One of Ours

Paris will block US plans to impose sanctions on Sudan's government, says French junior foreign minister Renaud Muselier.

The United Nations security council is debating a US-backed resolution which hopes to block travel and arms sales to the militia groups responsible for the massacres in Sudan's Darfur region. UN representatives describe the slaughter as "the world's worst humanitarian crisis."

Washington has threatened to extend the sanctions to Sudan's government if it does not work harder to bring an end to the violence. The Arab militia groups are said to be backed by Khartoum, with many black villagers - who are on the receiving end of the violence - claiming that their settlements are bombed by government planes before the militia ride in on horses to kill and destroy whatever is left.

Over a million refugees have fled the region.

Nevertheless, Khartoum's complicity in the slaughter does not seem to have unduly worried the French. Muselier says that in Paris' book, tens of thousands deaths and one million displaced people does not constitute ethnic cleansing:

"I firmly believe it is a civil war" he said, "and as they are little villages of 30, 40, 50, there is nothing easier than for a few armed horsemen to burn things down, to kill the men and drive out the women."

Muselier added that it would be better to "help the Sudanese get over their crisis so their country is pacified" rather than risk sending the government back to its old ways by imposing sanctions.

This is the diplomatic equivalent of putting trouble down to "high spirits."

France led opposition to US moves at the UN over Iraq. As was the case in Iraq, France also has significant oil interests in Sudan.

"Israel is under an obligation to terminate its breaches of international law; it is under an obligation to cease forthwith the works of construction of the wall being built in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem, to dismantle forthwith the structure therein situated," said the ruling, read by the court president, Judge Shi Jiuyong of China.

The court's non-binding advisory on the legality of the fence called on the United Nations Security Council to consider "further action" to stop the construction of the barrier.

"The court is of the view that the United Nations, and especially the General Assembly and the Security Council, should consider what further action is required to bring to an end the illegal situation resulting from the construction of the wall," said the court president.

He also urged the UN to "redouble its efforts" to end the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, which it said posed a threat to international peace.

In the ruling, the court said that Israel's security needs did not merit the construction of the barrier, stating that it "cannot be justified by military exigencies or by the requirements of national security or public order."...

The key U.S. assertions leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq - that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was working to make nuclear weapons - were wrong and based on false or overstated CIA analyses, a scathing Senate Intelligence Committee report asserted Friday.

Intelligence analysts fell victim to "group think" assumptions that Iraq had weapons that it did not, concluded a bipartisan report. Many factors contributing to those failures are ongoing problems within the U.S. intelligence community - which cannot be fixed with more money alone, it said.

Sen. Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican who heads the committee, told reporters that assessments that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and could make a nuclear weapon by the end of the decade were wrong.

"As the report will show, they were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence," he said.

"This was a global intelligence failure."...