The Mazeika Report
August 2, 2008
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August 2, 2008
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Geopolitical Diary: Cuba and a Return to the Russian-U.S. Tug-of-War
Stratfor Today »-->July 25, 2008
For the past week, a series of stories and denials have been published in the Russian media surrounding a possible plan for Russia to relocate a refueling base in Cuba and resume flights of Russia’s Tu-160 “Blackjack” and Tu-95 “Bear” nuclear-capable strategic bombers back into the Western Hemisphere. All the noise reached a crescendo when another piece of information — true or not — was leaked to the Russian press that a crew of the Russian bombers had gone to Cuba on Thursday to conduct preliminary surveys.
Thus far, there is no confirmation that Russia is indeed returning militarily to Cuba. It is, however, a signal of what could happen if the United Stated does not heed Russian demands for Washington to back off from Moscow’s turf. This would be, in Moscow’s eyes, an equal response to the United States’ signing ballistic missile defense system treaties with the Czech Republic and Poland — right on Russia’s doorstep — as well as discussing NATO membership with the former Soviet states of Ukraine and Georgia.
Russia did, in fact, respond to the West’s encroachment: cutting energy supplies to Europe and sending more military into Georgia’s secessionist regions. But the problem was that Moscow simply hadn’t gotten Washington’s attention.
Washington has been too wrapped up in other issues — such as the upcoming presidential election, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, negotiations with Iran and simply not believing Russia had any real tools with which to threaten it –- that it airily dismissed all of Moscow’s provocations. This has made Russia’s reprisals Europe’s problem at a time when Moscow wants to prove it once again is a global power and can stand up against its traditional foe: the United States. So Russia sent a signal of something that the United States simply cannot ignore — the moving of the Russian-U.S. tug-of-war from Russia’s doorstep to the U.S. doorstep. This is a serious threat and one with which Washington is quite familiar.
The Cuba option would be a powerful move against the United States — just as it was during the 1950s and 1960s — because it directly penetrates the United States’ immediate periphery. Combine the Cuba rumors with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s trip to Moscow this past week — which held its own flurry of rumored deals over Russian bases and defense deals — and Moscow is reminding the Americans of a prior miscalculation. In the 1950s, Washington assumed that it could threaten the Soviet Union along its borders in Europe, South Asia and East Asia. And the United States believed it could not be threatened in its homeland, in the Western Hemisphere — America assumed no foreign power would dare violate the Monroe Doctrine. Washington bet that Moscow did not have an equivalent threat, and it was wrong.
The Soviet Union’s move into Cuba back then changed the entire dynamic of the Cold War. The Soviet presence threatened the sea lanes out of the Gulf of Mexico, major facilities in Florida, all of the Caribbean airspace and some of the Eastern Seaboard. It forced the U.S. Navy and Air Force to shift resources and account for Soviet units there. It diverted the CIA into Latin America, forcing the conflicts in Central American and Grenada. Despite its inherent military vulnerability, Cuba was one of the most strategic Soviet assets. Nothing was the same after Cuba.
The Russians are reminding the Americans of their prior miscalculations on how Russians respond to perceived threats. The United States has shifted its focus from its periphery and once again moved to responding to threats that could never truly physically hit the homeland — such as an Iranian missile threat. In the nearly 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has returned to and enjoyed a world where any potential military threat is an ocean and half a world away.
For now, this is just a signal and no real movement on the ground has been made. Russia is serious, however, about its ability to follow through if the United States does not release the pressure elsewhere. The moves over Cuba are not an indicator of the Russians’ global intentions, but are meant to signal an increase in Moscow’s assertiveness. It is a gutsy and interesting move by the Russians. We have yet to see whether the Americans have really noticed (or want to admit that they noticed) and can divert attention from the Middle East and domestic politics to address the Russian threat — either by backing down or by escalating the situation, which would bring back a Cold War standoff.
Of course, if Washington and Moscow do get serious about things such as Cuba, then the U.S. escalation would go far beyond what Russia currently feels threatened over.
http://www.stratfor.com/
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Geopolitical Diary: Cyberwarfare Beginning To Take Center Stage
Stratfor Today »-->July 30, 2008
2008 has seen an increasingly public acknowledgment by the U.S. intelligence community of the cyberwarfare threat. A report by Defense News on Tuesday highlighted the recent emergence of significant bipartisan congressional support by the powerful U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence for a White House initiative on comprehensive national cybersecurity. Though public details are vague, the initiative seeks to improve computer security holistically across the military and government, while better hardening critical infrastructure against cyberattack. The intent is to create architecture that is also open to participation by business and the public.
Related Special Topic Pages
Cyberwarfare
It has long been abundantly clear that computers and especially the global connectivity of the Internet have been, as a whole, one of the most radical and far-reaching inventions in human history. High technology has changed the way business is done and the way humans personally connect and interact. Already we see jihadists using the Internet as a tool for manipulating public perception, coordinating operations and even sharing tactics, training and practices. At the same time, cyberspace has opened new avenues for espionage and crime alike. The free flow of information across international boundaries has influenced color revolutions in countries like Ukraine and precipitated the fall of governments.
But while the geopolitical significance of cyberspace is undeniable, its exploitation in global conflict — cyberwarfare — has largely been limited and deniable. Both the Pentagon’s exercise of cyberwarfare in Kosovo in 1999 and the potential use of it by Israel as part of its raid on Syria in September 2007 is the stuff of speculation. The world has yet to see the comprehensive military exploitation of cyberspace in international conflict.
This is an enormous concern, and though the U.S. Air Force is working to consolidate its cyberwarfare efforts under the aegis of a new Cyber Command, the Pentagon does not have anything close to the established dominance that it enjoys in more traditional domains.
For example, some experts claim that the massive 2004 blackout in the American northeast was precipitated by a Chinese hacker tinkering with systems relevant to the power grid. In 2007, in what has become one of the few true case studies in cyberwarfare, a massive cyberattack brought Estonia to a standstill in the wake of the controversial relocation of a Soviet World War II memorial. (And despite its recent status as a Soviet republic, Estonia is no poorly connected backwater. In fact, it is an exceptionally “wired” country by any standard — which contributed heavily to the effectiveness of the attack.)
At the time, the government was unable to communicate efficiently. Attacks on government websites were interspersed with disinformation and fraudulent postings. Though not everyone or everything was targeted, Estonia’s entire Internet infrastructure was so overloaded with traffic and preoccupied with defending itself that it essentially ceased to function — bringing corporate banking, access to the media and even day-to-day personal transactions to a halt.
Reports on the Estonian incident suggest that the attacks ultimately involved more than a million computers from some 75 countries (including some of Estonia’s NATO allies). And while nationalist fervor on the Russian side certainly played a part in rallying independent hackers, there is little doubt that the Kremlin was involved.
There are several interrelated points here:
Cyberwarfare has the potential to bring a country to an economic standstill on par with that experienced by the United States in the days following the 9/11 attacks.
Offensive actions in cyberspace often provide a great deal of deniability. It is a smart weapon of choice for inflicting blows without engaging in a shooting war.
The connectivity and computing power of systems and servers inside a country and allied countries can be co-opted and used in very simple but often all too effective brute-force attacks.
An attack can be executed from almost anywhere in the world without consideration for strategic geographic buffers and otherwise insurmountable distances.
The list goes on, but the underlying point is that cyberspace is a domain in which many of the traditional considerations of geopolitical conflict are fundamentally altered — if not obviated all together (e.g. geography may not matter, resources can be amassed largely undetected and the primary form of damage may be economic rather than physical).
As the unchallenged and the sole superpower, the United States is the obvious target because symmetrical competition is often inconceivable. Cyberwarfare efforts are under way in many countries around the world (including Russia), but China is widely considered to have the most advanced and robust capability.
Currently, assaults on U.S. systems (corporate, government and military alike) from all over the world occur daily. But there can be little doubt that in a significant escalation of hostilities with a country like Russia or China, such blows will be felt at home even if the conventional conflict may be thousands of miles away.
Keeping conflict an ocean and half a world away has been a core geopolitical imperative for Washington since the beginning. It is the root of the Monroe Doctrine and the reason why Soviet missiles in Cuba were so unacceptable. The very nature of the Internet thus makes comprehensive national cybersecurity at home a geopolitically relevant national interest.
http://www.stratfor.com/
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Pelosi: Save the Planet, Let Someone Else Drill
By Charles KrauthammerFriday, August 1, 2008; A17
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposes lifting the moratorium on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and on the Outer Continental Shelf. She won't even allow it to come to a vote. With $4 gas having massively shifted public opinion in favor of domestic production, she wants to protect her Democratic members from having to cast an anti-drilling election-year vote. Moreover, given the public mood, she might even lose. This cannot be permitted. Why? Because, as she explained to Politico: "I'm trying to save the planet; I'm trying to save the planet."
A lovely sentiment. But has Pelosi actually thought through the moratorium's effects on the planet?
Consider: 25 years ago, nearly 60 percent of U.S. petroleum was produced domestically. Today it's 25 percent. From its peak in 1970, U.S. production has declined a staggering 47 percent. The world consumes 86 million barrels a day, the United States, roughly 20 million. We need the stuff to run our cars and planes and economy. Where does it come from?
Places such as Nigeria, where chronic corruption, environmental neglect and the resulting unrest and instability lead to pipeline explosions, oil spills and illegal siphoning by the poverty-stricken population -- which leads to more spills and explosions. Just this week, two Royal Dutch Shell pipelines had to be shut down because bombings by local militants were causing leaks into the ground.
Compare the Niger Delta to the Gulf of Mexico, where deep-sea U.S. oil rigs withstood Hurricanes Katrina and Rita without a single undersea well suffering a significant spill.
The United States has the highest technology to ensure the safest drilling. Today, directional drilling -- essentially drilling down, then sideways -- allows access to oil that in 1970 would have required a surface footprint more than three times as large. Additionally, the United States has one of the most extensive and least corrupt regulatory systems on the planet.
Does Pelosi imagine that with so much of America declared off-limits, the planet is less injured as drilling shifts to Kazakhstan and Venezuela and Equatorial Guinea? That Russia will be more environmentally scrupulous than we in drilling in its Arctic?
The net environmental effect of Pelosi's no-drilling willfulness is negative. Outsourcing U.S. oil production does nothing to lessen worldwide environmental despoliation. It simply exports it to more corrupt, less efficient, more unstable parts of the world -- thereby increasing net planetary damage.
Democrats want no oil from the American OCS or ANWR. But of course they do want more oil. From OPEC. From where Americans don't vote. From places Democratic legislators can't see. On May 13 Sen. Chuck Schumer -- deeply committed to saving just those pieces of the planet that might have huge reserves of American oil -- demanded that the Saudis increase production by a million barrels a day. It doesn't occur to him that by eschewing the slightest disturbance of the mating habits of the Arctic caribou, he is calling for the further exploitation of the pristine deserts of Arabia. In the name of the planet, mind you.
The other panacea, yesterday's rage, is biofuels: We can't drill our way out of the crisis, it seems, but we can greenly grow our way out. By now, however, it is blindingly obvious even to Democrats that biofuels are a devastating force for environmental degradation. It has led to the rape of "lungs of the world" rain forests in Indonesia and Brazil as huge tracts have been destroyed to make room for palm oil and sugar plantations.
Here in the United States, one out of every three ears of corn is stuffed into a gas tank (by way of ethanol), causing not just food shortages abroad and high prices at home but intensive increases in farming, with all of the attendant environmental problems (soil erosion, insecticide pollution, water consumption, etc.).
This to prevent drilling on an area in the Arctic one-sixth the size of Dulles Airport that leaves undisturbed a refuge one-third the size of Britain.
There are a dizzying number of economic and national security arguments for drilling at home: a $700 billion oil balance-of-payments deficit, a gas tax (equivalent) levied on the paychecks of American workers and poured into the treasuries of enemy and terror-supporting regimes, growing dependence on unstable states of the Persian Gulf and Caspian basin. Pelosi and the Democrats stand athwart, shouting: We don't care. We come to save the planet!
They seem blissfully unaware that the argument for their drill-there-not-here policy collapses on its own environmental terms.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/31/AR2008073102824_pf.html
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Poll: 1 in 3 Muslim students approve killing for Islam 'Stop talking about celebrating diversity and focus on integration and assimilation'
If ignorance and poverty are responsible for the growth of extremist views in the Islamic world, someone needs ask to Muslim students, privileged enough and bright enough to attend some of the United Kingdom's best universities, why one-in-three of them endorses killing in the name of Islam.
