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French President Jacques Chirac said Wednesday that NATO should not lead a proposed international force in Lebanon, saying the alliance is seen in the region as "the armed wing of the West." "As far as France is concerned, it is not NATO's mission to put together such a force," Chirac told the daily newspaper Le Monde. "Whether we like it or not, NATO is perceived as the armed wing of the West in these regions, and as a result, in terms of image, NATO is not intended for this." Israel has suggested it would prefer a NATO-led coalition in Lebanon,...

American presence in Iraq is more dangerous to world peace than nuclear threats from North Korea or Iran, U.S. Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said to a crowd of more than 200 in North Miami Saturday afternoon.

WASHINGTON -- Two potential 2008 presidential candidates appealed Tuesday for the Senate to support their call to withdraw U.S. combat troops from Iraq "by a hard and fast deadline," a position putting them at odds with most of their fellow Democrats. "Our country desperately needs a new vision for strengthening our national security, and it starts by redeploying U.S. forces out of Iraq," Sens. John Kerry of Massachusetts and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin wrote in an e-mail sent to 3 million people nationwide. "It's time for every member of the Senate to send an important message that we must change...

PARIS — About 70 percent of French people are dissatisfied with President Jacques Chirac's performance, an all-time low popularity rating, according to poll published Sunday. Only 27 percent of French people are satisfied with Chirac, compared to 70 percent who say they disapprove, said the poll by the Ifop agency published in Le Journal du Dimanche newspaper. Chirac's popularity figures tied his record low — also the record for any president in the Fifth Republic that began in 1958, the paper said. Chirac's second term ends next year, and he is unlikely to seek re-election. The poll figures were even...

Whole Land of Israel question debate between Zionist realists, post-Zionist dreamers If we stick to the idea of the complete Land of Israel, we will soon be left with no State of Israel, and if we are left with no State of Israel, we will be left with no Land of Israel. In the best case scenario, we will become beholden to the good graces of a Palestinian state that will include the Whole Land of Israel. That's the whole story. It is also the reason that Ariel Sjharon changed his mind, and Ehud Olmert changed his mind, as did...

Israel formulating alternative to PM's unilateral pullout By Akiva Eldar In light of the international opposition to further unilateral steps by Israel, the government has begun to draft an alternative plan that would essentially convert Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's unilateral convergence plan into a bilateral move carried out in conjunction with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). According to the plan now being drafted by the Prime Minister's Office and the Foreign Ministry, Israel would propose to Abbas that they reach an agreement to establish a Palestinian state with provisional borders in Gaza plus about 90 percent of the...

Editorial: Kerry takes up the Swift Boat charges He deserves this opportunity to set the public record straight. Most of the controversies from the wild 2004 presidential campaign have long been forgotten. But one is coming back, the New York Times reported this week, and we're glad it is: Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic nominee for president, is joining an effort to debunk the many attacks on his service in Vietnam more than two decades earlier. [snip] Although they had little bearing on Kerry's qualifications to be president, his young-man's sentiments on Vietnam were a legitimate issue. But that's...

by Mark Finkelstein May 30, 2006 There are surely Bill O'Reilly experts out there who have carefully charted the history of his pronouncements on the Iraq war. But as a casual observer, it seemed to me that in this evening's Talking Points, O'Reilly struck an altogether more negative tone on Iraq, with implications for future US foreign policy. Here's what he had to say: "The chaos in Afghanistan and Iraq will never end, because there will always be people who hate Americans. And we are an occupying force in those countries. The very important question is how do we as...

France's prime minister said Thursday that military action is not the solution to the international standoff over Iran's nuclear program. French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said the war in Iraq should serve as a warning against attacking Iran. "My conviction is that military action is not the solution," Villepin said at a monthly news conference. "We have already lived through this type of scenario and we know that not only does it settle nothing, but it can raise risks. We have seen this in the most clear way with Iraq."

Eric Julien, a former French military air traffic controller and senior airport manager, has completed a study of the comet 73P Schwassmann- Wachmann and declared that a fragment is highly likely to impact the Earth on or around May 25, 2006. Comet Schwassman-Wachmann follows a five-year orbit that crosses the solar system's ecliptic plane. It has followed its five year orbit intact for centuries; but, in 1995, mysteriously fragmented. According to Julien, this is the same year that a crop circle appeared showing the inner solar system with the Earth missing from its orbit. He argues the "Missing Earth" crop...

