South African Workers plan further strike..[ 1662 ]

Workers plan further South Africa strike

Union members rally in Durban, South Africa, on August 17. The country has seen widespread strikes in recent weeks.

 

By Les Neuhaus, CNN

August 18, 2010 -- Updated 1058 GMT (1858 HKT)

 

(CNN) -- More than 1 million workers are planning a countrywide strike in South Africa on Wednesday, according to an official with a public sector union.

Nomusa Cembi, of the South African Democratic Teachers Union -- an affiliate of Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) -- said hospital, education and civil servants demanded better compensation and benefits from their government.

"We are trying to bring them to their knees," Cembi told CNN by phone from Johannesburg, referring to the South African government. "We took a decision yesterday that we would go on strike indefinitely until our employer gives us a better offer."

She said the strike was intended to raise wages to 8.6 percent and that they wanted a 1,000 Rand ($138) per month housing allowance. They also want those improvements to be backdated to April 1 of this year.

Cembi said medical benefits were also part of the negotiating standoff.

The last offer by the South African government, according to Cembi, came last week when a 7 percent wage hike was proffered, along with a 700 Rand a month housing allowance.

"Our organization has rejected their offer," Cembi said.

It was unclear how long the strike might continue.

Government officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

Last week public sector workers went on strike across South Africa, closing schools, impacting hospital staffing and wreaking havoc across a wide array of public services.

A North Korean aircraft, crashes in China..[ 1661 ]

North Korean plane crashes in China

 

In this photograph of the wreckage a North Korean flag can be seen on the plane's tail

BBC .,18 August 2010 Last updated at 09:25 GMT

A North Korean aircraft, which may be a fighter jet, has crashed in China near the country's shared border, say Chinese and South Korean reports.

It is believed the pilot, who was killed, may have been trying to defect to Russia, according to unnamed intelligence sources cited by Yonhap.
The crash happened on Tuesday afternoon in Fushun county, Liaoning province.
Defections are common but an attempt by plane is highly unusual and would be a source of embarrassment for Pyongyang.
China has a repatriation agreement with North Korea, which could explain why the pilot may have been trying to reach Russia, the report added.
North Korea has a military airbase in Sinuiju, near the border with China.
China's state media confirmed an unidentified small plane had crashed and that it may belong to North Korea.
An investigation into the cause of the crash was under way, Xinhua reported.
Soviet-era jet Photographs of the wreckage reportedly taken by a local resident and posted on the internet showed a North Korean flag on the plane's tail.

Military experts said the plane appeared to be a Soviet-era fighter jet, which were used during the 1950-53 Korean War.
A report in Hong Kong's Ming Pao newspaper said that a second pilot had bailed out but gave no information on his whereabouts. It conflicts with the South Korean report of only one pilot on board.
Technically, North and South Korea remain at war although a ceasefire agreement ended fighting in 1953.
Their border is the most heavily militarised zone in the world.

About the Ground Zero Mosque..[ 1660 ]

What Would Bush Do About the Ground Zero Mosque?

Updated: 10 hours 35 minutes ago

Print Text Size

Andrea Stone Senior Washington Correspondent

AOL News

WASHINGTON (Aug. 17) -- The political battle over plans to build an Islamic center two blocks from ground zero is reaching biblical proportions as Republicans pummel President Barack Obama

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Monday compared the center -- which many prominentsupport -- to Nazis trying to protest outside a Holocaust museum. Republican campaign staffers send out e-mails placing Obama on the same page as the leader of Hamas. And GOP candidates in places far away from lower Manhattan quickly launched TV ads declaring, "Mr. President, ground zero is the wrong place for a mosque." and Democrats for being insensitive to victims of 9/11. Jewish officials

Doug Mills, AP

Then-President George W. Bush, center, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, left, and other officials look toward at the site of the fallen buildings during a tour of the World Trade Center on Sept. 14, 2001.

But amid all the overheated rhetoric, some may wonder what former President George W. Bush might say about all this.

For now, nothing.

A spokesman for the former president told AOL News that Bush would have no comment on the matter.

But days after the 9/11 attacks, Bush had much to say about the need for religious tolerance even after Islamic extremists carried out the worst foreign attack in history on U.S. soil.

"The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam," Bush said at the Islamic Center of Washington in a speech that set the tenor for when he later sent U.S. troops to fight on Muslim soil in Afghanistan and later Iraq. "That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war."

He went on to say, in words that Democrats who disagreed with Bush on nearly every issue now recall fondly, that despite raw emotions, millions of American Muslims "need to be treated with respect. In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect."

Nearly nine years later, former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson echoed the message of his old boss. Writing in The Washington Post, he defended Obama. Unlike pundits, he wrote, "A president does not merely have opinions; he has duties to the Constitution and to the citizens he serves -- including millions of Muslim citizens."

Gerson went on to say that "those who want a president to assert that any mosque would defile the neighborhood near ground zero are asking him to undermine the war on terrorism. A war on Islam would make a war on terrorism impossible."

