Islamic Iran celebrates 30 years

The new administration in Washington offers the possibility of a new beginning.
But President Ahmadinejad's government world of warcraft gold has so far been reluctant to move away from the reassuring rhetoric of "Death to America".

It will be celebrated in a big rally in central Tehran expected to be addressed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
On this day three decades ago, the last resistance of the Shah's regime collapsed cheap wow gold. Iranians spilled out on to streets to celebrate their new freedom.
But three decades on, Iran is still suffering major economic problems, international isolation, and complaints about the lack of political freedom.
There will be plenty of celebrations on Tuesday, but also - less openly - plenty of criticisms as well.
Iran has certainly achieved full independence, but at the expense of continued international isolation.
Political and personal freedom runescape gold is restricted. The economy is in a mess, through a combination of mismanagement and sanctions.
Many Iranians struggle to survive.

Clinton pledges to use diplomacy

Collegial atmosphere
Mrs Clinton was greeted warmly by her ex-colleagues at the Senate hearing.

But the former first lady was also asked questions about conflicts of interest triggered by her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
Mr Clinton's charitable foundation has received a number of donations from foreign governments and multinational corporations.
Richard Lugar maple story mesos, the most senior Republican on the Senate panel, said the existence of Mr Clinton's foundation represented a "unique complication" that required "great care and transparency".
And Louisiana Senator David Vitter said Mr Clinton's fundraising activities posed "real and perceived conflict issues" for Mrs Clinton.

The BBC's James Coomarasamy in Washington says the atmosphere in the committee room was collegial and that on many issues, Mrs Clinton expressed views that world of warcraft were not dissimilar to those of the Bush administration.
The vote on the nomination is scheduled for Thursday, a sign that the committee's chairman, Senator John Kerry, does not expect there to be any stumbling blocks, correspondents say.

The US Senate Foreign Relations Committee wow gold conducted the hearing to confirm Mrs Clinton's appointment as secretary of state.
Mrs Clinton said there would be change of policy towards Cuba under President-elect Barack Obama's administration.
She confirmed the new government would lift the US ban on travel to Cuba.
Mr Obama has already said he is willing to talk to the government of President Raul Castro in an effort to end 50 years of strained relations since the Cuban revolution.

'Smart power'
In her opening statement at the hearing, Mrs Clinton expressed a desire to strengthen America's relationship with its allies.

"America cannot solve the most pressing problems cheap wow gold on our own, and the world cannot solve them without America," said the New York senator.
"We must use what has been called 'smart power', the full range of tools at our disposal," she added.
"With 'smart power', diplomacy will be the vanguard of foreign policy."
On North Korea, she indicated that she and Mr Obama support the existing six-party framework for negotiating that country's nuclear disarmament.
North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the US are involved in continuing talks on ending Pyongyang's plutonium enrichment.
"Our goal is to end the North Korean cheap runescape gold nuclear programmes," she told the hearing.
The six-party framework, she added, "provides an opportunity... for bilateral contact as well between North Korea and the United States".

Obama 'set to offer Clinton job'

Recognition

Mrs Clinton and Mr Obama fought a long and often bitter campaign to be the Democratic Party's presidential candidate.
But after losing out on the nomination, she endorsed his bid for the presidency and campaigned for his election.

The BBC's Kim Ghattas in Washington says the appointment of Hillary Clinton would likely heal the rift inside the Democratic party caused by the bruising primary campaign.

Mr Obama buy wow gold would also come across as a confident leader, not afraid to reach out to rivals and surround himself with strong personalities, our correspondent says.

The economic crisis will be a priority for Mr Obama at the start of his presidency.
But with the US involved in two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan , the former first lady would be able to hit the ground running on foreign policy, our correspondent says.

She would have instant international stature and recognition as secretary of state, and world leaders would welcome her, Kim Ghattas says.
However, with a vice-president as well-steeped in foreign policy as Joseph Biden, careful consideration needs to go into how the two will work together, our correspondent adds.

If a deal fails, other names touted for the post in the US media include Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, who world of warcraft gold ran for president in 2004, and New Mexico's governor Bill Richardson.

A Democratic Party official was quoted as saying the move would be made public after next week's Thanksgiving holiday.
The two sides have worked out financial disclosure issues regarding her husband Bill Clinton's charitable activities, the party official reportedly said.

The former president has offered to allow ethics reviews of his charities.
Mr Clinton has an international charitable foundation with operations in dozens of countries.
This latest move is seen as an attempt to address questions about whether his philanthropic activities would create conflicts of interest if his wife got the job.

