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WASHINGTON (AP) — The American commanding general in Afghanistan says he was surprised by President Hamid Karzai’s recent criticism of U.S. military operations in his country, but denies he considered resigning.
Army Gen. David Petraeus (peh-TRAY’-uhs ) tells ABC News that Karzai’s demand that the U.S. reduce the visibility and intensity of its military operations “was a surprise.” Karzai had told The Washington Post it was time to reduce “the intrusiveness into the daily Afghan life.”
Petraeus told interviewer George Stephanopoulos that he discussed Karzai’s remarks with him a couple days after the interview and said Karzai responded that the remarks were a reiteration of statements he’s made previously. Petraeus said he was reassured that he could continue to work with Karzai.
(This version CORRECTS APNewsNow. Replaces last paragraph to correct spelling of Stepanopoulos’ name.)
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Consuming healthy food items is necessary for dropping pounds. A lot of people will make changes to primary meals such as breakfast, lunch and dinner in order to drop weight. Nevertheless, in regards to snacks individuals usually forget these food calories happen to be important for weight loss also. A dieter will notice eating healthy to lose weight will involve keeping track of food products consumed during a meal and snack foods.
First of all, to get rid of unwanted pounds permanently, a number of snacks and meals should be consumed all day long. Those meals and snacks should be consumed roughly every two to three hours. A morning meal should be eaten within sixty minutes of getting up. A last snack ought to be eaten two or three hours before bedtime. Eating meals and snacks throughout the day helps keep metabolic rate boosted.
Another technique to eliminate pounds permanently is consuming approximately one thousand five hundred calories every day. Dieters might have to slowly reduce calorie consumption to get to this amount. Regarding those calories, most calories should be consumed some time earlier in the day. Whenever food is consumed earlier, a body will have plenty of time to properly digest food items as well as to use up those calories.
Given that many individuals experience hunger all day long, snack foods are often eaten. Snacks are where a number of people struggle with decreasing pounds. The majority of individuals keep on hand cookies, candy bars and chips as their snacks. These kinds of products are full of substances that result in extra fat. If a dieter does not consume nutritious snack foods removing extra weight is challenging.
A wonderful snack food whenever eating healthy to lose weight happens to be a mixture having dark chocolate chips, raisins, raw sesame seeds and raw almonds. This particular snack is loaded with dietary fiber and will be very nutritious. All those items assist in removing extra weight. In addition, dark chocolate chips and raisins will satisfy a person’s hunger for sweets and chocolate.
Almonds and sesame seeds that are raw furnish dietary protein plus essential fats. Though, when these foods are roasted most of the healthy fats turn into harmful fat that will be harmful for the human body. Thus, when removing weight happens to be the objective eating raw seeds and nuts is helpful.
Best of all, people can generally discover everything necessary in the local food store. Nonetheless, if a local food store does not have raw sesame seeds or almonds then check on the internet. Nutritionally sound foods for an affordable cost can be found through the web. Once dieters know which foods they should choose eating healthy to lose weight all day long will be simple.
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KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghanistan’s finance minister warned Saturday that the release of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables will hurt U.S.-Afghan relations, and he denied a report that he called President Hamid Karzai an “extremely weak man.”
Afghan Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal said it will no longer be “business as usual” between key Afghan ministers and U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry. The rift could jeopardize Eikenberry’s effectiveness as America’s top diplomat in Kabul at a time when U.S.-Afghan relations are already strained.
Zakhilwal said he never called Karzai “an extremely weak man” as reported in a U.S. Embassy cable dated Feb. 26, 2010.
The report is “absolutely, categorically wrong and false,” Zakhilwal said. “This leaves no trust between me and the ambassador — extremely little trust.”
He accused Eikenberry of misquoting him in the cable to further Eikenberry’s own opinion of the president.
“The ambassador has used my name to support his views of the president,” Zakhilwal said.
Eikenberry, a retired lieutenant general who once commanded troops in Afghanistan, warned last year against sending substantial numbers of troops because Karzai was not a reliable partner.
Eikenberry did not immediately comment on Zakhilwal’s remarks.
Details from a vast tranche of cables released by the WikiLeaks website portray Afghanistan as rife with graft to the highest levels of government. The leaks could further erode support for the nine-year war and bolster the concerns of U.S. lawmakers who have threatened to hold back aid until they are convinced the money will not end up lining the pockets of the political elite.
Karzai’s spokesman, Waheed Omar, has said that the presidential office was reviewing the documents, but that he did not believe they would strain U.S.-Afghan relations. He could not immediately be reached for comment Saturday.
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Many people have hectic schedules. As a consequence, taking time to eat nourishing food items as well as work out is typically hard. Thus, people turn to unhealthy routines for instance eating junk food items plus excluding exercise. Both of these actions promote weight gain. If dieters want long term loss of fat discovering healthy ways to lose weight is essential.
First of all, an appropriate method people can get rid of body weight is working out half an hour daily. This amount helps to reduce putting weight on in many individuals. Although, exercising only 30 minutes daily will not necessarily get rid of unwanted fat. In order to lose extra body weight, people have a pair of options. The first alternative is working out longer than thirty minutes every day. Research has discovered exercise beyond 30 minutes leads to loss of pounds. Number two option will be changing eating practices, which is discussed a little later.
One more thing in regards to physical activity that happens to be important in decreasing excessive fat is participating in different types of exercises. When individuals just engage in one kind of physical activity the body gets familiar with that activity. As a consequence, in order to decrease excessive fat an individual will need to enhance intensity levels or else exercise longer in order to challenge a human body plus use up food calories. A simpler technique for dropping weight will be mixing up exercises. Therefore, dieters should try to exercise forty-five minutes every day as well as do various exercises in order to lose weight.
Another healthy method to decrease body fat is modifying food consumption routines. Dieters can find two healthy ways to lose weight by modifying eating routines. One method happens to be watching exactly how much food is consumed. A lot of individuals eat abundant quantities of food items each day. On average, fifteen hundred calories ought to be drank and eaten per day. But, several individuals eat or drink around 3,000 calories. To drop excessive fat long term, individuals should slowly cut down on food quantities to approximately 1,500 calories every day.
Second alternative is controlling types of foods eaten. Individuals are going to experience a hard time reducing weight consuming boxed or canned foods. Those kinds of foods are generally packed with poor quality ingredients for instance hydrogenated oils and refined sugar that research has discovered bring about extra fat. Rather, an individual should eat natural fresh foods for example raw nuts, vegetables, raw seeds and fruits. These types of food items will be packed with nutrients and therefore result in fat loss.
Though daily routines in society today tend to be more hectic than before, healthy methods to eliminate weight need to be discovered. There are a number of methods existing for eliminating excess weight. However, a person will discover healthy ways to lose weight long term consist of engaging in different workouts in addition to consuming appropriate portion amounts of nourishing foods.
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EIN HOD, Israel (AP) — The cause of the worst forest fire in Israel’s history is likely negligence, not arson, authorities said Saturday, as firefighters from around the world battled the blaze whipping through northern pine forests toward the Mediterranean.
A spokesman for Israel’s police would not go into detail about the kind of negligence or explain why authorities were now leaning away from earlier suspicions of arson until further investigation had been carried out.
