Egypt News By Asfory
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A government-sanctioned commission that probed Israel’s summer war against Lebanon’s Hezbollah accused Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Monday of “severe failure” over his handling of the 34-day conflict.

Citing a “severe failure in judgment, responsibility and caution”, the panel said Olmert hastily led the country to war without a comprehensive plan.

Israel used Hezbollah’s capture of two of its soldiers last July as an excuse to launch a deadly offensive in Lebanon, in which more than 1,200 Lebanese and 160 Israelis were killed.

A UN-brokered ceasefire ended the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict in August, with Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah declaring a strategic victory over Israel.

Israel’s failure to retrieve the two captured soldiers, crush Hezbollah or halt its daily cross-border rocket attacks during the war led the Israelis to view the war as a failure, sending Olmert’s approval ratings to unprecedented lows and triggering widespread calls for his resignation.

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قالت جماعة الاخوان المسلمين بمصر يوم الاثنين انها لن تتراجع عن خوض انتخابات نيابية بعد القبض على اثنين من أعضاء مجلس الشعب ينتميان اليها واحالتهما للتحقيق أمام نيابة أمن الدولة العليا.

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April was one of the deadliest months in Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, with hundreds of Iraqi civilians and over 100 American troops killed, further increasing pressure on President Bush, whose “troop surge” plan showed no signs of progress in either halting Iraq’s raging violence or reducing the mounting death toll.

Bush’s repeated threats to veto a Democrat-backed legislation linking war funding to the withdrawal of U.S. troops by the end of next March intensified calls for the president’s impeachment over his handling of the war in Iraq.

“There’s three ways or four ways to influence a president… One is popular opinion, the election, third is impeachment and fourth is the purse,” top U.S. congressional Democrat John Murtha, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Defense, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program.

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اشارت صحيفة الواشنطن بوست الامريكية يوم الاثنين الى ان مكتب رئيس الحكومة العراقية نوري المالكي “متورط بتسريح ضباط في الجيش والشرطة في العراق حاولوا محاربة ميليشيات شيعية بشراسة”.

واشار التقرير الصادر في الصحيفة الامريكية الى ان “هناك وثائق تثبت ان 16 ضابطا عراقيا على الاقل سرحوا، بعضهم بموجب اسباب محقة ولكن البعض الآخر، ويعتبرون من خيرة الضباط، لم يفهم سبب طردهم”.

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At least 30 people have died and many more were hurt after a suicide bomber targeted a funeral in a Shia town north of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.
Police say the attack in Khalis, in Diyala province, took place inside a tent where mourners had gathered.

Earlier, the US said three US soldiers and a translator died in a Baghdad bomb at the weekend and another nearby was shot dead. Also a marine died in Anbar.

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Hamas political chief Khaled Meshaal warned of another Palestinian uprising, or intifada, unless the Western aid embargo was lifted and Israel stopped its attacks against the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

In an interview with the Palestinian daily al-Ayyam, Meshaal said the continuation of the economic sanctions against the Palestinian government and military actions by Israel would lead to “a huge explosion that would not only affect the Palestinians but also the entire region, especially the Zionist entity.”

“I warn and say that I see that the current situation is heading in the direction of the conditions that prevailed in the late 1990s … that paved the way for the al-Aqsa intifada,” Meshaal said. “I warn and under ‘warn’ I put many red lines.”

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A U.S.-led raid in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday killed more than six civilians, including a woman and a teenage girl, sparking a protest by hundreds of angry residents who voiced their opposition to the U.S. military presence in the war-torn country.

The attacks early Sunday in the Bati Kot district caused the death of five civilians, said Abdul Mohammad, a Nangarhar police investigator said.

The U.S. army claimed that the raid targeted a “suspected car bomb cell”, denying civilian casualties and saying that only four rebels were killed in the attack.

But the protestors, who insist that innocent civilians were among the casualties, took to the streets late Sunday, carrying the bodies of the victims and blocking traffic with tree trunks.

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Several thousand residents poured back into Mogadishu on Monday after a four-day calm, but an African Union commander warned that fighting could erupt again and a humanitarian crisis still looms.

Four days after Islamist insurgents and clan fighters melted away in the face of heavy fire by Somali-backed Ethiopian troops, AU troop commander Lieutenant Katumba Wamala cautioned that the battle was not yet won.

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Five men have been jailed for life for a UK bomb plot linked to al-Qaeda that could have killed hundreds of people.
Jurors in the year-long Old Bailey trial heard of plans to target a shopping centre, nightclub and the gas network with a giant fertiliser bomb.

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Egypt said Sunday it would seek the temporary return of some of its most precious artifacts from museums abroad, including the Rosetta Stone and a bust of Nefertiti.

The country’s chief archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, said the Foreign Ministry would send letters this week to France, Germany, the United States and Great Britain requesting that the ancient artifacts be loaned to Egypt.

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