Indian IT looks beyond Bangalore

http://news.com.com/Indias+IT+sector+looks+beyond+Bangalore/2100-1022_3-6180327.htmlCHANDIGARH, India--Fed up with traffic snarls and scarred roads, a software engineer in India's flagship IT hub of Bangalore took to the streets in protest last year--doodling on his laptop while trotti



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Poor George Tenet; He Still Doesn't Get It

Tenet's apologetic speech



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Fake encounter police murders in India: Top cops sent to police remand

Fake kills: Top cops sent to police remandApril 25, 2007: The three IPS (very senior police) officials, arrested on Tuesday for their alleged role in the fake encounter case,�were on Wednesday remanded to police custody till May one.D G Vanjhara, (Deputy Inspector General Gujarat Border Range), R K Pandian



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Sunday: 3 GIs, 102 Iraqis Killed; 166 Iraqis Wounded

US Casualties mount in IRAQ



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What was the U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney doing during his recent visit

What was the U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney doing during his recent visit to Saudi Arabia?Last weekend, Vice President Dick Cheney went on an official visit to Saudi Arabia, purportedly to discuss a “range of regional issues,” among which is the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, as stated Cheney's spokeswoman.



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Shock, Sympathy And Denunciation Of U.S. Gun Laws

The Virginia Tech shootings received extensive news coverage around the world Monday, leading many to question how such violence could keep happening in the United States. The Daily Mail's headline in the UK asked, "What price the right to bear arms?" Australian Prime Minister John Howard on Tuesday decried the "gun culture" in America.



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Surge: Violence unabated in Iraq: 312 Iraqis, 1 GI Killed; 302 Wounded

The whole 'Surge' episode looks like a cruel joke being played on the Iraqi people by desperate US politicians.It is time US admit defeat and quit Iraq.



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US cannot be trusted to act responsibly in the world: global poll

There is widespread global concern that the United States cannot be trusted to act responsibly in the world, according to a multinational poll released here Wednesday.



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Monday: 6 GIs, 69 Iraqis Killed; 39 Iraqis Wounded

War casualties continue to mount.



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U.S. helicopters crash in Iraq; 2 dead

By HAMID AHMED, Associated Press Writer 23 minutes ago

Two car bombs exploded five minutes apart in a busy Baghdad market in a mainly Shiite district Sunday, killing at least 18 people and wounding 50, while north of the capital, two U.S. helicopters crashed after an apparent collision in the air. Two soldiers were killed and five wounded, the military said.

The bombing in the southwest Baghdad market opened Sunday's renewal of sectarian carnage a day after a bomb killed at least 37 people and wounded more than 150 near a bus station and market close to one of Shiite Islam's holiest shrines in Karbala.

The two American helicopters crashed after an apparent collision 12 miles north of Baghdad.

"An investigation will be conducted to determine the cause of the incident; however, initial reports indicated it appears to be from a mid-air collision and not the result of enemy fire," the military said in a statement.

A suicide bomber also struck in Baghdad on Saturday, blowing up his car on a major bridge and killing 10 in the second such attack in 48 hours.

Chaotic arguing erupted in Iraq's legislature during its Saturday session, with the parliament speaker shouting for order as lawmakers squabbled over who was to blame for holes in security that allowed a suicide bomber to mingle among them Thursday and kill a Sunni Arab lawmaker.

The political wrangling underlined the continuing weakness of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government despite a more than 2-month-old U.S.-Iraqi military operation intended to pacify Baghdad and give his regime room to function.

The crackdown, which will land 30,000 additional American troops in Iraq by the end of next month, comes as opposition to the strategy grows in Washington and emerges as a central issue in the U.S. presidential campaign.

A possible presidential contender and one of the most vocal Republican critics of President Bush's Iraq policy, Sen. Chuck Hagel (news, bio, voting record) of Nebraska, was in Baghdad and planned to hold a news conference here Sunday. It was his fifth trip to the war zone.

In an interview broadcast Saturday, al-Maliki said he believed U.S. support for his administration was steadfast.

"I feel that there is strong support because success would mean a civilized and democratic process," he told Al-Arabiya television. "I don't feel any change ... despite differences within the American government."

The crackdown also brought a Pentagon decision this past week to extend the deployments of U.S. troops from 12 to 15 months — a situation that the U.S. commander in Iraq acknowledged Saturday was "tough news."

In a letter to his troops, Gen. David Petraeus expressed appreciation for "the hardship and strain the extension will put on you and your families," and he warned of "an enormous amount of hard work ahead."

In addition to the bombings in Karbala and Baghdad, at least 40 people were killed or found dead across Iraq on Saturday. The U.S. military announced the death of one service member, killed Friday by a roadside bomb in southern Iraq.

Saturday's bloodshed in Karbala came when a parked car loaded with explosives blew up at a busy bus station at midmorning, killing at least 37 people and wounding 168, police and hospital officials said. Other reports put the death toll as high as 56.

The station is about 200 yards from one of Shiite Muslims' holiest spots — the Imam Hussein shrine, where the Prophet Muhammad's grandson is buried. The shrine, 50 miles south of Baghdad, is the destination of an annual Shiite pilgrimage, during which hundreds of faithful were slain last month.

A makeshift triage center was set up in tents near the blast site. A man guided a wooden cart piled with body parts through a tangle of IV bags. The charred body of a child lay motionless on a stretcher.

At least 16 children were among the dead, said Interior Ministry spokesman, Brig. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf. Iranian and Pakistani pilgrims were also among the casualties, hospital officials said.

"I want my father. Where is my father?" cried Sajad Kadhim, an 11-year-old lying on the ground as doctors treated his burns.

"All I remember was we were shopping. My father was holding my hand and suddenly there was a big explosion. I don't know where my father is. I want my father," the boy cried.

