UFO Info Week-End

That comment was generally taken as a nod in the direction of Mr Blair a fervent proponent of UN involvement

That comment was generally taken as a nod in the direction of Mr Blair, a fervent proponent of UN involvement. But Mr Blair appeared to make little new headway when he met Mr Bush at Camp David last week.The disagreement is an increasing worry for neutral Iraq exile groups. “Quarrelling between the US government agencies is terribly detrimental to Iraq,” Rend Rahim Francke, the executive director of the Iraq Foundation, a non-profit group promoting democracy and human rights, said yesterday. “The best way of bringing the Iraqi opposition groups together is to end the divisions inside the US government. There should be one Iraq policy, not five or six.”She also urged that an Iraqi face be given to the military operation in progress. “When the troops go in, Iraqis see British and American soldiers who can’t communicate,” Ms Francke told a meeting at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, a think-tank and stronghold of neo- conservative hawks on Iraq. “I fail completely to understand why, when so many Iraqis are ready to go in to help build bridges, the coalition so far hasn’t made use of them.”Ari Fleischer, Mr Bush’s spokesman, said last night that the exact job of the UN in Iraq would only be decided once the war was over but the military is certain to play a key role.In the build-up to the conflict, the President Bush has tended to side with the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz group.

General Powell has had little choice but to go along, given the discipline of the administration and the premium Mr Bush places on loyalty.Separately, Mr Fleischer stressed the President’s complete faith in Mr Rumsfeld, who has been accused of overruling his top commanders and going to war with too small a force on the ground.The latest claims, Mr Fleischer said, were second guessing one of “1,000 colonels” at the Pentagon.. A man who hijacked a Cuban passenger plane and threatened to blow it up with a hand grenade was arrested yesterday after the aircraft landed safely in Florida. It was the second hijacking in two weeks of a Cuban airliner by those seeking to leave the Communist-run island for the United States.The North American Aero-space Defence Command scrambled two F-16 fighters from a south Florida base to escort the passenger aircraft.The hijacker carried a boy off the plane who appeared to be a relative. Steve Torrence of Key West Police said: “It looked like they were family. When he let the little boy down on the Ttarmac the little boy grabbed his leg.”US officials surrounded the Cubana Airlines Antonov 24 as police snipers aimed guns at the aircraft Passengers filed out with their hands in the air.

The male passengers slowly lifted their shirts to show they were not hiding weapons, then laid down on the Tarmac. Within an hour of landing, all the passengers were off the plane and were to be interviewed by federal investigators.The Cuban government said the plane originally had 46 passengers and crew when it was hijacked on a domestic flight from the Isle of Youth to Havana on Monday by a man apparently armed with two grenades.The hijacker threatened to explode a grenade unless he was flown across the Florida Straits but the plane did not have enough fuel for the trip and landed at Havana’s international airport. After a 12-hour stand-off, the hijacker allowed some passengers, including children, to get off the aircraft, which was then refuelled before flying to Key West.. Bad weather and washed-out roads blocked rescue teams yesterday from reaching victims buried by a landslide in a gold-mining town in Bolivia’s tropical basin that has killed at least 13 people and possibly up to 100.