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Sunday, July 31
View Article  México inunda de drogas a EEUU
by salvador rosillo on Sun 31 Jul 2005 08:22 PM EDT
PABLO BACHELET / The Miami Herald WASHINGTON   more »
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View Article  Zimbabwe rules out white farmers' return
by salvador rosillo on Sun 31 Jul 2005 07:39 PM EDT

The Zimbabwean Government has ruled out inviting white farmers to return to the land seized from them five years ago to boost the county's ailing economy.

In the state-run Sunday Mail newspaper, Land Reform and Resettlement Minister Didymus Mutasa says the country's land "is for the black people" and the Government is "not giving it back to anybody".

About 4,500 white farms have been seized in Zimbabwe since 2000 and have been blamed by many for a collapse in exports and economic activity.

In May, Zimbabwean Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono called for white farmers to be allowed to return to train black farmers and to avert economic collapse.

The Land Minister's statement comes ahead of a Farmers Union conference on Tuesday.

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View Article  Immigration Raid at Plant Leaves Children in Limbo
by salvador rosillo on Sun 31 Jul 2005 07:36 PM EDT
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: July 31, 2005   more »
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Saturday, July 30
View Article  History & Manufacture of Portland Cement
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 08:24 PM EDT
History & Manufacture of Portland Cement   more »
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View Article  CEMENT CO HISTORY
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 08:23 PM EDT
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View Article  Portland Cement
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 08:14 PM EDT
Portland Cement   more »
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View Article  Cement
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 07:31 PM EDT
Cement

HISTORY OF CEMENT

The word “cement” has been derived from the Latin word, “caementum” which means chipped stone crumb. This word later on was used to mean “binder”. Although the first reinforced concrete structure was built in 1852, the use of binding agents goes further back probably to lime and gypsum use after controlled use of fire by mankind. Lime has been the first material to be used as binder. Intense speculations are ongoing on when the binding feature of lime was initially discovered. Yet it would not be irrational to assert that this happened during the early stages of the history of civilization. Most probably limes formed due to fires built in limestone caves for heating or roasting food, had transformed to slaked lime due to contact with rainwater or humidity, and human beings coincidentally became aware of the binding effect of the powder formed, once it dried. The first applications of slaked lime can be seen in the drawings made on the cave walls. Later on it was employed again on cave walls for making interior and exterior decoration and plastering.

Evidence has been uncovered in different locations of ancient Egypt, Crete and Mesopotamia demonstrating that lime was used as a building material. Ancient Greeks and Romans have used lime as a hydraulic binder. Roman architect Vitruvius (B.C. 70-B.C. 25) had written about the hydraulic features of puzzolana and lime mixtures in his 10-Volumes book, namely, “On Architecture” and had even recommended a mixture ratio for mortar to be used in buildings to be put up nearby rivers and seashore; two parts puzzolana (pulvis Puteolanus) is to be mixed with one part limestone. Research results have confirmed that in Asia Minor, the plaster used in Çatalhöyük dwellings is approximately 7000 years old.

In ancient times, many binders that represent the civilization level of the associated period had been used in Egyptian pyramids, the Great Wall of China and fortresses built at different centuries. Then, about 2000 years before our day, the Romans had started using a hydraulic binder, which resembles the features of today’s cement. They obtained this binder by blending slaked lime with volcanic ashes and later on with baked brick powder. Whereas ancient Greeks were making mortar by blending volcanic tuff they obtained from Island of Santorini with lime, or used hydraulic lime they obtained from limestone that contained clay. Although ancient Greeks and Romans were aware of the hydraulic characteristic of puzzolana and lime mixtures and made use of these materials, they could not arrive at the knowledge to explain how lime is obtained or what was going on chemically during puzzolanic reactions. For instance, Pliny (i.e. Roman scientist Gaius Plinius) had written that it is not comprehensible “why lime, which is obtained through burning of stone by fire, burns once more upon contact with water?” As regards the quality and usage of binders, no significant improvement was attained until 18th Century. John Smeaton, who was assigned to rebuild the Eddystone Lighthouse in 1756, is known to be the first one to realize the chemical properties of lime. The subsequent development was the invention of the binder called the “Roman Cement", by Joseph Parker.

In 1824, a mason named Joseph Aspdin in Leeds obtained a binding agent by baking a mixture of fine particles of clay and limestone and then grinding the baked mixture. Joseph Aspdin, noticing that when water and sand was added into this material, the product resembled the building stones brought in from Portland Island after hardening, received a patent for his binder on 21.10.1824, under the name “Portland Cement”. Although the binder improved extensively in the following years, the “Portland” name was maintained as is. Since the binder invented by Joseph Aspdin was not baked at adequately high temperatures, it never reached the properties of today’s Portland cement. Anyhow it has been confirmed that Joseph Aspdin’s binder was used in the construction of the "Wakefield Arms" building, which is still intact nearby the Kirkgate train station in Britain.

The treatment of raw materials at high temperatures and grinding of these was accomplished later on by an Englishman named Isaac Johnson (1845).


The first cement plant was founded in Britain in year 1848.
The first German Cement Standard was established in 1860. Founding of American Concrete Institute (ACI) and the establishment of the US Directives.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. A.M. Neville, Properties of Concrete - Longman Scientific and Technical, NewYork 4th Edition, 1998
2. A.M. Neville and JJ.Brooks, Concrete Technology - Longman Scientific and Technical, NewYork, 1987
3. F.Kocataskin, Betonun Dünü Bugünü Yarını - 2. Ulusal Beton Kongresi
4. Betonu Olusturan Malzemeler ÇİMENTOLAR - Prof. Dr. Turhan Y. Erdogan T.H.B.B.
5. Concrete Through the Ages BCA, British Cement Association
6. Singer C.A., History of Technology, C.I, Oxford, 1977
7. Mindess, S and Young J F, Concretes 10 Prentice Hall Inc., 1981
8. Klemm, AV “Cementitous Materials: Historical Notes” Materials Science of Concrete (Ed. J. Skalny) C I s 1-26 The American Ceramic Society, 1989

Cement

HISTORY OF CEMENT

The word “cement” has been derived from the Latin word, “caementum” which means chipped stone crumb. This word later on was used to mean “binder”. Although the first reinforced concrete structure was built in 1852, the use of binding agents goes further back probably to lime and gypsum use after controlled use of fire by mankind. Lime has been the first material to be used as binder. Intense speculations are ongoing on when the binding feature of lime was initially discovered. Yet it would not be irrational to assert that this happened during the early stages of the history of civilization. Most probably limes formed due to fires built in limestone caves for heating or roasting food, had transformed to slaked lime due to contact with rainwater or humidity, and human beings coincidentally became aware of the binding effect of the powder formed, once it dried. The first applications of slaked lime can be seen in the drawings made on the cave walls. Later on it was employed again on cave walls for making interior and exterior decoration and plastering.

Evidence has been uncovered in different locations of ancient Egypt, Crete and Mesopotamia demonstrating that lime was used as a building material. Ancient Greeks and Romans have used lime as a hydraulic binder. Roman architect Vitruvius (B.C. 70-B.C. 25) had written about the hydraulic features of puzzolana and lime mixtures in his 10-Volumes book, namely, “On Architecture” and had even recommended a mixture ratio for mortar to be used in buildings to be put up nearby rivers and seashore; two parts puzzolana (pulvis Puteolanus) is to be mixed with one part limestone. Research results have confirmed that in Asia Minor, the plaster used in Çatalhöyük dwellings is approximately 7000 years old.

In ancient times, many binders that represent the civilization level of the associated period had been used in Egyptian pyramids, the Great Wall of China and fortresses built at different centuries. Then, about 2000 years before our day, the Romans had started using a hydraulic binder, which resembles the features of today’s cement. They obtained this binder by blending slaked lime with volcanic ashes and later on with baked brick powder. Whereas ancient Greeks were making mortar by blending volcanic tuff they obtained from Island of Santorini with lime, or used hydraulic lime they obtained from limestone that contained clay. Although ancient Greeks and Romans were aware of the hydraulic characteristic of puzzolana and lime mixtures and made use of these materials, they could not arrive at the knowledge to explain how lime is obtained or what was going on chemically during puzzolanic reactions. For instance, Pliny (i.e. Roman scientist Gaius Plinius) had written that it is not comprehensible “why lime, which is obtained through burning of stone by fire, burns once more upon contact with water?” As regards the quality and usage of binders, no significant improvement was attained until 18th Century. John Smeaton, who was assigned to rebuild the Eddystone Lighthouse in 1756, is known to be the first one to realize the chemical properties of lime. The subsequent development was the invention of the binder called the “Roman Cement", by Joseph Parker.

In 1824, a mason named Joseph Aspdin in Leeds obtained a binding agent by baking a mixture of fine particles of clay and limestone and then grinding the baked mixture. Joseph Aspdin, noticing that when water and sand was added into this material, the product resembled the building stones brought in from Portland Island after hardening, received a patent for his binder on 21.10.1824, under the name “Portland Cement”. Although the binder improved extensively in the following years, the “Portland” name was maintained as is. Since the binder invented by Joseph Aspdin was not baked at adequately high temperatures, it never reached the properties of today’s Portland cement. Anyhow it has been confirmed that Joseph Aspdin’s binder was used in the construction of the "Wakefield Arms" building, which is still intact nearby the Kirkgate train station in Britain.

The treatment of raw materials at high temperatures and grinding of these was accomplished later on by an Englishman named Isaac Johnson (1845).


The first cement plant was founded in Britain in year 1848.
The first German Cement Standard was established in 1860. Founding of American Concrete Institute (ACI) and the establishment of the US Directives.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. A.M. Neville, Properties of Concrete - Longman Scientific and Technical, NewYork 4th Edition, 1998
2. A.M. Neville and JJ.Brooks, Concrete Technology - Longman Scientific and Technical, NewYork, 1987
3. F.Kocataskin, Betonun Dünü Bugünü Yarını - 2. Ulusal Beton Kongresi
4. Betonu Olusturan Malzemeler ÇİMENTOLAR - Prof. Dr. Turhan Y. Erdogan T.H.B.B.
5. Concrete Through the Ages BCA, British Cement Association
6. Singer C.A., History of Technology, C.I, Oxford, 1977
7. Mindess, S and Young J F, Concretes 10 Prentice Hall Inc., 1981
8. Klemm, AV “Cementitous Materials: Historical Notes” Materials Science of Concrete (Ed. J. Skalny) C I s 1-26 The American Ceramic Society, 1989

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View Article  The History of Concrete:
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 07:29 PM EDT

A Timeline

Cement has been around for at least 12 million years. When the earth itself was undergoing intense geologic changes natural, cement was being created. It was this natural cement that humans first put to use. Eventually, they discovered how to make cement from other materials.

12,000,000 BC Reactions between limestone and oil shale during spontaneous combustion occurred in Israel to form a natural deposit of cement compounds. The deposits were characterized by Israeli geologists in the 1960's and 70's.
3000 BC
Egyptians 		Used mud mixed with straw to bind dried bricks. They also used gypsum mortars and mortars of lime in the pyramids.
Chinese Used cementitious materials to hold bamboo together in their boats and in the Great Wall.
800 BC
Greeks, Crete & Cyprus 		Used lime mortars which were much harder than later Roman mortars.
300 BC
Babylonians & As Syrians 		Used bitumen to bind stones and bricks.
300 BC - 476 AD
Romans 		Used pozzolana cement from Pozzuoli, Italy near Mt. Vesuvius to build the Appian Way, Roman baths, the Coliseum and Pantheon in Rome, and the Pont du Gard aqueduct in south France. They used lime as a cementitious material. Pliny reported a mortar mixture of 1 part lime to 4 parts sand. Vitruvius reported a 2 parts pozzolana to 1 part lime. Animal fat, milk, and blood were used as admixtures (substances added to cement to increase the properties.) These structures still exist today!
1200 - 1500
The Middle Ages 		The quality of cementing materials deteriorated. The use of burning lime and pozzolan (admixture) was lost, but reintroduced in the 1300's.
1678 Joseph Moxon wrote about a hidden fire in heated lime that appears upon the addition of water.
1779 Bry Higgins was issued a patent for hydraulic cement (stucco) for exterior plastering use.
1780 Bry Higgins published "Experiments and Observations Made With the View of Improving the Art of Composing and Applying Calcereous Cements and of Preparing Quicklime."
1793 John Smeaton found that the calcination of limestone containing clay gave a lime which hardened under water (hydraulic lime). He used hydraulic lime to rebuild Eddystone Lighthouse in Cornwall, England which he had been commissioned to build in 1756, but had to first invent a material that would not be affected by water. He wrote a book about his work.
1796 James Parker from England patented a natural hydraulic cement by calcining nodules of impure limestone containing clay, called Parker's Cement or Roman Cement.
1802 In France, a similar Roman Cement process was used.
1810 Edgar Dobbs received a patent for hydraulic mortars, stucco, and plaster, although they were of poor quality due to lack of kiln precautions.
1812 -1813 Louis Vicat of France prepared artificial hydraulic lime by calcining synthetic mixtures of limestone and clay.
1818 Maurice St. Leger was issued patents for hydraulic cement. Natural Cement was produced in the USA. Natural cement is limestone that naturally has the appropriate amounts of clay to make the same type of concrete as John Smeaton discovered.
1820 - 1821 John Tickell and Abraham Chambers were issued more hydraulic cement patents.
1822 James Frost of England prepared artificial hydraulic lime like Vicat's and called it British Cement.
1824 Joseph Aspdin of England invented portland cement by burning finely ground chalk with finely divided clay in a lime kiln until carbon dioxide was driven off. The sintered product was then ground and he called it portland cement named after the high quality building stones quarried at Portland, England.
1828 I. K. Brunel is credited with the first engineering application of portland cement, which was used to fill a breach in the Thames Tunnel.
1830 The first production of lime and hydraulic cement took place in Canada.
1836 The first systematic tests of tensile and compressive strength took place in Germany.
1843 J. M. Mauder, Son & Co. were licensed to produce patented portland cement.
1845 Isaac Johnson claims to have burned the raw materials of portland cement to clinkering temperatures.
1849 Pettenkofer & Fuches performed the first accurate chemical analysis of portland cement.
1860 The beginning of the era of portland cements of modern composition.
1862 Blake Stonebreaker of England introduced the jaw breakers to crush clinkers.
1867 Joseph Monier of France reinforced William Wand's (USA) flower pots with wire ushering in the idea of iron reinforcing bars (re-bar).
1871 David Saylor was issued the first American patent for portland cement. He showed the importance of true clinkering.
1880 J. Grant of England show the importance of using the hardest and densest portions of the clinker. Key ingredients were being chemically analyzed.
1886 The first rotary kiln was introduced in England to replace the vertical shaft kilns.
1887 Henri Le Chatelier of France established oxide ratios to prepare the proper amount of lime to produce portland cement. He named the components: Alite (tricalcium silicate), Belite (dicalcium silicate), and Celite (tetracalcium aluminoferrite). He proposed that hardening is caused by the formation of crystalline products of the reaction between cement and water.
1889 The first concrete reinforced bridge is built.
1890 The addition of gypsum when grinding clinker to act as a retardant to the setting of concrete was introduced in the USA. Vertical shaft kilns were replaced with rotary kilns and ball mills were used for grinding cement.
1891 George Bartholomew placed the first concrete street in the USA in Bellefontaine, OH. It still exists today!
1893 William Michaelis claimed that hydrated metasilicates form a gelatinous mass (gel) that dehydrates over time to harden.
1900 Basic cement tests were standardized.
1903 The first concrete high rise was built in Cincinnati, OH.
1908 Thomas Edison built cheap, cozy concrete houses in Union, NJ. They still exist today!
1909 Thomas Edison was issued a patent for rotary kilns.
1929 Dr. Linus Pauling of the USA formulated a set of principles for the structures of complex silicates.
1930 Air entraining agents were introduced to improve concrete's resistance to freeze/thaw damage.
1936 The first major concrete dams, Hoover Dam and Grand Coulee Dam, were built. They still exist today!
1956 U.S. Congress annexed the Federal Interstate Highway Act.
1967 First concrete domed sport structure, the Assembly Hall, was constructed at The University of Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign.
1970's Fiber reinforcement in concrete was introduced.
1975 CN Tower in Toronto, Canada, the tallest slip-form building, was constructed.