Mourners swarmed ambulances, beating their chests and crying out in grief. Some stormed the Karbala governor's office, demanding his resignation and blaming local authorities for lax security. Two police vehicles were set afire.

A spokesman for a top Shiite cleric in Karbala, Mohammed Taqi al-Mudarsi, said three civilians were killed in clashes with police.

"The behavior of Iraqi security forces was uncivil," said the spokesman, Ahmed Al-Shakarji. "People were trying to rescue their relatives and friends ... but the security forces opened fire on them."

The suicide car bombing in Baghdad killed 10 people, police said. The concrete structure of the Jadriyah bridge sustained little damage.

On Thursday, a suicide truck bomb collapsed the steel-girder al-Sarafiyah bridge farther north along the Tigris River, plunging cars into the water and killing 11 people.

Parliament convened a regular session a day after an emergency meeting was held to express defiance to insurgents and mourn those wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up in the assembly's cafeteria Thursday.

But Saturday's session descended quickly into chaos and angry recriminations. Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani said his office took "full responsibility" for Thursday's security breach, but he reminded legislators that some of them have refused to be searched when entering the building.

Khalaf, the Interior Ministry spokesman, told reporters that the bomber was known to legislators and that they identified his body after the explosion. He did not elaborate. Media speculation has fallen on workers in the building or a lawmaker's bodyguard.

A group with links to al-Qaida posted a Web statement Saturday claiming to have kidnapped 20 Iraqi soldiers to avenge the alleged rape of a woman by police. The Islamic State of Iraq threatened to kill the hostages unless the government handed over the alleged rapists within 48 hours.

The statement was accompanied by color photographs showing 20 blindfolded men in uniform. The claim and photos could not be independently verified, and there were no reports of kidnappings Saturday.

Six Steps to Avoiding Foreclosure

If you're a homeowner and are having trouble paying your mortgage, this article could save your house and your family's finances.



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4 Years After Hussein's Fall, Regret in Iraq

BAGHDAD, April 8 -- In a garage filled with classic motorcycles, Khadim al-Jubouri stared at the four-year-old magazines he usually keeps tucked inside a wooden desk. All of them contained photographs of a lone, burly man wearing a black tank top and swinging a sledgehammer into the base of a tall, bronze statue of Saddam Hussein. The man was Juba



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Sunday: 11 GIs, 73 Iraqis Killed; 95 Iraqis Wounded

11 US Armed Forces personnel killed in 24 hours. 'Yet Bush' continues to talk of Siege working. Is the 'siege' working for the forces fighting US? Is that what he means.



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Four years after invasion: Press united over Iraq 'tragedy'

Four years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, press opinion across the Middle East is united in its condemnation of the invasion of Iraq as an unmitigated disaster.Most commentators accuse US President George W Bush and his allies of turning the country into a "republic of real fear".



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Why Iraqis are against US Occupation: Insider: Missteps soured Iraqis on U.S.

Insider: Missteps soured Iraqis on U.S.

By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent1 hour, 1 minute ago

In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation's "shocking" mismanagement of his country — a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had "turned their backs on their would-be liberators."

"The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order," Ali A. Allawi concludes in "The Occupation of Iraq," newly published by Yale University Press.

Allawi writes with authority as a member of that "new order," having served as Iraq's trade, defense and finance minister at various times since 2003. As a former academic, at Oxford University before the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, he also writes with unusual detachment.

The U.S.- and British-educated engineer and financier is the first senior Iraqi official to look back at book length on his country's four-year ordeal. It's an unsparing look at failures both American and Iraqi, an account in which the word "ignorance" crops up repeatedly.

First came the "monumental ignorance" of those in Washington pushing for war in 2002 without "the faintest idea" of Iraq's realities. "More perceptive people knew instinctively that the invasion of Iraq would open up the great fissures in Iraqi society," he writes.

What followed was the "rank amateurism and swaggering arrogance" of the occupation, under L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which took big steps with little consultation with Iraqis, steps Allawi and many others see as blunders:

• The Americans disbanded Iraq's army, which Allawi said could have helped quell a rising insurgency in 2003. Instead, hundreds of thousands of demobilized, angry men became a recruiting pool for the resistance.

• Purging tens of thousands of members of toppled President Saddam Hussein's Baath party — from government, school faculties and elsewhere — left Iraq short on experienced hands at a crucial time.

• An order consolidating decentralized bank accounts at the Finance Ministry bogged down operations of Iraq's many state-owned enterprises.

• The CPA's focus on private enterprise allowed the "commercial gangs" of Saddam's day to monopolize business.

• Its free-trade policy allowed looted Iraqi capital equipment to be spirited away across borders.

• The CPA perpetuated Saddam's fuel subsidies, selling gasoline at giveaway prices and draining the budget.

In his 2006 memoir of the occupation, Bremer wrote that senior U.S. generals wanted to recall elements of the old Iraqi army in 2003, but were rebuffed by the Bush administration. Bremer complained generally that his authority was undermined by Washington's "micromanagement."

Although Allawi, a cousin of Ayad Allawi, Iraq's prime minister in 2004, is a member of a secularist Shiite Muslim political grouping, his well-researched book betrays little partisanship.

On U.S. reconstruction failures — in electricity, health care and other areas documented by Washington's own auditors — Allawi writes that the Americans' "insipid retelling of `success' stories" merely hid "the huge black hole that lay underneath."

For their part, U.S. officials have often largely blamed Iraq's explosive violence for the failures of reconstruction and poor governance.

The author has been instrumental since 2005 in publicizing extensive corruption within Iraq's "new order," including an $800-million Defense Ministry scandal. Under Saddam, he writes, the secret police kept would-be plunderers in check better than the U.S. occupiers have done.

