Weekly Round Up: Thai Coups, UK Troops And The New Iranian Hero!

This week’s news has been dominated by the gathering of all world statesmen at the United Nationals General Assembly. Can anyone forget Hugo Chavez calling George W Bush "the devil" in his a speech? Or President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accusing the US and UK of using the UN Security Council for their own ends! One person that did not enjoy his conference was Thaksin Shinawatra. Eighteen months ago, tycoon-turned-politician Mr Shinawatra won a landslide election victory and became a rising star on the regional stage. Today, he is out of a job after a coup d'etat and considering life in exile. Here is the rest of the news…

Europe
RAF 'fails to protect Afghanistan troops'
THE RAF is “utterly, utterly useless” at protecting troops on the ground, according to a British army major serving in Afghanistan.

Major James Loden of 3 Para described how, during a firefight against Taleban forces in the Helmand province last month, RAF pilots endangered their own British troops.

He said that a Harrier pilot fired two phosphorus rockets which just missed the Army’s own compound before strafing its perimeter fence 200 metres from the location of Taleban combatants. Mr Loden also said that more helicopters and manpower were desperately needed for the operation in Afghanistan, which has claimed 33 British soldiers’ lives since June including 19 this month alone.

The Ministry of Defence described the e-mails yesterday as “moving and humbling”, adding that Major Loden’s comments did not reflect the view of the vast majority of soldiers.

A government spokesman said that Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, had already pointed out that British soldiers in the province were sometimes “working to the limits of endurance”. He added that the major’s comments were unfortunate.

Britain foils five attacks in past year
British police have thwarted five attacks in the past year, London's top counter-terrorism commander said Tuesday.

Peter Clarke, the Metropolitan Police's anti-terrorism chief, said he was worried many Britons felt that the threat had passed after last year's London underground blasts and the August arrest of 17 people over a plot to blow up transatlantic airliners.

"I sensed at times that in the U.K., almost as if a bubble had burst and to some extent a sense, 'well, it's happened and that's that'," Clarke told a security conference in the Australian capital Canberra.

Clarke said there had been five police operations in the past year -- some still under wraps -- against people with "clear intentions to launch attacks."

UK accused of Guantánamo collusion
More than 100 senior doctors accused the government of colluding in war crimes by refusing to give medical aid to British residents detained at Guantánamo Bay. The doctors called for an urgent independent investigation into the medical needs of the detainees at the camp.

In a letter published in The Times newspaper, the doctors condemn the Foreign Office for its "shameful" refusal to respond to a request from the British Medical Association (BMA) to send a team of doctors to the detention camp in Cuba.

The medics also criticise the failure of the Foreign Office's medical and legal panels to discuss the plight of the detainees for the reason that they are not British passport holders.
Nine British citizens have been released from the camp since 2004, but at least eight men who have British residency rights are believed to still be there.

Killed in high-tech train crash in Germany
Travelling at nearly 200 kph (125 mph), the train crashed head-on into a maintenance vehicle which had apparently been left on the track due to human error, officials said.

“We have found 23 dead, and there are 10 injured who will be taken care of in hospital, whose lives are not in danger,” a police spokesman said.

Human error, rather than technical faults, were blamed for the tragedy. Most of the 29 passengers were in the front of the train, which pictures showed as being severely mangled by the crash.

The accident comes a month after a fire in an electrical storage compartment aboard Shanghai’s magnetic-levitation train as it was headed toward the city’s international airport. The fire generated large amounts of smoke but no injuries occurred.

The Shanghai system is the world’s only commercially-operating Transrapid train. Officials are studying the possibility of a line between Munich and the city’s airport. Concerns about the technology include the amount of electricity the trains use at high speed and the precision with which the tracks must be built.

This is Germany’s worst rail disaster since 1998, when 101 people died as an InterCityExpress derailed and smashed into a bridge near the northern town of Eschede in the country’s deadliest train crash.

GM The cover-up
According to the Independent newspaper, Britain's official food safety watchdog has privately told supermarkets that it will not stop them selling an illegal GM rice to the public.

Legally, no GM material is allowed to go on sale in Britain or any other EU country. It says that it has "not carried out tests of products on the market" and "has not issued any instructions to retailers" to do so. The agency says that modified rice does not present a safety concern and is advising people who may have US rice at home to continue to eat it. But some scientists say it could give cause for "concern over its potential allergenicity".

'Death of a President' drama wins film award
The controversial Channel 4 docudrama in which President George Bush is assassinated has received a prestigious award at the Toronto Film Festival.

