cryptogon.com

The Iraqi government declared the day a national holiday but soldiers and police were out in force to prevent insurgent groups spoiling the party as Iraqi forces took sole charge of security in cities, towns and villages for the first time since the 2003 invasion.

“All Iraqis are happy today because it’s the first day that they’re going to protect themselves,” said Baghdad civil defence spokesman Tahsin al-Sheikhli said.

“We know that Iraq’s enemies will attempt to disrupt security but our forces are ready to take them on.”

In the wake of several massive bombings that have killed more than 200 people this month, all leave for security force personnel has been cancelled. Motorcycles, the favoured transport of several recent bombers, have been banned from the streets.

“Our expectation is that maybe some criminals will try to continue their attacks,” interior ministry operations director Major General Abdul Karim Khalaf said.

“That is why orders came from the highest level of the prime minister that our forces should be 100 percent on the ground until further notice.”

On Monday, the former defence ministry building in the capital, taken over in the wake of the US-led invasion, was handed back to the Iraqi government.

“This marks the end of the rule of the multinational force,” said General Abboud Qambar, the head of Baghdad Operation Command.

It was a landmark celebrated by huge crowds of revellers in Baghdad’s largest park on Monday evening.

Popular Iraqi singers including Salah Hassan, Kassem Sultan and Abed Falek, who all live abroad, returned home for the celebration.

“Since 2003, I have never been to a party but today I am coming to hear the singers I love,” Ahmed Ali, 20, told AFP.

Revellers had to undergo three security checks to enter the park but no one seemed to complain amid a jubilant atmosphere, where an onstage banner declared that Baghdad’s sovereignty and independence had been recovered.

Even policemen joined in the fun, dancing with the party-goers.

“Today is the day that we got back our country,” said Salim Mohammed, from the sprawling Shiite working-class district of Sadr City.

…

Only a small number of US forces in training and advisory roles will remain in urban areas, with the bulk of American troops in Iraq, 131,000 according to Pentagon figures, quartered elsewhere.

The June 30 withdrawal is the prelude to a complete American pullout by the end of 2011.

Leftist President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped and transported to Costa Rica on Sunday morning after a growing controversy over a vote concerning term limits. Over the last week, Zelaya clashed with and eventually dismissed General Romeo Vasquez — who is now reportedly in charge of the armed forces that abducted the Honduran president.

According to the watchdog group School of Americas Watch, Gen. Vasquez trained at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at least twice — in 1976 and 1984 — when it was still called School of Americas.

The Georgia-based U.S. military school is infamous for training over 60,000 Latin American soldiers, including infamous dictators, “death squad” leaders and others charged with torture and other human rights abuses. SOA Watch’s annual protest to shut down the Fort Benning training site draws thousands.

How widespread is this practice? New research* based on a survey of 1,000 homeowners suggests that one in four mortgage defaults are “strategic”—by people who could meet their payments but who choose not to. The main drivers of strategic default are the scale of negative equity, and moral and social considerations. Few would opt to renege on their mortgage if the equity gap were below 10% of their home’s value, the authors find, partly because of the costs of moving. But one in six would bail out if loans were underwater by a half.

Four-fifths think strategic default is wrong. Those in the unethical minority are four times more likely to renege on loans (allowing for other influences) when their negative equity reaches $50,000. But morality has its price. When the equity gap reaches $100,000, “immoral” homeowners are only twice as keen to walk away from their debts as “moral” ones. People under 35 or over 65 are less likely to believe that default is wrong. So are the well-educated.

The memo, written on 31 January 2003, almost two months before the invasion and seen by the Observer, confirms that as the two men became increasingly aware UN inspectors would fail to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) they had to contemplate alternative scenarios that might trigger a second resolution legitimising military action.

Bush told Blair the US had drawn up a provocative plan “to fly U2 reconnaissance aircraft painted in UN colours over Iraq with fighter cover”. Bush said that if Saddam fired at the planes this would put the Iraqi leader in breach of UN resolutions.

The president expressed hopes that an Iraqi defector would be “brought out” to give a public presentation on Saddam’s WMD or that someone might assassinate the Iraqi leader. However, Bush confirmed even without a second resolution, the US was prepared for military action. The memo said Blair told Bush he was “solidly with the president”.

