From www.boston.com
Obama warns Republicans about attacking wife

Michelle Obama is a strong woman, but her husband the presidential candidate warned Republicans to lay off going after her.

"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK," Obama said.

Another Global Test. Who wants Europe running America. Don't give the country a bad case of BO. Vote republican.

www.lifeinitaly.com. Only in Italy.

(ANSA) - Roma, May 14 - Italian men on temporary job
contracts may have to worry about impotence as well as paying
the bills, a leading urologist said on Wednesday.
Speaking ahead of a national urology conference,
Florence Urology Clinic Director Marco Carini said not having
a permanent work contract put young men at risk of either
erectile disfunction or premature ejaculation.
''For young people, job insecurity, economic
difficulties and the impossibility of starting a family are
sources of anxiety and stress and can have serious
repercussions on their sex lives,'' Carini said.
''If there is no stable partner, added to the stress is
the performance anxiety that can flare up during occasional
relations,'' he added.
According to Carini, premature ejaculation afflicts
between 25 and 30% of young men, while erectile disfunction
is a problem for 35% of men under 35 and 47% of those over
36.
Around a million Italian men work as so-called 'precari'
- people with temporary contracts or other forms of contract
that give them little or no job protection or social security
cover - according to figures from national statistics bureau
Istat.
Seven out of ten people with temporary contracts live
with their parents, Istat said.

www.adnkronos.com

Vatican: Holy See signs up for two major climate pacts

Vatican City, 15 May (AKI) - The Vatican has signed two important international climate pacts aimed at protecting the earth's ozone layer and reducing use of the main chemicals that deplete the ozone layer, the Holy See announced on Thursday in a statement.

The Vatican has signed the United Nations' Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer and Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.

The Vienna Convention acts as a framework agreement to safeguard the ozone layer, while the Montreal Protocol contains legally binding targets for the phasing out of chlorofluorocarbons (CFS), a class of chemicals that deplete the ozone layer, contributing to global warming.

"The Holy See desires to encourage the entire international community to be resolute in promoting authentic co-operation between politics, science and economics," said Archbishop Celestino Migliore.

Migliore, Holy See permanent observer to the United Nations in New York, deposited the Vatican's pledge to the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon on 5 May.

"Such co-operation, as has been shown in the case of the ozone regime, can achieve important outcomes, which make it simultaneously possible to safeguard creation, to promote integral human development and to care for the common good, in a spirit of responsible solidarity and with profound positive repercussions for present and future generations," Migliore continued.

By signing up to the two climate pacts, the Holy See hoped that by recognising "the signs of [an economic growth] that has not always been able to protect the delicate balances of nature, all actors will intensify the aforesaid co-operation and strengthen the alliance between man and the environment," he concluded.

From www.theaustralian.news.com.au
Gerard Baker | May 16, 2008

EVERY decade or so the people who control the way we see the world anoint some American politician the Redeemer of a Troubled Planet.

In the late 1960s the media placed the halo on Robert Kennedy, the tragic dynast whose antiwar and civil rights credentials made him in life - as he remains to this day in death - a kind of devotional figure for most political journalists.

Kennedy at least had charisma and intelligence. But to prove that these were by no means necessary preconditions for the honour, it was conferred a few years later on Jimmy Carter, the plodding nonentity elevated by a willingly compliant press into Everyman, brandishing his steely sword of Truth against the Manichean mendacity of Richard Nixon's Republican legacy.

Partly because of the Carter embarrassment, the 1980s were barren years for the idolators. Try as they might, they couldn't work themselves into much ecstasy over Walter Mondale in 1984 or Michael Dukakis in 1988, though they had little flings with bit-part players Gary Hart and (I kid you not) Bruce Babbitt, a genial former governor of Arizona.

But by the 1990s a new Democrat, or rather a New Democrat, was come among us, a man the media told us would lift our eyes from our selfish greed and rid the world of the ineffable misery left by 12 years of reactionary rule. It's hard to imagine now, after the battering he's taken from his old friends in the press these past few months, but Bill Clinton was once their idol. His cleverly cynical balancing act - promising a return to high-minded tolerance while executing mentally ill prisoners in Arkansas, for example - was lauded as a brilliant synthesising of traditional liberal ideology with the political realities of the modern age.