Despite garnering largely negative reviews, Death of a President, by the British director Gabriel Range, was awarded the International Critics' Prize on Saturday.

The film made headlines when a scene showing President Bush being shot by a sniper following an anti-war demonstration was criticised by Republicans. In the dramatic sequence, created with the use of computer graphics, the President can be seen being held up by a secret service guard as his life ebbs slowly away.

Angry Turk workers urge Pope's arrest during visit
Employees of the state body that organizes Muslim worship in Turkey asked the authorities on Tuesday to open legal proceedings against Pope Benedict and to arrest him when he visits the country in November.

Muslims worldwide have been angered by remarks the Pope made in a lecture last week that they said portrayed Islam as a religion tainted by violence and irrationality.

Benedict has said he is deeply sorry Muslims have been offended by his use of a medieval quotation on Islam and holy war, but has stopped short of retracting his comments.

Hungarian PM holds firm in face of protests
Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany denied that his country was in crisis as anti-government demonstrations continued with 10,000 people protesting in front of parliament in Budapest.

"We do not have a crisis and if we did have one that would have no influence on our (austerity) program," the embattled Gyurcsany said in an interview in the German-language Financial Times Deutschland.

The Hungarian capital has seen a week of protests marred by violence after Gyurcsany admitted to lying about the state of the economy to win re-election in April, in comments secretly recorded in May and leaked to public radio.

Candidate - woman one day must lead U.N.
Latvia's president acknowledged Monday that her bid to become the next U.N. secretary-general is a long shot, but she said women must break into the "all-boys club" that has dominated the selection of the U.N. chief for the last 60 years.

Middle Easrt
Old Judge Out and New judge tosses Saddam from courtroom
The new chief judge in the Saddam Hussein genocide trial threw the former Iraqi president out of court Wednesday, and his lawyers stormed out in protest. A leading human rights group charged that the government's decision to replace the former chief judge, Abdullah al-Amiri, threatens the independence of the troubled tribunal.

Defense lawyers immediately questioned the decision to replace al-Amiri.
"
We don't expect this court established under the occupation authorities to be fair so we have decided to withdraw from this trial," defense lawyer Wadoud Fawzi told the court.

"The decision to sack the judge on the orders of the government shows that this trial lacks the standards of a fair trial," Fawzi said.

Asia
U.S. threatened to bomb Pakistan after 9/11
President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan said that after the September 11 attacks the United States threatened to bomb his country if it did not cooperate with America's campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Musharraf, in an interview with CBS news magazine show "60 Minutes" that will air Sunday, said the threat came from Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and was given to Musharraf's intelligence director.

"The intelligence director told me that (Armitage) said, 'Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age,"' Musharraf said. "I think it was a very rude remark."

Military ruled out of Thailand's top job
The frontrunner for the job of prime minister in Thailand's new military-appointed government has a reputation for independence, having stood up to the ousted leader, Thaksin Shinawatra. He also boasts a distant link to the king and a track record that would calm nervous foreign investors.

Pridiyathorn Devakula, the governor of the Central Bank of Thailand, says he has not been asked to accept the job, but that has not stopped pundits weighing in on his suitability for the role.

The coup leaders yesterday barred electronic media, including radio, television and internet operators, from disseminating news and comments they deemed a threat to national security and the monarchy.

They also banned political parties from holding meetings or from conducting any other activities, a statement read on national television said. "Political gatherings of more than five people have already been banned, but political activities can resume when normalcy is restored."

Mr Thaksin released a statement in London yesterday, saying he would take a "deserved rest" and that he planned to work on research, development and "possible charitable work" for Thailand. He called for new national elections to be arranged quickly, and for all parties to work towards national reconciliation.

The army chief, General Sonthi Boonyaratglin, at his first news conference since the coup, said he wanted to appoint a transitional leader "who is neutral and wants to uphold democracy" within two weeks. He offered no names.

North America
Canadian police errors led to man's torture
Canadian police wrongly identified an Ottawa software engineer as an Islamic extremist, prompting U.S. agents to deport him to Syria, where he was tortured, an official inquiry concluded on Monday.

Maher Arar, who holds Canadian and Syrian nationality, was arrested in New York in September 2002 and accused of being an al-Qaeda member. In fact, said the judge who led the probe, all the signs point to the fact Arar was innocent.

Arar, 36, says he was repeatedly tortured in the year he spent in Damascus jails, and the inquiry agreed that he had been tortured. He was freed in 2003.

Judge Dennis O'Connor found the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had wrongly told U.S. authorities that Arar was an Islamic extremist. "The provision of this inaccurate information ... (was) totally unacceptable" and guaranteed the United States would treat Arar as a serious threat, O'Connor said.

