MR. BFRY BREAKS DOWN YOUR WORLD

Here is a complete record of the 9/11 testimonies of surviving emergency workers, just recently released... Part of me is afraid to look at these, I've kept these emotions bottled up inside, I'll probablty break down when I look at these oral histories...

Israel is finally ending it's near universally condemned, illegal occupation of the Gaza Strip, after occuprying it since the of the 1967 "Six-Day" war, unless Natanyahu wins and decides to reoccupy, which we hope will not happen, and, it seems, probably will not (see previous posts)




Let's hope and pray that this goes smooth, fuck those crazy-ass settlers, they've brought so much misery to Arab and Jew alike...



Can you imagine how happy the Gazans are? You don't have to if you read this. Now, about the West Bank...

THIS IS PRICELESS FOR SO MANY REASONS!


The not-so-aptly named Romeo and Juliet reside in the Public Garden in spring and summer. (Globe Staff Photo / John Tlumacki)

Thou art no Romeo
Famed swan couple is all-female
By Donovan Slack, Globe Staff August 12, 2005

Boston's beloved pair of swans -- feted by city leaders, residents, and tourists alike as one of the Hub's most celebrated summer attractions -- are a same-sex couple. Yes, scientific tests have shown that the pair, named Romeo and Juliet, are really Juliet and Juliet.

The city's Parks and Recreation Department conducted the tests months ago, but didn't announce the results for fear of destroying the image of a Shakespearean love story unfolding each year in the Public Garden.

''Each year when the swans go in, the kids immediately come to us and say, 'Which one's Romeo, and which one's Juliet?' " parks spokeswoman Mary Hines said yesterday in response to a Globe inquiry. ''It's just like one of those fairy tales; why spoil it?"

This year and last, the swans have laid eggs in the spring and then stood guard at the nest as visitors and nearby residents made regular pilgrimages, hoping to see the eggs hatch. Neither batch did. Turns out, that's because they were never fertilized by a male swan.

The news ignited something of a debate among swan spectators in the Public Garden yesterday, with some insisting the city now should buy a true Romeo and others saying the city should embrace the two as a couple.

''If these two swans are happy together, they shouldn't have to have a guy," said Emma Stokien, a 15-year-old from New York. ''It's good to have the swans as a symbol of the acceptance in Massachusetts."

Some advocates involved in the heated debate on same-sex marriage took the opportunity to rejuvenate their argument, with a touch of levity.

''I think this proves that there's something in the environment in Massachusetts," Brian Camenker, director of the Article 8 Alliance, a Waltham-based organization fighting same-sex marriage, joked in a telephone interview. ''Maybe it's the water that's causing all this lunacy."

The city has kept swans at the Public Garden lagoon for 16 summers. City parks officials adopted the current Romeo and Juliet a few years ago, after others died. The breeder told the city that both were female, a good fit for the Public Garden because specialists say male swans tend to be aggressive.

But when the eggs showed up last spring and the swans began acting like future parents, park rangers thought the breeder had made a mistake. They began preparing for the first-ever hatching of swan babies, or cygnets, in the Public Garden.

Park rangers constructed a fence around the nest of nine or so eggs and began making regular checks, trying to monitor the progress of the eggs. In mid-July, though, the eggs began to disappear, one by one. The swans themselves had been seen kicking some of them into the nearby lagoon. Speculation abounded that maybe the swans had been inattentive. They tended to abandon the nest for hours on end. Maybe the public attention had disrupted their parenting, some said.

Rangers managed to save one egg with hope of getting to the bottom of the mystery. After testing, they discovered the egg had never been fertilized. And when the swans returned to their winter home at the Franklin Park Zoo, parks officials decided to have their genders tested. Not an easy task, specialists said.

It's not just a matter of turning the birds upside down, said aviculturalist Frederick Beall, general curator of Zoo New England, who performed the tests. It requires inverting the bird's rear quarters and performing a detailed examination of reproductive organs. While there is a small margin of error, Beall said he has no doubt that both Romeo and Juliet are female. ''We are 100 percent certain," he said.

Swans will pair up with members of the same sex if there are no opposite-sex mates available, and one will act out the role of the opposite gender. They tend to stay with the same mates until death, typically between age 20 and 30.

