Bertie Ahern - Taosearch for the third time in the Celtic Tiger Economy

Irish PM Bertie Ahern's Fianna Fail party has won the country's general election, but narrowly failed to gain an overall majority in parliament.

Bertis will again be the taoiseach (prime minister) – for the third consecutive terms has led a coalition government since 1997 - a period of sustained economic growth for the Republic

IRISH RESULTS
Fianna Fail: 78 seats ; Fine Gael: 51
Labour: 20; Greens: 6
Independents: 5 ; Sinn Fein: 4
Progressive Democrats: 2
Total seats: 166


The party secured 78 seats in the 166-seat assembly, but saw a decline in the vote of its previous coalition partners, the Progressive Democrats.

Mr Ahern now faces the prospect of tough talks with opposition parties to build a coalition government.

He can count on two independents and two surviving Progressive Democrats.

The current situation is main opposition Fine Gael polled well, winning 51 seats, but its potential coalition partners Labour and the Greens fared less well. As a result, not even these three parties combined could overtake Fianna Fail and the PDs.

The Republic of Ireland's system of proportional representation means that parties' representation in the Dail (lower house of parliament) closely matches their percentage of the vote.

3 days of fighting in Lebanon.

Here is the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, at the northern Lebanon, 4 miles North of Tripoli. At this camp, Lebanese army and militants of Fatah Islam group has been being fighting since yesterday Sunday.

According to Yahoo news: "Lebanese troops pounded a Palestinian refugee camp with artillery and tank fire for a second day Monday, raising huge columns of smoke as they battled a militant group suspected of ties to al-Qaida in the worst violence since the end of the 1975-90 civil war."

Here are pictures:

According to globalsecurity.org, "In what observers say is the worst fighting to hit Tripoli in two decades, army tanks opened fire on positions inside Nahr al-Bared camp held by militants from Fatah Islam, a Sunni al-Qaeda-styled group. ". "Sunday's violence began shortly after dawn when police raided a militant-occupied apartment on a major thoroughfare in Tripoli.

Authorities said police were looking for suspects of a bank robbery a day earlier in Amyoun, a town southeast of Tripoli. Local media reported the gunmen to be members of Fatah Islam. The armed militants resisted arrest and a gun battle ensued. It spread to surrounding streets and continued through the afternoon."

source google earth community.

Editor's note :
Kindly note that the videos were from CCN so hear the bad news but be reserved with their usual mediacracy of "Al Qaedah" related terror in the making and quick in "Bushism terror resolution" of sending in military might. Do you think by making a warlord out of Sinora or his successor will ever solve the issue.

MEDIA STATEMENT - FOUNDATION FOR THE FUTURE.

20 May 2007

The Foundation for the Future was first announced in Bahrain in Novembre 2005 by foreign and development ministers of the broader Middle East, North Africa, Europe and the United States. The Foundation is an independent set-up, involving governments and civil society to support civil society organisations in their efforts to foster democracy and freedom in the broader Middle East and North Africa.

From the onset, the Foundation obtained pledges of US$56 million. Thus far the Foundation only received funds from Turkey, the United Kingdom and Jordan, among others. The US has not disbursed any funds to the Foundation.

I was invited to join the board of the Foundation in mid 2006 together with representatives from Morocco, Kuwait, Iraq, Spain, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, US, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Switzerland and Qatar.

The other board members include Kamel Abu Jaber, advisor to the Jordanian Foreign Minister; Dr. Cornelio Sommaruga, former President of the International Committee of the Red Cross; Professor Ibrahim Kallin, advisor to the Foreign Minister of Turkey; and Sandra Day O'Connor, former US Supreme Court justice.

The first board meeting was convened in Doha, Qatar at the invitation of Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassim Bin Jabr Al-Thani, the Foreign Minister and presently Prime Minister of Qatar on 15 July 2006, and I was unanimously elected as the first honorary chairman. The decision was to set up the headquarters in Beirut.

However, in the Board Meeting on 4 December 2006 in Amman, Jordan, I met the Jordanian Foreign Minister Abdelelah Al-Khatib, who endorsed the setting up of the regional secretariat in Amman due to the delay in the Beirut headquarters as a result of the Israeli attack on Lebanon. The next board meeting will convene in 29-30 May 2007 in Bahrain, Lebanon.

