Militia fighters are operating just an hour’s drive from the capital’s suburbs, confident of undermining Western support for the war The Taliban are planning a major winter offensive combining their diverse factions in a push on the Afghan capital, Kabul, intelligence analysts and sources among the militia have revealed. The thrust will involve a concerted attempt to take control of surrounding provinces, a bid to cut the key commercial highway linking the capital with the eastern city of Jalalabad, and operations designed to tie down British and other Nato troops in the south. Last week Nato, with a force of 40,000 in the country including around 5,000 from Britain, said it had killed 48 more Taliban in areas thought to have been ‘cleared’. ‘They have major attacks planned all the way through to the spring and are quite happy for their enemy to know it,’ a Pakistan-based source close to the militia told The Observer. ‘There will be no winter pause.’ The Taliban’s fugitive leader, Mullah Omar, yesterday rejected overtures for peace talks from President Hamid Karzai and said it intended to try him in an Islamic court for the ‘massacre’ of Afghan civilians. Since their […]
LIMA — Foreign investors in Bolivia’s gas sector have bowed to the leftwing government’s nationalisation plan, agreeing to pay up to 82 per cent in tax, hand over control of commercialisation to the state and invest billions of dollars in the Andean country. ‘With these new contracts we want to generate more economic resources to solve the economic and social problems of our country,’ said Evo Morales, the leftwing Bolivian president. The Bolivian Hydrocarbons Chamber, which represents foreign investors such as Petrobras, Repsol, Total and British Gas, said the new accords would create ‘a positive and lasting relationship between partners – the companies and the state’. Mr Morales announced in May he was nationalising Bolivia’s gas reserves, the second largest in the region, and gave foreign operators 180 days to renegotiate their operating contracts or leave the country. All big foreign investors had threatened to take Bolivia to international arbitration but ultimately that proved no more than a negotiating tactic. A sticking point in the race to meet the deadline was the companies’ reluctance to be downgraded to mere service providers, operating turn-key contracts in which YPFB, the Bolivian state company, would be officially in […]
Hundreds of people marched in a silent tribute to two teenagers whose death exactly one year ago sent a wave of urban riots surging through France, sparking the country’s most serious social crisis in 30 years. French authorities were on alert for a new flare-up of violence after youth gangs, some carrying handguns, torched — and in one case hijacked — three buses near Paris on Wednesday, but police reported no major trouble overnight. In Clichy-sous-Bois, the poor northeast Paris suburb where the riots erupted on October 27, 2005, around 1,000 people, most of them youngsters, filed quietly Friday morning past the spot where the two boys died. ‘Once again, France and the world are watching us,’ the mayor of Clichy Claude Dilain told the crowd. ‘We need the calm, dignity and courage that are visible here to prevail. Let us show them who we really are.’ ‘Let’s not give anyone cause to point the finger at us,’ added local association leader Samir Mihi. Many of the marchers wore white T-shirts printed with the words ‘Zyed and Bouna, Dead for nothing.’ Zyed Benna, 17, and Bouna Traore, 15, both from immigrant families of African […]
Housing slump sends chill through U.S. WASHINGTON – The slumping U.S. housing market is sending a chill through the entire economy as new data yesterday showed growth slilpped to 1.6% during the last quarter, the slowest in three years. The U.S. Commerce Department said growth in the world’s largest economy fell a full percentage point between July and September from 2.6% in the second quarter. Economists blamed the slump in housing sales — with prices falling the most in more than three decades last month — for slowing growth. ‘We are feeling the effects of the housing bubble bursting and, while the ill wind is not pleasant, it is not likely to be long-lasting,’ said Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors in Holland, Pa. ‘Businesses and households did their part to keep the economy going.’ Residential housing construction fell at an annual rate of 17.4% in the latest quarter, the largest decline since the first quarter of 1991, after shrinking at 11.1% in the previous three months. The decline subtracted 1.12 percentage points from growth, the most in almost a quarter-century. Stock markets slipped yesterday after the disappointing gross domestic product report, with shares […]
For decades, the arrival of the first V-shaped flights of Bewick’s swans in Britain’s wetlands after a 2,000-mile journey from Siberia heralded the arrival of winter. This year, a dramatic decline in numbers of the distinctive yellow-billed swans skidding into their winter feeding grounds could be the harbinger of a more dramatic shift in weather patterns: global warming. Ornithologists at the main reserves that host the birds, the smallest of Britain’s swans, said only a handful had appeared on lakes and water courses. Normally, there would be several hundred. The latest arrival in a decade of Britain’s seasonal influx of 8,000 Bewick’s swans throws into sharp relief the debate on the effects of climate change as it enters a crucial week. As the Government’s forthcoming Climate Bill is finalised, Sir Nicholas Stern, a former World Bank economist, is expected to warn in a report on Monday that failure to tackle global warming will provoke a recession deeper than the Great Depression. But far from Westminster, the potential ecological impact of the same phenomenon was being noted in the absence of the high-pitched honking call of Bewick’s swans on reservoirs and wetlands from the Ouse to the Severn […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