American Muslims who protested the Bush administration's treatment of detainees at the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, say they long for the former president to speak out against the rhetoric of his fellow Republicans.

"President Bush would have said more or less the same thing as President Obama, only President Bush wouldn't have come under attack from extremists for saying so," Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations told AOL News. "Any leader has to take a position based on principle and not on a sense of mob rule."

Hooper accused elected officials like House Minority Leader John Boehner -- who called the proposed mosque "deeply troubling, as is the president's decision to endorse it" -- of trying to score "cheap political points based on hysteria and Islamophobia."

Mixing Politics and Religion

Though his message would get muddled over the weekend, Obama's initial impulse to strongly support the Islamic center sparked a firestorm of protest that was a reminder why mixing politics and religion can be a volatile brew.

"As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country," he said Friday at a White House dinner celebrating Ramadan.

J. Scott Applewhite, AP

President Barack Obama hosts an iftar dinner, the meal that breaks the dawn-to-dusk fast for Muslims during the holy month of Ramadan, in the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington, Friday, Aug. 13, 2010. For over a billion Muslims, Ramadan is a time of intense devotion and reflection.

With two of three Americans opposed to the so-called ground zero mosque, GOP leaders saw an opening in a year when Democrats were already expected to lose seats in November's election. Republicans privately spoke with glee about how the issue put Democrats on the defensive. One strategist who didn't want his name used said it "will ultimately lead some to question the president's motives."

Obama should never have opened his mouth, said GOP pollster Whit Ayres. "It's a political plus for Republicans if they frame it as a local issue with security implications that needs to be resolved at the local level, not at the national level," he said. "This will be one more point in a long litany of points about how the president and the Democratic leadership are out of step with the thinking of most Americans."

White House spokesman Bill Burton, asked about criticism of the president's remarks, said, "I can't speak to the politics of what the Republicans are doing. And the president didn't do this because of the politics. He spoke about it because he feels he has an obligation as the president to address this."

Apparently the most powerful Democrat in the Senate didn't get the message as candidates far from New York sought to distance themselves from Obama.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, fighting to keep his seat in Nevada against a challenge from tea party Republican Sharron Angle, came out against the planned Islamic center, saying it "should be built some place else."

That prompted Angle to tweet "Nice of you to join us" even as Republican campaign staffers e-mailed that it was "regrettable that he hasn't demonstrated this same independence from President Obama on the critical issues facing America during the last 19 months."

The controversy "could be a useful one for some Republicans, especially in conservative states and districts," said John Green, a University of Akron political scientist who studies the intersection of politics and religion.

"Much of the Republican base is likely to disagree with Obama and the cost at the ballot box may be small because Muslims are not very numerous and not very popular in the public," he said.

But Green warned that in the long run the issue could backfire on Republicans because of the country's growing religious diversity. "It is an issue like immigration, with some short-term advantages for the GOP in many places but a long-term disadvantage in the nation as a whole," he said.

"Politically it wasn't smart or necessary for President Obama to wade into this controversy. It just adds another unappetizing side dish to the Democrats' full plate of problems heading to November," said University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato. "But we've seen a long list of so-called political game changers fail to change much, including the BP oil spill, immigration and gay marriage. This election is about the economy, and it's going to stay that way."

Republican strategist Ron Bonjean agreed that other issues are uppermost in voters' minds but warned against underestimating the impact of Obama's remarks on the mosque.

"Jobs and the economy will remain the top issues of this election," he said, "but President Obama's comments can be used to remind Americans just how disconnected the White House is from voters who wonder why he decided to involve himself in the matter."

N.Y.: the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church ..[ 1659 ]

What About the Ground Zero Church? Archdiocese Says Officials Abandoned Project

By Judson Berger

Published August 17, 2010

Fox News' Kathleen Foster and John Brandt contributed to this report.

Shown here is the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church near the World Trade Center, before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. (Herman Krieger/Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America)

The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America accused New York officials on Tuesday of turning their backs on the reconstruction of the only church destroyed in the Sept. 11 attacks, while the controversial mosque near Ground Zero moves forward. 

The sidelined project is the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, a tiny, four-story building destroyed in 2001 when one of the World Trade Center towers fell on top of it. Nobody from the church was hurt in the attack, but the congregation has for the past eight years been trying to rebuild its house of worship. 

While the mosque project cleared red tape earlier this month, negotiations between the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the church stalled last year -- and will not be revived, according to government officials. 

Though the particulars of the two projects are completely different and on the surface unrelated, the church and its supporters see a disconnect in the way the proposals have been handled. 

An archdiocese official said Tuesday that the situation has created "consternation" for those still struggling to jump-start talks over the church. 

"We have people that are saying, why isn't our church being rebuilt and why is there ... such concern for people of the mosque?" Father Alex Karloutsos, assistant to the archbishop, told FoxNews.com. He said "religious freedom" would allow a place of worship for any denomination to be built, but accused officials with the Port Authority of making no effort to help move the congregation's project along. 