The report of this finding, based on a poll of 600 Muslim and 800 non-Muslim students at 12 universities in the UK, and conducted by YouGov on behalf of the Center for Social Cohesion, will be released tomorrow as "Islam on Campus."
Among its findings of Muslim beliefs:
40 per cent support introduction of sharia into British law for Muslims
One-third back the idea of a worldwide Islamic caliphate based on sharia law
40 per cent believe it is unacceptable for Muslim men and women to associate freely
24 per cent do not think men and women are equal in the eyes of Allah
25 per cent have little or no respect for homosexuals.
53 per cent believe killing in the name of religion is never justified (compared with 94 per cent of non-Muslims), while 32 per cent say it is
57 per cent believe Muslim soldiers serving in the UK military should be able to refuse duty in Muslim countries
More than half favor an Islamic political party to support their views in parliament
One-third don't think or don't know if Islam is compatible with Western views of democracy
"Significant numbers appear to hold beliefs which contravene democratic values," Hannah Stuart, one of the report's authors, told the London Times. "These results are deeply embarrassing for those who have said there is no extremism in British universities."
The report echoes one released last year by the Policy Exchange which found 37% of all Muslims aged 16-24 would prefer to live under a sharia system.
In addition to polling of 1,400 students, the researchers visited more than 20 universities to interview students and listen to guest speakers brought on campus. The report notes radical Islamic preachers regularly deliver inflammatory speeches that target homosexuals and border on anti-Semitism.
"Our researchers found a ghettoized mentality among Muslim students at Queen Mary (college)," said James Brandon, deputy director at CSC. "Also, we found the segregation between Muslim men and women at events more visible at Queen Mary."
A spokesman for Queen Mary told the Times the university knew Islamic preachers had spoken on campus but was unaware of what they had said.
"Clearly, we in no way associate ourselves with these views. However, also integral to the spirit of university life is free speech and debate, and on occasion speakers will make statements that are deemed offensive," he said.
Wes Streeting, president of the National Union of Students, condemned the study: "This disgusting report is a reflection of the biases and prejudices of a right-wing think tank – not the views of Muslim students across Britain. Only 632 Muslim students were asked vague and misleading questions, and their answers were willfully misinterpreted."
The report was criticized by the country's largest Muslim student body, the Federation of Student Islamic Societies. Most of the Islamic societies on campuses operate under the FOSIS umbrella.
The authors of the report note that campus Islamic societies have, in the past, been where some UK terrorists became radicalized. They cite Kafeel Ahmed, who drove a jeep engulfed in flames into a building at the Glasgow airport last year and died of his burns. Investigators believe he adopted jihadist beliefs while studying at Anglia Ruskin university, Cambridge.
In April, WND reported that the director-general of MI5 had warned the government that donations of hundreds of millions of pounds from Saudi Arabia and powerful Muslim organizations in Pakistan, Indonesia and the Gulf Straits had led to a "dangerous increase in the spread of extremism in leading university campuses."
"The finding that a large number of students think it is okay to kill in the name of religion is alarming," said Anthony Glees, professor of security and intelligence studies at Buckingham University.
"There is a wide cultural divide between Muslim and non-Muslim students. The solution is to stop talking about celebrating diversity and focus on integration and assimilation."
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?pageId=70673
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July 30, 2008
C.I.A. Outlines Pakistan Links With Militants
By MARK MAZZETTI and ERIC SCHMITT
New York Times
WASHINGTON — A top Central Intelligence Agency official traveled secretly to Islamabad this month to confront Pakistan’s most senior officials with new information about ties between the country’s powerful spy service and militants operating in Pakistan’s tribal areas, according to American military and intelligence officials.
The C.I.A. emissary presented evidence showing that members of the spy service had deepened their ties with some militant groups that were responsible for a surge of violence in Afghanistan, possibly including the suicide bombing this month of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, the officials said.
The decision to confront Pakistan with what the officials described as a new C.I.A. assessment of the spy service’s activities seemed to be the bluntest American warning to Pakistan since shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks about the ties between the spy service and Islamic militants.
The C.I.A. assessment specifically points to links between members of the spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, and the militant network led by Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, which American officials believe maintains close ties to senior figures of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
The C.I.A. has depended heavily on the ISI for information about militants in Pakistan, despite longstanding concerns about divided loyalties within the Pakistani spy service, which had close relations with the Taliban in Afghanistan before the Sept. 11 attacks.
That ISI officers have maintained important ties to anti-American militants has been the subject of previous reports in The New York Times. But the C.I.A. and the Bush administration have generally sought to avoid criticism of Pakistan, which they regard as a crucial ally in the fight against terrorism.
The visit to Pakistan by the C.I.A. official, Stephen R. Kappes, the agency’s deputy director, was described by several American military and intelligence officials in interviews in recent days. Some of those who were interviewed made clear that they welcomed the decision by the C.I.A. to take a harder line toward the ISI’s dealings with militant groups.
Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, is currently in Washington meeting with Bush administration officials. A White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe, would not say whether President Bush had raised the issue during his meeting on Monday with Mr. Gilani. In an interview broadcast Tuesday on the PBS program “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” Mr. Gilani said he rejected as “not believable” any assertions of ISI’s links to the militants. “We would not allow that,” he said.
The Haqqani network and other militants operating in the tribal areas along the Afghan border are said by American intelligence officials to be responsible for increasingly deadly and complex attacks inside Afghanistan, and to have helped Al Qaeda establish a safe haven in the tribal areas.
Lt. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the acting commander of American forces in Southwest Asia, made an unannounced visit to the tribal areas on Monday, a further reflection of American concern.
The ISI has for decades maintained contacts with various militant groups in the tribal areas and elsewhere, both for gathering intelligence and as proxies to exert influence on neighboring India and Afghanistan. It is unclear whether the C.I.A. officials have concluded that contacts between the ISI and militant groups are blessed at the highest levels of Pakistan’s spy service and military, or are carried out by rogue elements of Pakistan’s security apparatus.
With Pakistan’s new civilian government struggling to assert control over the country’s spy service, there are concerns in Washington that the ISI may become even more powerful than when President Pervez Musharraf controlled the military and the government. Last weekend, Pakistani military and intelligence officials thwarted an attempt by the government in Islamabad to put the ISI more directly under civilian control.
Mr. Kappes made his secret visit to Pakistan on July 12, joining Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for meetings with senior Pakistani civilian and military leaders.
“It was a very pointed message saying, ‘Look, we know there’s a connection, not just with Haqqani but also with other bad guys and ISI, and we think you could do more and we want you to do more about it,’ ” one senior American official said of the message to Pakistan. The official was briefed on the meetings; like others who agreed to talk about it, he spoke on condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic delicacy of Mr. Kappes’s message.
The meetings took place days after a suicide bomber attacked the Indian Embassy in Kabul, killing dozens. Afghanistan’s government has publicly accused the ISI of having a hand in the attack, an assertion American officials have not corroborated.
The decision to have Mr. Kappes deliver the message about the spy service was an unusual one, and could be a sign that the relationship between the C.I.A. and the ISI, which has long been marked by mutual suspicion as well as mutual dependence, may be deteriorating.
The trip is reminiscent of a secret visit that the top two American intelligence officials made to Pakistan in January. Those officials — Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, and Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director — sought to press Mr. Musharraf to allow the C.I.A. greater latitude to operate in the tribal territories.
It was the ISI, backed by millions of covert dollars from the C.I.A., that ran arms to guerrillas fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s. It is now American troops who are dying in Afghanistan, and intelligence officials believe those longstanding ties between Pakistani spies and militants may be part of an effort to destabilize Afghanistan.
Spokesmen for the White House and the C.I.A. declined to comment about the visit by Mr. Kappes or about the agency’s assessment. A spokesman for Admiral Mullen, Capt. John Kirby, declined to comment on the meetings, saying “the chairman desires to keep these meetings private and therefore it would be inappropriate to discuss any details.”
Admiral Mullen and Mr. Kappes met in Islamabad with several high-ranking Pakistani officials. They included Mr. Gilani; Mr. Musharraf; Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the army chief of staff and former ISI director; and Lt. Gen. Nadeem Taj, the current ISI director.
One American counterterrorism official said there was no evidence of Pakistan’s government’s direct support of Al Qaeda. He said, however, there were “genuine and longstanding concerns about Pakistan’s ties to the Haqqani network, which of course has links to Al Qaeda.”
American commanders in Afghanistan have in recent months sounded an increasingly shrill alarm about the threat posed by Mr. Haqqani’s network. Earlier this year, American military officials pressed the American ambassador in Pakistan, Anne W. Patterson, to get Pakistani troops to strike Haqqani network targets in the tribal areas.
Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the senior NATO commander in Afghanistan until last month, frequently discussed the ISI’s contacts with militant groups with General Kayani, Pakistan’s military chief.
During his visit to the tribal areas on Monday, General Dempsey met with top Pakistani commanders in Miramshah, the capital of North Waziristan, where Pakistan’s 11th Army Corps and Frontier Corps paramilitary force have a headquarters, to discuss the security situation in the region, Pakistani officials said.
North Waziristan, the most lawless of the tribal areas, is a hub of Al Qaeda and other foreign fighters, and the base of operations for the Haqqani network.
On Tuesday, Pakistani security forces raided an abandoned seminary owned by Mr. Haqqani, Pakistani officials said. No arrests were made.
Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/world/asia/30pstan.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=th&pagewanted=print
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Olympics: Russian drug test cheats suspended
8:36AM Friday August 01, 2008
MONTE CARLO - Seven Russian female athletes, including an indoor world record holder and a two-time world champion, were provisionally suspended by the IAAF for doping-related matters.
Suspended Russian Yelena Soboleva after
setting a new womens' 1500m World Record during
the Athletics World Indoor Championships in March. Photo / AP
Yelena Soboleva, who set an indoor world record in the 1,500-meter race at this year's world championships, was one of the seven charged eight days before the opening of the Beijing Olympics "for a fraudulent substitution of urine which is both a prohibited method and also a form of tampering with the doping control process."
Two-time world 1,500 champion Tatyana Tomashova was also suspended, along with middle-distance runners Yulia Fomenko, Svetlana Cherkasova and Olga Yegorova, and hammer thrower Gulfiya Khanafeyeva and discus thrower Darya Pishchalnikova.
"The IAAF could do nothing better ahead of the games in Beijing," All Russia Athletics Federation president Valentin Balakhnichev said of the suspensions. "It's not a civilized approach."
Soboleva, Tomashova, Fomenko, Khanafeyeva and Pishchalnikova have all qualified for the Beijing Olympics.
"This shows we are willing to do anything to stop doping," IAAF spokesman Nick Davies said. "The IAAF is ready to take on an investigative approach on these issues if it needs to."
The IAAF said the matter would be turned over to the All Russia Athletics Federation. It was unclear when the supposed tampering took place.
"These rule violations were established following the deliberate storage of samples by the IAAF and reanalysis using comparative DNA techniques, and were the result of a specific investigation which was instigated and carried out by the IAAF for more than a year," the IAAF said in a statement.
According to IAAF rules, athletes have up to 14 days to request a hearing with their national federation. If a hearing is requested, it must be held within two months.
Fomenko was second to Soboleva when she set the world record of 3 minutes, 57.71 seconds on March 9 in Valencia, Spain, breaking her previous mark of 3:58.05.
"The accusations are curious," Soboleva said Thursday in a televised interview. "It's the first ever such case. I think it's a predestined action. The time was carefully chosen - we practically could do nothing - neither file an appeal nor look into the case. We are simply put aside and our hands are tied."
Tomashova won world titles at the 2003 and '05 championships, and won silver at the 2004 Athens Olympics, while Yegorova won the 5,000 at the 2001 Edmonton worlds and took silver in the 1,500 at the 2005 Helsinki worlds and gold in 3,000 at the 2001 indoor worlds. Pishchalnikova won the silver medal in the discus at the 2007 worlds and gold at the 2006 European championships, and Khanafeyeva won silver in the hammer throw at the 2006 Europeans and set a world record in her event in 2006.
"This is all about the clear favorites," Russian Olympic Committee anti-doping chief Nikolay Durmanov said. "There are many questions. The first is: What in fact happened? There will be a special inquiry.
"A less important question but a more pertinent one is: Why is the issue of last year's tests emerging just a week ahead of the games? Couldn't this question have been discussed with us in May, June or March?"
Both Yegorova and Khanafeyeva have been embroiled in doping scandals before.
