Afghan leader meets Taliban-linked cleric

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, right, arrives with Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani at the prime minister's house in Islamabad, Pakistan for bilateral talks on Thursday, Feb 16, 2012. Karzai has arrived in Pakistan for talks on how Islamabad can facilitate peace negotiations with the Afghan Taliban. (AP Photo/B.K. Bangash)

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, right, arrives with Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani at the prime minister's house in Islamabad, Pakistan for bilateral talks on Thursday, Feb 16, 2012. Karzai has arrived in Pakistan for talks on how Islamabad can facilitate peace negotiations with the Afghan Taliban. (AP Photo/B.K. Bangash)

ISLAMABAD (AP) ? The Afghan president met Saturday with a Pakistani cleric linked to Taliban insurgents, a meeting that marked the first public contact between an Afghan official and members of the Afghan Taliban's support network in Pakistan in Afghanistan's bid to bring the militant movement to the negotiating table.

The meeting between President Hamid Karzai and the cleric was held in Islamabad said the cleric and Afghan officials, and shows how far the Afghan president is willing to go to open contact with the insurgent leaders.

The Taliban leaders are widely believed to be based in Pakistan with some level of protection by the country's security forces. The U.S. and Afghanistan increasingly see negotiating with the Taliban as the only way to end the more than ten years of warfare in Afghanistan and allow American troops to leave the country without it falling further into chaos.

Speaking to The Associated Press, the cleric, Maulana Samiul Haq, said Karzai asked for his help in bringing the militant movement's leadership into peace negotiations and to help establish contacts with the Taliban leadership. Haq said he told Karzai that he would help in the "noble cause" as long as it was clear what was wanted from the Taliban. Karzai was in Pakistan on a trip to gain the country's cooperation in the nascent peace process.

"I told him to take steps to gain some confidence of the Taliban. 'They do not trust you,'" Haq said he told Karzai. "I told him that if you take a clear position on what you can offer the Taliban, and what you want from the Taliban, God willing, I will contribute in this noble cause."

Hamed Elmi, deputy spokesman for Karzai's office, confirmed the meeting took place.

Haq runs a large seminary where many of the insurgent leaders once studied and reportedly still provides recruits for the Taliban fighting in Afghanistan. He is known in some circles as the "Father of the Taliban," but it's unclear how much sway he has currently with the movement.

Karzai met Haq in an Islamabad hotel, not his seminary closer to the Afghan border where he regularly preaches the virtues of jihad in Afghanistan to thousands of students.

Karzai's trip reinforces the centrality of Pakistan to the peace process.

Pakistan is seen as key because much of the Taliban leadership is believed to be based in the country, and the government has historical ties with the group. But Islamabad has always denied Taliban leaders are using its territory and rejected allegations that the Pakistani government has maintained its links to the group, frustrating Afghan and American officials who say Pakistan is not aggressively going after the terror group.

Pakistan sees the Afghan Taliban as its allies against the influence of its regional enemy, India and is believed to be trying to use its influence with the group to limit India's future power in Afghanistan.

Karzai met Thursday and Friday with Pakistan's civilian and military leaders to ask for their help in bringing the Taliban leadership to the table and ending the conflict that has wracked his country for years.

But there was little sign of progress. Pakistan said it was "preposterous" to think Islamabad could deliver Taliban chief Mullah Omar, a cleric widely believed to be hiding somewhere in the border area with Afghanistan.

Since its inception, the peace process has been beset by false hopes, mistrust and the competing interests of the main players: Afghanistan, the United States, the Afghan Taliban and Pakistan.

Afghan and Pakistani officials have complained about being sidelined in the peace process after the Taliban said they were opening an office in Qatar and were talking to the Americans. Publicly, the Afghan Taliban says it will not talk to Karzai, who they maintain is an illegitimate "puppet leader."

During Karzai's three-day trip to Pakistan, he held a number of meetings with political and religious figures in an attempt to push forward the peace process.

An aide to another hardline Islamist cleric, Qazi Hussain Ahmad, also said he met Saturday with the Afghan leader.

Karzai also met a delegation of a pro-Taliban Pakistani political party, Jamiat Ulema Pakistan. The party's seminaries in Pakistan recruited and trained Taliban militants who fought against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

Senator Maulana Ghafoor Haidri led the delegation and said the meeting took place on Thursday.

He said he welcomed Karzai's peace efforts, and promised him his party's support in ending the war.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2012-02-18-AS-Pakistan-Afghan/id-115b8875d03049bca13b278d764cd23d

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The Chawly Changer Coin Dispenser is a US made change organizer for your pocket or gear bag. It’s made of high impact acrylic and is designed to hold $1.34 by providing spring loaded slots for 3 quarters, a nickle slot for 3 nickles, a dime sized slot that can hold 4 dimes and a slot [...]

