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(NATO attacks on Yugoslavia 1999 to placate Middle Eastern Despots).

 Click on targeted train photo (on the right)  for full series. 

16 Apr

PARIS (Reuters) - French former film star Brigitte Bardot went on trial on Tuesday for insulting Muslims, the fifth time she has faced the charge of "inciting racial hatred" over her controversial remarks about Islam and its followers.

Prosecutors asked that the Paris court hand the 73-year-old former sex symbol a two-month suspended prison sentence and fine her 15,000 euros ($23,760) for saying the Muslim community was "destroying our country and imposing its acts".

Since retiring from the film industry in the 1970s, Bardot has become a prominent animal rights activist but she has also courted controversy by denouncing Muslim traditions and immigration from predominantly Muslim countries.

She has been fined four times for inciting racial hatred since 1997, at first 1,500 euros and most recently 5,000.

Prosecutor Anne de Fontette told the court she was seeking a tougher sentence than usual, adding: "I am a little tired of prosecuting Mrs Bardot."

Bardot did not attend the trial because she said she was physically unable to. The verdict is expected in several weeks.

French anti-racist groups complained last year about comments Bardot made about the Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha in a letter to President Nicolas Sarkozy that was later published by her foundation.

Muslims traditionally mark Eid al-Adha by slaughtering a sheep or another animal to commemorate the prophet Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son on God's orders.

France is home to 5 million Muslims, Europe's largest Muslim community, making up 8 percent of France's population.

"I am fed up with being under the thumb of this population which is destroying us, destroying our country and imposing its acts," the star of 'And God created woman' and 'Contempt' said.

Bardot has previously said France is being invaded by sheep-slaughtering Muslims and published a book attacking gays, immigrants and the unemployed, in which she also lamented the "Islamisation of France".

Marriage hits lowest rate since records began almost 150 years ago

Evening Standard (UK) March 27

The proportion of people getting married is now the lowest since records began in 1862.  The number of Britons tying the knot has collapsed to a record low, it has emerged.

The proportion of men and women getting married is below any level found since figures were first kept nearly 150 years ago.

And the number of weddings held in 2006 was the smallest since 1895, when the population was little more than half its present level.

The evidence that marriage is withering away at an increasing pace was met with a furious response from critics of Labour's benefits system, which disregards the status of husbands and wives and pays parents extra to stay single.

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis claimed the Government had "fuelled family breakdown" and researcher Patricia Morgan, who coined the phrase "marriage lite" to describe cohabitation, said Labour had succeeded in "eradicating" marriage.

"This is what they have tried to achieve and they should be congratulating themselves," she added.

"But it is a disaster for children, families and society."

Of the 157,490 civil weddings, 95,300 were held in "approved" premises - stately homes, hotels or even football ground hospitality suites which have been permitted to stage weddings since 1995.

The age of first-time brides and bridegrooms is continuing to increase. Women are nearly 30 while the man is almost 32.

One reason for the plunge in marriage numbers appears to be the crackdown on sham ceremonies undertaken by immigration authorities in 2005.

The Office for National Statistics said yesterday that the restrictions on marriage for non-European citizens introduced in February that year were "one of the many factors that may have contributed to the fall in the number of marriages".

Sham marriages may have been responsible for the blip in wedding figures that pushed the numbers up to more than 273,000 in 2004.

But the tax and benefit system came under most fervent attack. Advantages for married couples have gradually been withdrawn, joint taxation-ended in the 1980s and Gordon Brown withdrew the last tax break for couples, the Married Couples Allowance, shortly after Labour came to power in 1997.

Benefits such as tax credits now favour individuals living with children rather than couples and the bias against couples is thought to have contributed to the growing numbers "living apart together".

Around a million couples are thought to consider themselves an item but to remain living in separate homes.

Labour family policy has for a decade maintained that all kinds of families are equally valuable and ministers have campaigned for all references to marriage to be removed from state documents.

The Tories promised they would provide incentives for couples to get and stay together.

