Google Person Finder: 2011 Japan Earthquake

Arab Revolutionary Guide

Protesters in Tripoli, Libya destroy gaddafi Billboard - Feb 25th

WARNING GRAPHIC: Protester in Tripoli Libya shot in the head by mercenaries

Al Jazeera English: Live Stream - Watch Now - Al Jazeera English

Al Jazeera English: Live Stream - Watch Now - Al Jazeera English

Libyan city of Ajdabiya a 'free city'

Eyewitness reports protester deaths in Benghazi

Bahraini doctor pleads for help

Jubilant scenes in Tahrir Square

Easter, The Pope & A Muslim Converts to Christianity

By Philip Pullella
Reuters Sunday, March 23, 2008; 1:27 PM
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict called in his Easter message on Sunday for an end to injustice worldwide and expressed joy at continuing conversions to Christianity hours after he baptized a prominent Italian Muslim convert.
The pope celebrated an Easter Mass for tens of thousands of people in driving rain in St Peter's Square as Christians around the world commemorated Christ's resurrection.
The wind and rain that has whipped most of Europe did not spare Rome as the German pontiff, wearing white and gold vestments, said Mass while the crowd huddled under umbrellas.
The mass came some 12 hours after an Easter vigil service on Saturday night where, in a surprise move, the pope baptized Muslim-born convert Magdi Allam, 55, an outspoken journalist and fierce critic of Islamic extremism.
At the morning Mass, the pope read a prayer saying that after Christ's resurrection some 2,000 years ago "thousands and thousands of people converted to the Christian faith" and he added: "This is a miracle that still renews itself today."
The Egyptian-born Allam's conversion to Christianity -- he took the name "Christian" for his baptism -- was kept secret until the Vatican disclosed it in a statement less than an hour before the Saturday night service began.
Allam, who is a strong supporter of Israel and who an Israeli newspaper once called a "Muslim Zionist," has lived under police protection following threats against him, particularly after he criticized Iran's position on Israel.
Writing in Sunday's edition of the leading Corriere della Sera, the newspaper of which he is a deputy director, Allam said he realized that he was in greater danger but he has no regrets.
"INNATE EVIL"
Allam wrote: "... the root of evil is innate in an Islam that is physiologically violent and historically conflictual."
His conversion, which he called "the happiest day of my life," came just two days after al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden accused the pope of being part of a "new crusade" against Islam.
The Vatican appeared to be at pains to head off criticism from the Islamic world about the conversion of Allam, who defended the pope in 2006 when the pontiff made a speech that many Muslims perceived as depicting Islam as a violent faith.
"Conversion is a private matter, a personal thing and we hope that the baptism will not be interpreted negatively by Islam," Cardinal Giovanni Re told an Italian newspaper.
Still, Allam's highly public baptism by the pope shocked Italy's Muslim community, with some leaders openly questioning why the Vatican chose to shine such a big spotlight it.
"What amazes me is the high profile the Vatican has given this conversion," Yaha Sergio Yahe Pallavicini, vice-president of the Italian Islamic Religious Community, told Reuters. "Why could he have not done this in his local parish?"
In his twice-yearly "Urbi et Orbi" (to the city and the world) message delivered after the Mass, the pope decried "the many wounds that continue to disfigure humanity in our own day."
"These are the scourges of humanity, open and festering in every corner of the planet, although they are often ignored and sometimes deliberately concealed; wounds that torture the souls and bodies of countless of our brothers and sisters," he said.
He called for "an active commitment to justice ... in areas bloodied by conflict and wherever the dignity of the human person continues to be scorned and trampled," mentioning Darfur, Somalia, the Holy Land, Iraq, Lebanon and Tibet.
He then wished the world a happy Easter in 63 languages.

Obama's Speech: A Brilliant Fraud

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, March 21, 2008; Page A17

The beauty of a speech is that you don't just give the answers, you provide your own questions. "Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes." So said Barack Obama, in his Philadelphia speech about his pastor, friend, mentor and spiritual adviser of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright.

An interesting, if belated, admission. But the more important question is: which"controversial" remarks?

Wright's assertion from the pulpit that the U.S. government invented HIV "as a means of genocide against people of color"? Wright's claim that America was morally responsible for Sept. 11 -- "chickens coming home to roost" -- because of, among other crimes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (Obama says he missed church that day. Had he never heard about it?) What about the charge that the U.S. government (of Franklin Roosevelt, mind you) knew about Pearl Harbor, but lied about it? Or that the government gives drugs to black people, presumably to enslave and imprison them?