As 2007 began, Allawi concludes, "America's only allies in Iraq were those who sought to manipulate the great power to their narrow advantage. It might have been otherwise."

Retirement destinations: South East Asia the hot spot

The Perfect Place

by Steve Mollman
Friday, April 6, 2007provided by

If there were a better place to spend their retirement years, Harold and Mary Richards would have found it.

The British retirees surveyed the globe, drawing upon their years of living outside the United Kingdom for his career in education. They considered overlooked spots such as Croatia and Bulgaria. They even gave promising contenders a chance, first trying out South Africa and then Spain.

Ultimately, they picked Phuket, an island on Thailand's west coast blessed with sunshine, tranquility and friendly people. The price of entry also worked in their favor: For about $500,000, they got a four-bedroom luxury villa with a private pool, courtyard and garden. They figure that's less than half what it would have cost in similar spots in most European countries.

"This is a palace," Mr. Richards declares, surveying his new home. "What more could a man want?"

The Richardses aren't the only retirees from abroad happily settling into Southeast Asia. More people from around the world are coming to the region, drawn by word of mouth, incentives from regional governments vying for retirement nest eggs, and affordable living, including housing and relatively inexpensive medical care.

"Retirees everywhere are taking a very close look at the relative quality and cost of living in deciding where to spend their retirement years," says Su-yen Wong, a managing director for Mercer Human Resource Consulting in Singapore. "Much of the Southeast Asian region scores particularly favorably in the analysis."

According to Mercer's 2006 cost-of-living study, Kuala Lumpur ranked 114th out of 144 cities, while Bangkok was 127th and Manila came in at number 141. By comparison, Seoul, Tokyo and Hong Kong ranked as the second, third, and fourth costliest places (behind Moscow), while London and New York were in the top 10. Sydney was the 19th most expensive city, Madrid ranked 53rd and Monterrey in Mexico was 103.

While the overall number of overseas retirees in Southeast Asia is still small, it's growing fast. Malaysia, for instance, started issuing retirement visas in 1996. By 1998, there were fewer than 50 holders of such visas. But by 2001, the total had grown to more than 800 and last year topped 8,700, excluding dependents. Malaysia aims to add 3,000 to 3,500 retirement visas annually over the next three years under its Malaysia My Second Home program, says Donald Lim, the country's deputy minister of tourism.

Thailand doesn't have an official retirement program in place, but the number of retirement visas is climbing there, too. In 2005, Thai officials say nearly 1,500 visas were granted to overseas retirees. The final tally isn't in yet for 2006, but they say it will show a big increase.

The Philippines, meanwhile, has revved up its recruiting efforts as a matter of national priority. The number of overseas retirees rose by 1,273 last year, more than double the previous year's total. The number of active retirement visa holders totaled 5,183 at the end of 2006, excluding dependents.

"We aim to have one million retirees here by 2015," says Ernesto M. Ordonez, president of Philippine Retirement Inc., a nonprofit organization that helps foster cooperation between private companies and the government's Philippine Retirement Authority, which processes visas for retirees.

With that ambitious goal -- and the competition -- in mind, the Philippines is making a systematic effort to attract retirees from abroad. In January it halved the size of the local bank deposit it requires retirees to make to prove their financial viability -- this after Thailand stopped requiring any deposit from retirees as long as they can demonstrate a monthly pension of about $2,000. The Philippines now requires a $10,000 deposit, which covers the retiree and any dependents, providing retirees can show a monthly pension of $800 for a single person or $1,000 for a couple.

The latest cut followed a previous halving of the deposit requirement, which is partly credited for a surge in the number of retirees in 2006, says Lory Morgia, the retirement authority's marketing chief.

The good news for these countries is that the pool of potential retirees keeps expanding. The retiree population -- defined as age 60 and above -- from the U.S., Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and mainland China totaled 326.6 million people in 2006, according to the Healthcare Coalition Institute, a California-based industry research group. That figure should reach 425.6 million by 2015, the institute predicts. In Japan alone, nearly seven million people are set to turn 60 and retire over the next three years, according to Japan's National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.

Indeed, says Liam Bailey, head of residential research at real-estate services company Knight Frank LLP in London, the biggest potential source of overseas retirees for Southeast Asia is Asians retiring near their home countries. Most Americans and Europeans, he notes, will naturally stick to areas closer to home, such as the Caribbean and southern Europe respectively. "They want to be able to get back to their home country easily. It's sort of convenience-led."

Likewise, Mr. Bailey says, most Asian retirees will prefer to stick to their region. "We haven't really begun to see the impact of, say, wealthy India and China money, and second-home purchases in Asia. It will become enormous," he says.

Already, Malaysia is benefiting from the growing middle class in China. Lai Shevren, a spokeswoman in Kuala Lumpur for the Malaysian retirement program, notes that the largest single group of retirement visa holders -- about 2,000 -- are mainland Chinese. She says one attraction is that many of them have relatives in Malaysia.

"If we could capture even less than 1% of (the global retiree) market, it would benefit our economy hugely," says the Philippines's Mr. Ordonez. "We believe that every retiree who comes will create four jobs -- such as maids, cooks, drivers, nurses and caregivers, barbers and hairdressers. If every retiree spends an average of $1,000 a month, we will bring in revenue of $1 billion a month as well as creating four million jobs." The strategy is partly aimed at helping reverse the country's troubling brain drain of skilled workers such as doctors and nurses, he adds.

(Australia is often viewed as a big regional retirement spot, but its immigration hurdles, including the financial requirements for a visa, are significantly higher than they are in Southeast Asia.)

Of course, the concept of retirement means different things to different people. And these days retirees come in an array of ages and family situations, from 60-something bachelors to 50-ish couples with school-age kids. Some want to resettle permanently in a location; others want to split their time between favored destinations.