Water Tower Place in Chicago, Illinois, the tallest building was constructed.

1980's Superplasticizers were introduced as admixtures.
1985 Silica fume was introduced as a pozzolanic additive.

The "highest strength" concrete was used in building the Union Plaza constructed in Seattle, Washington.

1992 The tallest reinforced concrete building in the world was constructed at 311 S. Wacker Dr., Chicago, Illinois.

Next Topic: Scientific Principles
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View Article  The History of Concrete and Cement
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 07:27 PM EDT
By Mary Bellis

Concrete is a material used in building construction, consisting of a hard, chemically inert particulate substance, known as an aggregate (usually made from different types of sand and gravel), that is bonded together by cement and water.

The Assyrians and Babylonians used clay as the bonding substance or cement. The Egyptians used lime and gypsum cement. In 1756, British engineer, John Smeaton made the first modern concrete (hydraulic cement) by adding pebbles as a coarse aggregate and mixing powered brick into the cement. In 1824, English inventor, Joseph Aspdin invented Portland Cement, which has remained the dominant cement used in concrete production. Joseph Aspdin created the first true artificial cement by burning ground limestone and clay together. The burning process changed the chemical properties of the materials and Joseph Aspdin created a stronger cement than what using plain crushed limestone would produce.

The other major part of concrete besides the cement  is the aggregate. Aggregates include sand, crushed stone, gravel, slag, ashes, burned shale, and burned clay. Fine aggregate (fine refers to the size of aggregate) is used in making concrete slabs and smooth surfaces. Coarse aggregate is used for massive structures or sections of cement.

Concrete that includes imbedded metal (usually steel)  is called reinforced concrete or ferroconcrete. Reinforced concrete was invented (1849) by Joseph Monier, who received a patent in 1867. Joseph Monier was a Parisian gardener who made garden pots and tubs of concrete reinforced with an iron mesh. Reinforced concrete combines the tensile or bendable strength of metal and the compressional strength of concrete to withstand heavy loads. Joseph Monier exhibited his invention at the Paris Exposition of 1867. Besides his pots and tubs, Joseph Monier promoted reinforced concrete for use in railway ties, pipes, floors, arches, and bridges.

History of Structural Concrete Case Studies
Buildings that were significant to the development of the architectonic language of reinforced concrete. Each one was a proving ground, in one way or another, for design techniques, construction methods or spatial delineation.

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View Article  A History of Cement
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 07:22 PM EDT
CEMENT   more »
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View Article  solar center
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 05:09 PM EDT
[click to visit our gallery]
[click to visit our gallery]
[click to visit our gallery]
 Welcome to The Solar Center
Welcome to The Solar Center, a leading solar electric system supplier and installer. With operations in Nothern New Jersey and Long Island, we are able to bring the many benefits of solar electricity to homes and businesses in both areas. Solar electric rebates from the New Jersey Clean Energy Program can pay as much as 70% of the installed cost of your solar electric system while rebates on Long Island and the rest of New York State usually pay for more than 50% of the cost.

Stop in our main office and showroom on Route 10 in Denville, New Jersey to see solar system equipment on display.

Solar electric systems are being installed by the thousands on homes and businesses worldwide. Now you can enjoy the benefits of producing most of your own electric needs from clean solar energy equipment.

You will:
  • Eliminate part (or all) of your electric bill for the next thirty years.
  • Get to watch your electric meter spin backwards during daylight hours.
  • Enjoy a return on your investment of from 10% to 15% every year, which will increase as electric rates continue to climb.
  • Help combat Global Warming.
  • Reduce air pollution emitted from utility generation plants.
  • Help keep the lights on during peak electric demand days.
 
Get paid for going solar in New Jersey with
Green Tags
 
Did you know that solar systems generate electricity even when it's cloudy!
Learn More...
© 2005 The Solar Center, Inc. Denville, New Jersey 888-SOLAR-05 and 973-366-2244
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View Article  gowanous canal
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 05:07 PM EDT
www.answers.com   more »
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View Article  IEEE-IAS/PCA Cement Industry Technical Conference
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 04:51 PM EDT
cement   more »
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View Article  CEMEX-RMC A DONE DEAL; INTEGRATION BEGINS IMMEDIATELY
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 04:47 PM EDT
http://cementamericas.com/mag/cement_cemexrmc_done_deal/   more »
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View Article  CEMENT EDITION
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 04:40 PM EDT
http://cementamericas.com/mag/cement_news_americas_20/   more »
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View Article  Panel Systems & Precast
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 04:33 PM EDT
http://login.myblogsite.com/admin/index.cgi/cmd=post_article   more »
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View Article  Shotcrete
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 04:32 PM EDT
http://login.myblogsite.com/admin/index.cgi/cmd=post_article   more »
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View Article  Autoclaved Aerated Concrete
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 04:31 PM EDT
http://www.cement.org/homes/ch_bs_autoclaved.asp   more »
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View Article  Removable Forms (Cast-in-Place)
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 04:30 PM EDT
Removable Forms (Cast-in-Place)
Concrete Home > Building Systems > Removable Forms (Cast-in-Place)

There are different types of forming systems used with cast-in-place concrete for walls.

Traditional Forms
This traditional concrete forming technique uses temporary forms, typically made of aluminum. Rigid foam insulation is placed inside the forms or between the forms and held in place with a system of non-conductive ties. Concrete is then poured on either side of or between the foam. Steel rebar is also generally used to add strength to the wall. Once the concrete has cured, the forms can be removed and re-used many times with a minimum of maintenance.

The progression of a cast-in-place concrete home:
Clockwise from top left: The forms are set up, braced and ready to pour. Once the walls are poured, the forms are easily removed and the roof and interior work can begin. When the job is completed, the results speak for themselves. (Photos courtesy of Wall-Ties & Forms, Inc. and Western Forms, Inc.)

The obvious advantage of this system is speed. All exterior and interior walls can be poured at the same time, with door and window openings cast right along with everything else. Some systems even have floor and ceiling forms. Many different interior and exterior finishes are available to texture the concrete, or the walls can be furred out and finished conventionally. Builders can use as much or as little insulation as the project requires.

You can use form liners to provide texture to a concrete wall.

Tunnel Forms
With tunnel forming systems, walls, floors and ceilings are cast at the same time. Special heaters suspended inside the forms speed the curing process, actually "baking" the concrete. This enhanced curing process allows the forms to be stripped and repositioned the next day. Tunnel forms are best suited to multi-family buildings and attached housing where room dimensions are repeated, since multiple units can be created in a single pour.

> Return to top

Concrete Homes Council
(A Council of the Concrete Foundations Association)

The Concrete Foundations Association is an active force dedicated to the positive and constructive development of the above grade removable forms concrete home industry. Contact CHC for more information.

Concrete Homes Council
107 First St. West
P.O. Box 204
Mount Vernon, IA 52314
(319) 895-0761 / Fax: (319) 895-8830
www.concretehomescouncil.org

> Return to top

Partial List of Producers/Suppliers of Removable Form Systems

Advance Concrete Form, Inc.
5102 Pflaum Rd.
Madison, WI 53718
(800) 356-2202 or (608) 222-8684 / Fax: (608) 222-3693
www.advanceconcreteform.com

B.E.P. Forming Systems, Inc.
325 Industrial Way
Fayetteville, GA 30215
(800) 858-1390 or (770) 827-7841 / Fax: (770) 461-2387

Dow T-Mass
200 Larkin Center
1605 Joseph Dr.
Midland, MI 48674
www.t-mass.com

Duraform
301 Raemisch Rd.
P.O. Box 365
Waunakee, WI 53597
(800) 367-6464 or (608) 849-3000 / Fax: (608) 849-3676
www.duraform.com

Durand Forms, Inc.
9026 E. Lansing Rd.
Durand, MI 48429
(800) 545-6342
www.durandforms.com

EFCO-Forms
1800 NE Broadway Ave.
Des Moines, IA 50313
(515) 266-1141 / Fax: (515) 313-4422
www.efco-usa.com

E-Maxx Systems
(888) 883-6299
www.emaxxsystems.com

Gates & Sons, Inc.
90 S. Fox Street
Denver, CO 80223
(303) 744-6185 / Fax: (303) 744-6192
www.gatesconcreteforms.com

Hartman Equipment, Inc.
210 W. 74th Terrace
P.O. Box 8672
Kansas City, MO 64114
(800) 453-6955 / Fax: (816) 775-3945
www.hartmanforms.com

ICS 3-D Panelworks, Inc.
2610 Sidney Lanier Dr.
Brunswick, GA 31525
(912) 264-3772 / Fax: (912) 264-3774
www.3-dpanelworks.com

Outinord Universal, Inc.
115 NW 167 Street, Suite 400
N. Miami Beach, FL 33169
(305) 655-0119
www.outinord-americas.com

Precise Forms, Inc.
3130 Wheeling
Kansas City, MO 64129
(800) 537-0706 / Fax: (816) 861-8828
www.preciseforms.com

SCI Global
P.O. Box 4970
Greenwich, CT 06831
(203) 531-4400 / Fax: (203) 531-4403
www.sciglobal.com

Symons Corporation
200 East Touhy Ave.
Des Plaines, IL 60018
(847) 298-3200 / Fax: (847) 635-9287
www.symons.com

Tuf-n-Lite
650 Pleasant Valley Dr.
Springboro, OH 45066
(800) 382-0105 / Fax: (513) 743-0390
www.tuf-n-lite.com

Wall-Ties & Forms, Inc.
4000 Bonner Industrial Drive
Shawnee, KS 66226
(800) 444-9692
www.wallties.com

Western Forms, Inc.
6200 Equitable Rd.
Kansas City, MO 64120
(800) 821-3870 / Fax: (816) 241-0477
www.westernforms.com

Williams Form Engineering Corp.
P.O. Box 7389
Grand Rapids, MI 49510
(616) 365-9220 / Fax: (616) 365-2975
www.williamsform.com

> Return to top

Accessories for Removable Forms

Scott System (form liners)
10777 East 45th Avenue
Denver, CO 80239
(303) 373-2500 / Fax: (303) 373-2755
www.scottsystem.com

Disclaimer

Listing constitutes neither an endorsement nor recommendation by the Portland Cement Association (PCA). PCA disclaims any and all responsibility for the selection of firms listed, products they supply, and/or work performed by their products. This list is titled a "Partial List" because although PCA has made reasonable efforts to include all known producer/suppliers, we are not certain this list includes all producer/suppliers. This list is in alphabetical order and is not in order of industry rank or rating. PCA also assumes no responsibility for errors and omissions in this list.> Return to top

 

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View Article  A Better Way To Build A Better Home
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 04:20 PM EDT
Insulating Concrete Forms   more »
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View Article  Concrete Masonry Units
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 04:16 PM EDT
http://www.cement.org/homes/ch_bs_concretemasonry.asp   more »
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View Article  Guggenheim Museum in Guadalajara
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 04:05 PM EDT
Enrique Norten Wins   more »
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View Article  Nine Lives, but No Sweet Tooth
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 02:57 PM EDT
By HENRY FOUNTAIN Published: July 26, 2005   more »
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View Article  & Style Home Thursday Styles Sunday Styles Style: Magazine Weddings & Celebrations Columns
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 02:51 PM EDT
By DENNY LEE Published: July 31, 2005   more »
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View Article  Sinai Bombings Renew Old Tensions Between Bedouins and Egyptian Authorities
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 02:45 PM EDT
By HASSAN M. FATTAH Published: July 30, 2005   more »
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View Article  Guggenheim Aplenty
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 12:15 PM EDT

bilbao-guggenheim.jpg

The Guggenheim is big business, no doubt about it, and it looks like expansion is on the mind of museum director Thomas Krens. The Guggenheim has already had an international presence for a while now — outside of the well-known Guggenheim Bilbao are a few satellite “branches” in places like Berlin, Venice, and Las Vegas. But why stop there, especially with a $45.4 million endowment on their hands (as of the end of last year), and the prospect of new Guggenheims bringing in $150-200 million more from eager cities looking to spend on lavish new museums. Cities currently being considered: Guadalajara in Mexico (with architect Jean Nouvel being considered), Singapore, Rio de Janeiro (another possible Nouvel project), Hong Kong, and a collaboration with St. Petersburg’s Hermitage. New York is also in the cards for a possible new addition, with Frank Gehry being mentioned as architect.

But the question remains — is this franchise mentality good for the public, or is it diluting the brand?

A Museum Visionary Envisions More [The New York Times]
Changes at the Guggenheim. Nothing Changes. [Archinect]
Guggenheim [Official Site]

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View Article  Guggenheim Guadalajara
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 12:13 PM EDT

Guggenheim Guadalajara

 

Guggenheim Guadalajara: a TEN
Enrique Norten/TEN arquitectos won the commission for a Guggenheim branch in Mexico. A jury that counted on Frank Gehry, among many, selected Norten's tower scheme out of a trio that also included Jean Nouvel and Asymptote. Money has not been raised yet for the construction. (El Informador) | skyscrapercityforum galleries: 1, 2, 3. | via NA
- Javier Arbona on Jun 04, 05 | 4:08 pm

During my last tour of duty here, I pointed out a New York Times article covering the latest moves taking place within the Guggenheim empire. It’s just been announced that a choice has finally been made regarding the new Guggenheim branch (Guadalajara) in Mexico. The transparent tower-like structure by Enrique Norten (TEN Architectos) won the competition, even beating a Jean Nouvel design!

Guggenheim Guadalajara: a TEN [Archinect]
Guggenheim Aplenty [Gridskipper]

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View Article  Brazilians Seek Their Fortunes Overseas
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 09:02 AM EDT
By ALAN CLENDENNING Associated Press Writer   more »
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View Article  BURNING MAN AT 20
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 09:00 AM EDT
A better Mouse Trap Architect of 25-ton artwork based on popular children's board game finally works out kinks   more »
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View Article  Man attacks Saddam in court
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 08:54 AM EDT

 

Saddam Hussein has been formally charged with the killings of Shiite Muslims in the village of Dujail in 1982 (file photo).

Saddam Hussein has been formally charged with the killings of Shiite Muslims in the village of Dujail in 1982 (file photo). (Reuters)

Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was attacked by an unidentified man during his appearance at a court hearing in Baghdad on Thursday.

His defence team said in a statement that the man attacked Saddam and the two exchanged blows during a hearing attended by defence lawyer Khalil Dulaimi.

"As the president stood to leave the courtroom one of those present attacked him and there was an exchange of blows between the man and the president," the statement said.

The statement said the head of the tribunal did nothing to stop the assault.

It did not say if Saddam was hurt.

The Iraqi Special Tribunal trying Saddam on Friday released photographs of the toppled leader being questioned on the suppression of Kurdish and Shiite uprisings in 1991.

The tribunal said the photographs were taken during a hearing in Baghdad on Thursday.

Saddam has been formally charged with the killings of Shiite Muslims in the village of Dujail in 1982, but no date has been set for his trial.

- Reuters

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View Article  Drug Czar Says Medical Marijuana 'Dying'
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 08:52 AM EDT
By AUDREY McAVOY Associated Press Writer   more »
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View Article  The Dinosaur That Walked on Two Legs May Have Started Life on Four
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 08:48 AM EDT
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD Published: July 29, 2005   more »
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View Article  More American Retirees Seek Havens Abroad
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 08:25 AM EDT
By HILLARY CHURA Published: July 30, 2005   more »
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View Article  Unending Graft Is Threatening Latin America
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 08:23 AM EDT
By LARRY ROHTER and JUAN FORERO Published: July 30, 2005   more »
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View Article  Planet or Not, Pluto Now Has Far-Out Rival
by salvador rosillo on Sat 30 Jul 2005 08:18 AM EDT
By KENNETH CHANG and DENNIS OVERBYE Published: July 30, 2005   more »
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Friday, July 29
View Article  THE RAVAGING OF AFRICA:
by salvador rosillo on Fri 29 Jul 2005 10:36 PM EDT
 
The G8 Summit held in Kananaskis in June, pledged $6 billion dollars a year in so-called aid to Africa by 2006. The low figure caused Phil Twyford of Oxfam to say "We're extremely disappointed by this wasted opportunity. They're offering peanuts to Africa and recycled peanuts at that." In 1999, debt service payments from Africa, the poorest region in the world, to rich Western countries totalled $35.7 billion. African debt stands at a crippling $300 billion. According to The Guardian (U.K.) "African leaders invited to the G8 gathering in Kananaskis expressed deep disappointment that the plan did nothing to open western markets, cancel debts of the poorest countries or provide the financial aid needed to meet the U.N.'s targets for tackling global poverty by 2015."