''You could have two males, and they'll go through all the same behaviors, building a nest and sitting on it, but you won't have the eggs," Beall said.

Within an hour of the swans' return to the Public Garden in the spring, Romeo or Juliet -- rangers aren't sure which one -- laid a single egg, built a nest to house it, and began the pre-parental behavior. One would sit on the nest while the other shooed ducks away or went off to drink and feed. Sometimes they switched roles. After a week, though, the swans abandoned the nest, and the egg was found destroyed. Rangers removed the nest and fence, without grieving for the egg that would never hatch. (Swans typically lay only one clutch per year.)

As Romeo and Juliet, who are between 6 and 7 years old, stood on the rim of the lagoon yesterday, where swan boats glided by only yards from their nesting ground, spectators snapped pictures and commented on their beauty.

''They should have a Romeo," lamented Laura Elsheimer, a Hudson resident and owner of Sunshine Taxi Cab.

A visitor from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., suggested that the city should try to have one of next year's eggs fertilized so that Romeo and Juliet could become same-sex parents. ''I'm sure they'd probably be perfect parents," said L.D. Hollingsworth, smiling as he watched the swans grooming themselves.

Some same-sex marriage advocates hoped the swans' celebrity would not be diminished by the revelation of their same-sex status.

Marty Rouse, campaign director of MassEquality, said in a telephone interview: ''We should still cherish and love our swans, no matter whom they choose to swim with."

Donovan Slack can be reached at dslack@globe.com.



© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

General says attacks on US convoys in Iraq doubled

Having George, Dick and Rummy run a war is like having the MIT math team run a dating service

Evidently some satellites were recording night-time temperatures as daytime ones. Yeah, that might throw things off a bit. So now it's worse than we thought...

Let guess, Bush is going to say we need sto study this for four more years...

Changing the face of Israeli politics?
If Likud splits, it's hard to tell what will happen... the Israeli left is like the American left: VERY INEFFECTUAL

70,000 Stranded at Heathrow Airport

Well, they put a commemortive statue in Times Square in honor of the 60th anniversary of V-J Day (August 14th). Guess who the woman in the below picture is. Yep, at 86, its the original nurse! :-)



Considering her age, she don't look too bad!

You may have noticed some new links up, one of which is this very intelligent, very articulate, very interesting young neurotic Iraqi woman describing her life with her "HUBBY!" in Baghdad.

Her obersvations are very deep, incisive, passionate, and touching. The our STUPID NEWS MEDIA covers Iraq, you forget that Iraqis live in Iraq and have to go theough this hell day in and day out with no respite. She live in THE GREEN ZONE TWO YEARS AFTER THE WAR AND THEY STILL ONLY GET WATER AND ELECTRICITY ONCE IN AWHILE. And Baghdad has it better than most. I'm so ashamed...
anyway, read her blog it's truly really something.

Someday I hope to know why women are so crazy. Until that happens, we can keep exploring sexual biological and cultural differences... The crazy thing is how this is realted to Autism...

August 8, 2005

The Male Condition

By SIMON BARON-COHEN
Cambridge, England

TWO big scientific debates have attracted a lot of attention over the past year. One concerns the causes of autism, while the other addresses differences in scientific aptitude between the sexes. At the risk of adding fuel to both fires, I submit that these two lines of inquiry have a great deal in common. By studying the differences between male and female brains, we can generate significant insights into the mystery of autism.

So was Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, right when he remarked that women were innately less suited than men to be top-level scientists? Judging from current research, he was and he wasn't. It's true that scientists have documented psychological and physiological differences between male and female brains. But Mr. Summers was wrong to imply that these differences render any individual woman less capable than any individual man of becoming a top-level scientist.

In fact, the differences that show up in brain research reflect averages, meaning that they emerge only when you study groups of males and females and compare the two groups' averages on particular psychological tests or physiological measures. The evidence to date tells us nothing about individuals - which means that if you are a woman, there is no evidence to suggest that you could not become a Nobel laureate in your chosen area of scientific inquiry. A good scientist is a good scientist regardless of sex.

