The companies, such as cable provider Comcast Corp. and insurer Aflac Inc., are adjusting to the new political reality in Washington, where campaign contributions help buy access to a new group of lawmakers and committee leaders. The top 25 PACs poured more than $420,000 into Democratic candidate coffers between Nov. 8 and Dec. 31, about double the amount that went to Republicans, Federal Election Commission filings show.

"When power changes hands, money follows suit," said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington research group that focuses on campaign finance. "Some of them are making up for lost time; they didn't bet on the right horse in the last election." A similar shift occurred in 1994, when the Democrats lost control of both the House and Senate, paving the way for what Republicans were counting on to be a permanent change.

Norquist, president of the Washington-based Americans for Tax Reform, said the shift in political giving is misguided because Republicans better represent company interests, such as lower taxes. "What you're seeing is people paying protection money," he said. "Or you're buying access. Both of those are stupid investments."

Bolivia - Heavy rains in almost all of the Bolivian territory have caused the overflowing of major rivers, landslides and road obstructions isolating some rural communities.

Peru - Rain continues to hamper much of the central Andean region of Peru. The district of Pozuzo was cut off from the rest of civilization for three days after two bridges collapsed that connected the jungle region with the outside world.

Mozambique - The Shire river, the largest tributary of the Zambezi, has burst its banks, isolating over 43,000 people in Mutarara district, in the western Mozambican province of Tete. The river has burst its banks along 12 kilometres of its length, and in some areas the flood waters are two metres deep

Indonesia - Flooding killed five people and more than 100,000 others were left homeless in the Indonesian capital, an official said today as neck-high waters submerged large sections of the city.

Australia - Severe thunderstorms in the Adelaide River district, about 110 kilometres south of Darwin, have caused widespread damage to the Mount Bundey Station. More than 1,000 people have been evacuated from a shopping centre in Campbelltown in Sydney's south-west after serious flooding caused a ceiling to collapse.

Pakistan - Three children died, while several persons were injured in scores of house collapse here in the wake relentless heavy downpours that kept lashing with no respite since last 36 hours, while the flurry of rains heaped miseries in other cities as well.

India - Lightning killed two teenagers and injured many when a hailstorm lashed the rural hinterland of the Taj Mahal famous city, destroying standing crops, uprooting trees and affecting power supply.

Rwanda, - At least 10 people have been killed and hundreds more displaced in flooding after heavy rains in northwestern Rwanda, a government official said.

France - A Tornada rips off roofs ; mobile homes pushed off foundations or overturned; moving autos blown off roads ; trees snapped or uprooted - millions of Euros in damage.

USA - A tornado ripped through the New Orleans area early Tuesday, ripping the roof off a hotel, knocking down power lines and injuring three people. Trailers were overturned in some areas and at least six homes collapsed.

It follows several reports of cases, where the rights of criminals appear to have been put above public safety.
These include a convicted paedophile being allowed to use a gym shared by school pupils and a suspected car thief who was served fried chicken during a 20-hour siege. Lord Falconer told the BBC that was "absolute nonsense".

"Common sense would tell you are not entitled to food if you are running away from the police. You are not entitled to not have your photograph shown if you are a convicted murderer on the run." He added: "What we are trying to do is to bust these myths". In some cases press reporting incorrectly attributed decisions to human rights legislation he said. But he admitted: "There have been problems with how human rights and the Human Rights Act have been interpreted."

Mr Frattini raised the prospect that the European Arrest Warrant could be used to detain executives of polluting companies and send them for trial in other member states. But he added: "it is not enough to punish and prosecute managers - it's very important also that corporations pay fines". The directive has set alarm bells ringing among those who fear the EU is taking over the powers of member states.

"It's a significant transfer of power to the commission," says Timothy Kirkhope, leader of the British Conservatives in the European Parliament. "The decision on whether or not to criminalise offences in Britain should be a matter for Britain, not for the EU. We all support penalties against environmental vandals but this sets an alarming precedent."

