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JERUSALEM (AFP) - Major General Gabi Ashkenazi is awaiting final confirmation as Israel's new army chief of staff after his predecessor quit over the handling of last summer's war in Lebanon. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office announced the appointment of the 52-year-old Ashkenazi, currently director general of the defence ministry, late on Monday night. "After consultations between the prime minister and Defence Minister Amir Peretz, it was decided that... General Gabi Ashkenazi be named the 19th chief of staff of the Israeli army," the premier's office said in a statement. The nomination must be confirmed by the cabinet and...

Veteran of Entebbe to lead forces in Israel By Tim Butcher in Jerusalem Last Updated: 2:31am GMT 23/01/2007 An army officer with a reputation for plain speaking is to become Israel's next armed forces chief. Maj Gen Gabi Ashkenazi will take control after the unexpected resignation of Lt Gen Dan Halutz last week. Gen Ashkenazi, 53, fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur war and took part in the legendary 1976 Entebbe raid. His promotion suggests a desire among the Israeli military elite to return to the well-established formula of relying on army officers to run the military establishment. Gen Halutz...

Excerpt - TELLURIDE, Colo. (Hollywood Reporter) - Director Kevin MacDonald introduced the Telluride screening of "The Last King of Scotland" by saying, "It's my first feature. Please be gentle." But there's little need for gentleness. Much of "The Last King of Scotland" is an extraordinary piece about naivete caught up short in terrible events. Box office looks substantial in sophisticated urban venues in North America. ~ snip ~

POLICE together with the Civil Aviation Authority have stepped up security at Entebbe International Airport following Thursday's thwarted terrorist plot in Britain. "We have introduced more stringent measures at the airport," the deputy spokesman of CAA Mr Vianney Luggya told Daily Monitor on phone yesterday. "However, the measures will not inconvenience passengers at all." He said it's the level of alertness that had been raised, "otherwise there is nothing special because security at Entebbe is always up-to-date 24 hours." Uganda Police spokesman Mr Edward Ochom said the force has deployed extra officers at the airport to check lagguge and passengers...

JERUSALEM - Israel, awaiting word of the fate of a captured soldier, marked the 30th anniversary Tuesday of its dramatic rescue of dozens of hostages from hijacked plane in the African nation of Uganda. In the Entebbe raid on July 4, 1976, Israeli commandos and paratroopers carried out the hastily planned military operation in 99 minutes, whisking more than 100 hostages out of a terminal at Uganda's international airport and into waiting Hercules military aircraft. For some Israelis, the anniversary brought back memories of a seemingly lost era of daring, successful Israeli military operations. For others, it served as a...

Israel, awaiting word of the fate of a captured soldier, marked the 30th anniversary Tuesday of its dramatic rescue of dozens of hostages frim hijacked plane in the African nation of Uganda.

SATURDAY JULY 3, 1976 Officer Amitzur Kafri curled up around a bag of oranges on the floor of the Hercules-130 military plane, drifting in and out of sleep. Around him, 28 fellow Israeli Sayeret Matkal special forces reconnaissance soldiers in fake Ugandan army uniforms sat or lay, squished together, sweating and silent, on their way to Entebbe, Uganda. Preceding them by six days were 100-plus Israeli and other Jewish passengers from skyjacked Air France flight 139, held at gunpoint in Entebbe after most non-Israeli passengers were freed. The soldiers were drooping after intense training through the night followed by endemic...

PLEASE SIGN THE CONDOLENCE BOOK: http://www.otn.com/netking/ Nov. 2, 2003 200,000 Remember Rabin By MATTHEW GUTMAN An estimated 100,000 people packed Kikar Rabin in Tel Aviv on Saturday night to pay homage to slain prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, gathering at the spot where he was gunned down eight years ago to show support for the peace process he helped launch. Security was tight for the event, with some 1,500 police and soldiers manning barricades. Security guards combed the crowds, following several acts of vandalism at the site, including Rabin's memorial itself. Speakers delivered their speeches behind thick panes of bulletproof glass....

Editorial: Happy birthday, Shimon Shimon Peres "Opposition," said William Blake, "is true friendship." We think of that line in the afterglow of Shimon Peres's 80th birthday party, which brought together, among other celebrity mismatches, Moshe Katsav, Bill Clinton, Terje Roed-Larson, and Ariel Sharon for what turned out to be a moving event. If little else, these men share an admiration for Peres in which we join. Outside the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv, where the day's formal festivities were held, protesters called for bringing the "Oslo criminals" to justice. No Israeli newspaper has been more steadfast in its opposition to...