And conservatives should favor reducing illegality by putting illegal immigrants on a path out of society's crevices and into citizenship by paying fines and back taxes and learning English. Faux conservatives absurdly call this price tag on legal status ``amnesty.'' Actually, it would prevent the emergence of a sullen, simmering subculture of the permanently marginalized, akin to the Arab ghettos in France. The House-passed bill, making it a felony to be in the country illegally, would make 11 million people permanently ineligible for legal status. To what end?

Bberg reports car bomb explodes in Paris. One known dead.

One of the Democratic party's leading voices on Iraq warns the strife-torn country is on the verge of civil war. His remarks tonight came during a foreign policy address at Brown University. The senator said the conflict in Iraq is more a political and economic battle than a military one. He faulted the Bush administration for failing to better develop Iraq's infrastructure, economy and government institutions.

In this war freedom should come first not after! In New Hampshire the Motto is Live free or Die! I don't need Bush spying on law abiding americans and taking our freedoms. Anyone who surrenders a square inch of freedom to the government in the name of saftey is a traitor and should be treated like one! Let the Bush Fashists all drop dead! Filthy Commys! LET FREEDOM RING!

Bernard-Henri Levy is a French writer with a spatter-paint prose style and the grandiosity of a college sophomore; he rambled around this country at the behest of The Atlantic Monthly and now has worked up his notes into a sort of book. It is the classic Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion beloved of European journalists for the past 50 years. In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You've lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don't own guns,...

Angus Reid Global Scan) – French president Jacques Chirac begins the year with poor numbers, according to a poll by TNS-Sofres published in Le Figaro. Only 21 per cent of respondents express confidence in Chirac to face the country’s problems, down five points in a month. Chirac won the presidential election in 1995, and was re-elected in a run-off over Jean-Marie Le Pen in May 2002. Following a defeat in last May’s referendum on the European Constitution, Chirac named Dominique de Villepin as the country’s new prime minister. 43 per cent of respondents express confidence in de Villepin, down two...

TEHRAN – Following the designation of a day as "Holocaust Day" by the United Nations, the Mehr News Agency conducted an interview with French professor Robert Faurisson on November 2 about the motivations behind this move. In the interview, the professor says that Zionists will not tolerate any questioning of the "Holocaust" and argues that the more the Western public believes in the "Holocaust" the more Muslims will be killed. Following is the text of the interview: Q: As you know the UN General Assembly on Tuesday (November 1) passed a resolution designating January 27 as an international day of...

The round table titled “The New Serbian Rights and Anti-Semitism” was organized on November 2, 2005, in the Belgrade Media Center. This first in the series of activities under the project “Overcoming Anti-Semitism and Nationalistic Prejudice” – implemented with the assistance of the Council of Europe – provided the guidelines for further discussion of racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance and hate speech in today’s Serbia. Five keynote speakers addressed the panel assembling around forty participants. Sonja Biserko, chairperson of the Helsinki Committee, Aleksandar Lebl, journalist and president of the Commission for Monitoring Anti-Semitism (Federation of Jewish Communities in Serbia-Montenegro), writer [and...

Marking the tenth anniversary of the fall of the 'Republic of Serbian Krajina', an eloquent comment from IWPR's Balkan Crisis Report by a journalist who covered the parastate's four-year existence for The Independent (London)Ten years ago I sat in the front room of a house in west London in company with a number of Croats, all eyes glued to the fast-changing footage of the satellite television that was carrying programmes from Croatian state television. ‘Come round,’ my friend had said. ‘Something’s up.’ That ‘something’, it turned out, was the ignominious fall of the Republic of Serbian Krajina (RSK), the Serb entity that...

Want to know how popular Representative John Murtha (D-PA) is these days? Well, guess who the news media run to like school kids whenever the big, bad President George Bush gives a speech? You guessed it: they scamper over to their hero, John Murtha. And it's not like he's saying anything he hasn't said before. And it's not like the media isn't reporting anything about Murtha's statement they haven't reported before. It's merely an exercise the media undertakes to make certain an antiwar icon gets equal time, even if that antiwar icon is a Washington insider suspected of ethics violations....