US officials have ruled out a deal to exchange 15 Royal Navy personnel captured in the Gulf for five Iranians seized by American forces in Iraq.
State department spokesman Sean McCormack rejected suggestions that a swap could be made.
A second member of the Royal Navy crew captured in the Gulf has apologised for "trespassing" in Iranian waters, in a broadcast on Iranian television.
The crewman, who introduces himself as Nathan Thomas Summers, says: "I would like to apologise for entering your waters without permission."
A British resident is to be released from Guantanamo Bay, the Foreign Office has announced.
Bisher al-Rawi, an Iraqi national, has been held at the US detention camp in Cuba for almost five years on suspicion of links to terrorism.
In a statement, Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said it had been agreed with the US authorities that he would be returned to the UK shortly.
BBC - UK reveals Iran dispute evidence
Satellite data proves 15 navy personnel being held in Iran were 1.7 nautical miles inside Iraqi waters when they were seized, UK defence officials say.
Reports suggest the only woman among the group will be freed shortly.
An Iranian foreign ministry spokesman is quoted as saying Faye Turney, 26, would be released either later on Wednesday or on Thursday.
Iran has insisted the group were in its waters when they were taken last Friday.
Iran's embassy in London also issued a statement in response to the UK data, in which it said the sailors and marines had been 0.5 km inside Iranian waters at the time they were seized.
Footage of the 15 British service personnel taken captive by Iran was broadcast tonight.
The tape shows the group being arrested, eating food in captivity, together with an interview with Faye Turney.
They have now said Turney will be released with a letter for her parents saying the group were 'apparently' in Iranian territory.
China's state-run Zhuhai Zhenrong Corp, the biggest buyer of Iranian crude worldwide, began paying for its oil in euros late last year as Tehran moves to diversify its foreign reserves away from U.S. dollars.
The Chinese firm, which buys more than a tenth of exports from the world's fourth-largest crude producer, has changed the payment currency for the bulk of its roughly 240,000 barrels per day (bpd) contract, Beijing-based sources said.
Japanese refiners who buy about 500,000 bpd of Iranian crude, nearly a quarter of Iran's 2.2 million-bpd shipments, continue to pay in dollars but are willing to shift to yen if asked, industry sources and officials said separately.
Iranian officials have said for months that more than half the OPEC member's customers switched their payment currency away from the dollar as Tehran seeks to diversify its reserves, but news of the Zhenrong change is the first outside confirmation.
Thousands of British soldiers have gone absent without leave since 2003 because the Army is unwilling to accept the gravity of mental problems caused by their tours in Iraq.
The Ministry of Defence estimates there have been 10,000 Awol incidents since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and 1,100 servicemen are currently "on the run" from the Army.
A website run by associates of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, reported last night that the Britons would be put before a court and indicted.
Referring to them as “insurgents”, the site concluded: “If it is proven that they deliberately entered Iranian territory, they will be charged with espionage. If that is proven, they can expect a very serious penalty since according to Iranian law, espionage is one of the most serious offences.”
The penalty for espionage in Iran is death. However, similar accusations of spying were made when eight British servicemen were detained in the same area in 2004. They were paraded blindfolded on television but did not appear in court and were freed after three nights in detention.
The UN Security Council has unanimously voted in favour of new sanctions against Iran for its refusal to suspend its nuclear enrichment programme.
The decision broadens the limited sanctions imposed in December 2006.
The new sanctions block Iranian arms exports and freeze the assets of individuals and companies involved in Iran's nuclear and missile programmes.
Iran said on Saturday that 15 British service personnel detained by its navy off Iraq had admitted to violating its territorial waters, rejecting demands from London for their swift release.
The semi-official Fars news agency said the 15 naval personnel, who include a woman, had been brought to the capital Tehran for questioning about what they were doing during what Britain insists was a "routine" anti-smuggling patrol on Friday.
Armed forces general staff spokesman General Alireza Afshar said the 15 had admitted to their interrogators that they knew they were inside Iranian waters, contrary to the insistence of the British defence ministry that they had remained in Iraqi waters.
"They are currently being questioned and have admitted to violating the territorial waters of the Islamic repubic," Afshar told the Fars agency.
Iranian naval vessels on Friday seized 15 British sailors and marines in disputed Persian Gulf waters off the coast of Iraq, British and U.S. officials said. The detentions come at a time of high tension between the West and Iran, which accused the British of intruding on its territory.
The British government protested immediately, saying the 15 were taken captive in Iraqi waters and summoning the Iranian ambassador in London to the Foreign Office: "He was left in no doubt that we want them back," Britain's Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said after the meeting.
Vali Nasr, a senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, suggested that the latest detentions may be Iranian retaliation for the arrest of five Iranians in a U.S.-led raid in northern Iraq in January. The U.S. said the five included a Revolutionary Guards general.
"I think Iran sees this as retaliation for the arrest of their own personnel. They have repeatedly said that they want their personnel released," Nasr said. "So they are either signalling that they can do the same thing or they are trying to bring attention to it."
Oil rose above $62 to a three-month high on Friday after Iran seized 15 British navy personnel, raising concerns about renewed tension between the oil-producing nation and the West.
