Peres: Iran in 'open war' with Israel - CNN

Jerusalem (CNN) -- Iran is in an "open war" with Israel, President Shimon Peres said Monday, as he pointed the finger at Iran and Hezbollah for last week's bombing in Bulgaria that killed five Israelis.

In an exclusive interview with CNN, Peres said Israel would act to prevent further attacks.

Peres said Israel had "enough" hard intelligence to link the Bulgaria attack to Iran and its proxy Hezbollah and believes more attacks are being planned as part of what he called an "open war against Israel."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that Iran and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah movement were responsible for a number of attacks and attempted attacks against Israeli targets in Thailand, Georgia, India, Greece, Cyprus and other countries.

Asked whether the Bulgaria bombing and the other attempted attacks were revenge for the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists, which Iran blames on Israel, Peres said that Israel has never claimed responsibility for the killings. But he noted that Israel has a right to prevent killing of its citizens.

Read more on the tension between Israel and Iran

"We don't have an initiative of terror," Peres said. "We don't do it. But self-defense is the right and the must of every people."

He said Israel's policy was one of "prevention," rather than "retaliation."

"If you have enough information about a certain person which is a ticking clock that can explode a bomb that can endanger civilian life, clearly you have to prevent him from doing so," Peres said, citing reports that the United States has killed as many as 3,000 people in drone strikes aimed at terrorist enclaves.

With neighboring Syria in a spiral of violence, Peres said Israel will be forced to seize Syria's chemical weapons if there is a risk President Bashar al-Assad would use them against Israel or that the arsenal could fall into terrorist hands.

Over the weekend, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said he ordered the military to prepare contingency plans to attack Syria's chemical weapons arsenals, should the need arise.

"The use of chemical weapons is internationally forbidden... and what do you do when somebody violates the law? You fight against it," Peres said. "You stop them. We shall not remain indifferent and tell them, 'Do what you want.'"

When asked how far Israel would go to secure Syria's chemical arsenal, Peres simply said: "Until it will stop being a danger."

With Israel facing a potential influx of refugees, Peres said although no Syrians have tried to enter the country, Israel would not help any refugees who want to cross the border and would use force against any armed individuals.

"If they will come by force, we shall stop them by force," Peres said. "If they shall come in without force, we shall stop them the way any country defended her border with civilian means."

Peres spoke a day after Israel marked the 40th anniversary of the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Germany, where 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were killed.

While he wouldn't go into details, Peres said Israel was taking precautions to ensure Israeli athletes would not be targeted at the London Olympic Games, which start later this week. He argued, however, that if Israeli intelligence services been at Munich, they would probably have been able to prevent the attack.

Afghanistan war: When 'friends' attack, who can you trust? - Los Angeles Times

It has a name: green-on-blue violence. But the label doesn't begin to suggest the seriousness of the increasingly common phenomenon of Afghan soldiers, policemen and security guards attacking their NATO or U.S. mentors, the people who are funding, supporting and teaching them. Think of it as death-by-ally.

Such incidents have occurred at least 21 times so far this year, resulting in 30 American and European deaths. That's the same number of green-on-blue attacks reported in all of 2011. And, according to the Associated Press, the U.S. and NATO don't always release news of the assaults unless they result in deaths, so the number could be higher.

There have been at least four incidents of green-on-blue violence this month. The initial one, on July 1, reportedly involved a member of the elite Afghan National Civil Order Police shooting down three British soldiers at a checkpoint in Helmand province, deep in the Taliban heartland of the country. The shooter was captured.

Two days later, a man the Associated Press said was in "an Afghan army uniform" turned his machine gun on U.S. troops just outside a NATO base in Wardak province, west of the Afghan capital, Kabul, wounding five before fleeing.

Then, on July 22, a security guard gunned down three police trainers — two former U.S. customs and border protection agents and a former United Kingdom revenue and customs officer. This happened at a police training facility near Herat inAfghanistan'sgenerally peaceful northwest near the Iranian border.

The next day, an Afghan soldier on a military base in Faryab province in the north of the country turned his gun on a group of American soldiers also evidently working as police trainers, wounding two before being killed by return fire.

In 2007-08, there were only four green-on-blue attacks, resulting in four deaths. When they started multiplying in 2010, the initial impulse of coalition spokespeople was to blame them on Taliban infiltrators (and the Taliban did take credit for most of them). Now, U.S. or NATO spokespeople tend to blame such violence on individual pique or some personal grievance against coalition forces rather than Taliban affiliation. They prefer to present each case as if it were a local oddity with little relation to any of the others.

In fact, there is a striking pattern at work that should be front-page news. The attacks appear not to be coordinated, but they nevertheless seem to represent a kind of collective rejection of what the U.S. and NATO are trying to accomplish, some kind of primal Afghan scream from an armed people who have known little but fighting, bloodshed and destruction for more than three decades.

