Darfur conflict causes its presidential hopeful to quit the race

South Sudan's leading party has withdrawn its candidate from the first multi-party elections the country has seen in 24 years.

Yassir Arman, leader of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), said he would boycott the April poll because of electoral irregularities and conflict in Darfur.il

The party is calling for the election, due to be held 11-13 April, to be postponed until November.

Arman was seen as the main challenger to President al-Bashir because he could attact voters from both the north and the south of the country.

"We decided that Yasir (Arman) should end his campaign for the presidency of the Republic," Riek Machar, the SPLM vice-chairman, told reporters.

Arman was the most credible opponent to incumbent Omar al-Bashir, who seized power in a bloodless coup in 1989 and has had a warrant for his arrest issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The decision could affect the referendum to be held next year by the semi-autonomous south that will determine whether Sudan is split in two.

President al-Bashir had already threatened to cancel the referendum if the SPLM boycotted the election.

He said: "Holding elections in the Sudan is a national obligation that should be fulfilled."

The referendum was agreed under the peace agreement signed in 2005 to end the conflict in Darfur.

The civil war started between the Arab Muslim north and black Christian south started in 1983 and has claimed an estimated two million lives.

Black Widows distract media from Russia's other internal threat

The suicide attacks on Moscow's metro has reminded Russia that the Chechen problem never went away.

When Vladimir Putin became President a decade ago he vowed the crush the Chechen separatist movement.

What followed was a brutal military campaign that has inflicted wounds and grievances on Chechens that are likely to pass down generations.

Despite managing to reimpose Kremlin control over the province the conflict has spilled over into neighbouring Ingushetia and Dagestan.

The attack prompted strong rhetoric from President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin, who promised to destroy those responsible for the terrorists attacks.

Another brutal military operation is therefore likely. But Russia faces a greater existential threat than crazed extremists indoctrinated in Islamic fundamentalism with bomb belts strapped to their waists.

A week before the metro bombings the Russian people were up in arms about a scam that epitomised their country's endemic corruption.

It emerged that an official at a state agency sold four Mig 31 warplanes to a fictitious company for $5 each, then bought them back for $100,000.

Russia is ranked 146th out of 180 countries in Transparency International's corruption index, which estimates that bribery costs the economy £300bn a year.

Corruption also costs lives. The fire that tore through a nightclub in Perm in December was blamed on lax safety inspections. It killed 155 people, more than the death toll from Monday's suicide bombings and Novembers Nevsky Express explosion combined.

Therefore while the terrorist outrages and the prevention of further attacks will undoubtedly take priority, Medvedev should not forget that ordinary citizens will be judging him on whether he fulfils his promise to clamp down on the corruption which is making life that is already tough in a recession even tougher.

Female suicide bombers strike Moscow metro

At least 38 people were killed Monday morning when two female Chechen separatists detonated their explosive belts on Moscow metro trains in the morning rush hour.

The first bomber hit central Lubyanka station at 0756 (0356 GMT), killing 24. A second explosion killed 14 at Park Kultury station in the southwest of the city.

Russian authorities are blaming Chechen separatists for the attack, which is no surprise considering their history.

Monday's suicide bombing is the first since August 2004, where a female suicide bomber killed 10 after blowing herself up on outside Rizhskaya station.

Chechen rebels have a long history of bombing Russia's transport infrastructure since fighting for independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The attack was both deadly and symbolic. The FSB, the successor to the KGB, has its headquarters situated above the Lubyanka station.

The Moscow metro is a symbol of Russian pride and is one of the busiest in the world, carrying seven million passengers a day.

Chechen separatist leader Doku Umarov has declared himself emir of the North Caucasus mountain range and has pledged to introduce Sharia law there.

Russia has fought two wars with Chechen separatists but declared the conflict to be over last year. However violence has since spread into neighbouring provinces Dagestan and Ingushetia.

Umarov declared responsibility for the bombing of the Moscow to Saint Petersburg Nevsky Express in November last year, warning that "the war is coming to their cities."