Source: http://the-gadgeteer.com/2012/02/17/organize-your-change-with-a-chawly-changer-coin-dispenser/

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Romney, Obama campaign spar over US-China policy (Reuters)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) ? Mitt Romney lashed out at Beijing and President Barack Obama's China policy on Thursday, criticizing the president for going in "precisely the wrong direction" and calling meetings this week with visiting Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping "empty pomp."

In an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, the Republican presidential candidate chided Obama for demurring to the Asian powerhouse and said he would change course if elected by preserving a military presence in the region and confronting human rights issues in China more forcefully.

"President Obama came into office as a near supplicant to Beijing, almost begging it to continue buying American debt so as to finance his profligate spending here at home ... Such weakness has only encouraged Chinese assertiveness and made our allies question our staying power in East Asia," the former Massachusetts governor wrote.

"Now, three years into his term, the president has belatedly responded with a much-ballyhooed 'pivot' to Asia, a phrase that may prove to be as gimmicky and vacuous as his 'reset' with Russia," he said, adding that "the supposed pivot has been oversold" and was "also vastly under-resourced."

Romney's comments come as China's vice president and presumed future leader visits the United States to build ties and urge greater cooperation between the two countries. Obama and other administration officials have pressed Xi to improve China's human rights record and play by the rules of the world economy.

China's leader-in-waiting visited America's grainbelt on Thursday and discussed increased trade in farm goods with U.S. agricultural officials.

China is not beloved by the American electorate. Its trade and currency policies are blamed for job losses in the U.S. manufacturing sector that hit important election battleground states such as Ohio especially hard.

Beating up on Beijing is an easy way for candidates to score political points, and Obama's campaign, which was expecting Romney's attack, responded by calling him a flip-flopper on the issue.

"Today's tough talk on China stands in stark opposition to his position two years ago, when Romney called the president's decision to enforce trade laws against China 'bad for the nation and our workers,'" said campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt, quoting from Romney's book, "No Apology."

LaBolt also cited a Wall Street Journal report that said Romney's financial advisers had sold some $1.5 million in investments in China last year.

"He was comfortable investing 1.5 million of his own money in China rather than America until he decided it was bad for his politics. A Commander-in-Chief only gets one chance to get it right," LaBolt said.

TOUGH TALK FROM BOTH SIDES

On Wednesday, one day after meeting with Xi at the White House, Obama continued his attack on Chinese trade practices and called for manufacturing jobs to move back to the United States.

Obama chided competitors for not playing "by the same rules" at a campaign-style visit at Master Lock's Milwaukee, Wisconsin,

factory and pointed to his creation of a Trade Enforcement Unit to investigate unfair trade practices in China and other countries.

But Romney said in the newspaper piece he would take a different tack, calling for direct action to counter "abusive Chinese practices in the areas of trade, intellectual property, and currency valuation."

Romney, who is running in large part on his experience as a business executive, has made tough talk on China a centerpiece of his campaign's economic message and last week criticized China's "authoritarianism" during an address to an audience of technology executives.

"Unless China changes its ways, on day one of my presidency I will designate it a currency manipulator and take appropriate counteraction. A trade war with China is the last thing I want, but I cannot tolerate our current trade surrender," he wrote on Thursday.

He also called for reversing defense cuts and maintaining a strong military presence in the Pacific to balance "the long-term challenge posed by China's build-up."

"This is not an invitation to conflict. Instead, this policy is a guarantee that the region remains open for cooperative trade, and that economic opportunity and democratic freedom continue to flourish across East Asia," he wrote.

On the issue of human rights, Romney wrote: "We must also forthrightly confront the fact that the Chinese government continues to deny its people basic political freedoms and human rights."

(Editing by Anthony Boadle)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/obama/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120216/pl_nm/us_usa_campaign_china

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Source: http://www.workoninternet.com/business/investment-financial-strategy/personal-finance/191756-bad-credit.html

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Times correspondent Anthony Shadid dies in Syria

FILE - In this April 12, 2010 file photo, Anthony Shadid, winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting with The Washington Post, poses for a portrait at the Watson Institute for International Studies, on the campus of Brown University, in Providence, R.I. The New York Times said Shadid died Thursday, Feb. 16, 2012, apparently of an asthma attack, while on assignment in Syria. He was 43. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)

FILE - In this April 12, 2010 file photo, Anthony Shadid, winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting with The Washington Post, poses for a portrait at the Watson Institute for International Studies, on the campus of Brown University, in Providence, R.I. The New York Times said Shadid died Thursday, Feb. 16, 2012, apparently of an asthma attack, while on assignment in Syria. He was 43. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)

