By SALAH NASRAWI, Associated Press Writer
Sun Mar 4, 1:38 PM ET
Arabs will relaunch a 2002 land-for-peace offer in an effort to end the decades-long conflict with Israel at a summit later this month, but without changes Israel has been pushing, the Arab League's Secretary-General said Sunday.
Amr Moussa's remarks to a meeting of Arab foreign ministers came as Saudi Arabia announced that hard-line Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad offered support for the initiative during talks with Saudi officials, though Iran later denied the two discussed the peace plan.
"The Arab peace initiative expresses an Arab consensus and will not be redrafted as demanded by some foreign powers," Moussa told the ministers, who were meeting in Cairo ahead of the Arab League summit scheduled for March 28-29 in the Saudi capital.
"Maneuvering and watering down (the initiative) will be a strategic mistake," Moussa said. "It perhaps will lead to new bloodshed.
Last week, Israeli newspapers quoted Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni as saying Israel would not accept the Arab peace plan as is and asked to drop any reference to the right of the Palestinians displaced in the 1948 Mideast war to return to their homes inside the Jewish state.
Moussa ...   more »

By Ryan Jones
Mar 04, 2007
Israeli Vice Premier Shimon Peres said on Saturday that the current government still very much intends to uproot thousands of Jews from Judea and Samaria and surrender their homes to the "Palestinians."
In an interview on Israel's Channel 2 TV, Peres stated matter-of-factly:
"The government will evacuate...dozens of settlements by the end of its term."
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert originally ran on a platform of additional "disengagement" from the biblical Land of Israel.
But his plummeting popularity following Israel's failures in last summer's Lebanon war called into question the ability to implement such a controversial policy, and Olmert put the issue on the back burner.
At the time, Olmert claimed that he had been forced to change his mind due to the fact that Israel's withdrawals from southern Lebanon and Gaza had brought increased violence instead of peace.
But the fact that Peres made his latest remarks at a time when hostility from Lebanon and Gaza continues unabated calls into question whether or not Olmert has really learned his lesson.
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IRAN has trained secret networks of agents across the Gulf states to attack Western interests and incite civil unrest in the event of a military strike against its nuclear program, a former Iranian diplomat has revealed.
Spies working as teachers, doctors and nurses at Iranian-owned schools and hospitals have formed sleeper cells ready to be "unleashed" at the first sign of any serious threat to Tehran, it is claimed.
Trained by Iranian intelligence, they are also said to be recruiting fellow Shiites in the region, whose communities have traditionally been marginalised by the Gulf's ruling Arab clans.
Were America or Israel to attack Iran, such cells would be instructed to foment long-dormant sectarian grievances and attack the extensive American and European business interests in wealth centres such as Dubai and Saudi Arabia.
Such a scenario would bring chaos to the Gulf region, one of the few areas of the Middle East that remains prosperous and has largely pro-Western governments.
The claims have been made by Adel Assadinia, a former career diplomat who was Iran's consul-general in Dubai and an adviser to the Iranian Foreign Ministry.
They came as Sunni and Shiite heavyweights Saudi Arabia and Iran agreed on Saturday to ...   more »

David Leppard
CHILDREN aged 11 to 16 are to have their fingerprints taken and stored on a secret database, internal Whitehall documents reveal.
The leaked Home Office plans show that the mass fingerprinting will start in 2010, with a batch of 295,000 youngsters who apply for passports.
The Home Office expects 545,000 children aged 11 and over to have their prints taken in 2011, with the figure settling at an annual 495,000 from 2014. Their fingerprints will be held on a database also used by the Immigration and Nationality Directorate to store the fingerprints of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers.
The plans are outlined in a series of “restricted” documents circulating among officials in the Identity and Passport Service. They form part of the programme for the introduction of new biometric passports and ID cards.
Opposition politicians and privacy campaigners warn that the plans show ministers are turning Britain into a “surveillance society”.
David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: “This borders on the sinister and it shows the government is trying to end the presumption of innocence. With the fingerprinting of all our children, this government is clearly determined to enforce major changes in the relationship between the ...   more »

Erick Stakelbeck
CBN News
February 27, 2007
And the plot thickens. What this Newsweek article doesn't mention is that Iran will likely act here through its proxy, Hezbollah:
Increasing tensions between Washington and Tehran have revived New York Police Department concerns that Iranian agents may already have targeted the city for terror attacks. Such attacks could be aimed at bridges and tunnels, Jewish organizations and Wall Street..NYPD briefers told security execs last fall, according to a person with access to the briefing materials who asked for anonymity because of the sensitive subject matter.
NYPD officials have worried about possible Iranian-sponsored attacks since a series of incidents involving officials of the Iranian Mission to the United Nations. In November 2003, Ahmad Safari and Alireaza Safi, described as Iranian Mission "security" personnel, were detained by transit cops when they were seen videotaping subway tracks from Queens to Manhattan at 1:10 in the morning. The men later left New York.
"We're concerned that Iranian agents were engaged in reconnaissance that might be used in an attack against New York City at some future date," Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly told NEWSWEEK. A spokesman for the Iranian Mission in New York said he was ...   more »

BY HELEN KENNEDY 
Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, who says he prays daily and has a personal relationship with God, rejects the notion that America is "a Christian nation."
"There's a lot of America that's Christian. I would not describe us, though, on the whole, as a Christian nation," he told the Web site Beliefnet. "I guess the word 'Christian' is what bothers me, even though I'm a Christian. I think that America is a nation of faith."
The former North Carolina senator said he was raised in "a very Christian home" and attended a Southern Baptist church, where his dad was a deacon, but "drifted away" from God when he went to college and got married.
In 1996, when his teenage son died in a car wreck, everything changed, he said. "[In] the days after that, when I was trying to survive and Elizabeth's trying to survive, my faith came roaring back," he said, referring to his wife.
Edwards said he believes that God "will always be there for you," and he said he prays daily. "My faith informs everything I think and do," he said, but he added that he strongly believes in the separation of church and ...   more »

The nation’s first public school with a curriculum mostly dedicated to Arabic language and culture will open next fall in New York and American taxpayers will finance it.
The school will open in Brooklyn in September and will serve 500 to 600 students in grades six through 12. Half of the classes will actually be taught in Arabic and all courses will focus on the culture, which heavily features the religion of Islam.
Education officials say the school will be called the Khalil Gibran International Academy, named after a Lebanese-born Arab writer, painter and philosopher whose work is known around the world.
Although the campus has been named after a peaceful intellect who often wrote about love, there is concern about the actual curriculum since it will teach and promote the religion of Islam. Political Dishonesty calls it hypocrisy since the U.S. Government “frauds” would never start a Jewish school dedicated to the Jewish language and culture or an Irish school dedicated to the Irish language and Catholicism.
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