Nonetheless, with brain scanning, we can discern physiological differences between the average male and the average female brain. For example, the average man's cerebrum (the area in the front of the brain concerned with higher thinking) is 9 percent larger than the average woman's. Similar, though less distinct, overgrowth is found in all the lobes of the male brain. On average, men also have a larger amygdala (an almond shaped structure in the center of the brain involved in processing fear and emotion), and more nerve cells. Quite how these differences in size affect function, if at all, is not yet known.

In women, meanwhile, the connective tissue that allows communication between the two hemispheres of the brain tends to be thicker, perhaps facilitating interchange. This may explain why one study from Yale found that when performing language tasks, women are likely to activate both hemispheres, whereas males (on average) activate only the left hemisphere.

Psychological tests also reveal patterns of sex difference. On average, males finish faster and score higher than females on a test that requires the taker to visualize an object's appearance after it is rotated in three dimensions. The same is true for map-reading tests, and for embedded-figures tests, which ask subjects to find a component shape hidden within a larger design. Males are over-represented in the top percentiles on college-level math tests and tend to score higher on mechanics tests than females do. Females, on the other hand, average higher scores than males on tests of emotion recognition, social sensitivity and language ability.

Many of these sex differences are seen in adults, which might lead to the conclusion that all they reflect are differences in socialization and experience. But some differences are also seen extremely early in development, which may suggest that biology also plays a role. For example, girls tend to talk earlier than boys, and in the second year of life their vocabularies grow at a faster rate. One-year-old girls also make more eye contact than boys of their age.

In my work I have summarized these differences by saying that males on average have a stronger drive to systemize, and females to empathize. Systemizing involves identifying the laws that govern how a system works. Once you know the laws, you can control the system or predict its behavior. Empathizing, on the other hand, involves recognizing what another person may be feeling or thinking, and responding to those feelings with an appropriate emotion of one's own.

Our research team in Cambridge administered questionnaires on which men and women could report their level of interest in these two aspects of the world - one involving systems, the other involving other people's feelings. Three types of people were revealed through our study: one for whom empathy is stronger than systemizing (Type E brains); another for whom systemizing is stronger than empathy (Type S brains); and a third for whom empathy and systemizing are equally strong (Type B brains). As one might predict, more women (44 percent) have Type E brains than men (17 percent), while more men have Type S brains (54 percent) than women (17 percent).

What of Mr. Summers's other claim, that such sex differences are innate? We know that culture plays a role in the divergence of the sexes, but so does biology. For example, on the first day of life, male and female newborns pay attention to different things. On average, at 24 hours old, more male infants will look at a mechanical mobile suspended above them, whereas more female infants will look at a human face.

It has also been found that the amount of prenatal testosterone, which is produced by the fetus and measurable in the amniotic fluid in which the baby is bathed in the womb, predicts how sociable a child will be. The higher the level of prenatal testosterone, the less eye contact the child will make as a toddler, and the slower the child will develop language. That is connected to the role of fetal testosterone in influencing brain development.

Males obviously produce far more prenatal testosterone than females do, but levels vary considerably even across members of the same sex. In fact, it may not be your sex per se that determines what kind of brain you have, but your prenatal hormone levels. From there it's a short leap to the intriguing idea that a male can have a typically female brain (if his testosterone levels are low), while a female can have a typically male brain (if her testosterone levels are high). That notion fits with the evidence that girls born with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, who for genetic reasons produce too much testosterone, are more likely to exhibit "tomboy" behavior than girls with more ordinary hormone levels.

What does all this have to do with autism? According to what I have called the "extreme male brain" theory of autism, people with autism simply match an extreme of the male profile, with a particularly intense drive to systemize and an unusually low drive to empathize. When adults with Asperger's syndrome (a subgroup on the autistic spectrum) took the same questionnaires we gave to non-autistic adults, they exhibited extreme Type S brains. Psychological tests reveal a similar pattern.

And this analysis makes sense. It helps explain the social disability in autism, because empathy difficulties make it harder to make and maintain relationships with others. It also explains the "islets of ability" that people with autism display in subjects like math or music or drawing - all skills that benefit from systemizing.