By midday Saturday, firefighters still had not brought the blaze under control, said the spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld.
The fires burning north of the city of Haifa began Thursday, killing 41 people — most of them prison guards whose bus was engulfed by flames while they were on their way to evacuate a prison. The fires have forced the evacuation of 17,000 people.
The blaze was burning through the Carmel Forest, a prized area of woodland, sending a dark cloud of ash over much of northern Israel.
Israel’s small firefighting force was overwhelmed and the country sent out an unprecedented call for international help. Aircraft from Turkey, Greece, Cyprus and Britain were dumping sea water and flame retardant over the area.
Two more communities were evacuated Saturday morning. Some residents refused to go and pleaded with firefighters for help save their homes. One woman in the small artist community of Ein Hod desperately tried to protect her home from the encroaching flames with only a garden hose.
Residents of a nearby farming village were also ordered to leave.
Above them, small planes swooped and dumped orange fire retardant and sea water over tracts of dry pines that were lit in flames.
U.S. planes laden with equipment were expected to land later Saturday, alongside planes sent from New York City’s firefighting department, a military official said.
Fewer than half of those killed had been identified by late Friday because bodies had been burned beyond recognition.
The cadet prison guards were from some of Israel’s diverse communities: Arabs, Israelis of Russian and Ethiopian descent, working class Jews of Middle Eastern descent. They included young women about to be married and men who left behind widows.
The fire had burned about 15 square miles (40 square kilometers) of land — at least half of that national forest, said Hanan Goder of the Foreign Ministry, which is partly coordinating the response to the fire.
While small by international standards, the loss of the verdant forest was keenly felt in Israel, where only 7 percent of the land is wooded.
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PARIS (AP) — The European Central Bank’s chief says the euro remains a “credible” currency despite the debt crisis that has required the bailouts of Ireland and Greece and raised worries about Portugal and Spain.
Jean-Claude Trichet is also urging European governments to make a “quantum leap” toward reforming and cleaning up their budgets. Speaking Friday in Paris, he said, “This is no time for complacency.”
He would not single out any country or comment on whether the ECB has increased its purchase of Irish and Portuguese bonds amid worries about their debts.
Trichet insisted “the euro is a credible currency. The euro is a currency that is considered just as credible for the next 10 years as for the last 12 years.”
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.
LONDON (AP) — The European Central Bank stepped up efforts to contain the continent’s government debt crisis, as bank president Jean-Claude Trichet announced it would prolong measures to provide ready cash to banks and steady the financial system.
Markets were initially disappointed Thursday when Trichet did not say the bank would go even further and increase its purchases of government bonds. The euro sagged almost a cent during his news conference.
But it quickly bounced back, trading higher on the day on market chatter that the bank might in fact be quietly buying bonds of financially troubled eurozone countries — despite Trichet’s reticence on the issue.
By late-afternoon London time, the euro was trading 0.2 percent higher on the day at $1.3164.
Additionally, the ten-year bonds of both Ireland and Portugal suddenly rose.
For the Portuguese government, that’s a big relief as it struggles to keep borrowing costs from climbing out of reach and having to follow Greece and Ireland in seeking a bailout from its partner governments in the euro and the International Monetary Fund.
“This gave the impression of increased activity on behalf of the ECB in those markets,” said Elwin de Groot, an economist at Rabobank International.
The bank, the European Union and the 16 governments that share the euro are struggling to contain a crisis caused by too much state debt in some countries. They are trying to reassure bond investors that countries will not default and keep the interest rates on their debt loads from rising so high they can no longer afford to borrow.
Governments are slashing spending and raising taxes to cut their deficits, but that has raised fears that austerity will slow growth and make debt even harder to pay.
By offering more support for the economy, Trichet has clearly changed course from last month’s meeting, when he indicated Europe was doing well enough for the bank to gradually phase out its emergency liquidity measures.
Last weekend’s crisis bailout of Ireland changed all that however. Now markets are worrying Portugal and even much larger Spain might join Greece and Ireland in needing a bailout.
Markets widely expected the bank would step up and do more, given the potential consequences in the peripheral countries of Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. The EU’s top monetary official, Olli Rehn, openly lobbied for the bank to take action.
The ECB decided that it will prolong its one-week, one-month and three-month funding operations will continue at a fixed rate and at full allotment through to the first quarter of 2011. Those operations reduce anxiety in the financial system by offering banks all the short-term credit they want at the central bank’s record low rates.
Trichet indicated that those measures could be extended even further if needed and that the central bank kept its mind open to increasing its bond buying program.
“We are constantly looking at the situation of the markets and at the acute tensions,” Trichet said.
Though Trichet said the bond buying program was “ongoing” and that he had never said what the limit of the program was, many in the markets had been predicting that the ECB would indicate that it was stepping up the pace.
The euro and government bonds have been buoyed over the past couple of days in hopes that more bond buying would keep government bond prices up and interest yields down.
So far, the ECB is thought to have made around euro70 billion in direct bond purchases. The policy has proved controversial and Germany’s representative on the governing council Axel Weber had recently called for the program to be axed.
Unlike the Federal Reserve, the ECB’s bond purchases are not considered to expand the supply of money in the economy because the central bank “sterilizes” its bond purchases — as well as putting money back into the financial system through its bond buys, the ECB takes money out elsewhere.
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SAN DIEGO (AP) — People come and go at odd hours. The walls vibrate from jackhammers. Tenants pay rent in cash.
In San Diego’s Otay Mesa industrial area, these are signs that warehouses may be housing cross-border tunnels used to smuggle huge amounts of drugs from Tijuana, Mexico.
After two major underground passages were discovered last month less than two blocks from one of nation’s busiest border crossings for cargo, federal authorities are knocking on doors of warehouse owners and tenants to ask for help.
They hope to learn more about the 12,000 businesses that occupy Otay Mesa’s nondescript warehouses and low-slung office parks. The streets hum with cargo trucks by day and fall silent on nights and weekends.
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who visited two offices Thursday peppered managers with questions before asking to look around: What line of work are you in? Who is your landlord? How many neighboring suites are leased?
“We’re trying to get as many eyes and ears in the community as we can,” Jonathon White, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s San Ysidro agent in charge, reassured one manager, a customs broker.
The tunnels discovered last month ran about 2,000 feet and were equipped with rail car, lighting and ventilation systems. According to U.S. authorities, both were the work of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, headed by that country’s most-wanted drug lord, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
The discoveries produced some of the largest marijuana seizures in the United States.
A passage discovered Nov. 2 that ran between warehouses in Tijuana and San Diego resulted in seizures of 30 tons on both sides of the border. A tunnel found on Thanksgiving Day resulted that ran from a Tijuana home to two San Diego warehouses produced seizures of than 20 tons on both sides of the border
Outlets for the tunnel found last week were in bustling office parks, only 800 feet part. Looking back, neighbors said they missed clear warning signs.
One next-door neighbor remembers hearing voices through the walls at night and rarely seeing anyone during the day. The front door was spray-painted to prevent anyone from looking inside.
Mario Rodriguez, who worked next door to the tunnel’s other outlet, said he never saw anyone come or go.