Yegorova tested positive for EPO in 2001, but the result was thrown out because the French lab conducting the test did not follow the proper procedure. Khanafeyeva tested positive for an unspecified stimulant at the World Military Games in India in 2007, but the case was later dismissed.
Also Thursday, Romanian middle-distance runners Elena Antoci and Cristina Vasiloiu tested positive for the blood booster EPO and could be dropped from the country's Olympic team pending a second test, an official said.
- AP
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/4/story.cfm?c_id=4&objectid=10524715
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Kremlin corporate crackdown sends markets tumbling
JP Morgan Chase & Co. downgrades Russian stocks as government looks set to nationalize private steel and oil companies.
By Fred Weir Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
from the July 31, 2008 edition
Moscow - Russian President Dmitri Medvedev says he wants to make Russia a leading global financial center. But a series of state crackdowns on private companies have plunged Russian markets into turmoil and sent foreign investors fleeing.
Over the past week, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has twice publicly slammed Russian coal-and-steel giant Mechel for alleged price fixing, tax evasion, and monopolization, causing the company's shares to shed nearly $8 billion in value on the New York and Moscow stock markets.
In another case, Robert Dudley, CEO of the joint Russian-British oil venture TNK-BP, hastily left Russia last week claiming his company faces "sustained harassment" from officialdom in an ongoing internal dispute over control with Russian partners. Nearly 150 foreign employees of TNK-BP have been forced out of Russia in recent days over visa difficulties.
On Tuesday, the investment bank JP Morgan Chase & Co. downgraded Russian stocks, warning that "non-conventional policy methods" were threatening the country's economic stability.
Analysts say this amounts to the latest chapter in a Kremlin campaign to impose order upon the commanding heights – strategic sectors – of Russia's economy, which began with the destruction of the Yukos oil empire and the arrest of its politically disobedient owner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, five years ago. As usual, opinion is starkly divided over the government's intentions, with defenders arguing that the goal is to enforce the law in Russia's unruly business jungle. Critics, pointing to past cases, suggest that when the dust settles, assets formerly held by private interests are likely to be transferred to Kremlin-controlled companies.
"Based on my own experience, rule of law and property rights are almost non-existent in Russia," says Bill Browder, CEO of London-based Hermitage Capital, a leading investor in Russia. "Unless they can improve that, it makes no sense to invest there."
Mr. Browder, who has been unable to obtain a Russian visa for almost three years, recently charged that three Hermitage subsidiaries were targeted for takeover by corrupt officials of Russia's interior ministry, who obtained company documents and seals in the course of an official tax investigation. The seizures were thwarted, but he alleges that the officers subsequently used private company data to carry out a massive tax scam.
About 77,000 cases of such corporate "raiding" – illegal seizure of private assets, often carried out or abetted by corrupt police and state officials – occurred last year, he adds.
"It used to be oligarchs stealing from everybody, now it's law enforcement doing the stealing," Browder says.
Mechel, Russia's largest producer of coking coal, was accused at a meeting of business leaders last week by Mr. Putin of monopoly practices, including setting artificially high prices on the domestic market and exporting at unrealistically low prices to its own subsidiaries abroad in order to evade Russian duties. Putin chilled the nationally televised meeting with a veiled threat, noting that Mechel's billionaire owner, Igor Zyuzin, was absent due to sickness.
"Of course, an illness is an illness," said Putin, a former KGB agent, "but I think [Mr. Zyuzin] should get better as soon as possible, otherwise we shall have to send him a doctor to clear up all these problems."
This week, Russia's Federal Anti-Monopoly Service said it would probe Mechel, and another steel company, Evraz, on the price-fixing allegations. Experts say that's the normal procedure for policing the market, but Putin's comments were completely out of the ordinary.
"I think authorities want to beef up efforts in dealing with monopolism, and this [Putin's attack] might give that a boost," says Yaroslav Lissovolik, chief economist for Deutsche Bank in Russia. He says huge monopolies dominate Russia's economic landscape, and whittling them down to size is necessary to clear space for small and medium businesses, a key goal of Mr. Medvedev.
He says Putin may be trying to bring down inflation, which is spiking at nearly 10 percent this year, by forcing big companies to lower their domestic prices.
"Putin knows what he's doing," says Galina Kovalishina, an analyst with the independent Institute of Financial Studies in Moscow. "He doesn't care about the capitalization of any individual company, no matter how big it is. I think his main concern is the transparency of Russian business and ensuring the legal character of their dealings."
But critics point out that the government report indicting Mechel was prepared by deputy prime minister Igor Sechin, the same man who, as a Kremlin aide, oversaw the attack against Yukos. In that case, the private firm was assailed by criminal charges and back tax assessments, and in the end its assets wound up mostly in the hands of the state oil firm Rosneft.
Experts point out that Mechel is a politically obedient company, and its owner is a regular contributor to the pro-Kremlin United Russia party. "There isn't a political dimension here, as there was in the Yukos case, but it's quite likely that Mechel's coal business could be taken away and given to another company," says Alexei Mukhin, director of the independent Center for Political Information in Moscow. One possible recipient of Mechel's assets, he says, is RusSpetsStal, a specialty steel producer founded by Russia's state-owned arms export corporation, Rosoboronexport.
During recent months TNK-BP, which is a 50-50 venture between BP and four Russian billionaires, has been hit with environmental inspections, back-tax claims, espionage charges against one of its employees, and mass visa suspensions for its foreign workers. The affair remains murky, but many experts suspect that a big state firm, such as Gazprom, is waiting in the wings to pick up the pieces if the company is torn apart by the shareholder dispute. This week, the British government took the unusual step of formally complaining that Russian state agencies were piling onto TNK-BP in an apparent effort to hasten the company's demise.
"The way shareholders have manipulated elements of the Russian state bureaucracy and the way that has been allowed to continue is very disappointing," a British Embassy spokesman told journalists in Moscow.
Some experts suggest that these may be the first signs of a split between President Medvedev, who appealed for market calm on Tuesday, and his predecessor, the still-powerful Prime Minister Putin.
"Putin may have some purely political reasons," for weighing in on the Mechel affair, says Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist who studies Russia's political elite.
"Medvedev's image has been strengthening lately, so Putin may want to show who's master in the house. He gets a lot of PR points inside Russia, by playing to the part of the population that dislikes big business," she says.
Holocaust by hunger: An act of genocide?
Jul 30 2008, 18:46
Photo by Photo from M. Zheleznyak collection, courtesty of the Kyiv-based Institute of National Memory.Villagers of Udachne, in the Donetsk region, near an earth house in 1934. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin engineered a famine so horrendous that people resorted to cannibalism. Now, 75 years after one of the great forgotten crimes of modern times, Stalin's man made famine in 1932-1933, the former Soviet Republic of Ukraine is asking the world to classify it as a genocide
The demented Roman Emperor Caligula once mused that if all the people of Rome had one neck he would cut it just to be rid of his troublesome people. The trouble was there were simply too many Romans to kill them all.
Many centuries later, the brutal Soviet dictator Josef Stalin reflected that he would have liked to deport the entire Ukrainian nation, but 20 million were too many to move even for him. So he found another solution: starvation.
Now, 75 years after one of the great forgotten crimes of modern times, Stalin’s man-made famine of 1932 and 1933, the former Soviet republic of Ukraine is asking the world to classify it as a genocide.
The Ukrainians call it the Holodomor – the Hunger. Millions starved as Soviet troops and secret policemen raided their villages, stole the harvest and all the food in villagers’ homes. They dropped dead in the streets, lay dying and rotting in their houses, and some women became so desperate for food that they ate their own children.
If they managed to fend off starvation, they were deported and shot in the hundreds of thousands. So terrible was the famine that Igor Yukhnovsky, director of the Institute of National Memory, the Ukrainian institution researching the Holodomor, believes as many as nine million may have died.
For decades the disaster remained a state secret, denied by Stalin and his Soviet government and concealed from the outside world with the help of the “useful idiots” – as Lenin called Soviet sympathizers in the West.
Russia is furious that Ukraine has raised the issue of the famine: the swaggering 21st century state of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev see this as nationalist chicanery designed to promote Ukraine, which may soon join NATO and the European Union.
They see it as an anti-Russian maneuver more to do with modern politics than history. And they refuse to recognize this old crime as a genocide.
They argue that because the famine not only killed Ukrainians but huge numbers of Russians, Cossacks, Kazakhs and many others as well, it can’t be termed genocide – defined as the deliberate killing of large numbers of a particular ethnic group. It may be a strange defense, but it is historically correct. So what is the truth about the Holodomor? And why is Ukraine provoking Russia’s wrath by demanding public recognition now?
Ukraine was the breadbasket of Russia, but the Great Famine of 1932-33 was not just aimed at the Ukrainians as a nation – it was a deliberate policy aimed at the entire Soviet peasant population – Russian, Ukrainian and Kazakh – especially better-off, small-time farmers.
It was a class war designed to “break the back of the peasantry,” a war of the cities against the countryside and, unlike the Holocaust, it was not designed to eradicate an ethnic people, but to shatter their independent spirit.
So while it may not be a formal case of genocide, it does, indeed, rank as one of the most terrible crimes of the 20th century.
To understand the origins of the famine, we have to go back to the October 1917 revolution when the Bolsheviks, led by a ruthless clique of Marxist revolutionaries including Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, seized power in the name of the workers and peasants of the Russian Empire to create a Marxist paradise, using terror, murder and repression.
The Russian Empire was made of many peoples, including the Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs and Georgians, but the great majority of them, especially in the vast arable lands of Ukraine, southern Russia, the northern Caucasus, and Siberia, were peasants, who dreamed only of owning their own land and farming it.
Initially, they were thrilled with the revolution, which meant the breakup of the large landed estates into small parcels which they could farm.
But the peasants had no interest in the Marxist utopian ideologies that obsessed Lenin and Stalin. Once they had seized their plots of land, they were no longer interested in esoteric absurdities such as Marx’s stages in the creation of a classless society. The fact is they were essentially conservative and wanted to pass what little wealth they had to their children.
This infuriated Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who believed that the peasantry, especially the ones who owned some land and a few cows, were a huge threat to a collectivist Soviet Russia.
Lenin’s hatred of the peasantry became clear when a famine occurred in Ukraine and southern Russia in 1921, the inevitable result of the chaos and upheaval of the revolution.
With his bloodthirsty loathing for all enemies of the revolution, he said “Let the peasants starve,” and wrote ranting notes ordering the better off peasants to be hanged in their thousands and their bodies displayed by the roadsides.
Yet this was an emotional outburst and, ever the ruthless pragmatist, he realized the country was so poor and weak in the immediate aftermath of its revolutionary civil war that the peasants were vital to its survival.
So instead, he embraced what he called a New Economic Policy, in effect a temporary retreat from Marxism, that allowed the peasants to grow crops and sell them for profit. It was always planned by Lenin and his fellow radicals that this New Economic Policy should be a stopgap measure which would soon be abandoned in the Marxist cause.
But before this could happen, Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin defeated all his rivals for the Soviet leadership.
Then, three years later, grain supplies dropped radically. It had been a poor crop, made worse by the fact that many peasant farmers had shifted from grain into more lucrative cotton production.
Stalin traveled across Russia to inspect supplies and ordered forcible seizures of grain from the peasantry.
Thousands of young urban Communists were drafted into the countryside to help seize grain as Stalin determined that the old policies had failed.
Backed by the young, tough Communists of his party, he devised what he called the Great Turn: he would seize the land, force the peasants into collective farms and sell the excess grain abroad to force through a Five Year Plan of furious industrialization to make Soviet Russia a military superpower.
He expected the peasants to resist and decreed anyone who did so was a kulak – a betteroff peasant who could afford to withhold grain – and who was now to be treated as a class enemy. By 1930, it was clear the collectivization campaign was in difficulties. There was less grain than before it had been introduced, the peasants were still resisting and the Soviet Union seemed to be tottering.
Stalin, along with his henchman Vyacheslav Molotov and others, wrote a ruthless memorandum ordering the “destruction of the kulaks as a class.”
They divided huge numbers of peasants into three categories. The first was to be eliminated immediately; the second to be imprisoned in camps; the third, consisting of 150,000 households – almost a million innocent people – was to be deported to wildernesses in Siberia or Asia.
Stalin himself did not really understand how to identify a kulak or how to improve grain production, but this was beside the point. What mattered was that sufficient numbers of peasants would be killed or deported for all resistance to his collectivization program to be smashed.
