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allAfrica.com: Somalia: Ethiopia Accused of Killing 70 People (Page 1 of 1) Dhagahbur — Western Somali liberation front (WSLF) has accused the Ethiopian troops of killing seventy Somali ethnic people in Abarsan District in Dhagahbur region, officials said on Saturday. Sheik Ibrahim Mohamed Hassan, a leader of the Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF), said the Ethiopian soldiers refused the bodies to be buried after killing them. He accused the Ethiopian troops of ethnic cleansing in the region and called for the world to intervene. There are no confirmed reports about the leader's statement. Human Rights Watch has recently accused Ethiopia of limiting access to the region and had hit out at Western donors for failing to condemn war crimes on the mainly ethnically Somali people of the region.

Jaffa mosque daubed with 'Mohammed is a pig,' 'Death to Arabs' - Haaretz - Israel News : "Extremists spray-painted 'Mohammed is a pig' and 'Death to Arabs' early Sunday on the walls and doors of the Sea Mosque in Jaffa, sparking the fury of the Islamic Movement in the mixed Arab-Jewish city. The hate slogans also included 'Kahane was right,' a reference to the slain Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the outlawed anti-Arab Kach movement, and 'No peace without the House of Peace,' alluding to the Hebron structure from which dozens of far-right activists were evicted earlier this month."

A Radical Islamist Takeover Drives the Young From Somalia : "DADAAB, Kenya -- By the time Mohamed Abdi Ibrahim decided to leave Somalia, life in the southern city of Kismaayo had become, as he put it with consummate understatement, 'complicated.' Young men there had long shouldered AK-47 assault rifles and joined clan militias. But as an Islamist militia known as al-Shabab took control this year, it had become a place where boys were paid $50 to throw bombs, soccer fields served as militia training camps, and Islamist leaders walked into classrooms to take names of potential recruits. Ibrahim and two friends fled several months ago, just after the Shabab began beating people not attending Friday prayers and just before the group publicly stoned to death a 13-year-old girl it had convicted of adultery. The options for young men like them, it seemed, had narrowed to two: sign up or run. 'For us, it was not good to join,' said Ibrahim, a lanky 22-year-old who fled to

Robert Fisk’s World: One missing word sowed the seeds of catastrophe - Robert Fisk, Commentators - The Independent : "A nit-picker this week. And given the fact that we're all remembering human rights, the Palestinians come to mind since they have precious few of them, and the Israelis because they have the luxury of a lot of them. And Lord Blair, since he'll be communing with God next week, might also reflect that he still – to his shame – hasn't visited Gaza. But the nit-picking has got to be our old friend United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. This, you'll recall, was supposed to be the resolution that would guide all future peace efforts in the Middle East; Oslo was supposed to have been founded on it and all sorts of other processes and summits and road maps. It was passed in November 1967, after Israel had occupied Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Sinai and Golan, and it emphasises 'the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by

A Legacy of Evil - by Alan Bock : "In what might be called their legacy interviews (their exit interviews), President Bush has tried to soften his image and project a sense of competence, while Vice President Cheney has, if anything, gone out of his way to confirm that he was the administration's Darth Vader, devoted to protecting and extending the Empire and proud of it. Perhaps because I had the opportunity to meet with Cheney early on and get some sense of him as a person, I am inclined to credit him as more reliable. Dubya, perhaps understandably, strikes me as less honest – perhaps most dishonest with himself. He has acknowledged that introspection is not exactly his thing, and there is a great deal in his record a self-aware person would have to be ashamed of."

allAfrica.com: Somalia: Ethiopia Will Back Off (Page 1 of 1) STATESMEN ought to have a special prize just for themselves, like fools have the Darwin wards. The Darwin Awards commemorate very stupid people who did a service to human evolution by accidentally removing themselves from the gene pool. The statesman's equivalent could be called something like the Cheney-Zenawi Award. I mention this because the shining stupidity of the US Vice-President and the Ethiopian Prime Minister are on special display this week, as the Ethiopian army prepares to withdraw from Somalia two years after its foredoomed invasion, leaving the country in the hands of precisely the people whom they wanted to eliminate. We need negative role models too, and you couldn't ask for worse than this pair. I can't actually prove that getting Ethiopia to invade Somalia was Dick Cheney's brainchild, but it smells exactly like a Dick Cheney idea: crude, violent, and barking up entirely the wrong tree. Just

Tiny tribe claim Ethiopian allegiance in border row with Eritrea - Yahoo! News DOHAN, Ethiopia (AFP) – Groups of children giggling as they walk home from school in the shadow of Mount Asimba and the timeless stillness of Ethiopia's northeastern highland convey a deceptive sense of peace. After living in this region for more than 700 years, the tiny Irob ethnic group is torn, in its heart, by the border with Eritrea and engaged in a futile struggle for recognition dwarfed by the regional conflict pitting the two rival nations. A few miles from the front line, where tens of thousands of Ethiopian and Eritrean troops have been facing off for years, on the brink of war, children return from school on a dusty trail. The mountainous region in northeastern Ethiopia was ravaged by the border conflict that left some 80,000 dead between 1998 and 2000. The border subsequently drawn by an international UN-backed commission in a bid to end the war left the bulk of the Irob territory on Eritrea&