The alert among you will have noticed by now that what all these spiritually uplifting leaders have in common. They are all Democrats. Never in any of the chapters of this hagiography does a Republican, a conservative, appear in a remotely similar light. These alien creatures by contrast have always been portrayed as cartoonish representatives of the Dark Side of humanity, or, if they were really lucky, simply idiots, failed B-movie actors and irredeemably ignorant hicks with embarrassingly neanderthal views on women, religion and communism.

It's been a while coming - neither Al Gore in 2000 (before the luminescence created by his recent joint Nobel/Oscar triumphs) nor John Kerry in 2004 quite fit the bill. But it's fairly clear now that, with the near-certain nomination by the Democrats of Barack Obama everything is in place for the media to indulge in one of the greatest, orgiastic media fiestas of hero-worship since Elvis Presley.

You will not see a finer example of the genre than the cover story of this week's Newsweek, which was entitled "The O Team". This rhapsodic inside account of Senator Obama's campaign reads a little like a cross between Fr Alban Butler's Life of St Francis and the sort of authorised biography of Kim Jong Il you can pick up in any good bookshop in Pyongyang.

Mr Obama is portrayed throughout as an immanently benevolent figure. Not human really, more a comforting presence, a light source. He is always eager to listen to all aides of an argument, always instilling confidence in the weak-willed, resolutely sticking to his high principles, and tirelessly spurning the low road of electoral politics. I stopped reading after a while but I'm sure by the end he was healing the sick, comforting the dying, restoring sight to the blind and setting prisoners free.

The panegyric included the now conventional wisdom in the media that Republicans have only ever won elections in the past 40 years through lies and fearmongering - smearing their opponents and spreading false fears that a vote for a Democrat would open the country to foreign invasion.

To be fair, the Newsweek credo was only the latest and perhaps most shameless phase of the pro-Obama liturgy in the media. Some cable TV channels prostrate themselves nightly before him. Most newspapers worship at the altar. They have already set up a neat narrative for the election between Senator Obama and John McCain in November - the Second Coming versus Old Grouchy, The Little Flower of Illinois up against the Scaremongering Axeman from Arizona.

There's a special irony here. Senator McCain is the Republican who has received probably the single most favourable treatment from the media in the past 40 years. He has been a favourite because he conformed to the first law of contemporary political journalism: the only good conservative is a bad conservative. His willingness to defy his party on everything from taxes to global warming, to take on George Bush, has earned him at least an honourable mention in the martyrology of American politics of the last 40 years.

But now that he's up against Oh! Bama! he will have to be recast in the more familiar Republican mould of villain and scaremonger-in-chief.

This media narrative is not only an outgrowth of the journalists' natural enthusiasm for a Democrat such as Mr Obama. It is a clever ploy to pre-emptively de-legitimise any Republican critique of the Democratic nominee. It is designed to prevent Mr McCain from asking reasonable questions about Mr Obama's strikingly vacuous political background, or raising doubts about his credentials for the presidency.

The idolatry of Mr Obama is a shame, really. The Illinois senator is indeed, an unusually talented, inspiring and charismatic figure. His very ethnicity offers an exciting departure. But he is not a saint. He is a smart and eloquent man with a personal history that is startlingly shallow set against the scale of the office he seeks to hold. It is not only legitimate, but necessary, to scrutinise his past and infer what it might tell us about his beliefs, in the absence of the normal record of achievement expected in a presidential nominee.

If the last 40 years have taught us anything they have surely taught that premature canonisation is an almost certain guarantee of subsequent deep disappointment.

Maybe the locals are just tired the terror and death being imported by the Iranians into Iraq. Payback is a b*tch. From IRNA

 URGENT -- US agents carry terror attacks on Iranian diplomats
Baghdad, May 15, IRNA

Iraq-US-Terror
US agents carried terror attacks on Iranian Embassy staff in Baghdad on Thursday.

Three Iranian diplomats and one local staff of the Embassy were wounded.

1416**1416

---> Iraq-US-Terror

Update: Just the facts from Rueters.

Gunmen wound two Iranian diplomats in Baghdad
15 May 2008 19:15:58 GMT
Source: Reuters
BAGHDAD, May 15 (Reuters) - Gunmen opened fire on a car carrying two Iranian diplomats in Baghdad on Thursday, wounding them and two other people in the vehicle, an Iranian embassy official said.

The official, who declined to be named because he was not authorised to speak to the press, said they were driving in northwestern Baghdad's Kadhimiya district at around 5 p.m. local time (1400 GMT) when the car was struck by automatic gunfire.

He said one of the diplomats was severely wounded. Iraqi police were not immediately available for comment.

