Morning News For Friday Oct. 12

Truth hides under fallen rocks and stones
At the end of a disconnected phone (that’s where the truth hides)
This is an Open Thread

News Happening Now

Gore wins Nobel Peace Prize
OSLO, Norway – Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to spread awareness of man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures needed to counteract it
Gore, who won an Academy Award this year for his film “An Inconvenient Truth,” a documentary on global warming, had been widely expected to win the prize

USA

Rivals rip into Clinton over Iran vote
The senator backed a resolution labeling the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist group. Obama and Edwards see shadows of her 2002 vote to authorize force in Iraq.
By Michael Finnegan, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 12, 2007
WASHINGTON — Five years after she voted to authorize the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) is coming under attack from rivals in the presidential race for a recent vote that they say could bring the nation closer to war with Iran.
On Thursday, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) added his voice to the criticism, comparing Clinton’s vote on the measure to the “blank check” that he said she gave President Bush to wage war against Iraq.

Blackwater Guards Fired at Fleeing Cars, Soldiers Say
First U.S. Troops on Scene Found No Evidence of Shooting by Iraqis; Incident Called ‘Criminal’

By Sudarsan Raghavan and Josh White
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, October 12, 2007; Page A01

BAGHDAD, Oct. 11 — Blackwater USA guards shot at Iraqi civilians as they tried to drive away from a Baghdad square on Sept. 16, according to a report compiled by the first U.S. soldiers to arrive at the scene, where they found no evidence that Iraqis had fired weapons.
“It appeared to me they were fleeing the scene when they were engaged. It had every indication of an excessive shooting,” said Lt. Col. Mike Tarsa, whose soldiers reached Nisoor Square 20 to 25 minutes after the gunfire subsided.

US air raid kill 15 Iraqi civilians in bloddy start to Eid
BAGHDAD (AFP) – Iraqi women and children bore the brunt of a bloody start to Eid al-Fitr as the US military admitted to killing 15 in an air raid and a sinister suicide attack on kids shocked a northern town.
“Nineteen suspected insurgents and 15 women and children were killed in an operation Thursday in the Lake Tharthar region”, northwest of Baghdad, a US military spokesman told AFP in a rare admission of civilian deaths.

Asia

Nissan technology makes parking a cinch
TOKYO – Parking in tight spaces is a cinch with a new display from Nissan showing a panoramic bird’s-eye-view of what’s surrounding a car – a feature that the Japanese automaker says is a first for commercially mass-produced vehicles.
Using digital cameras, Around View Monitor displays an aerial view of the car on a dashboard screen.

The option will be available in the Infiniti EX35 luxury model, going on sale in the U.S. in December, and the Elgrand minivan selling in Japan later this month, the Japanese automaker said Friday.

Turkey ready to face world criticism over Iraq
ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday that Ankara was prepared to face up to any international criticism if his country launched an attack on Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq
Washington fears such an offensive, against Turkish Kurds fighting for an independent homeland in southeastern Turkey, could destabilize Iraq’s most peaceful area and potentially the wider region.

Europe

Putin says missile plan risks relations
MOSCOW – In a tense start to talks on a range of thorny issues, President Vladimir Putin on Friday warned U.S. officials to back off a plan to install missile defenses in eastern Europe or risk harming relations with Moscow.
Addressing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the Russian president appeared to mock the U.S. missile defense plan, which is at the center of a tangle of arms control and diplomatic disputes between the former Cold War adversaries.

Muslim scholars reach out to Pope
More than 130 Muslim scholars have written to Pope Benedict XVI and other Christian leaders urging greater understanding between the two faiths.

The letter says that world peace could depend on improved relations between Muslims and Christians.
It identifies the principles of accepting only one god and living in peace with one’s neighbours as common ground between the two religions.

It also insists that Christians and Muslims worship the same god.

Africa

Dark turns of party struggle enthrall South Africa
JOHANNESBURG: A politically powerful industrialist is gunned down in an ambush linked to a reputed mobster. Investigators link the mobster to the national police commissioner. Prosecutors obtain a warrant for the commissioner’s arrest. Then suddenly, the warrant vanishes – and the chief prosecutor who secured it is removed from his job.

Not even South Africa’s political insiders know for sure where this mystery leads, and the man who does know, President Thabo Mbeki, is not saying anything. But political and legal experts alike increasingly suspect the worst: that a brutal two-year battle for power in the governing African National Congress is spreading from party corridors into the government itself

Sudan: Africa Insight – Darfur – China’s Economic And Diplomatic Policy Pays Off
Patrick Mutahi
Nairobi

Realising that its almost unqualified support for Sudan was hurting its image, China balanced its thirst for oil versus international obligations and in the process, convinced Sudan to accept UN peacekeepers on its soil.

China has quietly changed its Darfur policy from a laid-back approach to a behind-the-scenes diplomacy.
Before the passing of UN Security Council Resolution 1769 authorising the $2 billion (Sh130 billion) a year, 26,000-strong United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID), China arranged low-key meetings with Sudan to discuss the deployment.

Americas

Trade More with South America to Counter Chavez, Experts Say
By Kevin Mooney
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
October 12, 2007

(CNSNews.com) – Free trade agreements can help forge alliances with Latin American nations eager to push back against the growing influence of Hugo Chavez, the virulently anti-U.S. leader of Venezuela, contend some foreign policy experts.

The alliances Chavez, a Marxist, has forged with rogue regimes could jeopardize U.S. national security in its own hemisphere, unless a concerted effort is made to re-establish economic and political ties with Central and South American countries, Juan Carlos Hidalgo, project coordinator for Latin America at the Cato Institute, told Cybercast News Service.

From the archive Death of Che
Oct 14th 1967
From The Economist print edition

BY A CORRESPONDENT

By killing Che Guevara, the Bolivian army and its American advisers have done more than cut short the guerrilla movement in Bolivia. Certainly the small surviving band of Bolivian guerrillas, who have lost their local leaders as well as Guevara, will not now be able to carry out their hopes of bringing the “armed struggle” from the countryside into the towns and mining areas. But Guevara’s death will also wreck his grander strategy of using Bolivia as the focus from which rebel activity would radiate across the South American continent. He had seen Bolivia as the first of the “many Vietnams” that would sap the morale of the United States in Latin America, and would destroy those regimes which he considered as Washington’s pawns.