"In a rare display of democratic muscle in this traditionally apolitical nation, Japan?s voters cast out the Liberal Democratic Party for only the second time in postwar history, handing a landslide victory to the opposition in hard-fought elections on Sunday.

The victor, the main opposition Democratic Party, must now tackle Japan?s worsening economic problems. Almost as crucially, it faces questions here about its ability to manage the relationship with Washington.

Voters set aside doubts about the untested Democrats, a broad coalition of former socialists and ruling party defectors who campaigned with promises to ease Japan?s growing social inequalities and change the way the country is governed."

" Israeli authorities indicted former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on corruption charges Sunday, the first criminal indictment ever filed against a current or past Israeli prime minister."

"Israeli police have recommended that Avigdor Lieberman, the country's foreign minister, be indicted on a string of corruption charges.

Officials have said that there is sufficient evidence to bring the ultra-nationalist politician to trial for charges including receiving bribes, money-laundering and embezzling public funds."

"
The British government decided it was ?in the overwhelming interests of the United Kingdom? to make Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, eligible for return to Libya, leaked ministerial letters reveal.

Gordon Brown?s government made the decision after discussions between Libya and BP over a multi-million-pound oil exploration deal had hit difficulties. These were resolved soon afterwards.

The letters were sent two years ago by Jack Straw, the justice secretary, to Kenny MacAskill, his counterpart in Scotland, who has been widely criticised for taking the formal decision to permit Megrahi?s release.

The correspondence makes it plain that the key decision to include Megrahi in a deal with Libya to allow prisoners to return home was, in fact, taken in London for British national interests."

"Within days, the grisly tableau became the focus of an investigation into what happened when the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina marooned Memorial Medical Center in Uptown New Orleans. The hurricane knocked out power and running water and sent the temperatures inside above 100 degrees. Still, investigators were surprised at the number of bodies in the makeshift morgue and were stunned when health care workers charged that a well-regarded doctor and two respected nurses had hastened the deaths of some patients by injecting them with lethal doses of drugs. Mortuary workers eventually carried 45 corpses from Memorial, more than from any comparable-size hospital in the drowned city."

"After he lost his job as a television reporter two years ago, Derek Fanciullo considered law school, thinking it was a historically sure bet. He took out ?a ferocious amount of debt,? he said ? $210,000, to be exact ? and enrolled last September in the School of Law at New York University."

"Their handcuffs were hardly even off before two heavily armed and masked men broke into the room, forced all present to lie prostrate, including six guards armed only with pepper spray and clubs. The masked men, together with three of the four defendants, then ran from the courthouse, jumped into a waiting Renault Clio, and fled. No trace has been found of them since.

The dramatic flight from the country?s most prestigious courthouse was only the latest in a string of escapes bedeviling the nation. Twelve days earlier, a helicopter landed in the courtyard of a prison in Bruges during recreation time and swept three convicts to freedom.

That escape was followed a few days later by a similarly brazen one at Merksplas, north of Brussels near the Dutch border, when six inmates seized a ladder from a building site in the prison courtyard and clambered over the wall. Four were seized by guards, but two succeeded in fleeing with the mother of one convict, who waited below the walls in her dark blue Toyota Yaris."

"China is trying to move away from the use of executed prisoners as the major source of organs for transplants.

According to the China Daily newspaper, executed prisoners currently provide two-thirds of all transplant organs.

The government is now launching a voluntary donation scheme, which it hopes will also curb the illegal trafficking in organs.

But analysts say cultural bias against removing organs after death will make a voluntary scheme hard to implement."

(bbc)

"

Call time: March 30, 2006
A: Investigator B: Hospital Staff
City: Wuhan (Tongji Hospital in Wuhan City)
Tel No.: 0118627-83662688 ext. Kidney Transplant Department (or Urological Surgery Department)
Telephone company record: 3/30/2006 17:46

A: Hello. Is it the Wuhan Tongji Hospital?
B: Yes, it is.
A: Are you the Urological Surgery Department? We need to have kidney transplant.
B: Yes, this is the Kidney Transplant Department.
A: When did you start the large volume kidney transplantation?
B: We are the earliest place. We started a long time ago.
A: How many operations do you do each year?
B: Our hospital is the place where largest amount of transplants have been done. In the whole Hubei Province area, our department is the most productive one. We?ve done a lot because we have ample organ supplies.
A: From a patient?s perspective, live kidney source is preferred. So we are looking for live organ transplantation from prisoners, for example, from those who practice Falun Gong. Is it possible?
B: Sure, it?s not a problem.
A: So do you get enough supplies of live organs from prisoners such as those who practice Falun Gong?
B: Yes, sure, no problem. When you are ready, you can come over directly and we will discuss it in detail." (China View)

""In March of this year, the world was staring down the barrel of a Great Depression," Rudd said in an interview here last week. "This is a case study in bringing the world back from the brink, and it was American leadership from President Obama that was the key to that." Rudd is Obama's political kinsman not only because they are philosophically in tune but also because the 51-year-old Australian's election in November 2007 foreshadowed Obama's own.

