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That is what is making the option of sending troops into Lebanon now more difficult. I think it is unlikely that they will want to go in and stay. But of course, they could make the same mistake again. They've done it before. The main thing to understand is the mood among the population that does not want a repeat of t...
I think the thinking of the people at the top is that if they can even push back Hizbollah one or two kilometres from the border then they can present this as a victory. Today's "clearing" of one kilometre would indicate that may be the case.
Another element in the situation is that Hizbollah is targeting civilians inside Israel. This is having two contradictory effects. On the one hand there is the hard-line position of "go after them, no matter what price, hit back." But there are the others who are simply fleeing the zones at risk.
Nasrallah has announced that he can hit Tel Aviv. The government denied this, but then the army said that he could. These contradictory statements are sending out the message that there is no clear direction at the top. There are also many signs that the Israeli army does not have a clear view of what it is doing.
What I think is true is that Israel had been planning this war for some time. According to different sources it seems that the Israeli military carried out some acts of provocation. Al-Manur, the Hizbollah TV station, claims that Israeli jeeps actually entered Lebanese territory just before the kidnappings. Al-Manur ha...
It may be the case also that Hizbollah miscalculated. I don't think they were expecting such an all-out attack. They thought this was their opportunity to simply get an exchange of prisoners, as has happened in the past. But now Israel is using this to attack all of Lebanon.
On the other hand it is also true that this is the first time since 1948 that Israel has been hit like this, so far into its own territory. This is generating a tremendous feeling of insecurity. This morning I went to the local supermarket to do some shopping and found that many items were missing from the shelves. The...
The degree to which the authorities must be worried is revealed by the enormous propaganda campaign they have mounted. They are constantly pumping away with the idea that "we must be united, we need massive support of the people" and so on.
Among the Ashkenazi intelligentsia there is clearly a split, with some sections seeing the barbarism of the Israeli government. The mood of some Israelis can be seen also by the fact that many are trying to get another passport. This wouldn't have happened twenty years ago. The population is very confused. Zionism is i...
It is unfortunate that Nasrallah's only aim is to break the backbone of the Israeli people. He has no concept of class divisions in society. If instead of the reactionary that he is he were to have a Marxist approach, i.e. to appeal to the ordinary working people, to target the military but not the civilians and so on,...
Israel is not the society that it was and also the balance of forces in the region has changed, and Israel will never recover what it had in the past.
The latest news is that there seems to be international pressure building up to reach some kind of deal. Damascus, Tehran and the French have been meeting. Blair is talking of some kind of international force to be deployed in the area.
Radio "Free Lebanon", a right-wing Christian station, has just reported that an Israeli F16 plane has been shot down. But the Israeli authorities immediately denied this. Al-Manur reported that a large, silver coloured vehicle of some kind had been brought down and had then exploded. The Israeli TV has shown pictures o...
Tonight Olmert is going to "talk to the nation" on TV. He will praise the people and try and whip up a spirit of national unity, but they are clearly worried. They know there is a limit to how much the people can take. While all this rhetoric is being churned out it is clear they are hoping to cook up some deal.
If they are forced to back off then there will be a tremendous mess. The cost is mounting up by the minute. Every day 200 Israeli warplanes are being used. Once all this is over they will announce more cuts in social spending to pay for the war effort. The same will happen on the Lebanese side. How much more can the pe...
Today there was a small incursion into Lebanese territory by Israeli Special Forces to "cleanse" a one-kilometre strip along the border. This links up to what I said earlier today, that they may try and reach a deal whereby Hizbollah is forced back a few kilometres from the border and then the Israeli government can sh...
Of course, the situation can also develop a logic of its won, beyond the control of the people at the top and Israel can get sucked into a scenario it had not planned for. We will see in the next few days.
For some people, a poisonous snake hissing in their courtyard is the stuff of nightmares. But in this sleepy village in eastern India, the reptiles are welcome and abundant.
The village of Choto Pashla in West Bengal state has one snake for every two residents, mainly the poisonous monocled cobra, a black reptile with a yellow ring around its neck that can grow to seven feet (two metres) in length.