The number of these events is startling, given that an Afghan who turns his weapon on well-armed American or European allies is likely to die. A small number of shooters have escaped and a few have been captured alive (including one recently sentenced to death in an Afghan court), but most are shot down. In a situation in which foreign advisors and troops are now distinctly on edge, however, these are essentially suicidal acts.

It's reasonable to assume that, for every Afghan who acts on such a violent impulse, there must be a larger pool who have similar feelings but don't act on them (or simply vote with their feet, like the 24,590 soldiers who deserted in the first six months of 2011 alone).

If the significance of green-on-blue violence hasn't quite sunk in yet here in the U.S., consider this: There is nothing in our historical record faintly comparable, no war in which our "native" allies have turned the weapons we supply on our forces in anything like these numbers — or, as far as I can tell, in any numbers at all. It didn't happen in the 18th and 19th century Indian wars, in the Philippine insurrection at the turn of the last century, in Korea during the early 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s, or Iraq in this century. (In Vietnam, the only somewhat analogous set of events involved U.S. soldiers, not their South Vietnamese counterparts, turning their weapons on their own officers in acts that, like "green-on-blue" violence, got a label all their own: "fragging.")

Whatever the singular bitterness or complaint behind any specific green-on-blue attack, a cumulative message clearly lurks in them that theU.S. militaryand Washington would prefer not to hear. To do so would be to acknowledge the full-scale failure of the ongoing American mission in Afghanistan. After all, what could be more devastating 12 years after the U.S.-led invasion than having such attacks come not from the enemies the U.S. is officially fighting, but from the Afghans closest to us, the ones we have been training at a cost of nearly $50 billion to take over the country as U.S. combat troops are drawn down.

What we're seeing, in the most violent form imaginable, is a sweeping message from our Afghan allies, from the security forces Washington plans to continue supporting long after most American troops have been withdrawn. To the extent that bullets can be translated into words, that message would be something like "Your mission has failed; get out or die."

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com, in which a longer version of this piece appears. His latest book is "The United States of Fear."

Iraqi officials still being killed in large numbers - Christian Science Monitor

In at least one city. And that's far from the only echo of the old Iraq in the new one.

By Dan Murphy / July 30, 2012

The paper quoted the head of the Baqouba city council as saying the officials resigned "to save their family members' lives because of living under threats from Al Qaeda and militants."

They had good cause for concern. The official, Abdullah al-Hiali, told the paper that eight neighborhood representatives, known as mukhtars, have been murdered in Baqouba this year, and that half of the 100 or so mukhtars in Baqouba have resigned under growing militant pressure.

The Islamic State in Iraq, a Sunni militant group that describes itself as affiliated with Al Qaeda, has been seeking to reassert its presence in the cities it plagued during the height of Iraq's civil war. Local officials have long been targeted by insurgents in Iraq, and it's a problem that really never went away. How many have been murdered over the years? The number is almost certainly in the thousands, though it doesn't appear there's ever been a systematic effort to track assassinations of politicians and local government officials.

Shortly after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US gave a contract worth up to $460 million to the Research Triangle Institute of North Carolina to set up neighborhood councils in a project that US officials said would build Iraqi democracy from the ground up. The results were different. Across Baghdad, the councils were devastated by murders and threats, and by early 2005, they had dissolved. 

In 2004 I closely tracked two of the councils in Baghdad in what the Monitor hoped would be a series documenting progress building a new order in Iraq. At least five of the members of the councils I followed, who were generous with their time over the months, ended up dead, and many more went into hiding as Iraq's civil war raged.

Though no longer making the headlines, many of Iraq's problems remain unsolved. And it's not just coming from militants. Amnesty International complains today, in highlighting the sentencing of an elderly man for terrorism offenses, that torture remains a popular practice under the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and that Iraqi "justice" often appears to be of the same standard as under Saddam Hussein. 

Amnesty International has condemned the trial in Iraq of a 70-year-old British man who has been sentenced to 15 years in prison after a hearing that lasted only 15 minutes. 

Ramze Shihab Ahmed, a dual Iraqi-UK national who has lived in the UK since 2002, was sentenced by a court in Baghdad on 20 June after being found guilty of "funding terrorist groups." 

Amnesty International has obtained and examined court documents and said it believes the trial proceedings were "grossly unfair."

At his trial, the ninth in a series of trials (he had been acquitted in each of the earlier ones), Mr. Ahmed's lawyer was not given the opportunity to challenge the prosecution's case, or to cross-examine prosecution witnesses or call his own witnesses. 

The court also failed to exclude from the proceedings Ahmed's "confession", despite longstanding allegations that this was extracted under torture.

