What’s News: A truce between anti-government protesters and Ukraine’s government fails as bloodshed erupts. Facebook to pay $19 billion for WhatsApp. Wal-Mart offers lower than expected forecast. Simon Constable reports. Photo: Getty Images
Thanks for checking us out. Please take a look at the rest of our videos and articles.
To stay in the loop, bookmark our homepage.
What’s News: A truce between anti-government protesters and Ukraine’s government fails as bloodshed erupts. Facebook to pay $19 billion for WhatsApp. Wal-Mart offers lower than expected forecast. Simon Constable reports. Photo: Getty Images
Thanks for checking us out. Please take a look at the rest of our videos and articles.
To stay in the loop, bookmark our homepage.
What’s News: A truce between anti-government protesters and Ukraine’s government fails as bloodshed erupts. Facebook to pay $19 billion for WhatsApp. Wal-Mart offers lower than expected forecast. Simon Constable reports. Photo: Getty Images
Thanks for checking us out. Please take a look at the rest of our videos and articles.
To stay in the loop, bookmark our homepage.
What’s News: A truce between anti-government protesters and Ukraine’s government fails as bloodshed erupts. Facebook to pay $19 billion for WhatsApp. Wal-Mart offers lower than expected forecast. Simon Constable reports. Photo: Getty Images
Thanks for checking us out. Please take a look at the rest of our videos and articles.
To stay in the loop, bookmark our homepage.
The music mogul is opening up about fatherhood and he’s not holding back. We were all pretty shocked when we found out Simon Cowell had a long-term girlfriend, who was still married! But not even Simon could prepare himself for the bombshell Lauren Silverman dropped when she revealed she was pregnant! But all that drama’s behind the couple, and rumor has it, the perpetual bachelor is going to make an honest woman out of his baby mama. But he confesses, “I’m not brilliant with babies. I never know what to do.”
Thanks for checking us out. Please take a look at the rest of our videos and articles.
To stay in the loop, bookmark our homepage.
It would be seen as a serious setback if Westgate mall plotter Ahmed Adbi Godane was the intended prize in Barawe
Official US reluctance to identify the target of the failed Somali raid by Seal Team Six special forces commandos may stem from a wish not to further bolster the reputation of al-Shabaab’s shadowy leader, Ahmed Abdi Godane, also known as Mukhtar Abu Zubeyr.
The Islamist militia’s hardline emir emerged as Africa’s most wanted man after the 21 September Westgate mall attack in Nairobi that killed least 67 people, for which he claimed responsibility. His capture would have been portrayed as a triumph. By extension, his eluding of US-style justice will be seen as a serious setback. Pentagon officials will say only that the target of the dawn raid on the seaside town of Barawe, south of Mogadishu, was a “high-value” al-Shabaab terrorist linked to Westgate. Local sources said the Seals attacked a building housing foreign fighters, and that an unidentified Chechen fighter may have been their quarry.
But this is unlikely to be the whole story, given the elaborate preparations for the raid, which began soon after Westgate. The US navy Seals are the same crack unit that killed the al-Qaida leader, Osama bin Laden, two years ago in Pakistan. This time, too, Barack Obama was reportedly kept closely informed of the progress of the Somali plan, and of the almost simultaneous operation in Libya.
Given the political sensitivity, at home and in the Muslim world, that surrounds such US on-the-ground incursions, Obama will have personally given the go-ahead for both raids. His orders were reportedly to capture, if possible, rather than kill.
It was a high-risk gamble that paid off in Tripoli, where the wanted al‑Qaida leader Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, also known as Anas al-Liby, was seized, but not in Somalia. And it was likely to be a gamble that could only be justified if the prize was the capture of Godane, the al-Shabaab eminence grise.
An unnamed Somali intelligence official confirmed Godane was the target, and the Somali government had been informed in advance. Obama’s hope was for high-profile trials. In al-Liby’s case, that may now happen, probably in New York. But for now, Godane is free to plan more atrocities.
Little wonder the Americans are keeping mum on the Barawe flop. Ever since the Black Hawk Down disaster in Mogadishu 20 years ago this month, Somalia has occupied a dreadful place in the American psyche. Since then, thanks to Godane, al-Shabaab has joined in formal alliance with al-Qaida.