Such snakes are found everywhere -- in rice fields, ditches, muddy ponds and even sometimes sunning themselves by houses -- and no one appears to fear them.
"The poison-fanged reptiles represent a way of life in Choto Pashla. People of the neighbouring villages are scared to come here," said Samir Chatterjee, the local school headmaster, who has written a book about the snakes.
"A recent count by the villagers found there are more than 3,000 snakes in this village of 6,000 people."
The Geological Survey of India is studying the village to figure out why the cobras are flourishing there, an official said.
"We wonder why a particular species of snakes is thriving in this village," said the official, asking not to be named. "We are looking into the topography of the village."
Local lore has it that the reptiles first came to the little rice-farming village 130 kilometres (80 miles) northwest of the state capital Kolkata en masse six centuries ago during a flood.
The Hindu village began worshipping the snakes as the representatives of a goddess and believe that their farms have consequently prospered ever since.
"Women offer milk to the reptiles at midday when the priest worships the goddess of snakes, Manasa, in the temple," said Chatterjee.
When a snake dies, the villagers place it in an earthen jar and then immerses it in the sacred Ganges River.
Still, apart from feeding them and performing their last rites, the villagers do try to keep the snakes at arm's length, or more.
"Our customs forbid us from touching the snakes," said 25-year-old Dipu Majhi who was bitten by a snake nearly five years ago while fishing in a pond.
Nearly a dozen villagers die of snake-bite every year, locals say, with the village still relying on traditional treatments.
"I was asked to bathe in the pond beside the temple of the goddess of snakes and then a pinch of mud from the temple compound was rubbed on the injury," said Majhi, a fish and vegetable seller.
"My hand swelled but healed after a week."
Anti-venom drugs are available at some hospitals in the state, but these may not be near enough for the villagers to get to in time.
"It's a unique village where poisonous cobras are co-existing with human beings," said Dipak Mitra, a herpetologist. Mitra also runs a snake park in Kolkata with 700 species of the reptiles, and has visited the village.
"It's simply incredible," he said.
DUBAI (Reuters) - Oil exporters have not fully recovered from the dramatic oil price shock of 2014, the head of the IMF said on Saturday, and she cautioned against spending money on “white elephant projects”.
“With revenues down, fiscal deficits are only slowly declining, despite significant reforms on both the spending and revenue sides, including the introduction of VAT and excise taxes,” Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the IMF, told a conference in Dubai.
Lagarde said the uncertainty in the growth outlook for oil exporters also reflected moves by countries to shift rapidly toward renewable energy over the new few decades, in line with the Paris climate change pact.
Saudi Arabia, the Middle East’s biggest economy, has announced plans to go ahead with three major projects including NEOM, a $500 billion economic zone announced by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The projects are backed by the country’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund.
The IMF’s revised forecast sees the global economy growing by 3.5 percent this year, 0.2 percentage points below what it expected in October.
“Unsurprisingly, a weaker global environment has knock-on effects on the region through a variety of channels - trade, remittances, capital flows, commodity prices, and financing conditions,” she said.
UNITED NATIONS, June 21 – North Korea's UN Ambassador Sin Son-ho on Friday called for the dismantling of the decades old “UN Command” in South Korea. He quoted former UN Secretaries General Boutros Boutros Ghali and Kofi Annan that it is not really a “UN” force.
When called on for a question by Sin Son-ho, Inner City Press asked if he knew the view of current Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, a former South Korean foreign minister, and if the UN could itself dismantle the UN Command as a mis-use of the UN name. Video here from Minute 35:34.
Sin Son-ho replied that the call for dismantling is in the first instance to the US; if no action is taken, North Korea will ask the General Assembly to act.
The problem with that is that GA resolutions have no legal effect. In the Security Council, the US could veto any resolution.
Sin Son-ho's press conference was standing room only, with photographers clicking and reporters shouting questions. Sin Son-ho did not call on the old UN Correspondents Association first but they insisted on it, as they did earlier this year with Evo Morales, click here for that.