People with autism often develop obsessions, which may be nothing other than very intense systemizing at work. The child might become obsessed with electrical switches (an electrical system), or train timetables (a temporal system), or spinning objects (a physical system), or the names of deep-sea fish (a natural, taxonomic system). The child with severe autism, who may have additional learning difficulties and little language ability, might express his obsessions by bouncing constantly on a trampoline or spinning around and around, because motion is highly lawful and predictable. Some children with severe autism line objects up for hours on end. What used to be dismissed by clinicians as "purposeless, repetitive behavior" may actually be a sign of a mind that is highly tuned to systemize.

One needs to be extremely careful in advancing a cause for autism, because this field is rife with theories that have collapsed under empirical scrutiny. Nonetheless, my hypothesis is that autism is the genetic result of "assortative mating" between parents who are both strong systemizers. Assortative mating is the term we use when like is attracted to like, and there are four significant reasons to believe it is happening here.

FIRST, both mothers and fathers of children with autism complete the embedded figures test faster than men and women in the general population.

Second, both mothers and fathers of children with autism are more likely to have fathers who are talented systemizers (engineers, for example).

Third, when we look at brain activity with magnetic resonance imaging, males and females on average show different patterns while performing empathizing or systemizing tasks. But both mothers and fathers of children with autism show strong male patterns of brain activity.

Fourth, both mothers and fathers of children with autism score above average on a questionnaire that measures how many autistic traits an individual has. These results suggest a genetic cause of autism, with both parents contributing genes that ultimately relate to a similar kind of mind: one with an affinity for thinking systematically.

In order to fully test this theory, we still need to do a lot of work. The specific genes involved must be identified. It is a theory that may be controversial and perhaps unpopular among those who believe that the cause of autism is largely or totally environmental. But controversy is not a reason not to test it - systematically, as we might say.

Simon Baron-Cohen is the director of the autism research center at Cambridge University and the author of "The Essential Difference: The Truth About the Male and Female Brain."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

he is such a girl even if he is good

YYYEEESSSS!!!!

Hamas has agreed not to undermine the Palestinian Authority during the Gaza withdrawal, but that may not happen as Netanyahu is now favored to beat Sharon in an expectecd election after BIBI gave an impassioned speech to the Knesset; he and Sharon are set for quite the face-off. I told you BIBI would mess this up... I hate him.


THE ODD COUPLE IS ABOUT TO HAVE A NASTY DIVORCE

Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) has just demanded an autonomous region in the south of Iraq. The Kurds are already expecting their own autonomous region...
Let the splintering begin...

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the brother of slain Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, is the curent and current leader SCIRI. See more in the previous posting. He made this announcement after meeting with grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the foremost spiritual leader of the Shias in Iraq.

A spokesman for PM Al Jafari, leader of Dawa, said this is unacceptable.

Good thing george is vacation during all this and the Gaza withdrawal. I'd hate to ask Mr. Happy-Go-Blindly to inconvenience himself.

A number or trends in Iraq are really pointing to it eventually becoming like Iran... The Iranian hand in Iraq politics is growing and growing and we are doing nothing... but the mainstream media as of yet has not connected the dots. In fact, its pathetic that they BARELY talked about the mayor being ousted from yesterday, but instead talked about that studpid figitive couple who shot a an officer... god help us and our ignorance and stupidity.

So here is some illumination, and this is polished folks. Even spell checked. Consider yourself lucky ;-p