In letters written by many Soviet leaders, including Stalin and Molotov, which I have read in the archives, they repeatedly used the expression: “We must break the back of the peasantry.” And they meant it.
In 193031, millions of peasants were deported, mainly to Siberia. But 800,000 people rebelled in small uprisings, often murdering local commissars who tried to take their grain. So Stalin’s top henchmen led armed expeditions of secret policemen to crush ‘the wreckers’, shooting thousands.
The peasants replied by destroying their crops and slaughtering 26 million cattle and 15 million horses to stop the Bolsheviks (and the cities they came from) getting their food.
Their mistake was to think they were dealing with ordinary politicians. But the Bolsheviks were far more sinister than that: if many millions of peasants wished to fight to the death, then the Bolsheviks were not afraid of killing them.
It was war – and the struggle was most vicious not only in the Ukraine but in the north Caucasus, the Volga, southern Russia and central Asia. The strain of the slaughter affected even the bullnerved Stalin, who sensed opposition to these brutal policies by the more moderate Bolsheviks, including his wife Nadya.
He knew Soviet power was suddenly precarious, yet Stalin kept selling the grain abroad while a shortage turned into a famine.
More than a million peasants were deported to Siberia: hundreds of thousands were arrested or shot. Like a village shopkeeper doing his accounts, Stalin totted up the numbers of executed peasants and the tons of grains he had collected.
By December 1931, famine was sweeping the Ukraine and north Caucasus. “The peasants ate dogs, horses, rotten potatoes, the bark of trees, anything they could find,” wrote one witness Fedor Bleov.
By summer 1932, Fred Beal, an American radical and rare outside witness, visited a village near Kharkiv in Ukraine, where he found all the inhabitants dead in their houses or on the streets, except one insane woman. Rats feasted on the bodies.
Beal found messages next to the bodies such as: ‘My son, I couldn’t wait. God be with you.’ One young communist, Lev Kopolev, wrote at the time of ‘women and children with distended bellies turning blue, with vacant lifeless eyes.
“And corpses. Corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots; corpses in peasant huts in the melting snow of Vologda [in Russia] and Kharkiv [in Ukraine].”
Cannibalism was rife and some women offered sexual favors in return for food. There are horrific eyewitness accounts of mothers eating their own children.
In the Ukrainian city of Poltava, Andriy Melezhyk recalled that neighbors found a pot containing a boiled liver, heart and lungs in the home of one mother who had died.
Under a barrel in the cellar they discovered a small hole in which a child’s head, feet and hands were buried. It was the remains of the woman’s little daughter, Vaska.
A boy named Miron Dolot described the countryside as ‘like a battlefield after a war.
“Littering the fields were bodies of starving farmers who’d been combing the potato fields in the hope of finding a fragment of a potato. Some frozen corpses had been lying out there for months.” On June 6, 1932, Stalin and Molotov ordered “no deviation regarding amounts or deadlines of grain deliveries are to be permitted.”
A week later, even the Ukrainian Bolshevik leaders were begging for food, but Stalin turned on his own comrades, accusing them of being wreckers. “The Ukraine has been given more than it should,” he stated.
When a comrade at a Politburo meeting told the truth about the horrors, Stalin, who knew what was happening perfectly well, retorted: “Wouldn’t it be better for you to leave your post and become a writer so you can concoct more fables!”
In the same week, a train pulled into Kyiv from the Ukrainian villages “loaded with corpses of people who had starved to death,” according to one report.
Such tragic sights had no effect on the Soviet leadership. When the American Beal complained to the Bolshevik Ukrainian boss, Petrovsky, he replied: “We know millions are dying. That is unfortunate, but the glorious future of the Soviet Union will justify it.”
Stalin was not alone in his crazed determination to push through his plan. The archives reveal one young communist admitting: “I saw people dying from hunger, but I firmly believed the ends justified the means.”
Though Stalin was admittedly in a frenzy of nervous tension, it was at this point in 1932 when under another leader the Soviet Union might have simply fallen apart and history would have been different.
Embattled on all sides, criticized by his own comrades, faced with chaos and civil war and mass starvation in the countryside, he pushed on ruthlessly – even when, in 1932, his wife Nadya committed suicide, in part as a protest against the famine.
“It seems in some regions of Ukraine, Soviet power has ceased to exist,” he wrote. “Check the problem and take measures.” That meant the destruction of any resistance.
Stalin created a draconian law that any hungry peasant who stole even a husk of grain was to be shot – the notorious Misappropriation of Socialist Property law.
“If we don’t make an effort, we might lose Ukraine,” Stalin said, almost in panic. He dispatched ferocious punitive expeditions led by his henchmen, who engaged in mass murders and executions.
Not just Ukraine was targeted– Molotov, for example, headed to the Urals, the Lower Volga and Siberia. Lazar Kaganovich, a close associate of Stalin, crushed the Kuban and Siberia regions where famine was also rife.
Train tickets were restricted and internal passports were introduced so that it became impossible for peasants to flee the famine areas. Stalin called the peasants “saboteurs” and declared it “a fight to the death! These people deliberately tried to sabotage the Soviet stage.”
Between four and five million died in Ukraine, a million died in Kazakhstan and another million in the north Caucasus and the Volga.
By 1933, 5.7 million households – somewhere between 10 million and 15 million people – had vanished. They had been deported, shot or died of starvation.
As for Stalin, he emerged more ruthless, more paranoid, more isolated than before.
Stalin later told Winston Churchill that this was the most difficult time of his entire life, harder even than Hitler’s invasion.
“It was a terrible struggle” in which he had “to destroy 10 million. It was fearful. Four years it lasted – but it was absolutely necessary.”
Only in the mind of a brutal dictator could the mass murder of his own people be considered “necessary.”
Whether it was genocide or not, perhaps now the true nature of one of the worst crimes in history will finally be acknowledged.
Simon Sebag Montefiore is a Londonbased author. His latest book, Sashenka, is about love, family, death and betrayal in 20th Century Russia. Montefiore’s website is www.simonsebagmontefiore.com.
http://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/oped/29329/print/
Compliments Daniel Foty
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Students Protest Ukraine's Sex Tourism Industry
Students from several universities dressed as prostitutes to draw attention to a problem many Ukrainians say is tarnishing their country.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
VIDEO: Students dress like prostitutes to protest
"We are not for sale:" a group of Ukrainian women gathered in central Kiev to protest against the country's burgeoning sex tourism industry.
The women - students from several universities - dressed as prostitutes to draw attention to a problem many Ukrainians say is tarnishing their country.
"Lots of foreigners come here for sex, and to put it bluntly sex tours are now being sold. We don't want our country to become a big brothel. It's a shame and it's shameful," says one of the protestors.
Prostitution is illegal but widespread and largely ignored by the government.
Ukrainian police estimate there are approximately 12,000 prostitutes in Ukraine, with 4,000 working in Kiev alone.
The former Soviet republic may lag far behind Thailand on the list of sex tourists' favourite destinations, but it's moving up - thanks in part to the easing of visa restrictions on American and European Union citizens.
Ukraine is one of the largest exporters of women to the international sex industry - a damning statistic.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, almost half a million Ukrainian women have been trafficked into sexual slavery abroad - and now increasingly at home as well.
http://www.wrecradio.com/cc-common/news/sections/newsarticle.html?feed=104673&article=4032792
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Kobe's defense leads U.S. over Lithuania, 120-84
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Stu Forster / Getty Images
Sarunas Jasikevicius, second from right, was held to nine points as the U.S. Olympic basketball team defeated Lithuania, 120-84.
Bryant locks down sharpshooter Sarunas Jasikevicius four years after he and Lithuania stunned the U.S. in Athens.
By Mark Heisler, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer 8:44 AM PDT, August 1, 2008
MACAO -- Moving up in class, even if it was hard to tell, the U.S. men's basketball team played its best opponent and turned in its most impressive performance.After crunching Canada by 55 points and Turkey by 32 in its first two exhibitions, the U.S. turned highly regarded Lithuania into another clay pigeon today, romping to a 120-84 victory as Kobe Bryant jumped all over Lithuania sharpshooter Sarunas Jasikevicius, helping hold him to nine points.
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If revenge is something you get in games that actually count, it was still a dominating performance for the Americans against an old nemesis.In the Olympic semifinals at Sydney in 2000, with the U.S. still unbeaten in three Olympiads with NBA pros, Jasikevicius had a chance to shock the world with a three-pointer at the buzzer but missed.Making up for it four years later in Athens, Jasikevicius scored 28 points, making seven three-point shots, as Lithuania toppled the Americans, 94-90, in group play.So it wasn't a coincidence when U.S. Coach Mike Krzyzewski pointed his best perimeter defender, Bryant, at Jasikevicius.Bryant didn't play him all game -- Chris Paul, among others, took a turn on him -- nor did Bryant shut Jasikevicius out, but it was close.Jasikevicius got off eight shots all night, missed six and was charitably charged with only three of Lithuania's 23 turnovers."He had some good games against the USA and was real brash about it, trash talked, things of that nature," said Bryant. "So it's my responsibility to bring it to him. . . ."This is what I do. They [the U.S. coaches] reminded me of it so, sic the Doberman on him."The turning point was the opening tip. In the Lithuanians' first 11 possessions, they got off only six shots, missed four of those and turned the ball over five times.By then the U.S. led, 18-5, and was just warming up.By halftime, it was 56-39. Lithuania cut the score to 61-52 in the third quarter but the Americans turned it back up on defense, leading to more turnovers that resulted in fast breaks, lobs and dunks.The U.S. team will now fly to the mainland for two more exhibitions in Shanghai against Russia and Australia before touching down in Beijing on Wednesday.mark.heisler@latimes.com
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USA demolish Lithuania ahead of Games
2nd August 2008, 4:06 WST
LeBron James' Team USA has buried European heavyweights Lithuania 120-84 on Saturday to lay down a marker for reclaiming the Olympic title.
The 12-time champions, humbled at Athens 2004, matched defensive ferocity with offensive class as they shot to a big early lead, stifled a brief comeback, and then ran away with it in front of a packed Cotai Arena.
Cleveland Cavaliers playmaker James again dominated as the NBA superstars made it three out of three after convincing warm-up wins against Canada and Turkey.
'King' James has promised a 13th Olympic gold and USA got off to a fearsome start, swarming the Lithuania offence and racing to a 19-0 lead as James picked up where he left off against Turkey with a pair of crowd-pleasing dunks.
NBA MVP Kobe Bryant showed delicate artistry with a two-point lay-up and jumper, and Chris Paul added a fade-away for another two with the USA cruising 31-15 by the end of the first period.
James is the reigning NBA scoring champion, but his defensive qualities were again instrumental and he fought under his own net before firing the length of the court for Paul, who flung it to Bryant for a flying jam and 56-39 lead at halftime.
Triple European champions Lithuania started the third period with a series of three-pointers, but James hit back with one of his own and added two net-swinging dunks to smother the brief renaissance.
Game MVP Dwyane Wade then took over scoring duties as he shot twice for three and was fed by Paul for a spectacular jam to take the score to 91-66 by the final period.
Another Wade slam, with the help of Deron Williams, completed Lithuania's misery as the world's fifth-ranked team finished outclassed and 36 points back.
Team USA are vying to end an eight-year international drought stretching back to Sydney 2000 with embarrassing flops at Athens 2004 and two World Championships along the way.
Lithuania's run of three straight Olympic bronze medals was ended by the USA in the Athens 2004 third-place play-off. They had earlier humbled the "Dream Team" defending champions in the opening round.
Lithuania had won six out of seven warm-ups this month, falling only to world champions Spain. They are drawn against Olympic title-holders Argentina, Russia, Australia, Iran and Croatia in Group A.
USA will now complete their Olympic preparations against Russia and Australia in Shanghai.
They play hosts China on August 10 to kick off a tough Group B also featuring Spain, African champions Angola and European powers Greece and Germany.
http://www.thewest.com.au/aapstory.aspx?StoryName=502446
AFP
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Lithuania says 33 troops returned from Iraq
2008-08-01 20:52:02 - VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) - Lithuania's ministry of defense says 33 Lithuanian troops have returned home after finishing their mission in Iraq.The contingent has served under U.S. command in Al Kut, about 100 miles (kilometers) from Baghdad, since November.Lithuania, a staunch U.S. ally, joined the coalition forces in Iraq in 2003.The ministry says eight Lithuanian military personnel will remain in Iraq as instructors and staff officers, but that the withdrawn contingent will not be replaced.
http://www.pr-inside.com/print734658.htm
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Geopolitical Diary: Cuba and a Return to the Russian-U.S. Tug-of-War
Stratfor Today »-->July 25, 2008
For the past week, a series of stories and denials have been published in the Russian media surrounding a possible plan for Russia to relocate a refueling base in Cuba and resume flights of Russia’s Tu-160 “Blackjack” and Tu-95 “Bear” nuclear-capable strategic bombers back into the Western Hemisphere. All the noise reached a crescendo when another piece of information — true or not — was leaked to the Russian press that a crew of the Russian bombers had gone to Cuba on Thursday to conduct preliminary surveys.