Amnesty says Ahmed was convicted based on secret evidence. He had returned home in November 2009 to seek the release of his son and was arrested in Mosul on Dec. 7 of that year.

"For nearly four months he was held in a secret prison near Baghdad, during which time his whereabouts were completely unknown to his family. During this period Ahmed alleges he was tortured – including with electric shocks to his genitals and suffocation by plastic bags – into making a false "confession" to terrorist offenses," the group writes.

That, like the assassinations in Baqouba, sounds familiar. Here's a piece of mine from November 2005:

The discovery of malnourished detainees, many bearing signs of torture, in an underground bunker at the Iraqi Interior Ministry came after a US Army 3rd Infantry Division soldier investigated an Iraqi family's complaints that one of its sons was being secretly held. When US troops raided the facility Sunday night, they expected to find at most 40 detainees, not 173 sickly men and boys, all Sunni Arabs. Iraqi officials have since confirmed that torture implements were also found there...

The most arresting interview was with a man who wanted only to identified as Abu Adhar. He was carried to the interview by four relatives. Injuries covered his face, back, and legs. He was abducted and thrown into the back of a car while investigating charges of abuse by the Interior Ministry for a Sunni mosque where he leads prayers. After driving through at least five Iraqi police checkpoints, they arrived at a house. He said he was tortured for two days with electric shocks and whips. "Then their commander said they were done, and to take me out and kill me."

The more things change...

Follow Dan Murphy on Twitter.

Gunmen attack Pakistani army camp, kill 8 people - NBC 29 News

By ASIF SHAHZAD
Associated Press

ISLAMABAD (AP) - Gunmen killed eight people in an attack Monday on a Pakistani army camp in a city where thousands of hardline Islamists spent the night on their way to the capital to protest the government's recent decision to reopen the NATO supply line to Afghanistan, police said.

Police were searching for the culprits and it was unclear if any of the Islamist protesters were involved, said Basharat Mahmood, police chief in the eastern city of Gujrat where the attack occurred.

"It is surely a terrorist attack," said Mahmood. "The attackers could have taken cover. They could have hid themselves among the protesters."

The camp on the outskirts of Gujrat was attacked at around 5:20 a.m., a little less than an hour after the leaders of the Difah-e-Pakistan, or Defense of Pakistan, protest movement finished delivering speeches inside the city, said the police.

The group, which includes hardline Islamist politicians and religious leaders, left the city of Lahore on Sunday along with 8,000 supporters in 200 vehicles to make the 300-kilometer (185-mile) journey to Islamabad. They traveled about halfway, spent the night in Gujrat and plan to hold a protest in front of parliament in the capital on Monday.

The roughly half dozen gunmen who attacked the camp were riding in a car and on motorcycles. They killed seven soldiers at the camp and a policeman who tried to intercept them as they were escaping, said Mahmood, the police chief. Four policemen and at least three soldiers were wounded, he said.

The camp that was attacked was set up to look for the body of an army major who was flying a helicopter when it crashed into a river in the area, said the police.

The leaders of Difah-e-Pakistan include people with known militant links, including Hafiz Saeed, the founder of the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group, and Maulana Samiul Haq, known as the father of the Taliban.

But they are not known to be supporters of the Pakistani Taliban, who have waged a bloody insurgency against the state over the past few years and killed thousands of soldiers and police.

Many of the Difah-e-Pakistan leaders have strong historical links with Pakistani intelligence, and the group is widely believed to have been supported by the army to put pressure on the U.S. while the government negotiated over the NATO supply line.

Pakistan closed the route in November in retaliation for American airstrikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. The government finally agreed to reopen the supply line last week after the U.S. apologized for the deaths.

One of the reasons Pakistan waited so long to allow NATO troop supplies to resume was that it was worried about domestic backlash in a country where anti-American sentiment is rampant.

Difah-e-Pakistan leaders said Sunday that they were holding their so-called "long march" to Islamabad to prevent Pakistan from becoming a slave to the U.S. and to show that many citizens are unhappy with the decision to reopen the route.

But the number of protesters has been relatively small so far given Pakistan's population of 190 million, and the demonstration is unlikely to have any effect on the government's decision.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Former Ferrari car designer Pininfarina dies - Reuters

MILAN, July 3 | Tue Jul 3, 2012 5:22pm IST

MILAN, July 3 (Reuters) - Sergio Pininfarina, whose family company designed almost every Ferrari since the 1950s and whose name is still synonymous with some of the world's most glamorous cars, has died aged 85.

The company said on Tuesday he died overnight in his Turin home.

Pininfarina had been groomed by his father Gian Battista, a onetime Turin carriage maker who founded the influential car design house in the 1930s, to succeed him in the business since he was a child.

