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17. juni 2007
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IRNA, Iran's official news agency, has this little item today:
Norwegian ambassador to Tehran Ole Christian Holthe on Sunday lauded Iran's effective role in the Middle East.
In a meeting with head of Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Alaeddin Boroujerdi here Sunday, Holthe said Iran-Norway relations are growing and the two sides are interested in promotion of relations.
He said that the Norwegian parliament's head of foreign policy commission Akselsson is to visit Iran.
Boroujerdi welcomed Akselsson's Tehran visit and said it would give an impetus to growing bilateral ties, especially in the parliamentary field.
Not that I trust IRNA very much, but I'd like to know precisely what Ole Christian Holthe said, and if he indeed praised Tehran's "effective" role, what he meant!
No word in the Norwegian media so far, and no information on Norway's Iran embassy site.
PS: The background to Norway constantly cozying up to the mullahs in Iran is that Norway has a big oil and oil services industry - but diminishing actual oil fields - while Iran has a heck of a lot of oil and a crippled infrastructure to develop it properly. Money talks.
Update: ABC Nyheter, a Norwegian user-driver news source with a lot of blogger input, is the only online source that picked this up today. Ambassador Holthe vehemently denies having said anything that could reasonably be interpreted as praise for Iran's role, and is protesting this 'spin' to the Iranian foreign office. What he did say was that it would be interesting to see how Iran could play a constructive role, which is something entirely different. IRNA made it into what they wanted, essentially. "This is unfortunately quite common," he noted.
8:46:16 PM 
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Israel will not tolerate an aggressive "Hamastan" on its border, and is planning a major military assault to destroy Hamas, if we are to believe an article in the Sunday Times.
ISRAEL’s new defence minister Ehud Barak is planning an attack on Gaza within weeks to crush the Hamas militants who have seized power there.
According to senior Israeli military sources, the plan calls for 20,000 troops to destroy much of Hamas’s military capability in days.
The raid would be triggered by Hamas rocket attacks against Israel or a resumption of suicide bombings.
Barak, who is expected to become defence minister tomorrow, has already demanded detailed plans to deploy two armoured divisions and an infantry division, accompanied by assault drones and F-16 jets, against Hamas.
The Israeli forces would expect to be confronted by about 12,000 Hamas fighters with arms confiscated from the Fatah faction that they defeated in last week’s three-day civil war in Gaza.
It is very important to note that the London Times has a miserably bad record of predicting Israel's actions. The otherwise well-reputed newspaper, after it revealed the traitor Morchechai Vanunu's information about Israel's nuclear programme in 1986, is simply not very popular in Israel's military and intelligence, and past "disclosures" have also revealed that the quality of its alleged defence sources leaves something to be desired.
It is not that unlikely, however, that these "leaks" may serve as a warning to Hamas about what will happen if the terrorist group commences rocket attacks on Israel from its newly conquered domain on Gaza. It would be an intolerable situation if a newly rearmed Hamas uses its total control as a launchpad for continued terrorism, hiding behind the desperate inhabitants on Gaza.
Update: Rocket attacks are indeed launched against Israel, but from Lebanon.
Two Katyusha rockets exploded near the northern Israeli border town of Kiryat Shmona. There were no casualties in the blast, Israeli police said.
Roads and vehicles were damaged in the attack, and bomb experts have launched an investigation at the scene.
It is the first time Israel has come under such an attack from Lebanon since the July-August 2006 conflict with Hezbollah, Israeli army radio says.
The rockets came from the Lebanese village of Taibeh, 4km (2.5 miles) from the border with Israel, Lebanese television station LBC reported. One hit a factory, the other hit a car.
Hezbollah denies having anything to do with these attacks, and security sources in Lebanon says some Palestinian group was behind it. That may well be true.
1:27:06 PM
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 Not even Alfred Hitchcock thought of making a movie based on attacking killer squirrels, but residents in the southern German town of Passau had such an unlikely scare when a squirrel in heat went on a rampage.
The squirrel first ran into a house in the southern town of Passau, leapt from behind on a 70-year-old woman, and sank its teeth into her hand, a local police spokesman said Thursday.
With the squirrel still hanging from her hand, the woman ran onto the street in panic, where she managed to shake it off.
The animal then entered a building site and jumped on a construction worker, injuring him on the hand and arm, before he managed to fight it off with a measuring pole.
"After that, the squirrel went into the 72-year-old man's garden and massively attacked him on the arms, hand and thigh," the spokesman said. "Then he killed it with his crutch."
What do you say to your friends when they ask you how you got your injury, and it was from a squirrel bite? Seriously!
You know what? I've written about squirrel attacks before, back in 2002. Amazing what you can read about here...
PS: Similar attacks have actually happened at other times, too, and journalists, like bloggers, always love these stories.
3:45:40 AM
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© Copyright 2007 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.07.2007; 23:27:36.
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