By Pavel Felgenhauer  
MiG-31E (Foxhound) jet fighter Yesterday, June 19, Moscow's respected business daily Kommersant reported that Russia's arms trading monopoly Rosoboronexport has begun to fulfill an arms deal it secretly signed with Syria earlier this year to sell five MiG-31E (Foxhound) jet fighters, considered one of the best in the world, and an additional unspecified number of the newest MiG-29M/M2 fighter-bombers. The paper reported the total price to be around $1 billion. MiG-31s were produced in Nizhniy Novgorod at the Sokol aviation factory from 1981 to 1994 (some 500 planes overall). Since production has been terminated, Syria, according to Kommersant, will get the jets from the Russian Defense Ministry stockpile after a refurbishing at Sokol (Kommersant, June 19).
Kommersant suggested that Iran is partially or even fully covering the purchase bill, and that the jets may partially or fully end up as part of the Iranian air force. Commenting on the Kommersant report, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamiynin yesterday morning told reporters, "All Russian arms deals comply with international law and Russia's obligations under international treaties and UN Security Council resolutions" (RIA-Novosti, June 19). This vague statement was widely taken as indirect conformation of the Kommersant story, but ...   more »

DETROIT -- While the NAACP has been fighting for the rights of African-Americans for nearly a century, it's important to fight for Muslim Americans in a post-9/11 world, the nation's Homeland Security chief told guests at the 98th NAACP national convention Tuesday evening.
"(We've) fought too long and too hard for the rights of African-Americans to turn our backs on the rights of Muslim Americans," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told a crowd of more than 600 at the Armed Services and Veteran Affairs awards dinner at the Renaissance Marriott Hotel.
The NAACP convention continues today with a report expected on the "State of Young Black America." Etan Thomas of the Washington Wizards also is scheduled to speak at a youth leadership luncheon. A gospel extravanga, featuring CeCe Winans, is on tap for tonight.
At the dinner last night, more than a dozen people were honored for their work in fostering equality in the military. The ceremonies Tuesday were hosted in part by the U.S. Coast Guard.
In his keynote speech, Chertoff recounted stories of heroic rescues by African-Americans serving in the Coast Guard in the 1800s as well as work by the Coast Guard to save thousands of African-Americans ...   more »

While environmentalists are usually vocal about perceived threats ranging from pesticides to global warming, there is a silence when it comes to one threat already harming the water supply: hormones from birth-control pills.
According to the National Catholic Register, EPA-funded scientists at the University of Colorado studied fish in a mountain stream near Boulder, Colo., two years ago.
When they netted 123 trout and other fish downstream from the city's sewer plant, they found 101 were female, 12 were male, and 10 were strange "intersex" fish with male and female features.
It's "the first thing that I've seen as a scientist that really scared me," university biologist John Woodling told the Denver Post.
The Denver Post published this graphic in October 2004 featuring results of a study showing how fish near Boulder, Colo., had their sex impacted by estrogen from birth-control products in local waters. Figures were from the University of Colorado and the Colorado Division of Wildlife
The main culprits were found to be estrogens and other steroid hormones from birth-control pills and patches that ultimately ended up in the creek after being excreted in urine into the city's sewers.
The Register says Woodling, University of Colorado physiology professor ...   more »

Anatole Kaletsky
Yesterday, the pound and the euro hit their highest levels in a generation against the US dollar. The dollar, meanwhile, collapsed to a record low against an average of all the world’s major currencies. It is tempting to interpret the flight from the dollar in financial markets as the clearest, most objective, indicator of America’s relative decline.
Europe has long been derided as an ageing, sclerotic continent, doomed to irrelevance in a world dominated by America and Asia. But could it actually be America, not Europe, that is failing to compete in the globalised world economy and is now threatened with long-term decline?
Much that is happening in the world today certainly seems to belie the hubristic assumptions about American hegemony that were so prevalent a few years ago. It is not just the military debacle in Iraq and the geopolitical setbacks suffered by American diplomacy from the Middle East to Venezuela to North Korea. Less prominent in the media headlines, but in some ways more troubling, are the indicators of economic underperformance: the reliance on foreign borrowing (now equivalent to $2,000 annually for every American man, woman and child); the loss of Wall Street’s global dominance in ...   more »

The New York City Police Department is creating a web of cameras and roadblocks around Lower Manhattan designed to detect, track and deter terrorists.
The New York Times reports that the lower Manhattan Security Initiative will begin monitoring cars moving through the area by the end of this year with the use of more than 100 cameras.
The program is not yet fully financed. But if it is, it would mean a network of license plate readers, as well as three-thousand public and private security cameras below Canal Street. Police and security officers would staff an operations center and movable roadblocks.
New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly says the area is very critical to the economic lifeblood of the nation. He says the initiative's aim is to make it less vulnerable.
But critics questions the plan's cost, efficacy and effects on privacy.
It would cost an estimated $90 million. The department currently has $25 million to spend on it.
Original Source

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