Behind the shameful peanut throwing lurks a deadly Western policy towards Africa. The U.S. government which dominates the G8, has through the Pentagon, the CIA, the World Bank and the IMF, systematically demolished African economies, health and education sectors, and fueled eleven wars on the continent with arms transfers and military training. This genocidal imperial strategy has killed more than four million Africans and allowed the U.S. and the West to attain Africa's abundant natural riches cheaply.

Nearly 80% of the strategic minerals the U.S. requires are found in Africa including 90% of the world's cobalt, 90% of the platinum, 40% of the gold, 98% of the chromium, 64% of the manganese and one-third of the uranium. These minerals are needed to make jet engines, cars, missiles, electronic components, iron and steel. Africa also accounts for 18% of U.S. oil imports as compared to 25% from the Persian Gulf, with Nigeria and Angola being the fifth largest and ninth largest exporters to the U.S. respectively.


Militarizing Africa

Africa is the most war-torn region in the world with armed conflicts going on in ten countries: Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Sudan, Liberia, Burundi, Rwanda, Somalia, Uganda, Ethiopia/Eritrea, Congo-Brazzaville and Algeria. The long wars in Angola and Sierra Leone ended (for now) in April and March 2002 respectively. The U.S. has provided arms and/or military training to participants in 11 of these 12 wars, the only exception being Algeria. During the 1990s, 32 African countries (out of 53) saw violent conflict. According to William Hartung, co-author of "Deadly Legacy: U.S. Arms to Africa and the Congo War," a report released in 2000 by the New York-based World Policy Institute, the U.S. sent $1.5 billion dollars in arms and training to Africa during the Cold War years (1950-1989) and this "set the stage for the current round of conflicts in the region." Hartung points out that "The military skills and equipment supplied by the U.S. are still being used by combatants in these wars." As "Deadly Legacy" explains, "many of the top U.S. clients of the Cold War?Liberia, Somalia, Sudan and Zaire (now DRC)" became riven by violence, instability and economic collapse during the 1990s (and still are).

Following the end of the Cold War, the Clinton Administration undertook "a wave of new military training programs in Africa." From 1991 to 1995, the U.S. gave military assistance to 50 countries in Africa out of a total of 53; during 1991-98, U.S. arms sales and military training to Africa totalled more than $227 million. The U.S. has four different military training programs for Africa: International Military Education Training (IMET), Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET), African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI) and the African Center for Security Studies (ACSS). Under IMET, the U.S. gave $7.9 million in outright grants to Sub-Saharan Africa in 1998, increasing it to $8.1 million in 1998 and $8.5 million in 2000. In contrast, South Asia got only $5.7 million, $5.6 million, and $5.8 million, respectively. In 2000, the U.S. gave $8.1 million under ACRI to 39 African countries and U.S. Special Forces have trained 34 out of 53 African national militaries under JCET.


Congo

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the heart of Africa, U.S. proxies Uganda and Rwanda occupy the eastern half of the country and are looting its mineral resources and sending them to the West. The DRC is the richest country in Africa holding the world's biggest copper, cobalt and cadmium deposits. The war started by Rwanda and Uganda against the Congolese government in 1998, has killed 2.5 million people and displaced 2.3 million. Oxfam called this war, "the world's biggest humanitarian disaster." Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia sent their armies to support the Congo government and Burundi joined the other side. Thus began "Africa's First World War" involving seven armies which has further wrecked a country crushed by more than a century of Western domination. The U.S. has given arms and/or military training to all seven armies. Rwanda and Uganda are the U.S.' "staunchest allies in the region" and Washington backed their invasion of the Congo according to Human Rights Watch. Uganda received $1.5 million in U.S. arms and military training in 1999 and Rwanda got $325,000 under IMET in 2000. U.S. Special Forces have trained the Rwandan Army in counterinsurgency, combat and psychological operations. This included instructions about fighting in the Congo. To keep the war going, the U.S. has helped the other side too with Zimbabwe getting $1.4 million in U.S. military training in 2000 and Namibia $500,000.


Angola

Another U.S.-made disaster is the 27-year long civil war in Angola (Africa's longest-running war) which ended in April 2002; the conflict killed 500,000 people and shattered the country. The U.N. has warned of a catastrophe in Angola, where half a million people face starvation (as a result of the war) and more than a million depend on food aid for survival. Thousands of people have died of hunger over the last few months, and more are dying every day. According to the BBC, "It is the worst starvation to hit Southern Africa in over a decade." Three and a half million Angolans (a third of the population) have been displaced by the war and eight to fifteen million land mines cover Angola making agriculture hazardous. As a result, fertile Angola has to import half its food requirements. There are 100,000 disabled land mine victims, 82% of Angolans live in poverty and a child dies of a preventable disease every three minutes. Like the Congo, Angola is rich in mineral wealth: it is Africa's second largest oil producer (after Nigeria) with some of the largest offshore oil deposits in the world, and its diamond output is worth about $800 million a year.

The civil war started with Angola's independence from Portugal in 1975 when the left-wing Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) took power and Washington launched a CIA covert operation in July to overthrow it. The operation was the brainchild of Henry Kissinger who was then Secretary of State in the Ford Administration. The CIA at the time was led by George Bush Sr. The CIA plan included backing a South African invasion of Angola in October and support for Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), an opponent of the MPLA, led by the brutal Jonas Savimbi. UNITA was an agent of the Portuguese colonial regime; its task was to destroy the MPLA, and it had received aid from apartheid South Africa whose invasion it joined. The U.S. asked for the South African invasion and helped Pretoria airlift men and materiel up to the front line so the latter could seize the capital Luanda and stop the MPLA from establishing itself as Angola's first independent government. Before South African forces could reach Luanda, however, Cuban troops landed there in November and beat back the apartheid army.

The CIA operation spent $31.7 million on arming UNITA and the South Africans before being shut down by Congress in 1976; U.S.aid to UNITA resumed in 1985 under the Reagan Administration and Savimbi received $250 million between 1986 and 1991. U.S. support for Savimbi reached a record $50 million in 1989 when George Bush Sr. became President. As one observer put it, "Two military supply flights a day maintained a UNITA campaign that became increasingly brutal and destructive. Savimbi...by this time...was reduced to naked coercion. Men were forced to fight for his army, women were dragooned into sexual slavery and peasant farmers had their food seized. Those who challenged his authority would be accused of witchcraft and burnt alive along with their families." According to Human Rights Watch, UNITA forces "engaged in indiscriminate shelling, long-term sieges that starved civilians, summary executions, torture, mutilation of the dead, hostage-taking, and attacks on international relief operations." The European Parliament denounced U.S. aid to Savimbi and declared UNITA "a terrorist organization which supports South Africa."

Washington's support for Savimbi continued even after the Cubans withdrew in 1991 and the U.S.S.R. collapsed. The U.S. finally recognized the Angolan government in May 1993 under Clinton. By then Savimbi was able to finance his war through diamonds smuggling; the conflict ended after he was killed by government troops in February 2002.


More Wars

At the same time that it laid waste to Angola, the U.S. ensured a similar fate for adjoining Mozambique, which also emerged from Portuguese colonialism in 1975. Here, the U.S., again through South Africa, backed the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) "an artificial armed engine of destruction," created by the intelligence service of racist Rhodesia. Even more vicious than UNITA, RENAMO committed massive atrocities against civilians and destroyed much of Mozambique's infrastructure in a 16-year long civil war with the left-wing government of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO). One million people were killed and five million displaced by the time the war ended in 1992. In 1988, Roy Stacey, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, who was part of a group trying to end Washington's backing for RENAMO, stated that the insurgents were carrying out "one of the most brutal holocausts against ordinary human beings since World War II."

Somalia which today is wracked by civil war and has no central government was the top recipient (per capita) of U.S. military and economic aid in Africa during the 1980s. Siad Barre, the country's dictator at the time, was a key strategic ally of Washington in the Cold War and got $600 million in U.S. aid. Following Barre's rampage of killing and plunder, Somalia literally fell apart. Barre's forces murdered 5,000 unarmed civilians in 1988-89 and in 1990 he was overthrown.

Similarly, Sudan today is embroiled in a 18-year old civil war that has killed two million people. The U.S. is actively supporting the rebel Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) against the government. However, it has long been clear that Washington wants to keep the rebels strong enough to prevent defeat but does not want them to become capable of toppling the government. "Peace" a U.S. official explained, "does not necessarily suit American interests. An unstable Sudan amounts to a stable Egypt."


Economic War

Washington has fomented not only military conflict in Africa but also an economic war through its agents the World Bank and the IMF. The Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) imposed by these institutions on 36 African countries since 1980 have devastated the continent, decimating national economies and health and education systems. SAPs offer loans on condition that governments drastically reduce public spending (especially on health, education and food subsidies) in favor of repayment of debt owed to Western banks, increase exports of raw materials to the West, encourage foreign investment and privatize state enterprises; the last two steps mean selling whatever national assets a poor country may have to Western multinational corporations. Under SAPs, Sub-Saharan Africa's external debt has actually increased by more than 500% since 1980, to $300 billion today. In 1997, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) stated that in the absence of debt payments, severely indebted African countries could have saved the lives of 21 million people and given 90 million girls and women access to basic education by the year 2000. The All-African Conference of Churches has called the debt "a new form of slavery, as vicious as the slave trade."

After twenty years of SAPs, 313 million Africans lived in absolute poverty in 2001 (out of a total population of 682 million), a 63% increase over the 200 million figure for 1994. Life expectancy has dropped by 15% since 1980 and today is 47 years, the lowest in the world. Forty per cent of Africans suffer from malnutrition and more than half are without safe drinking water. Health care spending in the 42 poorest African countries fell by 50% during the 1980s. As a result, health care systems have collapsed across the continent creating near catastrophic conditions. More than 200 million Africans have no access to health services as hundreds of clinics, hospitals and medical facilities have been closed. This has left diseases to rage unchecked, leading most alarmingly to an AIDS pandemic. More than 17 million Africans have died of HIV/AIDS which has created 12 million orphans.

Between 1986 and 1996, per capita education spending in Africa fell by 0.7% a year on average. Forty per cent of African children are out of school and the adult literacy rate in Sub- Saharan Africa is 60%, well below the developing country average of 73%. More than 140 million young Africans are illiterate. Given the annihilating social impact of SAPs all over Africa, it is not surprising that Emily Sikazwe, director of the Zambian anti-poverty group "Women for Change," asked: "What would they [the World Bank and the IMF] say if we took them to the World Court in The Hague and accused them of genocide?"


Ghana

Structural adjustment here was preceded by CIA intervention. In 1966, a CIA-backed military coup overthrew Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's President. Hailed as "Africa's brightest star," Nkrumah called for an anti-imperialist, pan-African organization and non-alignment in the Cold War. In October 1965, Nkrumah published his famous work, "Neo-Colonialism?The Last Stage of Imperialism" in which he accused the CIA of being behind many crises in the Third World. The U.S. government reacted by sending Nkrumah a note of protest and cancelling $35 million in aid to Ghana. Four months later, Nkrumah was overthrown in the CIA-engineered coup.

IMF involvement in Ghana followed the coup and SAPs were activated in 1983. Seen as a "star pupil" by the World Bank and the IMF, Ghana privatized more than 130 state enterprises including the mining sector (its main source of revenue), removed tariff barriers and exchange regulations and ended subsidies for health and education. As a result 20% of Ghanaians are unemployed and the cost of food and services has gone beyond the reach of the poor. GDP per capita was lower in 1998 ($390) than it was in 1975 ($411); 78.4% of Ghanaians live on $1 a day and 40% live below the poverty line; 75% have no access to health services and 68% none to sanitation.

The introduction of user fees for health care in 1985 combined with falling wages and increasing poverty has reduced outpatient attendance at hospitals by a third. As one observer put it, "Patients pay for everything; for surgery, drugs, blood, scalpel, even the cotton wool." User fees in education have raised the primary school dropout rate to 40%.

Ghana is the second largest gold producer in Africa (after South Africa) and gold mining is the country's main source of income. SAPs have compelled Ghana to sell the gold mining sector to Western multinational corporations which now own up to 85% of the large-scale mining industry. More than half of the 200 active gold concessions belong at least in part to Canadian companies. The corporations can repatriate up to 95% of their profits into foreign accounts and pay no income tax or duties. This means that Western companies virtually monopolize Ghana's gold which contributes little to its economy.


American Holocaust

Just as "An unstable Sudan amounts to a stable Egypt" so an unstable, war-wracked and poverty-stricken Africa amounts to a stable and prosperous West. This is U.S. imperial strategy towards Africa and it has destroyed the continent. The strategy aims at extracting the maximum amount of wealth from Africa for the West at the lowest cost through the perpetration of a holocaust created by eleven wars and structural adjustment programs imposed on 36 countries. The wars have killed more than four million Africans and the SAPs have led to an estimated 21 million deaths; both have resulted in the transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars to the West. Most African exports to the West are raw materials and the wars have helped keep their price low since the armies need to sell these for whatever money they can get in order to buy weapons; a considerable portion of the weapons are also bought from the West. SAPs have transferred $229 billion in debt payments from Sub-Saharan Africa to the West since 1980. This is four times the region's 1980 debt. Like the wars, SAPs also help keep raw material prices low by enforcing the expansion of such exports to the West. The value of primary African exports has dropped by about half since 1980. Four hundred years of the slave trade and 90 years of Western colonialism in Africa helped build the U.S. and European economies; Washington's ravaging of Africa today continues this horrifying legacy and starkly reveals the grotesqueness of the West.


Published in:
Briarpatch, February 2003

CCPA Monitor, October 2002
www.policyalternatives.ca
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View Article  Murdoch's Son and Expected Successor Quits News Corp.
by salvador rosillo on Fri 29 Jul 2005 04:45 PM EDT
By VIKAS BAJAJ and RICHARD SIKLOS Published: July 29, 2005   more »
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Thursday, July 28
View Article  A Rescue Mission, Slowing Cheetahs' Fast Disappearance
by salvador rosillo on Thu 28 Jul 2005 07:10 AM EDT
By MICHAEL WINES Published: July 28, 2005   more »
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View Article  Futuro Flashback: The Prefab From Another Planet
by salvador rosillo on Thu 28 Jul 2005 07:04 AM EDT
By PHIL PATTON Published: July 28, 2005   more »
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Wednesday, July 27
View Article  Iraq's al Qaeda says it killed Algerian envoys
by salvador rosillo on Wed 27 Jul 2005 04:28 PM EDT
ooo   more »
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View Article  China will 'protect Mugabe at UN'
by salvador rosillo on Wed 27 Jul 2005 04:26 PM EDT
China will 'protect Mugabe at UN'
Chinese President Hun Jintao ( l) and President Robert Mugabe (r)
Mr Hu (l) promised to help Zimbabwe
China will use its veto to stop the United Nations Security Council from criticising Zimbabwe's slum clearance, President Robert Mugabe says.

The UK and the US have asked the Security Council to discuss the demolitions, after a UN report said 700,000 had been made homeless.

Mr Mugabe is on a week-long visit to China, seeking help with Zimbabwe's economic crisis and foreign loans.

He has signed a trade deal with China, of which the contents remain unknown.

China will never allow that nonsense to happen
Robert Mugabe
China's growing role in Zimbabwe

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had said he would visit Zimbabwe but has now clarified that this would not happen until the demolitions end.

'Nonsense'

Despite pleas for an end to Operation Murambatsvina [Drive Out Rubbish], riot police continue to demolish illegally-built structures in the capital, Harare.

The scale of suffering is immense, particularly among widows, single mothers, children, orphans, the elderly and disabled persons
Report increases pressure
UN report in full (1.6K)
Most computers will open PDF documents automatically, but you may need to download Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Mr Mugabe says the demolitions are intended to weed out criminals and black-market traders he accuses of bringing down the economy.

Asked about the moves to discuss the demolitions at the Security Council, the state-owned Herald newspaper quotes Mr Mugabe as saying: "I know, of course, China will never allow that nonsense to happen".

