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McCain camp cites Biden's experience critique of Obama With Biden emerging as a  veep favorite in recent days, the McCain camp has had plenty of time to shape their first attack. And right out of the gates tonight, they're using the Delaware senator's primary season criticism of Obama's inexperience to drive a wedge between the yet-to-be announced Democratic ticket.  “There has been no harsher critic of Barack Obama’s lack of experience than Joe Biden," said McCain spokesman Ben Porritt in a statement.   "Biden has denounced Barack Obama’s poor foreign policy judgment and has strongly argued in his own words what Americans...

German police were today searching for around 10 more members of a terror cell suspected of plotting major bomb attacks, after the arrest of three men and the seizure of explosives materials. Officials have said the three men already in custody - two German converts to Islam and a Turkish national - were planning attacks which could have proved more deadly than those in London or Madrid, with possible targets including US military bases, discos, pubs and Frankfurt's international airport. August Hanning, a senior interior ministry official who formerly headed Germany's foreign intelligence service (BND), said today that police were...

The three suspected terrorists seized Tuesday were planning huge bomb attacks on targets in Germany. The bombs they were planning to make would have had more explosive power than those used in the Madrid and London terror attacks. The scenarios which the highest representatives of the German security forces were describing on Wednesday morning were horrific: "Massive bomb attacks," simultaneous attacks using several car bombs and huge numbers of people killed right in the middle of Germany. Only a bold raid foiled the plans of the Islamist terrorists, according to statements made in Karlsruhe by German Federal Prosecutor Monika Harms...

Three men have been arrested for planning attacks on Frankfurt's international airport and the U.S. military base in Ramstein, the German Defense Minister said Wednesday. "There was an imminent threat," Franz Josef Jung told Germany's ARD broadcaster. He declined to elaborate. Two of the suspects had German citizenship while the third was Pakistani, Germany's Sudwestrundfunk public broadcaster said. German federal prosecutors said they had arrested three suspected members of "an Islamic motivated terrorist organization." It was not immediately clear whether the three were suspected of having links to al Qaeda. Sudwestrundfunk said the men were arrested Tuesday evening and were...

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel DALLAS - Heart attack patients who were treated with their own stem cells a few days after being hospitalized had significantly improved heart pumping ability, according to the largest, most rigorous clinical trial to date of the controversial therapy. The improvement seen with stem cells was better than with the best drugs now available and it appears the therapy actually repaired damage done during heart attacks, said lead author Volker Schachinger, a cardiologist at J.W. Goethe University and the Third Medical Clinic of Cardiology in Frankfurt, Germany. "It opens up a completely new way of treating heart...

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - German police have arrested a man on suspicion of murdering a woman with a Bockwurst sausage. Prosecutors and police said the 50-year-old was arrested after the discovery of a woman's body in an apartment in Zwickau, eastern Germany. They said she had choked on a Bockwurst, which is a popular large German sausage. The prosecutors said the man had given a patchy account of events, acknowledging that he may have "administered" a Bockwurst to the woman. They are now working to establish exactly what happened in the run up to her death.

FRANKFURT AN DER ODER, Germany - A woman was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced Thursday to 15 years in prison for killing eight of her newborn babies in the 1990s and burying their bodies around her parents' home in a case that shocked Germany. Sabine Hilschenz, 40, was given the maximum sentence after the court found her guilty of eight counts of manslaughter. She also was suspected in the death of a ninth child in 1988, but the statute of limitations does not allow for that case to be tried. Hilschenz was arrested after the remains of the infants were...

Nageeb Abdul Jabar Mohammed Al-Hadi -- if that's even his name -- is just one of nearly 750 people U.S. investigators want to know more about in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. He has at least four aliases and two different birth dates. He is a Yemeni, with a Michigan driver's licence and a Detroit wife. He was on a plane from Frankfurt, Germany headed for Chicago when it was diverted to Toronto. He was arrested at Pearson International Airport and may be extradited to the United States to face two charges related to false passports and fraudulent misuse ...