The sole interview granted to a journalist by dictator Idi Amin after the daring Israeli commando raid to rescue the hostages being held in Entebbe, Uganda, was given to this writer on the night of July 3-4, 1976. I recalled the occasion when Amin died this week in exile in Saudi Arabia. In the light of the Saudis' involvement in financing terrorist organizations under the illusion of buying insurance for the preservation of their corrupt royal house it was hardly surprising that they gave asylum for over 25 years to one of the cruelest dictators post-colonialist Africa has known. During...

JEDDAH, Aug 2 (Reuters) - Former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, blamed for the murders of tens of thousands of Ugandans in the 1970s, is in "near-death condition" at a hospital in Saudi Arabia, a medical source said on Saturday. "He is alive but remains in a near-death condition in a coma," the source at King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Jeddah told Reuters, adding that Amin was on a ventilator. Amin came out of a coma last week and was said then to be in serious condition.

JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) - Doctors said Idi Amin, blamed for the murders of tens of thousands of Ugandans during his bloody dictatorship in the 1970s, was still alive in a Saudi hospital Tuesday. "He is still in intensive care and alive," a Saudi doctor at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Jeddah told Reuters. He refused to give details on whether Amin was in critical condition. Amin came out of coma last week and was said to be then in serious condition. Earlier last week, the hospital said Amin might not survive. Amin has lived in exile, mainly in...

JEDDAH: The condition of former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin is still serious but improving, medical officials in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia have said. "He came out of coma on Wednesday and is no longer using an artificial respirator. But he is still in intensive care and his condition is still serious," a hospital source told Reuters news agency. AFP news agency were told a similar thing by another unnamed source. The hospital had announced that Mr Amin might not survive after he went into a coma last week. Medical staff at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital told BBC that they would...

13:05 Former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin out of a coma in a Saudi hospital but still in serious condition (Reuters)

Long before the intifada, Oslo, the Sinai Accords and the nation's political upset in the late 1970s, there was Entebbe. The legendary heroic raid, code-named Operation Thunderbolt, when Israeli commandos rescued hostages being held by hijackers who had diverted their plane to Uganda. The commander of the IDF operation, Yonatan Netanyahu, was killed during the rescue, and the name of the operation was changed to Operation Yonatan in his memory. It was Sunday, June 27, 1976, when armed terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, together with some German accomplices, hijacked Air France flight 139, diverting it...

The US First Lady, Laura Bush, had tears in her eyes yesterday as she listened to a performance by the Watoto children's choir - made up mainly of children orphaned by HIV/Aids. Laura, and her husband, US President George W. Bush, were at The Aids Support Organisation clinic in Entebbe on the last stop of their four-hour visit to Uganda. During the emotional presentation, where President Yoweri Museveni was also present, Ms Bush wiped tears from her eyes as the children sang Christian songs of hope in English. Later, President Bush promised more support to Uganda in the fight...

In less than three decades Israel has gone from being a country that frees hostages to one that frees terrorists This past week the 27th anniversary of Operation Thunderbolt, the IDF's daring 1976 rescue of Jewish hostages held at Entebbe, Uganda, came and went virtually unnoticed, receiving little or no attention in the Israeli and international press. No accounts were published of the tense days that followed the hijacking by Palestinian terrorists of an airliner carrying dozens of Jews and Israelis, nor were interviews aired with any of those who participated in the heroic Israeli military raid, or those whom...

Entebbe Diary by Maj. (Res.) Louis Williams The name "Entebbe" and the operation with which it is associated enjoy a special place in the annals of the ongoing war against terrorism. To the people of Israel, and to many others, it was a declaration that free men need not submit to terrorist blackmail and extortion, no matter how impossible the alternatives may seem. Entebbe Diary is dedicated to the scores of men who flew to Africa and back, and to the hundreds more who, by their unstinting efforts in planning and preparation, made the mission possible, and whose hearts...

Major-General Benjamin (Benny) Peled, who has died aged 74, was the Commander of the Israeli Air Force (IAF) from 1973 to 1977, leading it during the traumatic days of the Yom Kippur War.On October 6 1973 Egypt and Syria attacked Israel simultaneously, catching her unprepared and off guard. With war on two fronts - Egyptian troops crossing the Suez Canal, and Syrian tanks rolling into the Golan Heights - and with no reserves mobilised to face the enemy, the task of stopping the Arab invasion was left to the small regular army and the IAF. Defence Minister Moshe Dayan phoned...