58 Percent of Americans: Bush Is Lying on Iraq In the Sept. 29-Oct. 2 (CNN) poll, 58 percent said the administration misled the public about how the war is going. In addition, 57 percent said the conflict has made the U.S. less safe from terrorism, indicating that Bush's central argument in defense of his policy isn't gaining traction with voters. Bloomberg

'Ancient light' takes Nobel Prize The CMB has been called the "echo" of the Big Bang - the event that created the Universe less than 14 billion years ago.
It is the radiation that formed when the Universe had cooled to such a degree that hydrogen atoms could exist. Before that time, scientists say, the Universe would have been so hot that matter and radiation would have been "coupled" - it would have been opaque. BBC

A Racial Rift That Isn't Black and White For centuries, the South has been defined by the color line and the struggle for accommodation between blacks and whites. But the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Hispanic immigrants over the past decade is quietly changing the dynamics of race relations in many Southern towns. NY Times

Violence not confined to Islam. Christian executes Girls in Paradise. A 32-year-old dairy truck driver killed at least three schoolgirls execution style and then shot himself dead after bursting into a one-room Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania... He was armed with an automatic handgun and a shotgun.. The Sydney Morning Herald

Liberty of thought and expression.
Robert Redeker, 52, a writer and high-school philosophy teacher who has been under police protection and in hiding with his family since the newspaper Le Figaro published his op-ed piece about Islam on Sept.19. Entitled "Faced with Islamist intimidations, what should the free world do?" Time

Is the homeland where America's heart is? What kind of American are you? Red-state or blue-state? Secular humanist pinko or Bible-thumping loon? Tribe of Coulter or tribe of Franken? ..., one could say that old fires of tribal hatred (country vs. city, populace vs. elites) were rebuilt and carefully tended by politicians who could benefit from them. In that sense, what has happened in America in the last quarter-century is not altogether different from what has happened in the Balkans, the Middle East, Rwanda, Sudan and countless other exotic locations. The modalities of conflict are different, for the most part, and that's something to be grateful for. Salon

Song Search. Download. Listen. Vote!
Remember the last time you came upon a song you hadn't heard of before, a catchy tune that entered your head and refused to leave? The last time a fresh new sound seemed to open up the world just a little bit more? That's what Song Search is trying to find -- we want to unearth the greatest song you've never heard. Salon

The Literary Guide to the World? From Booker Prize winner John Banville on Ireland to acclaimed travel writer Tom Bissell on Vietnam, writers talk about the literature -- from fiction to history to memoirs -- that brings their beloved places alive. Salon

A Portrait of Bush as a Victim of His Own Certitude As this new book's title, (State of Denial), indicates, Mr. Woodward now sees Mr. Bush as a president who lives in a state of willful denial about the worsening situation in Iraq, a president who insists he won't withdraw troops, even "if Laura and Barney are the only ones who support me." (Barney is Mr. Bush's Scottish terrier.) N Y Times Books

Nato drawn into growing Russian spy row Georgian police continued to surround Russian army headquarters, renewing demands for the handover of a fifth officer accused of spying on Georgian military installations. However, Russia was defiant in its refusal to hand him over. Times

NATO to Broaden Military Operations in Afghanistan The agreement, endorsed at an informal two-day meeting of alliance defense ministers, would see some 12,000 US troops come under NATO control within Afghanistan's International Security Assistance Force within weeks. Deutsche Welle via World Press Review

Another zero-day threat hits Windows The Windows Shell bug is one of several flaws that are publicly known and for which exploit code is available, but which Microsoft has yet to patch. Cybercrooks are actively exploiting yet-to-be-fixed holes in PowerPoint, Word and IE, Microsoft has acknowledged. CNet News

Peek at NSA's Secret Reading List Written specifically for NSA employees, the articles listed in the online indexes date back as far as 1956. Stories include an analysis of the TRS-80 Model 1's password-encryption algorithm, accounts of how Soviet codes were broken, analyses of bad management techniques within the sprawling eavesdropping agency, and an insider's view of North Korea's capture of the spy boat U.S.S. Pueblo in 1968 Wired

April 9, 2006
U.S. Study Paints Somber Portrait of Iraqi Discord

By ERIC SCHMITT and EDWARD WONG (New York Times)

WASHINGTON, April 8 — An internal staff report by the United States Embassy and the military command in Baghdad provides a sobering province-by-province snapshot of Iraq's political, economic and security situation, rating the overall stability of 6 of the 18 provinces "serious" and one "critical." The report is a counterpoint to some recent upbeat public statements by top American politicians and military officials.

The report, 10 pages of briefing points titled "Provincial Stability Assessment," underscores the shift in the nature of the Iraq war three years after the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Warnings of sectarian and ethnic frictions are raised in many regions, even in those provinces generally described as nonviolent by American officials.