The leader of the center-left Labor Party, Rudd ousted one of George W. Bush's best friends, conservative Prime Minister John Howard, by riding the same theme of change and the same generational tide that carried in his American friend.

Yet if Rudd praises Obama, he also praises Bush for acting swiftly when the global economy began coming apart in the fall of 2008. As Rudd put it in a speech to the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue, Bush acted in dire circumstances, at a moment when "global financial flows ground to a virtual halt." In fact, for all the flaws in the execution of the bank bailout program, Bush's willingness last fall to put the urgent need for massive action above his own ideological proclivities is likely to go down as the most enduringly constructive act of his presidency.

Rudd argues that in the last months of Bush's administration and the first months of Obama's, every economic indicator pointed to "catastrophe." He speaks of banks running out of money, developers whose credit was frozen and signs of panic among individual savers.

What prevented a repeat of the 1930s, he says, is that the world's governments actually learned from that era, particularly from "the deliberations on the Great Depression by John Maynard Keynes." The British economist stressed the imperative of government action at moments when the private economy falters."

(WP)

Labels: Travel

MY NAME IS JANE OWENE,NATIONALITY SOUTH AFRICA. I AM 21 YEARS OLD STUDYING MARKETING AND BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION AT THE UNIVERSITY BEFORE THE DEATH OF MY FATHER, I GOT YOUR CONTACT FROM THE SITE I PRAYED AND FASTED OVER IT AND SELECTED YOUR NAME AMONG OTHER NAMES.

I LOST MY FATHER YEARS BACK, HE WAS A WELL KNOWN COCAO AND COFFE MARCHANT HERE IN ABIDJAN COTE'DIVORE BEFORE HIS DEATH,HE WAS POISONED BY HIS BUSINESS ASSOCIATES DURING ONE OF THIER BUSINESS ASSOCIATES MEETING IN THE NORTHERN PART OF THIS COUNTRY.RIGTH NOW I AM STILL LEAVING IN COTE'DIVORE AND, IT INTEREST ME TO WRITE YOU FROM MY HEART HOPING THAT YOU WILL NOT BETRAY ME.

MY FATHER DEPOSITED SOME HUGE SOME OF MONEY IN ONE OF THE BANKS HERE IN ABIDJAN WHEN HE WAS ALIFE AS THE PROFITS HE MADE FROM HIS BUSINESS,ACCORDING TO HIM HE SAID THAT IT WAS BECAUSE OF THIS MONEY THAT HE WAS POISONED,INFACT IN A BREAF INTRODUTION ALL THE INFORMATION WILL BE GIVEN TO YOU WHEN I HEAR FROM YOU, (THE NAME OF THE BANK AND ALL THE DEPOSIT DOCUMENTS) AS WAS GIVEN TO ME BY MY FATHER ON HIS BED SIDE BEFORE HE GAVE UP AGAIN HE TOLD ME TO ARRANGE WITH ANY GOD FEARING FOREIGNER WHO WILL HELP ME TO RECEIVE THIS MONEY IN HIS BANK ACCOUNT TO ENABLE ME GET OUT OF THIS COUNTRY BEFORE HIS ENEMIES KILL ME.

THIS MONEY TOTALING US$ 6.400,000.00( SIX MILLION FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND UNITED STATE DOLLARS) NOW I AM SEEKING FOR A TRUSTED PERSON WHO WILL RECEIVE THIS MONEY INTO HIS OR HER ACCOUNT FOR ONWARD INVESTMENT.HOWEVER, WHAT I NEEDED FROM YOU IS YOUR GOOD ASSISTANCE IN HELPING ME TRANSFERRING THE SAID SUM TO YOUR ACCOUNT SINCE I AM INEXPERENCED IN THE WORLD OF BUSINESS,TO TREAT ME LIKE YOUR OWN WIFE OR CHILD THAT'S THE REASON WHY I AM ASKING FOR YOUR SUPPORT. I REALLY NEED TO MOVE THE FUND OUT .

I AND GOD WILL REWARD YOU FOR YOUR KIND ASSISTANCE. THE WORLD IS FULL OF BAD PEOPLE, PLEASE CAN YOU PROVE YOUR GENUETY TO ME FOR ME TO HAVE YOU AS A PARTNER? SORRY, I AM NOT SAYING YOU ARE A BAD PERSON BUT CONSIDERING THAT THIS IS MONEY AND , INHERITANCE AND LAST HOPE.SHOW YOUR INTEREST AND WE PROCCEED ON THE NEXT STEP OF ACTION HERE IS NO LONGER CONDUSIVE FOR ME TO STAY MY UNCLE IS BECAME GREEDY OVER MY LATE FATHER PROPERTY SINCE MY FATHER DONT HAVE A MALE
CHILD

BEST REGARDS
JANE OWENE

|

"In the OT levels, Hubbard explains how to reverse the effects of past-life trauma patterns that supposedly extend millions of years into the past.[116] Among these advanced teachings is the story of Xenu (sometimes Xemu), introduced as an alien ruler of the "Galactic Confederacy." According to this story, 75 million years ago Xenu brought billions of people to Earth in spacecraft resembling Douglas DC-8 airliners, stacked them around volcanoes and detonated hydrogen bombs in the volcanoes. The thetans then clustered together, stuck to the bodies of the living, and continue to do this today. Scientologists at advanced levels place considerable emphasis on isolating body thetans and neutralizing their ill effects."