Thus far, there is no confirmation that Russia is indeed returning militarily to Cuba. It is, however, a signal of what could happen if the United Stated does not heed Russian demands for Washington to back off from Moscow’s turf. This would be, in Moscow’s eyes, an equal response to the United States’ signing ballistic missile defense system treaties with the Czech Republic and Poland — right on Russia’s doorstep — as well as discussing NATO membership with the former Soviet states of Ukraine and Georgia.
Russia did, in fact, respond to the West’s encroachment: cutting energy supplies to Europe and sending more military into Georgia’s secessionist regions. But the problem was that Moscow simply hadn’t gotten Washington’s attention.
Washington has been too wrapped up in other issues — such as the upcoming presidential election, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, negotiations with Iran and simply not believing Russia had any real tools with which to threaten it –- that it airily dismissed all of Moscow’s provocations. This has made Russia’s reprisals Europe’s problem at a time when Moscow wants to prove it once again is a global power and can stand up against its traditional foe: the United States. So Russia sent a signal of something that the United States simply cannot ignore — the moving of the Russian-U.S. tug-of-war from Russia’s doorstep to the U.S. doorstep. This is a serious threat and one with which Washington is quite familiar.
The Cuba option would be a powerful move against the United States — just as it was during the 1950s and 1960s — because it directly penetrates the United States’ immediate periphery. Combine the Cuba rumors with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s trip to Moscow this past week — which held its own flurry of rumored deals over Russian bases and defense deals — and Moscow is reminding the Americans of a prior miscalculation. In the 1950s, Washington assumed that it could threaten the Soviet Union along its borders in Europe, South Asia and East Asia. And the United States believed it could not be threatened in its homeland, in the Western Hemisphere — America assumed no foreign power would dare violate the Monroe Doctrine. Washington bet that Moscow did not have an equivalent threat, and it was wrong.
The Soviet Union’s move into Cuba back then changed the entire dynamic of the Cold War. The Soviet presence threatened the sea lanes out of the Gulf of Mexico, major facilities in Florida, all of the Caribbean airspace and some of the Eastern Seaboard. It forced the U.S. Navy and Air Force to shift resources and account for Soviet units there. It diverted the CIA into Latin America, forcing the conflicts in Central American and Grenada. Despite its inherent military vulnerability, Cuba was one of the most strategic Soviet assets. Nothing was the same after Cuba.
The Russians are reminding the Americans of their prior miscalculations on how Russians respond to perceived threats. The United States has shifted its focus from its periphery and once again moved to responding to threats that could never truly physically hit the homeland — such as an Iranian missile threat. In the nearly 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has returned to and enjoyed a world where any potential military threat is an ocean and half a world away.
For now, this is just a signal and no real movement on the ground has been made. Russia is serious, however, about its ability to follow through if the United States does not release the pressure elsewhere. The moves over Cuba are not an indicator of the Russians’ global intentions, but are meant to signal an increase in Moscow’s assertiveness. It is a gutsy and interesting move by the Russians. We have yet to see whether the Americans have really noticed (or want to admit that they noticed) and can divert attention from the Middle East and domestic politics to address the Russian threat — either by backing down or by escalating the situation, which would bring back a Cold War standoff.
Of course, if Washington and Moscow do get serious about things such as Cuba, then the U.S. escalation would go far beyond what Russia currently feels threatened over.
http://www.stratfor.com/
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Geopolitical Diary: Cyberwarfare Beginning To Take Center Stage
Stratfor Today »-->July 30, 2008
2008 has seen an increasingly public acknowledgment by the U.S. intelligence community of the cyberwarfare threat. A report by Defense News on Tuesday highlighted the recent emergence of significant bipartisan congressional support by the powerful U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence for a White House initiative on comprehensive national cybersecurity. Though public details are vague, the initiative seeks to improve computer security holistically across the military and government, while better hardening critical infrastructure against cyberattack. The intent is to create architecture that is also open to participation by business and the public.
Related Special Topic Pages
Cyberwarfare
It has long been abundantly clear that computers and especially the global connectivity of the Internet have been, as a whole, one of the most radical and far-reaching inventions in human history. High technology has changed the way business is done and the way humans personally connect and interact. Already we see jihadists using the Internet as a tool for manipulating public perception, coordinating operations and even sharing tactics, training and practices. At the same time, cyberspace has opened new avenues for espionage and crime alike. The free flow of information across international boundaries has influenced color revolutions in countries like Ukraine and precipitated the fall of governments.
But while the geopolitical significance of cyberspace is undeniable, its exploitation in global conflict — cyberwarfare — has largely been limited and deniable. Both the Pentagon’s exercise of cyberwarfare in Kosovo in 1999 and the potential use of it by Israel as part of its raid on Syria in September 2007 is the stuff of speculation. The world has yet to see the comprehensive military exploitation of cyberspace in international conflict.
This is an enormous concern, and though the U.S. Air Force is working to consolidate its cyberwarfare efforts under the aegis of a new Cyber Command, the Pentagon does not have anything close to the established dominance that it enjoys in more traditional domains.
For example, some experts claim that the massive 2004 blackout in the American northeast was precipitated by a Chinese hacker tinkering with systems relevant to the power grid. In 2007, in what has become one of the few true case studies in cyberwarfare, a massive cyberattack brought Estonia to a standstill in the wake of the controversial relocation of a Soviet World War II memorial. (And despite its recent status as a Soviet republic, Estonia is no poorly connected backwater. In fact, it is an exceptionally “wired” country by any standard — which contributed heavily to the effectiveness of the attack.)
At the time, the government was unable to communicate efficiently. Attacks on government websites were interspersed with disinformation and fraudulent postings. Though not everyone or everything was targeted, Estonia’s entire Internet infrastructure was so overloaded with traffic and preoccupied with defending itself that it essentially ceased to function — bringing corporate banking, access to the media and even day-to-day personal transactions to a halt.
Reports on the Estonian incident suggest that the attacks ultimately involved more than a million computers from some 75 countries (including some of Estonia’s NATO allies). And while nationalist fervor on the Russian side certainly played a part in rallying independent hackers, there is little doubt that the Kremlin was involved.
There are several interrelated points here:
Cyberwarfare has the potential to bring a country to an economic standstill on par with that experienced by the United States in the days following the 9/11 attacks.
Offensive actions in cyberspace often provide a great deal of deniability. It is a smart weapon of choice for inflicting blows without engaging in a shooting war.
The connectivity and computing power of systems and servers inside a country and allied countries can be co-opted and used in very simple but often all too effective brute-force attacks.
An attack can be executed from almost anywhere in the world without consideration for strategic geographic buffers and otherwise insurmountable distances.
The list goes on, but the underlying point is that cyberspace is a domain in which many of the traditional considerations of geopolitical conflict are fundamentally altered — if not obviated all together (e.g. geography may not matter, resources can be amassed largely undetected and the primary form of damage may be economic rather than physical).
As the unchallenged and the sole superpower, the United States is the obvious target because symmetrical competition is often inconceivable. Cyberwarfare efforts are under way in many countries around the world (including Russia), but China is widely considered to have the most advanced and robust capability.
Currently, assaults on U.S. systems (corporate, government and military alike) from all over the world occur daily. But there can be little doubt that in a significant escalation of hostilities with a country like Russia or China, such blows will be felt at home even if the conventional conflict may be thousands of miles away.
Keeping conflict an ocean and half a world away has been a core geopolitical imperative for Washington since the beginning. It is the root of the Monroe Doctrine and the reason why Soviet missiles in Cuba were so unacceptable. The very nature of the Internet thus makes comprehensive national cybersecurity at home a geopolitically relevant national interest.
http://www.stratfor.com/
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Pelosi: Save the Planet, Let Someone Else Drill
By Charles KrauthammerFriday, August 1, 2008; A17
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposes lifting the moratorium on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and on the Outer Continental Shelf. She won't even allow it to come to a vote. With $4 gas having massively shifted public opinion in favor of domestic production, she wants to protect her Democratic members from having to cast an anti-drilling election-year vote. Moreover, given the public mood, she might even lose. This cannot be permitted. Why? Because, as she explained to Politico: "I'm trying to save the planet; I'm trying to save the planet."
A lovely sentiment. But has Pelosi actually thought through the moratorium's effects on the planet?
Consider: 25 years ago, nearly 60 percent of U.S. petroleum was produced domestically. Today it's 25 percent. From its peak in 1970, U.S. production has declined a staggering 47 percent. The world consumes 86 million barrels a day, the United States, roughly 20 million. We need the stuff to run our cars and planes and economy. Where does it come from?
Places such as Nigeria, where chronic corruption, environmental neglect and the resulting unrest and instability lead to pipeline explosions, oil spills and illegal siphoning by the poverty-stricken population -- which leads to more spills and explosions. Just this week, two Royal Dutch Shell pipelines had to be shut down because bombings by local militants were causing leaks into the ground.
Compare the Niger Delta to the Gulf of Mexico, where deep-sea U.S. oil rigs withstood Hurricanes Katrina and Rita without a single undersea well suffering a significant spill.
The United States has the highest technology to ensure the safest drilling. Today, directional drilling -- essentially drilling down, then sideways -- allows access to oil that in 1970 would have required a surface footprint more than three times as large. Additionally, the United States has one of the most extensive and least corrupt regulatory systems on the planet.
Does Pelosi imagine that with so much of America declared off-limits, the planet is less injured as drilling shifts to Kazakhstan and Venezuela and Equatorial Guinea? That Russia will be more environmentally scrupulous than we in drilling in its Arctic?
The net environmental effect of Pelosi's no-drilling willfulness is negative. Outsourcing U.S. oil production does nothing to lessen worldwide environmental despoliation. It simply exports it to more corrupt, less efficient, more unstable parts of the world -- thereby increasing net planetary damage.
Democrats want no oil from the American OCS or ANWR. But of course they do want more oil. From OPEC. From where Americans don't vote. From places Democratic legislators can't see. On May 13 Sen. Chuck Schumer -- deeply committed to saving just those pieces of the planet that might have huge reserves of American oil -- demanded that the Saudis increase production by a million barrels a day. It doesn't occur to him that by eschewing the slightest disturbance of the mating habits of the Arctic caribou, he is calling for the further exploitation of the pristine deserts of Arabia. In the name of the planet, mind you.
The other panacea, yesterday's rage, is biofuels: We can't drill our way out of the crisis, it seems, but we can greenly grow our way out. By now, however, it is blindingly obvious even to Democrats that biofuels are a devastating force for environmental degradation. It has led to the rape of "lungs of the world" rain forests in Indonesia and Brazil as huge tracts have been destroyed to make room for palm oil and sugar plantations.
Here in the United States, one out of every three ears of corn is stuffed into a gas tank (by way of ethanol), causing not just food shortages abroad and high prices at home but intensive increases in farming, with all of the attendant environmental problems (soil erosion, insecticide pollution, water consumption, etc.).
This to prevent drilling on an area in the Arctic one-sixth the size of Dulles Airport that leaves undisturbed a refuge one-third the size of Britain.
There are a dizzying number of economic and national security arguments for drilling at home: a $700 billion oil balance-of-payments deficit, a gas tax (equivalent) levied on the paychecks of American workers and poured into the treasuries of enemy and terror-supporting regimes, growing dependence on unstable states of the Persian Gulf and Caspian basin. Pelosi and the Democrats stand athwart, shouting: We don't care. We come to save the planet!
They seem blissfully unaware that the argument for their drill-there-not-here policy collapses on its own environmental terms.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/31/AR2008073102824_pf.html
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Poll: 1 in 3 Muslim students approve killing for Islam 'Stop talking about celebrating diversity and focus on integration and assimilation'
If ignorance and poverty are responsible for the growth of extremist views in the Islamic world, someone needs ask to Muslim students, privileged enough and bright enough to attend some of the United Kingdom's best universities, why one-in-three of them endorses killing in the name of Islam.