FILE - In this April 12, 2010 file photo, Anthony Shadid, winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting with The Washington Post, poses for a portrait at the Watson Institute for International Studies, on the campus of Brown University, in Providence, R.I. The New York Times said Shadid died Thursday, Feb. 16, 2012, apparently of an asthma attack, while on assignment in Syria. He was 43. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)

FILE - In this April 7, 2011 file photo, New York Times Beirut Bureau Chief Anthony Shadid discusses his capture by Moammar Gadhafi's forces in Libya, during a talk at the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum in Oklahoma City. The New York Times said Shadid died Thursday, Feb. 16, 2012, apparently of an asthma attack, while on assignment in Syria. He was 43. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki, File)

In this Feb. 2, 2011 photo provided by The New York Times, Times journalist Anthony Shadid, middle right, interviews residents of Embaba, a lower class Cairo neighborhood, during the Egyptian revolution. (AP Photo/Ed Ou for The New York Times) MANDATORY CREDIT: ED OU FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES, VIA THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK (AP) ? New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid had been shot in the West Bank in 2002 and kidnapped for six days in Libya last year, but it was an apparent asthma attack that killed the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner in Syria while he was reporting on the uprising against its president.

Shadid, who died Thursday at age 43, strove to capture untold stories in Middle East conflicts from Libya to Iraq. Most recently, he managed to get through the border area in Turkey adjoining Syria's Idlib Province with the aid of smugglers, the Times said.

Times photographer Tyler Hicks told the newspaper that Shadid had suffered one bout of asthma the first night, followed by a more severe attack a week later on the way out of the country.

"I stood next to him and asked if he was OK, and then he collapsed," Hicks told the Times.

Hicks said that Shadid was unconscious and that his breathing was "very faint" and "very shallow." He said that after a few minutes he could see that Shadid "was no longer breathing."

Hicks later carried Shadid's body to Turkey after this latest attack, the newspaper said.

"Anthony was one of our generation's finest reporters," Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger said in a statement. "He was also an exceptionally kind and generous human being. He brought to his readers an up-close look at the globe's many war-torn regions, often at great personal risk. We were fortunate to have Anthony as a colleague, and we mourn his death."

Lebanon's Prime Minister Najib Mikati wrote on his Twitter account: "Sincere condolences to journalist Anthony Shadid's (RIP) family, friends & New York Times colleagues. I've known and admired him personally. N.M."

Shadid's father, Buddy Shadid, told The Associated Press on Thursday his son had asthma all his life and had medication with him.

"(But) he was walking to the border because it was too dangerous to ride in the car," the father said. "He was walking behind some horses ? he's more allergic to those than anything else ? and he had an asthma attack."

Shadid, an American of Lebanese descent, had a wife, Nada Bakri, and a son and a daughter. He had worked previously for the AP, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. He won Pulitzer Prizes for international reporting in 2004 and 2010 when he was with the Post.

In 2004, the Pulitzer Board praised "his extraordinary ability to capture, at personal peril, the voices and emotions of Iraqis as their country was invaded, their leader toppled and their way of life upended."

Shadid also was the author of three books, including "House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East," in which he wrote about restoring his family's home in Lebanon, forthcoming next month from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

A native of Oklahoma City, Shadid graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He joined the AP in Milwaukee in 1990, worked on the International Desk in New York and served as the AP's news editor in Los Angeles. He was transferred to Cairo in 1995, covering stories in several countries.

AP Senior Managing Editor John Daniszewski, who worked with Shadid in Baghdad during the U.S. invasion in 2003, called him "a brilliant colleague who stood out both for his elegant writing and for his deep and nuanced understanding of the region."

"He was calm under fire and quietly daring, the most admired of his generation of foreign correspondents," Daniszewski said.

Martin Baron, the editor of the Globe, for whom Shadid worked while at that newspaper, told the Times that Shadid had a "profound and sophisticated understanding" of the Middle East.

"More than anything, his effort to connect foreign coverage with real people on the ground, and to understand their lives, is what made his work so special," Baron said. "It wasn't a matter of diplomacy: it was a matter of people, and how their lives were so dramatically affected by world events."

Ralph Nader, the former third-party presidential candidate, called Shadid "a great, great reporter."

"His courage, stamina, intellect and extraordinary powers of observation respected his readers' intelligence while elevating his profession's standards," the longtime consumer advocate said in a statement.

Nader added in a phone call to the AP that he knew Shadid from his time at The Washington Post and had met his family.

"What a loss," he said.

Shadid had been reporting in Syria for a week, gathering information on the resistance to the Syrian government and calls for Syrian President Bashar Assad to step down, the Times said. The exact circumstances and location of his death were unclear, it said.

Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson sent a note to the newsroom Thursday evening, relaying the news of Shadid's death and remembering him.

"Anthony died as he lived ? determined to bear witness to the transformation sweeping the Middle East and to testify to the suffering of people caught between government oppression and opposition forces," she wrote.