There are alerts about the growing power of Iranian-backed religious Shiite parties, several of which the United States helped put into power, and rival militias in the south. The authors also point to the Arab-Kurdish fault line in the north as a major concern, with the two ethnicities vying for power in Mosul, where violence is rampant, and Kirkuk, whose oil fields are critical for jump-starting economic growth in Iraq.

The patterns of discord mapped by the report confirm that ethnic and religious schisms have become entrenched across much of the country, even as monthly American fatalities have fallen. Those indications, taken with recent reports of mass migrations from mixed Sunni-Shiite areas, show that Iraq is undergoing a de facto partitioning along ethnic and sectarian lines, with clashes — sometimes political, sometimes violent — taking place in those mixed areas where different groups meet.

The report, the first of its kind, was written over a six-week period by a joint civilian and military group in Baghdad that wanted to provide a baseline assessment for conditions that new reconstruction teams would face as they were deployed to the provinces, said Daniel Speckhard, an American ambassador in Baghdad who oversees reconstruction efforts.

The writers included officials from the American Embassy's political branch, reconstruction agencies and the American military command in Baghdad, Mr. Speckhard said. The authors also received information from State Department officers in the provinces, he said.

The report was part of a periodic briefing on Iraq that the State Department provides to Congress, and has been shown to officials on Capitol Hill, including those involved in budgeting for the reconstruction teams. It is not clear how many top American officials have seen it; the report has not circulated widely at the Defense Department or the National Security Council, spokesmen there said.

A copy of the report, which is not classified, was provided to The New York Times by a government official in Washington who opposes the way the war is being conducted and said the confidential assessment provided a more realistic gauge of stability in Iraq than the recent portrayals by senior military officers. It is dated Jan. 31, 2006, three weeks before the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra, which set off reprisals that killed hundreds of Iraqis. Recent updates to the report are minor and leave its conclusions virtually unchanged, Mr. Speckhard said.

The general tenor of the Bush administration's comments on Iraq has been optimistic. On Thursday, President Bush argued in a speech that his strategy was working despite rising violence in Iraq.

Vice President Dick Cheney, on the CBS News program "Face the Nation," suggested last month that the administration's positive views were a better reflection of the conditions in Iraq than news media reports.

"I think it has less to do with the statements we've made, which I think were basically accurate and reflect reality," Mr. Cheney said, "than it does with the fact that there's a constant sort of perception, if you will, that's created because what's newsworthy is the car bomb in Baghdad."

In their public comments, the White House and the Pentagon have used daily attack statistics as a measure of stability in the provinces. Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a senior military spokesman in Baghdad, told reporters recently that 12 of 18 provinces experienced "less than two attacks a day."

Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on the NBC News program "Meet the Press" on March 5 that the war in Iraq was "going very, very well," although a few days later, he acknowledged serious difficulties.

In recent interviews and speeches, some administration officials have begun to lay out the deep-rooted problems plaguing the American enterprise here. At the forefront has been Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador, who has said the invasion opened a "Pandora's box" and, on Friday, warned that a civil war here could engulf the entire Middle East.

On Saturday, Mr. Khalilzad and Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior military commander in Iraq, issued a statement praising some of the political and security goals achieved in the last three years, but also cautioning that "despite much progress, much work remains."

Mr. Speckhard, the ambassador overseeing reconstruction, said the report was not as dire as its assessments might suggest. "Really, this shows there's one province that continues to be a major challenge," he said. "There are a number of others that have significant work to do in them. And there are other parts of the country that are doing much better."

But the report's capsule summaries of each province offer some surprisingly gloomy news. The report's formula for rating stability takes into account governing, security and economic issues. The oil-rich Basra Province, where British troops have patrolled in relative calm for most of the last three years, is now rated as "serious."

The report defines "serious" as having "a government that is not fully formed or cannot serve the needs of its residents; economic development that is stagnant with high unemployment, and a security situation marked by routine violence, assassinations and extremism."

British fatalities have been on the rise in Basra in recent months, with attacks attributed to Shiite insurgents. There is a "high level of militia activity including infiltration of local security forces," the report says. "Smuggling and criminal activity continues unabated. Intimidation attacks and assassination are common."

The report states that economic development in the region, long one of the poorest in Iraq, is "hindered by weak government."

The city of Basra has widely been reported as devolving into a mini-theocracy, with government and security officials beholden to Shiite religious leaders, enforcing bans on alcohol and mandating head scarves for women. Police cars and checkpoints are often decorated with posters or stickers of Moktada al-Sadr, the rebellious cleric, or Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, a cleric whose party is very close to Iran. Both men have formidable militias.