IRAQ/N

By Brian E. Frydenborg

The Iranian people, in the first decade of the 20th century, having seen their country’s regional influence fall to Russian imperial expansion to the north and British imperial expansion to its South, decided to take matters into their own hands when they felt that their Shah no longer was leading Iran; his office just a flicker of a shadow of what it once was, the Shah had become a puppet of, depending on what day of the week it was, the British or Russians or sometimes both. They wanted a constitution that would “protect” Islam from growing Western influence, and rose in a massive grassroots movement led by their religious leaders; many of whom were in Iraq. After all, Iran was a Shia Islam nation, and the holiest cities of Shia Islam, where the great heroes of Shiism were martyred at the hands of other Muslims who would later become known as Sunnis, were in Iraq: Najaf, Kufa, and Karbala, among others. So it was that Iranians had longstanding religious ties to these communities.
Iraq at this time was controlled by the vast (yet soon-to-be-dismembered by the Europeans) Ottoman Empire, run by Sunnis, which had oppressed Shias in Iraq for centuries. They treated the land of Iraq as buffer zone between their empire and their Shia rivals in Iran. This didn’t stop most Iranians from making pilgrimages to the holy cities in Iran, or from putting their life savings into assuring that they could be buried in these cities. A huge portion of Shia Iraq’s economy came from this dynamic. In fact, most of the major religious leaders in these Arab Shia communities were ethnically Persian (the ethnicity of Iran), and would be instrumental in helping to organize and energize the Iranian Constitutional Revolution.
Iran is only too happy today to return this favor.
Going from the early 1900’s to the 1970’s, we now have Saddam Hussein and a co ruler who finally resigns in 1979 in charge of Iraq; in Iran, a newly invigorated Shah is in power, having been re-empowered by a 1953 CIA coup which overthrew a government resistant Western interest, especially concerning control of oil.
In Iraq, oppression from Sunni Baathists drove Iraqi Shias even more to their religion and an underground movement al-Dawa al-Islamiyya (Islamic Call), which had been around since the late 1950’s, finally grew into a powerful grassroots force. At this time a Shia cleric, Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, rose to lead al-Dawa. Teaching Shia Islam in Iraqi schools became outlawed, and many Shia leaders, especially the Persians, were expelled form the country; it was in this climate that the Baathist government shut down the city of Karbala during a major Shia religious celebration there in 1977, in effect terminating the religious holiday. The Shias there had had enough, and engaged in furious rioting against Baathist police and mass civil disobedience. After days of rioting, only the arrival of the Iraqi army was able to restore order, using the most brutal of tactics.
Ayatollah Khomeini, having been exiled from Iran for working against the Shah’s government, was now residing in the Iraqi Shia holy city of An Najaf, where Iranians constantly called on him as a hero and potential savior. In 1978, the Iraqi government expelled Khomeini as part of its crackdown on Shias, which set in motion a series of events that would lead to his ascendancy in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, overthrowing Iran’s Shah. That same year, Saddam became the sole ruler of Iraq.
Soon after the Revolution, al-Sadr, who was now openly critical of the Iraqi government, asked that same government if he could lead a procession over to Iran to congratulate Khomeini; when he was refused, An Najaf and Karbala erupted in riots. Al-Dawa and its ties to Iran, now advocating a style of Islamic governance similar to what Khomeini had set up in Iran, was discovered by the Baathists. Khomeini’s calling for the taking of disputed border territory that Iraq controlled in addition to calling for a spread of the Iranian Revolution to Iraq alarmed Hussein, who feared even further instability in Shia Iraq that would upset the entire his Sunni-dominated system. A massive crackdown on al-Dawa and Shias in general began, and tens of thousands of Shias were arrested, tortured, executed, or expelled, and the remaining Shias would be prohibited from celebrating their most important religious holidays. Saddam virtually destroyed al-Dawa; al-Sadr—and his sister— were executed in 1980. He would go down a martyr and a legend.
The Iranian government actively tried to export its revolution to Iraq during the ensuing Iran-Iraq War, putting Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, the son of a revered Iraqi hero who had fought the British colonialists in the 1920’s, in charge of a new “Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq” (SCIRI). The military arm of this movement, the Badr Brigade founded personally by al-Hakim, consisted of thousands of dedicated Iraqis, eventually reaching corps size. Immediately after the Gulf War in 1991, this same Badr Brigade, with our encouragement, took part in the failed Shia uprising in southern Iraq against Saddam, and was slaughtered by the elite units of the Republican Guard, along with tens of thousands of other Shias.
A few years later, Muhammad Sadeq al-Sadr, brother of the executed leader of al-Dawa, called on Hussein to release prisoners from the uprising. Saddam responded in 1999 by having al-Sadr gunned down, along with two of his sons. A third son, Muqtada, went into hiding. Al-Sadr was succeeded by Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

