Vagueness of alert leaves travelers frustrated
Authorities don’t want to unnecessarily panic the public
By SCOTT SHANE
The State Department travel alert issued on Sunday in response to reports of a threat by Al Qaeda was anything but precise.Where is the threat? Europe. What is the target? Subways, railways, aircraft, ships or any “tourist infrastructure.”
What should Americans in Europe do? “Be aware of their surroundings” and “adopt appropriate safety measures to protect themselves when traveling,” the department advised.
More world news Pakistan: Dozens of Europeans in terror training
Dozens of Muslim militants with European citizenship are believed to be hiding out in the lawless tribal area of northwestern Pakistan, Pakistani and Western intelligence officials say. Full story
U.S. warns of potential terror attacks in Europe NYT: Alert vagueness leaves travelers frustrated French terrorism suspect arrested in Italy NYT: Drug smugglers burrow on the border The alert’s vagueness, issued after days of discussion inside the Obama administration, embodied the dilemma for the authorities in the United States and Europe over how to publicize a threat that intelligence analysts call credible but not specific.
Biodiversity 100: actions for the Americas
Preservation of rainforest dominates in South America, plus the threatened woodland caribou in Canada and vaquita in Mexico
Guillaume Chapron, Christine Ottery, Tim Holmes and James Randerson guardian.co.uk, Monday 4 October 2010 00.05 BST
Description: Argentina’s milestone Ley de Bosques (Forest Law) was passed in 2007, was one of the first national laws to set minimum standards of use of natural resources, largely in response to the rapid expansion of soy bean crops. However, the northern provinces of Argentina have been slow to implement the law in full. Hastily authorised, as well as illegal, forest clearings still threaten valuable corridors of native forest and their incredible biodiversity including jaguars, giant armadillos and Chacoan peccaries (which resemble hairy jungle pigs). Without proper implementation of the forest law, vast swathes of forest will be lost in the coming decades.
USA
Parties’ economic plans: Blame the other guys
As time before midterms draws short, lots of charges but few solutions
By TOM RAUM
WASHINGTON – If you don’t like the economy, blame President Barack Obama and Democrats because they’re making times tougher, Republicans are telling voters entering the four-week homestretch to an election the GOP hopes will return the party to power in Congress.Look, Democrats say, it’s the Republicans who caused the financial meltdown and recession. Do you want them to do it again? As bad as high unemployment, record home foreclosures and bankruptcies are, they’d be worse if the GOP had succeeded in blocking financial and auto industry bailouts and Obama’s stimulus plan, Democrats claim.
Interest-group spending for midterm up fivefold from 2006; many sources secret
By T.W. Farnamand Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, October 4, 2010; 12:09 AM
Interest groups are spending five times as much on the 2010 congressional elections as they did on the last midterms, and they are more secretive than ever about where that money is coming from.
The $80 million spent so far by groups outside the Democratic and Republican parties dwarfs the $16 million spent at this point for the 2006 midterms. In that election, the vast majority of money – more than 90 percent – was disclosed along with donors’ identities. This year, that figure has fallen to less than half of the total, according to data analyzed by The Washington Post.The trends amount to a spending frenzy conducted largely in the shadows.
Europe
Outsiders: The trouble with the Roma
Europe’s most persecuted minority has become the subject of increasingly draconian laws. But recent treatment of the Roma shames our continent, argues Peter Popham
Monday, 4 October 2010
This Thursday, in a hall in the Council of Europe’s headquarters in Strasbourg, a group of academics, government advisers and gypsy representatives will get together to discuss the next steps in a pan-European project entitled “The Decade of Roma Inclusion, 2005 to 2015”.The idea of the “decade”, according to its authors, is to “improve the socio-economic status and social inclusion of Roma”. The next phase will see Romanies stepping forward in museums and other institutions in Britain, Greece, Germany and Slovenia and talking about their culture, “getting people to talk to them and get to know them, to get rid of some of the fear,” as one of the organisers puts it.
Preliminary results show Bosnians divided on vote
Preliminary election results released on Sunday indicate that Bosnia’s three-person presidency will remain deadlocked over the nation’s future, with two leaders of the ethnically divided country advocating unity and a third pushing for the country’s break-up.
