In May 2000 this aim was achieved, thanks largely to the success of the party's military arm, the Islamic Resistance. In return, the movement, which represents Lebanon's Shia Muslims - the country's single largest community - won the respect of most Lebanese.

Hezbollah was formed primarily to offer resistance to the Israeli occupation. It also dreamed of transforming Lebanon's multi-confessional state into an Iranian-style Islamic state, although this idea was later abandoned in favour of a more inclusive approach that has survived to this day.

The party's rhetoric calls for the destruction of the state of Israel. It regards the whole of Palestine as occupied Muslim land and it argues that Israel has no right to exist.

The party was long supported by Iran, which provided it with arms and money. Hezbollah has always sought to further an Islamic way of life. But the party emphasises that its Islamic vision should not be interpreted as an intention to impose an Islamic society on the Lebanese.

"The Chinese military is less transparent than any significant military in Asia outside of North Korea," says Kenneth Lieberthal, a former White House China expert who's now at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. That doesn't serve China's interests, he says, because "when you are not very transparent, people assume you have something to hide."

Says General Tetsuya Nishimoto, Japan's former military chief of staff: "We should consider the build-up as a threat, because their goals and intentions are unclear." The official $45 billion defence-spending level for 2007 is less than 10 percent of the $622 billion the U.S. will spend on its military this year. U.S. officials and analysts say China habitually under-reports its true budget by a factor of two to three; whatever China spends, some of its senior commanders say, it still isn't enough.

China has also been able to alter the balance in the arena that matters most to its policy makers: Taiwan, which the government in Beijing regards as an integral part of China territory. In 1995, the U.S. faced down China by sending two aircraft- carrier groups into the area. Since then, China has steadily increased its military edge over the Taiwanese, while gaining the ability to inflict considerable damage on any U.S. force coming to Taiwan's aid in a crisis, say military experts.

Countries carrying out the most trade with China are among those expressing concern about Chinese military intentions. Last year, the U.S. was mainland China's biggest trading partner, with $262.6 billion in commerce, while Japan was second at $207.3 billion and Taiwan fourth at $107.8 billion, according to data from China's Customs General Administration.

While China is beefing up its military capabilities, Madeiros says, "what you don't see is China buying a long-range bomber force, long-range heavy-lift capabilities, things that would indicate that it's trying to develop global power projection." That hasn't stopped some top U.S. officials from ringing alarm bells. In a Feb. 23 speech in Sydney, Vice President Dick Cheney said China's buildup and the satellite shoot-down "are not consistent with China's stated goal of a peaceful rise."

According to the German Chancellor's Office's internal schedule, the final negotiations should begin April 23 and be terminated around June 1. As a prelude, Berlin will launch a large-scale PR campaign, culminating in a "Europe Festival" at the end of March before it proceeds on an "Information Tour" that will take it to more than 50 German cities. The estimated costs of this undertaking are in the double-digit millions. Among the cooperating partners of this propaganda endeavour, which also targets children and youth, are sectors of the German armed forces (Bundeswehr), including one institution specializing in psychological warfare operations.

Nearly all of the states that had initially rejected the proposed draft of the EU constitution, that had been solicited by Berlin, have, over the past few weeks, given up their resistance to many aspects. At the beginning of February, the governments of Great Britain and the Netherlands made known that they are in agreement with a radically abridged version of the contract. It is supposed to regulate the rationalization of the EU's institutions, in order to prepare for a more hard-hitting foreign policy and possibly introduce majority-rule decisions on central policies.

Great Britain still refuses to accept such decisions.

Cahuasquí said that most of the 1,000 foreign military bases on the planet belong to the United States, which has 737 in different countries. Others belong to Russia, China, the United Kingdom and Italy. "And these do not include secret military bases, like the four operated by the U.S. in Iraq," she said.

"But the United States doesn't only have bases in developing countries. It has 81 bases in Germany and 37 in Japan," she added. In Latin America and the Caribbean there are 17 U.S. military bases, located in Colombia, Peru, El Salvador, Aruba, Curaçao, Honduras, Ecuador, and Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, she noted.