Obama condemns such statements as wrong and divisive, then frames the next question: "There will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church?"

But that is not the question. The question is why didn't he leave that church? Why didn't he leave -- why doesn't he leave even today -- a pastor who thundered not once but three times from the pulpit (on a DVD the church proudly sells) "God damn America"? Obama's 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction.

His defense rests on two central propositions: (a) moral equivalence and (b) white guilt.

(a) Moral equivalence. Sure, says Obama, there's Wright, but at the other "end of the spectrum" there's Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of affirmative action and his own white grandmother, "who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe." But did she shout them in a crowded theater to incite, enrage and poison others?

"I can no more disown [Wright] than I can my white grandmother." What exactly was Grandma's offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street. And Harry Truman was known to use epithets for blacks and Jews in private, yet is revered for desegregating the armed forces and recognizing the first Jewish state since Jesus's time. He never spread racial hatred. Nor did Grandma.

Yet Obama compares her to Wright. Does he not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one's time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred?

(b) White guilt. Obama's purpose in the speech was to put Wright's outrages in context. By context, Obama means history. And by history, he means the history of white racism. Obama says, "We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country," and then he proceeds to do precisely that. What lies at the end of his recital of the long train of white racial assaults from slavery to employment discrimination? Jeremiah Wright, of course.

This contextual analysis of Wright's venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It's the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance. That's why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination.

But Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor. Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign. Then answer this, Senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?

+ Maclean's annual How the World Sees Canada poll shows deep admiration for a country we don't seem to like so much ourselves. What gives?

+ The future belongs to Islam

+ Tibet vs. China: It's All About Money

Canada Fights in Afghanistan Until 2011

KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan - After three intense days hurtling around by helicopter and armoured vehicle in the Canadian army's area of responsibility in Kandahar, Defence Minister Peter MacKay rejected assertions the situation in the province had become worse.

"I'm seeing tremendous success when it comes to the army, and that is my primary focus," MacKay said shortly before his fifth visit to Afghanistan ended Wednesday with a brief airfield celebration amid a group of NHL oldtimers who brought the Stanley Cup on a goodwill visit.

"As far as some of the infrastructure, for example, we're seeing roads being built, bridges completed in areas where, because of the security situation, those projects couldn't have occurred just a year ago."

Pressed further about the current security situation, the minister, who was in Afghanistan for three days this visit, said "the insurgency remains a real challenge, but you have to look at it in relative terms. You have to do a retrospective occasionally, look at where we were five short years ago, two years ago."

Asked about an allegation by at least one prisoner that Kandahar's governor was involved in human rights violations of detainees, MacKay replied that he understood the matter was under investigation by Afghan authorities and that as "an internal governance matter" it had to be handled by Afghans.
The minister met support troops at the main Canadian base at the Kandahar airfield as well as combat troops at remote forward operating bases and at even more isolated police sub-stations. Mac-Kay said last week's parliamentary vote to extend Canada's Afghan mission to 2011 was seen as a popular move. More.

Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia Trains Children

Some comments on YouTube:

110notruf (1 week ago) :
yes all world will be islamic
abd yes all jewish will be death
and yes all this chidlren will killed all jewish
and yes islam is the right religion
and yes america and jewish will be down
and we will see
we will see a big day ,big than 9-11
and fuck all jewish and christian

110notruf (1 week ago) :
allah akbar
this children will killed all jewish inscha allah
islam is th winner

+ In Seized Video, Boys Train to Fight in Iraq, U.S. Says
+ China: Orthodox Christians seek recognition

Iraq: Priest Paulos Rahho Body Found

(LA Times): Iraq's scared and dwindling Christian community has nothing to do with the sectarian or ethnic troubles afflicting the country. No Christian Iraqi took up arms against anybody or formed a militia or set roadside bombs or even tried to block the formation of a government.

More than anyone else, Iraq's Christians have been struggling just to survive against a torrent of troubles. All of which makes the death of the 67-year-old Chaldean Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho all the more tragic and troubling. His half-buried corpse was discovered in Mosul on Thursday, apparently the victim of gunshot wounds he sustained during a Feb. 29 kidnapping that left three of his guards dead, Mosul police told the Los Angeles Times in today's article by Baghdad correspondent Ned Parker and Rome bureau chief Tracy Wilkinson.
Chaldeans are part of the Catholic Church. Chaldean parishes around the world grieved the loss of Rahho.