Britain supported earlier proposals to criminalise environmental offences, but on a different legal basis. This would have left it to the member states to set the penalties. But that framework decision by the EU Council of Ministers was overturned by the European Court of Justice in 2005. Judges ruled that the EU's competence on environmental law overruled the member states' powers on criminal justice.

In their ruling, judges said: "The European Community has the power to require the member states to lay down criminal penalties for the purposes of protecting the environment."

DHS Secretary Chertoff set the tone in a staffwide memo last year, when he described as "extremists" the two dozen Muslim terrorists who plotted to blow up 10 airliners over the Atlantic. Unlike British authorities, Chertoff did not mention the religious motivation of the terrorists. Nowhere in the one-page memo were the terms "Muslim" or "Islamic" used.

"It's ridiculous. 'Extremists' could mean anyone. Who are we talking about here? Neo-Nazi extremists? Environmental extremists?" another DHS official said. "It's so politically correct. If the head of Homeland Security can't say it, who can?" In a press conference on the sky-terror plot, President Bush called the British terrorists and their ilk "Islamic fascists" but quickly backed off the remark after the Council on American-Islamic Relations and other Muslim groups complained.

A former senior CIA analyst says America is losing the war on Islamic terror because of such political correctness. "We are losing in Iraq and Afghanistan because the political leaders in both parties and their politically correct acolytes in the media, the academy and the general officer corps refuse to square with the American people about the enemy's motivation," said Michael F. Scheuer, who headed the CIA's bin Laden unit.
He says the enemy is motivated by faith in Islam and is carrying out a jihad, or holy war, against the West. Headquarters has already engaged in such outreach programs. For example, it recently dispatched a senior DHS official to personally take CAIR officials on a VIP tour of the department's anti-terror-screening operations at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, the nation's busiest airport.

CAIR, a Washington-based group that's been tied to terrorists and terror groups, had complained Muslim travelers were being unfairly delayed by Customs and Border Protection agents at inspection stations.
"CAIR had a special inside tour of airport security," an outraged American Airlines official at O'Hare told WND. "I work here. There's no way any of us would qualify for that tour."

CAIR has been invited by DHS headquarters to train Customs and Border Protection agents manning inspections booths at international airports to be more sensitive to Muslims and Muslim customs.

Mammoud Abbas, the Palestinian president and leader of Fatah, asked Ismail Haniya, the current Hamas-nominated prime minister, to form the new government. Abbas and Khaled Meshaal, the exiled leader of the Hamas, signed the deal in a palace overlooking the Kaaba, Islam's holiest shrine. The deal sets out the principles of the coalition government, including a promise that it will "respect" previous peace deals with Israel, delegates said.

Meshaal said the accord "will unify our ranks. There is a commitment and unity. We will preserve this partnership". Reacting to the agreement, an Israeli government spokeswomen said that any new Palestinian unity government must abide by previous Western demands regarding the Jewish state.

"Israel expects the new Palestinian government to accept and respect all three of the international community's principles - recognition of Israel, acceptance of all former treaties and a clear renunciation of all terror and violence," said Miri Eisin, a spokeswoman in the office of Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister.

Margaret Beckett, the British foreign secretary, welcomed what she described as an "important" agreement between rival Palestinian factions. "We welcome the ongoing efforts to end the violence and promote intra-Palestinian reconciliation," Beckett said in a statement released by the foreign ministry.

"The First Amendment protects the right to engage in religious speech on a public sidewalk," ADF Senior Legal Counsel David Cortman said. "Members of the Gideons have been highly respected for decades as peaceful providers of free Bibles to those who want them."

The arrest happened Jan. 19, when Mirto and Simpson were on the sidewalk outside of Key Largo School in Key Largo, Fla., and were distributing copies of the Bible to those interested. "Neither man entered school grounds," the law firm said. "After the school's principal called police, a Monroe County sheriff's officer asked the men to leave immediately or face trespassing charges. As the men prepared to leave, the officer decided to arrest both individuals."