Women have a history of taking part in Chechen separatist attacks. They were among the group that held a Moscow theatre hostage in 2002 and the gang that took over a school in Beslan in 2004.

Deal struck to bring Greece back from the brink

France and Germany have agreed on a deal for a financing plan to help debt-laden Greece, which will include the IMF.

The package will amount to 23bn euros (£21bn).

The French presidency said there were "very precise conditions" under which the 16 eurozone members "could be led to intervene" to help Greece.

Co-ordinated bilateral and IMF loans are envisaged to help struggling country and EU officials are poised to discuss the plan.

The news broke as leaders of the 27 EU member states gathered in Brussels for a two-day summit.

Last Thursday German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she would only press for aid and loans to Greece as a last resort.

She has been reluctant to offer anything resembling a bailout, which is not allowed under the current single currency rules.

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou called for action to stabilise the euro when he arrived at the summit.

The single currency fell to a 10-month low against the dollar on Wednesday after Portugal, another heavily indebted country, was downgraded by leading credit ratings agency Fitch.

How to live your boyhood dream: build a flying car

This is not news but it's news to me. Last year some very clever and adventurous bods from Wiltshire built the Skycar and drove it on land and in the air from London to Timbuktu.

That involved flying from Spain to Morocco...in a car.

Awesome.



Have a look:

http://www.skycarexpedition.com/about_skycar.php

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7909034.stm

Saudi Arabia arrests 113 'Al-Qaeda militants'

Saudi forces have detained more than 100 suspected militants thought to be linked to Al-Qaeda, Saudi officials said.

58 Saudi nationals and 55 foreigners were accused of planning to target oil facilities and security forces.

A large group of 101 suspects, described as a network, comprised 47 Saudis and others from Yemen, Somalia, Eritrea and Bangladesh, interior ministry Mansour al-Turki said.

Two other groups totalling 12 people, described as cells', were also arrested, he said.

Weapons, cameras, documents and computers were seized with the suspects.

"The network and the two cells were targeting the oil facilities in the Eastern Province and they had plans that were about to be implemented," Mansour al-Turki said.

All three independent groups were linked to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which was formed when two regional offshoots of the Islamic militant network merged in January 2009.

The group has vowed to topple the Saudi monarchy and Yemeni government and establish an Islamic caliphate.

Analysts said AQAP has exploited the instability in Yemen to set up bases there.

The arrests can be seen as both a success on the Saudi security forces part for their vigilence but also of a reminder that the threat posed by the group, which has waxed and waned over the past decade, could become more serious.

In February 2006 Al-Qaeda launched a suicide attack on the Abqaiq oil refinery, the largest in the world, in north-eastern Saudi Arabia.

The attack killed three and injured 10, but car bombs caused only a 'minor fire' that was swiftly brought under control.

Targeting oil facilities in the oil rich Gulf states has long been a tactic of the militant group.

The aim is to sabotage the oil supply, thereby destabilising Saudi Arabia and causing economic damage to the West.

Even if an attack causes little damage the news of a terrorist attack can cause sudden spikes in the price of oil.

However the failure to damage Abqaiq and the killing or capturing of most of its operational personnel was a major blow for Al-Qaeda.

Therefore today's arrests can be seen as a further and deeper blow to Al-Qaeda's credibility in launching attacks in Saudi Arabia.

The deluded rabbi

Was the story of Jesus entirely made up or actually based on a real person? Christopher Hitchens believes there is evidence for the latter, precisely because the story itself is so riddled with inconsistencies and fabrications. What follows is a summary of his argument:

One of the many prophecies made in the Bible is that the son of God will be born in the house of David, in the line of David and in the time of David. In other words, he must be born in Bethlehem. But Jesus of Nazareth was born in...well, Nazareth. What follows is a huge fabrication in order to get him to Bethlehem.

A census is proposed by Caesar Augustus but no such census ever took place. The people of the region were not required to go back to their home town to be registered. The gospels say that Corenius was the governor of Syria at the time, but he was not. None of the nativity story is true in any detail.

But the fabrication says something, for if it had all been made up and there never was such a person, there would have been no need to bother with the Nazareen business. Jesus could have just been said to have been born in Bethlehem.

