Anglo-saxon news dump
A whizz around the Brit-press
"Hey, let's keep an eye out for the bus with no flag"
ANGER AS US DROPS CUP FLAG
THE bus carrying the United States football team in the World Cup will not carry the Stars and Stripes flag because of fears of an al-Qaeda attack.
The other 31 teams taking part in the tournament will have huge flags painted on their coaches which will transport them from their hotels to practices, games and airports.
German officials liaised with the US Embassy and it was agreed that it would be "sensible" for the American team to be low profile.
The decision has sparked anger in the States.
More than 95 percent of people in polls insisted that the Stars and Stripes should go on the bus.
All other nations, including England, Poland and Spain which have supported the Iraq war, have their national flags painted on the sides of the buses.
All the team coaches will be escorted by police.
Meanwhile, hotel owners in Germany are furious after FIFA cancelled 3000 bookings.
Football's governing body said they had booked too many rooms for VIPs, sponsors and guests.
Daily_record
Goooood mornin' iraqinaaaaam
Basra on the brink of exploding
Deadly attack on helicopter and violent riots show threat facing British forces is escalating in southern Iraq.
The shooting down of the British military helicopter in Basra yesterday and the violent rioting that followed were grim reminders of the fragility of the security situation in southern Iraq.
Although the region has escaped much of the daily mayhem of the Sunni areas of the country, the time has long gone since it was portrayed as a model of reconstruction. Once the British may have been out of this firing line and seen by the Shia population of the south as "liberators". Now the picture is very different.
The attack on the helicopter is a racheting up of the threat facing the UK forces. British commanders had drastically restricted movements by road after a series of deaths caused by sophisticated bombs allegedly supplied by Iran. Transport by air was adopted as a far safer option ....
The_Indy
That's a surprise
Iran Threatens to Quit Nuclear Treaty
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - The Iranian parliament threatened Sunday to force the government to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty if the United States continues pressuring Tehran to suspend uranium enrichment.
In a letter to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan read on state-run radio, the lawmakers said they would consider forcing the withdrawal if ``the U.N. Secretary General and other members of the U.N. Security Council fail in their crucial responsibility to resolve differences peacefully.''
The legislators said they would have no choice but to ``review Article 10 of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.'' The article allows signatories to pull out of the treaty if they decide that extraordinary events have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country.
A withdrawing nation must give fellow treaty signers and the U.N. three months notice and detail the events that have forced the decision to pullout of the agreement...
The_Observer
It's the Midas touch, but in reverse
Ministers' anger derails Blair bid to relaunch government
Loyalist quits in fury at health cuts
Anger over Hoon, Straw demotions
Brown set for talks
Tonly Blair's relaunch of his beleaguered government was thrown off course last night after it was revealed that one senior minister had quit over controversial NHS reforms - and that a second came close to resigning.
Jane Kennedy, a long-standing loyalist who was thought to have been sacked from the government in Friday's dramatic reshuffle, disclosed that she left the Department of Health on grounds of conscience following fears about the impact on children's hospitals of changes to NHS finances.
And it emerged that Geoff Hoon, the former Leader of the Commons, threatened to resign after discovering the job he believed he had been promised in the reshuffle had been downgraded.
He accepted the post of Europe Minister only late yesterday, more than 24 hours after the reshuffle began...
The_Observer
Over The Pond
I like the 'vote now' tab at the top ov their web Page - no room for ambiguity.
Spies Among Us
Despite a troubled history, police across the nation are keeping tabs on ordinary Americans
In the Atlanta suburbs of DeKalb County, local officials wasted no time after the 9/11 attacks. The second-most-populous county in Georgia, the area is home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FBI's regional headquarters, and other potential terrorist targets.
Within weeks of the attacks, officials there boasted that they had set up the nation's first local department of homeland security.
Dozens of other communities followed, and, like them, DeKalb County put in for--and got--a series of generous federal counterterrorism grants.
The county received nearly $12 million from Washington, using it to set up, among other things, a police intelligence unit.
The outfit stumbled in 2002, when two of its agents were assigned to follow around the county executive.
Their job: to determine whether he was being tailed--not by al Qaeda but by a district attorney investigator looking into alleged misspending. A year later, one of its plainclothes agents was seen photographing a handful of vegan activists handing out antimeat leaflets in front of a HoneyBaked Ham store.
Police arrested two of the vegans and demanded that they turn over notes, on which they'd written the license-plate number of an undercover car, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is now suing the county.
An Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial neatly summed up the incident: "So now we know: Glazed hams are safe in DeKalb County." (there's more)
USNEWS
Are we approaching a 'wag the dog' moment ?
Pollster Suggests Bush Moves Might Be Too Little, Too Late
The recent White House shake-up was an attempt to jump-start the administration and boost President Bush's rock-bottom approval ratings, but have those efforts come too late to salvage the presidency? A prominent GOP pollster thinks that may be the case.
"This administration may be over," Lance Tarrance, a chief architect of the Republicans' 1960s and '70s Southern strategy, told a gathering of journalists and political wonks last week.
"By and large, if you want to be tough about it, the relevancy of this administration on policy may be over."
A new poll by RT Strategies, the firm headed by Tarrance and Democratic pollster Thomas Riehle, shows that 59 percent of Americans disapprove of Bush's job performance, while 36 percent approve -- a finding in line with other recent polls.... (more good news at the link)
Wapo
"Hey, let's keep an eye out for the bus with no flag"
ANGER AS US DROPS CUP FLAG
THE bus carrying the United States football team in the World Cup will not carry the Stars and Stripes flag because of fears of an al-Qaeda attack.
