Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama speaks during a primary campaign rally at the Kohl Center in Madison, Wisconsin, Feb. 12.

WASHINGTON,
Feb. 13--Barack Obama, already claiming a “new American majority,“ is focusing more and more on the likely Republican candidate in the November presidential election as he continues to rack up big victories over Hillary Rodham Clinton in their race for the Democratic nomination, AP said.
Obama surged to the fore in the delegate race for the party prize with resounding primary victories Tuesday in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia.
On the GOP side, John McCain took another step in shoring up his credentials as the runaway Republican front-runner despite lukewarm support from the party’s conservative base.
Clinton, considered the overwhelming Democratic favorite just a few weeks, was left to turn her attention to Texas and Ohio in an attempt to pump new life into her suddenly stumbling campaign.
“There’s a great saying in Texas, all hat and no cattle,“ she told a boisterous crowd of about 12,000 at a college basketball arena in El Paso Tuesday evening as the shape of the latest Obama ballot victories were unfolding. “Well, after seven years of George Bush, we need a lot less hat and lot more cattle.“
Before flying into Texas, she told a Cincinnati television station that “Ohio is really going to count in determine who our Democratic nominee is going to be.“ She also declared herself the “underdog candidate“ in the Wisconsin primary next Tuesday, the same day Obama’s birthplace Hawaii holds its primary.
In was at the University of Wisconsin where Obama characterized his surging campaign to a crowd of 17,000. “This is what change looks like when it happens from the bottom up,“ he said. “This is the new American majority.“
Looking ahead to November, he said that although he honors McCain’s experience as a war hero, he is linked to failed policies put in place by President Bush.
“George Bush won’t be on the ballot this November, but the Bush-Cheney war and the Bush-Cheney tax cuts for the wealthy will be on the ballot,“ he said.
McCain told supporters in Virginia it is clear where either Obama or Clinton would take the country “and we dare not let them.
They will paint a picture of the world in which America’s mistakes are a greater threat to our security than the malevolent intentions of an enemy that despises us and our ideals.“
The Associated Press count of delegates showed Obama with 1,210.
Clinton had 1,188, falling behind for the first time since the campaign began. Neither was close to the 2,025 needed to win the nomination.

GENEVA, Feb. 13--A unilateral declaration of independence by Serbia’s Kosovo province would violate international law and damage security in Europe, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday.
He said the United States and European countries did not understand the potential consequences of independence for Kosovo, whose Albanian leaders are expected to announce the move on Sunday in defiance of Serbia, Reuters reported.
“It would undermine the basics of security in Europe, it would undermine the basics of the United Nations charter,“ Lavrov told reporters in Geneva.
He said Western countries were dealing with the problem in a “haphazard“ way.
“Many of them, frankly, do not understand the risks and dangers and threats associated with a unilateral declaration of Kosovo independence,“ he said. “They do not understand that it would inevitably result in a chain reaction in many parts of the world, including Europe and elsewhere.“
Kosovo’s independence move has been delayed three times in the past year in deference to Russia’s insistence on continuing to search for a compromise and because of its explosive impact on Serbian politics.
Meanwhile, Russia could train its nuclear missiles on Ukraine if the pro-Western state joins NATO, President Vladimir Putin warned on Tuesday in a new attack on the alliance’s expansion towards Russia’s borders.
But Moscow said Putin would go to a NATO summit in April, signaling a desire to heal rifts with the bloc on one of his last international engagements before leaving office a month later.
Putin gave his missile warning just after a more reassuring step--he and Ukraine’s President Viktor Yushchenko settled a gas debt row at talks in the Kremlin, minutes before a Moscow-imposed deadline on Kiev to pay up or face supply cuts.

Marietta Hedges (l) yells at volunteer torture victim Maboub Ebrahimzdeh as human rights activists demonstrate water boarding in front of the Justice Department, in Washington, Jan. 5.