There has been mounting speculation that Mr Obama would offer the New York senator the role of America's top diplomat since a meeting between the two a week ago was reported.
Neither Mrs Clinton nor Mr Obama has confirmed the reports.

But an aide to Mr Obama's transition team said the two had had substantive conversations about the job, the Associated Press news agency reports.

Mrs Clinton would have to give up her Senate seat, which she has held for eight years, to take up the position.

The errors of Iraq are being repeated - and magnified

The error of Afghanistan is far more serious than the error of Iraq. If the resulting insurgency is now exported to Pakistan, both errors will seem peccadillos. Pakistan is the sixth largest state in the world, and nuclear-armed.

The awful prospect is that Obama and Brown may feel too weak to learn from Iraq and pull back. They will blunder on, not to a clean defeat but to something far worse, a war of attrition whose poison will spread across a subcontinent.

This has to be the beginning of the end. The UN mandate for the western occupation of Iraq expires next month, to be replaced by a US-Iraq treaty about to be ratified by the Iraqi parliament buy wow gold. This sets a limit of three years on the presence of foreign troops. It is sovereignty for slow learners.

With radical Mahdists demanding an immediate withdrawal, the treaty will hold only if honoured. Accordingly, it plans an end to ground operations next year, when British troops will anyway be leaving. Barack Obama is most unlikely to backtrack on the timetable.

Britain and now the US are both led by men whose heart was never in this war, and want only to get out with some dignity intact. The much oversold "surge" has offered such a screen. War fever has given way to war weariness. Nobody has a clue what will happen next in Iraq, and ever fewer care.

The wreckage will probably be the same patchwork of feuding provinces and sheikhdoms as was always going to follow Saddam Hussein's downfall, with each arguing over the spoils of the country's phenomenal oil wealth.
Iraq will be divided between the Kurdish north, the Sunni west and the Shia and pro-Iranian rest, the lines of confederation being decided by the resolution of militia power on the ground. The country will not be pro-democracy, pro-western, pro-Israeli or whatever fantasy seized the American (and British) neocons in the moment of madness that sparked this whole ideological escapade. Only when the west has gone will locally initiated reconstruction be secure. But the scars of 2005-07, when Iraq was the most hellish place on earth, will remain for a long time.

Never in recent history has a western intervention been so misguided and so bungled. On Monday the former lord chief justice Lord Bingham savaged world of warcraft gold the British government's decision to join the invasion as "a serious violation of international law", so much so as "passes belief". He castigated its failure to curb its own and the American abuse of human rights during the occupation.

He might have added such outrages as the driving of 2 million Iraqis into exile, the abandonment of Iraqi collaborators, the failure to restore public services to their condition even under Saddam, the continued "cleansing" of Christians, and the desecration of heritage sites.

After five years of occupation and £7bn of public money, London's finest minds joined with those of Washington to reduce what should be one of the world's richest countries to shambles. Iraq is still an economic and social basket case compared with its neighbours, Iran, Turkey, Syria and Jordan.
The occupation has vindicated TE Lawrence's view that the imperial mindset can never comprehend the Arab world. The incompetence in every department has been so astonishing as to strip the Atlantic powers of practical and moral claim to be the world's policemen in the 21st century. That lord of the rings online gold is the true measure of the Bush-Blair legacy.

As things stand there is still no inquiry into the legality of the invasion and no response from the former attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, to Lord Bingham's accusation, other than that it all seemed all right on the night. There is no audit of the billions the war has cost UK taxpayers. There is no explanation to the families of 176 dead British soldiers as to why they died, beyond the vacuous claim that they were "fighting terrorism" when they were not.

The reason not to let Iraq slip un-mourned into history is that the episode has one last service to perform. It should teach a lesson that foreign expeditions undertaken in a spirit of jingoist revenge, with a crazed optimism and no strategic plan, are usually a bad idea.

That lesson could not be more relevant, as the identical error is being made in Afghanistan and by the same two men cheap wow gold who privately or (in Obama's case) publicly expressed reservations about Iraq. In his last utterance Gordon Brown himself seemed blind to the parallels, talking as if one more push, one more hearts-and-minds campaign, should send Johnny foreigner back to the hills so decent people can walk the streets of London in peace.

The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has grown increasingly exasperated with the blatant failure of Nato to bring security to his country. He is no fantasist. He knows that he is powerless outside his capital, except where a genius for wheeler dealing can keep the drug lords in funds and the Taliban at bay. The Taliban are gaining ground and he is running out of time to negotiate with their leaders with leverage behind him.
Hence last week's outburst, in which Karzai indicated his determination to talk with the Taliban and offer safe protection to Kabul for their former leader, Mullah Omah, for that purpose. Should the Americans object, he replied that "if I say I want protection for Mullah Omah, the international community has two choices, remove me or leave".