Shadid, long known for covering wars and other conflicts in the Middle East, was among four reporters detained for six days by Libyan forces loyal to Moammar Gadhafi last March.

Speaking to an audience in Oklahoma City about a month after his release, he said he had a conversation with his father the night before he was detained.

"Maybe a little bit arrogantly, perhaps with a little bit of conceit, I said, 'It's OK, Dad. I know what I'm doing. I've been in this situation before,'" Shadid told the crowd of several dozen people. "I guess on some level I felt that if I wasn't there to tell the story, the story wouldn't be told."

When Shadid's wife was asked at the time whether she worried about him returning to writing about conflicts, she said as a journalist she understood that he might need to.

"At the end of the day, he's my husband, and the thought of going through life without him and raising our children alone is terrible," she said afterward.

Shadid's father, who lives in Oklahoma City, said a colleague tried to revive his son after he was stricken Thursday but couldn't.

"They were in an isolated place. There was no doctor around," Buddy Shadid said. "It took a couple of hours to get him to a hospital in Turkey."

___

Associated Press writer Rochelle Hines contributed to this report from Oklahoma City.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2012-02-17-Obit-Shadid/id-63a5b451285b492bad53cf213f3991c0

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India summons Norway ambassador over custody row

Norwegian ambassador Ann Ollestad with MoS Defence Pallam Raju.

The Norwegian ambassador was summoned to the Ministry of External Affairs and she met Secretary (West) Madhusudan Ganapathi, official spokesperson in the MEA Syed Akbaruddin told reporters here.

The envoy was summoned a day after CPI(M) MP and politburo member Brinda Karat met External Affairs Minister S M Krishna and sought government's immediate intervention in ensuring early return of two Indian children separated from their parents last year on the grounds of "emotional disconnect".

She had conveyed her concern over the statement made by a top Norwegian official that the children would not be sent to India before April.

Official sources said the ministry asked the envoy as to why the process of bringing the children together with their family was taking time.

NRI couple Anurup and Sagarika Bhattacharya's children Abhigyan (3) and Aishwarya (1) were taken away last year by Barnevarne (Norwegian Child Welfare Services), which claimed emotional disconnect with the parents, and placed them in foster parental care according to the local Norwegian court's directive.

Source: PTI

Source: http://news.in.msn.com/national/article.aspx?cp-documentid=5848249

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Car Auto Insurance ? Blog Archive ? 21St Century Auto Insurance ...

United States currently has over one hundred companies, the owner of a vehicle to offer a very wide selection. Here is a presentation of a brief overview of the insurance of the 21 Century car. It is behind a company in Los Angeles, which is relatively young, founded in comparison to other major auto insurance companies in 1954 by Louis W. Foster, and originally as the 20th Century Insurance. However, it is one of the largest service provider and the fastest growth in 50 states. Currently it is owned by the Farmers Insurance Group of Companies. The insurance sold their blankets directly through the media or by e-mail, eliminating the need for additional resources and costs of its own.

Cover the premiums of this company some data were collected. Probably the majority of their customers will agree that the speed of the car insurance is very attractive and competitive. 21st Century has the surprisingly low premiums for those who are low-risk customers into account. Nevertheless, there is always a problem, as those customers who receive safe and reliable coverage cheap and exceptional service, those who pose less risk of claims usually fetch higher prices than expected. You could offer a good price, but get unusual after an accident or a violation of the monthly cost.

Unfortunately, according to reviews, leaves much to be desired 21st century customer service. Apparently their customer service is extremely difficult to achieve and when the customer finally gets hold of the representatives they turn out to be a very inadequate assistance. There are several cases were found by customers complain that the negligence of the client agent to the catastrophic and disadvantages for the customers themselves lose. However, we must consider the 21st century car insurance, specializing in low-risk customers prefer making it harder for them to process claims.

With regard to the availability, in the 21 Century is very easy to navigate. The site has enough information to answer almost all questions are quotes on the main page, all available. You will be able to special offers and promotions in part to see. In addition, they provide you with a guide on how to drive, safe, risk minimization and so with a claim on car insurance at a low cost of ownership.

21st Century car insurance online company might not have very long range plans and guidelines for testing, because they focus primarily on the risk-free customers, they have pretty nice insurance plans for those who qualify. We must remember that the company offers low prices due to the huge amount of loyal customers. There is coverage for bodily injury and property damage, while everything else is pretty much under-insured plans as an option for car owners.

All in all a very competitive and very affordable. It had its advantages and disadvantages, but for those who are responsible drivers with clean driving record, it would be perfect. Dealing with risk-free clients is an advantage for those who are entitled to car insurance rates low.

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Source: http://www.xjwsy.com/21st-century-auto-insurance-company-review

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