Free Republic

The State Department paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayers grants to an Israeli group that used the money to build a campaign to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in last year’s Israeli parliamentary elections, a congressional investigation concluded Tuesday. Some $350,000 was sent to OneVoice, ostensibly to support the group’s efforts to back Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement negotiations. But OneVoice used the money to build a voter database, train activists and hire a political consulting firm with ties to President Obama’s campaign — all of which set the stage for an anti-Netanyahu campaign, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations...

ATHENS (Reuters) - Wildfires that tore through suburbs of Athens and forced thousands of people to flee their homes were contained on Tuesday as the government's handling of the disaster became an election issue. Likely to face voters early next year, the conservative government said very strong winds had made it difficult to fight fires in east Attica where swathes of forest and more than 150 homes were destroyed. "If what we experienced in Attica is the best this government can do, then it is obvious we must urgently replace it," the liberal daily Ethnos said in its main editorial....

Japan is voting today in the first referendum of Koizumi's alliance with the US over the War on Terror. For FR readers unfamiliar with the Japanese voting system, they use a parliamentary process to elect their prime minister. Prior news releases indicated that Koizumi considered resignation as Prime Minister if his political party did not retain control of a sizable fraction of the parliment. This would have hampered the deployment of Japanese resources in support of the US intervention in Iraq. So, the election appears to be a referendum on the Iraq policy of Koizumi (supportive of the Bush Administration)...