Wilbert van der Zeijden, of the Transnational Institute in the Netherlands, said he wanted the meeting to foster "a broad global campaign" against foreign military presence and bases all over the world. "If we can't shut down all the bases, we may at least be able to weaken the U.S. military network which allows them to attack when and where they wish," he said.

Her new "secret" isn't very new at all. In fact, it's the oldest lie in the history of the world. It is that you and you alone are master of your own universe a kind of "god," if you will. Whatever you want in life will be yours if only you visualize it and claim it earnestly in your heart. Oprah is peddling this lie to millions on her TV show.

I was once ambivalent about Oprah Winfrey not really quite sure to what to make of her. Today, I can honestly say that she is leading people into spiritual darkness. The book she is touting, by an Australian talk-show producer named Rhonda Byrne, makes some extraordinary claims.

"Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses and Jesus were not only prosperity teachers, but also millionaires themselves, with more affluent lifestyles than many present-day millionaires could conceive of," she writes.
Now let's put aside the dangling preposition for a moment and deal with the substance of this outrageous claim. Jesus was a millionaire? What did Jesus tell the rich young man who asked him how to inherit eternal life? He told him to sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor.

That's not the gospel Oprah is peddling today. The false and dangerous gospel she is promoting contends: "The energy you put into the world both good and bad is exactly what comes back to you. This means you create the circumstances of your life with the choices you make every day."

Here's another ugly aspect of this prosperity gospel: "The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts." Why should we ever help the destitute, the orphans, the widows, the victims of tragedy and illness? After all, according to Oprah and Byrne, they've brought these problems on themselves.

If you think I'm exaggerating the dangerous, deceiving claims of "The Secret," here's another, specifically dealing with those who contract diseases: "You cannot 'catch' anything unless you think you can, and thinking you can is inviting it to you with your thought."

I guess it's a sign of the times as we're told in II Timothy. Oprah is just doing what she's always done, I suppose: "Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth."

Michael Marcavage, director of Repent America and Pike both had alerted their constituencies earlier to H.R. 254, or the David Ray Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which could create "anti-hate" restrictions and penalties.
Marcavage told WND that plan would invert American justice, and instead of requiring evidence it would leave it to someone who claims to be offended to determine whether a "crime" has been committed.

"Truth is not allowed as evidence in hate crimes trials. A homosexual can claim emotional damage from hearing Scripture that describes his lifestyle as an abomination. He can press charges against the pastor or broadcaster who merely reads the Bible in public. The 'hater' can be fined thousands of dollars and even imprisoned!" Marcavage said.

Worse yet, there are some key phrases that open doors wide that many people don't want opened. For example, Pike said, the bill is to "prevent and respond to alleged violations," meaning "the government does not even have to wait until a hate crime has been committed but may act pre-emptively to 'prevent' crime."

Repent America, some of whose members already have served jail time simply for proclaiming the biblical message, is joining in sounding the alarm. "Having been charged under Pennsylvania's hate crimes law for declaring the truth about homosexuality, I can assure you that if this bill is passed and signed into law, it will be used to put Christians behind bars," said Marcavage.

In 2005 data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide "ice caps" near Mars's south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row. Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun.

"The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars," he said. Abdussamatov believes that changes in the sun's heat output can account for almost all the climate changes we see on both planets. Mars and Earth, for instance, have experienced periodic ice ages throughout their histories. "Man-made greenhouse warming has made a small contribution to the warming seen on Earth in recent years, but it cannot compete with the increase in solar irradiance," Abdussamatov said.

By studying fluctuations in the warmth of the sun, Abdussamatov believes he can see a pattern that fits with the ups and downs in climate we see on Earth and Mars. Most scientists now fear that the massive amount of carbon dioxide humans are pumping into the air will lead to a catastrophic rise in Earth's temperatures, dramatically raising sea levels as glaciers melt and leading to extreme weather worldwide.

