Israel considers truce amid airstrikes

Israeli airstrikes on Gaza continued for a fifth day Wednesday, as the Jewish state’s defense minister mulled a truce proposal to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza.The air assault overnight into Wednesday struck the office of Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya and the Hamas Interior Ministry, among other targets, the Israeli Defense Forces told CNN. The airstrikes followed a mission Tuesday that leveled at least three buildings in a Hamas government compound.
The Israeli air force also blasted away at a series of tunnels linking Gaza to Egypt through the Rafah crossing.

Meanwhile, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak was considering the truce proposal — originally raised by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner — and would bring it to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for consideration, a Defense Ministry official said Tuesday. Read the rest of this entry »

Israel has defined its aims : No Early End of War on Hamas in Gaza

As the conflict passed its third day, with no active diplomacy, there appeared to be no quick end to the largest assault on Gaza in decades.
Israel has defined its aims relatively narrowly, saying it seeks to cripple Hamas’s ability to fire rockets into Israel. It has not made clear if it means to topple the leadership of Hamas, which Israel and the United States brand as a terrorist organization.
Hamas sought to cast its fighters as martyrs in a continuing battle against Israel, the lone resisters in a Palestinian community divided between Gaza, where Hamas rules, and the West Bank, which is governed by the rival Fatah organization.
Hamas killed four Israelis on Monday after firing more than 70 rockets, including a long-range one into the booming city of Ashdod some 18 miles from Gaza, where it hit a bus stop, killing a woman and injuring two other people. Earlier, a rocket hit nearby Ashkelon, killing an Israeli-Arab construction worker and wounding three others. The other dead Israelis, The Associated Press reported, were a civilian in the Negev desert and a soldier.
Thousands of Israelis huddled in shelters as the long-range rockets hit streets or open areas late in the night, the most serious display of Hamas’s arsenal since the Israeli assault began.
In Gaza, where the bombardment continued early Tuesday, residents pulled relatives from the rubble of prominent institutions leveled by waves of Israeli F-16 attacks, as hospitals struggled to keep up with the wounded and the dead and doctors scrambled for supplies. Hamas gunmen publicly shot suspected collaborators with Israel; families huddled around battery-powered radios, desperate for news.
Mr. Barak said that Israel would widen and deepen the attack if necessary and told Israeli lawmakers that it would continue until Hamas no longer had the ability to fire rockets into Israel. Politicians on the left who supported the initial attack urged the government to seek a new cease-fire rather than continue the bombardment.
But the military created a two-mile war cordon along the Gaza border and amassed tanks and troops there, with commanders saying that a ground force invasion was a distinct possibility but had not yet been decided upon.
In Crawford, Tex., a spokesman for President Bush renewed calls for the parties to reach a cease-fire, but said Israel was justified in retaliating against Hamas’s attacks. “Let’s just take this one day at a time,” said the spokesman, Gordon Johndroe.
Allies of Hamas in parts of the Muslim world raised their voices. In Beirut, tens of thousands of Hezbollah supporters stood in pouring rain in protest, and in Tehran a group of influential conservative Iranian clerics began an online registration drive seeking volunteers to fight Israel.
Mr. Barak had told lawmakers that Israel had nothing against the citizens of Gaza and that it had more than once offered its hand in peace to the Palestinian nation. “But we have an all-out war with Hamas and its offshoots,” he said.
Israel sent in some 40 trucks of humanitarian relief, including blood from Jordan and medicine. Egypt opened its border with Gaza to some similar aid and to allow some of the wounded through.
At Shifa Hospital in Gaza, the director, Dr. Hussein Ashour, said that keeping his patients alive from their wounds was an enormous challenge. He said there were some 1,500 wounded people distributed among Gaza’s nine hospitals with far too few intensive care units, equipped ambulances and other vital equipment.
On Monday, Dr. Ashour was not the only official in charge. Armed Hamas militants in civilian clothes roamed the halls. Asked their function, they said it was to provide security. But there was internal bloodletting under way.
In the fourth-floor orthopedic section, a woman in her late 20s asked a militant to let her see Saleh Hajoj, her 32-year-old husband. She was turned away and left the hospital. Fifteen minutes later, Mr. Hajoj was carried out by young men pretending to transfer him to another ward. As he lay on the stretcher, he was shot in the left side of the head.
Mr. Hajoj, like five others killed at the hospital this way in 24 hours, was accused of collaboration with Israel. He had been in the central prison awaiting trial by Hamas judges; when Israel destroyed the prison on Sunday he and the others were transferred to the hospital. But their trials were short-circuited.
A crowd at the hospital showed no mercy after the shooting, which was widely observed. A man in his 30s mocked a woman expressing horror at the scene.