As the group has internationalised its outlook, it has attracted hundreds of fighters from the US, Britain and Middle East countries. Latest assessments from Kenya say the Westgate attackers belonged to al-Hijra, the local al-Shabaab affiliate. One unwanted consequence of the US operation may thus be to exacerbate the Islamist challenge across the Horn of Africa, as Godane, a self-styled global jihadist, surely wants. It further highlights the growing importance of northern Africa, Yemen and the Saudi peninsula to the fight against al-Qaida.
The relatively more straightforward Libyan operation may nevertheless have a similar negative effect. Much longer in preparation, it was clearly timed to coincide with the Somali raid, thereby in theory diminishing the public impact in Libya and the Muslim world generally. US officials say it was not directly linked to the calamitous 2012 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, although US counter-terrorism operations in Libya were stepped up after that incident.
A Libyan spokesman, contradicting statements in Washington, said the Libyan government was unaware of the operation and had not supported it. Such embarrassment is understandable. Libyans were already questioning their current government’s pro-western stance.
“Disclosure of the raid is likely to inflame anxieties among many Libyans about their national sovereignty, putting a new strain on the transitional government’s fragile authority. Many Libyan Islamists already accuse their interim prime minister, Ali Zeidan, who previously lived in Geneva as part of the exiled opposition to [deposed dictator Muammar] Gaddafi, of collaborating too closely with the west,” the New York Times reported.
The two raids may provide Obama with temporary relief from his domestic troubles, distracting attention from the government shutdown. But secretary of state John Kerry’s claim on Sunday that the operations showed terrorists they “can run but they can’t hide” was macho bombast straight from the George W Bush school of utter thoughtlessness.
The raids yielded one wanted man. They shed yet more blood. They played the terrorists’ game. They invited further retaliation and escalation down the road. They reminded Muslims everywhere that the US, in righteous mood, has scant regard for other countries’ borders and national rights. And they did nothing to address the roots and causes of confrontation between Islam and the west.
One Direction is hotter than ever, and the boys have decided to keep their careers going in the same direction. The boy band has signed a contract with Simon Cowell’s label Syco to stay with the company until 2016. The fifteen million dollar deal keeps the boys with The X-Factor boss, who gave them their start. The label confirmed the contract, saying that they “are delighted to confirm they have agreed to continue their hugely successful relationship and look forward to many years of continued success.” It is reported that the new deal is for three releases from the group.
Thanks for checking us out. Please take a look at the rest of our videos and articles.
To stay in the loop, bookmark our homepage.
Rightwingers’ long months of frustration at perceived US impotence in danger of boiling over into violent action
What was initially conceived as an American warning slap at Bashar al-Assad could be turning into something significantly more far-reaching as Republican hawks try to push a rudderless Barack Obama into launching a more robust, “strategic”, and prolonged military campaign in Syria than previously anticipated.
Few claim to be privy to the White House’s inner deliberations, or to know exactly which way Obama will jump. After all, he has spent more than two years resisting any direct involvement in Syria’s civil war. The political battle in Washington over the level and degree of US military engagement will be intense, forming a key element in the pro- and anti-intervention debate.
But Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons against civilians in Ghouta, near Damascus, on 21 August is no longer the principal casus belli, if it ever was, for an American-led attack. Long months of frustration at perceived US impotence in the Syrian crisis, and the damage it is doing to Washington’s regional interests and those of its allies, are in danger of boiling over into violent action.
Having surrendered the initiative by giving Congress what will effectively be a deciding vote, Obama now needs his hardline opponents’ support to avoid a Cameron-style humiliation in the House of Representatives. On one interpretation, this prospect has produced a bellicose shift in White House thinking. Alternatively, Obama may simply be telling the hawks what they want to hear, in order to secure their votes.
Retired US general Jack Keane, speaking to the BBC, claimed to have discerned a harder line. Keane said that Obama on Monday told two leading Republican senators, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, that the aim is no longer simply to “deter” Assad’s use of chemical weapons but also to “upgrade” rebel military capabilities and “significantly degrade” the regime’s overall military capacity. A previously critical McCain declared himself “encouraged”.
If the “degradation” objective is officially endorsed, Syria could face a sustained, weeks or months-long assault by sea and air-launched missiles, and maybe by long-range stealth bombers, while the US tries to attain it. This sort of operation might more closely resemble the 1999 Nato campaign in Serbia, during the Kosovo crisis than, say, the limited cruise missile strike ordered by Bill Clinton against the al-Shifa factory in Khartoum in 1998, a pharmaceutical plant wrongly identified as a chemical weapons facility.
