Gun battles raged between Hamas loyalists and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's forces in Gaza City on Tuesday, killing at least three people and reviving fears the strip was sliding into civil war. Hospital officials said the bodies of two security men loyal to Abbas's Fatah faction had also been dumped in a street after they were abducted earlier in the day.Concerned events were spinning out of control, Western and Arab nations urged a halt to the fighting.The internal violence, the worst in living memory, has escalated since Abbas called for early elections on Saturday in an attempt to break a political deadlock with the Hamas government. Hamas has accused Abbas of launching a "coup."Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, a senior Hamas leader, was expected to make a speech in Gaza at 6 p.m. (1600 GMT) to respond to Abbas's election call. Hamas has said it would boycott any polls....
http://news.yahoo.com
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Editor - 08:15:00 12-19-06
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 Professor, Wife Plead Guilty to Reduced Charges in Cuba Spying Case |
A psychology professor and his wife pleaded guilty Tuesday to reduced federal charges in a case involving allegations that both had spied for the Cuban government for decades. Carlos Alvarez, 61, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to become an unregistered foreign agent. His 56-year-old wife, Elsa Alvarez, admitted knowing about her husband's illegal activities but failing to report them to authorities. Carlos Alvarez faces up to five years in prison and his wife up to three years on the revised charges. Both were charged previously with the more serious charge of acting as illegal Cuban agents, which carries a longer possible prison sentence. U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore set sentencing for Feb. 27. Carlos Alvarez, a professor at Florida International University, was accused of spying for decades on Cuban-American exile groups and prominent individuals in Miami, as well as reporting on U.S. political affairs. His wife, also a university employee, was ...
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2737600
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Editor - 08:13:00 12-19-06
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| Weather forces closure of 120-mile stretch of Interstate 40 |
Icy road conditions caused numerous accidents and forced the closure of Interstate 40 between Albuquerque and Gallup early Tuesday, a spokesman for the New Mexico State Police said.Lt. Rick Anglada said authorities closed about 120 miles of the interstate in both directions at about 2:30 a.m. MT. He said he didn't know how many accidents had occurred, but there were reports of jackknifed 18-wheelers and vehicle rollovers.There were no reports of fatalities, Anglada said.Tim Shy, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Albuquerque, said snow and sleet had fallen across the region overnight. Temperatures were expected to bottom out in the 20s."It's been a mixed bag of snow, fog and freezing rain out there," Shy said.He said temperatures in the region were not expected to rise above freezing on Wednesday....
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/stormcenter/2006-12-19-rockies-snowstorm_x.htm?csp=34
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Editor - 08:11:00 12-19-06
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| Bush accused of silencing critic of Iran policy |
A former CIA analyst has accused the White House of trying to silence its critics after he was told that an article he wrote criticising the Bush administration's policy on Iran could not be published because it contained classified material. The article had already been cleared by the CIA. Flynt Leverett, a Middle East expert who also served on the National Security Council, said that his op-ed article for the New York Times contained no information that had not already been publicly discussed by officials. He said he was being targeted because he was critical of the government's "disastrous policies". "The claim [that the article contains classified information] is false, if not fraudulent," said Mr Leverett. "The people making this claim know it is not true ... This is an abuse of the pre-publication review policy to silence an opponent of their policies."...
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2086667.ece
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Editor - 00:42:00 12-19-06
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| High times for farmers as cannabis is named America's biggest cash crop |
Marijuana is the most valuable cash crop in the United States, worth more to its growers than corn and wheat combined, according to a new report by a leading American drug reform lobbyist that cites the US government's own figures. Decades of government efforts to crack down on both the cultivation and consumption of pot have had a counter-productive effect, since even the most conservative government estimates suggest domestic marijuana production has increased tenfold in the past 25 years. It is the leading cash crop in 12 states, and one of the top five crops in 39 states.The report's author, Jon Gettman, says it is "larger than cotton in Alabama, larger than grapes, vegetables and hay in California, larger than peanuts in Georgia, and larger than tobacco in South and North Carolina"....
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2086668.ece
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Editor - 00:40:00 12-19-06
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| Our Own Nuremberg Trials In 2007, the 'reality show' of the American rule of law, for the world to see. |
During the mutual-admiration hearing before the Senate Committee on Armed Services—which led to the unanimous confirmation of former CIA chief Robert Gates to be Donald Rumsfeld's successor—no senator asked Gates if he approves of the Pentagon's "extreme . . . emergency" insistence on a $125 million appropriation to construct a permanent compound for a war-crimes court at Guantánamo. There, in 2007, war-crimes trials will be held for dozens of Guantánamo "detainees." The facilities will accommodate simultaneous proceedings. Unlike the Nuremberg war-crimes trials of the Nazis, there will be no government officials in the dock, but rather—as detailed in my last column—prisoners against whom the United States has itself committed war crimes under the Geneva Conventions and our own War Crimes act. These crimes include their conditions of confinement and a total lack of the due process that the Supreme Court ordered in Rasul v. Bush (2004) and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006). ...
http://villagevoice.com/news/0651,hentoff,75320,2.html
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Editor - 00:37:00 12-19-06
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