"Officials cannot use fear of arrest as a means of bullying law-abiding Christians into silence," Cortman said. "These men broke no laws when they decided to communicate their message on a public sidewalk."

The Muslims view anything that Israel is doing in Jerusalem as a sign of Israeli hegemony over the city -- an affront to their ideology, said Dr. Mordechai Kedar of the BESA Center for Strategic Studies near Tel Aviv. That is why they are protesting so much, Kedar said in a telephone interview.

Some Muslims claim that all of Jewish history was concocted after 1948 just to validate Jewish claims to the land and the city. They are afraid that if there is digging around the Temple Mount, the archeologists will find evidence that the Jews were here 2,000 years ago and that would mean that Jerusalem was and should be the Israeli capital, Kedar said.

The Muslims came to Jerusalem in the 7th century. For them, everything before that -- whether Christian or Jewish -- is irrelevant. Claims based on previous ownership have lost their validity. Islam did not come to live side by side with Christianity and Judaism. It came to replace it and to build on its ruins, Kedar said.

This is why they are so "vociferous" in their complaints about the Temple Mount, he said. Kedar noted that it didn't bother the Islamic Movement in Israel when bulldozers dug under the Temple Mount several years ago (hollowing out what has been described as the largest mosque in the Middle East), but when Israel removes something from the site, it's a different story. "This is how they behave. This is how they talk. This is a wave of propaganda," said Kedar.

The bulldozers, he said, intended to demolish a mound next to al-Maghareba Gate, one of the entrances into Jerusalem's Old City leading to the mosque compound. According to the Waqf religious trust, two underground rooms connected to the mosques lie under the mound. They claim that levelling the mound would threaten the foundation of the entire al-Aqsa compound.

The work, just outside the site known as the Noble Sanctuary to Muslims and as the Temple Mount to Jews, is likely to inflame tensions. Israeli police have already restricted access to the site, preventing tourists and Palestinian men under the age of 45 from entering.

Israel's project entails excavating the mound to ensure that the subsequent renovation work does not damage any archaeological artifacts found at the site, officials said. Yuval Baruch, the antiquities authority's chief archaeologist for the Jerusalem region, told Israel radio the work was a salvage operation."We have begun the work in preparation for the salvage dig that is supposed to start here in the coming days in the framework of the renovation of the Maghareba Bridge," he said

The compound, which houses al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, is where the second Palestinian uprising erupted in September 2000 following a controversial visit by Israel's then-opposition leader, Ariel Sharon.The site is also revered by Jews as once the site of Solomon's temple, the holiest shrine in Judaism, destroyed by the Romans in 70AD.

On Sunday, Jordan's King Abdullah II warned against "any attack on Islamic sites" in Jerusalem and condemned Israeli attempts "seeking to change the nature of these sites and erase their Muslim character".In January 2007, Israel revealed a project to set up a synagogue next to the al-Aqsa Mosque's Dome of the Rock.

In February 2004, excavation works carried out by Israeli authorities led to the collapse of a part of the path leading to Al Maghareba Gate, one of the mosque's main entrances. The Israeli government has been conducting exploratory excavation works underneath the al-Aqsa Mosque since 1969.

Replacing the current Hamas-led government with a more moderate coalition might enable the Palestinians to re-engage more fully with the West, says our correspondent. Hamas has so far refused to recognise Israel or renounce violence - both preconditions to end a crippling Western aid boycott of the Hamas government.

"There may be obstacles but we confirm that we are going with true intentions to reach a Palestinian-Palestinian agreement that would end tensions and reinforce national unity," said Mr Haniya. Earlier Hamas-Fatah meetings - brokered by other Arab countries, Egypt, Syria and Qatar - have been preceded by equally optimistic words, but have led to nothing.

But there is a feeling that this time could be different, our correspondent says. There is huge domestic and international pressure on the two parties for a breakthrough, and the talks are being held in the auspicious surroundings of Islam's most holy city. The mediating will be done by Saudi Arabia, which has significant political and financial clout.