UNCA's 2013 president Pamela Falk of CBS, once the first question was re-directed to her, asked a pre-formulated question about the US position. Then, when Sin Son-ho called on Inner City Press and it thanked him on behalf of the new Free UN Coalition for Access, he spoke of his General Assembly plan.
Inner City Press by Twitter sought response from the US Mission to the UN and its Ambassador Susan Rice. Watch this site.
Jets carry out two sets of air raids to block ISIL evacuees from reaching area held by the group near Syria-Iraq border.
A US-led coalition battling the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group says its fighter jets have blocked a convoy of the group's fighters evacuated from Lebanon from reaching eastern Syria, and also struck a number of their comrades travelling from the other direction to meet them.
The attacks on Wednesday were aimed at derailing a deal for ISIL fighters to leave their enclave on the Lebanon border, along with their family members, for areas the armed group holds on Syria's eastern frontier with Iraq.
The evacuation deal, brokered by Lebanon's Hezbollah and the Syrian army, sparked a furious reaction from Iraq and the United States.
Iraq's Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said moving hundreds of fighters towards the Iraqi border was "unacceptable" and "an insult to the Iraqi people", while US officials said ISIL fighters should be killed on the battlefield.
The first set of attacks on Wednesday took place east of Humeima in southeast Syria, said Ryan Dillon, a spokesman for the coalition.
"To prevent the convoy from moving further east, we cratered the road and destroyed a small bridge," he told AFP news agency.
Dillon said the coalition understood there were civilians aboard the buses, and would only bomb the convoy if fighters could be separated from the civilians.
Describing ISIL as a "global threat", he said, "relocating terrorists from one place to another for someone else to deal with is not a lasting solution".
Later, coalition fighter jets also bombed ISIL vehicles heading towards the convoy from the Syrian town of Albukamal.
The buses, which left the Lebanese-Syrian border two days ago, were now stuck in territory held by Syria's government, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based group monitoring the country's conflict via a network of contacts on the ground.
There were about 300 fighters and almost as many family members, including children, on the buses being evacuated, according to Hezbollah, which defended the evacuation deal saying it was the "only way" to find out the fate of nine Lebanese soldiers ISIL had kidnapped in 2014.
The deal also involved ISIL surrendering Hezbollah and Syrian army prisoners and bodies in eastern Syria.
Hezbollah had fought a week-long offensive against ISIL on the Syrian side of the border with Lebanon, coinciding with a simultaneous assault by Lebanese troops on their side of the frontier.
The battles ended on Sunday with the announcement of the evacuation deal.
ISIL is on the back foot in both Syria and Iraq, losing swaths of its territory and its most important towns and cities.
In Syria, the US-led coalition is backing an alliance of Kurdish and Arab armed groups in the north which are assaulting ISIL in the city of Raqqa.
The Russian-backed Syrian army and allied armed groups have meanwhile seized most of the central desert from ISIL, and are advancing eastwards to relieve the army's besieged enclave in Deir Az Zor.
BRONTE WITTPENN \| Times Yellow air-conditioning ducts can be seen connected to windows at H.B. Plant High School in south Tampa on Monday, August 20, 2018. The school installed the ducts when the gym's air conditioning quit working, making the temperature rise to 90 degrees.
Florida lawmakers – well, some of them – love to shout to the heavens that this is a low-tax state. If they could rewrite the rules of language to make "tax" a four-letter word, it would be mandatory to teach it that way in public school classrooms.
Alas, while they are spreading confetti to celebrate all those tax reductions, we are seeing the cost to the public good when revenues sink too low. In a state like this one experiencing runaway growth, the low-tax zeal can (and does) have a bad effect in places where the public kind of needs to be fully operational — ...
Both areas need lots more money to meet demand, and there haven’t been many golden gifts from Tallahassee to meet that. So, something extraordinary has occurred. In just the last few weeks, those separate but equally important areas of our community have decided to ask Hillsborough County voters to approve sales tax in...
The All For Transportation group succeeded in a petition drive to put the issue right in front of voters, asking them to pass a 30-year, one-cent-per-dollar sales hike that will fund various transportation needs throughout the county.
