Iran and Japan close to oil deal

Iran and Japanese firm Inpex say they are close to finalising a [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/5309904.stm|joint project] to develop a big new Iranian oil field.Both sides say they are less than two weeks away from final agreement over the Azadegan field, which is one of the world's largest untapped oil reserves.
Any deal will no doubt raise eyebrows in the US which wants sanctions against Iran due to Tehran's nuclear ambitions.
While Japan is totally reliant upon oil imports, Iran is the world's fourth largest crude producer.

‘The apparent return of Western imperialism to the Middle East has renewed interest. Loose talk of a clash of civilisations has helped to stimulate a lot of hurried histories. Public appetite for reading about the crusades - now catered for in Christopher Tyerman’s God’s War: A New History of the Crusades - has coincided with a wave of awareness among historians that the existing literature was wrong: too materialist, too ignorant or dismissive of crusading spirituality and of the emotions and piety that crusaders invested in their bloody work. Objectively, however, the crusades do not deserve the attention they are getting. And the specialists continue to miss some of the most interesting points.

Historians have mistaken the crusades for early signs of Western vitality - European capacity to make war way beyond their frontiers. Yet the crusaders’ failure demonstrates that the opposite is true. Chasm-like discontinuities separate the “rise of the West” from the frustrations of the Middle Ages. Part of the crusades’ impact was to alert Westerners to their weakness and to the smallness of the corner of the world that they occupied.

To some extent, acquaintance with Arabic and Syriac scholarship helped the slow recovery of the learning of antiquity in Europe. But the big effect of the crusades in Christendom was how they warped Christian piety.’

Fighting A Not-So-Good Fight

‘Since late August, British commandos in the deserts of far southeastern Iraq have been testing one of the most serious charges leveled by the United States against Iran: that Iran is secretly supplying weapons, parts, funding and training for attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq.

A few hundred British troops living out of nothing more than their cut-down Land Rovers and light armored vehicles have taken to the desert in the start of what British officers said would be months of patrols aimed at finding the illicit weapons trafficking from Iran, or any sign of it.

There's just one thing.

"I suspect there's nothing out there," the commander, Lt. Col. David Labouchere, said last month, speaking at an overnight camp near the border. "And I intend to prove it."

Other senior British military leaders spoke as explicitly in interviews over the previous two months. Britain, whose forces have had responsibility for security in southeastern Iraq since the war began, has found nothing to support the Americans' contention that Iran is providing weapons and training in Iraq, several senior military officials said.

"I have not myself seen any evidence - and I don't think any evidence exists - of government-supported or instigated" armed support on Iran's part in Iraq, British Defense Secretary Des Browne said in an interview in Baghdad in late August.

"It's a question of intelligence versus evidence," Labouchere's commander, Brig. James Everard of Britain's 20th Armored Brigade, said last month at his base in the southern region's capital, Basra. "One hears word of mouth, but one has to see it with one's own eyes. These are serious consequences, aren't they?"’

British Find No Evidence Of Arms Traffic From Iran

‘Indonesian police or military officers may have played a role in the 2002 Bali bombing, the country's former president, Abdurrahman Wahid says.

In an interview with SBS's Dateline program, on the third anniversary of the bombing that killed 202 people, Mr Wahid says he has grave concerns about links between Indonesian authorities and terrorist groups.

While he believed terrorists were involved in planting one of the Kuta night club bombs, the second, which destroyed Bali's Sari Club, had been organised by authorities.

Asked who he thought planted the second bomb, Mr Wahid said: "Maybe the police ... or the armed forces."

"The orders to do this or that came from within our armed forces not from the fundamentalist people," he says.

The program also claims a key figure behind the formation of terror group Jemaah Islamiah was an Indonesian spy.’

Possible Police Role In 2002 Bali Attack