonated in Nablus.
ynetnews.com

Israel’s reckless, high-stakes decision to launch simultaneous wars against both Hamas and Hezbollah last week is a critical, perhaps world-shattering event. It cannot be seen merely in its local context, that is, as an act by the unilateralist regime in Jerusalem to crush the armed wings of two Islamic fundamentalist organizations in Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon. Nor can it be seen merely in its regional context, that is, as an effort to raise the stakes in the struggle against Syria, Iran and rejectionist factions in occupied Iraq. Rather, Israel’s actions must be seen, first and foremost, in the context of global politics.

The key question: Is the Israeli offensive designed as a calculated effort to catapult the hard-right, neoconservative ideologues back to power in Washington?

The terrorist attacks of 9/11, the 21st century’s Pearl Harbor, allowed Vice President Dick Cheneyăalong with Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, John Bolton, et al., to steer President George W. Bush and the U.S. government toward a global war, including the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; the endless ‘war on terrorism’ and the militarization of American foreign policy. Since then, and especially as the adventure in Iraq bogged down, the less adventurous realists in the American foreign policy establishment have begun to eclipse the previously hegemonic neoconservatives. For the past year or so, the Pollyannas amid the chattering classes have told us that the neoconservatives’ moment has passed, and that the adults are back in control in the nation’s capital. What they forgot, and what Israel’s criminal attacks on Gaza and Lebanon have reminded us, is that the neoconservative war party is global, not domestic. Outflanked, temporarily, in the United States, the neocons are now flexing their muscle outside the United States in a way that can give them added new leverage at home.

Let’s analyze the current crisis, piece by piece.
tompaine.com

Syria In Their Sights: 1/11/2006

The neocons plan their next ‘cakewalk’.

What makes this repackaged Orientalism new are its intentions, its proponents, and the enemy it has targeted for destruction. Its intention is to mobilize the United States behind a scheme to balkanize the Middle East into ethnic, sectarian and religious micro states, a new system of client states that would facilitate Israel’s long-term hegemony over the region. Ironically, the scholars who have dominated this repackaging of the old Orientalism are mostly Jewish, a reversal of roles that flows directly from the creation of a Jewish colonial-settler state in the heart of the Middle East. Once they had succeeded in creating Israel, the Zionists knew that its long-term survival depended on fomenting wars between the West and Islam. Zionism has pursued this goal by its own wars against Arabs and, since 1967, a brutal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza; but equally, it has pulled out all the stops to convince the United States to support unconditionally Israel’s depredations against Arabs.

The target of the war that the new Orientalists want to wage are what they variously call Islamists, Islamic fundamentalists, Islamic militants, Islamo-fascists, or Islamic terrorists. Whatever the term, it embraces all Islamicate movements–no matter what their positions on the political uses of violence–that appeal to Islamic symbols to mobilize local, national, and pan-Islamic resistance against the wars that the United States and Israel have jointly waged against the Middle East since 1945. These Islamicate resistance movements, which are both national and transcend national boundaries, have replaced the secular nationalists who, after failing to achieve their objectives, were co-opted by the United States and Israel to destroy the Islamicate resistance.
counterpunch.org

U.S. war commanders think some level of American forces will be needed in Iraq until 2016 and those forces will receive continued support from the vast majority of Iraqis.
washintontimes.com

Car bomb kills 59 near Shia shrine
A car bomb exploded today among a crowd of labourers near a major Shia shrine in southern Iraq, killing up to 59 people and sparking clashes between protesters and police, officials and witnesses said.

The slaughter continues
*FALLUJA – A U.S. soldier was killed in combat in Anbar province in western Iraq, the military said in a statement.

MAHMUDIYA – Gunmen stormed a crowded market in the town of Mahmudiya, 30 km (20 miles) south of Baghdad, amid mortar or grenade explosions, the U.S. military, police and the mayor said. A local hospital put the death toll at 56, with another 67 wounded. But the Ministry of Defence had a different account, saying two car bombs had exploded, killing 42 people.

TUZ KHURMATU – Police said 25 people were killed and 18 wounded in Sunday night’s explosion in a popular cafe in the town of Tuz Khurmatu, 170 km (106 miles) from Baghdad, in which a suicide bomber blew himself up.

DIWANIYA – Two U.S. soldiers were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded near their convoy in Diwaniya, 180 km (112 miles) south of Baghdad, the U.S. military said.

BAGHDAD – A U.S. soldier died from wounds after coming under fire in western Baghdad, the U.S. military said.

HADITHA – Gunmen killed Laith al-Rawi, local leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, one of the main Sunni parties, in Haditha, 240 km (150 miles) northwest of Baghdad, on Sunday, the Islamic Party said.

Try Putting Us in Their Place

Corruption Cited in Iraq’s Oil Industry
U.S. Comptroller General David M. Walker told Congress last week that “massive corruption” and “a lot of theft going on” in Iraq’s government-controlled oil industry is hampering the country’s ability to govern itself.

“It took me about, you know, a second and a half to realize that, obviously, there was massive corruption going on, because the numbers just didn’t add up,” Walker said, referring to a trip he took to Iraq this year in which he was shown figures on oil production and revenue.

Iraq’s divided parliament stands united over Israel
BAGHDAD, July 16 (Reuters) – Shi’ite, Sunni and Kurdish lawmakers in Iraq’s U.S.-backed parliament often fail to see eye to eye, but on Sunday they stood united in their condemnation of Israel’s military offensive against Lebanon.

Shi’ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has been pleading with fellow Iraqis to put aside deep sectarian and ethnic divisions of the kind that plunged Lebanon into civil war 30 years ago.

His pleas have gone largely unheeded, but Israel’s five-day-old assault on Lebanon that has killed well over 120 people, all but four of them civilians, has evoked strong feelings of solidarity among Iraqis, bridging the sectarian divide, with hostility toward Israel and the United States.

MIAMI — An unreleased court filing from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Miami, obtained by NBC 6, reveals compelling new details about the investigation into terror suspects arrested earlier this month in Liberty City and charged with plotting to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower and other buildings and to “wage jihad on America.”

The document also contains information challenging statements that the suspects were entrapped by an FBI confidential witness posing as an al-Qaida operative, according to NBC6 investigative reporter Jeff Burnside.

A judge requested the filing to obtain permission for police to tap phones used by the defendants. The document contained several key assertions, including:

– The two confidential witnesses being used by government investigators had been on the FBI payroll for years as informants in other, unrelated cases, and both lived in the Miami area.
nbc6.net