The report of this finding, based on a poll of 600 Muslim and 800 non-Muslim students at 12 universities in the UK, and conducted by YouGov on behalf of the Center for Social Cohesion, will be released tomorrow as "Islam on Campus."
Among its findings of Muslim beliefs:
40 per cent support introduction of sharia into British law for Muslims
One-third back the idea of a worldwide Islamic caliphate based on sharia law
40 per cent believe it is unacceptable for Muslim men and women to associate freely
24 per cent do not think men and women are equal in the eyes of Allah
25 per cent have little or no respect for homosexuals.
53 per cent believe killing in the name of religion is never justified (compared with 94 per cent of non-Muslims), while 32 per cent say it is
57 per cent believe Muslim soldiers serving in the UK military should be able to refuse duty in Muslim countries
More than half favor an Islamic political party to support their views in parliament
One-third don't think or don't know if Islam is compatible with Western views of democracy
"Significant numbers appear to hold beliefs which contravene democratic values," Hannah Stuart, one of the report's authors, told the London Times. "These results are deeply embarrassing for those who have said there is no extremism in British universities."
The report echoes one released last year by the Policy Exchange which found 37% of all Muslims aged 16-24 would prefer to live under a sharia system.
In addition to polling of 1,400 students, the researchers visited more than 20 universities to interview students and listen to guest speakers brought on campus. The report notes radical Islamic preachers regularly deliver inflammatory speeches that target homosexuals and border on anti-Semitism.
"Our researchers found a ghettoized mentality among Muslim students at Queen Mary (college)," said James Brandon, deputy director at CSC. "Also, we found the segregation between Muslim men and women at events more visible at Queen Mary."
A spokesman for Queen Mary told the Times the university knew Islamic preachers had spoken on campus but was unaware of what they had said.
"Clearly, we in no way associate ourselves with these views. However, also integral to the spirit of university life is free speech and debate, and on occasion speakers will make statements that are deemed offensive," he said.
Wes Streeting, president of the National Union of Students, condemned the study: "This disgusting report is a reflection of the biases and prejudices of a right-wing think tank – not the views of Muslim students across Britain. Only 632 Muslim students were asked vague and misleading questions, and their answers were willfully misinterpreted."
The report was criticized by the country's largest Muslim student body, the Federation of Student Islamic Societies. Most of the Islamic societies on campuses operate under the FOSIS umbrella.
The authors of the report note that campus Islamic societies have, in the past, been where some UK terrorists became radicalized. They cite Kafeel Ahmed, who drove a jeep engulfed in flames into a building at the Glasgow airport last year and died of his burns. Investigators believe he adopted jihadist beliefs while studying at Anglia Ruskin university, Cambridge.
In April, WND reported that the director-general of MI5 had warned the government that donations of hundreds of millions of pounds from Saudi Arabia and powerful Muslim organizations in Pakistan, Indonesia and the Gulf Straits had led to a "dangerous increase in the spread of extremism in leading university campuses."
"The finding that a large number of students think it is okay to kill in the name of religion is alarming," said Anthony Glees, professor of security and intelligence studies at Buckingham University.
"There is a wide cultural divide between Muslim and non-Muslim students. The solution is to stop talking about celebrating diversity and focus on integration and assimilation."
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?pageId=70673
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July 30, 2008
C.I.A. Outlines Pakistan Links With Militants
By MARK MAZZETTI and ERIC SCHMITT
New York Times
WASHINGTON — A top Central Intelligence Agency official traveled secretly to Islamabad this month to confront Pakistan’s most senior officials with new information about ties between the country’s powerful spy service and militants operating in Pakistan’s tribal areas, according to American military and intelligence officials.
The C.I.A. emissary presented evidence showing that members of the spy service had deepened their ties with some militant groups that were responsible for a surge of violence in Afghanistan, possibly including the suicide bombing this month of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, the officials said.
The decision to confront Pakistan with what the officials described as a new C.I.A. assessment of the spy service’s activities seemed to be the bluntest American warning to Pakistan since shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks about the ties between the spy service and Islamic militants.
The C.I.A. assessment specifically points to links between members of the spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, and the militant network led by Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, which American officials believe maintains close ties to senior figures of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
The C.I.A. has depended heavily on the ISI for information about militants in Pakistan, despite longstanding concerns about divided loyalties within the Pakistani spy service, which had close relations with the Taliban in Afghanistan before the Sept. 11 attacks.
That ISI officers have maintained important ties to anti-American militants has been the subject of previous reports in The New York Times. But the C.I.A. and the Bush administration have generally sought to avoid criticism of Pakistan, which they regard as a crucial ally in the fight against terrorism.
The visit to Pakistan by the C.I.A. official, Stephen R. Kappes, the agency’s deputy director, was described by several American military and intelligence officials in interviews in recent days. Some of those who were interviewed made clear that they welcomed the decision by the C.I.A. to take a harder line toward the ISI’s dealings with militant groups.
Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, is currently in Washington meeting with Bush administration officials. A White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe, would not say whether President Bush had raised the issue during his meeting on Monday with Mr. Gilani. In an interview broadcast Tuesday on the PBS program “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” Mr. Gilani said he rejected as “not believable” any assertions of ISI’s links to the militants. “We would not allow that,” he said.
The Haqqani network and other militants operating in the tribal areas along the Afghan border are said by American intelligence officials to be responsible for increasingly deadly and complex attacks inside Afghanistan, and to have helped Al Qaeda establish a safe haven in the tribal areas.
Lt. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the acting commander of American forces in Southwest Asia, made an unannounced visit to the tribal areas on Monday, a further reflection of American concern.
The ISI has for decades maintained contacts with various militant groups in the tribal areas and elsewhere, both for gathering intelligence and as proxies to exert influence on neighboring India and Afghanistan. It is unclear whether the C.I.A. officials have concluded that contacts between the ISI and militant groups are blessed at the highest levels of Pakistan’s spy service and military, or are carried out by rogue elements of Pakistan’s security apparatus.
With Pakistan’s new civilian government struggling to assert control over the country’s spy service, there are concerns in Washington that the ISI may become even more powerful than when President Pervez Musharraf controlled the military and the government. Last weekend, Pakistani military and intelligence officials thwarted an attempt by the government in Islamabad to put the ISI more directly under civilian control.
Mr. Kappes made his secret visit to Pakistan on July 12, joining Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for meetings with senior Pakistani civilian and military leaders.
“It was a very pointed message saying, ‘Look, we know there’s a connection, not just with Haqqani but also with other bad guys and ISI, and we think you could do more and we want you to do more about it,’ ” one senior American official said of the message to Pakistan. The official was briefed on the meetings; like others who agreed to talk about it, he spoke on condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic delicacy of Mr. Kappes’s message.
The meetings took place days after a suicide bomber attacked the Indian Embassy in Kabul, killing dozens. Afghanistan’s government has publicly accused the ISI of having a hand in the attack, an assertion American officials have not corroborated.
The decision to have Mr. Kappes deliver the message about the spy service was an unusual one, and could be a sign that the relationship between the C.I.A. and the ISI, which has long been marked by mutual suspicion as well as mutual dependence, may be deteriorating.
The trip is reminiscent of a secret visit that the top two American intelligence officials made to Pakistan in January. Those officials — Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, and Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director — sought to press Mr. Musharraf to allow the C.I.A. greater latitude to operate in the tribal territories.
It was the ISI, backed by millions of covert dollars from the C.I.A., that ran arms to guerrillas fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s. It is now American troops who are dying in Afghanistan, and intelligence officials believe those longstanding ties between Pakistani spies and militants may be part of an effort to destabilize Afghanistan.
Spokesmen for the White House and the C.I.A. declined to comment about the visit by Mr. Kappes or about the agency’s assessment. A spokesman for Admiral Mullen, Capt. John Kirby, declined to comment on the meetings, saying “the chairman desires to keep these meetings private and therefore it would be inappropriate to discuss any details.”
Admiral Mullen and Mr. Kappes met in Islamabad with several high-ranking Pakistani officials. They included Mr. Gilani; Mr. Musharraf; Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the army chief of staff and former ISI director; and Lt. Gen. Nadeem Taj, the current ISI director.
One American counterterrorism official said there was no evidence of Pakistan’s government’s direct support of Al Qaeda. He said, however, there were “genuine and longstanding concerns about Pakistan’s ties to the Haqqani network, which of course has links to Al Qaeda.”
American commanders in Afghanistan have in recent months sounded an increasingly shrill alarm about the threat posed by Mr. Haqqani’s network. Earlier this year, American military officials pressed the American ambassador in Pakistan, Anne W. Patterson, to get Pakistani troops to strike Haqqani network targets in the tribal areas.
Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the senior NATO commander in Afghanistan until last month, frequently discussed the ISI’s contacts with militant groups with General Kayani, Pakistan’s military chief.
During his visit to the tribal areas on Monday, General Dempsey met with top Pakistani commanders in Miramshah, the capital of North Waziristan, where Pakistan’s 11th Army Corps and Frontier Corps paramilitary force have a headquarters, to discuss the security situation in the region, Pakistani officials said.
North Waziristan, the most lawless of the tribal areas, is a hub of Al Qaeda and other foreign fighters, and the base of operations for the Haqqani network.
On Tuesday, Pakistani security forces raided an abandoned seminary owned by Mr. Haqqani, Pakistani officials said. No arrests were made.
Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/world/asia/30pstan.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=th&pagewanted=print
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Olympics: Russian drug test cheats suspended
8:36AM Friday August 01, 2008
MONTE CARLO - Seven Russian female athletes, including an indoor world record holder and a two-time world champion, were provisionally suspended by the IAAF for doping-related matters.
Suspended Russian Yelena Soboleva after
setting a new womens' 1500m World Record during
the Athletics World Indoor Championships in March. Photo / AP
Yelena Soboleva, who set an indoor world record in the 1,500-meter race at this year's world championships, was one of the seven charged eight days before the opening of the Beijing Olympics "for a fraudulent substitution of urine which is both a prohibited method and also a form of tampering with the doping control process."
Two-time world 1,500 champion Tatyana Tomashova was also suspended, along with middle-distance runners Yulia Fomenko, Svetlana Cherkasova and Olga Yegorova, and hammer thrower Gulfiya Khanafeyeva and discus thrower Darya Pishchalnikova.
"The IAAF could do nothing better ahead of the games in Beijing," All Russia Athletics Federation president Valentin Balakhnichev said of the suspensions. "It's not a civilized approach."
Soboleva, Tomashova, Fomenko, Khanafeyeva and Pishchalnikova have all qualified for the Beijing Olympics.
"This shows we are willing to do anything to stop doping," IAAF spokesman Nick Davies said. "The IAAF is ready to take on an investigative approach on these issues if it needs to."
The IAAF said the matter would be turned over to the All Russia Athletics Federation. It was unclear when the supposed tampering took place.
"These rule violations were established following the deliberate storage of samples by the IAAF and reanalysis using comparative DNA techniques, and were the result of a specific investigation which was instigated and carried out by the IAAF for more than a year," the IAAF said in a statement.
According to IAAF rules, athletes have up to 14 days to request a hearing with their national federation. If a hearing is requested, it must be held within two months.
Fomenko was second to Soboleva when she set the world record of 3 minutes, 57.71 seconds on March 9 in Valencia, Spain, breaking her previous mark of 3:58.05.
"The accusations are curious," Soboleva said Thursday in a televised interview. "It's the first ever such case. I think it's a predestined action. The time was carefully chosen - we practically could do nothing - neither file an appeal nor look into the case. We are simply put aside and our hands are tied."
Tomashova won world titles at the 2003 and '05 championships, and won silver at the 2004 Athens Olympics, while Yegorova won the 5,000 at the 2001 Edmonton worlds and took silver in the 1,500 at the 2005 Helsinki worlds and gold in 3,000 at the 2001 indoor worlds. Pishchalnikova won the silver medal in the discus at the 2007 worlds and gold at the 2006 European championships, and Khanafeyeva won silver in the hammer throw at the 2006 Europeans and set a world record in her event in 2006.
"This is all about the clear favorites," Russian Olympic Committee anti-doping chief Nikolay Durmanov said. "There are many questions. The first is: What in fact happened? There will be a special inquiry.
"A less important question but a more pertinent one is: Why is the issue of last year's tests emerging just a week ahead of the games? Couldn't this question have been discussed with us in May, June or March?"
Both Yegorova and Khanafeyeva have been embroiled in doping scandals before.
