Vice President Dick Cheney, who has a history of heart trouble, checked himself into a hospital after experiencing shortness of breath, an aide said. Cheney, 63, who has had four heart attacks, returned from a hunting trip late this past week with a cold that left him short of breath, spokeswoman Mary Matalin said. She said the vice president felt fine otherwise, but that as a precaution and given his health history, his cardiologist, Dr. Jonathan Reiner, recommended that Cheney go to George Washington University Hospital for tests to make sure it was just a cold.

The Middle East after Yasser Arafat was the main topic today at the White House, where British Prime Minister Tony Blair met with President Bush. One day after the burial of Arafat in Ramallah, preparations were underway for elections for the top position.
Many Palestinians paid homage to their departed leader, visiting his grave at the Muqata compound on Saturday. To the roars of tens of thousands of Palestinians, and shots in the air fired by tense Palestinian police and masked gunmen, Arafat's flag-draped casket was borne through milling, surging crowds Friday for burial in a plot next to the office to which Israel confined the Palestinian leader for nearly three years. The burial ceremony followed a solemn funeral ceremony earlier in the day in Cairo, attended by world dignitaries. Egyptian helicopters then flew Arafat's body and accompanying PA leaders to a parking lot near the burial site prepared for the Palestinian leader.

Backed by tanks and artillery fire, U.S. troops launched a major attack Saturday against insurgent holdouts in southern Fallujah, hoping to finish off resistance in what had been the major guerrilla bastion of central Iraq. An Iraqi official estimated that about 1,000 insurgents had been killed so far in the weeklong offensive.

In the northern city of Mosul, a car bomb exploded as an Iraqi National Guard convoy passed by, witnesses said. In recent days, an armed uprising in sympathy with Fallujah's insurgents has killed 10 Iraqi National Guards and one American soldier, the U.S. military said. The region's governor blamed the uprising on "the betrayal of some police members" and said National Guard units arrived to help quell the violence. Also, a U.S. infantry battalion was diverted from Fallujah and sent back to Mosul. Insurgents appeared to be taking advantage of the lessening of American troop strength around Fallujah as U.S. commanders report an increase in small-scale rebel attacks.

A leading cleric who spent an hour by Yassir Arafat's bedside in a French hospital this morning says that the Palestinian leader is still alive. Egypt has agreed to host a funeral in Cairo for Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, who is in a Paris hospital where he suffered a brain hemorrhage, Egyptian and Palestinian officials said.

U.S.-led troops battled through "half of Falluja" on Wednesday, but Muslim militant kidnappers threatened to behead three relatives of Iraq's interim prime minister / CIA stooge Allawi if he did not call off the offensive.

Bush and Kerry are both members of the secretive Skull & Bones society which is linked to other Illuminati groups such as the Bilderberg group, Council on Foreign Relations, Church of Satan, etc. Both would work toward bringing about the New World Order of a one world government. The mark of the beast is already with us >> Try googling "VeriChip"

A FOURTH Black Watch soldier was killed by a roadside bomb attack in Iraq yesterday. Two more were injured in the blast, which came as US troops launched an all-out offensive on the rebel city of Fallujah.

A federal judge on Monday declared as unlawful the Pentagon's war crimes court judging Osama bin Laden's driver in a stinging rebuke of President Bush's framework for detaining war-on-terror captives and trying them at military commissions. The decision by U.S. District Judge James Robertson, sitting 1,300 miles away in Washington, D.C., brought pretrial motions here to a skidding halt in the case of Yemeni captive Salim Hamdan, 34. It also raised questions about the future of the military commissions created by the Bush administration to try alleged terrorists captured around the world after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The Hamdan commission learned of the decision Monday afternoon in a note brought to court by a Marine in battle dress. Army Col. Peter Brownback, the presiding officer, declared an "indefinite recess" for his three-colonel Pentagon panel serving on the first U.S. war crimes court since World War II.