The Serbian intervention ended with the overthrow of the late Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, who was subsequently put on trial for war crimes at the international criminal court in The Hague. This is a journey the White House, while still denying any overt intention to topple Assad, hopes the Syrian leader will undertake, sooner rather than later.
The implications for Syria and the region of a prolonged American-led campaign, if that is what transpires, would be complex and dangerous. Inside the country, Assad has had plenty of time to prepare for US attacks. Gen Keane suggested mobile missile launchers, used to deploy chemical weapons, and artillery have already been moved closer to civilian areas. If they are targeted, significant civilian casualties may ensue, as happened repeatedly in Iraq in 2003 and Afghanistan after 2001.
What the UN refugee agency has termed this century’s worst humanitarian crisis, with 5 million Syrians internally displaced and 2 million already forced to leave the country, could acquire even more catastrophic proportions. Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Jordan are all struggling to cope with the current emergency. A further escalation, and further waves of human misery, could prove permanently destabilising, both politically and in security terms.
Assad has shown again and again since the uprising began that, if pushed, he will push back even harder. And since it may be safely assumed that key intelligence and insider knowledge supporting any American military campaign will be furnished by Israel, it also seems possible that Israel will come into Assad’s missile sights, if and when push really comes to shove.
This sort of cross-border escalation, triggered by the existential “degrading” of the regime’s power now mooted in Washington, could also draw in the other big regional player, Iran, whose forces – diplomatic, paramilitary and proxy – are already closely engaged, not least via the Shia fighters of Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
Tehran hardliners, anxious to shape the greenhorn presidency of the newly-elected Hassan Rouhani, will seize on American action as proof that the “Great Satan” must be confronted, not conciliated. They may push for direct intervention by Iran itself, rather than see their key Arab ally fall. They will certainly be in no mood to talk nuclear compromises with the west.
From anarchic Egypt to schismatic Iraq to restless, repressed Turkey to Yemen, the Arabian peninsula and the smouldering Maghreb, the negative impact and unforeseeable, unwanted repercussions of what might be seen as another “American war” in the Muslim lands would be significant and, in the longer run, potentially contrary to both western interests and the region’s desperately needed future development.
Nothing would better serve al-Qaida’s warped agenda. Nothing would more quickly increase the threat to every airport or subway train. Nothing would more effectively set at odds and divide, again, the western and Muslim worlds. For as they have proved before, the American rightwingers now pushing Obama towards open-ended warfare have few equals as recruiting sergeants for terror.
Ed Miliband’s party has to chart a recovery distinct from the hesitancy of the coalition – not simply offer a pale imitation
August politics is always hell. The happy are on holiday. The miserable have free rein to whinge. Ed Miliband returns to work today amid a chorus of charges that Labour has no vision, no strategy, no policies. With the coalition emerging from recession with a predictable upturn in popularity, the old doubts about Miliband’s competence are revived.
Getting Labour into shape after the shambles of the late Blair-Brown era was always to be an awesome task, comparable to that facing the Tories in 1997. Labour’s senior figures, notably Ed Balls, have assuaged their contortions of guilt with much sound and fury, but little by way of alternative policies. Miliband and Balls have concentrated on noisy performances in parliament, with some effect, but have failed to emerge as plausible national leaders.
Their programme has been a pale imitation of the Tories. They are for cuts, but not too deep, for glamour projects, for monetary caution, for the Afghan war. A fear of seeming too leftwing has led them to fudge every opportunity the ineptitude of the coalition has offered them, on welfare capping, on immigration, on the NHS, on housing. It is hard to see the British Labour party as a leftwing party at all.
Miliband’s great task is to unburden himself of past guilt and chart a recovery distinct from the hesitancy of the coalition. The causes, good leftwing ones, are there in abundance. The case for stimulating consumption rather than banking goes begging, largely because Miliband and Balls remain in thrall to banking as the central institution of the economy. Labour should set cities free to raise local property taxes and relieve the deep cuts in local services. It should be the party of urban house-building rather than rural development. It should pick up its old causes, minimum wages, localised healthcare, town and country planning, community education, the arts in the provinces.
Miliband must put his past behind him. He needs round him fresh voices free of guilt, to champion causes and groups the coalition has sorely offended. He might even call it new Labour.
