terrorist confession leaked to the press

terrorists posed as Maylasian students

MUMBAI, Nov 30 - A sensational revelation has emerged from a terrorist caught alive by Indian troops: The attack on Mumbai's top hotels was meant to be India's Sept 11.

Azam Amir Kasav - some reports have his name as Ajmal Amir Kasab - confessed that part of the plot called for him and his fellow terrorists to carry out a replay of the destruction of Islamabad's Marriott Hotel, in targeting Mumbai's Taj Mahal Hotel.

The Marriott was blown up by militants in September, an attack that killed more than 50 people.

According to a report in The Times of India, Azam said the attacks on the Taj and The Oberoi Trident were aimed to create a "Sept 11 in India", a reference to the coordinated attacks by Al-Qaeda on the United States in 2001. They involved the crashing of hijacked planes into the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon that left nearly 3,000 people dead.

The confessions of the clean-shaven, fluent English-speaking 21-year-old Pakistani have given investigators a clearer picture of what had happened last Wednesday.

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Russia's Communists: crisis will help us regain power

Sat Nov 29, 2008 10:56pm IST | Reuters India

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's Communists expect the global financial crisis will cause social unrest and help them challenge for power, the party's leader said on Saturday.

Gennady Zyuganov told the party's annual congress the Communists should make maximum use of the growing public discontent caused by the economic downturn to try to restore their political strength.

"The wind of history is blowing in our sails again ... At this time of crisis the world of imperialism is starting to die. We are standing on the threshold of political and social shifts," Zyuganov said in a 2-hour speech opening the congress.

Russia's Communists ruled the Soviet Union for eight decades and remained a major opposition force for several years after the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991.

But the party has since lost much of its authority and many analysts say it is too weak to seriously challenge for power.

The Russian authorities are trying to minimise the impact of the financial crisis by promising billions of dollars of state aid. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has pledged higher social payments to the needy and lower taxes for business.

"The authorities are clearly not coping with managing the country ... A mass social protest is brewing and it is hard to predict now when and in what shape it will explode," Zyuganov said.

The Kremlin has acknowledged the crisis will lead to a rise in popular discontent, challenging the massive popularity that Putin secured in eight years as president and handed on to his successor, Dmitry Medvedev.

Medvedev has ordered police to stamp out any social unrest arising from the crisis and Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev has said higher unemployment could lead to a rise in crime.

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Flash! Obama AP says Hillary will be new SOS

President-elect Barack Obama plans to nominate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as his secretary of state on Monday, transforming a once-bitter political rivalry into a high-level strategic and diplomatic partnership. (Nov. 30)

He's Not Black

By Marie Arana | Washington Post
Sunday, November 30, 2008; Page B01

He is also half white.

Unless the one-drop rule still applies, our president-elect is not black.

We call him that -- he calls himself that -- because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There's no in-between.

That was my reaction when I read these words on the front page of this newspaper the day after the election: "Obama Makes History: U.S. Decisively Elects First Black President."

The phrase was repeated in much the same form by one media organization after another. It's as if we have one foot in the future and another still mired in the Old South. We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black. Progress has outpaced vocabulary.

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Stop Covering Up And Kill The CRA

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 11/28/2008

Regulation: The Community Reinvestment Act is to blame for the financial crisis, but it so powerfully serves Democrats' interests that they'll do anything to protect it — including revising history.

The CRA coerces banks into making loans based on political correctness, and little else, to people who can't afford them. Enforced like never before by the Clinton administration, the regulation destroyed credit standards across the mortgage industry, created the subprime market, and caused the housing bubble that has now burst and left us with the worst housing and banking crises since the Great Depression.

The CRA should be abolished, along with the government-sponsored enterprises that fueled the secondary market for subprimes — under pressure from Clinton, who ordered HUD to set quotas for "affirmative action" lending at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

But powerful Democrats in Washington want to protect the act — along with Fannie and Freddie — and spin the subprime scandal as the result of too little regulation, not too much.

"Repealing or weakening the CRA would be a mistake," warns Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn., who argues that the CRA should be strengthened.

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Mark Steyn on the significance of the Bombay terror attacks

It’s Not the Cold War
Updating strategy to fight the ideology.
November 29, 2008 9:00 AM
By Mark Steyn

see photos at the Boston Globe's BIG PICTURE

. . . In the ten months before this week’s atrocity, Muslim terrorists killed over 200 people in India and no-one paid much attention. Just business as usual, alas. In Bombay, the perpetrators were cannier. They launched a multiple indiscriminate assault on soft targets, and then in the confusion began singling out A-list prey: Not just wealthy Western tourists, but local orthodox Jews, and municipal law enforcement. They drew prominent officials to selected sites, and then gunned down the head of the antiterrorism squad and two of his most senior lieutenants. They attacked a hospital, the place you’re supposed to take the victims to, thereby destabilizing the city’s emergency-response system.