Details of the trade deal signed by Mr Mugabe and Chinese President Hu Jintao have not been made public but it is expected to involve loans in exchange for trade and mineral concessions.

Zimbabwe has adopted a "Look East" policy since increasing criticism from the west for alleged human rights abuses and electoral fraud.

Mr Mugabe has also asked South Africa for help repaying its debts to avoid expulsion from the IMF.

Prosecution urged

Last week's UN report said the campaign violated international law and Mr Annan himself called it a "catastrophic injustice" to Zimbabwe's poorest.

The UN report was compiled by Mr Annan's special envoy, Anna Tibaijuka, after a two-week fact-finding mission to Zimbabwe.

Homeless family
Mr Mugabe says the demolitions are aimed at criminals
The report found that programme had been carried out in "an indiscriminate and unjustified manner, with indifference to human suffering".

It said Zimbabwe's government was collectively responsible, and it urged prosecution of those who "may have caused criminal negligence".

But Zimbabwe said the allegations were "definitely false" and that the report showed an "in-built bias".

The Zimbabwean opposition says the evictions are meant to punish urban residents, who mostly vote against the government.

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View Article  Who's That Strange Monkey in the Mirror?
by salvador rosillo on Wed 27 Jul 2005 12:32 PM EDT
By NICHOLAS WADE Published: July 26, 2005   more »
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View Article  Really, Don't Drink the Water
by salvador rosillo on Wed 27 Jul 2005 12:28 PM EDT
By PERRY GARFINKEL Published: July 26, 2005   more »
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View Article  In Biarritz, Catching a Wave With Aristocratic Flair
by salvador rosillo on Wed 27 Jul 2005 12:26 PM EDT
By CHRISTIAN L. WRIGHT Published: July 24, 2005   more »
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Tuesday, July 26
View Article  Discovery's crew safely in space
by salvador rosillo on Tue 26 Jul 2005 11:50 AM EDT
BY MARTIN MERZER mmerzer@herald.com   more »
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View Article  Reports Sully Clean Image of a Mexican Candidate
by salvador rosillo on Tue 26 Jul 2005 08:59 AM EDT
By GINGER THOMPSON Published: July 25, 2005   more »
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View Article  In Chicago, Plans for a High-Rise Raise Interest and Post-9/11 Security Concerns
by salvador rosillo on Tue 26 Jul 2005 08:34 AM EDT
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO Published: July 26, 2005   more »
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Monday, July 25
View Article  Blacks Pin Hope on DNA to Fill Slavery's Gaps in Family Trees
by salvador rosillo on Mon 25 Jul 2005 09:17 AM EDT
By AMY HARMON Published: July 25, 2005   more »
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Sunday, July 24
View Article  FOUND GOLD
by salvador rosillo on Sun 24 Jul 2005 09:29 PM EDT
POEMSPOEMS   more »
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View Article  A Gritty Midwest City Is Reinventing Itself As a Colony for Artists
by salvador rosillo on Sun 24 Jul 2005 03:50 PM EDT
By ROBERT SHAROFF Published: July 24, 2005   more »
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View Article  Once Derelict, Now Desirable
by salvador rosillo on Sun 24 Jul 2005 03:47 PM EDT
By PATRICK O'GILFOIL HEALY Published: July 24, 2005   more »
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View Article  Planet of the Retired Apes
by salvador rosillo on Sun 24 Jul 2005 02:09 PM EDT
By CHARLES SIEBERT Published: July 24, 2005   more »
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View Article  U.S. Sees Progress and Hope for Accord in Gaza Talks
by salvador rosillo on Sun 24 Jul 2005 12:30 PM EDT
By JOEL BRINKLEY Published: July 24, 2005   more »
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View Article  Super, Sure, but Not More Than Human
by salvador rosillo on Sun 24 Jul 2005 09:05 AM EDT
By GINA KOLATA Published: July 24, 2005   more »
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View Article  Wish You Were Here in July?
by salvador rosillo on Sun 24 Jul 2005 08:57 AM EDT
Wish You Were Here in July?   more »
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View Article  From Shoes to Aircraft to Investment, Zimbabwe Pursues a Made-in-China Future
by salvador rosillo on Sun 24 Jul 2005 07:12 AM EDT
From Shoes to Aircraft to Investment, Zimbabwe Pursues a Made-in-China Future   more »
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View Article  Journalist Jailed for a Year in Kabul Feels Abandoned by U.S. as He Seeks Ways to Survive
by salvador rosillo on Sun 24 Jul 2005 07:08 AM EDT
Journalist Jailed for a Year in Kabul Feels Abandoned by U.S. as He Seeks Ways to Survive   more »
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Saturday, July 23
View Article  GOD'SGODSGOD
by salvador rosillo on Sat 23 Jul 2005 11:07 PM EDT
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View Article  an Performers Are Granted Asylum
by salvador rosillo on Sat 23 Jul 2005 05:23 PM EDT

Vance Jacobs for The New York Times

Nicole Durr, second from the right, the creator, director and producer of the "Havana Night Show" listened Thursday as the lead singer of the group gave instructions to the troupe during rehearsal in Las Vegas.

 

 

LAS VEGAS, July 21 - Ending an arduous yearlong journey, 50 Cuban performers were granted political asylum this week after what is believed to be the largest group defection of Cubans in American history.

The musicians, singers and dancers of the "Havana Night Club" revue, which recently changed its name to the "Havana Night Show," celebrated the official statement on Thursday and planned to appear together in another venue on Friday, the local Social Security office. There they hope to begin the process of becoming permanent residents and, ultimately, United States citizens.

"This has been pretty amazing for all of us," said Jose David Alvarez, 24, the host of the stage show. "The United States of America has always been a myth for Cuban young men like me and a lot of my colleagues in the company. It has always meant freedom for us, because in Cuba, it's kind of different."

Members of the troupe have been performing in Las Vegas since announcing their decision to seek asylum in November, and the last one was notified by American authorities Thursday that asylum had been granted. The troupe had defied Cuban government orders in seeking visas to perform in the United States.

A year ago this week, Cuban officials raided the Havana building where the group rehearsed and seized thousands of dollars worth of equipment. They ordered the group to disband and told them they would no longer be permitted to perform. Their founder and artistic director, Nicole Durr, who is German, was arrested and expelled from the country.

But after many delays and pleas to top leaders in Havana, Cuban authorities relented and allowed the troupe to leave Cuba for a series of shows last summer and fall at the Stardust Resort and Casino here. Members of the company defected en masse on Nov. 15. Their contract to perform at the Stardust has been extended until Sept. 4.

"It's historic that 50 artists defected together and made the sacrifice to leave their families at home," said Ms. Durr in an interview before leading a rehearsal in a warehouse east of the Las Vegas airport. "Some of them have wives and children that they haven't seen in a year."

She said that now that the musicians have been granted asylum, they can begin the process of getting family members admitted to the United States.

Ms. Durr said that this week she gathered the troupe together to turn over to them the government documents. "I told them, 'Now it's official. This is something you can't buy. This paper is your destiny.' "

A spokeswoman for United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, the successor agency to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said the government does not comment on asylum cases. "Because of the very nature of asylum, we are not allowed to discuss asylum cases at all," said Marie Sebrechts, public information officer in the Southern California office.

Pamela Falk, a law professor at the City University of New York, has been the Havana group's legal adviser. Ms. Falk met a number of the performers as they arrived in Mexico from Cuba and escorted them into the United States. She has served as their advocate at the State Department and the immigration service and has enlisted the aid of politicians and celebrities on their behalf.

"It's a great moment," Ms. Falk said. "It's been a very long road."

She said she believed the case was the largest mass defection in the history of Cuba. The troupe, she said, contained a fascinating cross-section of Cuban society, ranging in age from 19 to 38 and representing many of the island's racial groups - Afro-Cuban, mulatto and European.

Ms. Falk said that there was little question that the artists would eventually receive asylum because of the privileged status Cubans have under American immigration law, dating to the takeover of the island by Fidel Castro in 1959. Under the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, any Cuban who arrives in the United States, whether legally or illegally, is presumptively granted permanent residency. But the political asylum process often takes years, Ms. Falk said, and never have 50 defectors been granted asylum together.

Mayelin Montes, 24, who goes by the name Lala, said that the official notice of asylum was a huge relief after a year of uncertainty.

"Now we have like a piece of space in this country," Ms. Montes said. "We fought so hard, and now we are very happy."

When the troupe first arrived, they stayed in a seedy motel and lived from week to week. But as their act became a popular at the Stardust, most of the performers moved into an apartment complex about 20 minutes west of the Strip where they have air-conditioning, dishwashers and use of a swimming pool for the first time in their lives, said Ms. Durr, who serves not only as producer and musical director but also as den mother to the young performers.

She said that the artists were paid well, but declined to say how much they make. "Let's put it this way, a lot of dancers in town want to audition for my show," Ms. Durr said. "But what am I going to do with a Russian?"

Mr. David, in addition to serving as host of the stage show, said he also performed in musical numbers. "I dance, I sing, I eat some fruit, too," using a lighthearted Cuban expression for an all-around performer.

He said he was already beginning his study of American history for the citizenship examination. He said there were interesting parallels between the Cuban and American revolutions, although he said he preferred the outcome of the American revolt. He said he intended to continue to challenge society, using his art as an expression of rebellion.

"An artist will always be a revolutionary in the whole sense of the word," Mr. David said, "because he's always trying to change things, but through culture, not politics."

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View Article  Tending the Memories of an Enduring Polish Family
by salvador rosillo on Sat 23 Jul 2005 05:20 PM EDT

 

Oliver Hartung for The New York Times

"There's saying in my family

 

KRAKOW, Poland

THE photograph is one of those sepia-toned images full of suggestions about the unrecoverable past: two women, one young, one older, seated on wicker chairs in a somewhat tangled garden, while lying at their feet is a young girl, maybe 9 or 10, her hand resting in what look like buttercups.

But superimposed on the pastoral image, which is of three generations of the Olczak family of Warsaw and Krakow, there are two strands of barbed wire, suggesting to the viewer the horrors that the women in the photograph are about to know.

The photograph is part of the cover design of "In the Garden of Memory: A Memoir," by Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, who is the young girl in the picture.

Ms. Olczak-Ronikier has become well known in Poland, since her book won the country's most prestigious literary award, the Nike Prize, in 2002. The book sold a very impressive 80,000 copies in Poland and has also been published in Britain, France and the Netherlands, and other foreign editions are in the works.

Ms. Olczak-Ronikier's memoir gained its broad audience in Poland partly because the clan described in it is one of Poland's most illustrious, but also because its members were deeply involved in the central events of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Her family left its traces especially in the two interrelated areas of culture and politics, though not only in those. One relative, André Citroën, founded the Citroën automobile company in France; Ms. Olczak-Ronikier's grandfather, whom she calls the hero of her memoir, was one of Poland's most famous booksellers and publishers, and a man who nurtured a generation of Polish writers.

Another member of the almost Tolstoyian dramatis personae was Zygmunt Bychowski, who served as a doctor in the Russian Army during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904. A great-uncle, Maksymilian Horwitz, was a revolutionary, a leader of the Communist International who knew Lenin and Trotsky and was a radical supporter of the proletarian dictatorship and its cruel methods. There is a haunting photograph in Ms. Olczak-Ronikier's book that shows him after he had been arrested and tortured, and shortly before he was executed, by Stalin's police in Moscow in 1937.

In a more recent generation, Ms. Olczak-Ronikier's relatives include Marek Beylin, a commentator for Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's most influential newspaper, and Peter Osnos, whose family moved to America and who is now a publisher in New York.

Ms. Olczak-Ronikier lives with her husband, Michael Ronikier, a translator of books and plays from English to Polish, in an apartment in the Salvator district of Krakow, whose stately brick houses have beautiful views of the Vistula River.

Everything is old or, if not old, comfortably worn - the rooms, the books, the furniture. Ms. Olczak-Ronikier is a small woman with dark hair and bright eyes whose life before tackling her family history centered on the Polish theater.

Among her other books is a handsome, lavishly illustrated coffee-table tome on cabaret in Krakow. She is now writing a script based on "In the Garden of Memory," which will be broadcast on Polish television.

SHE said she wrote her memoir because she knew there were good stories in her family history and, as she put it, "good stories should be told." But there were also deeper reasons.

"There's a saying in my family: 'You should achieve something in your life,' " she said. She suffered because of it, feeling inadequate in front of the portraits of the relatives who, in her view, had accomplished so much. Writing her book was an act of redemption, she said, a way of shedding a burden. "I compare it to a sack full of heavy stones that I was able to throw away," she said.

Needless to say, she is part of the story. The girl in the dust-jacket photograph survived the Holocaust, along with the other women pictured there, her mother and her grandmother, and they are central to the tale.

Ms. Olczak-Ronikier's grandmother, Janina Mortkowicz, was the wife of Ms. Olczak-Ronikier's hero, her grandfather Jakub Mortkowicz, who opened what became one of Warsaw's most important bookstores and publishing houses at the end of World War I.

"He was an example of the tragic love of assimilated Jews in Poland," Ms. Olczak-Ronikier said. "He often met with anti-Semitic attacks, but the purpose of his life was to promote Polish literature."

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Wednesday, July 20
View Article  THE WORLD
by salvador rosillo on Wed 20 Jul 2005 08:37 PM EDT
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Monday, July 18
View Article  As China Raises Its Arts Profile, Officials Try to Catch Up
by salvador rosillo on Mon 18 Jul 2005 11:14 AM EDT

 

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

WASHINGTON, July 17 - Zhou Ping joined the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra five years ago as a librarian, cataloging its scores and recordings. A sharp, plain-spoken former music major, she was promoted last August to performance and promotions manager. With a nine-person staff and no management experience, Ms. Zhou, 30, suddenly found herself with a mandate to raise the 126-year-old orchestra's public profile - and by extension, its profits.

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Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

From left, Jiang Haoshu, Chen Jianying, Zhou Ping and Pan Yong were part of the delegation at the Kennedy Center learning about such topics as customer relations, grants and program development.

In a conference room at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the struggling new manager stood and asked a simple and pointed question of Michael M. Kaiser, the center's president: "How do you run a marketing department with no marketing budget?" A room full of her peers looked up eagerly for an answer.

As China races toward a more market-driven economy, it is building new theaters, concert halls and museums nearly as fast as it is erecting Western-style shopping malls, hotels and business complexes. But the government is also decentralizing control of the arts industry, cutting the full subsidies long provided to companies and performers. Now scrambling to staff and operate a slew of increasingly independent arts organizations, the government has turned for help and advice to the Kennedy Center, which just concluded a two-week arts management seminar for the Chinese. During the program, a group of newly appointed managers and government officials charged with overseeing the arts in China sought the counsel of Mr. Kaiser and his staff on tricky concepts like courting donors, developing operating budgets and projecting and sustaining ticket sales. Chinese officials said they hoped the seminar would become an annual event.

During the opening session on strategic planning and mission statements, Mr. Kaiser referred to the cultural development boom with a note of caution. "This concerns me a great deal in China," he said. "You're building so much, there is a fear I have that if your missions are not complete you're going to try to have every organization doing everything."

Although many of China's current global ambitions engender fear and suspicion among some American political and corporate leaders, the belief that cultural exchange can soften hostility between nations may make the growing superpower's artistic modernization less threatening.

The management seminar is not the only major collaboration between the Kennedy Center and the Chinese government this year. In October, the Kennedy Center will present a monthlong Festival of China that it is promoting as "the single-largest celebration of Chinese performing arts in American history." With 20 companies and 600 artists, the festival will showcase a wide range of performances and exhibitions, including traditional Beijing opera, modern dance, a display of Qin dynasty terra-cotta warriors and a fashion exhibition celebrating the designs of Vivienne Tam and other Chinese-born designers.

For the Chinese, the festival is as much study-abroad program as international tour. While Americans are taking in performances, Ministry of Culture officials said, managers traveling with the companies will have a chance to observe everything from press relations and electronic ticketing systems to coordinating ushers.