The other 31 teams taking part in the tournament will have huge flags painted on their coaches which will transport them from their hotels to practices, games and airports.
German officials liaised with the US Embassy and it was agreed that it would be "sensible" for the American team to be low profile.
The decision has sparked anger in the States.
More than 95 percent of people in polls insisted that the Stars and Stripes should go on the bus.
All other nations, including England, Poland and Spain which have supported the Iraq war, have their national flags painted on the sides of the buses.
All the team coaches will be escorted by police.
Meanwhile, hotel owners in Germany are furious after FIFA cancelled 3000 bookings.
Football's governing body said they had booked too many rooms for VIPs, sponsors and guests.
Daily_record
Goooood mornin' iraqinaaaaam
Basra on the brink of exploding
Deadly attack on helicopter and violent riots show threat facing British forces is escalating in southern Iraq.
The shooting down of the British military helicopter in Basra yesterday and the violent rioting that followed were grim reminders of the fragility of the security situation in southern Iraq.
Although the region has escaped much of the daily mayhem of the Sunni areas of the country, the time has long gone since it was portrayed as a model of reconstruction. Once the British may have been out of this firing line and seen by the Shia population of the south as "liberators". Now the picture is very different.
The attack on the helicopter is a racheting up of the threat facing the UK forces. British commanders had drastically restricted movements by road after a series of deaths caused by sophisticated bombs allegedly supplied by Iran. Transport by air was adopted as a far safer option ....
The_Indy
That's a surprise
Iran Threatens to Quit Nuclear Treaty
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - The Iranian parliament threatened Sunday to force the government to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty if the United States continues pressuring Tehran to suspend uranium enrichment.
In a letter to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan read on state-run radio, the lawmakers said they would consider forcing the withdrawal if ``the U.N. Secretary General and other members of the U.N. Security Council fail in their crucial responsibility to resolve differences peacefully.''
The legislators said they would have no choice but to ``review Article 10 of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.'' The article allows signatories to pull out of the treaty if they decide that extraordinary events have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country.
A withdrawing nation must give fellow treaty signers and the U.N. three months notice and detail the events that have forced the decision to pullout of the agreement...
The_Observer
It's the Midas touch, but in reverse
Ministers' anger derails Blair bid to relaunch government
Loyalist quits in fury at health cuts
Anger over Hoon, Straw demotions
Brown set for talks
Tonly Blair's relaunch of his beleaguered government was thrown off course last night after it was revealed that one senior minister had quit over controversial NHS reforms - and that a second came close to resigning.
Jane Kennedy, a long-standing loyalist who was thought to have been sacked from the government in Friday's dramatic reshuffle, disclosed that she left the Department of Health on grounds of conscience following fears about the impact on children's hospitals of changes to NHS finances.
And it emerged that Geoff Hoon, the former Leader of the Commons, threatened to resign after discovering the job he believed he had been promised in the reshuffle had been downgraded.
He accepted the post of Europe Minister only late yesterday, more than 24 hours after the reshuffle began...
The_Observer
Over The Pond
I like the 'vote now' tab at the top ov their web Page - no room for ambiguity.
Spies Among Us
Despite a troubled history, police across the nation are keeping tabs on ordinary Americans
In the Atlanta suburbs of DeKalb County, local officials wasted no time after the 9/11 attacks. The second-most-populous county in Georgia, the area is home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FBI's regional headquarters, and other potential terrorist targets.
Within weeks of the attacks, officials there boasted that they had set up the nation's first local department of homeland security.
Dozens of other communities followed, and, like them, DeKalb County put in for--and got--a series of generous federal counterterrorism grants.
The county received nearly $12 million from Washington, using it to set up, among other things, a police intelligence unit.
The outfit stumbled in 2002, when two of its agents were assigned to follow around the county executive.
Their job: to determine whether he was being tailed--not by al Qaeda but by a district attorney investigator looking into alleged misspending. A year later, one of its plainclothes agents was seen photographing a handful of vegan activists handing out antimeat leaflets in front of a HoneyBaked Ham store.
Police arrested two of the vegans and demanded that they turn over notes, on which they'd written the license-plate number of an undercover car, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is now suing the county.
An Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial neatly summed up the incident: "So now we know: Glazed hams are safe in DeKalb County." (there's more)
USNEWS
Are we approaching a 'wag the dog' moment ?
Pollster Suggests Bush Moves Might Be Too Little, Too Late
The recent White House shake-up was an attempt to jump-start the administration and boost President Bush's rock-bottom approval ratings, but have those efforts come too late to salvage the presidency? A prominent GOP pollster thinks that may be the case.
"This administration may be over," Lance Tarrance, a chief architect of the Republicans' 1960s and '70s Southern strategy, told a gathering of journalists and political wonks last week.
"By and large, if you want to be tough about it, the relevancy of this administration on policy may be over."
A new poll by RT Strategies, the firm headed by Tarrance and Democratic pollster Thomas Riehle, shows that 59 percent of Americans disapprove of Bush's job performance, while 36 percent approve -- a finding in line with other recent polls.... (more good news at the link)
Wapo
posted by Damiel | 9:59 PM
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