Mr. Hakim's party controls the provincial councils of eight of the nine southern provinces, as well as the council in Baghdad.

In a color-coded map included in the report, the province of Anbar, the wide swath of western desert that is the heart of the Sunni Arab insurgency, is depicted in red, for "critical." The six provinces categorized as "serious" — Basra, Baghdad, Diyala and three others to the north — are orange. Eight provinces deemed "moderate" are in yellow, and the three Kurdish provinces are depicted in green, for "stable."

The "critical" security designation, the report says, means a province has "a government that is not functioning" or that is only "represented by a single strong leader"; "an economy that does have the infrastructure or government leadership to develop and is a significant contributor to instability"; and "a security situation marked by high levels of AIF [anti-Iraq forces] activity, assassinations and extremism."

The most surprising assessments are perhaps those of the nine southern provinces, none of which are rated "stable." The Bush administration often highlights the relative lack of violence in those regions.

For example, the report rates as "moderate" the two provinces at the heart of Shiite religious power, Najaf and Karbala, and points to the growing Iranian political presence there. In Najaf, "Iranian influence on provincial government of concern," the report says. Both the governor and former governor of Najaf are officials in Mr. Hakim's religious party, founded in Iran in the early 1980's. The report also notes that "there is growing tension between Mahdi Militia and Badr Corps that could escalate" — referring to the private armies of Mr. Sadr and Mr. Hakim, which have clashed before.

The report does highlight two bright spots for Najaf. The provincial government is able to maintain stability for the province and provide for the people's needs, it says, and religious tourism offers potential for economic growth.

But insurgents still manage to occasionally penetrate the tight ring of security. A car bomb exploded Thursday near the golden-domed Imam Ali Shrine, killing at least 10 people and wounding dozens.

Immediately to the north, Babil Province, an important strategic area abutting Baghdad, also has "strong Iranian influence apparent within council," the report says. There is "ethnic conflict in north Babil," and "crime is a major factor within the province." In addition, "unemployment remains high."

Throughout the war, American commanders have repeatedly tried to pacify northern Babil, a farming area with a virulent Sunni Arab insurgency, but they have had little success. In southern Babil, the new threat is Shiite militiamen who are pushing up from Shiite strongholds like Najaf and Karbala and beginning to develop rivalries among themselves.

Gen. Qais Hamza al-Maamony, the commander of Babil's 8,000-member police force, said his officers were not ready yet to intervene between warring militias, should it come to that, as many fear. "They would be too frightened to get into the middle," he said in an interview.

If the American troops left Babil, he said, "the next day would be civil war."

Eric Schmitt reported from Washington for this article, and Edward Wong from Baghdad. Jeffrey Gettleman contributed reporting from Hilla, Iraq, and Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi from Baghdad.

Antarctica Cannot Replace Ice Loss

Antarctica Cannot Replace Ice Loss ...the findings suggest that a century of steady increases in global temperatures is altering the seasonal balance of the world's water cycle, in which new snow and ice neatly offset thaw and rainfall runoff every year to maintain the current level of the seas. LA Times

Consensus grows on climate change   A recent scientific report commissioned by the UK government warned that the world might already be fixed on a path that would begin melting the Greenland ice cap. That in turn would start raising sea levels throughout the world. BBC News By Roger Harrabin, Environment Correspondent

Writers issue cartoon row warning The writers say the violence sparked by the publication of cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad shows the need to fight for secular values and freedom. ...."It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats." BBC News

Did early humans socialise to avoid getting eaten?The work suggests that teamwork could have given earlyHomo – our human-like ancestors – an important advantage over their cousins Paranthropus, contributing to the latter’s extinction.New Scientist

Paintings by European masters stolen from Rio museum A spectacular robbery of art works by Picasso, Matisse, Monet and Dali marred the start of the Rio Carnival on Friday, which saw a slimmer than usual King Momo kick off festivities to feverish samba rhythms. From Merco Press as reported via Worldpress

Who's isolating whom? America cannot preach democracy in Palestine, then chastise the winners, just as it cannot demand concessions from Hamas without Israel budging, too. It cannot bully dictatorial allies to reform, then always expect their support. And America cannot single out Iran on the nuclear issue, while ignoring Israel's nearby arsenal. It's like Dick Cheney hunting quail but shooting his friend instead, joked a Saudi columnist. ...What Egyptian officials fear is that too much pressure, too soon, could drive Hamas into further extremism. Instead of making threats, say the Egyptians, outsiders should bolster Palestinian institutions that are not run by Hamas, such as the presidency of Mahmoud Abbas, and give Hamas itself time to sort out a more practical, less ideology-bound position. ...
Economist