“We don’t realize until it’s too late,” said Rodriguez, 46. “Look over there, across the street. I have no idea what they do.”
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LIMBE, Haiti (AP) — A gray-haired woman, her eyes sunken and unfocused from dehydration, stumbles up a dirt path slumped on the shoulder of a young man, heading to a rural clinic so overcrowded that plastic tarps have been strung up outside to shade dozens who can’t fit inside.
On the path to the clinic, another cholera victim lies dazed, her head bleeding because she couldn’t stay atop the motorcycle taxi that carried her along the twisting country roads to the treatment center on the front line of Haiti’s sudden battle with cholera.
Nearby, a 16-month-old girl wails as a nurse prods her with a needle, trying to find a vein for the intravenous fluids she needs to save her life.
Many feared Haiti’s growing epidemic would overwhelm a capital teeming with more than 1 million people left homeless by January’s earthquake. But, so far, it is the countryside seeing the worst of an epidemic that has killed nearly 1,900 people since erupting less than two months ago.
Rural clinics are overrun by a spectral parade of the sick, straining staff and supplies at medical outposts that could barely handle their needs before the epidemic.
At the three-room clinic near Limbe, in northern Haiti, a handful of doctors and nurses are treating 120 people packed into three rooms.
“It’s really attacking us,” Guy Valcoure, grandfather of the 16-month-old, says of the cholera. He piled on the back of a motorcycle with the baby and her mother to make a 40-minute ride in pre-dawn gloom to reach the clinic.
Holding a plastic cup in case his granddaughter gains enough strength to drink some water, Valcoure watches anxiously as a nurse tries without success to find a vein to give her intravenous fluids. Eventually, a doctor manages to get an IV into the baby’s foot. “She’s going to be OK,” the nurse tells Valcoure.
Not everyone is so fortunate. It was too late to save an old woman carried to the clinic on a door over the weekend, says Dr. Benson Sergiles, a doctor from Cap-Haitien on loan to the clinic. “It’s getting worse by the day,” he says, his eyes bleary from being up all night.
And experts say the disease has not yet reached its peak.
The Health Ministry says there have been more than 80,000 cases since cholera was first detected in late October and the Pan-American Health Organization projects it could sicken 400,000 people within a year.
A makeshift clinic run by the aid group Doctors Without Borders in Cap-Haitien is seeing 250 patients a day and expects two or three times as many in coming weeks, said Dr. Esther Sterk, a physician from the Netherlands in charge of the treatment center in a crowded gymnasium.
The cases are also rising further into the countryside, as at the little clinic near Limbe.
“I don’t think we’re anywhere near the end of this,” said Dr. John Jensen, a Canadian doctor volunteering with his wife, a nurse, for nearly a month at the clinic about 12 miles (20 kilometers) west of Cap-Haitien.
Fear over the spread of cholera even triggered a violent witch-hunt in the remote southwestern Grand Anse region, where locals have killed at least 12 neighbors on suspicions they used “black magic” to infect people, national police spokesman Frantz Lerebours said Thursday.
Cholera made its first appearance on record in Haiti near the central town of Mirebalais. From there it spread north through the Artibonite region. It has sickened thousands in the capital, but it is the vast rural population that is most vulnerable because cholera is spread by bacteria in contaminated water, and poor rural people often have no access to clean water and no clinics nearby.
“Most Haitians live in rural areas and most don’t have latrines,” said Dr. Louise Ivers of the medical aid group Partners in Health. “Most people have to do their business in a hole in the back garden and drink water from an unprotected source.”
It is these people who have the fewest options when they get sick. “Why do you die from cholera? Because you don’t have access to health care,” Ivers said.
A hospital in the central Haitian city of Maissade has just two physicians to care for a population of 60,000. That center along had treated 350 cholera patients as of last week, said Dr. Tim Rindlisbacher of Toronto, Canada, who recently worked there as a volunteer with the Canadian aid group Humanity First.
He said he believes many more never got treatment.
“It is easy to miss it in the rural areas,” Rindlisbacher said. “There’s a lot of people who never make it to a hospital, never make it to a doctor and there’s no way of tracking those people.”
In much of the countryside, public transportation is rare. The nearest doctor or nurse could be a trek of many hours through the mountains. Even in the cities, ambulances don’t exist and cholera patients usually travel by taxi or collective transport.
Associated Press journalists this week came upon four men carrying a 14-year-old boy on a stretcher along a dirt road, his mother trudging alongside. They had been walking four hours from their village to the town of Grand Riu Du Nord, in mountains about 16 miles (25 kilometers) south of Cap-Haitien to reach a clinic staffed by Cuban doctors, who treated the boy.
A maddening fact about cholera, which rapidly drains the bodily fluids from its victims, is that it is easy to treat and most people survive if they get medical attention. Doctors Without Borders says the disease has a mortality rate of less than 1.5 percent among people who reach the more than two dozen treatment centers it operates around Haiti.
Yet no one knows how many are dying uncounted and alone out in the countryside.
One small village visited by Guytho Alphonse, a public health promoter for the aid group Oxfam, is a three-hour walk from the nearest medical clinic. He said villagers told him that an entire family of six had died of the disease. His visit was meant to prevent such tragedies: he was distributing oral rehydration mixture and chlorine for treating wells.
Dr. Thony Michlet Voltaire, who runs a hospital in the town of Sante Borgne, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) from Cap-Haitien, said he was getting 40 patients a day. He said seven people had arrived in such bad shape over the past week that they could not be saved.
“A lot of people are dying at home because they can’t make it to us,” said Voltaire, who said his clinic, the Alliance Sante Borgne, was in dire need of medicine, volunteers and such basic supplies as clean bed sheets.
Aid groups and international organizations such as the United Nations are working on campaigns to confront the outbreak, but Ivers and others said it will take an army of health workers to stop cholera’s spread.
“Let me put it this way: We have 3,000 community health workers and we are hiring more … as many as we can,” she said.
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Lots of dieting programs promote to be an individual’s fastest and easiest strategy to lose fat. Although some fat loss plans may be simple and quick, people may want to be cautious if using those diet programs. Every person wants an effective rapid as well as easy way to lose weight however individuals might want to look for healthy ways for losing weight also. Thankfully, individuals can locate healthy in addition to simple techniques to lose weight without spending a fortune.
An excellent strategy to reduce weight that will be healthy in addition to easy will be consuming more meals in the home instead of going out. People typically consume a lot more foods when eating at restaurants since food establishments serve large meals. Also, those food items an individual eats at restaurants are often higher in calories and fat than foods consumed at home. Therefore, individuals should try and consume food products within the house whenever possible.
Looking at portions, no matter if consuming foods within the house or else in dining establishments a person ought to manage portions. Throughout the past several decades, possibly the most horrible food trend was the explosion in portion sizes. In this market, people are ingesting more than a human body requires. A terrific technique people can control portion sizes is instantly taking away thirty-three percent of the food on a plate regardless of whether dining on foods within the house or at restaurants. The food taken off might be consumed at lunchtime the next day. Research has discovered when extra foods are served a dieter eats larger amounts of food regardless of just how famished he or she is. Alternatively, when fewer foods are on a plate a dieter eats less. So, a healthy as well as easy way to lose weight will be managing portion amounts.