UPDATE, 2 p.m. PST: From Baghdad, Parker has filed a report about Rahho's funeral service in Mosul:
"I ask the people of the church to be steadfast and patient," Iraq's Chaldean patriarch, Cardinal Emmanuel III Delly, told mourners in an emotional ceremony. "He became a martyr because of his great faith, and his love for his service."

+ The great Turkish hypocrisy and 2,994 rockets fired into Israeli territories

+ 2007: Chaldean priest Fr Ragheed Ganni and three deacons killed in Mosul

Nothing much a man may want ...

There’s nothing much a man may want
but to be quiet and innocent

a little food a little wine
at Christmas and at Easter time

wherever he may build his nest
may no one there disturb his rest.

But everything has all gone wrong
they wake him up at break of dawn

then come and drag him to and fro
eat up what little he has and lo

from out his mouth from out of sight
and in a moment of great delight

they snatch his morsel in an evil hour.
Hip hip hurrah for those in Power!

Hip hip hurrah for those in Power
for them there is no ‘I’ or ‘our’.

Hip hip hurrah for those in Power
whatever they see they must devour.

-- The Sovereign Sun by Odysseas Elytis

IDF Kill Muhammad Shahade, Organizer of Mercaz Harav Attack

Bethlehem sources say IDF forces operating in town kill Muhammad Shahade, Islamic Jihad operative believed to be responsible for attack on Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem; three other militants killed in raid (www.ynetnews.com) -- Muhammad Shahade, an Islamic Jihad operative who Palestinian sources say was behind the terror attack in Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem last week, has been killed by IDF forces in Bethlehem Wednesday afternoon, local witnesses reported. According to reports, another three militants have been killed in the raid, one of them an al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades member. Military sources said that the four men were responsible for a series of terror attacks against Israel in the years 2000-2001, but did not attribute the Jerusalem attack to Shahade.

Shahade, a former Fatah member and an Islamic Jihad operative, has been known to have extensive ties with Hizbullah. Palestinian sources reported that IDF forces have operated in the city, close to the Mukataa compound, and that several Palestinians have been injured. He said that Shahade was the target of the raid. A senior wanted terror suspect, Muhammad Balbul, has reportedly been injured in the clashes. Two days after the Jerusalem attack, which was carried out by Alaa Abu Dheim and left eight students killed, the police reported they have arrested eight people suspected of involvement in the attack.

Indonesian Intel: Fugitive Terrorist in Singapore

JAKARTA, March 12, 2008 (news.xinhuanet.com) -- Indonesian intelligent chief Syamsir Siregar said on Wednesday that he believed that the fugitive terrorist leader Selamat bin Kastari, who escaped from Singapore's prison last month, was still in Singapore. Kastari was the top leader of the Southeast Asia terrorist network of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) for Singapore and was jailed for plotting to blow up Changi airport in Singapore in 2001. Many believed that he had entered into Indonesian territory which make him easier to escape from police hunting rather than in Singapore.

"I am confident that he is still in Singapore," Siregar told reporters after a meeting on security at the office of coordinating ministry of politics, legal and security affairs here. He refused the suspicion that the terrorist leader had already entered Indonesia. On March 8, Singaporean Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew said that Kastari might go to Indonesia for consolidation as he was a leader of the JI. "Should he be in Indonesia, we had already arrested him," the intelligent chief said.

Muslim Terror Plots in China Discovered

[Associated Press] BEIJING –Chinese police killed alleged terrorists plotting to attack the Beijing Olympics, while a flight crew managed to prevent an apparent attempt to crash a Chinese jetliner in a separate case just last week, officials said Sunday. Wang Lequan, the top Communist Party official in the western region of Xinjiang, said materials seized in a January raid in the regional capital, Urumqi, had described a plot with a purpose "specifically to sabotage the staging of the Beijing Olympics."

"Their goal was very clear," Wang told reporters in Beijing. Wang cited no other evidence and earlier reports on the raid had made no mention of Olympic targets. Speaking at the same meeting, Xinjiang's governor said a flight crew prevented an apparent attempt to crash a China Southern flight from Urumqi on Friday. Nur Bekri did not specifically label the incident a terrorist act, saying it remained under investigation. No passengers were injured and police were investigating, he said.

+ Full story.