Four top Palestinian officials Tuesday will be visiting ailing leader Yasser Arafat, according to chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat. Arafat was poisoned by the Israeli's using new high technology developed to assist in assassination operations. The hard-to-trace poison was put in Arafat's food. Thirteen attempts have been made on Arafat's life, including three poisonings.

Heavy fighting has erupted across Fallujah after Ayad Allawi, the Iraqi interim prime minister, gave American-led forces the order to attack the rebel-held city.

Ordinary Palestinians, politicians and militants were Monday united in frustration over the dearth of information about the condition of Yasser Arafat who has been fighting for his life in a Paris hospital for 10 days.

Police in the Netherlands say they suspect that an explosion at a Muslim school is related to the murder of a Dutch filmmaker.

The militant Hezbollah organization Monday released footage of a reconnaissance drone it had sent into Israeli airspace a day earlier, a flight which the United Nations said violated the UN-drawn border between Lebanon and Israel.

In the global village that is our world, the man who becomes the President of the United States affects us all. So in this week in which George W Bush has won himself another four years I write in a gloomy mood. The prospect of another four years of George W Bush is terrifying. Not because of what he can do to America but because of what he can do to the rest of us. In the past four years his foreign policy and his Christian fundamentalist worldview have made the world a much more dangerous place than it used to be. So what he can achieve in the next four years is almost too terrifying to contemplate. Already, those of more pessimistic bent than I are beginning to worry about nuclear crusades and a Third World War.

Remember the time when Bill Clinton described our relatively harmless subcontinent as the most dangerous place in the world? How would he describe his own country now, led as it is by a man who believes he is right about everything because his Christian God is always right, and backed by a country who loves him for his faith-based politics and for the clarity of his stand where the world is concerned.

Nobody can accuse President Bush of not having clarity in his worldview. From those first terrible moments of September 11, 2001, he showed absolute clarity. He was going to get the men responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and he was going to teach them the lesson of their lives. So far we all agreed with him. The world was on his side because there was no other side. Who could possibly support a bunch of religious fanatics who thought killing innocent civilians was what Allah asked of them as the price of their ticket to Paradise? Personally, I continue to believe that the American attack on Afghanistan was a justifiable response. Osama bin Laden was an honoured guest of that country and at the time it was led by a bunch of barbarians, so depraved, so devoid of basic humanity that they executed veiled women for crimes they did not know they had committed. After the destruction of Bamiyan’s magnificent Buddhas it would have bothered me not at all if every last Taliban had been blown to bits.

Afghanistan had to be saved from the mad men who had seized it and Osama and his lunatic army had to be defeated. I backed Bush the whole way on his initial military response, as did more than half the world and certainly more than half of India. We were more than ready to be in the vanguard of the war on terrorism because had we not suffered, until 9/11, more than any other country? My first doubts about the global war on terrorism began when I noticed that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were being counted among America’s closest allies. And, when Bush started talking about God and righteousness he began to sound, to my heathen ears, no different than the Islamic fundamentalists who were blowing themselves up in the name of their own God and righteousness. The only way to win this war on terrorism is to make it a fight between reason and faith, and neither Bush nor his advisors seem to have noticed this in the past four years. When it becomes faith against faith, memories of ancient wars between Christianity and Islam revive and jehad acquires a meaning it did not have when the global war against terrorism began.

Where the war became something else altogether was when President Bush thought it necessary to invade Iraq to destroy those weapons of mass destruction that were never found. Reams have been written on the subject and I have no intention of going over the same ground in this column, but if the new Bush administration wants to work towards making the world a less dangerous place then it must work towards defusing the Iraq bomb. Iraq has today become to even moderate Muslims a symbol of what they no longer see as a war on terrorism but a war on Islam. Osama bin Laden could not have dreamed up a better scenario for his battle against Western civilisation or a more fertile recruiting ground for the mujahideen he needs to fight the jehad against the West.

Meanwhile, instead of becoming a model democracy for the Middle East’s other countries to emulate, Iraq goes every day from barbarism to more barbarism with America seemingly unable to halt its terrible slide into chaos.