Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the kingdom's former ambassador to the United States, is reportedly under house arrest over a conspiracy against the monarch.
Saad al-Faqih, head of the opposition group Islamic Reform Movement, told Arab-language TV al-Alam that Prince Bandar has been disappeared and the media has published no word from the ex-diplomat's whereabouts since nearly three months ago.
According to al-Faqih, the prince first disappeared in Britain but he returned to the kingdom shortly afterwards.
He added that after Saudi officials discovered that he had provoked 200 agents working for the Saudi security service to stage a coup against King Abdullah, he was put under house arrest.
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton is heading to North Korea for
negotiations to secure the freedom of 2 detained American
journalists nearly 5 months after they
were seized on the China border.
Clinton is on his way to
Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, where he will try to win the
release of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, South Korea's Yonhap news agency
reported, citing an unidentified high-level source.
With dictators on the rise, democracy under assault and foreign powers making inroads in Latin America, it’s not clear the Obama administration has a plan for dealing with it - other than more of its “Have a Coke and a Smile” brand of foreign policy.
Unfortunately, considering the challenges we’re facing, relaxed soft-drink diplomacy just isn’t going to cut it.
Topping the list is Venezuela, a major thorn in our side for some time now, but which has, remarkably, only gotten worse since President Barack Obama took office.
Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds dropped a bombshell on the Mike Malloy radio show, guest-hosted by Brad Friedman (audio, partial transcript).In the interview,
Sibel says that the US maintained ‘intimate relations’ with Bin Laden,
and the Taliban, “all the way until that day of September 11.”
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday "deplored" the alleged abuse of political prisoners in Iran following the election and urged their immediate release.
President Barack Obama said Friday that he's open to more overtures
to Cuba, such as lifting restrictions on academic travel to the island,
but not without signs of changes from the government in Havana.
"We're not there yet,'' he said. "We think it's important to see
progress on issues of political liberalization, freedom of the press,
freedom of assembly, release of political prisoners in order for there
to be the full possibility of normalization between our two countries.''
The Kurdish provinces of Iraq
are a world apart from the country inhabited by their fellow citizens.
Basic services like electricity and fuel are good and increasingly
available to all Kurds.
Booming foreign investment has created a business culture complete with
plans for a golf course as part of a gated-community outside the
capital city of Erbil. There have been no U.S. combat fatalities in the
autonomous Kurdish region since the fall of Saddam Hussein,
in 2003. But there's one thing the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG)
can no longer lord over the struggling central government in Baghdad:
democracy.
"The KRG has a democracy gap with Baghdad," says Quil Lawrence, author of Invisible Nation: How the Kurds' Quest for Statehood Is Shaping Iraq and the Middle East.
"After years of counting on American support because of its
pro-Western, secular and, most importantly, pro-democratic image, the
Kurdish parliament looks like a rubber stamp s
Los Angeles – David Vine will be the featured guest on the Scott Horton Show at Antiwar Radio, 2:30pm Eastern, Friday July 24th.
David Vine will be discussing his book, Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia.
David Vine is an assistant professor of Anthropology at American
University. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington
Post, Mother Jones online, Foreign Policy in Focus, Chronicle of Higher
Education, and elsewhere.
The Scott Horton Show airs Tuesday through Friday from 2PM-4PM
Eastern on KAOS 95.9FM. Additional feeds and archives available at
Antiwar Radio.
For more information on Scott Horton or Antiwar Radio please contact:
Georgia's president asked U.S. Vice President Joe Biden for
advanced U.S. weaponry, military aid and unarmed observers to monitor a
cease-fire along the boundaries of two Moscow-backed breakaway regions,
a senior U.S. official said.
On
Wednesday, Washington-based investigative journalist Wayne Madsen
quoted US intelligence officials as making ‘prominent’ references to
Bhutto as a probable target of the program.
Switzerland's government said it would forbid the Swiss bank
UBS AG from complying with any court-ordered transfer of data on tens
of thousands of American clients to the U.S. government, and would
consider seizing documents to prevent that.
President Obama
signed an agreement to cut American and Russian strategic
nuclear arsenals by at least one-quarter, a first step in a broader
effort intended to reduce the threat of such weapons drastically and to
prevent their further spread to unstable regions.
COLORADO SPRINGS | U.S. missile defenses are prepared to try to knock
down the last stage of a Taepodong-2 missile that North Korea is
expected soon to launch if sensors detect the weapon threatens U.S.
territory, the commander of the U.S. Northern Command told The
Washington Times.
"The nation has a very, very credible ballistic-missile defense
capability. Our ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California, I'm
very comfortable, give me a capability that if we really are threatened
by a long-range ICBM that I've got high confidence that I could
interdict that flight before it caused huge damage to any U.S.
territory," said Air Force Gen. Victor E. "Gene" Renuart, Northcom
commander.
There is no
area in which Republicans have further strayed from our traditions
than in foreign affairs.
Generations
of conservatives followed the great advice of our Founding Fathers
and pursued a restrained foreign policy that rebuffed entangling
alliances and advised America, in the words of John Quincy Adams,
not to "go abroad looking for dragons to slay."
Sen. Robert
Taft, the stalwart of the Old Right, urged America to stay out of
NATO. Dwight Eisenhower was elected on a platform promising to get
us out of the conflict in Korea. Richard Nixon promised to end the
war in Vietnam.
U.S. officials said Tuesday that a North Korean ship has turned around
and is headed back toward the north where it came from, after being
tracked for more than a week by American Navy vessels on suspicion of
carrying illegal weapons.
(This BBC video explains how the US Military has moved from inside the cities to just outside the cities out of sight where they'll be waiting for..... The media is being scrubed of the many new large US military bases around the country. If there is any sort of an uprising against the 'USA approved' government there will be intervention... immediately. Just as with Vietnam, this war will continue until it is no longer funded.)