Federal investigators in Germany have unearthed new evidence linking Iran to the 1985 bombing of a US military base that injured 35 people, a report said on Saturday. Iranian secret agents had allegedly detonated explosives concealed in a vehicle at the Frankfurt post-exchange food store on November 24, 1985, said the report in Focus news magazine. Focus said investigators believe the agents were members of a hit squad working on orders from Teheran to eliminate dissidents living in Europe in exile. The hit squad was also responsible for the deaths of two dissidents, one in Hamburg in 1987 and another...

Taliban told US it would give up Osama - middleman By Mark Trevelyan BERLIN, June 4 (Reuters) - U.S. and Taliban officials met secretly in Frankfurt almost a year before the September 11 attacks to discuss terms for the Afghans to hand over Osama bin Laden, according to a German television documentary. But no agreement was reached and no further negotiations took place before the suicide hijackings in 2001, which bin Laden subsequently hailed in a videotape as the work of his al Qaeda network. ZDF television quoted Kabir Mohabbat, an Afghan-American businessman, as saying he tried to broker a...

"This is a two-million-dollar piece of conceptual art. This is bin full of wastepaper. Okay, class, who can tell me what the difference is?" This is just one of the questions trash collectors in Frankfurt, Germany, will be asked when they begin mandatory art classes next month. The classes were mandated after one of the city's sanitation workers picked up a sculpture by the artist Michael Beutler believing it to be a pile of junk. The piece, part of a city-wide exhibit, was later thrown into the city incinerator and burned. A London newspaper reported that the poor befuddled sanitation...

NEW YORK (AP) — A Yemeni sheik accused of funneling millions of dollars to terrorist networks warned U.S. agents that "Allah will bring storms" to America because of his arrest, according to newly filed court papers. Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad made the remark last year after a German court ordered him extradited to the United States to face charges that he helped finance al Qaeda and Hamas, prosecutors said in the documents filed in U.S. District Court. The statement — spoken in English to agents bringing al-Moayad from Frankfurt, Germany, to New York on Nov. 16, 2003 — counter defense...

Mar. 5, 2003 Yemeni cleric charged with raising funds for Al Qaida and Hamas By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW YORK A Yemeni cleric detained in Germany bragged to an FBI informant that he supplied $20 million, recruits and weapons to Osama bin Laden in the years leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks, US officials said Tuesday. Much of the money came from contributors in the United States, including worshippers at the Al Farouq mosque in New York, Attorney General John Ashcroft said in announcing charges against Sheik Mohammed Al Hasan Al-Moayad. Amid an undercover operation, Al-Moayad "boasted that jihad...

BUDAPEST, Aug. 15 (Reuters) - Bomb threats forced two passenger planes en route to Frankfurt to make emergency landings in Hungary on Sunday. A third plane was searched after it landed in Frankfurt. The Hungarian police said they found nothing in a search of a Turkish Airlines plane that landed in Budapest, but they had not yet examined luggage from the aircraft. No explosives were found on the other two planes. The pilot of the Turkish Airlines plane, with 162 passengers on board, requested permission to land in Budapest after being told of the bomb threat by air traffic controllers...

Authorities raided the Islamic school of a Morccan cultural association in Frankfurt on Sunday, searching for violent and degrading videos, including one allegedly showing a person being decapitated. Police and officials from Frankfurt's office of municipal authority raided a Moroccan school for Koran studies near the city's downtown train station in search of extremist propaganda used for inciting children to hatred. According to the state prosecutor's office on Monday, the officials were looking for material such as videos, DVD's and publications which showed violent and degrading images. Lead prosecutor Hubert Harth confirmed the search of the school, which is part...

German prosecutors have filed charges against a deputy head of police after he ordered officers to threaten a suspect with torture. Wolfgang Daschner, of the Frankfurt police department, has admitted issuing the order to try to find the whereabouts of a kidnapped boy. The child, who was 11 years old, was subsequently found killed. The case has caused public debate in Germany about whether such means might be justified in extreme circumstances. 'Intense pain' The policeman admitted issuing the order Mr Daschner has argued he was utterly justified in threatening the man, who was held in police custody. The events...