Take Hong Kong businessman John Tam. He holds a retirement visa for Thailand, but the 58-year-old semi retired executive plans to live there only three or four months a year. He bought a villa on Phuket about two and half years ago with an eye toward retirement -- and investment. He and his wife Magdalena, 56, move between it and other homes they have in Shanghai (because of its liveliness), Beijing and Wuhan (for their culture and history), Bangkok (for the people and the food) and Hong Kong.

"I'm planning to split my time among several places," says Mr. Tam, who plans to leave his electronics-component distribution business when he turns 60. "I'm used to traveling a lot, so it would allow me to travel here and there, even in retirement."

Mr. Tam won't disclose his purchase price, but a realtor in Phuket says prices have climbed 30% annually over the past five years and she estimates the Tam home currently is worth about $2 million. (Parts of the island were damaged in the 2004 tsunami. But Mr. Tam says his villa is elevated and fronted by islands that act as a natural barrier; the neighborhood where the Richardses live was largely untouched.)

Billy and Marita Thomson, who recently purchased a retirement condo in the Philippines' Subic Bay area, site of a former U.S. naval base northwest of Manila, also plan to divide their time. They met there in the 1960s when Mr. Thomson, now 60, was a U.S. Marine. But, having lived in Alaska for the past 30 years, Mr. Thomson isn't about to give up his salmon fishing. So the couple plans to spend half the year in Alaska and half the year in the Philippines's warmer climate, where he enjoys swimming, snorkeling and scuba diving and she visits her family.

The Philippine government also is trying to lure back Filipinos who settled in the U.S. and are now reaching retirement age -- people like Pepito and Fina Raguini, aged 63 and 62 respectively, who grew up in the Philippines but have long lived in America where she worked as a nurse and he was in the U.S. Navy. Two years ago, they bought a two-bedroom unit at Subic Holiday Villas after a relative purchased one. Now they go there about twice a year for two or three months at a time and spend the rest of the year in their spacious home in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

"At least 50% of our condo sales" are to Filipinos living in the U.S., says John M. Reyna, assistant vice president for Robinsons Land Corp.'s leisure and retirement project. Starland Properties Inc., developer of Subic Holiday Villas, says that more than 80% of its buyers are Filipino Americans who divide their time between the two countries.

Others intend to make a more permanent move. Lee Hyeung Seock's physician in Seoul recommended he avoid the South Korean capital's polluted air because of a lung ailment. So Mr. Lee, 50, retired as an exporter of women's garments, applied for a Malaysian retirement visa and moved to Kuala Lumpur with his family last September. Being able to enroll his 10-year-old son in an American-style school is a bonus. "In Korea," Mr. Lee says, "there are only a few international schools."

For Kiyoshi Shiraiwa, 65, and his wife Yoko, 59, the bonus of retiring to Malaysia is golf. They pay about $425 each for annual membership at Kelab Golf Perkhidmatan Awam, a lush country club 10 minutes away by taxi from their Kuala Lumpur condo. They say that in Tokyo something equivalent would cost 10 times as much -- and be 90 minutes away. "We play golf twice a week," says Ms. Shiraiwa, looking as if she still can't believe it.

The couple rent their condo, which has a pool, tennis courts and gym, for about $575 a month; they estimate a similar set-up in Tokyo would cost more than $1,700. And the comforts of home -- including shops that cater to Japanese tastes -- aren't far away. "It's like a little Tokyo," beams Ms. Shiraiwa.

Jack Simon, a retired swimming coach from Florida, chose to settle on Penang, an island off Malaysia's northwest coast. The 68-year-old bachelor, who is fluent in Spanish, considered settling somewhere closer to home, such as Mexico, Ecuador, Uruguay or Chile. But he had attended a work conference in the region a few years back, and on a side trip to Penang was impressed by the island's food, friendliness, climate -- and low costs.

Mr. Simon describes Penang as "unbelievably inexpensive," noting he gets by mainly on his U.S. Social Security checks. He pays about $350 a month for a two-bedroom, two-bathroom condo that overlooks the Andaman Sea and is surrounded by tropical jungle. He plays golf frequently with friends, and dines out four or five times a week. A maid cleans for him once a week.

All told, Mr. Simon says he lives on less than $1,500 a month, adding that he could never enjoy his current lifestyle on the Florida coast spending the same amount.

Accessibility to good health care also influenced his decision to stay in Penang, Mr. Simon says. Not long after arriving, he had major spinal surgery at Island Hospital, a local private facility. That was followed by minor prostate surgery. "Medical care here is first rate," he says. Mr. Simon says he isn't insured, so he paid cash, and adds that the two procedures, including hospital stays and 24-hour home care, totaled less than $10,000. He figures his out-of-pocket expenses in the U.S., where much of the bill would have been covered by the government's Medicare program, would still have cost him two to three times more than he paid in Malaysia.

The low cost of living also drew Takeshi Yano, 63, and his wife, Junko, to Penang. "It's very, very hard to live in Japan with only a pension, so (retirees) are moving here," says the former cosmetics importer from Tokyo.

Mr. Yano, who says the couple didn't know anyone in Penang when they decided to move there, receives a monthly government pension of about $2,000 to $2,500, depending on the exchange rate. "I wanted to go to Europe or the U.S., but the basic idea is: Can we live with the pension or not?"

On Penang, he says, he manages by paying about $450 in monthly rent for a three-bedroom, sea-view apartment. Mr. Yano says he plays golf once a week and socializes with other Japanese retirees and expatriates, as well as Penang locals.

For some, though, the gain in lifestyle doesn't offset the loss of comfort zone. Mr. Yano says some of his acquaintances on Penang went back to Japan after a few months because they couldn't adjust. They didn't speak English -- almost everyone there does. They also didn't own a car, he says, plus Penang isn't pedestrian-friendly and doesn't have enough taxis -- and taxi drivers charge the Japanese more, he grouses.