According to the most recent figures available from China's Ministry of Finance, government spending on the arts - a broad category that includes performing arts, sports, film, television and radio - rose to $6 billion in 2003 from $3.6 billion in 2000. But while overall spending on the arts has increased, much of the additional financing for the performing arts is being directed toward building new venues like the National Grand Theater, a 6,000-seat, egg-shaped, glass and titanium complex under construction in central Beijing near Tiananmen Square. Current cost estimates for the ultramodern project, which will include an opera house, concert hall and theater, are roughly $360 million.

Arts companies art not only competing for funds with such special projects, but also grappling with new fiinancing structures. China has a long history of supporting the arts. But for decades the Communist government ran its opera companies and orchestras essentially the same way it did steel factories and other enterprises - it paid for and controlled virtually everything. The government covered the salaries of performers, directors, designers and stagehands alike. Ticket sales and donor support were nonissues, because company costs were fully underwritten.

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Sunday, July 17
View Article  mortgages
by salvador rosillo on Sun 17 Jul 2005 06:51 PM EDT


Which Mortgage Is Best?
In this downloadable audio guide Dennis Hevesi talks about how to find a mortgage in the New York region.

 

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View Article  Which Mortgage? A Complicated Tale
by salvador rosillo on Sun 17 Jul 2005 02:00 PM EDT
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View Article  Bill Giving Native Hawaiians Sovereignty Is Too Much for Some, Too Little for Others
by salvador rosillo on Sun 17 Jul 2005 01:52 PM EDT

 

 

HONOLULU, July 15 - Hawaii is once again awash with mainlanders, as summer vacationers delight in its beaches and make themselves feel at home even on distant tropical islands. Breakfast at Starbucks, lunch at Subway, dinner at Red Lobster and a restful night at the Marriott or Hilton.

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Andrew Shimabuku for The New York Times

Kekuni Blaisdell, who supports independence, says the bill "keeps us under the heel of the United States."

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Andrew Shimabuku for The New York Times

Haunani Apoliona says the measure is a long overdue acknowledgment of the history of native Hawaiians.

But most visitors soon discover something profoundly different about the 50th state that the requisite luaus and hula dances only hint at. The 250,000 indigenous people of Polynesian ancestry who are among Hawaii's 1.2 million residents make the state like no other, sustaining a native Hawaiian cultural and linguistic imprint that preceded the arrival of Capt. James Cook by a millennium.

Now, 112 years after United States troops helped overthrow the independent Kingdom of Hawaii and 12 years after Congress apologized for it, that Hawaiian distinctiveness appears close to being formally recognized by the United States government. A bill that for the first time would extend sovereignty to the native Hawaiian people is poised for a vote - and likely approval - in the United States Senate despite opposition from many Republicans who denounce the measure as unworkable and as promoting racial Balkanization.

The bill, the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act, is considered the most significant development for native Hawaiians since statehood in 1959. The measure would give them equivalent legal standing to American Indians and native Alaskans and lead to the creation of a governing body that would make decisions on behalf of the estimated 400,000 native Hawaiians in the United States.

The governing body would also have the power to negotiate with federal and state authorities over the disposition of vast amounts of land and resources taken by the United States when the islands were annexed in 1898, including about 300 square miles of land long ago set aside for use as native homelands and an additional 2,500 square miles scattered throughout the islands being held in trusts.

Haunani Apoliona, a musician who is chairwoman of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, a state agency that would be superseded by the new governing body, said the bill was a long overdue acknowledgment that Hawaiian history did not begin with the arrival of Cook and the British Navy in 1778.

"We were here before Columbus," Ms. Apoliona said. "We were in Hawaii before the Pilgrims."

The House of Representatives has passed earlier versions of the bill and would take up the current one if the Senate passes it, perhaps as early as next week.

The Bush administration has remained largely neutral on the measure, though the Justice Department on Wednesday cast some doubt on the constitutionality of the proposed law, namely whether Congress has the authority to treat native Hawaiians as it does Indian tribes. Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella said in a letter to Congress that the proposed law also must be amended to include protections for United States military operations in Hawaii and stronger language precluding casino gambling.

The bill's supporters in Hawaii say that they do not intend to have casinos and that the Justice Department's other concerns can be addressed.

But they acknowledge there are basic questions that will take years of negotiations to answer, like how native Hawaiians would go about governing themselves, whether native Hawaiians in and outside the state would live under different laws from other citizens, and who would qualify as a native, given the large degree of assimilation through marriage and the many Hawaiians living on the mainland.

As for the measure's constitutionality, most everyone believes that will ultimately be determined by the United States Supreme Court.

The measure, which took more than five years to reach the Senate floor, arises from conflicting crosscurrents in Hawaiian society, as native Hawaiians grow impatient for the United States to right the wrongs of more than a century ago, while many nonnative residents and interest groups seek to scale back entitlement programs already available to native Hawaiians.

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View Article  Dick Morris Reveals 'Arnold's Bold Gamble'
by salvador rosillo on Sun 17 Jul 2005 12:54 PM EDT

 

NewsMax Magazine

 

 

With his poll numbers plunging, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is betting his future - and California's - on a special election in November.

Dick Morris writes in an exclusive special report for NewsMax Magazine that "Arnold's Bold Gamble" may re-shape American politics forever.

The "Arnold's Bold Gamble" edition of NewsMax Magazine is just hitting newsstands across the country (including many Barnes & Noble and Books-a-Million bookstores).

You can also check out our FREE offer by Going Here.

In this blockbuster report, Dick Morris reveals:

  • His personal anecdote about his late night call from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger
  • Why Arnold has decided to "declare war" on California's special interests - and risk his political future.
  • Why Arnold's success or failure in the nation's most populous state will reverberate throughout the country and affect you.
  • How Arnold's redistricting initiative has incumbent Democrats terrified and how it could impact the U.S. Congress.
  • Arnold's controversial move to revamp the state's education system that has teacher unions across the country mobilized to stop him.
  • Why California's budget debt rises by $11 million a DAY.
  • The two Hollywood stars who may challenge Schwarzenegger in 2006.
  • The potentially ruinous proposals liberals want on the November ballot.
  • How California nurses have stymied Arnold's hospital reforms.
  • The special election initiative that worries Democrats the most.
  • Arnold's innovative plan to lessen our dependence on foreign oil.
  • The political ambitions of the man called the "anti-Arnold."
  • How the East Coast media has missed the full dimensions of Schwarzenegger's bold proposals.
  • A look at the Governator's successes thus far - and his setbacks.
  • A review of the new Schwarzenegger biography "Fantastic" - and an exclusive interview with its author, Laurence Leamer.
  • And much, much more.

This explosive edition of NewsMax Magazine details what Dick Morris calls Schwarzenegger's "One-Man Revolution" - and tells why Arnold's vision should be a blueprint for all chief executives to follow.

Schwarzenegger openly says he'd like to president. The Constitution still bars him from doing so, but Dick Morris reveals that Schwarzenegger's ballot plans may electrify America.

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View Article  Pyrenees and Heat Can't Slow Armstrong
by salvador rosillo on Sun 17 Jul 2005 06:12 AM EDT

Joel Saget/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

 

AX-3 DOMAINES, France, July 16 - A surging Lance Armstrong faced his most direct challenge in this year's Tour de France on Saturday, the first of three days in the Pyrenees, only to widen his lead by more than a minute over his closest rival.

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Georg Totschnig broke away early and won Saturday's stage over Lance Armstrong by 56 seconds. Totschnig's victory was Austria's first in the Tour in the postwar era.

Armstrong, isolated from his team by the German T-Mobile team's attack, did everything but win the stage, the 14th of 21. He took second in the stage from Agde to Ax-3 Domaines, finishing the 220.5 kilometers (137 miles) 56 seconds behind Georg Totschnig of Austria.

Totschnig, who rides for the Gerolsteiner team, was ahead for most of the day after the early breakaway. He was timed in 5 hours 43 minutes 43 seconds, a dazzling speed of 23.9 miles an hour, considering the climbs and the heat. The temperature reached 108 degrees.

"A very tough day with the heat and the distance," said Armstrong, who is seeking his seventh straight Tour de France victory. "A very tough day."

It was an even tougher day for Mickael Rasmussen of Denmark, the rider in second place over all. Rasmussen, with the Rabobank team, finished eighth Saturday, 51 seconds behind Armstrong. He remains second to Armstrong over all, but he dropped to 1 minute 41 seconds back.

The stage began in the Mediterranean port of Agde and passed over four minor climbs until the 176th kilometer (about 109 miles), when the riders began ascending the Port de Pailhères, a climb of 15.2 kilometers (about 9.5 miles) at a grade of 8 percent.

Armstrong had no teammates to help him up the climb because, as he put it, T-Mobile sprinted at the start of it, and Armstrong's Discovery Channel teammates, wearied by the heat and their work at the front of the pack, were left behind.

"Naturally that gives you fear," Armstrong said of T-Mobile's tactics. "You either fight back or run away."

He fought back, of course.

After the descent from the peak, the stage ended with a climb to the resort of Ax-3 Domaines, an ascent of 9.1 kilometers (about 5.7 miles) with a grade of 7.3 percent.

On both mountains, Armstrong responded powerfully to attacks by Ivan Basso of Italy, with CSC, and Alexander Vinokourov of Kazakhstan, with T-Mobile. Armstrong, Basso and Jan Ullrich of Germany, with T-Mobile, were together with a few kilometers to go, when Armstrong accelerated, leaving Ullrich behind. Then Armstrong sprinted for second place and 12 bonus seconds for finishing second.

"When you can steal 15, 20 seconds, you have to do it," he said. "You have to be opportunistic."

Basso received an eight-second bonus for finishing third.

Because Totschnig was no threat in the overall standings, he was allowed to go off early in the day with a half-dozen similarly low-ranked colleagues. As they were reeled in one by one on the two major climbs, Totschnig managed to maintain his lead, which reached a maximum of 9:50 before it shrunk to 56 seconds.

As the first Austrian to win a stage in the Tour since Max Bulla in 1931, he was asked if this was the happiest day of his life.

No, he touchingly replied, that would have been the days his son and daughter, Max and Emma, were born.

Discussing Sunday's stage, which should be even tougher, Armstrong said he would change his tactics.

"I won't be making any explosive moves tomorrow," he said at a news conference. "I have to wait for the final climb."

Sunday's stage, 205 kilometers (127.4 miles) from Lézat-sur-Lèze to Saint-Lary Soulan, will cover six mountaintops. Portet d'Aspet, the first climb, is considered a second-category climb in terms of length, steepness and difficulty. The peaks that follow, Menté, Portillon, Peyresourde and Val Louron-Azet, are all ranked first category. The stage ends with a climb to Pla d'Adet, which is above the town of Saint-Lary Soulan.

Pla d'Adet is the backbreaker, especially after the first five. It is a climb of 10.7 kilometers (6.6 miles) at a grade of 7.6 percent. It is beyond a category rating.

"Tomorrow's no cakewalk," Armstrong said. "It's the queen stage, the hardest day in the Tour."

Christophe Moreau, a Frenchman with Crédit Agricole, also lost time to Armstrong on Saturday. He started the day in third place over all, but he fell to 10th after finishing 24th. He was 6:47 behind Totschnig and dropped to 8:37 back over all.

Basso is now in third over all, 2:46 behind. His third-place finish Saturday, two seconds behind Armstrong, moved him up one place over all.

Ullrich finished fourth in the stage and moved into fourth over all (4:34 behind Armstrong), up from eighth.

Two Americans, Levi Leipheimer of Gerolsteiner and Floyd Landis of Phonak, are fifth (4:45 back) and sixth (5:03 behind).

In discussing Basso, who finished third in the Tour last year, and Ullrich, who has been second five times and won in 1997, Armstrong said, "Both were stronger than we saw in the Alps."

He added that he expected them to do well Sunday, but that the heat might take its toll.

"If it's this hot again tomorrow," Armstrong said, "a lot of riders will be going home."

Although all 160 riders who started the stage Saturday finished it, 112 of them finished more than 20 minutes behind the winner.

After a day off Monday, the festivities in the Pyrenees end Tuesday with two small climbs and the first-category Marie Blanque and the beyond-category Aubisque.

This was Armstrong's third second-place finish in this Tour, and he has yet to win a stage.

"It's not important, but I can't seem to win one," Armstrong said. "I'd like to win one. Maybe I'll win tomorrow."

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View Article  Housing Goes Frothy to Flat in Denver Area
by salvador rosillo on Sun 17 Jul 2005 06:10 AM EDT

 

 

 

PARKER, Colo., July 12 - Tom Woods, a 37-year-old defense industry consultant, wanted to build a nest egg for one of his young sons' college tuition. Inspired by rising prices for homes in this Denver suburb, three years ago he invested in a new three-bedroom townhouse for $155,000. His hopes were that renters would cover most of his mortgage and that the property's value would appreciate by at least $10,000 a year.

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Kevin Moloney for The New York Times

To entice homebuyers, sellers are reducing prices in Denver as the once-hot housing market there slumps.

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Kevin Moloney for The New York Times

Tom Santilli, a real estate agent, tours a model home in suburban Denver. Even houses in impeccable condition have been slow to sell, he said.

But last October, when Mr. Woods put the townhouse up for sale to help pay some unforeseen medical bills, there was more pain than gain: the house sat on the market for eight months. He finally found a buyer in June, but to seal the deal he had to make big concessions, including paying the buyer's closing costs. After handing over the keys on Friday, he ended up with a profit of just $10,000 for his three-year investment.

Even as prices for homes in frothy markets like Las Vegas; Riverside, Calif.; Miami; and Washington are still jumping by more than 20 percent a year, Denver's homeowners are learning the hard way about living through the real estate doldrums. Five years ago, median house prices were rising at an annual clip of nearly 17 percent. By the first quarter of 2005 the increase had slipped to 3 percent, according to an analysis by Economy.com, a research firm.

Still, some Denver homeowners have read reports in the news media of skyrocketing prices elsewhere and assume they are accumulating wealth in their homes at the same rapid pace.

"I was surprised," Mr. Woods said. "My expectations were higher."

Although sellers continue to profit, houses are sitting on the market longer, buyers are negotiating harder, and some owners, particularly young buyers who may have been counting on rapid appreciation, are postponing dreams of renovations, moves to larger homes and big savings for their families.

With economists warning that prices in hot markets cannot continue to rise as sharply as they have in the past few years, the experience of Denver's homeowners may foreshadow what could happen if those markets start to cool. Denver's circumstances are in some ways particular to the area, driven largely by job losses in the telecom sector, but they illustrate how a moderate slowdown could play out for homeowners in other parts of the country and stand as a potent reminder that galloping price appreciation is not the norm.

Economists are divided as to whether certain markets will simply cool off, or whether they will actually melt and send prices plummeting, as happened in parts of California, New England and New York in the 1980's and early 1990's. Earlier this year, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said some metro areas were showing signs of "froth."

Optimists point to Denver as a model of an adjusting real estate market. "I think it's a good example of when a market softens, what happens," said David Lereah, the chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, a trade association. "You see double-digit price appreciation go down to 4 percent or even 1 percent, and then it starts coming back to a historical norm of between 4 and 6 percent. That's very healthy. That's wonderful. It beats inflation."

But many analysts take a gloomier perspective, suggesting that the most heated markets could suffer more than Denver's so-called soft landing. "I think Denver is a best-case scenario," said John H. Vogel Jr., adjunct professor of real estate at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. In the case of markets like Naples, Fla.; Miami; and New York, he said, "I think you'll see dramatic price decreases because I think the prices have become artificially inflated by trading and speculation."

Denver's housing boom never quite reached the heights of Las Vegas's, for example, where home prices increased by nearly 33 percent in the first quarter of this year, according to Economy.com. But from 1998 through the third quarter of 2001, homeowners in sprawling Denver enjoyed double-digit appreciation as telecom employers like Qwest Communications International added jobs - and homebuyers - to the market.

From December 2000 to September 2003, however, Denver lost about 74,000 jobs, about 6 percent of its job base, according to Economy.com. Increases in home prices stalled, then started to taper off. Houses lingered on the market, and sellers were forced to cut prices.

Touring a development last week in Castle Rock, a southeastern suburb, Tom Santilli, an agent with Re/Max Alliance, pointed out a four-bedroom house that had not sold for five months, despite its impeccable condition. The price had been lowered to $396,500 from $419,000, but because of a few flaws - a smallish family room, and white kitchen cabinets instead of wood and glass - the sellers had "not even had a low-ball offer" after showing it to 65 prospective buyers, Mr. Santilli said.