After our recent invasion, a lot of doors opened for Shias. Both al-Hakim and Muqtada al-Sadr returned in 2003. Hakim was assassinated that August. Al-Sadr is wanted in the murder of a rival cleric and may have been involved in the murder of al-Hakim. His militia, the so called “Mahdi Army,” has clashed with aides to al-Sistani, the most prominent Shi religious leader in Iraq. And we all remember the brutal fighting with American troops and the odd decision for us to let him and his militia off the hook after al-Sistani brokered a truce that ended the siege of the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf. Muqtada clearly wants power, and as a man who killed many American troops and the newest member in a family of legends among the Shia community, he is poised to grab just that.
The United Iraqi Alliance controls over 48% of the Iraqi National Assembly. The 1st, 2nd and 4th largest parties in the Alliance are as follows: Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, al-Dawa, and the Badr Organisation, formerly the Brigade. (#12 is the Hezbollah Movement in Iraq, incidentally, another Iranian government sponsored movement)
This past Wednesday, the Badr Organization illegally ousted the Mayor of Baghdad in an armed coup d’état. The Iraqi Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, has said he will not oppose this move. He is a member of al-Dawa, and recently met with al-Sadr, who has been talking about taking a more active role in politics instead of killing American soldiers now. He is hugely popular with disaffected Shias (growing in number daily) and upon his emergence from hiding, a huge slum of Baghdad was popularly renamed “Sadr City” in his honor. He talks openly of creating an Islamic theocracy, and has positioned himself as the 2nd most influential Shia cleric in Iraq. Al-Sistani, current #1, was born in 1930.

The new Iranian president is a hardliner, and we have recently confirmed that weapons and some of the bombs killing our troops are coming through the Iraqi-Iranian border.

The reason I have laid all this out in this manner is to connect the dots of these many disconnected (as reported by most media) stories for you, the readers. There are a lot of questions being asked as to what kind of an Iraq we can expect down the road. Now you can tell anyone who asks this, with confidence: just look to Iraq’s eastern neighbor.

Then you can turn to ask them, “Do you think Bush’s invasion was worth it when, years from now, it will have turned Iraq into Iran?”

I'm glad that our Presidential and Cabinet Secretarial Leadership has done such a good job in Iraq! My hat is off to you George, Dick and Don!