I did not appoint Ms. Shaha Ali Reza to the Foundation. She was first assigned by the World Bank through the US State Department to the Foundation in late 2005 before I became Chairman. The executive committee of the decided in mid 2006 to regularise the appointment so that Shaha advises directly from the World Bank and not the State Department.

The board will issue a full statement after the meeting in Bahrain next week. However, due to the incessant propaganda from the UMNO controlled-media, I have decided to issue this statement. If there is no clarification by the media on the matter, the Foundation will not hesitate to institute legal action against the relevant parties.

ANWAR IBRAHIM

Foundation for the Future Chairman

Kedudukan Kelantan - kewangan, Jenayah & Rasuah

Call That Humiliation?

Published on Saturday, March 31, 2007 by The Guardian/UK



No hoods. No electric shocks. No beatings. These Iranians Clearly Are a Very Uncivilised Bunch
by Terry Jones

I share the outrage expressed in the British press over the treatment of our naval personnel accused by Iran of illegally entering their waters. It is a disgrace. We would never dream of treating captives like this - allowing them to smoke cigarettes, for example, even though it has been proven that smoking kills. And as for compelling poor servicewoman Faye Turney to wear a black headscarf, and then allowing the picture to be posted around the world - have the Iranians no concept of civilised behaviour? For God’s sake, what’s wrong with putting a bag over her head? That’s what we do with the Muslims we capture: we put bags over their heads, so it’s hard to breathe. Then it’s perfectly acceptable to take photographs of them and circulate them to the press because the captives can’t be recognised and humiliated in the way these unfortunate British service people are.

It is also unacceptable that these British captives should be made to talk on television and say things that they may regret later. If the Iranians put duct tape over their mouths, like we do to our captives, they wouldn’t be able to talk at all. Of course they’d probably find it even harder to breathe - especially with a bag over their head but at least they wouldn’t be humiliated.

And what’s all this about allowing the captives to write letters home saying they are all right? It’s time the Iranians fell into line with the rest of the civilised world: they should allow their captives the privacy of solitary confinement. That’s one of the many privileges the US grants to its captives in Guantánamo Bay.

The true mark of a civilised country is that it doesn’t rush intocharging people whom it has arbitrarily arrested in places it’s just invaded. The inmates of Guantánamo, for example, have been enjoying all the privacy they want for almost five years, and the first inmate has only just been charged. What a contrast to the disgraceful Iranian rush to parade their captives before the cameras!

What’s more, it is clear that the Iranians are not giving their British prisoners any decent physical exercise. The US military make sure that their Iraqi captives enjoy PT. This takes the form of exciting “stress positions”, which the captives are expected to hold for hours on end so as to improve their stomach and calf muscles. A common exercise is where they are made to stand on the balls of their feet and then squat so that their thighs are parallel to the ground. This creates intense pain and, finally, muscle failure. It’s all good healthy fun and has the bonus that the captives will confess to anything to get out of it.

And this brings me to my final point. It is clear from her TV appearance that servicewoman Turney has been put under pressure. The newspapers have persuaded behavioural psychologists to examine the footage and they all conclude that she is “unhappy and stressed”.

What is so appalling is the underhand way in which the Iranians have got her “unhappy and stressed”. She shows no signs of electrocution or burn marks and there are no signs of beating on her face. This is unacceptable. If captives are to be put under duress, such as by forcing them into compromising sexual positions, or having electric shocks to their genitals, they should be photographed, as they were in Abu Ghraib. The photographs should then be circulated around the civilised world so that everyone can see exactly what has been going on.

As Stephen Glover pointed out in the Daily Mail, perhaps it would not be right to bomb Iran in retaliation for the humiliation of our servicemen, but clearly the Iranian people must be made to suffer - whether by beefing up sanctions, as the Mail suggests, or simply by getting President Bush to hurry up and invade, as he intends to anyway, and bring democracy and western values to the country, as he has in Iraq.

> Terry Jones is a film director, actor and Python
> www.terry-jones.net

> © 2007 The Guardian