You have the right to except Islam. If you give up the right to except Islam you have the right to assume room temperature.
From www2.irna.com

"Islamic world urged to stand against Western-style human rights"

Iran-Larijani-Human Rights
Secretary of the Human Rights Headquarters of Iran's Judiciary Mohammad-Javad Larijani called on all Islamic states on Thursday to stand against the Western-style human rights.

Addressing a local gathering of judiciary officials, Larijani criticized the West's interpretation from the human rights.

He stated that after the victory of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, the country committed to fulfill international undertakings on human rights.

Iran has decided to fulfill those international commitments in accordance to its interest as an Islamic country, stressed the official.

He explained, "Tehran's strategy is to conform international commitments on human rights to the Islamic concepts and then enforce" them nationwide.

According to Larijani, only 20 percent of the international documents signed by Iran on human rights, were different, in words, from Islamic concepts.

"80 percent of international documents signed by Iran on the human rights issue are not literally different from Islamic principles," Larijani said.

The Iranians arrested 15 people for a mosque bombing in Iran. They say the suspects are clandestine agents of the United States and Britain. My question to Senator McCain is this. Will they use Army Field Manual guidelines to question these people, or ball-peen hammers and water boarding to get what they want????????? We all know the answer to that. I think we need to stock up on ball-peen hammers and water boarding stations if we are serious about winning this war on terror.

Here is the story if you want to read it. From www.farsnews.com

Iran Arrests 15 over Shiraz Blast

TEHRAN (FNA)- Iran has arrested a total of 15 people over a deadly mosque bombing in the southern city of Shiraz, the intelligence minister said on Wednesday.

Iranian officials have accused the United States and Britain of training and financing people behind the April 12 bombing which killed 13 people and wounded more than 200.

"So far 15 people have been arrested and all the ones involved in this incident are our country's nationals," Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejehi said.

Iran said the bombers were western-backed monarchists after the arrest of first suspects last week.

Ejehi said the bombers were linked with an anti-Islamic television channel.

"This movement stems from a place that combats Islam. It is a channel broadcasting from London on 'Your TV' since 2004," the minister said of the Persian language opposition satellite channel.

"In their propaganda they targeted Islam, the Koran, God, the prophet (Mohammed) and Islamic sanctities.

"They brainwashed ... lowlifes and incited hatred towards Islam in a way that if they wanted to carry out an operation those people would be very motivated to do it," Ejehi said.

"If a person is told to go bomb a mosque with people at prayers they would not hesitate."

An opposition expatriate group named the Kingdom Assembly of Iran, headed by 'Your TV' host, Forood Fooladvand, claimed responsibility on its website for the blast and vowed that more "hostile acts" were to be expected.

Iranians have a sizeable diaspora community in Iran's arch-foe, the United States, a few of whom support the son of Iran's deposed Shah, Reza Pahlavi.

The intelligence minister said Iran had complained to Britain against people behind the channel in 2005 and 2006 but that the British "did not do anything, in contradiction with their words."

Ejehi also said, "the ones responsible for the Shiraz blast were directly controlled by America and were trained in bombing, acting secretly and escaping. They were provided with equipment and financial aid."

The bombing ripped through a packed mosque, which was a gathering place for members of a religious and cultural centre named Rahpouyan-e Vessal, during the evening prayers sermon led by a prominent local cleric.

The local cleric would preach against Wahhabism - the ultra-conservative form of Sunni Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia.

In his sermon, he also attacked the Bahai faith, whose followers are deemed as apostate by the Islamic republic and their beliefs are not recognized by the constitution.

Ejehi described targeting religious places as an "American package" and stressed that "the United States officially supports people who commit terrorist acts in the east and west of the country."

The intelligence minister also said the people behind the blast "intended to bomb a Russian consulate in northern Iran to harm Iran's relations with its neighbors."

There is not good place to start in refuting this. The lunacy speaks for itself.

 West 'In a Slough Ignorance of Islam'

Once again the CIA and MI6 are publishing dire warnings of the vitality of Al-Qaeda. Once again the Islamic world as a whole is being tarnished by association.

US presidential contender John McCain is saying that America needs a leadership to confront the transcendent challenge of our time: The threat of radical Islamic terrorism.

And the words still ring in our ears from Samuel Huntington's treatise, "The Clash of Civilizations", the book that in many ways triggered this paranoia that infects the politicians, the press and the public discourse. "The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism, it is Islam", he wrote.