Saudi Arabia also has its own motives for seeking a solution to the crisis in Gaza, says the BBC's Middle East analyst Roger Hardy. Saudi leaders are deeply uneasy about the role of Iran in three of the region's main trouble spots - Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, he says. Saudi Arabia may have ambitions of filling a leadership vacuum in the Arab world, he says - though whether they are capable of doing so remains to be seen.

Opponents say Perry should have let the Legislature decide whether to impose a mandate. "He's circumventing the will of the people," said Dawn Richardson, president of Parents Requesting Open Vaccine Education, a citizens group that fought for the right to opt out of other vaccine requirements. "There are bills filed. There's no emergency except in the boardrooms of Merck, where this is failing to gain the support that they had expected."

Texas allows parents to opt out of inoculations by filing an affidavit objecting to the vaccine on religious or philosophical reasons. Conservative groups say such provisions still interfere with parents' rights to make medical decisions for their children.

The executive order is effective until Perry or a successor changes it, and the Legislature has no authority to repeal it, said Perry spokeswoman Krista Moody. Moody said the Texas Constitution permits the governor, as head of the executive branch, to order other members of the executive branch to adopt rules like this one. The federal government approved Gardasil in June, and a government advisory panel has recommended that all girls get the shots at 11 and 12, before they are likely to be sexually active.

Merck could generate billions in sales if Gardasil -- at $360 for the three-shot regimen -- were made mandatory across the country. Most insurance companies now cover the vaccine, which has been shown to have no serious side effects.

The numbers are barely comprehensible by anyone not involved in the industry. Foot and mouth saw the destruction of seven million sheep and cattle (quite unjustifiably, but that's another story). Avian flu, which has now been diagnosed on one of Bernard Matthews's turkey farms in Suffolk, could, if it takes hold in poultry farms across Britain, be equally devastating. The one infected farm holds 160,000 birds. They will all have to be slaughtered.

Frogs, locusts and boils could hardly be worse.Except that there is something worse. The H5N1 strain of bird flu could, as may have happened with BSE, leap the species barrier. Indeed, in a statistically small number of cases, this has already happened: 164 people have died from the human form of the disease since 2003. The official word for a disease which originates in animals but is passed to humans is zoonosis.

Zoonoses include many of the world's most fearful killers - anthrax, bubonic plague, Ebola, Lassa fever, probably HIV. So far, nearly all the people who have died from human bird flu live or work close to poultry. They caught the disease directly from birds. The fear is that the avian flu virus will mutate into a form that can be transmitted easily from person to person. The result could be a pandemic on the scale of the influenza of 1918-19, which killed 70 million people around the world.

Commercial farms cram poultry into tiny spaces. They may never see daylight. Bernard Matthews has a very good brand. But his white turkeys grow fast and die young. They have been bred to put on weight as quickly as possible. While old-fashioned turkey breeds, such as the bronze, mature slowly, only reaching their optimum size after six months, modern commercial equivalents have been bred to plump up in just half the time.

Can it be right? We may wake up to the consequences of paying so little money - little more than £5 in the case of some frozen turkeys being offered before Christmas - for food.

Her position conflicts with the British preference for a mini-treaty to streamline voting rules and end the rotation of the EU presidency every six months. New tensions emerged last week after Gordon Brown, the chancellor, was reported to have indicated that he would not even consider such technical changes without a promise that the constitution was off the agenda.

Government sources confirmed this weekend that Britain did not believe a formal constitution was necessary for the EU to work efficiently with 27 members. Britain also wants to avoid changes that would encroach on sensitive national interests such as defence policy. Several British ministers have gone on record saying the constitution in its current form is not a viable option. The challenge now is to agree on some sensible institutional reforms that suit all 27 member states, a senior British official said.

Burying the constitution recently described by John Reid, the home secretary, as a dead parrot would release Tony Blair and his successor from the promise of a potentially damaging referendum. Britain's stance may anger the 18 countries who have ratified the constitution. At a meeting in Madrid this month, the 18 friends of the constitution, plus Portugal and Ireland, reaffirmed support for the document and discussed expanding it to cover climate change and immigration.