August 10, 2005
Mayor of Baghdad Is Deposed; Insurgents Kill 4 U.S. Troops
By JAMES GLANZ
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 10 - Armed men entered Baghdad's municipal building during a blinding dust storm on Monday, deposed the city's mayor and installed a member of Iraq's most powerful Shiite militia.
In continuing violence, the United States military announced today that four American soldiers were killed on Tuesday and six others were wounded when insurgents attacked a patrol near Baiji in northern Iraq. Two Iraqi policemen and four civilians were killed in a suicide car bombing in western Baghdad, the Interior Ministry said.
The deposed mayor, Alaa al-Tamimi, who was not in his offices at the time, recounted the events in a telephone interview on Tuesday and called the move a municipal coup d'état. He added that he had gone into hiding for fear of his life.
"This is the new Iraq," said Mr. Tamimi, a secular engineer with no party affiliation. "They use force to achieve their goal."
The group that ousted him insisted that it had the authority to assume control of Iraq's capital city and that Mr. Tamimi was in no danger. The man the group installed, Hussein al-Tahaan, is a member of the Badr Organization, the armed militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, known as Sciri.
The militia has been credited with keeping the peace in heavily Shiite areas in southern Iraq but also accused of abuses like forcing women to wear the veils demanded by conservative Shiite religious law.
"If we wanted to do something bad to him, we would have done that," said Mazen A. Makkia, the elected city council chief who led the ouster on Monday and who had been in a lengthy and unresolved legal feud with Mr. Tamimi.
"We really want to establish the state of law for every citizen, and we did not threaten anyone," Mr. Makkia said. "This is not a coup."
Mr. Makkia confirmed that he had entered the building with armed men but said that they were bodyguards for him and several other council members who accompanied him. Witnesses estimated that the number of armed men ranged from 50 to 120. Mr. Makkia is a member of a Shiite political party that swept to victory during the across-the-board Shiite successes during January's elections.
Mr. Tamimi, the deposed mayor, was appointed by the central government and held ministerial rank. He was originally put in place by L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator in the country until an Iraqi government took over in June 2004.
Baghdad is the only city in Iraq that is its own province, and the city council had previously appointed Mr. Tahaan as governor of Baghdad province, with some responsibilities parallel to Mr. Tamimi's. But the mayor's office was clearly the more powerful office, a fact that proved to be a painful thorn in the side of Mr. Makkia, who believed that the council, which he controls, should hold sway in Baghdad.
Mr. Makkia provided a phone number for Mr. Tahaan, but the phone did not appear to be turned on. A spokesman for the American Embassy in Baghdad said that he was aware of the developments but that he had no immediate comment.
When asked whether the Iraqi prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a politician with another Shiite Islamic party, Dawa, was concerned about developments at the municipality, a spokesman, Laith Kubba, said, "My guess is, yes, he is."
Mr. Kubba said he had not yet had a chance to talk with the prime minister about the issue. But gave clear indications that the prime minister would not stand in the way of the move.
Weeks ago, Mr. Tamimi had offered to resign or retire, saying that the budget he had been given was not adequate. For a city of six million people, the central government had given him a budget of $85 million; he had requested $1 billion.
As of Tuesday, the prime minister still had not formally accepted the offer, Mr. Kubba said. But he said the offer could be used to find a way to formally remove Mr. Tamimi.
"It's more or less a fait accompli that he's not going back to office," Mr. Kubba said. He added that Mr. Tahaan would be considered an interim mayor until the prime minister settled on someone to take the post permanently.
Leaders of the country's major political parties, meanwhile, resumed a summit meeting to break the deadlock over Iraq's new constitution, which was delayed by the same sandstorm on Monday.
The deadline for the constitution is in five days and the parties have so far failed to resolve several crucial issues like the role of Islam in the government, the future of the ethnically mixed and oil-rich city of Kirkuk and the scope of self-rule for regions outside Iraqi Kurdistan.
After the meeting, the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, said discussion focused mainly on the issue of autonomy and the distribution of oil revenues. He expressed confidence that the group would complete the constitution on time, but added, "As the English people would say, the devil is in the details."
The four American soldiers killed in northern Iraq on Tuesday were under the command of the 42nd Infantry Division of New York, the military said today. Six others were wounded in the attack.
The three Iraqi policemen were members of a group on patrol in the western Baghdad suburb of Ghazaliya, an Interior Ministry official said. A fourth officer was wounded.
Insurgents also fired a mortar round into Antar Square in the Adamiya neighborhood, killing a traffic policeman and wounding seven other people, the ministry official said.
In other violence on Tuesday, an American soldier was killed and two were wounded when a car bomb exploded as a patrol passed through a crowded square in central Baghdad, the military said. An official at the Interior Ministry said at least three civilians were killed and 54 wounded in the same blast. Mortars landed near a mosque in southern Baghdad, killing two civilians and wounding four, the official said.
At least nine security officials were killed in four separate shooting incidents around Baghdad on Tuesday. An American marine was killed by small-arms fire on Monday in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, the military said.
In Washington, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday that Iran had become a conduit for weapons smuggled into Iraq and used by insurgents, and he criticized Tehran for not doing more to prevent the smuggling.
"Weapons clearly, unambiguously from Iran have been found in Iraq," he said at a Pentagon briefing. He added: "It's a big border. It's notably unhelpful for the Iranians to allow weapons of those types to cross the border."
Defense officials have said recently that components and fully manufactured bombs from Iran began appearing about two months ago and that a large shipment was captured last month in northeast Iraq after coming across the border.
Mr. Rumsfeld's comments were the first confirmation by a senior American official that such smuggling was occurring. Mr. Rumsfeld said it was not clear who in Iran was responsible for the shipments, which some specialists have said could be the work of smugglers or splinter insurgent groups, rather than the government of Iran.
Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also said at the briefing that Iraqi and American forces have made arrests in Haditha, where 20 marines were killed in two ambushes last week, after tips from Iraqis in the area. "The public came forward and said these are the folks," General Myers said.
Mr. Tamimi, the ousted mayor, said he believed that Shiite political parties had forced the takeover in Baghdad in order to position themselves for the elections once a constitution is agreed upon.
For his part, he said, he had lost the sense of enthusiasm that had brought him back to Iraq after nearly a decade in exile.
"When I left in 1995, every day, it is years for me," Mr. Tamimi said. "But now when I leave I don't think I will be sorry. I leave because I cannot live in such conditions."
Dexter Filkins, Khalid al-Ansary and Kirk Semple contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, and David S. Cloud from Washington.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

# posted by Brian @ 10:06 AM 0 comments

I honestly am at a loss for words from this. unbelievable...


