[A-List] News Archive: June 29, 2003

["bon moun" <sherrynstan@xxxxxxx>]

After days of an intense search from the ground and air, U.S. forces
found the bodies yesterday of two American soldiers missing north of
Baghdad, as the toll of American dead since the start of war passed 200.
http://www.canoe.ca/EdmontonNews/es.es-06-29-0034.html

An Iraqi civilian was killed and two U.S. military police soldiers were
wounded in Baghdad on Sunday when an explosion targeted a U.S. convoy,
the latest in a series of hit-and-run strikes on occupation forces.
<http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=3006767>

?The safety conditions in Afghanistan have deteriorated badly in the
course of 2003 and one can't say that they have changed in a decisive,
long-term or effective fashion. It is therefore hard to think of
promoting repatriation [of Afghan refugees] in the immediate future?,
Luco Lo Presti, Afghanistan coordinator of the Italian section of
Amnesty International, told a press conference in Rome on June 23. 
<http://www.greenleft.org.au/current/544p12b.htm>

Insurgents attacked U.S. troops in southeastern Afghanistan, sparking a
gunbattle in which American helicopters were called in for strikes, the
military said Saturday.
http://famulus.msnbc.com/FamulusIntl/ap06-28-084545.asp?reg=ASIA

Afghanistan is entering a watershed year. A constitution is to be
ratified in October and "free and fair" elections will be held next
June.
http://www.iht.com/articles/101025.html

Saddam Hussein must be captured or killed so he can no longer be a
rallying point for anti-coalition fighters in Iraq, the top U.S.
official in the country said Sunday.
http://www.boston.com/dailynews/180/world/Saddam_Hussein_must_be_caught_
:.shtml

The district attorney's on-again, off-again pursuit of charges against
protesters who shut down the city as the war in Iraq began is off again.
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/special_packages/iraq/619347
8.htm 

The British government was yesterday locked in an increasingly bitter
dispute with the BBC over its reports that Prime Minister Tony Blair's
office embellished intelligence to justify war on Iraq.
http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/Articles.asp?Article=55204&Sn=WORL

Two suspected separatists stormed an army camp in Kashmir yesterday,
killing 12 soldiers before being shot dead, a defence official said.
http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/Articles.asp?Article=55199&Sn=WORL

North Korea yesterday angrily rebuked the US for seeking to bring the
nuclear crisis to the UN and threatened reprisals.
http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/Articles.asp?Article=55185&Sn=WORL

Former regime sympathizers and criminals are behind the attacks on
coalition forces in Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said on
Capitol Hill today. The secretary also said he does not believe the
activity in Iraq rises to the level of a guerrilla war.
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jun2003/n06272003_200306273.html

For those who have been asleep since 9/11, Rumsfeld (D.H. Rumsfeld, as
Seely says he is affectionately known among the literary cognoscenti) is
the nation's square-jawed, harsh-talking, heartless secretary of
defense, an existentialist on the order of Albert Camus' Meursault.
http://www.timesstar.com/Stories/0,1413,125~1511~1484939,00.html

Vice President Dick Cheney will represent President Bush at Tuesday's
funeral for former Sen. Strom Thurmond, the White House says.
http://www.thetandd.com/articles/2003/06/29/news/news3.txt

While I was traveling in California recently, there wasn't much evidence
of the ''grass-roots'' movement to recall Democratic Gov. Gray Davis.
http://www.suntimes.com/output/orourke/cst-edt-rour29.html

Plopped beside a bucket of ice on a Hollywood production lot is a gooey,
oozing, mass of fake tissue that looks an awful lot like Arnold
Schwarzenegger's head. It is, in fact, a replica of the Terminator's
half- eroded skull crafted by Stan Winston's Oscar-winning
special-effects crew. The real Arnold is behind the wheel of a golf
cart, tooling around the lot en route to a conversation he does not
particularly want to have. Will he run for governor of California? 
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/06/29/MO255564.DTL

A Republican plan to redraw state congressional lines to eclipse a
majority held by Texas Democrats in Congress for decades stirred passion
today from opponents who like the lines just where they are. 
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/1971788

The stock market's malaise forced many shareholders to the sidelines --
but black investors are sitting out more than white investors, according
to a new study.
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/business/6169113.htm

Palestinian militants have put off declaring a cease-fire with Israel
because of factional disputes, officials in the main Fatah faction said
Sunday.
http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=3006
839

Liberia's main rebel group declared a unilateral cease-fire Friday in
its three-year military effort to topple the government of President
Charles Taylor, bringing an uncertain respite from days of heavy
fighting in the nation's capital.
http://www.iht.com/articles/101083.html

Malawi's army has been deployed to quell violent riots after
demonstrators attacked an American children's charity and several
churches to protest the removal of five Muslim foreign nationals
suspected of working for al-Qaida.
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/breaking_news/6197886.htm