Few, if any, in the Western leadership seem to make the point that Al-Qaeda is a deviant phenomenon within the Islamic world, just as Hitler was a deviant phenomenon within the Christian world (commentators seems to overlook Hitler's early speeches calling on Catholic principles). But Islam has a much better record over the ages of dealing with its deviants who take violence to excess. Islamic culture has never been tolerant of Nazism, fascism or communism. Christianity has spawned all three. Buddhism failed to resist Japanese militarism and Confucianism provided hospitable to Maoism. Yes, there was Saddam Hussein but he was an atheistic brute without an ideology.

Of course, there have been many incidents in the long history of Islam when there have been large-scale losses of life. The massacres and starvation of the Armenians in 1915 still stirs the waters of contemporary debate. But Islam has never spawned anything comparable with Hitler's systematic genocide of the Jews - indeed throughout its history Islam has been protective of the Jews, regarding them as "people of the book" to whom it had a special responsibility. Nor has it settled other parts of the world and systematically obliterated other civilizations as did Christian Spain with the Aztecs and Incas. Nor have Islamic societies created anything equivalent to South Africa's apartheid or the racist culture of the old American South. Unlike many Christian churches, the mosque has never separated people by race. Even today Americans confess that nowhere is there more segregation in their society than at the Sunday noon hour.

Western memories are highly selective. When at Easter time the Greek peasants of the Peloponnese began to kill all the Muslims in the land there was silence. But fifty years later when there were mass killings of Christians in Bulgaria there was a great outpouring of moral outrage. Delacroix immortalized the massacre in his painting, "Massacre of Chaos", with Christian women pursued by Turkish lancers and Gladstone wrote a best-selling pamphlet in which he described the Ottomans as leaving "a broad line of blood marking the track behind them, and as far as their domination reached civilization vanished from view".

Almost forgotten today is that it was the Ottomans who gave refuge to the Jews when they were expelled from Iberia, as were fleeing German, French and Czech Protestants, but every cultivated Westerner knows Voltaire's "Fanaticism or Muhammad the Prophet" or Dante's portrayal of Muhammad in hell.

Christianity has always been led or dominated by people of European descent. But the leadership of the Muslim world has been much more fragmented - between AD 661 and 750 it was the Arab Umayyad dynasty. Between 750 and 1258 it was the multiethnic Abbasid dynasty. And from 1453 to 1922, the Turkish-dominated Ottoman Empire. In India there was the separate Moguls and in Persia the Safavids. In sub-Saharan Africa there were the Muslim empires of Mali and Songhai.

Despite their relative poverty today, with great teaming cities like Cairo, Dakha and Jakarta, criminal violence is much, much lower than in Christian-influenced societies.

Muslim countries, according to the UN's annual Human Development report, have the world's lowest murder and rape rates. In Tehran, the capital of Iran, and according to the CIA (allegations) the most important single source of terrorism today, you can go out at 11 or 12 pm at night and find families with children picnicing in city parks. When my daughters' friends ask me where can they safely travel alone in an interesting Third World city I say Cairo. Certainly not Catholic Rio or Protestant Cape Town. Not only are murders and muggings comparatively rarer, there is much less prostitution and hard drug use. Neither is there that much AIDS.

The Western debate about Islam is frankly infantile. Even Barack Obama, with his own personal experience to go off, either is ignorant or just scared of going into battle on these issues. I have not read one speech by one Western politician who seriously attempts to educate public opinion. We live in a slough of ignorance.

ARAB NEWS

Allah is Satan in disguise, and Mohammad was his prophet, feces be upon him.

Published: 15 May 08 13:12 CET
Online: http://www.thelocal.de/11889/

Presenting the government's annual domestic intelligence report, Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble on Thursday said Islamic fundamentalists posed a bigger threat to Germany than neo-Nazis, anarchists or other extremist groups.

Islamist terrorism "continues to be the greatest threat to stability and security in Germany and Europe," Schäuble said in Berlin.

It is only thanks to hard work from German intelligence services and their partners in other countries that there have as yet been no serious terrorist attacks in Germany, Schäuble said. He said Germany continues to be a target for terrorists because of its growing military engagement in Afghanistan and the strengthening of the terrorist network Al Qaida.

Intelligence services must develop their ability to gather information in order to prevent future attacks, Schäuble said.

The interior minister also said neo-Nazis continued attempts last year to infiltrate mainstream German culture, especially by offering recreational programs for young men. Violent right-wing groups are increasingly operating across national borders, he said.