Merkel will try to break the deadlock during Germany's six-month presidency of the EU before a summit in June. Britain's opposition is shared by Poland and the Czech Republic.

Hundreds of thousands of them came together in Beirut's southern suburbs, heavily Shia in population, and a Hezbollah stronghold - that is why parts of it were devastated during last summer's Israeli bombings. Old and young, men and women, babes in arms, almost everybody dressed in black, in mourning for the Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad.

More than anything else, the martyrdom of Hussein over 13 centuries ago has given Shia Islam the defining characteristics at the heart of its ethos: suffering and sacrifice in the face of oppression, the patience and endurance of the downtrodden, and reverence for the ultimate sacrifice, martyrdom. But that does not necessarily mean passively accepting death and defeat.

In fact, Shia Islam is on the march, throughout the region, whose faultlines - sectarian, ethnic and political - have been perilously exposed by the tectonic pressures currently exerted on it. When sectarian strife broke out between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq, especially after the attack on the Shia shrine at Samarra a year ago, people began talking of Iraq as "the new Lebanon".

Sectarian revenge killings between Iraqi Shias and Sunnis are now claiming more than 100 lives every day. In the meantime, the region remains in grievous danger of exploding out of control, especially in terms of the Sunni-Shia divide. Despite the fact that it is allied to the United States, Saudi Arabia, which sees itself as the custodian of Sunni Islam, has seen the dangers.

It has been talking intensively to the Iranians, and that dialogue is partly credited with persuading the factions in Lebanon to draw back from the brink. The Saudis are also brokering a ceasefire between Hamas and Fatah in the Palestinian territories, though it is proving difficult to consolidate.

If the Americans are pulling in different directions, it is hard to see how local and regional initiatives can get very far.

Hamas embarked on this war with some 10,000 fighters 6,000 from among the ranks of what is known as the Executive Police Force founded by the Hamas government, and 4,000 armed members of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Martyrs' Brigades.

The gunmen are well trained and organized within a quasi military organization, and they are equipped with every means of warfare including sniper rifles, communications devices, flack jackets, night vision equipment, Kalashnikov rifles, hand grenades, RPGs and almost limitless munitions. This force is ready for battle, it has been training for the past two years, and is also ready to engage in a civil war.

Up against them are Fatah and Abbas loyalists along with the national security forces who together total some 60,000 gunmen. The majority lacks any formal military training and is fighting with light weapons while suffering from a lack of munitions and logistic means yet more importantly, they were not trained for warfare against Hamas.

The Palestinian infighting is no different than other civil wars. This is a war over values, over a way of life, and over the future identity of Palestinian society and state: It pits Fatah's secular democratic nationalism against Hamas' radical Islam. Hamas is fighting passionately in the name of religion and is backed by the "fatwas"- religious edicts that defines Fatah members as heretics and justifies the killing of Muslims. Such a war took place in Algeria. Fatah sources are saying that the battles are aimed at preventing "Algerization" of the Territories.

Hamas treats Fatah as "mortadin," namely as those who abandoned the way of Islam after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. His successor, Caliph Abu Bakr, issued a religious edict that permits and encourages their killing. Fatah members, on the other hand, regard themselves as true Muslims and view Hamas as 'khawaraj' - a group that detached itself from the Islamic community, strictly adheres to religious laws, and defines those who do not follow its path as heretics punishable by death.

Fatah and Hamas both believe that the infighting in the Palestinian Authority has just begun. Therefore, Hamas is insisting on establishing a national unity government under its cover it will maintain its power and continue to instill the values of radical Islam among the population.

Hamas and Abbas want a unity government in order to reach a lull in the fighting for the purpose of strengthening their forces for the next round of battles, which will culminate in either a military victory or a victory at the polls. A unity government is not likely to bridge the gaps, and the battles will inevitably be resumed. A decision will only be reached after a lot of blood has been shed and after the defeated party will disarm and accept the authority of the victor.

Israel and the entire region would be much better off if Fatah were to win this war.