HAMBURG, Germany - Police closed streets around a military hospital Tuesday after U.S. authorities warned that Islamic militants planned suicide car bomb attacks against the facility. The intelligence warning from the United States named two alleged suicide attackers from Ansar al-Islam, a group linked to al-Qaida that planned to carry out the attack on the Bundeswehr hospital, said state Interior Minister Dirk Nockemann. The alleged suicide attackers traveled to Hamburg in early December, said Heino Vahldiek, head of the Hamburg branch of federal security agency. Police closed streets about 2:30 p.m. around the hospital in the suburb of Wandsbek. U.S....

<p>November 17, 2003 -- A Yemeni cleric who allegedly boasted of giving Osama bin Laden millions of dollars collected at a Brooklyn mosque could be hauled into federal court as soon as today, after more than 10 months spent fighting extradition from Germany, a law enforcement source said. Sheik Mohammed Al Hasan Al-Moayad and his alleged assistant, Mohammed Mohsen Yahya Zayed, are expected to be arraigned in Brooklyn Federal Court immediately upon their arrival in the U.S. on charges they gave material support to al Qaeda and Hamas.</p>

(Los Angeles-AP) -- U.S. authorities say a Saudi consular official and Muslim leader is suspected of having terrorist links, so they deported him. The official (Fahad al Thumairy) has been living in Southern California. He was detained at Los Angeles International Airport this week after arriving from Frankfurt. He was deported Thursday, and authorities say he may not return to the United States for five years. A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security says he was placed on a flight headed to Saudi Arabia. But officials wouldn't provide details on his alleged terrorist connections. The 31-year-old had worked for...

Man diagnosed with SARS took 6 international flights, by the end of which he was extremely ill. En route, he flew from Hong Kong to Barcelona to Munich to Frankfurt to London and back to Munich -- and then back to Hong Kong... MORE...developing...breaking...China involved?????????

Iraq Crisis March 16th, 2003 Within the past weeks it has apparently been the aim of German foreign policy to isolate America in the United Nations Security Council. This is shown in a confidential wire report of the German UN ambassador, Pleuger. It concerned impeding the latest attempts for consensus with America and, therefore, to force Washington to go it alone against Iraq. The report has been made available to the “Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung”. At the same time, there are considerations in the Federal Government to use the issue of the reconstruction after a war as a means, in the...

Two apparently contradictory pieces of news have hit the German financial center over the past week - on the one hand, rumors that Frankfurt Stock Exchange operator Deutsche Börse is planning to take over its London counterpart; on the other, a research piece showing that Finanzplatz Frankfurt is losing ground to London. In what McKinsey called “a private memo“ to Dresdner Bank Chairman Bernd Fahrholz and Deutsche Börse Chairman Werner Seifert, two of its consultants concluded that “Frankfurt's financial community is undergoing erosion.“ The financial market experts point above all to the effects of the German banking crisis, the country's...

FRANKFURT, Germany - One of four Algerians accused of plotting to blow up a French Christmas market told a German court Monday that he had spent six months in training camps in Afghanistan, and said he met two of the other defendants in neighboring Pakistan. In nearly four hours of questioning by Judge Karlheinz Zeiher, Salim Boukari said that on his journey back to Europe, he met co-defendants Aeurobi Beandalis and Fouhad Sabour in a guest house in Pakistan that was a base for people traveling to and from the Afghan camps. The three, along with fourth defendant Lamine Maroni,...

As most readers of this newsletter know, we believe in calling things what they are, in plain English, and in such a way that there is no doubt in what we mean. So we haven't been using words like duplicitous, deceitful and devious when describing the Democrats in Congress. Instead, when they act like socialists (as do some Republicans), socialists is what we call them. There is a very good reason for this socialist tag, too. We are far from being alone in this assessment. Specifically, we find the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in total agreement. First, though, a...