Civil rights advocates said the case of Arar and three other Canadians who ended up in Syrian jails raised suspicions that Canada might be outsourcing interrogation to nations where torture was commonplace.

US deports woman who hid her death camp past
For 47 years, Elfriede Rinkel lived a seemingly blameless life in a rundown apartment in San Francisco. She was a first-generation German immigrant whose husband, Fred, was a German Jew who had fled the Nazis.

Together, they mixed easily in Jewish circles, attended synagogue and donated to Jewish charities. When Fred Rinkel died two years ago, his widow buried him in a Jewish cemetery, his gravestone adorned with the Star of David - with space for herself next to him. This week, however, it transpired that the little old lady from the Tenderloin district harboured a secret she withheld from her husband, her family and the US authorities.

For the last year of the Second World War, Ms Rinkel - then known by her maiden name Elfriede Huth - worked as a guard and dog handler in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, not far from Düsseldorf. More than 130,000 women passed through the slave labour facility in six years, and more than two-thirds of them died - in gas chambers, medical experiments or from malnutrition and disease.

Ms Rinkel has been deported back to Germany, She is now living with a sister in Viersen, a short drive from the Ravensbrück camp. The German authorities have the option of trying her for war crimes, but it's more likely that her main punishment will be the embarrassment of having her past revealed.

First female space tourist savoring 'every single second' in orbit
The world's first female space tourist, American national Anousheh Ansari, said she is savoring every bit of her time at the International Space Station, despite the trip's hefty price tag.

Ansari, 40, told reporters she has no regrets at a press conference broadcast from the International Space Station, responding to a reporter's question about the more than 20 million dollars she reportedly paid for the eight-day space tour.

Ansari, who lived in Iran until the age of 16, is only the fourth space tourist in history, but the first woman to take the extraordinary voyage.

Ansari, who went to the US in 1984, made her fortune after she and her husband sold their telecommunications company for $550m in 2000. She is currently being sued for alleged insider trading in regard to that sale and the case is pending in a Massachusetts court.

She accompanied NASA's Michael Lopez-Alegria and Russia's Mikhail Tyurin to the ISS, and she is due to land in Kazakhstan on September 29, along with Jeffrey Williams and Pavel

Mrs Ansari's husband, Hamid, said: "I'm so very happy. It's really hard to describe. She's waited to do this for so long. It's so great to see it finally become a reality."

Her journey has sparked considerable interest in Iran and triggered an outpouring of national pride. A number of people who have left comments on her internet blog have been from Iran and have spoken of their pride in her endeavour.

On a bad note She was told to remove an Iranian flag from her spacesuit and, at the insistence of the Russian and U.S. governments, promise that there will be no political messages during her trip.

Ansari, said an Iranian flag on her spacesuit had nothing to do with politics and only conveyed her personal attitude to the nation and its people. She said she was a symbol of the country and wanted people to be proud of the Iranian flag on her spacesuit. The Iranian flag is not officially represented in events at the International Space Station, she said.

Africa
'Space flight' for Nigerian girl
A 17-year-old schoolgirl is to become the first Nigerian to experience a "space flight" when she takes off from the Kennedy Space Center on Saturday.

Stella Felix from the south-east was chosen from 400 Nigerian students who applied to go on a zero-gravity flight. "I feel like an ambassador," she said before leaving Lagos for Florida. "I feel so happy to be the first."

The trip is organised to coincide with the United Nations' Space Week.

"The goal of the programme is to use space to inspire education on a global basis while promoting international understanding among the youth," said Robert Boroffice, director general of the National Space Research and Development Agency.

Australasia
Aborigines win Australian land claim
A federal court judge has given a tribe of Aborigines a limited land title claim over the major Australian city of Perth.

It was the first such ruling that Aborigines, the indigenous people who lived in Australia before white settlers arrived, were the traditional owners of an urban area. The potentially precedent-setting decision could apply to other large cities.

The ruling determined that the Noongar people were the traditional owners of a 2,300-square-mile area of Western Australia state that includes the state capital of Perth, a city of 1.7 million people.

But Tuesday's ruling by Judge Murray Wilcox only grants Aborigines limited rights to the land, and indigenous people say the issue is about recognition of their rights, not moving homeowners out.

The ruling means the Noongar people can now exercise rights such as hunting and fishing on land where their native title — a claim on land Aborigines held before settlers arrived — has not been usurped by freehold titles, those where the government has passed all interest in the land to the owner, or leasehold titles, where a person leases property from the owner.