The five-page document, written by Blair’s foreign policy adviser, Sir David Manning, and copied to Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the UK ambassador to the UN, Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, the chief of the defence staff, Admiral Lord Boyce, and the UK’s ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, outlines how Bush told Blair he had decided on a start date for the war.

Paraphrasing Bush’s comments at the meeting, Manning, noted: “The start date for the military campaign was now pencilled in for 10 March. This was when the bombing would begin.”

Last night an expert on international law who is familar with the memo’s contents said it provided vital evidence into the two men’s frames of mind as they considered the invasion and its aftermath and must be presented to the Chilcott inquiry established by Gordon Brown to examine the causes, conduct and consequences of the Iraq war.

As noted above, in the section on the time frame for an invasion, whether the United States decides to invade Iran with or without a provocation is a critical consideration. With provocation, the international diplomatic and domestic political requirements of an invasion would be mitigated, and the more outrageous the Iranian provocation (and the less that the United States is seen to be goading Iran), the more these challenges would be diminished. In the absence of a sufficiently horrific provocation, meeting these requirements would be daunting.

The gains drove the yield on the gilt to its lowest level in six weeks after Britain’s biggest business lobby group said financial-services companies may cut 13,000 jobs in the third quarter, stoking demand for the safest assets. Gilts also rose as a report showed the economic slump led to the smallest increase in net mortgage lending since records began in 1993.

“The 10-year is leading as we’ve got a buyback,” said Jason Simpson, an interest-rate strategist in London at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc. “And if the Bank of England is looking at lending numbers as a clue to whether quantitative easing has been successful, it’s not going to get much joy. This underlines the need for more purchases.”

The yield on the 10-year gilt dropped seven basis points to 3.61 percent as of 4:36 p.m. in London. The 4.5 percent security due in March 2019 climbed 0.6, or 6 pounds per 1,000-pound face amount, to 107.19. The yield on the two-year note rose five basis points to 1.2 percent.

The Bank of England said it was offered 4.3 billion pounds of gilts maturing between 2020 and 2032 today, 1.22 times the amount it bought. It will purchase 3 billion pounds of securities due between 2015 and 2019 on July 1, bringing its spending since the quantitative-easing policy was introduced to 105.5 billion pounds.

Purchase Plan

Simon Ford, who founded a “gift experience” company that prospered in the United Arab Emirates’ boom years, said he had been forced to escape as he feared being sent to debtors’ prison under strict bankruptcy laws.

He is one of thousands of British and other expatriates who have lost work and businesses and are leaving Dubai as it experiences its worst crisis since the UAE’s founding 40 years ago.

One bank has predicted the city’s 1.4 million population could shrink by almost a fifth. More than 85 per cent of its population is foreign.

Financial planners fear a second wave will get under way this weekend as parents who have lost jobs but waited for the end of the school year follow younger professionals to the airport.

Madoff appeared in court today before U.S. District Judge Denny Chin for the first time since his March 12 guilty plea for an epic swindle that may have reached $65 billion.

“I don’t ask for any forgiveness,” Madoff, 71, told Chin. He said he deceived his brothers, his two sons and his wife, none of whom was in the court. The courtroom burst into applause as Chin imposed the sentence.

“We have received reports of attacks on two well clusters in the Estuary Field in the western operations. We have shut in some production as a precautionary measure while investigations progress,” a Shell spokesman in Nigeria said.

Nigeria’s main militant group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), said earlier its fighters had attacked an oil platform in Shell’s Forcados fields in the southern state of Delta.

Shell said the attacks being investigated were not in Forcados itself but in its western operations, all of which feed into the Forcados oil export terminal.

Forcados is one of Nigeria’s benchmark crude oil grades but production has been subject to delays for months due to militant attacks on oil facilities and disruptions to production.

The ICBM was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base near Santa Barbara at 3:01 a.m. and carried three unarmed re-entry vehicles to their targets near the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, said Lt. Raymond Geoffroy.

The missile, configured with a National Nuclear Security Administration Test Assembly, was launched under the direction of the 576th Flight Test Squadron, whose members installed tracking and command destruct systems on it to collect data and meet safety requirements.

…