Other things some people have difficulty adjusting to are the lack of seasons and the sometimes-oppressive heat and humidity. There's also, of course, the distance from family and friends. Security issues, too, are a major concern among overseas retirees.

Mikio Mori, 53, and his wife Etsuko, 42, considered resettling in the Philippines when Mr. Mori retired from a big Japanese oil company in Japan, but he says they worried about "no safety" in the Philippines, an image problem Philippine officials acknowledge but say doesn't reflect reality. Anticipating language difficulties in Thailand, the Moris opted for Kuala Lumpur, where they have a view of the Petronas Twin Towers from their high-rise apartment.

Then there's insurance. Because national healthcare coverage usually doesn't apply to a foreign retiree, medical expenses are out of pocket if the retiree isn't covered by private local insurance, which can be hard to obtain for anyone over 60.

Back in Thailand, the Richardses -- he is 81 and she is 79 -- are convinced they made the right decision. Married for 59 years, they spent all but five of those outside Britain. They are still settling into Phuket's lifestyle, having moved into their villa in November. But aside from minor annoyances, like having to renew his Thai retirement visa every 12 months, Mr. Richards says he has little to complain about.

"This seemed to be an ideal place to spend the rest of our lives," he says. "We settled here, and we have absolutely no regrets at all."

--Steve Mollman is an Asia-based writer. Ian Gill in Manila contributed to this article.