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View Article  Blowing Up in the West
by salvador rosillo on Sun 17 Jul 2005 06:09 AM EDT

 

 

WASHINGTON — The young man was poor and without prospects, but that was not why he carried the bomb. He had not been recruited and was not out for revenge, he said, but simply longed to fulfill "the love of martyrdom." As he lugged his heavy black bag toward an Israeli bus stop, his main worry was not moral but practical. The bomb, evidently derived from fertilizer, smelled terrible, and might give him away. He bought a $3 bottle of perfume and doused it.

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Joon Mo Kang and Bill Marsh/The New York Times

He was a figure out of a nightmare scenario of cultish, facile killing and self-destruction. But he was real enough, a Palestinian named Zaydan Zaydan, 18. He was interviewed in an Israeli hospital three years ago after the bomb went off, wounding only him.

The nightmare assumed a new form last week when British authorities revealed that four British men were suspected of detonating the explosions that killed at least 54 people and injured hundreds in downtown London on July 7. Framed by new suicide attacks in Israel and Iraq, the news suggested the European breakout of suicide violence that many had feared since the Sept. 11 attacks. The British authorities were initially careful not to call the men suicide bombers, though they said all four died in the bombings.

If the attacks were Islamist suicide bombings, they were the first such strikes in Western Europe, terrorism experts said. This was once a freakish phenomenon, and then a more frequent but concentrated one, confined to battlegrounds like Lebanon and Chechnya. But a "love of martyrdom," with its paired desire to kill indiscriminately, may now have taken hold in Leeds, England, just as it did for Zaydan Zaydan in his hometown, Jenin, on the West Bank.

With the successful deployment of a human delivery system, terrorists in Europe appeared to have at hand the same arsenal - hardware-store ingredients, some secrecy and cunning, and a lethal ideology - that they have used to torment Middle Eastern societies.

Yet while there was new cause for fear, there was also reason for hope. Experts on terrorism said the danger of suicide attack was rising, but that outside of areas embroiled in conflict it was still partly contained by a firewall of social condemnation. "One should not draw too many parallels between what is happening in the Middle East and what is happening elsewhere," said Efraim Halevy, a former chief of Mossad, Israel's spy agency. "It's not the same balance of power within the community," he said. "That's No. 1. That's very important."

Still, Mr. Halevy added, while the parallels might be limited, some did exist. "The threat is such that a very small number of people can bring about an act of such devastating consequences," he said.

Several experts on terrorism said they would not be surprised if suicide had indeed emerged as a weapon in the hands of native Muslim terrorists in Western Europe. "What I'm most surprised about is that it hasn't happened before now," said Lance Emory, who served with the F.B.I. in Britain from 1998 to 2003.

Mr. Emory said the British had "done a pretty good job" and had "had successes" disrupting attacks in the past. But suicide bombing is "just the most difficult thing to try to ferret out," he said, "because you've got someone who's totally committed."

Several terrorism experts said that with extremist preaching preparing the way, little sophisticated infrastructure is needed to conduct bombings like those in London.

"I don't think it needs a recruiting system at all," Mr. Halevy said. "All it needs is that there should be in place a very small capacity which would enable young people who wish to follow this path to find their way to Afghanistan and Pakistan, to get training." He added, "The masterminds, they're not looking for multitudes of people." Out of 1.6 million Muslims in Britain, he said, there was bound to be "a small nucleus of people who were extreme."

Fighting in Iraq and the West Bank and Gaza appears to be further fanning the desire - or supplying the rationale - for violence, increasing estrangement from the surrounding non-Muslim community. Some terrorist experts also warned that European jihadists who went to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan were returning with new skills.

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Saturday, July 16
View Article  ``México seguro''
by salvador rosillo on Sat 16 Jul 2005 10:18 PM EDT
Posted on Sat, Jul. 16, 2005
 
  C O N T E N I D O   R E L A C I O N A D O 
EL GOBERNADOR de Nuevo México, Bill Richardson, y el de Coahuila, Enrique Martínez en la reunión de Torreón.
JOSE MENDEZ / EFE
EL GOBERNADOR de Nuevo México, Bill Richardson, y el de Coahuila, Enrique Martínez en la reunión de Torreón.

Analistas cuestionan el plan ``México seguro''


EFE

MEXICO

El plan ''México seguro'', puesto en marcha hace un mes por el gobierno en la frontera con EEUU y el oeste del país, no ha logrado contener la violencia atribuida a los narcotraficantes, estimaron ayer diversos analistas.

A falta de cifras oficiales, la prensa mexicana afirma que la ola de ''narcoviolencia'' ha dejado al menos 700 muertos en los últimos siete meses y que el ritmo de asesinatos no cede, pese al programa que comenzó el 12 de junio el presidente Vicente Fox.

Teniendo en cuenta esta situación, los gobernadores de los estados de ambos lados en una reunión celebrada en la ciudad mexicana de Torreón declararon que la zona fronteriza entre México y Estados Unidos debe ser considerada de ''atención estratégica en materia de seguridad'', al concluir ayer una cita de dos días.

Asimismo, exigieron a los gobiernos federales una partida específica para atender ese problema en una zona que es habitada por 11 millones de personas a ambos lados de la línea fronteriza de 3,200 kilómetros.

La Secretaría de Seguridad Pública Federal (SSP) de México informó que en el último mes han sido detenidas 968 personas y decomisados 25 kilos de cocaína y 21 de he_

roína, $1.5 millones en efectivo, 110 armas cortas y largas y 123 vehículos. Sin embargo, no mencionó la cifra de muertes ocurridas durante el primer mes de ``México seguro''.

En la reunión de Torreón participaron por EEUU los gobernadores de los estados de California, Arizona, Nuevo México y Texas, y por México los de Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León y Tamaulipas.

En Nuevo Laredo ''la racha de crímenes sigue inalterable'', Eduardo Reyes, portavoz del Centro de Derechos Humanos ``Miguel Agustín''.

La zona de la frontera entre ambas naciones es asolada por una guerra entre los cárteles mexicanos que se disputan el control de las rutas de la droga en la región, pugna que ha dejado centenares de muertes violentas este año.

La línea fronteriza es punto de cruce de más de medio millón de indocumentados, de los que mueren cada año unos 400, principalmente en el desierto de Arizona. ''Hemos recibido denuncias de abusos de los militares y policías contra los civiles, en el marco del programa'', añadió.


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View Article  Primitive Hunting Weaponry:
by salvador rosillo on Sat 16 Jul 2005 09:46 PM EDT
Blowguns   more »
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View Article  BLOWGUN HISTORY
by salvador rosillo on Sat 16 Jul 2005 09:31 PM EDT

BLOWGUN HISTORY

 Home

SIZE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN DIFFERENT CALIBER BLOWGUNS: The .40 caliber blowgun measures 3/8"; .50 caliber is 1/2" and the .62 caliber is 5/8".  These measurements are based on "inside" diameter of blowgun - wall to wall.

Enter the 20th century!  Terminator blowguns use precision manufactured, .40 caliber, seamless T-6061 aircraft aluminum tubing.  Our blowguns come equipped with a custom manufactured, high quality, anti-inhale mouthpiece to ensure no dart inhalation and to provide maximum airflow. With all the new improvements, you can expect ranges over 250 feet and muzzle velocities as high as 350 feet per second or more! In fact, the darts can penetrate 1/4" of plywood with no problem! 100% USA made, Terminator blowguns are the highest quality blowguns made in the world and come with an exclusive.

Over 40,000 years ago, the first blowguns began to appear in many different parts of the world. Although crude, these primitive weapons were extremely accurate. It is not known exactly where blowguns originated, however, it is generally believed that they appeared simultaneously in many parts of the world. Back then blowguns were made from bamboo or other hollowed out woods. Blowguns are still used today for hunting by Amazonian Indians in South American, and by Pygmies in Africa. They were also used by the Ninja prior to 1500 in Japan for silent assassination with poison darts.
Blowguns are still used today by the Dyak tribe It is generally believed that blowguns appeared simultaneously in several parts of the world. Earliest evidence of blowguns appeared in parts of Africa and Asia. Blowguns are still used today by the Dyak tribe of headhunters in Borneo for hunting and as weapons in tribal wars. Using hollowed out bamboo tubes, which reach lengths of over 20 feet and darts made out of reeds, the Dyak are very capable hunters. In the tropical areas of Africa, the Pygmies use blowguns to hunt their prey of small game. Around 1500 in Japan,  Ninja assassins to kill in complete silence using poisoned darts used the blowgun.  The Ninja also used the blowgun for diversions by shooting darts in different directions to make the enemy believe they were surrounded.
In the America's, blowguns have been used for several thousand years In the America's, blowguns have been used for several thousand years by native Americans as survival weapons. Amazonian Indians today still rely on the extreme accuracy of the blowgun to hunt for wild game. Although rarely used as a weapon, blowguns do play an important role in tribal wars. North American Indians relied on the extreme accuracy of the blowgun for hunting and for skill games. The art of blowgun making is still taught to anyone wishing to learn at many Native American festivals and on reservations. Although over 40,000 years old in technology, the blowgun still holds the fascination of young and old.
Today modern man has found may uses for the blowgun Today modern man has found may uses for the blowgun. Today's hunter uses the blowgun to hunt small game silently while still-hunting larger game. Blowguns are used all over the world to help maintain wildlife by delivering tranquilizer darts in complete silence. The animals are then studied and released back into the wild. Herpetologists use the blowgun with stun darts to help them capture elusive lizards.  Today, many people are finding that blowguns offer a quite challenging sport. With many different darts to choose from, blowguns are finding their way into everyday society. With the introduction of paintballs and soft-tip darts, the blowgun offers a wide variety of sporting activities.

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View Article  In Croatia, a New Riviera Beckons
by salvador rosillo on Sat 16 Jul 2005 08:24 PM EDT
In Croatia, a New Riviera Beckons   more »
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View Article  Ron Moore's Deep Space Journey
by salvador rosillo on Sat 16 Jul 2005 08:18 PM EDT
Ron Moore's Deep Space Journey   more »
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View Article  India Knight: Mind the gap-year waste
by salvador rosillo on Sat 16 Jul 2005 07:22 PM EDT
India Knight: Mind the gap-year waste   more »
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View Article  http://www.energyinnovations.com/static_2003.html
by salvador rosillo on Sat 16 Jul 2005 05:51 PM EDT
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View Article  Ill-Secured Soviet Arms Depots Tempting Rebels and Terrorists
by salvador rosillo on Sat 16 Jul 2005 12:06 PM EDT
By C. J. CHIVERS
Published: July 16, 2005

ICHNYA, Ukraine - The ammunition is stacked in mounds in a clearing, exposed to rain and sun. The crates that hold it are rotting. After more than a decade in the elements, many have ruptured, exposing high-explosive rockets and mortar fins.

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Nikolai Khalap for The New York Times

At a Ukraine arms depot, boxes of mortar rounds are starting to rot.

This is the overstuffed ammunition depot behind the security fences at Military Unit A1479, a small base in the Ukrainian forest under military guard. At least 5,700 tons of ammunition, grenades and explosive powder have come to rest here, according to an unclassified NATO inventory. Almost all of it is unwanted. Much of it has expired, and some is considered too unreliable or too unsafe to use.

The scenes at Unit A1479 provide a glimpse of a dangerous legacy of the militarized Soviet state, one that has emerged as a risk to post-Soviet states and to nations far away, endangering local environments and communities and providing a reservoir of lethal materials for terrorists and armed groups.

[Though recent history has shown how fluid and dangerous the arms can be, there has been no indication or allegation that munitions from Ukraine were used in the bombings last week in London.] Huge depots of conventional weapons and ammunition remain in much of the former Soviet borderlands, many of them vulnerable to the elements, inadequately secured or watched over by security agencies with histories of corruption and suspicious arms sales. Largely unaddressed while Western nations and post-Soviet states have worked to secure and dispose of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, the conventional stockpiles pose problems as yet unsolved.

Nowhere are these problems known to be more pronounced than in Ukraine. NATO and the Ukrainian military estimate that the Soviet military left 2.5 million tons of conventional munitions here as it withdrew soldiers and arms from Europe, as well as more than 7 million rifles, pistols, mortars and machine guns. The imbalance is deeply disproportionate; the Ukrainian military now numbers roughly 300,000.

The surplus weapons and ammunition, some dating to World War I and stored in at least 184 military posts around the country, is packed in bunkers, locked in salt mines and sitting in the open air.

Shipments of the more modern matériel have left Ukraine in suspicious arms deals and reappeared in conflicts in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Western governments worry that some stocks, including explosives and portable antiaircraft missiles that can down civilian aircraft, may end up with terrorist groups.

In one deal alone, extensively documented by the United Nations and human rights organizations, the Ukrainian state arms export agency transferred 68 tons of munitions in 1999 to Burkina Faso, in West Africa. From there, they were shipped to Liberia, ending up in the hands of the Revolutionary United Front, which sacked Sierra Leone.

The delivery included 3,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles, 50 machine guns, 25 rocket-propelled grenade launchers, 5 antiaircraft missiles, 5 guided antitank missiles and ammunition.

[Ukraine has not been alone in such circuitous deals. Amnesty International released a report on July 5 that 400 tons of surplus ammunition was shipped from Albania and Serbia to Rwanda in 2002 and 2003, and then channeled to armed groups in Congo.]

Allegations of illegal arms dealing have also surrounded Trans-Dneister, the breakaway region of Moldova that according to estimates provided by Russia to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has 42,000 small arms and 20,000 tons of munitions, including aircraft bombs, rockets and 39,000 landmines.

Belarus, Georgia and the Central Asian states were similarly left with unwanted depots, although their stocks are believed to be much smaller than Ukraine's because they did not become depositories for munitions being withdrawn from Eastern Europe.

Russia, where depot explosions are reported each year, is thought to have the largest stockpiles of all, but it has been less forthcoming about them than Ukraine. One concentration is in the small Russian enclave in Kaliningrad, between Poland and Lithuania, said Aaron Karp, a consultant at the Small Arms Survey, a private research organization in Geneva. "The usual assumption is that Kaliningrad is explosive," he said.

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View Article  Armstrong Extends Lead in Pyrenees
by salvador rosillo on Sat 16 Jul 2005 11:38 AM EDT
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View Article  Mexico Says 2 Agents Sought to Blackmail Salinas Brother
by salvador rosillo on Sat 16 Jul 2005 07:01 AM EDT
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
Published: July 15, 2005

OAXACA, Mexico, July 14 - Nearly eight months after the brother of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari was discovered smothered to death, two federal agents were arrested Thursday and charged with trying to extort millions of dollars from him.

The state attorney general in charge of the inquiry, Alfonso Navarrete Prida, told reporters on Thursday that at least four other federal agents were under investigation and that as many as eight other people were being investigated for involvement in the suspected extortion plot. The police say the effort may have gone awry and ended in the killing of the former president's brother, Enrique Salinas de Gortari. "There are more people responsible and we continue investigating who they are," he was quoted by an aide as having said at a news conference in Toluca.

The possible involvement of elite federal agents - Mexico's equivalent of the F.B.I. - in a plot to extort money from the Salinas family is the latest bizarre twist in a case that has puzzled and fascinated the country since Mr. Salinas de Gortari's body was discovered on Dec. 6 in his car in a quiet suburb of the capital. He had been beaten and smothered in what investigators say they suspect was an attempt to scare him into paying extortion money. A plastic bag was over his head.

At the time of his death, he was being sought by the French police for questioning. Interpol had put out a bulletin on Nov. 22 asking for information about his whereabouts. For several years, French investigators had been examining the financial transactions between Enrique Salinas, 52, and his eldest brother, Raúl Salinas de Gortari, who was recently released from prison after a judge acquitted him on charges of ordering the killing of a prominent politician in 1994.

Carlos Salinas de Gortari was president from 1988 to 1994 and remains a major power broker in the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the authoritarian and corrupt machine that ran the country for seven decades before being defeated in the 2000 election.

The two agents, José de Jesús Medellín Simental and Eduardo Paredes Monroy, were taken before a judge and charged Thursday with trying to use the Interpol request to extort $2.9 million from Enrique Salinas. Luis Holguín, a spokesman for the attorney general, said the agents went to Mr. Salinas's house and called him on the telephone several times asking for money.

