be just

Nile River row: Could it turn violent? | Africa News blog The giggles started when the seventh journalist in a row said that his question was for Egypt’s water and irrigation minister, Mohamed Nasreddin Allam. The non-Egyptian media gave him a bit of a hammering at last week’s talks in Addis Ababa for the nine countries that the Nile passes through. Allam bared his teeth when a Kenyan journalist accused him of hiding behind “colonial-era treaties” giving his country the brunt of the river’s vital waters whether that hurt the poorer upstream countries or not. “You obviously don’t know enough about this subject to be asking questions about it,” he snapped before later apologising to her with a kiss on the cheek. Five of the nine Nile countries — Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Kenya — last month signed a deal to share the water that is a crucial resource for all of them. But Egypt and Sudan, who are entitled to most of the water and can veto upstream dams under a

Panetta Warns Against Minuscule Defense Cuts -- News from Antiwar.com In a bold statement of bureaucratic overreach, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta seemed to supersede his authority on Thursday, telling lawmakers he would not accept large military cuts under a debt deal . He compared the possibility of increasing the expected defense cuts – $350 billion in projected spending over 10 years – to a “doomsday mechanism” that would weaken America.