So the very falsity of it, the very fanatical attempt to to fabricate the story does suggest there was some charismatic deluded individual wandering about at that time.

Furthermore, most of the witnesses of the resurrection are hysterical, deluded, illiterate females who would have had as much chance of being heard in a Jewish court then as they would have in an Islamic court today.

What religion that wants its fabrication to be believed is going to say 'you have got to believe it because we have got some illiterate, hysterical girls'? It is impressive that the evidence is so thin, so feeble, so hysterical and so obviously and strenuously cobbled together because it does suggest that such a character did in fact exist.

I hope you found that interesting, because I can't give you the time it took for you to read it back to you. Sorry!

Why George Galloway deserves no 'Respect'

George Galloway was suspended from the House of Commons for failing to declare all outside sources of income. This is a grave matter indeed. What makes it graver still is that the source of income in question was from the so-called Oil for Food programme, run by the UN and Saddam Hussein, which was used to buy political influence outside the country instead of spending it on the Iraqi people who were dying from those soldiers. So he was stealing directly from the mouths of the Iraqi people.

He's very pro-war but on the other side. He's an apologist for Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and the Assad regime in Syria. He's defended the July 2005 terrorist attacks in London, saying we brought it on ourselves.

He has said publicly that the worst day of his life was the collapse of the Soviet Union.

He is on the payroll of Press TV, which is funded by the Iranian regime.

He was a 'personal friend' of the late Sheikh Zayed whose son, one of the UAE's 22 royal sheikhs, was filmed torturinga grain dealer he thought had cheated him. He beat him, drove a 4x4 over his legs and shovelled sand in his mouth shouting 'you donkey, you dog!'

And he calls his political party 'Respect'.

Did sugar drive the industrial revolution?

I've been wasting yet more time on what is fast becoming my most time-consuming pastime, watching debates on Youtube. Forget porn, videos of kids with lightsabres or cats getting flung into walls by ceiling fans. Watching the world's leading academics trade verbal blows is what gets my juices flowing.

Anyhoo, interesting man of the hour in Mr Niall Ferguson, who graced our screens with his The Ascent of Money programme and who thinks that Britain should have stayed out of the First World War and let Germany win. Hm.

He certainly knows how to take a fresh look at things. This is a quote from him discussing the history of our species and the role nutrition played in the feverish development that has taken place since the Industrial Revolution 150 years ago:

"Human nutrition. For most of human history men and women were malnourished. You can see that by the skeletons that survive. They really were rather short. And their lives were pretty brief. They didn't take long to be taken out by disease. And then there was a great breakthrough. It wasn't a particularly happy story because the great breakthrough involved enslaving millions of Africans and getting them to produce sugar for the consumption of sugar in Western Europe.

Sugar is a great source of energy. For the first time there are people in the world getting the calories they need, and those people are in Britain.

At this point you start to see a shift in the direction of proper nutrition. People start to get better and better fed. By the mid-twentieth century you have human beings getting a really good diet.

But then you tip over into the obese era. Because this thing can't be sustained. What happens is that the habits of the industrial era, lets have some sugar lets have some more sugar lets mmm that's pretty good lets put some corn oil and sugar and have that too...you reach a point of diminishing returns. You only have to take a walk through Atlanta airport...

There comes a point when you just can't actually get any bigger. You reach a point like in Monty Python's Meaning of Life when you're about to explode."

What should be taught at school (1)

It is clear that the invasion of Iraq will remain the most controversial military action undertaken by the United States and Britain decades to come, with the a consensus that it was a fiasco on the one hand and those who believe the surge turned the war around and Iraq will over time bear the fruits of a modern democratic state on the other. And, of course, everything in between.

So I found it both refreshing and insightful to look back 200 years to when America first planted its flag in foreign soil. It did so in the soil of a Muslim country, but it was far from unprovoked and it would be a warped mind indeed whose sympathies didn't lie with the US at this time in its history.