If it doesn't work click on the "UPDATE PREFERENCES" button and put in your settings...

I think this could be our year peopl...

"I think this team is on the verge of doing something very special, and that's why I wanted to join them."- Ty Law

WHAT A SANDSTORM!!


A US soldier of 3rd Infantry Division walks in the sandstorm in the Camp Taji, northwestern of Baghdad. Baghdad was paralyzed by a sandstorm with shops closed and very little traffic as a cloak of orange dust reduced visibility to a few metres.(AFP/Liu Jin)

Here are the last two pics of a slideshow form the NYTimes website. This is a family living in the slums of Gaza. The images with their captions are powerful enough without me editotializing for you: George Azar for The New York Times

Ibrahim Nassar, 11, left, who lives with his mother and four younger siblings in the Deir el Balah refugee camp, has covered the apartment's living room walls with crayon drawings of rocket launchers and automatic rifles. Shown with Ibrahim are his sister Sumayah, 9, his brother Ahmad, 5, and their mother, Taghreed.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company


George Azar for The New York Times

Ahmad often cries out in the dark, tends to stutter and does not like leaving the house, his mother said.


HERE IS A LINK TO THE WHOLE SLIDESHOW

Threatening the stability of the current Israeli government and possibly the Israeli withdrawal from the illegally occupied Gaza strip, Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu'recent resignation from PM Sharon's cabinet has caused a stir in Israel.

Netanyahu, even more of right wing hawk than Sharon, clearly has ambitions of becoming Prime Minister again. Back when he was, he did a GREAT, along with Hamas and Arafat's ineptness, of undermining and eventually killing oslo. Yes, a small part of the last example of white colonialism of non-white territory should be ending in this next week; teh question is, how smooth will it be? While there has been some talk between Israeli and Palestinian officials, what has developed is that the U.S. is dealing separately with each in an effort to keep this from getting too unmanageable. Of all the people in Bush's little cliqu, Condi is certainly the best qualified to deal with this. Bust Bush has takena very hand' off approach to the Middle East OTHER than Iraq, so it remains to be seen how much inolvement George wants from condi. Still, it's clear that when enough pressure is put on Israel by America, some positive results can be reached. It seems if it wasn't for us, Israel would still be dragging its feel on getting out of Gaza...Eitehr way, this next week is a major one for the middle east, one of the most importnt in decades. Good thing our President is hard at work.. oh wait, he's on VACA at the RANCH. Fuck him, he should be over there meeting with both Abbas and Sharon now the fucking shmuck.
A young israeli boy, a settler, argues with an Israeli policeman during a protest against the withdrawal from Gaza. What kind of people birng their kids into this, and warp their kids so that their faces become THAT CONTORTED in anger??? Disgusting.

THE JETS GOT LAW!

New ENgland is done, but they would have been dethroned by us even w/out this acquisition...

The Cossacks are coming back? Now THAT is crazy...

Hard to believe... at only 67, Peter Jennings has died. One of the finest news anchors ever, and now that is even easier to see because of all the horrible ones that are in the game now.

In a small way, 9/11 killed him. See, Mr. Jennings used to be a pretty crazy smoker, but he quit a long time ago. Yet after that horrible day, the despair he felt drove him back into his habit... and now, he has died of lung cancer.

Peter, here's a big thank you from someone who will sorely miss you. Rest in piece.

HOOORAY! IT'S THE GEORGE W. BUSH CONSPIRACY THEORY GENERATOR MACHINE!!!

Day-to-day life at the Playboy Mansion for a reality TV series on E!? Dammit, why can't this be an HBO show... PREMIERES TONIGHT ON E! at 9PM

Preview of first episode: Welcome to the Playboy Mansion! Met Holly, Bridget and Kendra--then get ready to go out with 'em to celebrate Star Wars. But will a home-movie snag bring out Holly's dark side?


So yeah, I read that and had a fleeting image of a playmate going Dath Vader style and light-sabering the other mansion bimbos, starting with the silicone.

Lynsey Addario/Corbis

The gurney of Sgt. Andrew Butterworth, 25, whose leg was amputated following a rocket-propelled grenade attack on his Bradley Fighting Vehicle near Kirkuk.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company