U.S. crude climbed 64 cents at $62.33 a barrel by 1335 GMT, adding to gains of more than $2 on Thursday. The session high of $62.50 was the strongest level since December 26 last year.
London Brent crude also rose to a three-month high of $63.50 and was trading 78 cents higher at $63.29 by 1335 GMT.
A total of 3,196 active-duty soldiers deserted the Army last year, or 853 more than previously reported, according to revised figures from the Army.
The new calculations by the Army, which had about 500,000 active-duty troops at the end of 2006, significantly alter the annual desertion totals since the 2000 fiscal year.
Police arrested three men on Thursday in connection with the July 7, 2005, suicide bomb attacks that killed 52 commuters on London's transport system.
The men were arrested by counter-terrorism police "on suspicion of the commission, preparation, or instigation of acts of terrorism" in the north of England, a police statement said.
PARIS - The saucer-shaped object is said to have touched down in the south of France and then zoomed off. It left behind scorch marks and that haunting age-old question: Are we alone? This is just one of the cases from France's secret "X-Files" — some 100,000 documents on supposed UFOs and sightings of other unexplained phenomena that the French space agency is publishing on the Internet.
France is the first country to put its entire weird sightings archive online, said Jacques Patenet, who heads the space agency's UFO cell — the Group for Study and Information on Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena.
Al Gore has been challenged to an internationally televised debate on "climate change" by Lord Christopher Monckton, a policy adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during her leadership of the United Kingdom.
In a formal press release from the Center for Science and Public Policy, Lord Monckton has thrown down the gauntlet to challenge Gore to what he terms "the Second Great Debate," an internationally televised, head-to-head, nation-unto-nation confrontation on the question, "That our effect on climate is not dangerous."
Monckton said, "A careful study of the substantial corpus of peer-reviewed science reveals that Mr. Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth," is a foofaraw of pseudo-science, exaggerations, and errors, now being peddled to innocent schoolchildren worldwide."
I was going to post about this sooner but at first, YouTube and Google Video were straight up censoring videos and then some things seemed questionable to me so I held off on posting about this whole thing.
Most of what happened is summed up here:
The Santa Fe New Mexican - Blog Post By: Devin Green
As today is my last day setting the homepage for The Santa Fe New Mexican I thought I would bid you all farewell. I resigned two weeks ago to better pursue my personal interests. It is to my great amusement however that this day coincides with an astonishing story to share in this blog. There is an uproar rising across the Internet over what is being called yet another blatant, 9/11 smoking gun.
Early this week an independent researcher, reviewing video archives of the BBC's 9/11 coverage, divulged the discovery of an earth shaking incongruence. BBC reporters announced the collapse of the 47 story Salomon Brothers Building 23 minutes BEFORE the actual sudden collapse. This building, also known as WTC 7, is clearly visible, standing tall, as a reporter gestures to the live view through the window behind her.
The videos:
YouTube - BBC Reported Building 7 Collapse 20 Minutes Before It Fell
Putfile - time stamped BBC (UPDATE - November 28, 2007. 10:21 pm: This video was on YouTube for several months but I see it has now been removed. It use to be at this link and was titled “BBC 24 TELLS OF COLLAPSE OF BUILDING 7 WITH TIME STAMP!”)
The BBC has struck a content deal with YouTube, the web's most popular video sharing website, owned by Google.
There seemed to be some censorship on digg.com as well.
There is also a petition which can be seen here.
A FORMER spy who claimed MI6 might have been involved in Princess Diana's car crash has been banned from giving evidence at the inquest.
Richard Tomlinson, Britain's MI6 agent in France between 1991 and 1995, has been gagged by the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith.
House Democrats have dropped plans to use the coming Defense Supplemental Appropriations legislation to permanently close the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, RAW STORY has learned. One House Democrat sitting on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee promised the party would return to the issue later in the year when taking up the standard Defense funding bill.
Far from being an individual tragedy, the death of Ivan Safronov will be seen by many as part of a grim trend. The Kommersant reporter is at least the 20th Russian journalist to die in suspicious circumstances since 2000, when Vladimir Putin assumed the Russian presidency. Shot, stabbed or poisoned, the journalists have two things in common: no one has been convicted, or in most cases even arrested, after their deaths. And all of them had angered powerful vested interests which appear to suffer little restraint in dealing with their enemies.
Gordon Brown, likely to be the next prime minister, will deliver a speech calling for a "new world order" to combat global warming on Monday.
An Israeli human rights group has accused Israel's army of using two young Palestinians as human shields during a recent raid in the West Bank.
The B'Tselem group said it had testimony from a 15-year-old boy, his 24-year-old cousin and also an 11-year-old girl.
They said that soldiers had forced them to enter houses ahead of the troops during the raid in Nablus.
The use of human shields is illegal under Israeli and international law.
The Israeli defence force says it is investigating the allegations.
US commanders in Iraq may need another 7,000 troops to support the military surge in Iraq, a senior Pentagon official told Congress on Tuesday.
Gordon England, the deputy defence secretary, said the troops would be necessary to support the 21,500 combat troops who are being sent to Iraq to help quell violence in Baghdad and al-Anbar province. Appearing before the House budget committee, Mr England rejected a recent estimate by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office that the surge would require an additional 15,000-28,000 support personnel.
