Group items tagged

Foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts, according to documents seen by the Guardian. Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read their email traffic.

The G20 spying appears to have been organised for the more mundane purpose of securing an advantage in meetings. Named targets include long-standing allies such as South Africa and Turkey.

According to the material seen by the Guardian, GCHQ generated this product by attacking both the computers and the telephones of delegates.

Britain has flatly denied any foreknowledge of a Mossad plan to assassinate a top official of the Palestinian group Hamas, in Dubai, amidst angry accusations in Whitehall that Israel is seeking to deflect blame from itself by implicating others.British government sources dismissed as "nonsense" a report claiming the Israeli secret service had given the UK advanced warning of possible complications arising from the illicit use of British passports in an unspecified "overseas operation" – the murder of the Hamas commander ­Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

Officials complained of misleading briefing, apparently by pro-Israeli sources, reflected in a report in Friday's Daily Mail, which claimed that the Foreign Office was told, albeit only in general terms, of an impending assassination. The Mail story was widely reported today, both in Israel and across the Arab world.

if Israeli official involvement were proved Britain would, at the very least, expect a public apology and guarantees that passports would not be stolen again. A more extreme option could be expelling diplomats from Israel's London embassy.

Mali, little known or not, now belongs inside the arc of instability that was once defined as stretching from Afghanistan, in the days when the Taliban took charge, through Pakistan to the Middle East and the Horn of Africa via Iraq and Yemen. Now the arc is rapidly extending westwards beyond the Arab lands to Nigeria, west Africa and the Atlantic seaboard. The common denominators are poverty, underdevelopment, illiteracy, mass youth unemployment, misgovernance, authoritarianism, corruption, suppression of women's rights and of human and civil rights in general. All this and western political and commercial meddling, too.

Despite all this disassociation, despite the looking the other way and the simplistic analysis pitting cut-throat, dynamite-wielding Islamist killers against innocents abroad, this bigger story in which Mali's plight is now entangled ultimately involves us all, more intimately and continuously than could any random threat of a terror bomb in Paris or London. A major shift in perception and in action is required. Otherwise, be it indirectly through mass migration, people trafficking, arms and drugs smuggling, epidemic disease, the pernicious poison of official corruption and abuse; or directly through resulting, premeditated ethnic and sectarian, religion-based violence, the nonchalant, unthinking condemnation of a vast swath of humanity to impoverishment, physical, material and spiritual, will inevitably return to haunt the more fortunate peoples of the west.

David Cameron risks making "premature" and "opportunistic" demands in Europe and weakening Britain's power in Washington and other major capitals, the most senior diplomat to leave government in recent years has warned.Sir Nigel Sheinwald, Britain's ambassador to Washington until last year and before that the senior British diplomat in Brussels, said in a Guardian interview that recent warnings by the US administration urging Britain against staging a distracting referendum was "a conscious decision by the Obama administration to intervene in the UK debate", reflecting a long-standing view that it wanted its closest political ally closely involved in Europe.

Sheinwald said: "If Britain is active and influential in Washington that makes us more influential in Brussels, Delhi and elsewhere. Equally if we are influential in Europe, then we have a bigger impact in Washington and the other power capitals of the world. These things are mutually reinforcing.

"I just cannot see any logical basis for thinking a move to the sidelines, or particularly a move out of Europe, would be anything other than diminishing to UK's capacity, standing, influence, ability to get things done and capacity to build coalitions internationally."

David Cameron is struggling to maintain Tory discipline over Europe after cabinet loyalists Michael Gove and Philip Hammond said on Sunday they would vote to leave the European Union if a referendum were to be held now.

Gove, the education minister, confirmed for the first time that he believes that leaving the EU would have "certain advantages", while Hammond, the defence secretary, later said he too would vote to leave if he was asked to endorse the EU "exactly as it is today".

The remarks, which follow similar calls by Lord Lawson and Michael Portillo last week for Britain to leave Europe, are particularly significant because they are the first cabinet ministers to say they would vote to quit if an immediate referendum were held.

the number of citizens who think that conflict between groups is "largely inevitable" has risen by seven points to 40%, or that agreement with the suggestion that there will be a serious clash between British Muslims and white Britons has also risen, by nine points to 59%.

the percentage of respondents who view Muslims as compatible jumped by almost 10 points to 33%. Clearly, the numbers remain low, and point to wider challenges facing government and our local communities

Whereas expectations of a future clash between Muslims and non-Muslims are especially pronounced among citizens aged 60 and above (at 70%), among 18- to 24-year-olds this figure tumbles to 48%.

US military commanders have warned their Israeli counterparts that any action against Iran would severely limit the ability of American forces in the region to mount their own operations against the Iranian nuclear programme by cutting off vital logistical support from Gulf Arab allies.

The US Fifth Fleet is headquartered in Bahrain and the US air force has major bases in Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. Senior US officers believe the one case in which they could not rely fully on those bases for military operations against Iranian installations would be if Israel acted first.

"The Gulf states' one great fear is Iran going nuclear. The other is a regional war that would destabilise them," said a source in the region. "They might support a massive war against Iran, but they know they are not going to get that, and they know a limited strike is not worth it, as it will not destroy the programme and only make Iran angrier."