Another strategy to reduce pounds that is healthy and straightforward will be eating leisurely and calmly. Quite a few dieters eat quickly thus tend to eat even more foods compared to what a body must have. A fantastic way an individual could consume food products more leisurely is putting their fork or spoon down after every bite. Another ideal technique a dieter can eat more leisurely will be consuming water regularly throughout their meal. Lastly, a wonderful technique individuals could dine on foods slower will be talking during the meal. An individual’s brain requires approximately twenty minutes to recognize its stomach is filled. Hence, whenever individuals dine on foods slow enough, their mind will alert them no further food products are desired.
There consist of a number of methods offered to lose weight. Certain techniques tend to be simpler and quicker compared to other techniques. Nonetheless, if searching for an effective quick in addition to easy way to lose weight dieters also must make certain the method will be safe.
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There are those who know about the existence of dietary supplements but are unclear about their uses. In addition, many of us are biased to not use these products since we are suspicious about their side effects. Our suspicion is baseless most of the times when we do not even have substantial evidence to back our claim that these dietary supplements are hazardous to our health in the long run. Dietary supplements are preparations consumed in addition to normal diet that are capable of providing different vital nutrients such as vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fibers and fatty acids that are otherwise missing in our daily diet or not available in adequate quantities. Hence, dietary supplements are popularly known as nutritional supplements or food supplements. Dietary supplements are only regarded as drugs and natural health enhancing substances in many countries while only in some counties they are advertised as proper foods.
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But before consuming these products, you must realize that it is imperative for the athletes to maintain proper levels of nutrition needed to have the extreme strength, optimum agility and also endurance resulting in an improved overall performance. The complete nourishment that the body requires can be supplied by backing up regular diet with these sports supplements. Any good athletic program has for its founding levels a right combination of the correct foods along with sports nutrition supplements to complete the diet.
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CAIRO (AP) — Egypt’s largest opposition group has not won a single seat in the first round of parliamentary elections with more than 40 percent of contests decided.
The fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, which has alleged rampant fraud in Sunday’s vote, controls a fifth of the seats in the outgoing parliament. The leading opposition group suffered the dramatic setback after years of government crackdowns, especially during the election campaign.
The Brotherhood says it is weighing its next move and may boycott runoffs on Dec. 5, when 26 of its candidates are slated to compete.
Official results for the first round, announced late Tuesday, gave President Hosni Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Party 209 of 508 seats. The round decided 43 percent of seats.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.
CAIRO (AP) — President Hosni Mubarak’s ruling party has captured nearly all the parliament seats that were decided in a first round of voting, according to results announced Tuesday from elections that Egypt’s opposition has decried as riddled with violations.
Egypt’s largest opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, dismissed the results, which accounted for 43 percent of parliament’s 508 seats. The rest will be decided in runoffs on Dec. 5, but the fundamentalist Brotherhood expects to be almost entirely swept out of parliament by what it said was rampant rigging, intimidation and vote-buying — allegations echoed by rights groups.
That would be a huge blow to the most powerful opposition force, which shocked the ruling National Democratic Party in the last election in 2005 by winning 88 seats, or a fifth of parliament. A sustained government crackdown has since weakened the group, which is outlawed but fields candidates as independents.
Brotherhood leader Mohammed Badie said Mubarak’s government had broken its promise to hold clean elections, but vowed his group would not resort to violence.
“We will not allow anyone to tempt us into breaking the law,” he told a news conference. “The crimes committed by the regime clearly reflect its weakness and confusion. … Whatever is built on falsehood is false,” he added. “The election is invalid.”
Results announced Tuesday showed the ruling party has so far secured 209 seats. Opposition parties won five seats and independents seven — none of them for the Brotherhood. The group has 27 members who will stand in the weekend runoffs for those contests where no candidate won more than 50 percent of votes.
Sunday’s vote has been closely watched for any indications on the political direction of Egypt ahead of a more crucial presidential election in 2011. Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt for nearly 30 years and is now 82, underwent surgery earlier this year to remove a gallbladder. Many believe he is positioning his son, Gamal, to succeed him, but there is widespread public opposition to “inheritance” of power.
The ferocity of the crackdown on the Brotherhood could indicate a concern among authorities that uncertainty over Mubarak’s continued grip on power could open the way for escalating dissent in a country with widespread poverty and increasingly vocal protests over food prices, unemployment and other economic hardships. Opponents say the ruling party aimed to sweep parliament to ensure it does not become a platform for dissent.
The Obama administration said Monday it was dismayed by reports of election-day interference and intimidation by security forces — irregularities that call into question the fairness and transparency of the process. Egypt is a key U.S. ally in the Middle East.
State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters Tuesday that ultimately it was up to the Egyptian government to satisfy its people’s desire for broader participation in the political process.
“We will, as part of our ongoing dialogue with Egypt, continue, where we feel appropriate, to express our concerns about these kinds of developments,” Crowley said.
Egypt’s High Election Commission acknowledged a few isolated cases of fraud and violence but denied they undermined the integrity of the election. Spokesman Sameh el-Kashef told reporters Tuesday that 1.4 percent of nearly 90,000 ballot boxes were discarded due to tampering.
“While the commission deeply regrets these violations, it is satisfied and reassured that these violations didn’t impact the integrity and fairness of the results of the first round of elections,” he said.
The commission said turnout was 35 percent, considerably higher than the figure of no more than 15 percent given by most observers and rights groups.
Though it considers the election to be rigged, the Brotherhood maintains it is better to have a presence within parliament to expose Egypt’s electoral and political problems.
In the run-up to the Nov. 28 election, at least 1,400 Brotherhood supporters were arrested.
The group, founded in 1928, has been outlawed for more than 50 years, but its network of social services and participation in elections as independents has been largely tolerated by the government.
Other opposition parties leveled similar charges against the government of violating promises to hold free and fair elections.
___
Associated Press writers Sarah El Deeb in Cairo and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.
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ASTANA, Kazakhstan (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called on a European security organization Wednesday to play a bigger role in helping stabilize Afghanistan and to do more to strengthen the voice of human rights groups worldwide.
In the aftermath of the leak of huge numbers of sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables by the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy website, Clinton also urged a greater commitment to press freedom, but she made no overt reference to the embarrassing episode.
“It is not enough for a constitution to guarantee freedom of the press if, in reality, journalists are put under intense pressure and even assaulted,” she told the opening session of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s first summit meeting in 11 years.
She made no explicit mention of WikiLeaks, nor did it come up in other officials’ speeches on the first day of the summit.
On the sidelines of the summit, Clinton and her Belarussian counterpart, Sergei Martynov, announced that the former Soviet republic of Belarus will give up its stockpile of material used to make nuclear weapons by 2012.
That’s a significant step forward in efforts aimed at keeping nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists, and follows similar commitments made by other former Soviet republics, including Kazakhstan. Washington will provide technical and financial help to enable Belarus to dispose of its highly enriched uranium stocks.
On Afghanistan, Clinton said the OSCE can play an important role to improve border security, counter illicit trafficking, boost legitimate trade, promote economic development and help develop national institutions.
