Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cosmicforce who wrote (6580)	2/3/2004 5:52:31 PM
From: Yogizuna	Respond to of 20773

Yes, amazing is it not? Janet Jackson can show her right breast (and I do not believe they are really sorry), but the truth cannot, must not be told about our kid's future. Step by step, we seem to be turning unto a "kinder and gentler" version of the old Soviet Union in some ways.

To: cosmicforce who wrote (6580)	2/3/2004 11:00:49 PM
From: epicure	Respond to of 20773

yikes here are some REAL NUMBERS FOR YA NEW YORK (Reuters) - Planned job cuts in January were 26 percent higher than in December as U.S. jobs moved to countries like India, China and the Philippines, and as mergers made some jobs redundant, according to a report on Tuesday. The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., said post-holiday job cuts reached 117,556 in January surpassing the 100,000 threshold for the first time since last October. biz.yahoo.com CC

To: cosmicforce who wrote (6580)	2/4/2004 9:14:05 AM
From: epicure	Respond to of 20773

Prior U.S. Letdowns Worry Iraq Kurds By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: February 4, 2004 Filed at 8:46 a.m. ET WASHINGTON (AP) -- No group in Iraq was more thrilled by the U.S.-led military intervention in Iraq last year than the country's Kurds, who suffered severe repression under Saddam Hussein's rule. Kurds can only hope that the American unfaithfulness to the Kurdish cause in the 1970s, '80s and '90s doesn't repeat itself. ``I am worried,'' says Mike Amitay, executive director of the Washington Kurdish Institute, which looks after the interests of Kurdish minorities in Iraq and elsewhere in the region. Kurds constitute the world's largest population of stateless people. Besides Iraq, they can be found in Turkey, Iran and Syria. Iraqi Kurds are eager for autonomy in the post-Saddam era so that they can protect themselves against the kind of disaster that occurred on Sunday when twin suicide bombings killed more than 100 people in the Kurdish city of Irbil. It was one of the deadliest postwar terrorist attacks in Iraq. The targets were the headquarters of Kurdish political parties generally supportive of U.S. policies. After a long history of rejection, the former Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani once asked: ``Have the Kurdish people committed such crimes that every nation in the world should be against them?'' At a minimum, Kurds want autonomy in a tripartite state that also would include Shiite and Sunni Muslim sectors. Just how much autonomy will be a matter of debate and discussion for years, and the United States will help shape the outcome. The Bush administration believes Kurds are entitled to an entity within a unified Iraq, but one that is drawn according to geographic and administrative, not ethnic, lines. Iraqi Kurd leaders agree, but no one doubts the powerful pro-independence grass roots sentiment in the Kurdish area. ``Nearly all Kurds favor independence,'' says William Eagleton, a former U.S. ambassador and Kurdish expert. President Bush opposes independence. ``The United States' ambition is for a peaceful country, a democratic Iraq that is territorially intact,'' Bush said last week with the prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, sitting at his side. Erdogan is concerned that an independent Iraqi Kurd entity in neighboring Iraq would only incite the restive Turkish Kurd population. Key unresolved issues are the boundary lines of an autonomous Kurdish entity and control over Kirkuk and its oil-rich environs. Is the oil Kurdish or Iraqi? U.S. officials say serious discussions on the Kurds' fate over the long term probably will await the emergence of strong central government in Baghdad, one capable of engaging the Kurdish authorities as equals. Kurds have ample reason to question whether America will keep their interests in mind. They were displeased last October when the United States pressured the former colonial power, Turkey, to dispatch 10,000 troops to Iraq to join coalition forces. Given their historic enmity for Turkey, the Kurds were aghast. The plan was dropped. In 1991, with the encouragement of the first President Bush, the Kurds rose up against Saddam after Operation Desert Storm. But U.S. help never came and many Kurds were slaughtered. Earlier, the Reagan administration generally had ignored Saddam's brutality, opting to side with him in the Iran-Iraq war, seeing the Iraqi leader as the lesser of evils. An estimated 180,000 Kurds were killed by Saddam's forces during that period. In the 1970s, the United States called off CIA support for the Iraqi Kurds to help cement a peace deal between Iran and Iraq. This gave Baghdad a free hand to punish the Kurds, whom it regarded as heretics. But for the 10 years prior to the invasion of Iraq last March, the United States and Britain kept Saddam's forces at bay by enforcing a no-fly zone over the Kurdish area. The Kurds used the respite to establish democracy and raise living standards. Saddam, the Kurds' old nemesis, is now in American military custody. Still, experience has told them that peace and security are still a long way off. ------ EDITOR'S NOTE -- George Gedda has covered foreign affairs for The Associated Press since 1968.