Yegorova tested positive for EPO in 2001, but the result was thrown out because the French lab conducting the test did not follow the proper procedure. Khanafeyeva tested positive for an unspecified stimulant at the World Military Games in India in 2007, but the case was later dismissed.
Also Thursday, Romanian middle-distance runners Elena Antoci and Cristina Vasiloiu tested positive for the blood booster EPO and could be dropped from the country's Olympic team pending a second test, an official said.
- AP
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/4/story.cfm?c_id=4&objectid=10524715
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Kremlin corporate crackdown sends markets tumbling
JP Morgan Chase & Co. downgrades Russian stocks as government looks set to nationalize private steel and oil companies.
By Fred Weir Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
from the July 31, 2008 edition
Moscow - Russian President Dmitri Medvedev says he wants to make Russia a leading global financial center. But a series of state crackdowns on private companies have plunged Russian markets into turmoil and sent foreign investors fleeing.
Over the past week, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has twice publicly slammed Russian coal-and-steel giant Mechel for alleged price fixing, tax evasion, and monopolization, causing the company's shares to shed nearly $8 billion in value on the New York and Moscow stock markets.
In another case, Robert Dudley, CEO of the joint Russian-British oil venture TNK-BP, hastily left Russia last week claiming his company faces "sustained harassment" from officialdom in an ongoing internal dispute over control with Russian partners. Nearly 150 foreign employees of TNK-BP have been forced out of Russia in recent days over visa difficulties.
On Tuesday, the investment bank JP Morgan Chase & Co. downgraded Russian stocks, warning that "non-conventional policy methods" were threatening the country's economic stability.
Analysts say this amounts to the latest chapter in a Kremlin campaign to impose order upon the commanding heights – strategic sectors – of Russia's economy, which began with the destruction of the Yukos oil empire and the arrest of its politically disobedient owner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, five years ago. As usual, opinion is starkly divided over the government's intentions, with defenders arguing that the goal is to enforce the law in Russia's unruly business jungle. Critics, pointing to past cases, suggest that when the dust settles, assets formerly held by private interests are likely to be transferred to Kremlin-controlled companies.
"Based on my own experience, rule of law and property rights are almost non-existent in Russia," says Bill Browder, CEO of London-based Hermitage Capital, a leading investor in Russia. "Unless they can improve that, it makes no sense to invest there."
Mr. Browder, who has been unable to obtain a Russian visa for almost three years, recently charged that three Hermitage subsidiaries were targeted for takeover by corrupt officials of Russia's interior ministry, who obtained company documents and seals in the course of an official tax investigation. The seizures were thwarted, but he alleges that the officers subsequently used private company data to carry out a massive tax scam.
About 77,000 cases of such corporate "raiding" – illegal seizure of private assets, often carried out or abetted by corrupt police and state officials – occurred last year, he adds.
"It used to be oligarchs stealing from everybody, now it's law enforcement doing the stealing," Browder says.
Mechel, Russia's largest producer of coking coal, was accused at a meeting of business leaders last week by Mr. Putin of monopoly practices, including setting artificially high prices on the domestic market and exporting at unrealistically low prices to its own subsidiaries abroad in order to evade Russian duties. Putin chilled the nationally televised meeting with a veiled threat, noting that Mechel's billionaire owner, Igor Zyuzin, was absent due to sickness.
"Of course, an illness is an illness," said Putin, a former KGB agent, "but I think [Mr. Zyuzin] should get better as soon as possible, otherwise we shall have to send him a doctor to clear up all these problems."
This week, Russia's Federal Anti-Monopoly Service said it would probe Mechel, and another steel company, Evraz, on the price-fixing allegations. Experts say that's the normal procedure for policing the market, but Putin's comments were completely out of the ordinary.
"I think authorities want to beef up efforts in dealing with monopolism, and this [Putin's attack] might give that a boost," says Yaroslav Lissovolik, chief economist for Deutsche Bank in Russia. He says huge monopolies dominate Russia's economic landscape, and whittling them down to size is necessary to clear space for small and medium businesses, a key goal of Mr. Medvedev.
He says Putin may be trying to bring down inflation, which is spiking at nearly 10 percent this year, by forcing big companies to lower their domestic prices.
"Putin knows what he's doing," says Galina Kovalishina, an analyst with the independent Institute of Financial Studies in Moscow. "He doesn't care about the capitalization of any individual company, no matter how big it is. I think his main concern is the transparency of Russian business and ensuring the legal character of their dealings."
But critics point out that the government report indicting Mechel was prepared by deputy prime minister Igor Sechin, the same man who, as a Kremlin aide, oversaw the attack against Yukos. In that case, the private firm was assailed by criminal charges and back tax assessments, and in the end its assets wound up mostly in the hands of the state oil firm Rosneft.
Experts point out that Mechel is a politically obedient company, and its owner is a regular contributor to the pro-Kremlin United Russia party. "There isn't a political dimension here, as there was in the Yukos case, but it's quite likely that Mechel's coal business could be taken away and given to another company," says Alexei Mukhin, director of the independent Center for Political Information in Moscow. One possible recipient of Mechel's assets, he says, is RusSpetsStal, a specialty steel producer founded by Russia's state-owned arms export corporation, Rosoboronexport.
During recent months TNK-BP, which is a 50-50 venture between BP and four Russian billionaires, has been hit with environmental inspections, back-tax claims, espionage charges against one of its employees, and mass visa suspensions for its foreign workers. The affair remains murky, but many experts suspect that a big state firm, such as Gazprom, is waiting in the wings to pick up the pieces if the company is torn apart by the shareholder dispute. This week, the British government took the unusual step of formally complaining that Russian state agencies were piling onto TNK-BP in an apparent effort to hasten the company's demise.
"The way shareholders have manipulated elements of the Russian state bureaucracy and the way that has been allowed to continue is very disappointing," a British Embassy spokesman told journalists in Moscow.
Some experts suggest that these may be the first signs of a split between President Medvedev, who appealed for market calm on Tuesday, and his predecessor, the still-powerful Prime Minister Putin.
"Putin may have some purely political reasons," for weighing in on the Mechel affair, says Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist who studies Russia's political elite.
"Medvedev's image has been strengthening lately, so Putin may want to show who's master in the house. He gets a lot of PR points inside Russia, by playing to the part of the population that dislikes big business," she says.
Holocaust by hunger: An act of genocide?
Jul 30 2008, 18:46
Photo by Photo from M. Zheleznyak collection, courtesty of the Kyiv-based Institute of National Memory.Villagers of Udachne, in the Donetsk region, near an earth house in 1934. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin engineered a famine so horrendous that people resorted to cannibalism. Now, 75 years after one of the great forgotten crimes of modern times, Stalin's man made famine in 1932-1933, the former Soviet Republic of Ukraine is asking the world to classify it as a genocide
The demented Roman Emperor Caligula once mused that if all the people of Rome had one neck he would cut it just to be rid of his troublesome people. The trouble was there were simply too many Romans to kill them all.
Many centuries later, the brutal Soviet dictator Josef Stalin reflected that he would have liked to deport the entire Ukrainian nation, but 20 million were too many to move even for him. So he found another solution: starvation.
Now, 75 years after one of the great forgotten crimes of modern times, Stalin’s man-made famine of 1932 and 1933, the former Soviet republic of Ukraine is asking the world to classify it as a genocide.
The Ukrainians call it the Holodomor – the Hunger. Millions starved as Soviet troops and secret policemen raided their villages, stole the harvest and all the food in villagers’ homes. They dropped dead in the streets, lay dying and rotting in their houses, and some women became so desperate for food that they ate their own children.
If they managed to fend off starvation, they were deported and shot in the hundreds of thousands. So terrible was the famine that Igor Yukhnovsky, director of the Institute of National Memory, the Ukrainian institution researching the Holodomor, believes as many as nine million may have died.
For decades the disaster remained a state secret, denied by Stalin and his Soviet government and concealed from the outside world with the help of the “useful idiots” – as Lenin called Soviet sympathizers in the West.
Russia is furious that Ukraine has raised the issue of the famine: the swaggering 21st century state of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev see this as nationalist chicanery designed to promote Ukraine, which may soon join NATO and the European Union.
They see it as an anti-Russian maneuver more to do with modern politics than history. And they refuse to recognize this old crime as a genocide.
They argue that because the famine not only killed Ukrainians but huge numbers of Russians, Cossacks, Kazakhs and many others as well, it can’t be termed genocide – defined as the deliberate killing of large numbers of a particular ethnic group. It may be a strange defense, but it is historically correct. So what is the truth about the Holodomor? And why is Ukraine provoking Russia’s wrath by demanding public recognition now?
Ukraine was the breadbasket of Russia, but the Great Famine of 1932-33 was not just aimed at the Ukrainians as a nation – it was a deliberate policy aimed at the entire Soviet peasant population – Russian, Ukrainian and Kazakh – especially better-off, small-time farmers.
It was a class war designed to “break the back of the peasantry,” a war of the cities against the countryside and, unlike the Holocaust, it was not designed to eradicate an ethnic people, but to shatter their independent spirit.
So while it may not be a formal case of genocide, it does, indeed, rank as one of the most terrible crimes of the 20th century.
To understand the origins of the famine, we have to go back to the October 1917 revolution when the Bolsheviks, led by a ruthless clique of Marxist revolutionaries including Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, seized power in the name of the workers and peasants of the Russian Empire to create a Marxist paradise, using terror, murder and repression.
The Russian Empire was made of many peoples, including the Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs and Georgians, but the great majority of them, especially in the vast arable lands of Ukraine, southern Russia, the northern Caucasus, and Siberia, were peasants, who dreamed only of owning their own land and farming it.
Initially, they were thrilled with the revolution, which meant the breakup of the large landed estates into small parcels which they could farm.
But the peasants had no interest in the Marxist utopian ideologies that obsessed Lenin and Stalin. Once they had seized their plots of land, they were no longer interested in esoteric absurdities such as Marx’s stages in the creation of a classless society. The fact is they were essentially conservative and wanted to pass what little wealth they had to their children.
This infuriated Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who believed that the peasantry, especially the ones who owned some land and a few cows, were a huge threat to a collectivist Soviet Russia.
Lenin’s hatred of the peasantry became clear when a famine occurred in Ukraine and southern Russia in 1921, the inevitable result of the chaos and upheaval of the revolution.
With his bloodthirsty loathing for all enemies of the revolution, he said “Let the peasants starve,” and wrote ranting notes ordering the better off peasants to be hanged in their thousands and their bodies displayed by the roadsides.
Yet this was an emotional outburst and, ever the ruthless pragmatist, he realized the country was so poor and weak in the immediate aftermath of its revolutionary civil war that the peasants were vital to its survival.
So instead, he embraced what he called a New Economic Policy, in effect a temporary retreat from Marxism, that allowed the peasants to grow crops and sell them for profit. It was always planned by Lenin and his fellow radicals that this New Economic Policy should be a stopgap measure which would soon be abandoned in the Marxist cause.
But before this could happen, Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin defeated all his rivals for the Soviet leadership.
Then, three years later, grain supplies dropped radically. It had been a poor crop, made worse by the fact that many peasant farmers had shifted from grain into more lucrative cotton production.
Stalin traveled across Russia to inspect supplies and ordered forcible seizures of grain from the peasantry.
Thousands of young urban Communists were drafted into the countryside to help seize grain as Stalin determined that the old policies had failed.
Backed by the young, tough Communists of his party, he devised what he called the Great Turn: he would seize the land, force the peasants into collective farms and sell the excess grain abroad to force through a Five Year Plan of furious industrialization to make Soviet Russia a military superpower.
He expected the peasants to resist and decreed anyone who did so was a kulak – a betteroff peasant who could afford to withhold grain – and who was now to be treated as a class enemy. By 1930, it was clear the collectivization campaign was in difficulties. There was less grain than before it had been introduced, the peasants were still resisting and the Soviet Union seemed to be tottering.
Stalin, along with his henchman Vyacheslav Molotov and others, wrote a ruthless memorandum ordering the “destruction of the kulaks as a class.”
They divided huge numbers of peasants into three categories. The first was to be eliminated immediately; the second to be imprisoned in camps; the third, consisting of 150,000 households – almost a million innocent people – was to be deported to wildernesses in Siberia or Asia.
Stalin himself did not really understand how to identify a kulak or how to improve grain production, but this was beside the point. What mattered was that sufficient numbers of peasants would be killed or deported for all resistance to his collectivization program to be smashed.