Alisher Usmanov: "a Vicious Thug, Criminal, Racketeer, Heroin Trafficker and Accused Rapist"

Reposted from Craig Murray (Original post date was 6th September 2007)
"I thought I should make my views on Alisher Usmanov quite plain to you. You are unlikely to see much plain talking on Usmanov elsewhere in the media becuase he has already used his billions and his lawyers in a pre-emptive strike. They have written to all major UK newspapers, including the latter:
“Mr Usmanov was imprisoned for various offences under the old Soviet regime. We wish to make it clear our client did not commit any of the offences with which he was charged. He was fully pardoned after President Mikhail Gorbachev took office. All references to these matters have now been expunged from police records . . . Mr Usmanov does not have any criminal record.” Let me make it quite clear that Alisher Usmanov is a criminal. He was in no sense a political prisoner, but a gangster and racketeer who rightly did six years in jail. The lawyers cunningly evoke "Gorbachev", a name respected in the West, to make us think that justice prevailed. That is completely untrue.
Usmanov's pardon was nothing to do with Gorbachev. It was achieved through the growing autonomy of another thug, President Karimov, at first President of the Uzbek Soviet Socilist Republic and from 1991 President of Uzbekistan. Karimov ordered the "Pardon" because of his alliance with Usmanov's mentor, Uzbek mafia boss and major international heroin overlord Gafur Rakimov. Far from being on Gorbachev's side, Karimov was one of the Politburo hardliners who had Gorbachev arrested in the attempted coup that was thwarted by Yeltsin standing on the tanks outside the White House.
Usmanov is just a criminal whose gangster connections with one of the World's most corrupt regimes got him out of jail. He then plunged into the "privatisation" process at a time when gangster muscle was used to secure physical control of assets, and the alliance between the Russian Mafia and Russian security services was being formed.
Usmanov has two key alliances. he is very close indeed to President Karimov, and especially to his daughter Gulnara. It was Usmanov who engineered the 2005 diplomatic reversal in which the United States was kicked out of its airbase in Uzbekistan and Gazprom took over the country's natural gas assets. Usmanov, as chairman of Gazprom Investholdings paid a bribe of $88 million to Gulnara Karimova to secure this. This is set out on page 366 of Murder in Samarkand.
Alisher Usmanov had risen to chair of Gazprom Investholdings because of his close personal friendship with Putin, He had accessed Putin through Putin's long time secretary and now chef de cabinet, Piotr Jastrzebski. Usmanov and Jastrzebski were roommates at college. Gazprominvestholdings is the group that handles Gazproms interests outside Russia, Usmanov's role is, in effect, to handle Gazprom's bribery and sleaze on the international arena, and the use of gas supply cuts as a threat to uncooperative satellite states.
Gazprom has also been the tool which Putin has used to attack internal democracy and close down the independent media in Russia. Gazprom has bought out - with the owners having no choice - the only independent national TV station and numerous rgional TV stations, several radio stations and two formerly independent national newspapers. These have been changed into slavish adulation of Putin. Usmanov helped accomplish this through Gazprom. The major financial newspaper, Kommersant, he bought personally. He immediately replaced the editor-in-chief with a pro-Putin hack, and three months later the long-serving campaigning defence correspondent, Ivan Safronov, mysteriously fell to his death from a window.
Full Story
+ Craig Murray site
+ Wiki article on Alisher Usmavov

Added to Blog Roll

Added to blog roll:

Greek In Argentina (Cypriot Greek)

I Don’t Forget (Cyprus)

Terror plot to destroy New York airport foiled

NEW YORK — Four Muslim men were foiled from carrying out a plot to destroy John F. Kennedy International Airport, kill thousands of people and trigger an economic catastrophe by blowing up a jet fuel artery that runs through populous residential neighbourhoods, authorities said Saturday.

Three men were arrested and one was being sought in Trinidad on Saturday. In an indictment charging the four men, one of them is quoted as saying the plot would “cause greater destruction than in the Sept. 11 attacks.”

One of the suspects, Russell Defreitas, a U.S. citizen native to Guyana and retired JFK employee, said the airport was a symbol that would put “the whole country in mourning.” Full article.

Other news:

+ Iran president sees "countdown" to Israel's end
+ More vigorous Fidel Castro shown on Cuban TV

Alan Johnston

British reporter Alan Johnston, kidnapped in Gaza on March 12, appeared for the first time Friday in a video posted on an Islamic militant website.
The 45-year-old BBC reporter is seen in the video wearing a red sweatshirt and says he has been treated well by his captors. He then goes on to denounce Israel and blast British and U.S. Mideast policy.

