A new report from the U.N. Children's Fund says the United States and Britain are the worst countries in the industrialized world in which to be a child. UNICEF says an examination of 40 factors, such as poverty, deprivation, happiness, relationships, and risky or bad behavior puts the United States and Britain at the bottom of a list of 21 economically developed nations.

The UNICEF report sought to assess children's well-being in developed countries by measuring a number of factors, including health, education, poverty, family relationships, and bad or risky behavior. Children were also asked to say whether they were happy.

In the overall table of children's well-being, the Netherlands comes out on top, followed closely by the Scandinavian countries, which also have highly developed welfare systems. At the bottom are the United States at No. 20, and Britain at No. 21.

It's not that developed welfare states necessarily have happier children, says David Parker of UNICEF.

"I think what we know from history in the U.S.," Parker says, "is that it's not necessarily how the welfare is provided but the nature of the support. One of the key things is that the role of government is important, but the entire society must have at its heart the idea of improving child well-being."

The United States fared worst of all 21 countries in health and safety, measured by rates of infant mortality and accidents and injuries.

The United States and Britain were lowest overall in the category of behavior and risks, meaning that American and British children are more likely to use drugs, drink alcohol and be sexually active than children elsewhere.

A Muslim cleric allegedly abducted by CIA agents in Italy and then detained in Egypt was released by Egyptian authorities on condition he did not reveal anything about his kidnapping, independent Egyptian daily Al Masri al Yom reported on Tuesday. Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr, an Egyptian Muslim cleric also known as Abu Omar, was allegedly kidnapped in February 2003 in Milan under the so-called 'extraordinary renditions' - the secret transfer by the US of terror suspects to detention centers around the world.

The event sparked interest and, from some quarters, outrage in Italy - where top Italian and US intelligence officials are on trial for the abduction - but has raised very little interest in Egypt, where Abu Omar was subsequently detained for four years.

Pro-government newspapers gave very little attention to the news of the cleric's release from jail, where he claims he was tortured.

Indeed local authorities have never officially admitted they were detaining him and Milan prosecutors investigating his abduction asked Egypt twice in vain to question him from October 2004 to mid 2006 without receiving a reply.

Only Masri Al Yom on Tuesday published an article on Abu Omar's case, reporting on his alleged abduction and adding new details to his story.

"According to our sources, the imam was freed after signing a statement while he was detained in the Torah prison in which he vowed not to leave his home and country to testify in Italy at a trial against 23 people including many CIA agents accused by magistrates of playing a role in his kidnapping," the paper reported.

Abu Omar also reportedly promised not to speak to journalists on the issue, nor sue, as he had promised, Italian government officials nor testify against US intelligence agents.

The cleric's lawyer Montasser al Zayat refused to either confirm or deny this report but said his client would sue Italian opposition leader Silvio Berlusconi, who was premier when Abu Omar was kidnapped, and ask for 10 million dollars in compensation.

The cleric's family says Egyptian police brought him back home on 11 February. Abu Omar has reportedly since moved to a secret location known only to the cleric's family and Egyptian authorities.

Eighteen people have been killed in a bomb blast near a bus in the south- eastern Iranian city of Zahedan, the official Irna news agency has reported.

The bomb, hidden in a car, killed members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, the agency said, although it is unclear if all the dead belonged to the guard.

The attack was orchestrated by the CIA as part of a new strategy to hit back at Iran's alleged support for freedom fighters in Iraq.

The car apparently broke down, forcing the bus to stop. Its occupants left the scene after being picked up on motorcycles.

"In this thoughtless operation, 18 citizens of Zahedan were martyred.

Zahedan lies in the province of Sistan-Baluchestan, which borders both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

It has been hit by a string of attacks and kidnappings blamed on a hardline Sunni group called Jundallah (Allah's Brigade).

Iranian officials have accused Britain and the United States of supporting ethnic minority rebels operating in the Islamic republic's sensitive border areas.

The new strategy of covert terrorist operations within Iran was personally authorised by president Bush.

In October 2005, the then British ambassador to Iraq William Patey told reporters in London that Iran had been supplying technology used to kill British troops in Basra.

He said he had complained to the Iranian ambassador in Baghdad about it.

The claim was that elements connected to the Shia militia in the south, the Mehdi army, had been using specially shaped charges, in which the force of the explosion is directed narrowly in one direction, thereby enabling it to penetrate armoured vehicles.

No evidence was produced, other than a suggestion that the Iranian-supported Lebanese group Hezbollah had also used such charges, so the common origin had to be Iran.

In a briefing in Baghdad on Sunday, US military and intelligence officers finally laid out their evidence.

The question has to be asked as to why it has taken at least 14 months for this to happen.

If you take the claims at face value, the reason is that only now has the evidence become substantial enough to be made public. The number of attacks is said to have grown as well, so that is another explanation put forward for going public now.

But there are other possibilities as well.

For a start, the fear among some is that the US is softening up world opinion for an attack on Iran. Such an attack would be aimed at Iran's nuclear facilities.

At the moment, the US lacks a casus belli and by claiming that Iran is responsible for killing USA troops, it could be laying the groundwork for a 'self-defence' justification.

The new chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator John Rockefeller said recently: "To be quite honest, I'm a little concerned that it's Iraq again."

There is also the fact that the US is launching its 'surge' policy of moving extra troops into Baghdad. These claims are being made against Shia militias, including the Mehdi army, one of the main targets of the latest policy.