The announcement by the Pentagon of trials by military commission for six of the big-name prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, is the latest in the series of smoke-and-mirror tricks used by the Bush administration to cover the inhuman illegality of the regime in the prison.
The issue is straightforward: the men cannot receive fair trials.
In these first cases linked to 9/11, prosecutors will seek the death penalty for the six men, who include the self-declared mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and of other Al-Qaeda attacks such as the east African US embassy bombings and the murder of journalist Daniel Pearl, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
The best-known of the other five defendants are Ramzi bin Al-Shibh, a Yemeni, said to have been the intermediary between the hijackers and Al-Qaeda, and Mohammed Al-Qahtani, believed originally to have been the 20th hijacker for 9/11, although he failed to make it into the US.
The immediate problem for the holding of any successful trial of these men is that they are known to have been severely tortured by the CIA and contractors working for them. No evidence obtained by torture is admissible in any court, and senior US lawyers are lining up to make all necessary legal challenges to the government.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for instance, is one of three men who the CIA has recently admitted were tortured with “waterboarding“ by their operatives.
The descriptions of this technique of simulated drowning, carried out in secret prisons halfway round the world, are the stuff of nightmares.
It is torture, and that is outlawed under international law. No words of excuse from the powerful can change that. And to see the CIA chief, Michael Hayden, in Congress openly justify waterboarding, is to see how far the war on terror has degraded the American government and its complicit allies here.
In the case of Al-Qahtani, Time magazine published the secret log of his 49 days of 20-hour-per-day interrogation.
The log described how the prisoner was forcibly administered intravenous fluids and drugs and forcibly given enemas, in order to keep his body functioning well enough for the interrogations to go on.
The log, titled Secret Orcon Interrogation Log Detainee 063, offered a daily, detailed view of the interrogation techniques used to get confessions from him from November 2002 to January 2003. These included:
¥ Restraint on a swivel chair for long periods;
¥ Deprivation of sleep for long periods;
¥ Loud music and white noise played to prevent him from sleeping;
¥ Various humiliations, such as training him to act as a dog and wrapping him in an Israeli flag;
¥ Lowering the temperature in the room, then throwing water into his face;
¥ Forcing him to pray to Osama bin Laden.
Under this torture, not surprisingly, Al-Qahtani made many false confessions, and implicated other prisoners.
Later he withdrew all this, according to his lawyer.
Besides the issue of torture, the very system of military commissions has had a credibility problem from the start.
The commissions have been beset by legal challenges, which went right to the supreme court, as well as by criticism from the military lawyers meant to work in them. Although officials have spoken of charging 80 or more detainees with war crimes, so far only one case has been completed, that of David Hicks, an Australian and the only non-Muslim in Guantanamo.
That ended with a plea bargain, which included a gagging order.
Over six years 1,000 prisoners have been held without trial--despite supreme court orders that their cases should be heard in federal courts.
The men have been kept away from the courts by the US military, the justice department and the White House, because most would never be convicted of any crime.
Outrageously, covering up this history, the Pentagon propaganda teams are now comparing their military commissions for the 9/11 suspects favorably to the Nuremberg trials after the second world war.
The American justice system is once again taking a body blow from the Bush administration.

Victoria Brittain
GUARDIAN.CO.UK

Abdullah Ahmad Badawi

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Feb. 13--Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi dissolved parliament Wednesday to pave the way for snap elections which are expected to erode the ruling coalition’s majority.
Abdullah’s popularity has plummeted as the nation is beset by mounting racial tensions, unprecedented street protests, anger over rising fuel and food prices, and high crime rates, reported AFP.
Announcing that the king had consented to dissolve parliament, the premier indicated he did not expect a repeat of the 2004 landslide when the Barisan Nasional coalition seized 90 percent of parliamentary seats.
“2004 was a special election and it was extraordinary. I pray that BN will get at least two-thirds of the votes in the upcoming election,“ he told a press conference.
“I hope voters will understand the issues affecting our country objectively,“ he said, adding that the Election Commission would decide on the polling date.
Voting must be held 60 days after parliament is dissolved, but the government traditionally allows just a two-week campaign period, which would mean a ballot in early March.
Abdullah appealed for calm during the campaign in an apparent reference to a string of public rallies over the past few months which police have broken up with tear gas and water cannons.
“My hope is that during the voting, nothing untoward will happen--there will be no disturbances or trouble that will affect the voting process,“ he said.
Abdullah heads the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), which leads the Barisan Nasional multi-racial coalition that holds 200 of the 219 seats in parliament. It has been in power since independence a half-century ago.

BAGHDAD, Iraq,
Feb. 13--The speaker of Iraq’s fragmented parliament threatened late Tuesday to disband the legislature, saying it is so riddled with distrust it appears unable to adopt the budget or agree on a law setting a date for provincial elections.
Disbanding parliament would prompt new elections within 60 days and further undermine Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki’s shaky government, which is limping along with nearly half of the 40 Cabinet posts vacant, AP reported.
The disarray undermines the purpose of last year’s US troop “surge“--to bring down violence enough to allow the Iraqi government and parliament to focus on measures to reconcile differences among minority Sunnis and Kurds and the majority Shiites. Violence is down dramatically, but political progress languishes.
Iraq’s constitution allows Mahmoud Al-Mashhadani, the hot-tempered speaker and a member of the minority Sunni faction, to dissolve parliament if one-third of its members request the move and a majority of lawmakers approve. Al-Mashhadani said he already had sufficient backing for the move from five political blocs, but he refused to name them.
Al-Mashhadani said the Iraqi treasury had already lost $3 billion by failing to pass the budget before the end of 2007. He did not explain how the money was lost.