"There are some who think this might signal that some sort of deal is in the works for Alan's release, that as part of the deal the group needed to give some sign of life as a show of good faith in negotiations," CTV's Middle East Bureau Chief Janis Mackey Frayer said Friday from Jerusalem. There is no indication of when the video was recorded. Full article.

Other News
+ The number of rigs actively exploring for oil and natural gas in the United States increased by 16 this week to 1,760.

+ 4 Oil Workers Kidnapped in Nigeria

+ Fighting rages at Lebanese camp: About 30 soldiers have been killed, along with about 50 militants and one civilian, Lebanese officials have said. Palestinian sources reported that between 17 and 25 militants and 20 civilians have died.

Cpl. Matthew McCully

Cpl. Matthew McCully, the Canadian soldier killed Friday by an improvised explosive device in southern Afghanistan, died alongside the Afghan soldiers he helped mentor.

He was a member of Canada's Operational Mentor and Liaison Team, which trains Afghans how to fight as organized units.

McCully, who was based in CFB Petawawa, was killed while taking part in Operation Hoover -- a large offensive launched against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan.
Full article.

Other News:
+ Troops kill 18 militants in Afghanistan
+ New Taliban commander threatens bombings
+ PM hints Canada may stay in Afghanistan past 2009
+ Afghanistan wants Canada's help, Harper says

2 Ontario Men Lose Citizenship For Lying About Nazi Pasts

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (North): The Canadian government stripped two Ontario men of their citizenship Thursday, saying they lied about their Nazi ties when they came to Canada after the Second World War.

"These cases have been under consideration for a very long time," Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said in a statement. "Due process was followed according to the laws of Canada. It's time to move forward."

Both men — Helmut Oberlander of Kitchener and Jacob Fast of St. Catharines — can have the government's decision reviewed by the Federal Court. The decision puts them at risk for deportation. Immigration Minister Diane Finley has the final say on whether they are deported or not. Both men have been involved in lengthy citizenship battles.

In 2000, the Federal Court ruled that Oberlander didn't reveal his involvement with a notorious mobile Nazi police unit when he immigrated to Canada from Ukraine in 1954. The mobile unit, called the Einsatzkommando, allegedly killed more than a million people, mostly Jews, in the former Soviet Union. The court found that Oberlander, a retired developer who is in his 80s, was not personally involved in the executions but worked as a translator for the Einsatzkommando.

Fast's case landed in the Federal Court in 2003. The court concluded that when the retired General Motors employee immigrated to Canada in 1947, he lied about his German citizenship and his involvement with a German security police force attached to the notorious Schutzstaffel, or SS. The court didn't find any evidence suggesting Fast, who is now in his 90s, committed war crimes.

"Today in Israel, we have had enough"

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Israel pounded Hamas targets with air strikes Thursday, killing at least six people and wounding dozens. It had stepped into intense fighting between the Islamic militants and the rival Fatah movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The Israeli attacks followed Hamas rocket barrages on southern Israel...

Israel unleashed the air campaign — a hit on a Hamas command centre, on a trailer housing bodyguards and two vehicles — after Gaza militants fired more than 50 rockets on the Israeli border town of Sderot in three days. “Today in Israel, we have had enough. Israel will take every defensive measure to stop these rocket attacks. We will defend our citizens against the rockets, against the weapons, against the Iranian-backed Hamas who are attacking Israel,” said Israeli government spokeswoman Miri Eisen.

Other news:
+ US forces kill 6 insurgents in Iraq
+ Syria urges Hamas and Fatah to halt fighting
+ Taliban ambush: ‘Get us out of here'



+ Wolfowitz to Delegate Authority to Senior Officials (Update2)
+ Blast, clashes in India kill 13; alert is issued
+ European Union to Russia: "Don't try to divide us,"
+ Canadians favour role in ending Darfur violence, poll

+ Israel kills 8 in air raid on Hamas politician's home

+ 48 killed as Lebanese army fights Islamists

Hunt On For Missing U.S. Troops in Iraq

Associated Press, BAGHDAD ~ Massive air, house-to-house hunt for 3 soldiers after Al Qaeda group in Iraq says it captured the Americans. An Al Qaeda front group announced yesterday it had captured American soldiers in a deadly weekend attack, as thousands of U.S. troops searched insurgent areas south of Baghdad for their three missing comrades.

