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2. august 2006
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Israel has sent 8,000 ground troops into southern Lebanon:
Israeli military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media, said their troops were going from village to village in south Lebanon to clear them of Hezbollah guerrillas.
Wednesday evening, Israeli warplanes slammed mountain villages in south Lebanon with at least five new airstrikes in areas 13 miles from the northernmost tip of Israel, witnesses said.
Hezbollah was putting up resistance, but the officials said they were confident that would not change their objective of reaching four miles into Lebanon by Thursday. They said they could easily dash inland to the Litani River — their final objective about 18 miles from the border — but that they were moving methodically so as not to leave behind pockets of resistance.
But, apparently, Hezbollah's not dead yet:
Hezbollah fighters have launched more than 230 rockets from Lebanon, the biggest single-day barrage since the conflict began, Israeli officials say.
One person was killed and dozens injured as some rockets landed up to 70km inside Israel, the deepest so far.
The upsurge came as Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel had destroyed Hezbollah's infrastructure.
Two interpretations: 1) Hezbollah is really hurt, but is straining to put out one massive demonstration that they aren't. 2) Hezbollah is not seriously hurt.
I'm afraid that until I receive good evidence to the contrary, I have to go with number two.
11:06:24 PM 
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 Israel has hacked into Hezbollah's al-Manar television station, sending a message to the Lebanese:
Israel on Tuesday hacked into the television station of Hizbullah, emblazoning images on the screen showing pictures of corpses and claiming the group's leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was a liar.
One of the images shown on Al-Manar TV portrayed the body of a fighter lying face-down, wearing khaki trousers with a text beneath in Arabic reading: "This is the photograph of a body of a member of Hizbullah's special forces."
"Nasrallah lies: it is not us that is hiding our losses," continued the text, which appeared during the evening news and stayed on the screen for several minutes.
A photograph of Nasrallah himself also appeared with the legend: "member of Hizbullah: watch out."
The terrorists has had its radio stations hacked in similar ways, and according to the newssource Israel has also sent mobile text messages to the Lebanese that its fight is with Hezbollah, not them.
PS: The IDF has also found out that it takes more than an aerial war to take out the enemy, and has launched a number of ground incursions, including a commando raid on a hospital to capture Hezbollah members.
Israel Defense Forces commandos completed a raid of the Hezbollah stronghold of Baalbek in east Lebanon at daybreak Wednesday, in what Lebanese security sources described as a major operation against suspected Hezbollah positions.
The IDF reportedly captured five junior Hezbollah militants and killed several others before completing the operation and safely returning to Israel.
Lebanese police said, however, that six people were captured in the raid, Israel Radio said.
One of the captured, Hussein Nasrallah, has the same family name as Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, but it is not known whether they are related.
10:04:31 AM
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Great kudos to British prime minister Tony Blair, who has been under hard pressure lately from anti-Israeli fractions in his own party, for clearly putting the blame for the current Middle East carnage where it belongs: with Salafi-extremists in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Shia extremists in Lebanon.
The Prime Minister said: "There is an arc of extremism now stretching across the Middle East and touching countries far outside that region."
He said in Iraq, Syria had allowed al-Qaeda operatives to "cross the border" while Iran had supported extremist Shia.
"The purpose of the terrorism in Iraq is absolutely simple - carnage, causing sectarian hatred, leading to civil war," he said.
Those who called for Blair to issue a one-sided condemnation of Israel were disappointed.
Mr Blair also spoke about the conflict between Israel and Lebanon and said that the "purpose of the provocation" that began it "was clear".
"It was to create chaos, division and bloodshed, to provoke retaliation by Israel that would lead to Arab and Muslim opinion being inflamed, not against those who started the aggression but against those who responded to it," he said.
However, he said it was still possible to come out of the crisis "with a better long-term prospect for the cause of moderation in the Middle East succeeding".
He added: "But it would be absurd not to face up to the immediate damage to that cause which has been done."
Mr Blair said all would be done to try to halt the hostilities in the conflict.
"But once that has happened we must commit ourselves to a complete renaissance of our strategy to defeat those that threaten us," he said.
I haven't been too happy with his performance in the Mohammad cartoon crisis, not to mention the dangerous appeasement by his government of Islamists in Britain, but this time he's a loud and clear voice for sanity. Refreshing, and so rare on this continent.
8:41:39 AM
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I wondered a bit why I received quite a few google image search hits on Charlotte Fredriksen (image right) today, but it has sort of a natural explanation, as I found out when I browsed through today's Norwegian newspapers.
It is a feud going on between some Norwegian glossy magazine (Se og Hør, apparently lots of people read it) and Norwegian TV2 Nettavisen, where the latter has "disclosed", through reading Fredriksen's photo blog, that she is moderately intimate in some pictures with glossy mag journalist Camilla Høyem. According to the online paper, this is a serious violation of journalistic ethics (cue laughter here), since journalists should not be personal friends with their victims targets.
Obviously, I can't be bothered about the journalistic lapses in celebrity news. I just wished someone paid attention to the gross abuses in news reporting. But that doesn't make a good story; can't beat scantily clad blondes. Of course I'm an absolute google whore, thus the picture above. Also, it compensates for some rather sickening pictures a few days back.
5:13:54 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.09.2006; 04:59:03.
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