contributions

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/040613/1/3l0pa.html
The first elections for a newly enlarged EU parliament have left governments reeling, as voters dealt ruling parties a string of stunning defeats and stayed away from the polls in record numbers.
Voters punished governments who supported the US-led invasion of Iraq and painful economic reforms, while the electorate in former communist eastern Europe showed no sympathy for leaders who had guided them into the European Union just over a month (…)

The world spent nearly $1 trillion US on weapons in 2003, with the U.S. accounting for almost half of the total, according to a Swedish research institute.
Military spending increased by a "remarkable" 11 per cent year-on-year to $956 billion said the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in its Yearbook 2004, released Wednesday.
It added to a cumulative increase of 18 per cent over military spending in 2001, the year of the September 11 attacks on the U.S.
FROM JUNE 5, (…)

By Bob Tourtellotte
Michael Moore’s anti-Iraq war crusade is not stopping with U.S. President George W. Bush as the filmmaker says he now wants to make a movie about Prime Minister Tony Blair’s role in the war.
Moore, director of "Fahrenheit 9/11," the controversial documentary which last month won top prize at the Cannes film festival, said on Friday that he now wants to take a close look at the prime minister’s role in backing the war in Iraq and sending troops into harm’s way.
"I (…)

Gary Younge in New York
The Guardian
Most American voters believe it was not worth going to war in Iraq and almost two-thirds believe the US is "getting bogged down", according to a Los Angeles Times poll.
The poll, which shows that views on the Iraq war represent a divide between Republicans and Democrats, reveals that 53% of voters say that the situation in Iraq did not merit the war, while 43% say it did. When the question was asked by the same pollsters in November and March the (…)

THE routing of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s ruling Labour party in local council elections showed how vulnerable governments were in the wake of the Iraq war, Australian commentators said today.
The British Labour party lost about 470 seats nationwide in council elections, with the anti-war Liberal Democrats securing around 30 per cent of the vote.
Griffith University Emeritus Professor of History and Politics, Ross Fitzgerald, said the British result was a positive sign for Labor (…)

Dutch opposition parties critical of the Iraq war scored significant gains at the start of elections for the European Parliament, while Prime Minister Tony Blair lost support across Britain in local voting, key tests since the invasion last year.
Iraq, as well as domestic issues, concerned voters as the 25 nations of the recently expanded European Union began electing legislators a four-day process that started Thursday in Britain and the Netherlands.
While Britain’s results in the EU (…)

More than a month after the Fallujah siege, a senior U.S. military officer acknowledged Saturday that the Americans had not achieved their goals in the restive Sunni Muslim city, now in the hands of hardline clerics and fighters who held off the Marines.
There’s still a long way to go in Fallujah before the coalition - and for that matter the Iraqi government - can be satisfied that we have brought Fallujah to resolution,’’ Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the coalition deputy operations chief, (…)

I have now obtained yet another installment of Abu Ghraib interrogator Joe Ryan’s diaries. This batch has been reconstructed from the search results preview text in the Wisenut search engine (http://www.wisenut.com/), and covers the period 7th - 18th March 2004. The new entries join the already discovered entries for April 11-26 (Google cache) and March 21 - April 02 (Alexa cache).
If you want to find out about the method used to reconstruct the diary entries, scroll down past the diary (…)

http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?a=13&o=81218 The United States government, in conjunction with key allies, is running an "invisible" network of prisons and detention centres into which thousands of suspects have disappeared without trace since the "war on terror" began.
In the past three years, thousands of alleged militants have been transferred around the world by American, Arab and Far Eastern security services, often in secret operations that bypass extradition laws. The (…)

SYDNEY - The United States will maintain close relations with Australia even if a new government withdraws Australian troops from Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell said.
Powell reiterated statements by President Bush that the withdrawal of Australian troops by a Labor government, that might win in a election later this year, would be "disastrous."
But in an interview with Australian Broadcasting Corp television, Powell stopped short of Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage’s (…)