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The BBC has rejected a call made by an independent panel studying charges of bias in its coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to change its editorial policies on the use of the word "terrorist" and appoint a senior editor to oversee its Middle East coverage. Using the word "terrorist" to describe attacks on civilians, BBC management argued in a paper released June 19, would make the "very value judgments" it had been asked to eschew. An independent panel in May found the BBC's reporting from Israel did "not consistently constitute a full and fair account of the conflict but rather,...

US President George W. Bush directly linked Tehran to roadside bombings against US forces in Iraq, stepping up his criticisms of Iran amid a tense standoff over its nuclear program. "Tehran has been responsible for at least some of the increasing lethality of anti-coalition attacks by providing Shia militia with the capability to build improvised explosive devices in Iraq," Bush said in a speech. He cited recent congressional testimony from John Negroponte, the US director of national intelligence. The president's comments came as he launched a public relations offensive to bolster support for the war in Iraq some three years...

A potential Off Broadway production of "My Name Is Rachel Corrie," an acclaimed solo show about an American demonstrator killed by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to stop the destruction of a Palestinian home, has been postponed because of concerns about the show's political content. The production, a hit at the Royal Court Theater in London last year, had been tentatively scheduled to start performances at the New York Theater Workshop in the East Village on March 22. But yesterday, James C. Nicola, the artistic director of the workshop, said he had decided to postpone the show after polling local...

BERLIN (Reuters) - The good guy in the Wachowski brothers' latest cinematic adventure is a "terrorist" at war with the British government. The masked crusader makes homemade bombs, which he plants on London's subway system, and condones violence in pursuit of justice. The Orwellian authorities rule chiefly by fear. With "V for Vendetta", the scriptwriters who brought us "The Matrix" may be asking for trouble. Starring a shaven-headed Natalie Portman as the foil to the mystery man known only as V, the film is based on a 1980s graphic novel warning readers about the danger of lurching to the political...

epression did little to stop anarchist violence. But eventually the world moved on and the movement withered. BOMBS, beards and backpacks: these are the distinguishing marks, at least in the popular imagination, of the terror-mongers who either incite or carry out the explosions that periodically rock the cities of the western world. A century or so ago it was not so different: bombs, beards and fizzing fuses. The worries generated by the two waves of terror, the responses to them and some of their other characteristics are also similar. The spasm of anarchist violence that was at its most convulsive...

One way of measuring any terrorist attack is to look at whether the killers accomplished everything they set out to. On Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida set out to hijack four planes and succeeded in seizing every one. Had the killers attempted to take another 30 jets between 7:30 and 9 that morning, who can doubt that they'd have maintained their pristine 100 percent success rate? Throughout the IRA's long war against the British Crown, two generations of politicians pointed out that there would always be the odd ''crack in the system'' through which the determined terrorist would slip. But on...

One way of measuring any terrorist attack is to look at whether the killers accomplished everything they set out to. On Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida set out to hijack four planes and succeeded in seizing every one. Had the killers attempted to take another 30 jets between 7:30 and 9 that morning, who can doubt that they'd have maintained their pristine 100 percent success rate? Throughout the IRA's long war against the British Crown, two generations of politicians pointed out that there would always be the odd ''crack in the system'' through which the determined terrorist would slip. But on...

(CNSNews.com) - Terrorism experts have long warned that Islamists espousing violence enjoy a haven in London, an assertion that has come into sharp focus again with Thursday's bombings in the British capital. For years, Britain tolerated the presence of high-profile and outspoken Islamic clerics whose fiery sermons frequently extolled jihad against the West. Since 9/11, however, anti-terror legislation has been tightened, some groups have been outlawed, terror rings have been broken and some controversial figures have been arrested. One of them, Egyptian-born Abu Hamza al-Masri, went on trial this week at London's Old Bailey courthouse, where he faces more than...

The recent arrest of an al Qaeda terrorist in Pakistan provided some clues that terrorists were planning attacks on trains and buses, but there were no specific warnings of the bombings in London yesterday, U.S. officials said. The lack of a specific warning highlights continuing U.S. intelligence shortcomings in spying on al Qaeda and related Islamist groups, which are suspected in the attacks. "I'm not aware of any specific intelligence that suggested this was going to take place," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told reporters after the bombings. Officials said the bombings likely were carried out by a "pop-up" cell...

Yvonne Nash does not know if her partner has been killed Friends and relatives of people missing since the London bomb attacks have started the hunt for their loved ones. The Scotland Yard casualty hotline on 0870 156 6344 has already received over 100,000 calls and police are trying to work out how many people are missing. Yvonne Nash, 30, says she fears partner Jamie Gordon was killed by a bomb which destroyed a bus in Tavistock Square. "We are just trying to keep going. Is he dead? Is he alive? Not knowing is dreadful," she said. Mr Gordon has...