Mr. Navarrete said at the news conference in Toluca that one piece of evidence against the agents was that the Federal Investigation Agency informed Interpol as late as the day of the killing that there was no indication Mr. Salinas was in Mexico despite the contacts agents had made with him.

Mr. Holguín said there was no evidence the two agents were at the scene of the killing or that they took part in smothering the victim.

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View Article  Immigration Sting Puts 2 U.S. Agencies at Odds
by salvador rosillo on Sat 16 Jul 2005 06:55 AM EDT
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Thursday, July 14
View Article  NOT OUR FIGHT
by salvador rosillo on Thu 14 Jul 2005 07:58 PM EDT
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View Article  One-Story Building Collapses into Busy Block of Manhattan
by salvador rosillo on Thu 14 Jul 2005 05:51 PM EDT
REAL ESTATE   more »
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View Article  An Enclave Wonders if It Is Too Private
by salvador rosillo on Thu 14 Jul 2005 10:13 AM EDT
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View Article  In One Arizona Community, an Oasis in a Toxic World
by salvador rosillo on Thu 14 Jul 2005 10:11 AM EDT
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View Article  Using Feng Shui in Offices and Stores
by salvador rosillo on Thu 14 Jul 2005 10:07 AM EDT
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View Article  Príncipe Alberto sube al trono en Mónaco
by salvador rosillo on Thu 14 Jul 2005 09:49 AM EDT
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View Article  Petrolera venezolana teje red de beneficiarios
by salvador rosillo on Thu 14 Jul 2005 08:23 AM EDT
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View Article  bull
by salvador rosillo on Thu 14 Jul 2005 08:20 AM EDT
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View Article  Yellow Jersey Still in Place, Armstrong and His Team Endure Rival's Attack
by salvador rosillo on Thu 14 Jul 2005 08:15 AM EDT
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View Article  In a Wide Sweep for Militants, Italy Detains 174
by salvador rosillo on Thu 14 Jul 2005 08:10 AM EDT
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View Article  Israel Seals West Bank and Gaza to Suppress Violence
by salvador rosillo on Thu 14 Jul 2005 08:08 AM EDT
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View Article  lives of 3 men
by salvador rosillo on Thu 14 Jul 2005 08:04 AM EDT
 
 
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
Published: July 14, 2005

LEEDS, England, July 13 - In the gritty, working-class suburbs of Leeds, Shahzad Tanweer, 22, was the fun-loving, rich kid of the neighborhood, the son of a savvy, Mercedes-driving shop owner.

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Michael Kamber for The New York Times

Youths congregated Wednesday on a corner in the Holbeck section of Leeds. In Holbeck and Beeston, diverse, working-class neighborhoods, tensions between whites and residents of South Asian origin often run high.

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Ian Hodgson/Reuters

Bashir Ahmed, center, an uncle of the bombing suspect Shahzad Tanweer, said Wednesday in Leeds that his nephew "loved his country."

Hasib Hussain, 18, who lived nearby, was the impressionable one, a charming young man who had been drifting into a reckless teenage life until religion set him straight.

And Mohamed Sadique Khan, 30, was the grown-up one, with a wife and a baby daughter at home. The three men used to work out together at the Hardy Street mosque in Beeston, the Leeds neighborhood that two of the suspects called home.

As the identities of these suicide bombing suspects slowly emerged Wednesday behind a thicket of disbelief, the question that nobody in these neighborhoods could answer was this: What kind of radical force threw the three men together, with another bomber, to commit such a heinous crime against their country, the one they rooted for in soccer matches, and their people?

"It still hasn't sunk in yet that these people could have perpetrated something like this and actually came from our community," said Hanif Malik, spokesman for the Hamara Community Services Center in Beeston. "The tensions in this town are not based on religion, but on economics and culture."

Bradford, a community nearby, had riots a few years ago, as did Leeds, though on a smaller scale, and tensions between whites and South Asians often run high in the Holbeck and Beeston neighborhoods, home to many of Leeds' Muslims, residents said.

Many local businesses are owned by people of South Asian origin, a source of resentment among many whites. Last year a white teenage boy was stabbed to death by a group of South Asian teenagers, and the hard feelings have deepened since then.

Some whites make no attempts to hide their disaffection, and say relations are only likely to worsen. "Make them all go back," said David Swaine, 23, of Beeston.

In many ways, the two youngest suicide bombing suspects, Mr. Tanweer, 22, and Mr. Hussain, 18, were British to the core, shaped by their diverse, rough neighborhoods, where flashy cars, petty teenage battles and designer clothes jostle with the Muslim values of work, family and religion. But in the last year or two, friends said, they had noted a turn toward Muslim piety in each man; nothing shocking or obnoxious, just something plain to see.

Mr. Tanweer, a university-educated cricket fanatic who also excelled in soccer and whose father ran a successful fish and chips shop, had taken to praying five times a day, something his relatives did not do, and attending a number of mosques regularly, acquaintances said. He even went to Pakistan last year to visit relatives and study religion, and some media reports said he visited Afghanistan on the same trip.

"He went to Pakistan," said a friend who works for a local greengrocer in Beeston and asked that his name not be used for fear of reprisals. "But a lot of people go to Pakistan. So? The lads used to tease him that he was going there to get married. I think he went for six weeks or something."

Forensic evidence indicates Mr. Tanweer was on the subway train at Aldgate.

"The family is shattered," said Bashir Ahmed, 65, Mr. Tanweer's uncle, who walked toward Mr. Tanweer's house, which was roped off by police tape. Mr. Tanweer "loved his country," he said. "He loved this community. I thought his only interest was cricket. He was not especially religious. Our family does not have a future in this community now."

Mr. Hussain, an average student who graduated from Matthew Murray Vocational School in 2003 and was attending Thomas Danby College, the equivalent of the last two years of high school. He had also begun to shake off Western habits, even more abruptly than his friend Mr. Tanweer. A tall, shy teenager, Mr. Hussain, who lived in Holbeck, had taken up with a rough Pakistani crowd in his high school years, the kind of young people who brawled with white kids over girls and perceived slights. Classmates said he was relatively docile, until provoked, then he could become violent.

Hassan M. Fattah and Jonathan Allen contributed reporting for this article.
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Wednesday, July 13
View Article  Building in Iceland? Better Clear It With the Elves First
by salvador rosillo on Wed 13 Jul 2005 06:46 PM EDT
travel   more »
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View Article  Estudiantes exigen destitución de dos ministros del chavismo
by salvador rosillo on Wed 13 Jul 2005 05:12 PM EDT
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View Article  Colombia's future rides on coal train
by salvador rosillo on Wed 13 Jul 2005 05:08 PM EDT
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View Article  Armstrong Starts Ascent to Another Title
by salvador rosillo on Wed 13 Jul 2005 12:17 PM EDT
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View Article  Town Uses Trespass Law to Fight Illegal Immigrants
by salvador rosillo on Wed 13 Jul 2005 06:00 AM EDT
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View Article  In Firehouse, Fastest Way Down Is on Its Way Out
by salvador rosillo on Wed 13 Jul 2005 05:57 AM EDT
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Tuesday, July 12
View Article  Monaco's Albert II to take throne
by salvador rosillo on Tue 12 Jul 2005 09:09 AM EDT
Monaco's Albert II to take throne
Tourists wait for the changing of the guard in front of the Prince Palace in Monaco. Picture: 11 July 2005
Monegasques and tourists are preparing for a day of festivities
The celebrations officially proclaiming Prince Albert II of Monaco the ruler of the Mediterranean principality have opened with a Mass at its cathedral.

The move follows the death of his father, Prince Rainier, in April. The Grimaldi family has ruled the statelet for some 700 years.

The mayor will later symbolically hand over the town's keys to the prince. Fireworks and a ball will follow.

A more formal ceremony is to be held in November with foreign heads of states.

Illegitimate son

Tuesday's ceremonies have been overshadowed by the latest revelations to rock the Riviera royal dynasty.

In an interview on French television on Monday, Prince Albert, 47, discussed his illegitimate baby son, Alexandre.

He also suggested that other paternity suits were a possibility.

Prince Albert II of Monaco. File photo
Profile: Prince Albert
Until recently the tall, balding Albert was the least scandal-prone member of the family, unlike his sisters Princess Caroline and Princess Stephanie, says the BBC's Caroline Wyatt in Paris.

He was a bachelor who kept his private life private despite rumours of liaisons with models and actresses.

Then a French air hostess originally from Togo revealed in Paris Match magazine that Albert was the father of her 22-month-old son, Alexandre, and published photos of Albert with the baby.

In Monday's interview, Prince Albert said he was shocked at the way Alexandre's existence had been revealed.

His illegitimate son will not be able to inherit the throne, although Prince Albert has acknowledged paternity and assumed his financial responsibilities.

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View Article  Israel Seeks $2 Billion in U.S. Aid for Gaza Withdrawal
by salvador rosillo on Tue 12 Jul 2005 09:02 AM EDT
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View Article  Suspect in Killing of Dutch Filmmaker Maintains His Silence
by salvador rosillo on Tue 12 Jul 2005 09:00 AM EDT
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View Article  Marga López, 81, Mexican Movie Star, Dies
by salvador rosillo on Tue 12 Jul 2005 08:58 AM EDT
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View Article  Timetable Set for a Truce in Ivory Coast
by salvador rosillo on Tue 12 Jul 2005 07:44 AM EDT
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Monday, July 11
View Article  Untitled
by salvador rosillo on Mon 11 Jul 2005 08:54 AM EDT

GLENEAGLES, Scotland -- In a display of resolve following subway bombings in London, leaders of the major industrial nations pledged Friday to boost aid to Africa, help finance the Palestinian Authority, and bring China and India into what they called a "new dialogue" on global warming.

Meeting at a secluded Scottish golf resort, leaders from the Group of 8 wrapped up their closely watched summit slightly ahead of schedule so British Prime Minister Tony Blair could return to London to oversee his government's response to Thursday's attacks.

"We speak today in the shadow of terrorism," Blair said before leaving. "But it will not obscure what we came here to achieve. ... We offer today this contrast to the politics of terror."

As their nations' flags fluttered at half-staff outside, the G-8 leaders issued a series of communiques presenting what they described as a collective determination to tackle some of the world's most vexing challenges.

Yet on the two signature issues Blair had placed at the top of the summit agenda, Africa aid and climate change, the leaders avoided being tied down to the specific country-by-country targets sought by environmental and relief groups.

"It isn't all that everyone wanted," Blair acknowledged. "But it is progress; real, achievable progress."

President Bush left Gleneagles resort about an hour earlier than planned, without commenting publicly on the summit agreements, which some observers said had been watered down in response to U.S. pressure.

"There's been no movement from the Bush administration," said Jennifer Morgan, climate change director for the World Wildlife Fund. "Even the very noble efforts of Prime Minister Blair to get President Bush to change his position have failed."

For months, the summit had been a focal point for critics of globalization, advocates of Third World development and debt relief, and supporters of new efforts to address the environmental risks posed by global warming.

Millions of people tuned into worldwide broadcasts of last weekend's "Live 8" concerts organized by rock musicians Bob Geldof and Bono. Tens of thousands gathered in the Scottish capital, Edinburgh, to focus attention to the gathering at the Gleneagles resort 40 miles to the northwest. A few clashed with police, smashed car windows and disrupted traffic closer to the summit site.

But the sense of urgency escalated after the bombings, which some authorities believed were timed to coincide with the summit. The explosions forced G-8 leaders to revise their agenda so Blair could tend to the crisis.

The G-8 members represent the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan and Russia. Also attending the summit were the leaders of China, India, Mexico, Brazil and seven African nations, as well as U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the heads of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

Most of the declarations endorsed by all G-8 members had been anticipated, and the final negotiations generally involved the nuances of multinational policy and the niceties of diplomatic language. Although the organization has no formal authority to legislate or enforce its decrees, its members generally feel bound by the commitments they make during summits.

Among the significant new initiatives announced was a pledge to provide $9 billion in aid over three years to the Palestinian Authority to help it establish a democratic government, provide security and rein in militants as part of an ongoing peace process with Israel.

(Begin optional trim)

Blair said the G-8 members agreed to provide the assistance Thursday evening, after the London attacks underscored the dangers posed by extremists. But U.S. officials said the initiative was added to the agenda last week in response to a proposal by former World Bank President James Wolfensohn.

U.S. Deputy national security adviser Faryar Shirzad, the only U.S. official to participate with Bush in all of the G-8 deliberations, said the funds would help the Palestinian Authority "spur the kind of economic development and governance necessary for them to develop a capability to govern."

(End optional trim)

The Africa aid pledge came after members met Friday morning with the leaders of seven African nations. The agreement calls on G-8 nations to double by 2010 their development assistance to the continent, which current stands at $25 billion a year. That increase was part of a broader commitment to boost development aid around the world by $50 billion a year.

The G-8 members also ratified an agreement by their finance ministers to write off about $40 billion in debt owed to multinational organizations by 18 poor countries, 14 of which are in sub-Saharan Africa. The deal will reduce annual debt service obligations by about $1 billion.

But Blair had to abandon his efforts to persuade the G-8 members to increase their overall development aid budgets to 0.7 percent of their nations' gross domestic product.

While Bush had promised to double U.S. aid to Africa to about $8 billion a year by 2010, it would require a far bigger increase to reach the 0.7 percent target. The total American aid budget amounts to less than 0.2 percent of gross domestic product, placing the United States 21st on a list of 22 industrial economies.

Blair's biggest disappointment might have been his inability to get Bush to consider entering into any kind of pact requiring specific reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that contribute to global warming. The United States is the only G-8 nation that has refused to sign the 1997 Kyoto Protocol mandating such cuts.

Instead, Blair got an agreement acknowledging that human activity is a probable cause of global warming, and a commitment to launch multinational talks on climate change this year.

The so-called "action plan" was endorsed by the leaders of China, India, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa, fast-growing economic powers who are becoming big consumers of oil and other pollution-producing fuels.

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View Article  G-8 Leaders Agree on $50B in African Aid
by salvador rosillo on Mon 11 Jul 2005 08:48 AM EDT
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View Article  Antigua marca de Cuba lleva a empresa al éxito
by salvador rosillo on Mon 11 Jul 2005 07:15 AM EDT
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View Article  Una nueva guerrilla mexicana en Chiapas
by salvador rosillo on Mon 11 Jul 2005 07:10 AM EDT
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View Article  Kurdish Suspects Reveal International Links, Officials Say
by salvador rosillo on Mon 11 Jul 2005 07:06 AM EDT
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View Article  Mayor Pursues Plans Outside Manhattan, and Even Critics Applaud
by salvador rosillo on Mon 11 Jul 2005 07:03 AM EDT
By CHARLES V. BAGLI
Published: July 11, 2005

While public attention was focused on the city's ill-fated plan to build a stadium on the West Side of Manhattan over the past two years, the Bloomberg administration quietly labored over projects and development plans in corners of the city - from Jamaica, Queens, to Staten Island - that generated very few headlines.

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Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times

KeySpan Park in Coney Island, built by the Giuliani administration, has had little success in stimulating development in the neighborhood.

But the city has only so many resources, and not every project can get the full attention of City Hall. With the stadium plan now dead in Albany and the city's Olympic bid rejected, urban planners and local development officials are hoping that the Bloomberg administration will bring to other projects the same kind of energy and focus that it displayed on the West Side.

Even critics of the Bloomberg administration in private organizations, like Robert D. Yaro, the president of the Regional Plan Association, and Jonathan Bowles, the research director of the Center for an Urban Future, give Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg high marks for doing what few previous mayors have done: promoting economic development projects in the boroughs outside of Manhattan that could transform entire neighborhoods.

Those efforts include rezoning the crumbling industrial streets of Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn in a plan for a waterfront residential neighborhood; reinvigorating the Hunts Point industrial park in the Bronx; and helping to create a relatively inexpensive office market in Long Island City, Queens.

But some officials active in development efforts in Jamaica and Long Island City say that while the Bloomberg administration did not ignore their communities, they wished that it had moved more swiftly.

"I give the administration enormous credit for its work in the boroughs," said Mr. Bowles of the Center for an Urban Future, a nonprofit research group. "But New York moves so slowly sometimes. It was the mayor's personal involvement on the West Side and Williamsburg that pushed them forward in an expedited manner. It'd be great if he could devote the same energy and resources to other projects."