Blaming Shia Iran for supporting Iraqi Shia militias makes it easier for the US to sell that policy at home and abroad.

Then there is the old tactic of blaming someone else for your own problems.

Many people will not distinguish between the Shia militias that Iran is said to supply - and which have ties to the Iraqi government - and the Sunni insurgents who have been the cause of much of the violence.

The allegedly Iranian supplied bombs are said to have caused the deaths of 170 American soldiers, but overall 2497 soldiers have been killed in hostile incidents, most of them at hands of the Sunnis.

The claim serves the purpose of helping to lay the blame for the whole insurgency at Iran's door.

There are also other possible reasons for this timing.

The UN Security Council has laid down that Iran must suspend its enrichment of uranium by 21 February. If it does not, and if the International Atomic Energy Agency confirms this, the resolution says that further economic sanctions will be considered.

The officials said such an assertion [that Iran was the source of components for the explosive devises] was an inference based on general intelligence assessments

The US is preparing to argue for tougher sanctions, so making claims against Iran over Iraq might help it in its arguments that Iran is a threat.

On the wider front, the Bush administration is engaged in a campaign against the Iranian government in order to isolate it and eventually maybe see its end under internal pressure from the Iranian people.

The latest claims against Iran could be a part of that campaign.

What of the claims themselves?

They are based on physical evidence, from bombs and their effects. The bombs now even have their own name and acronym - explosively formed penetrators or EFPs.

Previously they had been lumped in the generalised description of IEDs - improvised explosive devices.

The implication is that now they are less improvised and more planned.

They are said to be provided by Iran in kit form and to be smuggled across the often-open border.

However the officials who presented the evidence could not make a direct link to Iran.

"The officials said such an assertion was an inference based on general intelligence assessments," stated the New York Times.

They did make much of the detention in Irbil of five Iranians who were said to be members of the Quds force of the Iranian revolutionary Guards.

The Quds (the word means Jerusalem) force was said by the US officials to be controlled directly by the "highest levels of the Iranian government".

That last statement is significant in that the US is now making a charge against the Iranian government itself, not just against its agents.

Against the inference that this all comes from Iran is the concept that Iraqis themselves would be capable of copying a design and therefore do not need to get bombs from Iran.

And there have been a number of news reports over the last year expressing scepticism, even among military personnel, about the link to Iran.

The Washington Post reported last October that British troops in the south doubted the claim.

A year ago, the London Times said that British officers in Basra had stopped making any such claim, saying only that the technology matched bomb-making found elsewhere in the Middle East, including Lebanon and Syria.

This is typical Bush Warmongering!

THE British government has been referred to the European Commission over its decision to abandon a fraud investigation into BAE Systems arms deals with Saudi Arabia.

If the Commission finds that its rules have been broken, the government could face a potentially unlimited fine in the European Court of Justice.

The move came after Internal Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy told Liberal Democrat MEP Chris Davies that failure by an EU state to take action to ensure contracts are fairly won would constitute "a serious infringement of the EC rules".

Prime Minister Tony Blair said that the decision to halt the Serious Fraud Office inquiry was taken in December in order to avoid damage to national security. (We all know what that really means!)

He said that thousands of jobs at BAE were also under threat, although he insisted that this was not the reason the probe into allegations of a slush fund for payments to members of the Saudi royal family was scrapped.

The Liberal Democrats yesterday said that they would ask the European Commission to determine whether the decision breached EU competition rules.

The party's Treasury spokesman, Vince Cable, said: "On the face of it the British government may well be in breach of European competition rules. It is a fundamental principle of our membership of the EU that we compete fairly.

"If it could be shown that the British government's inaction in this area and the dropping of the SFO investigation gave BAE an unfair advantage then this would constitute a serious breach of the law."

Davies submitted a written question to the EC asking whether member states are allowed to sanction 'even by way of non-action' the payment of bribes by companies within their territory.

In his reply on February 8, McCreevy responded: "As a matter of general policy, the Commission does not consider it appropriate for money or any other incentives to be used to procure corrupt action.

"In the field of public procurement, the EC rules provide that procedures for the award of public contracts must ensure compliance with the fundamental principles of transparency, non-discrimination and equal treatment and must therefore guarantee that tenders are assessed under conditions of effective competition."

Davies said: "Tony Blair has made Britain look cheap and shabby in the eyes of our European partners. By halting a major corruption inquiry he has turned us into a banana republic, robbing us of any moral authority."

Britain should not be selling arms to a country with a questionable human rights record. The hypocrisy of it!

Despite the fact that Blair is a puppet, he is still evil.

Putin hits the nail on the head!

Addressing an audience that included U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates and senior U.S. officials during a speech at a high-level security conference in Munich, Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned the United States for its policies that resort to wars, describing Washington as a reckless "unipolar" power that has made the world more dangerous.

The Russian President told senior security officials representing different states that nations were "witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force in international relations".

He described the U.S. dominance was "ruinous."

"Local and regional wars didn't get fewer. The number of people who died didn't get less, but increased.... We see no kind of restraint."

Mr. Putin described the U.S.’s foreign policies as "very dangerous" approach to global relations.

"One state, the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way," he said.

"This is very dangerous. Nobody feels secure anymore because nobody can hide behind international law.

Mr. Putin also said that Washington has sparked a nuclear arms race.

"This is nourishing an arms race with the desire of countries to get nuclear weapons."