I try to remember that:

1. We're all bozos on this bus.

2. My shit stinks. (So does yours.)

3. It's not like anyone gets out of this alive.

"The Swiss banking giant UBS and the Justice Department said Wednesday that they had reached an accord that would force the bank to disclose names of American clients suspected of tax evasion."

"But Saparwoko said the man who died in the shootout at a farmhouse in central Java on Saturday was a florist, identified only as Ibrohim. He made floral arrangements at the J.W. Marriott Hotel and Ritz-Carlton, where suicide bombers attacked last month during breakfast, killing themselves and wounding more than 50 others."

"Bombing Shiite mosques has become so common that Sunni extremists have been forced to look elsewhere to provoke outrage ? much as they did in 2005, when Shiites similarly showed patience when attacked. They have attacked groups of Shiite refugees waiting for food rations, children gathering for handouts of candy, lines of unemployed men hoping for a day?s work, school buses, religious pilgrimages, weddings, marketplaces and hospitals in Shiite areas and even the funerals of their victims from the day before.

Iraq?s Shiites, counseled by their political and religious leaders and habituated to suffering by centuries as the region?s underclass, have refused to rise to the bait ? for now. Instead, they have made a virtue of forbearance and have convinced their followers that they win by not responding with violence. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has brought once violent Shiite militiamen into the fold, while the Shiites? spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has forbidden any sort of violent reprisals."

"Speaking during an unprecedented visit by an American secretary of state to Goma, in the epicenter of Congo?s war-torn east, she said the American government would help train gynecologists, supply rape victims with video cameras to document violence and send military engineers to help train Congolese police officers to crack down on rapists.

?This problem is too big for one country to solve alone,? she said at a round-table meeting here with doctors and human rights advocates.

?I?m not here to leave a business card, but I can?t wave a magic wand either,? she said when human rights workers pressed her for concrete assistance."

"I have had several experiences of women trying to convince me that being straight would make me incredibly happy and sex with women is much more fulfilling. Thanks ladies, but no thanks, somehow it's hard to imagine replacing my interest in sweaty jockstrap with lacy panties. You may think homosexuality is just a phase, but this way of thinking shows a problem with the ways in which that kind of a woman was taught to associate, and also demonstrates the problems that stem from a society riddled with phobias and stereotypes.

I believe it will be beyond beneficial for both sides when a gay man and straight woman build a friendship without necessarily crossing each others sexual preference or being disrespectful. Besides sharing the same passion for fashion and men, most ladies like to get a guys point of view on things; and by having gay friend they can be sure he just wants to be friends, sharing opinions without wanting to get in her pants. They can also go guy hunting or just gossip about them. A gay friend is also a good style advisor - most gay men, of course, if he's a drag queen he'll be busy indulging his own fetish for women's wear! And a GFF will tell you honestly if your boobs need some work done without necessarily offending your feeling."

"I was skeptical when Berthoud said this. Don't you need to raise your heart rate and sweat in order to strengthen your cardiovascular system? Don't you need to push your muscles to the max in order to build them?

Actually, it's not clear that vigorous exercise like running carries more benefits than a moderately strenuous activity like walking while carrying groceries. You regularly hear about the benefits of exercise in news stories, but if you read the academic papers on which these stories are based, you frequently see that the research subjects who were studied didn't clobber themselves on the elliptical machine. A routine example: in June the Association for Psychological Science issued a news release saying that "physical exercise ... may indeed preserve or enhance various aspects of cognitive functioning." But in fact, those who had better cognitive function merely walked more and climbed more stairs. They didn't even walk faster; walking speed wasn't correlated with cognitive ability.

"But Kjell Ivar Breili, NPA's programme manager, says this is the first such team to be used in Sudan.

Mr Breili said NPA's two female teams have recently beaten several of the six male teams in terms of the numbers of mines cleared.

"The women do a great job - and we don't have problems of fighting or drinking," he said.

Each de-miner creeps painstakingly forward down thin alleys, moving the safety line forward only once every section has been checked.

It is tough work in baking sun, and the plastic face-shields they wear inside the minefield mean that it is not possible to drink water during each 45-minute shift.

However, the women must pour water on to the hard-baked soil to soften the earth and allow the gentle probing of suspect objects."

"A Merpati Nusantara Airlines plane with 15 passengers and crew on board
disappeared shortly after takeoff in eastern Indonesia on Sunday, an airline
official said.

Among the 13 passengers were 11 adults and two babies,
said Nikmatullah, director of operations for the airline. The crew included a
pilot and co-pilot. "

Labels: news, Venezuela