The First Barbary War took place between 1801-1805 and saw a young United States of America take on the quasi-autonomous states of North Africa, then part of the Ottoman Empire and today known as Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. Morocco was also one of the Barbary states but stayed out of the war having signed a peace treaty with the US a few years beforehand. Morocco was, incidentally, the first country to recognise the independence of the United States of America.

Historians estimate that between 1750 and 1820 a million and a half white people (Europeans and North America) were taken as slaves by these states and pressed into servitude as were their ships and properties. In 1631 Algerian pirates sacked and enslaved the entire population of the Irish village of Baltimore (108 people).

Before American declared independence its merchant vessel were protected by the Royal Navy. This protection obviously ceased but after the War of Independence the ships of the US Navy were either sunk, sold, or in need of some serious work. Indeed it wasn't till 1794 that the US Navy was recommissioned. Yet one fifth of America's Atlantic coast exports went to the Med, in the holds of around 100-American owned ships. They became easy pickings for the Barbary pirates who in 1784 boarded the Betsy and subsequently two more vessels. The sailors were taking through jeering crowds to Hassan, the ruler of Algiers, who denounced them as Christian dogs, threw them in a dungeon and fed them 15 ounces of bread a day. Hassan then asked for a $60,000 ransom.

In 1785 Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met with Tripoli's envoy to London, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, and asked him what right his country had to extort money and take slaves. According to Jefferson, the ambassador answered that such a right was founded on the Laws of the Prophet: that it was written in the Koran that all nations who did not recognise their authority were sinners; that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found; and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners; and that every Muslim slain in battle would go to heaven.

For the next fifteen years the US agreed to pay 'tribute' (as opposed to 'ransom'), but this amounted to $1m a year at a time when the entire revenue in the Federal Reserve amounted to just $10m. So for fifteen years the US gave 10% of its revenue to pirates supported by religious monarchist Muslim states to not enslave any of its citizens.

But when Jefferson became inaugerated as president in 1801 he denied to pay the $225,000 demanded by the Pasha of Tripoli. The Barbary states declared war on the US in May by cutting the flag staff from the US consulate in Tunis. Jefferson decided enough was enough and sent a naval fleet to the Med.

The turning point of the war came in 1805 in the Battle of Derma when General Willian Eaton and US Marine First Lieutenant Presley O'Bannon led eight marines and 500 Greek, Arab and Berber mercenaries from Egypt to capture Derma. This was the first time the US flag was raised on foreign soil.

Alas, despite demonstrating it meant business and its armed forces could operate cohesively pirates once again became the scourge of American shipping in 1807. It wasn't until the Second Barbary War in 1815 that pirating was effectively put to rest in the Med.

This piece of history is interesting because it can be compared to so many of the issues we face today, from fighting fundamentalist Islam to Somali pirates off the Horn of Africa.

The lesser of two evils? Latvia's Nazi parade goes ahead

On Tuesday a group of ageing war veterans risked arrest by parading through the streets of Latvia's capital Riga.

The city's court had ruled the march to be illegal on the grounds that it would incite violence between Latvian nationalists on the one side and the country's Russian speaking and Jewish populations on the other.

That is because the parading veterans fought alongside the Nazis in the Second World War. They were called the Latvian Legion and were under the command of the Warren SS.

Despite being a flashpoint for tension the event was peaceful and attended by 1,000 people. Both groups had the ban overturned.

The war divided the country. 130,000 fought with the Soviets while 146,000 fought for the Germans.

Many Latvians joined the Germans because they saw them as liberators. Latvia had suffered a brief but brutal occupation by the Soviets between 1939-1941. Latvia was again annexed by the Soviet Union in 1944 and remained part of the communist bloc until it collapsed in 1991.

The demographic result of years of Soviet occupation was a large Russian speaking population which interprets history in a different way to the majority of ethnic Latvians.

Despite fighting for both sides, neither the Soviets or the Nazis became less lenient. 15,000 Latvians disappeared to Siberian concentration camps between 1939-1941 and when the Nazis invaded they rounded up and killed 70,000 of Latvia's 85,000 Jews, with the help of loacl informants.

It is a moral quagmire whose complexities are a far cry from 'good vs evil' narrative prevalent in the West and Russia.