Mr Jones said he saw a man in an agitated state on the bus A bus passenger says he may have seen one of those responsible for the bomb attacks in London. Richard Jones, from Binfield, near Bracknell, Berks, had got off a bus just before it was blown up in Tavistock Square on Thursday. Mr Jones, 61, an IT consultant, has told BBC News he saw a man acting suspiciously on the bus. He said the man was fiddling with something in his bag and seemed in an agitated state. Everybody is standing face-to-face and this guy kept dipping...

Almost everywhere Londoners go in public, chances are they're being tracked by cameras. Now officials say the British capital's ubiquitous closed-circuit TV cameras may help police determine who was behind the attacks. Thousands of them watch the Underground system alone, and investigators have used the footage in the past to solve crimes. London's train stations are monitored by 1,800 cameras, and there are more than 6,000 watching the capital's Tube network. Cameras also have been installed on some London buses. On top of that, more and more people carry pocket-size digital cameras and camera phones, and some footage from such...

The remains of a London bus destroyed by a bomb near Tavistock Square "My son flew in from London at the weekend, and we were discussing, as we have several times before, why it hadn't happened yet. "It" was the jihadist attack on the city, for which the British security forces have been braced ever since the bombings in Madrid. When the telephone rang in the small hours of this morning, I was pretty sure it was the call I had been waiting for. And as I snapped on the TV I could see, from the drawn expression and halting...

(Go to original article for highlighted links, eg. MetroBlogging London, and others, etc.) As journalists scrambled to cover the London bomb blasts, ordinary citizens went online to share pictures snapped by cameraphones and reports of what they saw. At Technorati.com, a search engine for blogs, eight of the top 10 searches Thursday were related to the blasts. Here's a round-up of the accounts and photos. Check back throughout the day for updates. The British newspaper The Guardian solicited firsthand accounts of the blasts from those who were there. Responses poured in from people like Matina Zoulia, who wrote, "As I...

Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times Kimberly Lane, a teacher at Heritage High School, expressed dismay after the arrest. At Heritage High School in East Harlem, where the student idiom is hip-hop and salsa, the 16-year-old Guinean girl stood out, but not just because she wore Islamic dress. She was so well liked that when she ran for student body president, she came in second to one of her best friends - the Christian daughter of the president of the parent-teacher association, Deleen P. Carr. Now Ms. Carr, a speech pathologist who calls herself "a typical American citizen," is as outraged...

I have been writing to numerous people ever since September 11, 2001. That event changed me. Before September 11, 2001 I assumed our government knew what it was doing in the world and I never questioned anything it did, but after September 11, 2001 i started to think ,why would anybody hate us so much as to try to kill as many Americans as possible. My quest for the truth lead me to one very sobering conclusion.........our policies, even before our independence in 1776, has gradually created a world in which we do not realize what people around the world...

Onstage Murder Could've Been Prevented, Security Experts Say Concert venues need trained staff and metal detectors, they insist. The onstage murder of "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott leaves not just Damageplan fans, but concertgoers everywhere, with many troubling concerns. Chief among them was that the tragedy might have been prevented for less than $50, the price of a handheld metal detector. "It should have been a common practice. It should have been something they had," said Paul Wertheimer of Crowd Management Strategies, a consulting firm specializing in concert safety. "If it was used right, it would have caught the gun and you...

You're a Marine at a checkpoint somewhere in Iraq, watching cars and trucks streaming by -- Iraqis on their way to work or shopping or the mosque. How do you figure out which vehicle may be another deadly bomb? And what do you do when you spot a "suspicious" car? These unanswerable questions put the life-threatening challenges facing our troops in Iraq into grim perspective. Since the war in Iraq began we at TCS have discussed the insidious nature of car bombs and their effect on human beings. We have emphasized that car bombings are not random terrorist acts, but...

Infiltrating the San Francisco Intifada Festival By Adam Balling and Lee Kaplan FrontPageMagazine.com | October 11, 2004 While attention is focused on the Fourth Annual Conference of the National Palestine Solidarity Movement at Duke University this weekend, an event that will be a training session for college activists nationwide to work to destroy Israel and oppose US forces in Iraq, a similar smaller event took place last Saturday in San Francisco. That anti-Israel event was organized by allies of the Palestine Solidarity Movement in the San Francisco Bay Area who operate under the umbrella name of International A.N.S.W.E.R., a communist...

Al-Qa'ida Women's Magazine: Women Must Participate in Jihad The new online magazine Al-Khansaa(1) is published by Al Qa'ida's Arabian Peninsula Women's Information Bureau. The first issue features articles calling on women to participate in Jihad, along with an article criticizing women in Saudi television. The following are excerpts from the articles:(2) Editorial: 'Our Goal Is Paradise' An editorial in the magazine stated: "... We love Allah and His Messenger. We march in a single path, the path of Jihad for the sake of Allah, and our goal is Shahada [martyrdom] for the sake of Allah, and our goal is [to...