Gayle Baron, president of the Long Island City Business Development Corporation, said there was increasing interest by Manhattan corporations in moving some of their operations to Long Island City. Citigroup is expected to start construction of its second office building there this fall.

The city, she said, is in final negotiations with a developer, Tishman Speyer Properties, over a proposed 2.2 million-square-foot commercial and retail project on a city-owned garage site at Queens Plaza, and Silvercup Studios plans a major building project in 2007.

But efforts have been "a little disjointed," Ms. Baron said, and she longs for something bigger.

"Where I think we really need help is with a comprehensive marketing initiative, with city funds, to really brand Long Island City," she said. "It's time for a comprehensive economic development plan that takes into account the commercial interests and the manufacturing and arts groups that continue to thrive in the area."

Mayor Bloomberg has dismissed criticism from his political rivals who say he has been "Manhattan-centric" and obsessed with stadium building, to the exclusion of projects in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx or Staten Island. In speeches before civic and business groups, he has challenged his critics to name another mayor who had invested $2 billion in projects in all five boroughs.

"The press has been focused on the West Side and the stadium, but my agency has been focused on all five boroughs for the last three and a half years," said Andrew M. Alper, president of the city's Economic Development Corporation.

"We've been working hard on the redevelopment of the Bronx Terminal Market, the homeport site in Staten Island, Downtown Brooklyn, the rezoning of Greenpoint-Williamsburg and the Potamkin project in Harlem," he said, referring to the Harlem Auto Mall, a joint venture of the Potamkin Auto Group and General Motors.

In the next few weeks, the Bloomberg administration expects to announce a major development project in Jamaica and the selection of a developer for the proposed East River Science Park, a corporate park for life science industries near Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan.

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View Article  Bosnian Muslims Retrace Steps of Those Killed in 1995
by salvador rosillo on Mon 11 Jul 2005 07:00 AM EDT
By DAVID ROHDE
Published: July 11, 2005

KONJEVIC POLJE, Bosnia and Herzegovina, July 10 -About 500 Bosnian Muslim men set out on foot at 7:30 a.m. Sunday from this quiet farming village in eastern Bosnia on the third and final day of their re-enactment of the "march of death" a decade ago this week.

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A young Bosnian boy prayed over one of nearly 600 coffins stored at a battery factory for burial Monday, 10 years after the Srebrenica massacre.

Bearing Bosnian and Bosnian-Muslim flags, the men completed their solemn retracing of the route taken by an estimated 15,000 Muslim men during the war in Bosnia. They had fled the town of Srebrenica in panic in July 1995, after lightly armed United Nations peacekeepers failed to protect them from advancing Serb forces. The Serbs killed more than 7,000 of the fleeing Muslims in ambushes and mass executions that war crime judges later declared genocide.

On Sunday, the column of Muslims marching through the woods here were again surrounded by hundreds of armed Serbs, but on this day the Serbs were police officers assigned to protect the marchers.

Zoran Rosuljas, a Serb policeman who shook hands with one of the marchers along the route, said it was "no problem" guarding Muslims 10 years after the three-year war that killed more than 200,000 people. Asked if he felt comfortable with his former enemies, he swiftly responded. "Why not?" he said. "Why not?"

That handshake was just one of curious scenes on the final day of the 40-mile march to protest the failure to arrest the two Serbian leaders indicted on charges of genocide in the killings, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. As many as 50,000 people are expected to attend ceremonies on Monday marking the 10th anniversary of the fall of Srebrenica. The bodies of 610 men exhumed from mass graves and identified through DNA testing will be laid to rest.

As they began their final leg Sunday morning - actually a reverse tracing of the original march, to end in Srebrenica - the men first passed through the village of Nova Kasaba, the site of two mass graves dug by Serb soldiers. Beginning in 2001, Muslim families moved back into this area under the protection of American military forces that patrolled this part of Bosnia until 2004.

Mehmet Muharemovic, 50, a farmer in the village, said he had encountered no problems with local Serbs or Serb police. Asked about a chicken coop that had been built on top of one of the mass graves after it was exhumed, he said it belonged to another returning Muslim farmer. "It's no problem," he said, with a shrug, a cigarette dangling from his lips. "Everyone lost someone. What can you do about it?"

As the men made their way up dirt roads and mountain paths that, a decade ago, were filled with thousands of panicked Muslims, they spoke calmly. Ali Hodzic Naziv, the man who shook hands with the Serb policeman, said he was marching in memory of his two teenage sons, who disappeared somewhere in these forests.

Mr. Naziv, 53, a burly man who was evacuated from Srebrenica for medical treatment after he was shot in the left leg in 1993, was in pain after two days of walking. But he said it would make him feel better to see the route his sons, who stayed behind, took during their final hours.

"I have to hold on for my sons," he said as he struggled up a muddy path. "I will make it, if God lets me."

Amir Halicic, a wiry 20-year-old, said he was walking to understand what his father experienced when he successfully fled in 1995. He said his father told him he was too frightened to march, that he never wanted to walk through those forests again.

Mr. Halicic, 10 when Srebrenica fell, said he fled separately with his mother and grandfather. Two of them survived. "I didn't have a childhood," he said. "My grandfather was killed right in front of my eyes."

Near the front of the column was a tall, sunburned man who said he was returning to Srebrenica for the first time in 10 years. That man, Gary Kremer, had been a surgeon with the Dutch peacekeepers who were overwhelmed by Serb forces here in 1995. He said a Muslim he befriended during the war had invited him to march. Survivors from Srebrenica, who have bitterly complained that the Dutch did not do enough to protect them, seemed to treat him well.

Change was evident. When skull fragments were found at a spot where the column stopped to remember those killed in a large ambush, Muslim men came forward to photograph the remains with the cameras in their cellphones. Along most of the route, rebuilt homes and mosques, and newly planted fields, abound in what was a deserted no man's land of burned houses in 1995.

But the reality of what occurred here, and Bosnia's continuing struggles, sunk in as the march ended. The march stopped by a partially exhumed mass grave near Srebrenica. Staring down at exposed femurs, skulls and tibias, some of the exhausted marchers wept.
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View Article  Jerusalem barrier: Security for Jews, hardships for Palestinians
by salvador rosillo on Mon 11 Jul 2005 06:54 AM EDT
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Sunday, July 10
View Article  For American Bikes, a Takeover de France and All of Europe
by salvador rosillo on Sun 10 Jul 2005 10:15 PM EDT
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View Article  Taliban Kill 10 Afghan Police Officers
by salvador rosillo on Sun 10 Jul 2005 10:13 PM EDT
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View Article  The Enigma of Damascus
by salvador rosillo on Sun 10 Jul 2005 09:39 PM EDT
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View Article  Israeli Barrier in Jerusalem Will Cut Off 55,000 Arabs
by salvador rosillo on Sun 10 Jul 2005 09:37 PM EDT
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View Article  solar cells
by salvador rosillo on Sun 10 Jul 2005 08:32 PM EDT
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View Article  New arts boss demands a pay rise
by salvador rosillo on Sun 10 Jul 2005 05:22 PM EDT
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View Article  African poet to pull out of book festival
by salvador rosillo on Sun 10 Jul 2005 05:20 PM EDT
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View Article  Africa at the G8 meeting on July 6
by salvador rosillo on Sun 10 Jul 2005 05:17 PM EDT
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Saturday, July 9
View Article  Harlem (Housing Woes) on His Mind
by salvador rosillo on Sat 09 Jul 2005 06:45 PM EDT
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View Article  French pres ordered Greenpeace ship sabotaged-paper
by salvador rosillo on Sat 09 Jul 2005 02:28 PM EDT
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View Article  In a Basement, and Things Are Looking Up
by salvador rosillo on Sat 09 Jul 2005 12:43 PM EDT
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View Article  Sports Home Baseball Pro Basketball Golf Soccer Tennis Pro Football Hockey College Basketball College Football Other Sports Columns
by salvador rosillo on Sat 09 Jul 2005 12:09 PM EDT
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View Article  For Japanese Astronaut, the Wait Is Almost Over
by salvador rosillo on Sat 09 Jul 2005 12:08 PM EDT
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View Article  Viagra Label to Note Risk of Vision Loss
by salvador rosillo on Sat 09 Jul 2005 09:38 AM EDT
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View Article  Viagra Label to Note Risk of Vision Loss
by salvador rosillo on Sat 09 Jul 2005 09:37 AM EDT
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View Article  Fly Me to the Moon? No, but the Next Best Thing
by salvador rosillo on Sat 09 Jul 2005 09:36 AM EDT
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View Article  In Effort to Secure Borders, Iraqis Are Patrolling a River for Smugglers and Pirates
by salvador rosillo on Sat 09 Jul 2005 09:33 AM EDT
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View Article  Palestinians Feel Like Underdogs Against King David
by salvador rosillo on Sat 09 Jul 2005 09:31 AM EDT
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View Article  New Imam Calls for Help in Catching Bombers
by salvador rosillo on Sat 09 Jul 2005 09:28 AM EDT
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View Article  8 Leaders Hail Steps on Africa and Warming
by salvador rosillo on Sat 09 Jul 2005 09:25 AM EDT
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View Article  Boom in Jobs, Not Just Houses, as Real Estate Drives Economy
by salvador rosillo on Sat 09 Jul 2005 09:22 AM EDT
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Friday, July 8
View Article  Baja California Sur
by salvador rosillo on Fri 08 Jul 2005 03:31 PM EDT
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View Article  Uno de 4 niños en EEUU es de madre inmigrante
by salvador rosillo on Fri 08 Jul 2005 09:32 AM EDT
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View Article  Andy García pinta a `Modigliani'
by salvador rosillo on Fri 08 Jul 2005 09:30 AM EDT
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View Article  Tom Cruise, la cientología y sus controversias
by salvador rosillo on Fri 08 Jul 2005 09:27 AM EDT
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View Article  A Church-State Solution
by salvador rosillo on Fri 08 Jul 2005 08:57 AM EDT
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View Article  Bombings Rewrite G-8 Agenda
by salvador rosillo on Fri 08 Jul 2005 08:53 AM EDT
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View Article  Taliban vow to kill missing U.S. commando
by salvador rosillo on Fri 08 Jul 2005 12:26 AM EDT
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View Article  Evidence suggests al-Qaedas return to Afghanistan: experts...The News International
by salvador rosillo on Fri 08 Jul 2005 12:24 AM EDT

PARIS: Members of Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network may have returned to Afghanistan en masse to bolster Taliban militants fighting US and Afghan forces in the east and south of the country, officials and analysts say.

Although no one has come forward with any hard proof, evidence seems to indicate that hardline Al-Qaeda fighters have gone back to the country that was their home base for years until US-led forces toppled the Taliban in late 2001.

The governor of the southern Afghan province of Kandahar, Gul Agha Shirzai, said after a deadly suicide attack at a mosque last month that police "found documents on the (bomber’s) body that showed he was an Arab".

He told reporters that this proved that "Arab Al-Qaeda teams had entered Afghanistan and had planned terrorist attacks".

Afghan Defense Minister Abdur Rahim Wardak on Monday told the New York Times: "There is a regrouping of Al-Qaeda, and it seems they are going to pay more attention to Afghanistan. We are running into foreign fighters here and there."

And Afghan Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah said on a visit to India this week that the Taliban had become "numerically stronger" and that the likely explanation was that they were getting "outside support".

The head of the UN mission in Afghanistan, France’s Jean Arnault, warned the UN Security Council in late June that the security situation in the country was worsening.

Arnault told the council that the Taliban rebels seem to have "more funding, more deadly weaponry, more powerful media for propaganda and more aggressive, cruel and indiscriminate tactics".

Since the start of the year, attacks committed by Taliban militants have resulted in nearly 600 deaths, as opposed to 850 deaths in similar attacks for all of 2004, according to an AFP tally.

Michael Scheuer, who headed up the CIA’s special "bin Laden unit" from 1996 to 1999, sees nothing shocking in the recent reports of an increased Al-Qaeda presence in Afghanistan.

"The recent attacks fit bin Laden’s strategic goal of ensuring ‘the pious Caliphate will start from Afghanistan’," accords to Scheuer.

"Consistent with Al-Qaeda’s tactical doctrine for aiding Islamist insurgencies, Taliban leaders are taking the lead in discussing and claiming credit for the increased violence.

"Al-Qaeda’s doctrine is clear: Support the insurgents fully and offer advice, but stay in the background, do not dictate, and allow local leaders to run operations as they see fit," Scheuer said.

In certain remote regions of Afghanistan, US and Afghan forces routinely encounter concentrations of hardened militants, sparking long hours of combat.

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Thursday, July 7
View Article  Turkey apprehensive over EU crises
by salvador rosillo on Thu 07 Jul 2005 11:04 PM EDT
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View Article  Rebels Kill Egyptian Diplomat, Adding Pressure on Others in Iraq
by salvador rosillo on Thu 07 Jul 2005 11:00 PM EDT
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View Article  An Umbrella in a Shower of a Million Bits That Had Been a Bus
by salvador rosillo on Thu 07 Jul 2005 10:56 PM EDT
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View Article  In Americans, Lurking Fears Rise to Surface
by salvador rosillo on Thu 07 Jul 2005 10:50 PM EDT
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View Article  Even Comic-Book Superheroes Can Use a Little More Momentum
by salvador rosillo on Thu 07 Jul 2005 10:46 PM EDT
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View Article  Brooklyn Plan Draws a Rival, and It's Smaller
by salvador rosillo on Thu 07 Jul 2005 10:28 AM EDT
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View Article  Flora With a Star in Its Corner
by salvador rosillo on Thu 07 Jul 2005 10:27 AM EDT
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View Article  Responsibility Claim Is Posted on Militant Site
by salvador rosillo on Thu 07 Jul 2005 10:24 AM EDT
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Wednesday, July 6
View Article  Move to Canada?
by salvador rosillo on Wed 06 Jul 2005 07:56 PM EDT
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Tuesday, July 5
View Article  tious Armstrong Is Seeing Yellow
by salvador rosillo on Tue 05 Jul 2005 08:44 AM EDT
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View Article  Straight, Gay or Lying? Bisexuality Revisited
by salvador rosillo on Tue 05 Jul 2005 08:42 AM EDT
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View Article  Gunmen Storm Disputed Religious Site in India
by salvador rosillo on Tue 05 Jul 2005 08:29 AM EDT
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View Article  Instant Skyline Added to Brooklyn Arena Plan
by salvador rosillo on Tue 05 Jul 2005 08:26 AM EDT
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Monday, July 4
View Article  When is the Iraqi army ready to take over?
by salvador rosillo on Mon 04 Jul 2005 06:09 PM EDT
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View Article  Moving Beyond Oil
by salvador rosillo on Mon 04 Jul 2005 06:06 PM EDT
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View Article  Choking on Aid Money in Africa
by salvador rosillo on Mon 04 Jul 2005 06:03 PM EDT
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View Article  New Racial Gaffe in Mexico; This Time It's a Tasteless Stamp Set
by salvador rosillo on Mon 04 Jul 2005 05:59 PM EDT
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View Article  Brazilians Streaming Into U.S. Through Mexican Border
by salvador rosillo on Mon 04 Jul 2005 05:51 PM EDT
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View Article  Fight Grows Over a Stamp U.S. Sees as Racist and Mexico Adores
by salvador rosillo on Mon 04 Jul 2005 05:49 PM EDT
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View Article  With Congress's Blessing, a Border Fence May Finally Push Through to the Sea
by salvador rosillo on Mon 04 Jul 2005 05:46 PM EDT
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View Article  PRI Defeats Fox's Party in a Key State
by salvador rosillo on Mon 04 Jul 2005 05:43 PM EDT
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View Article  Mexico Braces for Next Move by Elusive Leader of Zapatista Rebels
by salvador rosillo on Mon 04 Jul 2005 05:40 PM EDT
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Saturday, July 2
View Article  trenton downtowner
by salvador rosillo on Sat 02 Jul 2005 06:27 PM EDT
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Friday, July 1
View Article  saud's home
by salvador rosillo on Fri 01 Jul 2005 05:33 PM EDT
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View Article  Africa has most nations at risk
by salvador rosillo on Fri 01 Jul 2005 12:15 PM EDT
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