She urged a recommitment to what she called “comprehensive security” — not just protection against armed attack but also protection of democracy, human rights and fundamental freedoms.
The summit is being held over two days in Astana, the gleaming new Kazakh capital rising from the sparsely populated northern steppes.
The OSCE was born in the 1970s to nurture rapprochement between Cold War enemies. But the organization has in recent years struggled to define a clear purpose — an anxiety reflected in the speeches of many leaders at the Astana summit.
In the opening address, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon lamented shortcomings among the group’s members in enforcing the rule of law and protecting the rights of minorities.
“The OSCE unfortunately sometimes sees violations of its commitments in its own area,” he told delegates.
Those words will have been uncomfortable fare for summit host nation Kazakhstan, whose government has been subjected to frequent OSCE admonitions for failing to live up to commitments on improving media freedoms and democratic standards.
European Union President Herman Van Rompuy enjoined the OSCE to energize its role as a mediating influence in times of conflict.
“The OSCE’s capability in early warning … as well as in crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation needs to be strengthened,” Van Rompuy said.
Failure to achieve any breakthrough in Europe’s various territorial stalemates, from Moldova’s separatist Trans-Dniester region to the perennial tension between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region, has served as an embarrassing reminder of the OSCE’s weakness to effect significant change.
“By the very use of words like ‘unresolved’ or ‘protracted,’ we risk putting these conflicts into a special category, beyond hope as it were,” Van Rompuy said.
Meanwhile, in a thinly veiled broadside at Russia, Clinton chided efforts to obstruct the placement of an OSCE mission in Georgia, whose own territorial integrity has been undermined by Moscow’s diplomatic and financial support for the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
“It is regrettable that a participating state has proposed to host a mission, and the OSCE has not been allowed to respond,” Clinton said.
Russia fought a brief but intense war with Georgia over South Ossetia in 2008.
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BEIJING (AP) — China, one of the biggest Internet policers, took no chances with the latest online sensation and blocked the WikiLeaks website Wednesday amid potentially embarrassing claims made in leaked U.S. diplomatic memos posted there.
Attempts to access wikileaks.org and cablegate.wikileaks.org were met with a notice saying the connection had been reset, or were diverted the user to popular Chinese search engine Baidu. That’s the standard response when the connection to an overseas-based website has been cut.
The U.S. Embassy memos — called cables, though they are mostly encrypted electronic communication — contain some frank talk about and attributed to Chinese figures and their North Korean allies.
In one, a Chinese diplomat is quoted describing North Korea as a “spoiled child” for attempting to win U.S. attention with a provocative missile test.
China’s representative to six-nation disarmament talks, meanwhile, is described by a South Korean diplomat as an “arrogant, Marx-spouting former Red Guard who ‘knows nothing about North Korea, nothing about nonproliferation.’”
Another memo reveals details of a Chinese contingency plan for North Korea’s collapse — the existence of which is likely to drive a wedge between the allies at the very least.
The leaks also claimed that leadership of China’s ruling Communist Party directed a cyber-intrusion into Google’s computer systems, and expressed concern over attempts by Iranian front companies to obtain Chinese nuclear technology.
It wasn’t clear when the blocks were imposed, although a vast swath of the Internet is inaccessible behind China’s firewall, including social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Human rights and political dissent-themed sites are also routinely banned, although technologically savvy users can easily jump the so-called “Great Firewall” with proxy servers or other alternatives.
China’s government has taken a low-key approach to the leaks, with the Foreign Ministry saying it would not comment on specific assertions in the cables.
“China takes note of relevant reports. We hope the U.S. side will properly handle the relevant issue. As for the content of the documents, we do not comment on that,” ministry spokesman Hong Lei said Tuesday.
On Wednesday, the Global Times, a provocative tabloid published by the ruling Communist Party mouthpiece Peoples Daily, labeled the disclosure a “nefarious slander against China.”
It also wondered why the U.S. didn’t block the posting of the leaks, saying that raised questions as to whether it had reached some form of tacit understanding with WikiLeaks.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has said that WikiLeaks acted illegally in posting the documents. Officials around the world have said the disclosure jeopardizes national security, diplomats, intelligence assets and relationships between foreign governments.
The massive leaks were “embarrassing” and “awkward,” but the consequences for American foreign policy should be limited, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday.
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ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Warnings about flimsy ballot challenges in the Minnesota governor’s race recount haven’t stopped the trailing candidate from trying.
Republican Tom Emmer has lodged hundreds of challenges as he tries to chip away at the pre-recount lead held by Democrat Mark Dayton. So far, Emmer has tried to disqualify more than three times more ballots as Dayton.
Challenges are being made over stray marks, goofy write-ins and other grounds. The recount continues Tuesday.
More than 400 Emmer challenges were attempted — and deemed frivolous — in one small Minnesota county Monday. That was the opening day of a recount due to last about a week.
Going into Tuesday, the Minnesota Secretary of State says Dayton had picked up 20 votes from his Nov. 2 count. Emmer had lost a handful.
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KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghan gunmen attacked a construction company in Kabul province, wounding one security guard and kidnapping nine others, the Interior Ministry said Tuesday.
Gunmen opened fire on 18 Afghan guards in the mountainous Sarobi district, about 27 miles (45 kilometers) east of the capital, Kabul on Monday.
Nine guards were kidnapped and nine escaped, said Zemeri Bashary, a spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry. The gunmen also seized several rifles.
The attack came the same day an Afghan border policeman killed six American service members during a training mission, underscoring one of the risks in a U.S.-led program to educate enough recruits to turn over the lead for security to Afghan forces by 2014.
The attacker was killed in the shootout, which appeared to be the deadliest attack of its kind in at least two years.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for killing the six U.S. troops in Nangarhar province near the Pakistan border, saying the officer had enlisted as a sleeper agent in order to have an opportunity to kill foreigners.
Attacks on NATO troops by Afghan policemen or soldiers, although still rare, have increased as the coalition has accelerated the program. Other problems with the rapidly growing security forces include drug use, widespread illiteracy and high rates of attrition.
NATO is still investigating an incident earlier this month in which two U.S. Marines were killed in southern Helmand province, allegedly at the hands of an Afghan soldier.
After two deadly shootings in July, NATO officers said they were re-examining training practices to make sure that such attacks did not happen again.
On July 20, an Afghan army sergeant got into an argument at a shooting range in northern Afghanistan and shot dead two American civilian trainers before being killed. Another Afghan soldier was killed in the crossfire.
A week earlier, an Afghan soldier stationed in the south killed three British troopers, including the company commander, with gunfire and a rocket-propelled grenade in the middle of the night.
In November 2009, an Afghan policeman killed five British soldiers at a checkpoint in Helmand.
On Sept. 29, 2008, an Afghan police officer opened fire at a police station in eastern Paktia province, killing a U.S. soldier and wounding three before he was fatally shot. A NATO official expressed shock at the time that an Afghan officer would betray his NATO partners.
Col. John “Pete” Johnson, a U.S. forces commander in eastern Afghanistan, said afterwards that the Sept. 2008 attack was “way out of the norm” and “the first incident of its kind.”