And, aside from dozens of corpses, they were rewarded with instant, tangible, economic damage to India: the Bombay Stock Exchange was still closed on Friday, and the England cricket team canceled their tour (a shameful act).

What’s relevant about the Mumbai model is that it would work in just about any second-tier city in any democratic state: Seize multiple soft targets and overwhelm the municipal infrastructure to the point where any emergency plan will simply be swamped by the sheer scale of events. Try it in, say, Mayor Nagin’s New Orleans. All you need is the manpower. Given the numbers of gunmen, clearly there was a significant local component. On the other hand, whether or not Pakistan’s deeply sinister ISI had their fingerprints all over it, it would seem unlikely that there was no external involvement. After all, if you look at every jihad front from the London Tube bombings to the Iraqi insurgency, you’ll find local lads and wily outsiders: That’s pretty much a given.

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Medvedev meets with Raul Castro in Cuba

HAVANA (AFP) — Visiting Russian President Dmitry Medvedev met with Cuban President Raul Castro seeking to forge closer ties with the former Soviet Union's Cold War ally, on the last leg of a tour to boost Russia's reach in Latin America.

Not long after arriving in Havana around 2050 GMT from Venezuela, Medvedev held two rounds of official talks -- one private and one between the two countries' delegations -- at the imposing Palace of the Revolution.

Then the Cuban president, who maintains a low public profile, and Medvedev paid a visit to the new Russian Orthodox cathedral in colonial Old Havana, with bells tolling and security tight.

It marks the last stop for Medvedev on a four-nation trip, including Peru, Brazil and Venezuela, where he visited Russian warships due to carry out joint maneuvers next week.

It was unclear whether Medvedev, on the first visit by a Russian leader to Cuba since 2000, would also meet ailing former president Fidel Castro, 82.

The visit could be light on substance: there were no agreements scheduled to be signed though the countries do have cooperation in fields such as oil, nickel, telecommunications, biotechnology and tourism.

Medvedev's Latin America tour largely has sought to boost trade, despite the world economic slowdown, but was also seen as a rebuff to US moves in formally Communist-ruled parts of Europe, such as planned missile defense facilities.

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Medvedev and Chavez: long-haul partnership

The shameful pardons are disqualifying

Opposed to Holder without Apology
November 25, 2008 9:45 AM
By Andrew C. McCarthy


I’ll concede this much to Lanny Davis: Last Friday night, during our Hannity & Colmes debate over President-Elect Barack Obama’s selection of Eric Holder to be the next Attorney General, Davis said (or I should say, screeched) that I’d soon be apologizing, and he’s right. I am sorry that our discussion degenerated into a screaming match. That’s wince-making television that doesn’t edify anyone. So I do apologize to anyone who had to endure that segment.

But Davis’s hysterical suggestion that I apologize to Eric Holder is, well, hysterical. And out of the question.

In my mind, it is Holder who owes an apology — he and his cheerleaders like Lanny Davis, who has never seen a sow’s ear that couldn’t be warped into a silk purse (and isn’t it a thrill to see that “Change” has already put Lanny back on the side of power?); like the leading Democrats who’ve addled us for years with their “grave” concerns about the Justice Department’s lost integrity (it turns out they were kidding); and like President-Elect Obama, who promised voters counterterrorism seriousness but has now given us an AG nominee who promoted a corrupt pardon process that sprung mass-murderers from prison … that is, when he wasn’t otherwise busy securing a pass for a notorious fugitive fraudster and orchestrating a SWAT team’s gunpoint-seizure of a six-year-old child for transport to a communist tyranny.

Let’s be blunt here: The Marc Rich pardon was one of the most disgraceful chapters in the history of the Justice Department. Not the modern history, the entire history. Rich was accused of mega-crimes: millions in fraud, tax-evasion, and trading with the America’s enemies. In 2000, he was a fugitive.

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Al Qaeda may target New York trains, feds say

From Kelli Arena and Mike Ahlers | CNN | updated 20 minutes ago | Nov. 26, 2008

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Federal authorities have received a "plausible but unsubstantiated" report that al Qaeda may have discussed targeting transit systems in or around New York City, the Department of Homeland Security said.
Al Qaeda suicide bombers could target New York City subways, federal security officials say.

Al Qaeda suicide bombers could target New York City subways, federal security officials say.

"These discussions reportedly involved the use of suicide bombers or explosives" on subway or passenger rail trains, according to a joint DHS and FBI statement issued Tuesday.