According to the government report issued Thursday, there were 28,538 politically motivated crimes in Germany last year - a slight decrease over 2006. The report attributed 980 crimes to right-wing groups, a slight decrease, and 833 crimes to left-wing extremists.

The government report tallied 4,400 neo-Nazis in Germany in 2007, an increase of 200 people over the previous year. Some 6,300 potentially violent leftists were tallied in 2007.

There were few substantive changes in Germany's extremist left, Schäuble said, despite the much-publicized rise of the hard-line socialist Left party, Die Linke. Germany's domestic intelligence services have long been monitoring individual members of the party, formed in part from the ashes of the East German communist party.

"We must continue to monitor The Left party," Schäuble said, saying there are extremist elements within the party.

Schäuble continued to reject calls to ban the neo-Nazi NPD party, saying a ban "could result in an outcome opposite to our hopes" and adding that right-wing extremism is best fought on a political stage.

Many argue that banning the NPD altogether could push it underground - making it more dangerous and perhaps even more attractive to people who are disaffected with politics.

ddp/dpa

The Local (news@thelocal.de)

www.news.com.au

WEST Australian Opposition Leader Troy Buswell says there is "absolutely no substance" to reports he once did something inappropriate to a marsupial quokka.

Mr Buswell, who has admitted to sniffing the chair of a former Liberal party colleague and snapping the bra of a Labor staffer, was questioned on the rumours today while attending a press conference at Parliament House.

It followed his sacking from the frontbench yesterday of former leader Paul Omodei, who said recently there would be "more stories" to emerge about Mr Buswell and that his leadership would "die the death of a thousand cuts".

Asked if he had done anything inappropriate to a quokka, a small marsupial found on a holiday island off Perth, Mr Buswell replied: "No".

Asked if he was aware of any rumours about actions involving the small marsupials, which are indigenous to Rottnest Island, Mr Buswell said: "I have absolutely no idea about these stories of quokkas on Rottnest.

"I'm not being backward in saying that I'm not a perfect individual and you know I've had a robust past and there may be elements of that that have proved offensive to people.

"I don't shy away away from that at all, but I'm not aware that I've caused any offence to a quokka."

Asked how the rumours had started, Mr Buswell said: "I have no idea.

"I'm not going to comment on it. All I've heard is people use the word quokka and then smile and laugh.

"I'm just not interested to be honest with you."

He said none of his MPs had come to him to report the rumour.

"Members of the press have in passing mentioned the word quokka and suggested to me that something inappropriate in the past may have happened.

"Nothing has, absolutely nothing."

From NRO. Make this one go viral on the net people. All you need to know about Obama.

BARACK OBAMA

Palestinians in Gaza Are Phonebanking for Barack Obama

Phil Klein calls our attention to an al-Jazeera news report that sounds like a parody, but is genuine: A report on Palestinians in Gaza who are phonebanking in support of Barack Obama's campaign.

I transcribed the most jaw-dropping parts:

REPORTER: It may be hard to believe, but working in this tiny Internet cafe in Gaza City may just be one of Barack Obama's biggest fans.

Before every U.S. primary, 23-year-old Ibrahim Abu Jayyab gathers 17 of his friends to try and rally support for Obama's campaign in the U.S.

So why does a young Palestinian living in Gaza spend so much of his time and money on an election thousands of miles away?

ABU JAYYAB: [translated] It all started at the time of the U.S. primaries. After studying Obama's electoral campaign manifesto, I thought, 'this is a man that is capable of change inside America.' As for potential change in the Middle East, he can also do that. I think he can bring peace to the area, or at least this is what we hope.

REPORTER: And the game plan? Ibrahim and his friends call random numbers in the U.S. before every primary to deliver one simple message:

ABU JAYYAB: [in English] Elect Senator Obama. I will change. I will achieve... the justice in the Middle East.

The rest of the report is about Bush failing to achieve peace in the Middle East, the U.S. "unwillingness to apply pressure on Israel over illegal settlements," a professor who says his students are following the election but

A potttery maker says, "unless you support Israel, you won't get in the White House."

The report concludes by showing graffiti in Gaza depicting a monstrous Bush, lips dripping with blood, clutching the world and drinking blood through a straw from a pile of skulls. The caption is, "Good bye Mr. Bush, we wont' miss you."

The reporter's voice over of the graffiti: "There does to be one thing people here agree on."

05/13 02:54 PM