Published: 12:35AM BST 04 Oct 2010
Some three million voters in a country uneasily split between Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats had the choice of 8,000 candidates for the central parliament, several regional parliaments, the Bosnian Serb presidency and the federal presidency, which is shared among the three ethnicities.With half the votes counted shortly before midnight, the Croat and Bosniak seats in the presidency were likely to be won by strong supporters of a unified Bosnia, the electoral commission said. Leading for the Serb seat was a candidate advocating separation of Bosnian Serbs from the rest of the country.
Middle East
Israeli PM ignoring all real issues in talks, sources say
The Irish Times – Monday, October 4, 2010
MICHAEL JANSEN
ISRAELI PRIME minister Binyamin Netanyahu has refused to address substantive issues during three sessions of direct talks with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, an Israeli newspaper has reported.Instead, he limited discussion to the conduct of negotiations and Israel’s partial curb on settlement building in the West Bank.
Quoting unidentified western diplomatic sources, the Israeli liberal daily Haaretz reported yesterday that Mr Netanyahu “refuses to present fundamental positions or discuss the borders of the[ future] Palestinian state”.
Asia
Ahmed Wali Karzai: ‘The stories are very hurtful. The only thing I haven’t been accused of is prostitution’
If you believe his critics, Ahmed Wali Karzai is a corrupt gangster who has allowed the Taliban to flourish but remains untouchable because he is the President’s brother. But, in a rare interview, he tells Kim Sengupta that his hands are clean
Monday, 4 October 2010
Ahmed Wali Karzai has a letter to prove that he is not a drug trafficker with a private army who runs Kandahar in the manner of a Mafia don. “It has taken years to get this, but here it is, and it shows that these accusations against me are false, baseless,” he declared.The letter from the US Drugs Enforcement Agency gives an assurance, Mr Karzai told The Independent, that he is not the subject of narcotics investigations. It will be made public in Kabul at a press conference in the near future by his half-brother, the Afghan President. “Then, perhaps, all these stories, which are very hurtful, will stop. I have been accused of so many things that I have begun to forget them. The only thing I have not been accused of so far is prostitution.”
Maoists on the rise in lopsided economy
FORTUNES OF INDIA: Dispossessed villagers have an open ear for left-wing extremism, writes Mary Fitzgerald in Chhattisgarh
The Irish Times – Monday, October 4, 2010
RAMESH WAS an illiterate teenage orphan when he joined the ragtag army that came to his village preaching Maoist revolution. During his years in the jungle he learned to read, write, and fire a gun.Ramesh says he left his cadre only because he wanted to start a family with a fellow Maoist. The couple now live quietly with their young daughter not far from where, in April, their former comrades ambushed and killed almost 80 paramilitaries – the deadliest attack in a dirty war fought out far from the high-tech companies and Bollywood glamour of boom India.
Africa
A trucker explains how foreign hauliers and officials prey on South African operators, writes Paul Ash
‘Have you pimped my truck?” Andre van Huyssteen roars into his cellphone. “I want a furry dashboard and a gold tissue box, so I can compete on rates.” Then he laughs.
By Paul Ash
Van Huyssteen, owner of Boksburg trucking company Vanito Trading, is a plain speaker and tells you straight that Africa is not for sissies.On any day, one of his five rigs is crawling along the road between Johannesburg and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), with a grader, bulldozer or cement-mixer chained on the back.
One of his trucks is there now, on a roadside south of Lubumbashi. He knows this even before his driver calls to tell him as the truck has a satellite tracker that he monitors during a journey.
Latin America
Brazil presidential elections head for second-round
Dilma Rousseff may have fallen just short of becoming country’s first woman leader
Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro The Guardian, Monday 4 October 2010
Brazil looked to have fallen short of electing its first female president last night, with Dilma Rousseff appearing to have to go into to a second round run-off.With 90% of votes counted, Rousseff had in the region of 46%; to win outright she would have needed more than 50%. One “well-placed” source within the Rousseff camp told Reuters there was “no way” she would take the first round, although Rouseff, a former guerrilla, had the backing of the retiring president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Recent Comments