Born in 1926, he joined the family firm after graduating in mechanical engineering from Turin's Polytechnic University, became chief executive in 1961 and then chairman when his father died in 1966.

By then, the company had already risen to prominence through a knack for making the latest aerodynamic design trends attractive to a broader public.

The family's prestige in Italy was such that it was allowed to change its name to Pininfarina from the original Farina - Pinin, meaning "the little one" in Piedmont, was Gian Battista's nickname - with a presidential decree in 1961.

The ground-breaking 1947 Cisalfa coupe, designed by Gian Battista "Pinin" Farina after World War Two, now sits in New York's Museum of Modern Art. It was one of Sergio's favourite models.

Gian Battista also initiated the Ferrari connection in 1952, but Sergio ended up managing most of their common projects and turned the business from craftsman level into a world renowned name.

In his half-a-century reign at Pininfarina, the company's automobile production rose from 524 units per year to more than 50,000.

Besides the historic partnership with Ferrari, Alfa Romeo and Maserati (all owned by Fiat ), Pininfarina also designed cars for Rolls-Royce and other non-Italian brands.

The 1963 Chevrolet Corvette Rondine, 1986 Cadillac Allante, the 1995 Bentley Azure and the 1996 Peugeot 406 Coupe (designed by Sergio) all wore the Pininfarina badge.

Sergio also designed the 1986 Fiat 124 Spider, the 1984 Ferrari Testarossa, the 2002 Ferrari Enzo, the 2003 Maserati Quattroporte and the 2004 Ferrari Scaglietti.

Pininfarina was listed on the Italian Stock Exchange in 1986.

Sergio Pininfarina stepped down to become honorary chairman in 2006, shortly before the financial crisis, which hit the car industry heavily.

Many small builders, like Germany's Karmann and France's Heuliez, did not survive. Other design firms downsized, while Italdesign - another leading Italian stylist - was acquired by Volkswagen AG.

Pininfarina was forced to raise capital in 2009, re-negotiate its debt and shrink its business.

It had to close its manufacturing operations and reinvent itself as a smaller niche design player, with the family's 77 percent stake in the company used as collateral for loans with creditors it needs to pay back by 2018.

In May, Pininfarina said it expected to post its first profit this year since 2004.

Former NASA Astronaut Alan Poindexter, 50, Dies In Jet Ski Accident

	Former NASA Astronaut Alan Poindexter, 50, Dies In Jet Ski Accident Retired astronaut Alan Poindexter was killed in Florida when hit by a personal watercraft piloted by one of his sons, state officials said. The retired NASA astronaut died Sunday of injuries he received when a personal watercraft driven by one of his sons crashed into one he was riding on with another son, the Pensacola News Journal reported Monday. Poindexter, 51, and his son, Samuel, 22, were sitting on a personal watercraft in Little Sabine Bay at Pensacola Beach when Poindexter's oldest son, Zachary, 26, crashed into them, Stan Kirkland, a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission spokesman, said. Poindexter was removed from the water and taken to a beach where friends performed CPR, the News Journal said. He then was taken to a hospital, where he died of his injuries. His sons were not injured. The Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission was investigating. While at NASA, Poindexter piloted the Atlantis space shuttle in 2008 to deliver the Columbus module -- a 23-foot-long cylindrical space lab -- to the International Space Station, and the Atlantis shuttle mission in 2009 to repair the Hubble space telescope. He also was a Discovery shuttle commander in 2010. Poindexter was dean of students and executive director of programs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., at the time of his death.	From: liya28a Views: 0 0 ratings
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Chick-fil-A Chief Spokesman Don Perry Dies

	Chick-fil-A Chief Spokesman Don Perry Dies Don Perry, head spokesman for Chick-fil-A, has died. The Atlanta-based company said Perry died "suddenly" Friday morning. Perry, who most recently was vice president of public relations, had worked with the chain for nearly 29 years, according to Chick-fil-A. "He was a well-respected and well-liked media executive in the Atlanta and University of Georgia communities, and we will all miss him," the company said in a statement. "Our thoughts and prayers are with his family." Local news outlets reported that Perry suffered a heart attack. A spokesman with a third-party public relations company working with Chick-fil-A said he could not confirm the heart attack reports. Last week, Perry helmed the company's official response to the controversy that erupted after Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy spoke out against gay marriage. He sent out a statement that the company's intent going forward was "to leave the policy debate over same-sex marriage to the government and political arena." Chick-fil-A planned on "not proactively being engaged in the dialog" on the issue, Perry wrote in an email with the statement. The company's policy, according to the statement he sent, "is to treat every person with honor, dignity and respect -- regardless of their belief, race, creed, sexual orientation or gender."	From: InternetDreams Views: 41 2 ratings
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