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BOISE, Idaho (AP) — The surveillance video from the overhead cameras shows Hanni Elabed being beaten by a fellow inmate in an Idaho prison, managing to bang on a prison guard station window, pleading for help. Behind the glass, correctional officers look on, but no one intervenes when Elabed was knocked unconscious.
No one steps into the cellblock when the attacker sits down to rest, and no one stops him when he resumes the beating.
Videos of the attack obtained by The Associated Press show officers watching the beating for several minutes. The footage is a key piece of evidence for critics who claim the privately run Idaho Correctional Center uses inmate-on-inmate violence to force prisoners to snitch on their cellmates or risk being moved to extremely violent units.
Lawsuits from inmates contend the company that runs the prison, the Corrections Corporation of America, denies prisoners medical treatment as a way of covering up the assaults. They have dubbed the Idaho lockup “gladiator school” because it is so violent.
The AP initially sought a copy of the videos from state court, but Idaho 4th District Judge Patrick Owen denied that request. The AP decided to publish the videos after a person familiar with the case verified their authenticity.
The videos show at least three guards watching as Elabed was stomped on a dozen times. At no time during the recorded sequence did anyone try to pull away James Haver, a short, slight man.
About two minutes after Haver stopped the beating of his own accord, the metal cellblock door was unlocked. Haver was handcuffed and Elabed was examined for signs of life. He bled inside his skull and would spend three days in a coma.
CCA, the nation’s largest private prison company, said it was “highly disappointed and deeply concerned” over AP’s decision to release the videos.
“Public release of the video poses an unnecessary security risk to our staff, the inmates entrusted to our care, and ultimately to the public,” the prison company said in a statement.
CCA, which oversees some 75,000 inmates in more than 60 facilities under contracts with the federal government, 19 states and the District of Columbia, has faced allegations of abuse by guards elsewhere.
A year ago, CCA and another company, Dominion Correctional Services LLC, agreed to pay $1.3 million to settle a lawsuit in which the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission claimed male officers at a prison in Colorado forced female workers to perform sex acts to keep their jobs.
In January, Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear ordered some 400 female inmates transferred to a state-run prison after more than a dozen reports of sexual misconduct by male guards employed by CCA. Similar accusations were made in March at a CCA-run prison in Hawaii, and in May, agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement placed CCA on probation and launched an investigation of whether a guard at a central Texas detention facility sexually assaulted women on their way to being deported.
Before the Idaho attack, Elabed tried to get help from prison staffers, telling them that he had been threatened and giving them details about drug trafficking between inmates and staffers that he had witnessed, according to his lawsuit. He was put in solitary confinement for his protection but was later returned to the same unit with the inmates he snitched on, his lawsuit said. He was on the cellblock only six minutes before he was attacked.
Steven Pevar, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in 34 years of suing more than 100 prisons and jails, the Idaho lockup is the most violent he has seen.
“This isn’t even what we know of as a prison — this is a gulag,” Pevar said.
Pevar blames the violence on CCA and the former warden, Phillip Valdez, who was head of the prison when Elabed was attacked. Valdez was later transferred to another CCA prison in Kansas. The company refused to disclose its reason for moving him.
CCA officials maintain the prison is safe and run according to state and federal standards. But at least some of those standards appear to be violated in the video — including a requirement that emergency care arrive within four minutes of a disturbance. It took medical workers nearly six minutes to get to Elabed — a delay that can be life-threatening in serious injuries, according to state prisons officials.
“Nurses and medical professionals believe you need to get a heart beating and breathing started within four minutes or the person’s going to die,” Idaho Department of Correction spokesman Jeff Ray said.
CCA spokesman Steven Owen said employees receive training and supervision designed to protect both themselves and the inmates.
“As Mr. Haver’s wanton attack illustrates, correctional and medical personnel must often respond to render aid in dangerous situations, not knowing the extent of the risk they may face when they do,” Owen said.
Owen also condemned the attack and said the surveillance videos were key to Haver’s guilty plea in the beating. CCA was unable to answer additional questions surrounding the circumstances of the attack due to pending litigation, he said.
Elabed’s family learned through medical records that CCA officials pulled him out of the hospital before he could get significant treatment and against his doctor’s advice, in order to treat him at the cheaper in-prison facility, the family said.
Elabed, who was originally sentenced to two to 12 years for robbery, was ultimately released on a medical parole because he was too badly injured to be cared for in prison.
A slew of federal lawsuits detail beatings behind prison walls and long waits for medical care at CCA-run prisons in Idaho. Inmate Todd Butters said in his lawsuit he was denied X-rays after he was severely beaten by gang members on his cellblock for refusing to pay $5 a week in “rent.” The Idaho Supreme Court threw out the case after finding Butters didn’t take the necessary steps to try to solve the problem with prison officials before suing.
In another attack, inmate Daniel Dixon said he was denied X-rays and a doctor’s visit after he claimed other inmates beat him until he had broken ribs and facial bones and other injuries.
State officials have long been aware of allegations of mistreatment and poor management at the Idaho Correctional Center, the state’s largest prison. A review of hundreds of public records by AP found in 2008 that ICC had a violence rate three times as high as other Idaho prisons.
The AP found in a follow-up investigation that ICC had only marginally improved its violence rate and that inspectors were still finding rampant gang violence and extortion. State auditors have also found widespread problems keeping medical charts updated, excessive wait times for medical care and other problems with treatment.
Even though Idaho Department of Correction officials have increased oversight and top department leaders have spoken out about their concern over the medical issues, state lawmakers have renewed the company’s multimillion-dollar contract with Nashville, Tenn.-based CCA and added 600 beds to the prison.
Idaho Department of Correction Director Brent Reinke said in a statement that he couldn’t talk about the video because of pending litigation, but said the eight state-run prisons his agency operates are among the safest and most efficient in the country.
Reinke also said his department began beefing up oversight at the private prison three years ago.
“The Board of Correction acknowledges that when you put a group of people who have a history of criminal behavior together in one place, it is likely you will have problems. But that doesn’t mean we should tolerate them,” Reinke wrote.
Today, the 24-year-old Elabed isn’t able to talk much about the assault. He has brain damage and persistent short-term memory loss.
“It’s almost like Hanni’s autistic after this. I feel like I’m talking to someone who’s 12 or 13 years old,” said his brother, Zahe Elabed.
Elabed’s attorney, Ben Schwartzman, said the footage is tough to forget.
“Guard intervention was appropriate and could have happened in a way that would not have put the guards in danger of their personal safety,” Schwartzman said. “They were spectators … and that seems to indicate a level of callousness that I find shocking. It’s an embarrassment to the institution and to the individuals.”
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By Mark Smith
This weight loss plan promises up to 15 pounds in 32 days, but does it really deliver?
Developed by the editors of Prevention magazine, the Flat Belly Diet is a weight loss plan that says users can lose up to 15 lbs in just 32 days. Liz Vaccariello, one of the diet’s authors, stops by The Doctors today to discuss this diet plan. The cornerstone of the diet is the power of monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFA) which are ‘good’ fats known to have a positive effect on cholesterol numbers and some say has been shown to reduce dangerous belly fat.