Write toSteve Mollman at steve.mollman@wsj.com

Stories about Iraq, Americans are not aware of

Stories about Iraq, Americans are not aware of

Stories about Iraq, Americans are not aware of

4/3/2007 4:15:00 PM GMT

Advertisement (Reuters Photo) Bodies of victims of violence are seen on the floor of a hospital morgue in Kirkuk As violence rages across Iraq, the U.S. refuses to admit that the situation has got out of its control, maintaining that the current quagmire is merely the result of the Shia-Sunni differences. Sami Rasouli, an Iraqi American who helped establish the Muslim Peacemaker Team, was a well-known restaurateur in Minneapolis. Rasouli has returned to his home country, Iraq, to help it recover from the war and U.S. occupation. In an interview with Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, Rasouli gives a different assessment of the situation in Iraq, contradicting that given by the Bush administration and the mainstream media. Amy Goodman began her interview with listing a number of attacks that ripped through Iraq in recent days as well as recently released figures about the civilian death toll among Iraqis. “At least eleven people have been killed and more than 90 injured after a suicide truck bomb attack in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk. Among the casualties were children from a nearby school. Meanwhile, two truck bombs exploded in Mosul Sunday, killing two people and wounding twenty-two,” she said. “In other violence, the bodies of nineteen men kidnapped at a fake checkpoint in Baghdad were found today. All had been shot in the head. Meanwhile, six U.S. soldiers were killed over the weekend in roadside bombings south of Baghdad. “The latest bloodshed comes a day after Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain paid a heavily guarded visit to Baghdad market. McCain said afterwards the American people were not being given the full picture of the progress being made in curbing violence in Baghdad. “Iraqi figures estimate civilian deaths in violence across the country rose 15% over February to more than 2,000. More than 600 Iraqis have been killed in the past week alone. Among them were at least 152 people killed in a suicide truck bombing in Tal Afar, the deadliest single attack since the invasion four years ago. Shia gunmen, including police, went on a revenge shooting rampage afterwards, killing at least forty-five Sunni men. “Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., Democrats in the House and Senate have pushed through war-funding bills that set timetables for withdrawing U.S. forces. The measures need to be reconciled before they’re sent to President Bush, who has promised to veto them. Amy asked Rasouli to comment on these latest figures as well as the recent attack in Tal Afar, “the worst attack -- having the worst casualties since the invasion of Iraq.” He replied saying: “Well, I heard Senator McCain talking about the progress, which I kept hearing this from the President and the rest of the administration’s officials in the last four years. But speaking about Tal Afar as an example, I was a member of Muslim Peacemakers Teams, among others, accompanied with Peggy Gish and Michele [Naar-Obed] from CPT, or the Christian Peacemakers Team -- this is sometime in January 2006 -- we visited the second Grand Ayatollah in Najaf, Sayed Mohammed Saeed al-Hakim, and he told us this story after we introduced ourselves as Peacemakers. He said Tal Afar is populated by all kind of people that form the beautiful mosaic formula of the Iraqi fabric society, which Sunnis beside Shias -- and by the way, I’m a Shia, and my wife is a Sunni, so this is a normal intermarriage in Iraq within the Iraqi society. “So, sometimes in September 2005, the people of Tal Afar faced heavy bombing from the U.S. air raids, and they had to leave the city seeking refuge. Those are families, women and children seeking refuge -- next city, which is Sinjar. And Sinjar is populated by Yezidis, and falsely known in Iraq as Satanic worshippers. And those Yezidis were ready to receive and offer refuge for the Sunnis and Shias who fled the city of Tal Afar, and they offered them homes, food, mattresses, other needs, and assured them that they would leave if they don't like them to be with them, because they held a different religion. So they left to stay with their relatives, the Yezidis, and allowed the Shias and Sunnis to stay in their homes until the crisis would be over in Tal Afar. “And since then -- actually since May 1, 2003, when the President announced major military operation combat was over -- they still in the state of fleeing their homes -- it's not only in Tal Afar -- across the country. There are over two million Iraqis have got displaced in Iraq in their home own land, became refugees. There are people from Tal Afar that are still in Najaf and Karbala, and we met them, and we tried hard, as the members of the Muslim Peacemakers Team, to offer them refuge, shelter, food and others donated by the Iraqis themselves. They still share with them what they need. And, by the way, Iraqis still are surviving for that Food-for-Oil Program or Oil-for-Food Program. And it's not enough, but they try to survive within the insecurity and hardship conditions of the occupation. Asked about why he returned to Iraq after some three years, Rasouli said… “ Well, the first initial visit, when I made -- my mother died back in November 2003, and I wanted to go and offer my condolences to sisters and relatives, and I spent about four weeks there, and I was happy, from one side, to get reunited with my family and their forty nieces and nephews. But from the other side, when I get outside and see the sign of the destruction and what war caused to the people, I was devastated. So I came back. I couldn't function. It took me a year to decide to go back. So I sold my business and tried to be un-obligated to anything else, and I went. “But I wanted to do something, how much this thing I can offer, less or more, it might make little change, so I headed there, but I was surprised to meet members of the Christian Peacemakers Teams in Karbala, working with the Karbala Human Rights Watch center, where I met with them. And it was, for me, like something I found to shape up my mission. And we were all, the Iraqi, at that center, impressed with the work of Christian Peacemakers Team. So that's why we decided to form the Muslim Peacemakers Team. “And since then, the MPT was involved with joint efforts and projects in Iraq, mainly was the clean-up project in the city of Fallujah, where eighteen delegates -- three were Christian, and fifteen Shia Muslim men and women from Najaf -- who committed themselves to go offer the troubled city that faced destruction twice, in April 2004 and November 2004. So we were there and announced help to pick up rubbles, garbage, knocking the doors of the residents to ask for taking away waste. And the people there were touched. They actually haven't seen any garbage collectors for the previous two years, since the war started. So they invited us to pray with them. And we went, and we did. We prayed in the Al Furqan Mosque in the area of Saba Nissan. There were close to 2,000 worshippers, where the Sheikh changed his sermon to a unity. People learned about us, that we were among them, Sunni and Shia worshipping together, same God, having the same holy book, the Qur’an. And about his meeting with the head of the House Appropriations Committee, David Obey, in Wisconsin, Rasouli said: “Actually, the person who organized my meeting, Mike Miles, called his office, and the office staff agreed that we have a meeting with Congressman Obey. And actually, I met him, and he bought me breakfast -- it was nice -- and listened -- he listened to what I had to say patiently. And we had a nice hour, which mostly I talked about sharing with him what I have experienced in Iraq for the last eight months and other stories. The congressman expressed his prior knowledge about what I had to tell him. And as to do anything – About his message to Congressmember Obey around the vote, as some call it, an antiwar vote, “because it calls for a timetable in Iraq; others call it a continuation of war vote, because it further appropriates money for the war in Iraq.” Rasouli said: “Well, what I understood that they presented their bill, and the President presents his bill, and it goes back and forth. But as a result, it looks like the administration is not listening and will not listen and look at the November 7th vote seriously. So I sense that probably the presidency should be offered to the Democrats in the next election, 2008. Amy asked Mr. Rasouli about what he want to “see happen in Iraq right now? And what would happen if the U.S. troops were to withdraw immediately?- A question he answered saying: “The U.S. administration, through its occupation in Iraq, has failed, has failed profoundly, and every day passes by indicates more violence happening in Iraq and more failure for their role. And, actually, I don't know what their role in Iraq is and what are the objectives that the U.S. intends to accomplish in Iraq so far. I see nothing. I see the war as pointless. It caused lots of agony and disastrous result for the Iraqis. An average Iraqi wake up in the morning, whether it’s a child going to school or a farmer going to his farm or a worker going to his work -- and, by the way, there is 65% unemployment rate in Iraq, so not much work in Iraq. But Iraqis are on a blind date. Every day they wake up with brutal death. “We cannot justify the presence of the U.S. troops in Iraq by saying, well, they will -- or they are doing anything good for the Iraqis to prevent such as civil war, so-called fight between Sunnis and Shias. This is not a civil war. This is a political war between who supported the U.S. invasion, which is the current government and its death squads, and the people of Iraq, who resisted, resisted this occupation and is still resisting this occupation. “Iraqis are fed up with the administration allegation, and if there is any civil war taking place, they are saying, we should have it now, rather we have it later, one year later or five years later. Let's have it now and get over with it. Then we will have our country back, we can rebuild it, and we rule it. We are the people that belong to an ancient multi-civilization country. It is Mesopotamia, where Hammurabi set his first code of law; the Sumerian, they came up with the invention of writing; the Babylonian; the Acadian; the Sumerian; and all the civilization that was built around Tigris and Euphrates.

Engaging India: Dismal state of Tourism

The magnificent Taj Mahal is deservedly one of India’s biggest tourist attractions. But the gleaming white marble tomb strikes a startling contrast with the decrepit surrounding city of Agra. Even the highly competent travel agent who coordinated my recent trip bluntly affirmed this view. ”I love my job - I meet people from all over the world,” he



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Sadr militia returns to Baghdad (Sadr City)

Sadr militia returnsBy MARTIN SCHRAMTuesday, April 03, 2007They're back.The Mahdi Army, the militia once solely controlled by the devoutly anti-America Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, has reportedly oozed back into the Sadr City section of Baghdad that is a prime target of the new U.S. strategy the Bush administration calls 'surge'.



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Silicon Valley's "best brains" work on energy

By Leonard AndersonTue Apr 3, 7:25 PM ET

Venture capitalists in Silicon Valley have been searching for the next big thing in high-tech for years, but now many have switched to greener pursuits -- finding technology to help cut global warming.

Although commercial success could take years, venture capitalists are pouring cash into solar power, fuel cells, wind energy, biofuels, new lighting microchips, "smart" power grids, and other innovative energies.

"The best brains in the country are no longer working on the next pharmaceutical drug or the next Silicon Revolution. They want to work on energy," said Vinod Khosla, a top venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.