The statement from the group came on one of the deadliest days in Iraq in recent weeks, with at least 126 people killed or found dead. A suicide truck bomb tore through the offices of a Kurdish political party in northern Iraq, killing 50 people, and a car bombing in a Baghdad market killed another 17.
U.S. Maj.-Gen. William Caldwell said 4,000 U.S. troops backed by aircraft and intelligence units were scouring the farming area as the military made "every effort available to find our missing soldiers. Full story.

+ Gunfight breaks out at meeting involving U.S., Afghan and Pakistani soldiers in Pakistan on Monday, and a number of soldiers were killed and wounded

+ Making a Case for Iraqi Progress, in the U.S.
+ Hicks Pleads Guilty to Supporting Terrorism
+ Wounded Iraqi Forces Get Little or No Aid
+ Rift Appears Among Iraq Insurgent Groups
+ Is the Iraq Surge Strategy Working?

+ Strike paralyses Karachi, Pakistan
+ Afghans, Pakistanis skirmish
+ Bomb hits NATO vehicle in Afghanistan
+ Spain to send 14 officers to Afghanistan police mission

+ Canadian Muslim was on suicide mission: Afghanistan
+ 55 Taliban militants killed in E Afghanistan


Camp Nathan Smith, Kandahar ~ A member of the Royal 22e Régiment, presently deployed as the Force Protection (FP) Company for the Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team (KPRT), provides security in a village outside of Kandahar City, Afghanistan. The FP Company provides a security perimeter so members of the Civil Military Co-operation (CIMIC) team can work to assess a village’s needs.

The KPRT is an integral part of the Joint Task Force Afghanistan (JTF-AFG), which is Canada’s military contribution to Afghanistan. Canadian operations will focus on working with Afghan authorities to improve security, governance and economic development. About 2500 members of the Canadian Forces (CF) are currently serving as part of TF-AFG. They play a key role in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force mission whose goal is to improve the security situation in Afghanistan and assist in rebuilding the country. Photo by Sgt Roxanne Clowe, Canadian Forces Combat Camera

Taliban Commander Dadullah Killed

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Mullah Dadullah, the Taliban's top operational commander in southern Afghanistan, was killed during a clash with Western and Afghan forces in Helmand province, officials said on Sunday.

The death of Dadullah represents the biggest setback to the Taliban command since the insurgency began, after its Islamic militia government was toppled by U.S. backed forces in 2001.

"He was killed last night and right now I have his body before me," Assadullah Khalid, governor of neighboring Kandahar province, told Reuters. Full article.

1 Million Turks: "No To Sharia"

Paul De Bendern, The Australian: At least 1 million Turks took to the streets of Izmir today to demand their country remain a secular state, stepping up pressure on the Islamist-rooted government before July elections.

Organisers hoped the fourth major anti-government protest in a month would unite the Opposition ahead of the poll. People flocked to Izmir from across Turkey, undeterred by a bombing in the port city that killed one man and injured 14 yesterday. It was not clear who was behind the market attack. Streets and buildings in Turkey's third largest city, including army barracks, were covered in a sea of red Turkish flags and portraits of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the revered founder of modern Turkey.

“Turkey is secular and will remain secular,” the protesters, predominantly middle class youths at this festive rally, chanted. “No to sharia (Islamic law).” Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's reformist AK Party Government has been forced to call a parliamentary election months ahead of schedule to defuse a deep conflict with Turkey's secularists over a presidential vote.
Turkey's secular elite, including opposition parties, top judges and army generals, successfully blocked Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul's election. They feared the ex-Islamist might try to undermine Turkey's separation of state and religion, a claim Gul and his AK Party strongly deny.

“The AK Party will most likely win the elections but they will have to take into account these demonstrations and what people are saying. They can't remain arrogant any more,” said Haluk Berk, a doctor who also teaches at an Izmir university. “The silent majority is finally coming out,” he said, standing alongside his son. Turkey's main opposition centre-left Republican People's Party (CHP) and the smaller leftist Democratic Left Party (DSP) - which are in talks to form an alliance - hope to use the rally to build momentum ahead of the July 22 election.
Police told Reuters at least 1 million people attended the seaside rally, with no major incidents reported. Organisers, mainly left wing groups, had hoped to attract 2 million people. The protest began to wind down by late afternoon.

The success in derailing the AK Party's plans to have Gul elected president has given opposition parties new confidence, analysts say, but added that they were racing against time to come up with a credible election manifesto. The political crisis has brought about mergers between opposition parties in the hope that in July they can win more than the 10 per cent of votes needed to enter Parliament.