No problem. It looks like an inexperienced journalist/intern on the weekend shift that is mistakenly reposting/redistributing yesterday's news. Looks like they used this story as a reference.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/121584
If you look at the INN dateline, they have it as 2/18/07 in bold, but originally published 2/16/07 in smaller print underneath. So one can forgive UPI on this one (but they really shouldn't use INN especially without a second Israeli news source like JPost or Haaretz). Even so, they have been sealing off the Temple Mount during Friday prayers the past few weeks and the story is referring to that. I'm not seeing the story anywhere else. But it was UPI, so I thought it was interesting since they usually do not declare alerts on Temple Mount on Saturdays/Sundays. But I'm not seeing it reported anywhere else. So it is probably the same alert from two days ago (Sunday there now).
Ok.
MIDDLE EASTERN countries secretly armed and supported suspected Al-Qaeda recruits in the failed state of Somalia in a direct challenge to western interests in east Africa, according to a United Nations report. Hundreds of Islamist fighters were flown, with Eritrean assistance, from Somalia to Syria and Libya for military training. Others were taken to Lebanon to fight with Hezbollah, the report to the UN security council has revealed.
UN investigators also detailed military aid given to the Islamists by Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Arab states friendly to the West. Iran also supplied 125 shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, 80 of which arrived by sea in dhows and the rest by air. A clandestine operation to smuggle the fighters out of Somalia began in July last year.
In an interview, Evgueny Zakharov, the owner of Aerolift, an airline with a fleet of ageing Antonov and Ilyushin transport aircraft, based in Johannesburg but registered in the British Virgin Islands, said: “We transported lots of men in uniform — Arabian men with masks. “They were disciplined men and although none of them had rank badges there were obviously people in charge. They got on the aircraft as if they had done it many times before.”
Excerpted
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article1400655.ece
Algerian al-Qaeda poses new threat to north Africa and Europe
Sun 18 Feb 2007
AL-QAEDA is using North Africa to open a new front in the international terror war. An alliance between al-Qaeda and a north African Islamic insurgency group has resulted in the creation of the so-called Al-Qaeda in Islamic North Africa. The new group dramatically raised the stakes last week with a wave of coordinated bombings of police targets in Algeria in which six people were killed and about 30 injured.
According to the US-funded Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, the group - formerly the Salafist Group of Call and Combat (GSPC) - "is now the most significant terrorist movement in Algeria" and remains focused on "overthrowing the secular Algerian government and establishing an Islamist state in the country." The bombings are a bitter blow to Algeria's moderate pro-West government, which thought it had beaten the Islamic insurgency that killed more than 150,000 people in the 1990s. Only last autumn Algeria's voters backed President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's offer of an amnesty to 1,000 Islamic terrorists hiding in Algeria and neighbouring countries.
Meanwhile, analysts say the GSPC is increasingly cooperating with other Islamic militants around north Africa. This follows a call from al-Qaeda's second-in-command, and head in Iraq, Ayman al-Zawahiri, for an extension of jihad to confront the "Crusaders". The group also has links with the Moroccan-born extremists who are among those on trial in Madrid for the March 2004 train bombings. Most attended the Al-Quds mosque in Tangiers to hear the preaching of Mohammed Fizazi, a cleric sentenced to 30 years for inspiring attacks in Casablanca.
Excerpted
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=262982007