Palestinian PM and cabinet resign
The Palestinian prime minister and cabinet today resigned following what appeared to be a dramatic election win for Hamas.
Results are not due until this evening, but a senior official for Fatah – the formerly dominant force in Palestinian politics – conceded that the party had lost its majority in parliament.
Fatah later rejected participation in a coalition with Hamas – a move that will make peacemaking in the region more difficult.
“Let Hamas alone bear its responsibilities, if it can,” Ziyad Abu Ein, a Fatah official, told Reuters.
Polls had predicted a Hamas-Fatah coalition as the most likely outcome of the vote, but officials from both parties give Hamas between 70 and 75 MPs in the 132-seat parliament as constituency results came in.
As he announced his resignation, the prime minister, Ahmed Qureia, said the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, would have to ask Hamas to form the next government. “This is the choice of the people. It should be respected,” he said.
Great headline, guys. As the losers, they are obliged to resign.
US Orders Syria To Do the Impossible
Is there a person anywhere in the world who still thinks there is an ounce of sanity in the Bush administration? If so, let that person read John Bolton’s orders to Syria in the January 24 online edition of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Bolton is Bush’s unconfirmed ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton, a neoconservative warmonger, has managed to get the UN Security Council on January 23 to instruct Syria to disband and disarm the Lebanese militias. Bolton says, “I hope in Damascus they read it very carefully and then comply.”
How is Syria to meet this demand?
Last year Syria complied with US demands to withdraw its troops from Lebanon. As Syria has no military presence in Lebanon, it could not disarm a local police force, much less the Shia militias that defeated the Israeli army and drove it out of Lebanon and that have representatives in the Lebanese parliament.
After three years and unimaginable expense, the superpower American military has proved that it cannot disarm the recently formed Iraqi militias. Yet, the idiot Bolton thinks puny Syria can disarm the Lebanese militias that defeated the brutal Israeli army!
Bolton: Bush won’t tolerate nuclear Iran
…According to Bolton, Bush worries that a nuclear-equipped Iran under its current leadership could well engage in a nuclear holocaust, “and that is just not something he is going to accept.”
US military ‘at breaking point’
The US military has become dangerously overstretched because of the scale of its operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, two reports have warned.
One, by former officials in the Clinton administration, said the pressure of repeated deployments was very corrosive and could have long-term effects.
The second, ordered by the Pentagon and yet to be released, reportedly calls the army “stretched to breaking point”.
The US defence secretary dismissed the claims as out of date or misdirected.
Audit Describes Misuse of Funds in Iraq Projects
01/25/06 “New York Times” — — A new audit of American financial practices in Iraq has uncovered irregularities including millions of reconstruction dollars stuffed casually into footlockers and filing cabinets, an American soldier in the Philippines who gambled away cash belonging to Iraq, and three Iraqis who plunged to their deaths in a rebuilt hospital elevator that had been improperly certified as safe.
The audit, released yesterday by the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, expands on its previous findings of fraud, incompetence and confusion as the American occupation poured money into training and rebuilding programs in 2003 and 2004. The audit uncovers problems in an area that includes half the land mass in Iraq, with new findings in the southern and central provinces of Anbar, Karbala, Najaf, Wasit, Babil, and Qadisiya. The special inspector reports to the secretary of defense and the secretary of state.
Agents from the inspector general’s office found that the living and working quarters of American occupation officials were awash in shrink-wrapped stacks of $100 bills, colloquially known as bricks.
One official kept $2 million in a bathroom safe, another more than half a million dollars in an unlocked footlocker. One contractor received more than $100,000 to completely refurbish an Olympic pool but only polished the pumps; even so, local American officials certified the work as completed. More than 2,000 contracts ranging in value from a few thousand dollars to more than half a million, some $88 million in all, were examined by agents from the inspector general’s office. The report says that in some cases the agents found clear indications of potential fraud and that investigations into those cases are continuing.