While there is competition from Canada, Germany, China, India and other nations, traditional energy companies have been relatively quiet.

"It is under-researched. There are easy pluckings. Oil companies spend no money on research, especially outside of how you discover more oil. All their efforts are token or nominal. The same is true of the coal business," Khosla said.

R&D WAVE

It could be years, however, before "clean" power plans translate into commercial products, not only because of scientific barriers, but also due to uncertainties about timing, market development and competition.

"We have yet to see any major successes. A lot happening right now is sort of a research-and-development wave for individual technologies, Silicon Valley and industry itself," said Regis McKenna, a veteran marketing strategist who helped launch Apple Inc., Electronic Arts, and Genentech, among others.

McKenna recalled that the microprocessor, the brain of computers, was developed in 1971 but it took another 10 years before pioneer Intel found a market for the device in personal computers.

More than two-thirds, or $883.6 million, of all clean technology investments last year were made by U.S. investors.

Cleantech Venture Network, an industry trade group, estimates that clean energy investment in Silicon Valley topped $500 million last year, including not just venture capital but also corporate and some debt financing. The group estimates $3.6 billion was invested across the United States and Europe.

Among the largest clean tech investments were $75 million in solar cell maker NanoSolar of Palo Alto, California, and $50 million for Los Angeles-based renewable biofuels producer Altra Inc.

Biofuels, wind power, solar photovoltaics and fuel cells are likely to pace new energy growth, according to Clean Edge.

While new spending on clean technology is growing far faster than classic venture capital sectors such as computers, health care or retail start-ups, it remains a tiny fraction -- only 3.7 percent -- of the overall market.

CALIFORNIA 'GREENRUSH'

A growing sense of urgency to reduce the use of carbon-based fuels, which scientists blame for global warming, is driving the move in Silicon Valley.

"We're not debating whether climate change is occurring. We know it is and we have the capabilities to do something about it and move toward a cleaner energy future," said Ron Pernick, co-founder of the Clean Edge Inc., a research and consulting firm.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's efforts to launch a "greenrush" in California with a law to fight global warming also has focused more attention on Silicon Valley.

Schwarzenegger and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg praised a new fuel cell start-up -- Bloom Energy -- during a tour of the company last fall to tout their green credentials and strike a partnership to improve the environment.

Business can make more money by switching to energy-efficient systems and developing clean technologies. New jobs will sprout from a burgeoning service industry to cater to companies' green demands, Schwarzenegger said.

Beyond the buzz about environmentally friendly technology, Silicon Valley's most important contribution could be to shift existing managerial talent from Web and computer companies into building new energy businesses, Khosla said.

Echelon Corp., a developer of "smart" electric meters to measure energy efficiencies, taps hardware and software managers and engineers who have built digital communications networks at earlier Silicon Valley companies, said Jeff Lund, the company's vice president of business development.

And even old dogs can learn new tricks. Forty-year-old Applied Materials Inc., the biggest supplier of tools for making microchips, added solar cell manufacturing to its repertoire last year, and is equipping its Sunnyvale research center in Silicon Valley with one of the largest sun-powered energy systems in the United States.

April 3, 2007

Relatives of Interned Japanese-Americans Side With Muslims

By NINA BERNSTEIN

Holly Yasui was far away when a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled last June that the government had wide latitude to detain noncitizens indefinitely on the basis of race, religion or national origin. The ruling came in a class-action lawsuit by Muslim immigrants held after 9/11. But Ms. Yasui, an American citizen of Japanese ancestry, had reason to take it personally.

Her grandparents were among thousands of Japanese immigrants in the United States who were wrongfully detained as enemy aliens during World War II. And her father was one of three Japanese-Americans who challenged the government’s racial detention and curfew programs in litigation that reached the Supreme Court in the 1940s.

Now, Ms. Yasui, along with Jay Hirabayashi and Karen Korematsu-Haigh, a son and a daughter of the two other Japanese-American litigants, is urging an appeals court in Manhattan to overturn the sweeping language of the judge’s ruling last year.

The ruling “painfully resurrects the long-discredited legal theory” that was used to put their grandparents behind barbed wire, along with the rest of the West Coast’s Japanese alien population, the three contend in an unusual friends-of-the-court brief filed today in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

“Their interest is in avoiding the repetition of a tragic episode in American history that is also, for them, painful family history,” the brief states.

In recent years, many scholars have drawn parallels and contrasts between the internment of Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the treatment of hundreds of Muslim noncitizens who were swept up in the weeks after the 2001 terror attacks, then held for months before they were cleared of links to terrorism and deported.

But the brief filed today is a rare case of members of a third generation stepping up to defend legal protections that were lost to their grandparents, and that their parents devoted their lives to reclaiming.

“I feel that racial profiling is absolutely wrong and unjustifiable,” Ms. Yasui, 53, wrote in an e-mail message from San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where she works as a writer and graphic designer. “That my grandmother was treated by the U.S. government as a ‘dangerous enemy alien’ was a travesty. And it killed my grandfather.”

Prof. Eric L. Muller, a legal historian at the University of North Carolina School of Law, said he contacted Ms. Yasui and the others after reading about the decision by the federal judge, John Gleeson. Both sides in the case, known as Turkmen v. Ashcroft— a lead plaintiff is Ibrahim Turkmen — appealed parts of the decision by Judge Gleeson. He let the Muslims’ lawsuit continue, mainly on their claims of unlawful detention conditions, but dismissed key elements of their discrimination claims.

Asked to comment, the Justice Department would not discuss the Turkmen case, but its appeal argues in part that government officials “were confronted with unprecedented law enforcement and security challenges in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks,” and that “there were no clear judicial precedents in this extraordinary context.”

Professor Muller said he drafted the brief on behalf of the three grandchildren to try to persuade the Second Circuit to reject what he considers the needless breadth of Judge Gleeson’s opinion. “Judge Gleeson’s decision paints with such a broad brush, there isn’t really any stopping point,” he said.