Abdussamatov remains contrarian, however, suggesting that the sun holds something quite different in store.
"The solar irradiance began to drop in the 1990s, and a minimum will be reached by approximately 2040," Abdussamatov said. "It will cause a steep cooling of the climate on Earth in 15 to 20 years."

French and German markets also slipped in early trading - with the Cac and Dax indexes losing close to 2% each. In Taiwan shares closed down 3.7% while the main Indian market was 3.6% lower in mid-afternoon trading.

The Nikkei tumbled 575.68 points to 16,642.25 on Monday, its lowest level since December and the largest single day plunge since June 2006. The fall was largely a result of the continued rise of the yen - which hit its highest rate against the dollar in three months on Monday.

By close of trading on Friday, indexes had tumbled across the US, Europe and Asia. The Dow Jones fell 4.2% during the week and the FTSE 100 lost £80bn, or 5%, in value. Investors had blamed factors as varied as a new tax in China and the US mortgage market for the decision to dump stocks.

The size of last week's sell-off may have caught investors by surprise, but observers had been warning that a market correction was on the cards. Many of the world's top indexes and shares had climbed back to levels not seen since the dotcom bubble was burst in 2000, fanning fears that they had become overvalued.
China's Shanghai market - which sparked the sell-off by falling almost 9% on Tuesday, its biggest decline for a decade - has more than doubled in value since the end of 2005.

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan did little to calm markets when he said last week that there was a possibility that the US economy would go into recession by the end of the year.

"Taiwan is a country whose sovereignty lies outside the People's Republic of China," he added, referring to China by its formal name.He spoke of a "four wants" policy - namely independence, a new constitution, further development and a change to the country's officially designated name. Since taking office, President Chen has sought to emphasise the island's separate identity, the BBC's Caroline Gluck in Taipei says.

But his latest comments are his strongest since taking office and raise new worries of increased tensions with China as well as Taiwan's main ally, the US, our correspondent adds. Those fears contributed to falls on Taiwan's stock market on Monday and a weakening of the Taiwan dollar against the US dollar. Opposition leaders accused him of being irresponsible and putting Taiwan at risk of a possible war with China.

China sees Taiwan as part of its territory and has threatened to use force if the island ever moved to declare formal independence. The United States is committed to supplying Taiwan with defensive weapons, but opposes any Taiwanese provocation of China. In response to Mr Chen's comments, China's Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing told Taiwanese reporters in Beijing: "Don't listen to local leaders".

"Whoever wants to split away will become a criminal in history". Amid increasing international concern at the country's expanding military, China on Sunday announced a 17% increase in the defence budget for 2007. Taiwan's defence ministry warned that the move not only upset the military balance across the Taiwan Strait, but also increases "the potential for a disruption to peace and stability in Asia".

The two sides have made considerable progress, and Vietnam's prime minister met Pope Benedict in Rome in January. But the Vatican - whose delegation is being led by the Holy See's Undersecretary of State for Relations with States, Monsignor Pietro Parolin - remains concerned about a number of issues.

Last month, Father Nguyen Van Ly, a Catholic priest and democracy activist, was taken from his home in the Bishop's Palace in the central city of Hue by police and placed under house arrest 20kms (12 miles) outside the city. A Vatican news agency has also alleged mistreatment of Catholics by, among others, local authorities in the north west of Vietnam.

The Vatican wants the government to return church property confiscated decades ago, and also to be allowed to provide more education and welfare services. This is something the government is considering as it tries to manage some of the problems caused by Vietnam's rapid economic development. The government keeps the Catholic Church under tight control - for example, it must approve the appointment of every priest. This is a legacy of a time when the communist authorities saw the church as an agent of colonialism.

But times have changed and now it sees the church as a potential ally against social problems and even as a force for national unity.

China's state-run Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association welcomed the meeting and especially Pope Benedict XVI's decision to write a letter to China's 10m Catholics. Association vice-chairman Liu Bainian said: "This is beneficial for China-Vatican relations. It is a step forward but we still have to see the concrete actions."