Many women want to lose the fat from their midsection, and with good reason. Studies have shown that belly fat has a higher level of activity and sends more fat particles throughout the body than the fat that collects around the thighs and buttocks. It also releases more cytokines, which are indicated as a cause for the insulin resistance that leads to diabetes. Fat that collects around the lower body is not as active, and not only doesn’t send fat particles throughout the body, but acts as ‘good’ fat, providing protection from heart attack and diabetes.
The Flat Belly Diet aims to get rid of this dangerous belly fat. At the beginning, there is a 4-day anti-bloat jumpstart period. For these 4 days, you consume 1200-1400 calories per day and drank 2 liters of a spiced water that the diet authors call Sassy Water. For the following 28 days, the diet works on three basic rules:
1. Eat a MUFA at every meal:-
According to Livestrong.com, Pennsylvania State University researchers discovered in 1999 that a diet high in MUFAs reduced cardiovascular risk by an average of over 20%. According to the developers of the Flat Belly Diet, “Research shows that MUFAs have health benefits and target belly fat. They also help control satiety, so by adding in one MUFA at meals and snacks it is easier to stick with the plan and lose belly fat.”
2. Keep each meal at or around 400 calories :-
Calorie control is especially important with this diet because the MUFAs are not low in calories. They include foods like avocados, almonds and almond butter – basically nuts and healthy, natural oils. When you purchase the diet plan, there are several meal recipes and ideas included, all of which are right around 400 calories each. While you will be eating a lot of fruits, vegetables, beans, and nuts, there is very little red meat.
3. Never go more than 4 hours without eating :-
No diet works if you feel hungry, plus when you do feel hungry, you’re more likely to go off the plan. Also, studies show that if you want to keep your metabolism up, you should eat more often. Eat your meals every 4 hours to keep hunger at bay and your metabolism working.
The natural question is, ‘Does the diet really work?’ The simple answer is yes. If you stick to this plan, you will lose weight. The same is true for most weight loss plans that decrease your calorie intake. Will the diet actually decrease your belly fat specifically? According to WebMD.com, Dr. Michael Jensen, a Mayo Clinic obesity researcher and endocrinology specialist says, “There are so many variables associated with weight loss that it is premature to associate belly fat with a specific food or diet plan.”
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Mark Smith
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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Defense attorneys for the man accused of abducting Elizabeth Smart are not disputing the facts in the case, but they’re trying to show at Brian David Mitchell’s trial that he’s mentally ill and can’t be held responsible.
Smart was 14 when she was abducted from her home at knifepoint on June 5, 2002. She was recovered nine months later — on March 12, 2003 — disguised in wig and sunglasses and walking a suburban Salt Lake City street with Mitchell.
Now 23, Smart has testified during Mitchell’s ongoing trial that she was forced to enter a polygamous marriage with Mitchell, endured near daily rapes, was forced to use drugs and alcohol, and was taken to California against her will about four months.
If convicted, the 57-year-old former street preacher could spend the rest of his life in prison.
After a break for the Thanksgiving holiday, the federal trial was resuming Monday for Mitchell, charged in U.S. District Court with the kidnapping and unlawful transportation of a minor across state lines for the purposes of illegal sexual activity.
As the trial moves into its fourth week, the defense is expected to call on psychiatric evaluators to testify about Mitchell’s competency.
Included on the list of defense witnesses is Dr. Richart DeMier, a forensic psychologist from a federal prison facility who was court-ordered to evaluate Mitchell in 2009, DeMier diagnosed Mitchell as paranoid schizophrenic and said he was not competent to stand trial.
DeMier’s findings contradict those of Dr. Michael Welner, New York City forensic psychologist hired by prosecutors to conduct his own evaluation. Welner diagnosed Mitchell with an anti-social personality disorder, psychopathy, alcohol abuse and said he is “malingering” — faking or exaggerating an illness to avoid prosecution.
Both evaluators were also on the stand during a 10-day competency hearing held in 2009.
DeMier said then he had based his conclusion on Mitchell’s belief that “he is divinely ordained to fulfill a special role at the end of the world, putting himself on par with Jesus or God.”
In March, U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball ruled Mitchell competent for trial.
Also expected on the witness stand is Utah psychologist Dr. Stephen Golding who found Mitchell incompetent for trial in a parallel state case. Golding has said Mitchell has “referential thinking” and ascribes special meaning to ordinary experiences.
During the 2009 competency hearing, Golding testified that religious-based delusions left Mitchell believing he was being pressured or commanded to do certain things. The directives came through emotionally distressing revelations, Golding said.
“Mr. Mitchell’s ego, his self, was constantly warring with what he thought he needed to do,” Golding explained last year. “Over time it developed into a pretty frank delusional disorder.”
Smart has testifed that she never believed Mitchell’s religious beliefs were sincere and that he used religion to manipulate others. That included Smart and Wanda Eileen Barzee, Mitchell’s now-estragned wife, who pleaded guilty to federal charges in the case last year after more than year of court-ordered treatment with anti-psychotic medications.
Last week, a tearful 65-year-old Barzee, who is serving a 15-year prison term, testified that she had once believed that her husband was being directed by God. In hindsight, Barzee said, she sees it was a ruse.
“He was a great deceiver,” she said.
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The CIA has come closer to capturing or killing Osama bin Laden’s top deputy than was previously known, during a nine-year hunt at the root of a devastating 2009 suicide bombing at an agency base in Afghanistan, The Associated Press has learned.
The CIA missed a chance to nab Ayman al-Zawahiri in 2003 in the northwest Pakistani city of Peshawar, where he met with another senior al-Qaida leader who was apprehended the next day, several current and former U.S. intelligence officials said.
The fugitive Egyptian doctor may also have narrowly survived a bombing by Pakistani military planes in 2004, the former and current officials said. And a well-publicized U.S. missile strike aimed at him in 2006 failed because he did not turn up at the attack site, they said.
Targeting al-Zawahiri — along with bin Laden — is a main goal of U.S. counterterror efforts, focused on a man who has retained control of al-Qaida’s operations and strategic planning even as he has led an underground existence in Pakistan’s rugged tribal border zone.
“Finding senior al-Qaida terrorists — at a time when we’re pursuing the most aggressive counterterrorism operations in our history — is of course a top priority for the CIA,” said agency spokesman George Little.
But unlike bin Laden, a cipher since the Sept. 11 attacks who has surfaced only in occasional taped statements, al-Zawahiri has kept a higher public profile, taking risks that expose him more.
He is known to travel cautiously and regularly issues audio and video harangues that are scrutinized closely for clues, said the current and former officials, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the classified hunt for the al-Qaida leader.
The CIA’s pursuit of al-Zawahiri climaxed last December in the suicide bombing that left seven agency employees dead at the agency’s eastern Afghanistan base in Khost, one of the worst U.S. intelligence debacles in recent decades.
The bomber turned out to be an al-Qaida double agent who had lulled U.S. intelligence into believing he could bring them closer to al-Zawahiri. Part of the terrorist’s bait was his claim that al-Zawahiri suffered from diabetes — a revelation about his health, if true.