The judge held that under immigration law, “the executive is free to single out ‘nationals of a particular country.’ ” And because so little was known about the 9/11 hijackers, he ruled, singling out Arab Muslims for detention to investigate possible ties to terrorism, though “crude,” was not “so irrational or outrageous as to warrant judicial intrusion into an area in which courts have little experience and less expertise.”

The brief counters that the ruling “overlooks the nearly 20-year-old declaration by the United States Congress and the president of the United States that the racially selective detention of Japanese aliens during World War II was a ‘fundamental injustice’ warranting an apology and the payment of reparations.”

And, it adds, the district court’s deference to the government “ignores the tragic consequences of such deference” for 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II.

Among those people was Ms. Yasui’s grandfather Masuo Yasui, who immigrated to the United States in 1903 and became a successful businessman and apple grower in Hood River, Ore., where his nine children were born and raised.

By 1940, he was one of 47,000 Japanese immigrants who lived in the 48 states, nearly 90 percent on the West Coast. They had remained aliens because federal law forbade naturalization of any person of Asian ancestry. Since the law also forbade Japanese immigration after 1924, the United States had been home to all of them for at least 17 years on Dec. 7, 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

Two months later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, decreeing that West Coast residents of Japanese ancestry — whether American citizens or not — were “enemy aliens.” An 8 p.m. curfew was imposed on them; roundups sent them to desolate internment camps.

Challenged by Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi and Ms. Yasui’s father, Minoru — all of them American citizens, like most of those interned — the measures were upheld, on a 6-to-3 decision, by the Supreme Court in 1944. The decision was not repudiated by the courts until 1983.

“In the case of my grandfather, the tragedy was multiplied by the fact that he was a hero in the eyes of his children, a leader in the Japanese-American community of Hood River, and had always counseled his compatriots to be ‘200 percent American,’ ” Ms. Yasui said. “And look what it got him: arrested and dragged out of his house a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, transferred from one military prison to another for years, and not released until several months after the war was over.”

She was only 5 when he died in the 1950s, she said, but she later learned that he committed suicide, after days of hallucinations in which he imagined that the F.B.I. was after him again.

The Hirabayashi and Korematsu grandparents, too, died before Congress enacted a law apologizing for the internment and offering compensation of $20,000 each for the survivors. Signed into law in 1988, the law was intended partly “to discourage the occurrence of similar injustice and violations of civil liberties in the future.”

By then, courts re-examining the cases of the three Japanese-American litigants found that the government had suppressed evidence that security fears were overblown. For example, what the Army had suspected were signals sent to Japanese submarines from California hillsides had actually come from “farms where people used flashlights to go to outside toilets,” a former Justice Department lawyer testified.

Since 9/11, Professor Muller said, “post-Pearl Harbor fear is no longer a historical fossil,” making the new brief all the more significant.

If it was a grave injustice to subject “enemy aliens” to prolonged detention on account of race and national origin in World War II, the brief says, it was at least as unjust to single out the Turkmen plaintiffs, who were accused only of overstaying their visas.

April 3, 2007

U.S. Cites Indian Government Agencies in Weapons Conspiracy

By MARK MAZZETTI and NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, April 2 — The Justice Department, in an indictment disclosed Monday, charged that agencies of the Indian government participated in a conspiracy to sidestep United States export regulations and obtain secret weapons technology from American companies over several years.

The indictment charges that a private electronics firm, Cirrus Inc., operating in Singapore, South Carolina and Bangalore, India, was working as an agent of the Indian government to obtain sensitive missile and weapons technology for its military programs.

It lists four company officials, including the founder, Parthasarathy Sudarshan, and a number of unidentified co-conspirators who were not charged, including one mentioned only as an Indian government official who worked in Washington. The indictment indicates that the defendants were buying equipment for three Indian government agencies.

The charges, coming just months after Congress approved President Bush’s plan to ship American nuclear reactors and fuel to India, could prove to be a diplomatic embarrassment for the administration, which has made cementing closer ties with India a top foreign policy priority.

The indictment suggests that India broke a pledge to the Bush administration more than two years ago not to flout American export laws and secretly seek weapons technology from the United States.

Although Congress has signed off on the nuclear deal, India must still reach a separate agreement on nuclear inspections with several international organizations before the deal is complete.

In a letter to the State Department in September 2004, Shyam Saran, then the Indian foreign secretary, wrote, “The Government of India shall not obtain or use U.S. origin licensable items in contravention of U.S. export control laws and regulations.”

The weapons sales detailed in the indictment occurred between 2003 and 2006 and were shipped to government agencies that were part of the Indian Ministry of Defense and Department of Space.

The defendants were charged with violating the United States Export Administration Act, which prohibits the export of dual-use technologies, those with both military and nonmilitary uses, without approval from the Commerce Department attesting that the technology will be used only for nonmilitary purposes.

The indictment charges that Cirrus officials sometimes forged certificates to show the vendors in the United States that the sales had Commerce Department approval.

Officials at the Indian Embassy in Washington declined to comment except to say that government officials in New Delhi have pledged to look into the allegations.

Some critics of the nuclear deal reacted angrily to the indictment, and criticized the administration for pressing Congress to approve the agreement at the same time that the Justice Department was investigating an alleged conspiracy involving Indian government officials.

“This is not only an indictment of individuals for breaking export control law, it is also a blistering indictment of the Bush administration’s judgment,” said Representative Edward J. Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who was one of the leading Congressional opponents of the nuclear deal.

Tom Casey, a State Department spokesman, said, “This is a law enforcement matter that began before our efforts to conclude a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement.”

He added, “The arrests of these individuals are not connected to our efforts to conclude an agreement.”