More than 1,000 people carrying their meager belongings have returned to
this unstable northeastern Congolese town since an emergency force told
tribal fighters to leave the area or be disarmed, a force spokesman said
Saturday.
http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/africa/06/28/congo.fighting.ap/

Nigerian union leaders vowed yesterday to bring Africa's biggest oil
industry to a halt as part of a general strike in protest over a massive
domestic fuel price hike.
http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/Articles.asp?Article=55233&Sn=BUSI

China's Central Bank Governor Zhou Xiaochuan said on Sunday he did not
see the possibility of the yuan being revalued higher.
http://www.forbes.com/home_europe/newswire/2003/06/29/rtr1014247.html

Hong Kong and China have signed a landmark free trade deal aimed at
boosting the Asian financial centre's ailing economy but critics say it
offers only marginal benefits and could further erode its political
autonomy.
http://www.swisspolitics.org/en/news/index.php?section=int&page=news_inh
alt&news_id=3991131

The developments, Chinese sources say, signal inner strife between
increasingly confident Communist Party boss Hu Jintao and his
influential predecessor Jiang Zemin, seven months after China's
smoothest power handover since the 1949 revolution.
http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=3006622

THE politician in Atal Behari Vajpayee must surely have identified with
the poetry of Mao Zedong when he directed the Foreign Office earlier
this week to finally fall in line with Beijing?s formulation that the
?Tibetan Autonomous Region? was a part of China.
http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=26638

Moscow is hoping that Qatar will agree to extradite top radical Chechen
leader Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev to Russia, a spokesman for the Russian
foreign ministry said on Saturday.
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_29-6-2003_pg4_5

Gazprom President Aleksey Miller said that Russia and Turkey will reach
an peaceful end on Gazprom issue by 1st June. 
Gazprom clarified earlier that Turkey will have to pay Gazprom from 1st
June even if it doesn't use the natural gas.
http://www.turks.us/article.php?story=20030628224333332

Russia has held major war games in the Baltic Sea in a conspicuous
demonstration of its naval power ahead of the NATO expansion in the
region.
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/stories/2003062902061200.htm

Britain will become more and more dependent on Russia for gas. We will
also have an incentive to help it increase its oil production.
http://news.independent.co.uk/business/comment/story.jsp?story=419890

A G-77 delegation led by Moroccan Ambassador Mohamed Bennouna has
visited Ciudad Guayana in southeastern Venezuela to get to know
government officials and on-site developments strategically applied to
consolidate the Guayana region as the non-oil choice for Venezuela's
economic future.  The visit was a follow-up to a regional G-77 Latin
America & Caribbean meeting in Caracas June 16-17.
http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=8990

The US economy attained it highest-ever postwar growth of real GDP,
achieving what today would be the completely unthinkable rate of 7.5%,
in the Reagan re-election year of 1984.
http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=8987

At the meeting of Andean Economic community (CAN) Heads of State in
Colombia, Venezuela has proposed a meeting of CAN and Southern Cone
Economic Community (Mercosur) presidents sometime in August to polish up
terms leading to greater integration between the continent's two main
economic blocks. 
http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=8985

ChevronTexaco, the second-largest U.S. oil company, said it and its
partners will invest up to $2.1 billion in developing a natural gas
field in Venezuela's offshore Deltana Platform tract, South America's
largest natural gas reserve.
http://www.canada.com/calgary/calgaryherald/info/business/story.html?id=
FEE9B15B-EC2E-4CDD-92F2-B24173DEC087

Brazil's president told a summit of South American leaders they must
merge the continent's two largest trading blocs to gain U.S. concessions
in free-trade negotiations.
http://www.canoe.ca/EdmontonNews/es.es-06-29-0067.html

Rejecting opposition assertions that he is moving toward a
Venezuelan-style authoritarian democracy, Ecuadorean President Lucio
Gutiérrez said in an interview that he is not pressing for the promotion
of former coup participants, nor is he planning to hold a plebiscite to
reorganize Congress and change the Supreme Court.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/6194733.htm

Though they do not quite know what to make of the way their assertive
new president, Néstor Kirchner, is governing the country, Argentines now
have a phrase to describe it.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/international/americas/29ARGE.html?ex
=1057464000&en=3a486e9fec33b18b&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE>

Fifty years ago I was also young, and a student in Tehran. Those days
most student strikes and political demonstrations began at senior high
school level, and then gathered momentum in the streets of the Capital.
http://www.counterpunch.com/zarrabi06282003.html

Steven Griles is finally on the run. Griles is Interior Gale Norton's
top lieutenant, the man who holds the keys to the nation's oil and
mineral reserves.
http://www.counterpunch.com/stclair06282003.html

It is with great amazement that I watch President Bush's supporters
justify his neverending lies by countering that Bill Clinton lied. 
http://www.sltrib.com/2003/Jun/06282003/public_f/70585.asp