While the "No How, No Way, Not One Thin Dime" crowd was absorbing that, the School Board charged ahead with a plan to ask voters for a half-cent sales tax increase to pay for, well, lots of needs.
It’s a bold strategy, to say the least.
The transportation initiative already faced a tough route to approval, given how fierce the opposition here can be toward any sort of tax increase. Opponents will pull out the usual talking points and keep repeating them until Election Day — financial mismanagement, why should we trust you, they just want a fancy-schma...
But now, that campaign will also compete in voters’ minds with the image of broken air conditioners in schools, crumbling buildings, grumpy teachers fed up with substandard pay — not that any of that will ease the ferocity of the opposition.
Oops, I used a word neither side wants to hear — "compete."
The transportation folks say they aren’t trying to talk down the dire needs of the public schools here. It’s vice versa from school officials.
Someone entering the voting booth is likely to see things differently, depending whether they have school-aged children or are fed up with being struck in traffic jams every day — or both.
Cindy Stuart was first elected to the School Board in 2012. She will be the longest-serving member of that body after April Griffin and Susan Valdes leave in November.
"In terms of funding from the state, I’ve seen it go from bad to worse in the time I’ve been here," Stuart said. "People tell us, ‘Go to Tallahassee and fight for funding.’ We do fight, but we can’t keep up with the growth. We have to have more money."
I suppose the Legislature could always authorize building a wall along the Georgia and Alabama borders to stop people from moving here and forcing the state to build more schools.
That was a joke, by the way, just in case any lawmaker right now is thinking, "Hmmm…."
One thing we know about the opposition, though: It is always mobilized and motivated to say no to that four-letter word spelled t-a-x.
There was some encouraging news from Tuesday’s primary election night. Voters in several areas of the state approved tax hikes or extensions to pay for school needs, including teacher salaries.
Of course, those voters didn’t have to consider a transportation tax request at the same time, and that’s where we come in.
Schools are expensive. Transportation is expensive.
There isn’t enough money to go around, and people just keep coming here.
France's election commission on Sunday released a statement saying that any news organization or individual that publishes information leaked from the hacking attack targeting presidential frontrunner Emmanuel Macron's campaign could be subject to a criminal offense, France 24 reported.
"The dissemination of such data, which has been fraudulently obtained and in all likelihood may have been mingled with false information, is liable to be classified as a criminal offense," a commission statement said.
"On the eve of the most important election for our institutions, the commission calls on everyone using the internet and social media . . . not to spread this information," the statement said.
In France, there is an electoral "discretionary period" that prohibits French press from quoting presidential campaigns or their supporters until polls close 8:00 p.m. Sunday. The discretionary period went into effect midnight Saturday.
On Friday, Macron's campaign confirmed that it was the victim of a "massive and coordinated hacking operation" after a document dump containing 14 gigabytes of emails and campaign documents appeared online four hours before the media blackout went into effect.
"The leak happened in the last hours of the campaign. This operation is clearly meant to undermine democracy, just like what happened in the US during the last presidential campaign," a statement from the Macron campaign said Friday.
France established a discretionary period for the sole purpose of preventing scandals at the final-hour from influencing the election results.
Brian Fallon, Hillary Clinton's national press secretary for the 2016 presidential campaign, admitted that he preferred this system compared to the alternative.
A re-authorization bill for the FAA that will secure nearly $90 billion in funding over five years for the agency passed in the U.S. House of Representatives by a margin of 398-to-23 Wednesday. The bill must be passed in the Senate before the end of the month to prevent the FAA from shutting down.
Highlights of the bill, which has been negotiated and agreed to by both the House and the Senate, include direction on supersonic aircraft regulation and drones. Notable sections that were cut ahead of the final version include sought-after legislation to privatize air traffic management and the prohibition of “unreaso...
“Not only does it provide FAA programs with stability and certainty for the next five years, its numerous reforms will allow America’s aviation industry to continue to safely innovate, thrive and lead,” said Rep. Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, in a statement.

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