David Davis said: "This is a sad indictment of the Government's policies which have penalised families and fuelled family breakdown.

"Stable families are the best formula for bringing up children and preventing delinquency, anti-social behaviour and crime.

25 Apr NY Post

A top-secret Syrian nuclear reactor - built with North Korean help - was within weeks of going operational when it was blown up by Israeli jets in a dramatic attack last September, US officials revealed yesterday.

The Bush administration broke its seven-month silence about the raid by showing key congressmen evidence of the Syrian-Korean axis of evil, including a video apparently taken inside the reactor by an Israeli mole.

The facility, code-named Al Kibar by the Syrians, bore stunning similarities to North Korea's notorious Yongbyon reactor.

Kim Jong Il's Stalinist regime bowed to US pressure last year and agreed to shut down Yongbyon, which made plutonium, a key component of nuclear bombs.

But work on Al Kibar went on.

The White House said the evidence proved that the Al Kibar reactor was "a dangerous and potentially destabilizing development for the world."

Syria "must come clean" about its nuclear program, presidential spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

The video and other evidence was shown to Congress in closed-door briefings yesterday.

Israel sent a squadron of F-15 jets to the remote Euphrates River site on Sept. 6 to blow it up.

Israel, Syria and the United States had refused to discuss details of the September raid until now. A US official said the reactor was mostly completed by September. Perino said it was then "damaged beyond repair," but Syria tried to bury the evidence. "This cover-up only served to reinforce our confidence that this reactor was not intended for peaceful activities," she said.

No uranium, which is needed to fuel a reactor, was evident - indicating Syria was not close to producing nuclear weapons.

When Israel destroyed Saddam Hussein's reactor in 1981, the facility was believed to be a year away from helping Iraq join the atomic "club."

In 2002, President Bush identified North Korea, along with Iran and Iraq, as part of the "axis of evil." Syria was left out of that description, although Bashar Assad's harsh regime is a sponsor of terrorism.

According to some accounts, the Syria video showed North Korean workers, possibly including a nuke scientist.

Speaking to the parliament's powerful foreign affairs and defence committee, a senior military intelligence official said that over 20 Katyusha-type rockets, also known as Grad, were fired against Israel since last Thursday.

"We are talking about regular Iranian-made rockets," an official quoted the intelligence official as saying.

The 122-millimetre rockets have a range of about 20 kilometres (12.5 miles) and carry a large payload which caused heavy damage to buildings in the southern coastal town of Ashkelon, which bore the brunt of the Grad rocket fire.

Gaza militants have in recent years fired thousands of short-range makeshift rockets and mortars against southern Israel, but have only rarely fired the longer-range Grad-type rockets.

Israel believes that over 100 such rockets were smuggled into the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip through its porous border with Egypt in recent months following the Hamas violent takeover of the territory, a security official has told AFP.

More than 116 Palestinians, including 22 children, were killed during the latest escalation of violence in Gaza which erupted last Wednesday and ended early Monday morning. Two Israeli soldiers and one Israeli civilian have also been killed.

Israel accuses Iran of actively backing and supplying arms to Hamas.

British Propose Permit to Smoke

16 Feb BBC

Smokers would have to get a license to light up under the plan.  Smokers could be forced to pay £10 for a permit to buy tobacco if a government health advisory body gets its way.

No one would be able to buy cigarettes without the permit, under the idea proposed by Health England.

Its chairman, Professor Julian Le Grand, told BBC Radio 5 Live the scheme would make a big difference to the number of people giving up smoking.

But smokers' rights group Forest described the idea as "outrageous", given how much tax smokers already pay.

Professor Le Grand, a former adviser to ex-PM Tony Blair, said cash raised by the proposed scheme would go to the NHS.

He said it was the inconvenience of getting a permit - as much as the cost - that would deter people from persisting with the smoking habit.

"You've got to get a form, a complex form - the government's good at complex forms; you have got to get a photograph.

"It's a little bit of a problem to actually do it, so you have got to make a conscious decision every year to opt in to being a smoker."