A blunt internal inquiry raked the CIA last month for failing to properly vet the double agent in the months before the bombing and suggested its preoccupation with al-Zawahiri may have led to lapses in judgment. One person familiar with the inquiry said the agency’s intent on getting to al-Zawahiri was a “significant driver” behind the mistakes, a conclusion even CIA director Leon Panetta acknowledged.
“That’s what this mission was all about,” Panetta said. “It was the opportunity that we all thought we had to be able to go after No. 2.” He added that “in some ways maybe the mission itself clouded some of the judgments that were made here.”
Al-Zawahiri has presented a more opportunistic target than bin Laden both because of his visibility and also because of the CIA’s ability to develop better intelligence about his movements.
“We felt like we did at times come very close to getting him,” said a former senior U.S. official familiar with the targeting efforts. “We had more of it (intelligence) and we had better confidence in it.”
Former intelligence officials say both bin Laden and al-Zawahiri take elaborate precautions, keeping their distance from each other to ensure that al-Qaida’s top leadership would not be eliminated in a single strike.
Bin Laden, 53, is believed to be hiding near the border between Pakistan’s lawless tribal regions and Afghanistan. Al-Zawahri, 59, appears to have spent time in Pakistan’s northwest tribal region of Bajaur, populated by large numbers of Wahabi Islam followers.
Both men are believed wary of using cell or satellite phones. But al-Zawahiri has tried at times to make contact with family members in Egypt, former intelligence officials say. More importantly, he has remained in the public eye with numerous messages.
According to the private SITE Intelligence Group, bin Laden has made 23 audio and one video tape since 2006. Al-Zawahiri has outpaced his superior, making 37 audio and 22 video recordings in the same period. In al-Zawahiri’s latest audio recording, issued Nov.4, he warned the U.S. that “we will fight you until the last hour.”
Each time al-Zawahiri speaks, he increases the chances the U.S. could zero in on him. The CIA scours his recordings for clues, the former officials said, sifting for signs that might indicate how long it takes al-Zawahiri to receive information about current events he cites.
“It tells us about information flow,” said Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism research fellow at the New America Foundation.
But despite the risks he takes, al-Zawahiri has always been able to keep several steps ahead of his pursuers.
The CIA had its first chance on Feb. 28, 2003. Former intelligence officials say al-Zawahiri met that day in a car with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-professed mastermind of 9/11 attacks, in Peshawar. Al-Zawahiri, a former official said, was on his way to the remote northern tribal region.
The former officials say the CIA was pursuing Mohammed at the time, but did not have a fix on him until an informant sent a text message to a CIA handler the next day that he was in Rawalpindi, about 110 miles to the east. Pakistan’s spy service, which was working with the CIA, moved in and captured Mohammed.
By then, al-Zawahiri was gone.
Mohammed was flown to a CIA black site in Poland and interrogated using harsh methods, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning. Mohammed admitted he had met with al-Zawahiri but would not disclose the details, a former CIA officer said.
The next chance to target al-Zawahiri came in mid-March 2004, former officials said. A detainee in U.S. custody passed along information about a possible al-Qaida hideout in the mountainous northwest Pakistani region of South Waziristan, where government troops, helicopters and planes were mounting a military offensive against militants.
The CIA passed the intelligence to the Pakistan military, which bombed the village of Azam Warzak near the Afghan border. The former U.S. officials said they later received reports that al-Zawahiri was at the scene during the bombing and suffered minor injuries.
Pakistani military spokesman Gen. Athar Abbas would not confirm the reports, but noted recently that “these were the times when the two intelligence agencies were working hand in glove.”
Taliban operatives and Pakistani civilians told AP recently that al-Zawahiri was injured in the attack. The al-Qaida leader then spent three days in the town of Mir Ali in north Waziristan before heading north to Bajaur, said the militants and locals, all who insisted on anonymity for safety reasons.
One key to locating al-Qaida’s upper echelon, former U.S. officials said, is cracking the crude but effective communications network linking the fugitive terrorists. The system uses a chain of human couriers ensuring no one messenger interacts with either bin Laden or al-Zawahiri.
A Taliban operative who filmed one of al-Zawahiri’s messages told AP that both bin Laden and al-Zawahiri rely heavily on Arabs instead of locals for security. The operative insisted on anonymity for safety reasons. His role inside al-Qaida was confirmed by Afghan officials.
The CIA appeared to come close to cracking the network in May 2005, when Pakistani intelligence officials nabbed a high value detainee near Peshawar named Abu Faraj al-Libi. The suspect took command of the terror group’s operations and communications after Mohammed’s 2003 arrest.
The CIA had intelligence indicating the Libyan acted as “communications conduit,” relaying messages from senior al-Qaida leaders to bin Laden. The former officials said al-Libi “almost certainly” had met with bin Laden or al-Zawahiri after 9/11.
The day he was arrested, al-Libi was believed to be delivering a message to al-Zawahiri. Taken to a black site in Romania, al-Libi gave up no information about al-Zawahiri and bin Laden or how they traded messages, the former officials said.
“Libi seemed to be the key to the puzzle but it turned out he was a dead end,” said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution Saban Center and a former CIA officer.
Despite his silence, the CIA thought it had another chance to target al-Zawahiri on January 13, 2006. The CIA had received a tip their target was headed to a gathering of top al-Qaida operatives in the town of Damadola in the Bajaur region. Al-Zawahiri reportedly had met with al-Libi a year earlier in Bajaur— where locals had also pinpointed the terrorist leader after the 2004 bombing.
A former senior CIA official familiar with the episode said all the “intelligence signatures” pointed to al-Zawahiri’s arrival that day. Former CIA Director Porter Goss gave a green light to launch a drone missile strike, the former senior official said. Goss declined comment through a spokeswoman.
The drone strike obliterated a mud compound, killing eighteen people, provincial officials said, including several al-Qaida figures and a dozen civilians.
But al-Zawahiri was not among them. Pakistani intelligence officials said at the time that he was invited to the dinner but decided instead to send several aides. The CIA initially thought the strike had missed the terrorist leader by an hour, but a current U.S. official recently acknowledged al-Zawahiri never showed up.
Later that month after the strike, al-Zawahiri taunted then-President George W. Bush in a videotape. “Bush,” he said, “do you know where I am? I am among the Muslim masses.”
The CIA thought it had its best chance yet to strike at al-Zawahiri last year when a doctor working with Jordanian intelligence claimed to offer new details suggesting the terrorist leader suffered from diabetes. The former and current U.S. officials said there were already indications al-Zawahiri might have the disease.
CIA officers began working with the informant, Humam al-Balawai, believing the doctor might gain access to al-Zawahiri for medical reasons, the former officials said. When al-Balawi was taken to meet with CIA officials at a secret base in Khost, in eastern Afghanistan, last Dec. 30, the double agent detonated hidden explosives as the officials neared him.
Those familiar with the CIA’s inquiry into the suicide bombing said the operation aimed at al-Zawahiri ran afoul of one the spy game’s cardinal perils — wishfulness. In this case, the CIA was convinced it might finally have him in its sights after so many misses.
It proved to be one more miss, and a costly one.
____
Gannon reported from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Islamabad, Pakistan. Eileen Sullivan and Kimberly Dozier in Washington contributed to this report.
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