In letters written by many Soviet leaders, including Stalin and Molotov, which I have read in the archives, they repeatedly used the expression: “We must break the back of the peasantry.” And they meant it.
In 193031, millions of peasants were deported, mainly to Siberia. But 800,000 people rebelled in small uprisings, often murdering local commissars who tried to take their grain. So Stalin’s top henchmen led armed expeditions of secret policemen to crush ‘the wreckers’, shooting thousands.
The peasants replied by destroying their crops and slaughtering 26 million cattle and 15 million horses to stop the Bolsheviks (and the cities they came from) getting their food.
Their mistake was to think they were dealing with ordinary politicians. But the Bolsheviks were far more sinister than that: if many millions of peasants wished to fight to the death, then the Bolsheviks were not afraid of killing them.
It was war – and the struggle was most vicious not only in the Ukraine but in the north Caucasus, the Volga, southern Russia and central Asia. The strain of the slaughter affected even the bullnerved Stalin, who sensed opposition to these brutal policies by the more moderate Bolsheviks, including his wife Nadya.
He knew Soviet power was suddenly precarious, yet Stalin kept selling the grain abroad while a shortage turned into a famine.
More than a million peasants were deported to Siberia: hundreds of thousands were arrested or shot. Like a village shopkeeper doing his accounts, Stalin totted up the numbers of executed peasants and the tons of grains he had collected.
By December 1931, famine was sweeping the Ukraine and north Caucasus. “The peasants ate dogs, horses, rotten potatoes, the bark of trees, anything they could find,” wrote one witness Fedor Bleov.
By summer 1932, Fred Beal, an American radical and rare outside witness, visited a village near Kharkiv in Ukraine, where he found all the inhabitants dead in their houses or on the streets, except one insane woman. Rats feasted on the bodies.
Beal found messages next to the bodies such as: ‘My son, I couldn’t wait. God be with you.’ One young communist, Lev Kopolev, wrote at the time of ‘women and children with distended bellies turning blue, with vacant lifeless eyes.
“And corpses. Corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots; corpses in peasant huts in the melting snow of Vologda [in Russia] and Kharkiv [in Ukraine].”
Cannibalism was rife and some women offered sexual favors in return for food. There are horrific eyewitness accounts of mothers eating their own children.
In the Ukrainian city of Poltava, Andriy Melezhyk recalled that neighbors found a pot containing a boiled liver, heart and lungs in the home of one mother who had died.
Under a barrel in the cellar they discovered a small hole in which a child’s head, feet and hands were buried. It was the remains of the woman’s little daughter, Vaska.
A boy named Miron Dolot described the countryside as ‘like a battlefield after a war.
“Littering the fields were bodies of starving farmers who’d been combing the potato fields in the hope of finding a fragment of a potato. Some frozen corpses had been lying out there for months.” On June 6, 1932, Stalin and Molotov ordered “no deviation regarding amounts or deadlines of grain deliveries are to be permitted.”
A week later, even the Ukrainian Bolshevik leaders were begging for food, but Stalin turned on his own comrades, accusing them of being wreckers. “The Ukraine has been given more than it should,” he stated.
When a comrade at a Politburo meeting told the truth about the horrors, Stalin, who knew what was happening perfectly well, retorted: “Wouldn’t it be better for you to leave your post and become a writer so you can concoct more fables!”
In the same week, a train pulled into Kyiv from the Ukrainian villages “loaded with corpses of people who had starved to death,” according to one report.
Such tragic sights had no effect on the Soviet leadership. When the American Beal complained to the Bolshevik Ukrainian boss, Petrovsky, he replied: “We know millions are dying. That is unfortunate, but the glorious future of the Soviet Union will justify it.”
Stalin was not alone in his crazed determination to push through his plan. The archives reveal one young communist admitting: “I saw people dying from hunger, but I firmly believed the ends justified the means.”
Though Stalin was admittedly in a frenzy of nervous tension, it was at this point in 1932 when under another leader the Soviet Union might have simply fallen apart and history would have been different.
Embattled on all sides, criticized by his own comrades, faced with chaos and civil war and mass starvation in the countryside, he pushed on ruthlessly – even when, in 1932, his wife Nadya committed suicide, in part as a protest against the famine.
“It seems in some regions of Ukraine, Soviet power has ceased to exist,” he wrote. “Check the problem and take measures.” That meant the destruction of any resistance.
Stalin created a draconian law that any hungry peasant who stole even a husk of grain was to be shot – the notorious Misappropriation of Socialist Property law.
“If we don’t make an effort, we might lose Ukraine,” Stalin said, almost in panic. He dispatched ferocious punitive expeditions led by his henchmen, who engaged in mass murders and executions.
Not just Ukraine was targeted– Molotov, for example, headed to the Urals, the Lower Volga and Siberia. Lazar Kaganovich, a close associate of Stalin, crushed the Kuban and Siberia regions where famine was also rife.
Train tickets were restricted and internal passports were introduced so that it became impossible for peasants to flee the famine areas. Stalin called the peasants “saboteurs” and declared it “a fight to the death! These people deliberately tried to sabotage the Soviet stage.”
Between four and five million died in Ukraine, a million died in Kazakhstan and another million in the north Caucasus and the Volga.
By 1933, 5.7 million households – somewhere between 10 million and 15 million people – had vanished. They had been deported, shot or died of starvation.
As for Stalin, he emerged more ruthless, more paranoid, more isolated than before.
Stalin later told Winston Churchill that this was the most difficult time of his entire life, harder even than Hitler’s invasion.
“It was a terrible struggle” in which he had “to destroy 10 million. It was fearful. Four years it lasted – but it was absolutely necessary.”
Only in the mind of a brutal dictator could the mass murder of his own people be considered “necessary.”
Whether it was genocide or not, perhaps now the true nature of one of the worst crimes in history will finally be acknowledged.
Simon Sebag Montefiore is a Londonbased author. His latest book, Sashenka, is about love, family, death and betrayal in 20th Century Russia. Montefiore’s website is www.simonsebagmontefiore.com.
http://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/oped/29329/print/
Compliments Daniel Foty
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Students Protest Ukraine's Sex Tourism Industry
Students from several universities dressed as prostitutes to draw attention to a problem many Ukrainians say is tarnishing their country.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
VIDEO: Students dress like prostitutes to protest
"We are not for sale:" a group of Ukrainian women gathered in central Kiev to protest against the country's burgeoning sex tourism industry.
The women - students from several universities - dressed as prostitutes to draw attention to a problem many Ukrainians say is tarnishing their country.
"Lots of foreigners come here for sex, and to put it bluntly sex tours are now being sold. We don't want our country to become a big brothel. It's a shame and it's shameful," says one of the protestors.
Prostitution is illegal but widespread and largely ignored by the government.
Ukrainian police estimate there are approximately 12,000 prostitutes in Ukraine, with 4,000 working in Kiev alone.
The former Soviet republic may lag far behind Thailand on the list of sex tourists' favourite destinations, but it's moving up - thanks in part to the easing of visa restrictions on American and European Union citizens.
Ukraine is one of the largest exporters of women to the international sex industry - a damning statistic.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, almost half a million Ukrainian women have been trafficked into sexual slavery abroad - and now increasingly at home as well.
http://www.wrecradio.com/cc-common/news/sections/newsarticle.html?feed=104673&article=4032792
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Kobe's defense leads U.S. over Lithuania, 120-84
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Stu Forster / Getty Images
Sarunas Jasikevicius, second from right, was held to nine points as the U.S. Olympic basketball team defeated Lithuania, 120-84.
Bryant locks down sharpshooter Sarunas Jasikevicius four years after he and Lithuania stunned the U.S. in Athens.
By Mark Heisler, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer 8:44 AM PDT, August 1, 2008
MACAO -- Moving up in class, even if it was hard to tell, the U.S. men's basketball team played its best opponent and turned in its most impressive performance.After crunching Canada by 55 points and Turkey by 32 in its first two exhibitions, the U.S. turned highly regarded Lithuania into another clay pigeon today, romping to a 120-84 victory as Kobe Bryant jumped all over Lithuania sharpshooter Sarunas Jasikevicius, helping hold him to nine points.
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If revenge is something you get in games that actually count, it was still a dominating performance for the Americans against an old nemesis.In the Olympic semifinals at Sydney in 2000, with the U.S. still unbeaten in three Olympiads with NBA pros, Jasikevicius had a chance to shock the world with a three-pointer at the buzzer but missed.Making up for it four years later in Athens, Jasikevicius scored 28 points, making seven three-point shots, as Lithuania toppled the Americans, 94-90, in group play.So it wasn't a coincidence when U.S. Coach Mike Krzyzewski pointed his best perimeter defender, Bryant, at Jasikevicius.Bryant didn't play him all game -- Chris Paul, among others, took a turn on him -- nor did Bryant shut Jasikevicius out, but it was close.Jasikevicius got off eight shots all night, missed six and was charitably charged with only three of Lithuania's 23 turnovers."He had some good games against the USA and was real brash about it, trash talked, things of that nature," said Bryant. "So it's my responsibility to bring it to him. . . ."This is what I do. They [the U.S. coaches] reminded me of it so, sic the Doberman on him."The turning point was the opening tip. In the Lithuanians' first 11 possessions, they got off only six shots, missed four of those and turned the ball over five times.By then the U.S. led, 18-5, and was just warming up.By halftime, it was 56-39. Lithuania cut the score to 61-52 in the third quarter but the Americans turned it back up on defense, leading to more turnovers that resulted in fast breaks, lobs and dunks.The U.S. team will now fly to the mainland for two more exhibitions in Shanghai against Russia and Australia before touching down in Beijing on Wednesday.mark.heisler@latimes.com
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USA demolish Lithuania ahead of Games
2nd August 2008, 4:06 WST
LeBron James' Team USA has buried European heavyweights Lithuania 120-84 on Saturday to lay down a marker for reclaiming the Olympic title.
The 12-time champions, humbled at Athens 2004, matched defensive ferocity with offensive class as they shot to a big early lead, stifled a brief comeback, and then ran away with it in front of a packed Cotai Arena.
Cleveland Cavaliers playmaker James again dominated as the NBA superstars made it three out of three after convincing warm-up wins against Canada and Turkey.
'King' James has promised a 13th Olympic gold and USA got off to a fearsome start, swarming the Lithuania offence and racing to a 19-0 lead as James picked up where he left off against Turkey with a pair of crowd-pleasing dunks.
NBA MVP Kobe Bryant showed delicate artistry with a two-point lay-up and jumper, and Chris Paul added a fade-away for another two with the USA cruising 31-15 by the end of the first period.
James is the reigning NBA scoring champion, but his defensive qualities were again instrumental and he fought under his own net before firing the length of the court for Paul, who flung it to Bryant for a flying jam and 56-39 lead at halftime.
Triple European champions Lithuania started the third period with a series of three-pointers, but James hit back with one of his own and added two net-swinging dunks to smother the brief renaissance.
Game MVP Dwyane Wade then took over scoring duties as he shot twice for three and was fed by Paul for a spectacular jam to take the score to 91-66 by the final period.
Another Wade slam, with the help of Deron Williams, completed Lithuania's misery as the world's fifth-ranked team finished outclassed and 36 points back.
Team USA are vying to end an eight-year international drought stretching back to Sydney 2000 with embarrassing flops at Athens 2004 and two World Championships along the way.
Lithuania's run of three straight Olympic bronze medals was ended by the USA in the Athens 2004 third-place play-off. They had earlier humbled the "Dream Team" defending champions in the opening round.
Lithuania had won six out of seven warm-ups this month, falling only to world champions Spain. They are drawn against Olympic title-holders Argentina, Russia, Australia, Iran and Croatia in Group A.
USA will now complete their Olympic preparations against Russia and Australia in Shanghai.
They play hosts China on August 10 to kick off a tough Group B also featuring Spain, African champions Angola and European powers Greece and Germany.
http://www.thewest.com.au/aapstory.aspx?StoryName=502446
AFP
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Lithuania says 33 troops returned from Iraq
2008-08-01 20:52:02 - VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) - Lithuania's ministry of defense says 33 Lithuanian troops have returned home after finishing their mission in Iraq.The contingent has served under U.S. command in Al Kut, about 100 miles (kilometers) from Baghdad, since November.Lithuania, a staunch U.S. ally, joined the coalition forces in Iraq in 2003.The ministry says eight Lithuanian military personnel will remain in Iraq as instructors and staff officers, but that the withdrawn contingent will not be replaced.
http://www.pr-inside.com/print734658.htm
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