The two main causes of disagreement between the sides are the Vatican's recognition of Taiwan and China's ordination of bishops without the Holy See's consent. Three such bishops were appointed last year. While the Vatican has indicated it is willing to downgrade relations with Taiwan, the Episcopal appointments remain a sticking point.

The BBC's David Willey in Rome says both sides seem to want to improve ties, keeping open the possibility of a papal visit around the time of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

"The culture is shifting, and marriage has almost become a luxury item, one that only the well educated and well paid are interested in," said Isabel V. Sawhill, an expert on marriage and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Marriage has declined across all income groups, but it has declined far less among couples who make the most money and have the best education. These couples are also less likely to divorce. Many demographers peg the rise of a class-based marriage gap to the erosion since 1970 of the broad-based economic prosperity that followed World War II.

As cohabitation and out-of-wedlock births increase among the broader population, social scientists predict that marriage with children will continue its decades-long retreat into relatively high-income exclusivity.College-educated women, whose numbers have risen sharply since 1980, often live with a partner and postpone marriage. But in most cases, they eventually marry and have children, and divorce at about half the rate of women who do not finish high school.

While the marriage gap appears to be driven primarily by education and income, it does have a racial dimension.Marriage and childbearing seem to be more "de-coupled" among black people than white people, with about a third of first births among white women coming before marriage, compared with three-quarters among black women, according to a recent review of research on cohabitation. As for children, the review found that 55 percent of blacks, 40 percent of Hispanics and 30 percent of whites spend some of their childhood with cohabiting parents.

Class, though, is a much better tool than race for predicting whether Americans will marry or cohabit, said Pamela Smock, co-author of the review and a University of Michigan sociology professor. "The poor aren't entering into marriage very much at all," said Smock, who has interviewed more than 100 cohabitating couples. She said young people from these backgrounds often do not think they can afford marriage.Arguments that marriage can mean stability do not seem to change their attitudes, Smock said, noting that many of them have parents with troubled marriages.

"This is not a product that everyone would want to consume," Rissler said, adding that other companies grow such plants indoors or in vats. "It is unwise to produce drugs in plants outdoors."Ventria has developed three varieties of rice, each endowed with a different human gene that makes the plants produce one of three human proteins. Two of them -- lactoferrin and lysozyme -- are bacteria-fighting compounds found in breast milk and saliva.

The company is also talking to the Food and Drug Administration about putting the proteins into health foods. Its third variety of rice makes serum albumin, a blood protein used in medical therapies. Also on Wednesday, the agency revealed that a type of rice seed in Arkansas had become contaminated with a different variety of genetically engineered rice, LL62, that was never released for marketing. The error was discovered in the course of an ongoing investigation into the widespread contamination of U.S. rice by yet another gene-altered variety, LL601, which has seriously disrupted rice exports.

Those problems, along with the previous discovery of unapproved, gene-altered StarLink corn in food and the accidental release of crops that had been engineered to make a vaccine for pig diarrhea, undermine the USDA's credibility, critics said.
"USDA's record is not good," Rissler said, pointing to several recent court judgments against the department and a December 2005 inspector general report that savaged the department for its poor oversight of biotechnology. "We don't think they can enforce even the inadequate system that is in place.

(from - www.organicconsumers.org) "Scientists have begun putting genes from human beings into food crops in a dramatic extension of genetic modification. The move, which is causing disgust and revulsion among critics, is bound to strengthen accusations that GM technology is creating "Frankenstein foods" and drive the controversy surrounding it to new heights. Even before this development, many people have opposed the technology on the grounds that it is playing God by creating unnatural combinations of living things. Opponents say that no one will want to eat the partially human-derived food because it will smack of cannibalism".

The summit comes at a time of sectarian division and tension between Saudis and Iran over events in Iraq and Lebanon. Saudi Arabia, a major Sunni power in the region, and Iran, an important Shia power, have found themselves aligned with groups on opposing political sides. Correspondents say Saudi Arabia has led a diplomatic drive in recent months to counterbalance what it sees as Iran's growing influence in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.