A New York City panel voted unanimously to reject landmark status for a building in downtown Manhattan, paving the way for its demolition — and for the construction of a 13-story, $100 million mosque near the World Trade Center site.

"Unfortunately, they have just been silent -- dead silent, actually," said Karloutsos, whose father was ordained at St. Nicholas. "They just simply forgot about the church." 

The Port Authority and the church announced a deal in July 2008 under which the Port Authority would grant land and up to $20 million to help rebuild it in a new location -- in addition, the authority was willing to pay up to $40 million to construct a bomb-proof platform underneath. 

Within a year, the deal fell through and talks ended. Port Authority officials told Fox News that the deal is dead. 

The archdiocese and Port Authority offer sharply conflicting accounts of where things went wrong. The Port Authority has previously claimed the church was making additional demands -- like wanting the $20 million up front and wanting to review plans for the surrounding area. They say the church can still proceed on its own if it wishes.  

"The church continues to have the right to rebuild at their original site, and we will pay fair market value for the underground space beneath that building," a spokesperson with the Port Authority told Fox News. 

But Karloutsos called the Port Authority's claims "propaganda" and said the church has complied with all conditions. He said the government should honor agreements that date back to 2004, under former New York Gov. George Pataki. 

Pataki, speaking with Fox News on Tuesday, agreed that the church should be rebuilt. 

"I don't understand it," Pataki said. "Why the Port Authority now has so far put roadblocks in the way of its reconstruction is beyond me. It's not the right thing to do." 

George Demos, a Republican candidate for New York's 1st Congressional District, has also drawn attention to the church negotiations. He released a written statement last week calling the Port Authority "disingenuous and disrespectful" for claiming the church project could go forward. 

"For the last year, the Port Authority has refused to meet with church officials and is now reneging on its commitment to rebuild the church," Demos said. 

Demos said the stalled church plans are an "outrage," considering New York City's Landmarks Preservation Committee vote in early August to deny historical status protection to the building where the mosque is set to be built, clearing the way for the project to move forward. 

The church project has not attracted the kind of national attention the mosque has. President Obama injected the mosque into the national political conversation when he appeared to endorse the plans at a Ramadan dinner at the White House Friday. The White House later clarified that Obama was supporting the developers' right to build the mosque, not the project itself. 

The president's comments set the stage for mounting criticism from Republicans, who widely oppose the project and now want other Democrats to declare where they stand on what for months was a largely local issue. 

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has supported the church as well as the mosque, defended the mosque proposal Tuesday. 

"I think it will add to the diversity of the area," Bloomberg said. As for Obama's comments, he said: "He understands the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as well as anyone." 

Fox News' Kathleen Foster and John Brandt contributed to this report.

Hostages freed, at Turkey's Embassy in Israel..[ 1658 ]

Hostage drama ends at Turkey's embassy in Israel

 

Mr Injaz was limping as he was taken away by security officials

BBC, 17 August 2010 Last updated at 21:45 GMT

A man who broke into the Turkish embassy in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv has been arrested and taken to hospital with gunshot wounds.

The man had taken two hostages but they were later freed. Officials said he was shot by embassy security guards.

Israel's foreign ministry identified the man as a Palestinian who stormed the UK embassy in Tel Aviv in 2006.
There are reports that the man, named as Nadim Injaz from the West Bank, was demanding asylum in Turkey.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said the situation at the embassy was under control and all staff were safe.
"A man who claimed he was Palestinian came to the embassy and wanted asylum. He was reportedly armed. He was overpowered," he said.
"He is also in good health at the moment. He said that he was seeking asylum but we are evaluating the whole incident. An investigation is under way but there is nothing to worry about."
Television images showed Mr Injaz limping as he was led out of the building by police. He was then put onto a stretcher and taken away in an ambulance.

Earlier images showed Israeli police and ambulances outside the embassy building, on Hayarkon Street, near the busy beachfront. Police and heavily armed security personnel could also be seen.
Threat
Mr Davutoglu had said the assailant was carrying a knife, a can of petrol and a toy gun, when he forced his way into the embassy compound on Tuesday evening.
He later retreated to an upper floor of the embassy after being shot and freeing his hostages - thought to be the consul-general and his wife.

 

Israeli officials identified the assailant as Nadim Injaz, a Palestinian from Ramallah

A man identified as Mr Injaz was later photographed looking out of one of the building's windows.
Israel's Channel 2 television also played a recording of a man it claimed was the attacker, who threatened to burn down the embassy if he was not allowed to leave the country.

Mr Injaz is from the West Bank town of Ramallah and is reported to have a history of mental illness. He has claimed he used to work for Israeli intelligence and is being persecuted by them.
In 2006, he stormed the British embassy in Tel Aviv and tried to demand asylum.
Correspondents say Tuesday's incident appears to be unrelated to a recent diplomatic dispute between Israel and Turkey.

Ties deteriorated after nine Turks were killed in late May in an Israeli commando raid on a flotilla of aid ships bound for the Gaza Strip.