Pakistan plays down tensions with India

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari played down cross-border tensions with India in a speech Saturday, telling citizens democracy and dialogue will end discord and increase regional stability.”The solution to the problem of the region, the solution to the problem of Pakistan … is politics, is dialogue … because politics is part of the cure, not part of the problem,” Zardari said, speaking at a memorial service for his late wife, former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
“We have issues? Yes, we have issues. We have non-state actors? Yes, we have non-state actors. Yes, they are posing an agenda on us. We ourselves have accepted we have a cancer. … We will cure this cancer ourselves.”
Zardari delivered the national address from Naudero, the Bhutto family home in Pakistan’s Sindh province.
It comes amid escalated tensions after reports Friday that Pakistan had redeployed military resources on its eastern border with India. Read the rest of this entry »

PM Benazir Bhutto : Tens of thousands of people have gathered at the mausoleum

Tens of thousands of people have gathered at the mausoleum of Pakistan’s former PM Benazir Bhutto to mark the first anniversary of her assassination.
Ceremonies in Garhi Khuda Bakhsh, southern Pakistan, are expected to include prayers, poetry and speeches.
Mrs Bhutto was killed in a suicide bomb and gun attack in Rawalpindi, near Islamabad, after an election rally.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon says he expects an independent inquiry into her death to be set up soon.  Read the rest of this entry »

Three Bangladeshis to hang for attack on British envoy

SYLHET, Bangladesh (AFP) — A Bangladeshi court on Tuesday sentenced to death by hanging three Islamic militants convicted of plotting to kill the British ambassador in a grenade attack four years ago.
The British High Commission in Dhaka immediately welcomed a resolution to the case but condemned the death sentences.
The three men, along with two others sentenced to life imprisonment, were convicted in a fast-track court in the northeastern city of Sylhet for the 2004 blasts, which left three people dead and scores wounded. Read the rest of this entry »

A Nobel Prize for physics in the administration Obama

Barrack Obama, the newly elected President of the United States, has chosen to entrust the Department of Energy to a Nobel Prize in Physics, Steven Chu, engaged in seeking new sources of energy. 
Aged 60, Steven Chu is director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (the ‘Berkeley Lab’ in short version) for four years. On the website of the institution, it is a longstanding supporter of seeking scientific solutions to fight against climate change. He wanted to make Berkeley Lab, which the Department of Energy-a world leader in research on alternative energy sources.
Steven Chu has worked to include the creation of a multidisciplinary research center on solar energy, Helios, whose construction should begin in 2010. One of the main objectives of this center is to develop techniques for storage and transportation of energy from the sun.
The future head of the Department of Energy will need all these innovations to complete the targets for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases sought by Obama. It will also support the modernization of the national electricity distribution.
Steven Chu shared the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physics with Frenchman Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and American William Phillips, for their work on cold atoms. These physicists have managed to cool gases with lasers so that the atoms are slowed, trapped, and they can be studied at leisure.

Barack Obama has muscled its battle plan to put the U.S. economy on track.

The president-elect Barack Obama has muscled its battle plan to put the U.S. economy on track. Its ambitious goal is to create three million jobs and protect the middle class by setting up a working group dedicated to this mission.

Relatives of Obama said that after a four-hour meeting with his economic advisers last week, he had the goal of creating 2.5 million jobs, announced a month ago , To three million over the next two years, reports the American press.  Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft will pay $ 6 billion for aQuantive

 Microsoft buys aQuantive for six billion dollars – If advertising has long continuously adapt to technology and eras, the Internet has clearly been a source of salvation in this area. Online advertising in recent years knows such a boom that has propelled the front of the stage companies like DoubleClick or RealMedia, while allowing others, like Google, diversify. Microsoft is now announcing the acquisition of aQuantive for six billion dollars, showing ready to offer a premium of 85% to get their hands on one of the last major independent advertising market on the Internet. Read the rest of this entry »

Somalia: War crimes are decimating the population

All parties to the growing conflict in Somalia have repeatedly committed war crimes and other serious abuses during the last year, which contributed to the humanitarian catastrophe in the country, said Human Rights Watch in a report published today, hui. Human Rights Watch urged the United States, the European Union and other major international players to revise their approaches inadequate to the crisis and to support efforts to ensure that perpetrators accountable for their actions. Read the rest of this entry »

Barack Obama: the dream of reunion as expected between Africa and black America.

Obama, who is trying not to get caught up in the ghetto image of “racial candidate” does not remove the ambiguity but on the contrary, make the most of. He reminded constantly that its roots are a distant elsewhere. This explains the marketing few months ago a DVD entitled apologetic “Senator Obama goes to Africa” (2007) in which the child sees the country back under the cheers in Kenya but also across several countries in which it is addressed “His brothers”. Read the rest of this entry »