An account of the talks was issued by the official Saudi Press Agency early on Sunday, shortly after Mr Ahmadinejad left Riyadh to return home to Tehran. Speaking in Tehran after the talks, Mr Ahmadinejad said: "We discussed the Palestinian and Iraq issues comprehensively. We have common views in this regard."

He also said that "plots carried out by the enemies in order to divide the world of Islam were discussed" and that the Saudis had joined Iran in condemning them, the AFP news agency reports. "Iran and Saudi Arabia oppose the dominance of enemies over the region and their conspiracies. During this trip, we tried to devise some measures to prevent the enemies from harming the Muslim world and to foil their plots," Mr Ahmadinejad said.

Mr Ahmadinejad's trip to Riyadh came as Iran is under growing pressure from the West over its refusal to halt its uranium enrichment programme. The US has also claimed that the "highest levels" of Iran's government are supplying arms used by Shia militants in Iraq. Iran is a rising power bolstered by the removal by the US of its two great enemies - the Taleban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq - the BBC's diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus says.

Iran's Shia allies are now the dominant force in Iraq, while Tehran's influence is spreading more widely into Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. Sunni-ruled states like Jordan and Saudi Arabia are watching Iran's rise with a degree of anxiety, our correspondent adds. It makes sense for the Saudis and the Iranians to talk as neither country has an interest in a Sunni-Shia rivalry in the region getting out of control, our correspondent says.

Indeed, the fact that this bilateral meeting has come ahead of a wider multilateral gathering on Iraq suggests that some sort of new understanding just might be in the works, he says.

This time round we are already deep in a New Cold War whose stakes are literally the future of life on this planet. The debacle in Iraq, or the prospect of a US tactical nuclear pre-emptive strike against Iran are ghastly enough. In comparison to what is at play in the US global military buildup against its most formidable remaining global rival, Russia, they loom relatively small. The US military policies since the end of the Soviet Union and emergence of the Republic of Russia in 1991 are in need of close examination in this context. Only then do Putin's frank remarks on February 10 at the Munich Conference on Security make sense.

Putin spoke in general terms of Washington's vision of a 'unipolar' world, with 'one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making, calling it a 'world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.'

Then the Russian President got to the heart of the matter: 'Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force military force in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts. As a result we do not have sufficient strength to find a comprehensive solution to any one of these conflicts. Finding a political settlement also becomes impossible.'

Putin continued, 'We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one state's legal system. One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?'

The vast resources-rich and population-rich Eurasian Heartland and landmass is building economic and military ties with one another for the first time in history, ties whose driving force is the increasingly aggressive Washington role in the world.

The driver of the emerging Eurasian geopolitical cooperation is obvious. China, with the world's largest population and an economy expanding at double digits, urgently needs secure alliance partners who could secure her energy security. Russia, an energy goliath, needs secure trade outlets independent of Washington control to develop and rebuild its tattered economy. These complimentary needs form the seed crystal of what Washington and US strategists define as a new Cold War, this one over energy, over oil and natural gas above all. Military might is the currency this time as in the earlier Cold War.

By 2006 Moscow and Beijing had clearly decided to upgrade their cooperation with their Eurasian neighbors. They both agreed to turn to a moribund loose organization that they had co-founded in 2001, in the wake of the 1998 Asia crisis, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization or SCO. The SCO had highly significant members, geopolitically seen. SCO included oil-rich Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan as well as China and Russia. By 2006 Beijing and Moscow began to view the SCO as a nascent counterweight to increasingly arbitrary American power politics. The organization was discussing projects of energy cooperation and even military mutual defense.

A new Armageddon is in the making. The unilateral military agenda of Washington has predictably provoked a major effort by Russia to defend herself. The prospects of a global nuclear conflagration, by miscalculation, increase by the day. At what point might an American President, God forbid, decide to order a pre-emptive full-scale nuclear attack on Russia to prevent Russia from rebuilding a state of mutual deterrence?

Bush's America is a hollowed-out debt-ridden economy engaged on using its last card, its vast military power to prop up the dollar and its role as world sole Superpower.