Despite the pullback from cities and towns, due to be completed on Tuesday, US troops will still be embedded with Iraqi forces. ...while the pullback is significant, the actual withdrawal of US combat troops in 2010 will pose a greater challenge.(They aren't really leaving,... the troops are now populating the new US military bases instead of the cities)
Barack Obama is joining with the Castro brothers and Hugo Chavez in condemning the Honduras military for coming to the defense of their constitution, as determined by the Honduran Supreme Court, and removing a president who was determined to illegally amend the constitution making him president for life to better institute his socialist agenda.
(AP)
Thousands of troops, backed by hundreds of tanks, artillery and other
heavy weaponry, began rumbling through the North Caucasus on Monday, as
Russia began its largest military exercises since last year's war with
Georgia.
The
Caucasus 2009 war games are being seen by many experts as a warning
shot for nearby Georgia, where the government says it has rearmed armed
forces and where NATO recently wrapped up its own exercises.
Experts
say the exercises may also be signal to the United States that Russia
will give no ground on its efforts to maintain an exclusive sphere of
influence in Georgia and other former Soviet republics. The games run
through July 6 _ the day that President Barack Obama arrives in Moscow
for a highly anticipated summit with Russia's Dmitry Medvedev.
Defense
Ministry official say more than 8,500 troops will take part, along with
nearly 200 tanks, armored vehicles, 100 artillery units and several
units
Kyrgyz officials said the US could use the base in Central
Asia as a transit center to supply NATO forces in Afghanistan. It
appeared that the United States had sharply increased the rent that it
paid to avoid complete closure.
Hello
Americans I am here to tell you that you hold your own fate and way of
life in the palm of your hands. You are under the ever watchful eye of
an ever increasing tyrannical government.Many of us have been told that
our actions are traitorous and un-American why because we support the people because we support the Constitution.
I’m here to
tell you people that are asleep that you are the traitors you that
stand idly by while our freedoms are stripped from us are the un-Americans.
Yet today
Barack Hussein Obama and members of the United States Senate and House
of Representatives and the mainstream media condemn the attacks on
Iranians right of free speech the physical abuse and executions of
those that speak out for freedom in Iran Yet in our own country today
the mainstream media which serves as nothing more than a propaganda
mouthpiece for the Whitehouse and the globalists along with our elected
representatives continue to push for legislation and various
Navy Positions Destroyer For Possible Intercept of North Korean Ship Suspected of Proliferating Missiles, Nukes
The U.S. military is preparing for a possible intercept of a North Korean flagged ship suspected of proliferating weapons
material in violation of a U.N. Security Council resolution passed last Friday, FOX News has learned.
The
USS John McCain, a Navy destroyer, is positioning itself in case it
gets orders to intercept the ship Kang Nam as soon as it leaves the
vicinity off the coast of China, according to a senior U.S. defense
official. The order to inderdict has not been given yet, but the ship
is moving into the area.
"Permission has not been requested. Nor is it clear it will be," a military source told
FOX News. "This is a very delicate situation and no one is interested in precipitating a confrontation."
The
ship left a port in North Korea Wednesday and appears to be heading
toward Singapore, according to a seni
The suspect ship could become a test case for interception of the
North's ships at sea, something the North has said it would consider an
act of war.
Officials said the U.S. is monitoring the voyage of the North
Korean-flagged Kang Nam, which left port in North Korea traveling in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of
China
The British Government responded with ill-disguised fury to the news
that 4 Chinese Uighurs freed from Guantanamo Bay had been flown for
resettlement on Bermuda.
The Government of Bermuda failed to consult with the
Foreign and Commonwealth Office on the decision to take in the Uighurs –
whose return is demanded by Beijing – and it could now be forced to send
them back to Cuba or risk a grave diplomatic crisis.
President Barack Obama declared unequivocally the United States doesn't accept the legitimacy of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory and that "just as Israel's right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine's."
"Obama is just a prettier face. I'm sure his intentions are in the right place but I don't expect much from the man," a Cairo electrician said. Ordinary Arabs warned Obama against emulating the policies of Bush by lecturing Muslims on democracy
LONDON -- President Barack Obama reiterated that Iran may have some right to nuclear energy _ provided it takes steps to prove its aspirations are peaceful.
In a BBC interview broadcast Tuesday, Obama also restated plans to pursue direct diplomacy with Tehran to encourage it to set aside any ambitions for nuclear weapons it might harbor.
Iran has insisted its nuclear program is aimed at generating electricity. But the U.S. and other Western governments accuse Tehran of seeking atomic weapons.
"Without going into specifics, what I do believe is that Iran has legitimate energy concerns, legitimate aspirations. On the other hand, the international community has a very real interest in preventing a nuclear arms race in the region," Obama said.
The comments echo remarks Obama made in Prague last month in which he said his administration would "support Iran's right to peaceful nuclear energy with rigorous inspections" if Iran proves it is no longer a nucle
The Defense Department is reportedly furious with the President’s proposal to sell blueprints of the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber to the People’s Republic. Gates has flatly rejected the President’s plan, but has since been asked to step down if he will not facilitate the process.
Cuba criticized Microsoft for blocking its Messenger instant messaging service on the island and in other countries under US sanctions, calling it yet another example of Washington's "harsh" treatment of Havana. was disabling the program's availability in Cuba, Syria, Iran, Sudan and North Korea to come into compliance with a U.S. ban on transfer of licensed software to embargoed countries.
North Korea does nothing with out the expressed approvale of China, the Korean war was actually the First China War, now with an explosion of a weapon, most likly from China and the Norths tossing out of the Treaty ending the "police actio