Meanwhile, a private war is being fought by US special forces against anyone with a gun in the east of the country, the bombing of Pakistani villages so capricious and counter-productive as to suggest a lack of all tactical control. In the south the British have no strategy except to re-enact the Zulu wars at exorbitant cost in money and lives. The Helmand campaign is magnificent but mad.

Publicists are being hired to assert that Afghanistan is just fine "in part", like the curate's egg. The reality is that even Kabul is no longer safe for foreigners. The conflict is far more intractable than Iraq, since the staple crop is not oil but opium and since the border with Pakistan is hopelessly unstable. Throughout history this land has been the theatre of defeat.

Last month Taliban operating out of Pakistan's North-West Frontier territory cut the Khyber Pass, a crucial supply link into Kabul, which can be traversed only in massively armed convoys. This is precisely the trap into which invading forces have been sucked for a century and a half, be they British, Russian or now American. As a blunder it ranks with marching on Moscow. Yet Nato has done it. Nobody reads history.

Leveling, bug reports and the Scourgeborne

Flamewhisker asked

I don't know about other realms, but Kilrogg has had a bad problem with bugged/broken quests. Do you have any info on whether Blizz is aware of the extent of the problem and what they're going to do about it?If you run into bugs, report those bugs. GM tickets, the various support forums depending on the bug, all that stuff. If people are properly reporting bugs, that's how Blizzard becomes aware of them. I'm not Blizzard so I don't have a list of the bugs maple story they're aware of, but I can tell you what they're going to do about it! They'll fix them as soon as they're able. Certain quests have been hotfixed already, and the ones they can't hotfix will probably be fixed in the next patch.

Andrew asked...For those of us who won't be able to play Wrath for a while still, what would be the best route to catch up with everyone and get into raiding as quickly as possible?Just quest, really. Finding a good place to grind out mobs can technically be better XP per hour, but really, that's a horrible way to experience the expansion your first time through. Most of the people that did it that way (such as Nymh) did it after they'd already seen all of the leveling content in the Wrath beta. Just quest. The order I did zones in is this: Howling Fjord, Dragonblight, Grizzly Hills, Zul'Drak, Sholazar Basin until you hit 77, then get Cold Weather Flying and move on to Storm Peaks or Icecrown until 80. Exchange Howling Fjord for Borean Tundra if you want. I just went with the Fjord personally because it had fewer people.

professorrev asked...Just wondering if the Death Knight will be getting tier armor sets. I can't see any information floating about. Would seem like a bit of a jip if they didn't though...They won't retroactively have sets added to places like Molten Core or Black Temple, but world of warcraft gold they do have sets in the new dungeons, certainly. Their Tier 7 is called Scourgeborne. Heroes' Scourgeborne is the 10-man set and Valorous Scourgeborne is the 25-man set. They share tokens just like everyone else. Since that makes the tokens uneven, two with three classes and one with four classes, the odd one out has a slightly higher droprate to compensate.As a sidenote, the word you're looking for is 'gyp' and it's actually a racial slur! I didn't know that until recently myself, and I've since stopped using it. It's one of those words that has sort of lost its insulting intent over the years, but there are still people out there who would get offended and be insulted, even if you don't mean it that way. I'm not your father/mother, so use the word if you want. I just wanted to stick my nose in, in case you didn't know!

Genkitty asked...What happened to my Seal/Judgement of the Crusader, the one that upped holy damage on the target? It was my bread and butter Judgement and I miss it.You don't need it anymore! The damage boost that the Judgement gave has been rolled into your spells baseline. The amount of damage they would have done with Judgement of the Crusader buy wow gold before is how much damage they do now without it.

Lian asked...Is there any sign of Dungeon Set blues in Wrath? Sets that function similar to the dungeons sets of WoW vanilla and BC, before players move onto tiered armor?Nope, there aren't any class-specific dungeon sets this time around. Which is probably for the best, nobody actually collected those for any purpose beyond, "It's my class set!" Getting a bunch of Druid pieces when you don't have a Druid is annoying, too. The good news is that the entry level raids, Naxxramas, Eye of Eternity and cheap wow gold Obsidian Sactum? They're all really, really easy (though the Sanctum can be harder if you want). If you want a class set just for the sake of having a class set, you can do that. If you just want good gear, the blues that everyone can use will do you perfectly.It is fun to complete a set, my Priest has kept every single set she's completed since Devout, but the 5-man class sets have become sort of... unnecessary.