Any number of other Libyan armed groups might have had a hand in the killings. But in truth, responsibility may also be traced back, directly or indirectly, to those in London, Paris, Brussels and Washington who launched last year's Nato intervention in Libya with insouciant disregard for the consequences. It was clear then, or should have been, that toppling Muammar Gaddafi was the easy bit. Preventing an Iraq-style implosion, or some form of Afghan anarchy, would be much harder.

Once again, the western powers have started a fire they cannot extinguish. A year after David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy jointly travelled to Libya to lay claim to a liberator's bogus laurels, the Libyan revolution they fanned and fuelled is in danger of degenerating into a chaotic, violent free-for-all.

Do not be misled by the fig leaf of this summer's national assembly polls. Post-Gaddafi Libya lacks viable national political leadership, a constitution, functioning institutions, and most importantly, security. Nationwide parliamentary elections are still a year away. The east-west divide is as problematic as ever. Political factions fight over the bones of the former regime, symbolised by the forthcoming trials of Gaddafi's son, Saif, and his intelligence chief, Abdullah al-Senussi.

Iran, handed geostrategic windfalls in the past decade by Washington's elimination of two of its main enemies, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan, now fears the pendulum of regional influence could swing the other way.

The political and military hardliners in control say Syria stood by Iran in its hour of need, the only Arab nation on its side in the 1980-88 war with Iraq, and deserves loyalty now.They also view the conflict in Syria as an extension of a sectarian power struggle with Iran's regional rival Saudi Arabia, as well as a U.S.-led campaign to shackle its nuclear ambitions by sanctions or if necessary by military force.

For Iran, "losing" Syria would be a damaging blow, but prolonged post-Assad instability might offer opportunities to a country adept at pursuing its interests in a conflict-ridden region, as it has shown in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere."Assad is far from gone and even when he is, things are going to be chaotic for a while," said Dina Esfandiary of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. ""And Iran thrives in that kind of context."

British companies accounted for $20.5 billion of the $265.8 billion Russia has attracted from abroad since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union. Russian companies traditionally sell stocks and bonds in London.

Medvedev and Cameron also discussed Iran, the Middle East and the future of BP, which has a 50 percent stake in TNK-BP, a joint venture with Russia-based partners.

Dubai police chief declared that he was "99%, if not 100% certain" of Mossad's involvement, and called on Interpol to issue an arrest warrant for the Israeli spy chief, Meir Dagan

SOCA is concentrating specifically on the misuse of British passports, it is understood that MI6 is conducting a broader, parallel probe into Israeli involvement

US also looked likely to be drawn into the affair for the first time, after the Wall Street Journal reported that Mabhouh's assassins had used American-registered credit cards to buy plane tickets.

two years ago this week, when a bomb in a Pajero jeep in Damascus decapitated a man named Imad Mughniyeh. Mughniyeh was the military leader of Lebanon's Shia movement Hizbullah, an ally of Iran, and was wanted by the US, France and half a dozen other countries. Israel never went beyond cryptic nodding and winking about that killing in the heart of the Syrian capital, but it is widely believed to have been one of its most daring and sophisticated clandestine operations

The Mossad's most celebrated exploits included the abduction of the fugitive Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who was later tried and hanged in Israel. Others were organising the defection of an Iraqi pilot who flew his MiG-21 to Israel, and support for Iraqi Kurdish rebels against Baghdad. Military secrets acquired by Elie Cohen, the infamous spy who penetrated the Syrian leadership, helped Israel conquer the Golan Heights in the 1967 Middle East war.

Over the years, the Mossad's image has been badly tarnished at home as well as abroad. It was blamed in part for failing to get wind of Egyptian-Syrian plans for the devastating attack that launched the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Critics wondered whether the spies had got their priorities right by focusing on hunting down Palestinian gunmen in the back alleys of European cities, when they should have been stealing secrets in Cairo and Damascus. The Mossad also played a significant, though still little-known, role in the covert supply of arms to Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran to help fight Saddam Hussein's Iraq, as part of the Iran-Contra scandal during Ronald Reagan's presidency.

The Invention of the Jewish People.

Sand's hands are depicting how most Jews are descended from converts who never set foot in the Holy Land.

according to Sand there was no exile, and as he seeks to prove by dense forensic archaeological and historical analysis, it is meaningless to talk today about a "people of Israel". At least not if by that you mean the Jews.

Iran's president has unveiled new "third-generation" centrifuges that its nuclear chief says can enrich uranium much faster than current technology.The centrifuges would have separation power six times that of the first generation, Ali Akbar Salehi said in a speech marking National Nuclear Day.

The new technology could shorten the time it takes to build a nuclear bomb.

In a BBC interview, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei, said Western nations were seeking harsher sanctions "out of frustration". "I don't think Iran is developing, or we have new information that Iran is developing, a nuclear weapon today," he said. "There is a concern about Iran's future intentions, but even if you talk to MI6 or the CIA, they will tell you they are still four or five years away from a weapon. So, we have time to engage." He said it was a "question of building trust between Iran and the US". "That will not happen until the two sides sit around the negotiating table and address their grievances. Sooner or later that will happen."