Skelos Frustrates, Paterson Thunders

After Skelos's announcement, Silver would not commit to a vote in his own chamber.

"I am prepared to accomplish a result," he said. "It's time for us to join together across the aisle and deal with a crisis in this state and in this nation. I can make it very clear that everything is on the table. I am prepared to discuss every aspect of what the governor sent to us, and there is no point and it is a total lack of leadership for someone to tell you he's not making a recommendation and he's not putting anything together."
An actual senate vote on Paterson's plan would bring political pain wow eu gold. Democrats who go on record on behalf of the cuts would be blasted by interest groups and unions. If they vote against them, they'll have run afoul of Paterson.

But Skelos has little incentive to agree to anything. The longer he waits, the longer he can make Paterson and other Democrats push for either cuts to beloved services or tax increases that may hurt them politically. While this will cause the state's financial health to deteriorate further - Paterson and fiscal officials warn the state's credit rating may slip - it will strengthen Skelos's hand as Republicans try to win back the senate.

The possibility of action to bridge New York's multi-billion dollar deficit grows slimmer by the minute.
Unable to win passage of any package - his own or a compromise - David Paterson late Monday balked on plans to have lawmakers vote wow gold cheap during a special session and called legislative leaders back to the negotiating table. His announcement came around 9:20 p.m., after an evening of roundabout posturing between both Republican Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat, in which it became apparent that no existing bill could pass both houses.

Skelos, who has become an increasingly prickly thorn in Paterson's side, called the governor's bluff and said he would respond by bringing draft legislation to a floor vote. Skelos said he personally would not vote for Paterson's plan because it calls for mid-year cuts to education, but claimed that he instructed senators to vote as they pleased. Observers - including the governor - realized this doomed the legislation.
And it infuriated Paterson.

"All of this back-and-forth and he-said she-said is not helping anybody," Paterson said during a press conference attended by four reporters in the flesh and lord of the rings online gold several others teleconferenced in from a local wine bar. "This is the way that good-faith efforts are manipulated by people who are not being serious."

Paterson has put $5.2 billion in cuts and revenue increases on the table. Two billion dollars of those measures would take effect this fiscal year; the remainder would bridge a bigger gap in next year's budget.

Since the package was unveiled last week, it was lambasted by Skelos and other Republican senators because it cut aid to schools. Skelos also said he believed the cuts for the next fiscal year should be addressed in December, when Paterson is due to unveil his complete budget.

Last week, Skelos denounced Paterson's proposal, saying "I don't see anything creative in this proposal. It's just hack away, hack away."

Monday, he attacked the governor for only presenting draft bills.

That criticism may have seemed foolish, given complete drafts that were posted online for a week. But the distinction is important: draft bills can be negotiated, but not formally considered. Since it's his special session, Paterson sends the bills (and the required message of necessity to waive a three-day waiting period) to the legislature to consider. So Skelos can't force a vote on the bills - a vote which would embarrass the governor - unless Paterson gives him something to vote on.

And the governor won't do that. "I'm not going to do that until we have a public leaders meeting," he said. "I am willing to send bills for a vote if the senate is interested to cut spending in the state of New York."
He had choice words for Skelos buy wow gold: "He has decided to play this political game, which I think is an insult not only to the public of the state of New York but really to this entire process."

John McArdle, a Skelos spokesman, said in reply: "By taking up the governor's bills, that he asked us to take up, how is it playing politics?"

"We intend to show up for session, and we will show up for a leaders meeting, and our position hasn't changed," McArdle said.

The Status Symbol

Mr. Mattie has also apparently swapped his Louis Vuitton briefcase for a Coach bag and felt so guilty at his July engagement party at the Waldorf Astoria that he spent the whole time worrying rather than enjoying the Veuve Cliquot. Meanwhile, an unidentified 37-year-old partner at a New York fashion firm said he's been buying dinner for his artist friend and pretending that he is expensing it.

“It’s not as much fun to have something like that when someone else is getting kicked out of his apartment,” said the fashion firm partner. “If I bought it two years ago, everyone would be patting me on the back. Now they’re like, ‘Ooooh.’ I wouldn’t say they’re jealous. I’d say they’re miserable.”

Hiding one's wealth might seem silly, but we're thinking that this rise of status guilt might not be such a bad thing. Sure, we enjoy ogling pretty things like Birkin bags, Christian Louboutin shoes, and Balenciaga dresses at cocktail hour. But then there are the not so classy status symbols that lorld of the rings online gold we'd gladly like to seee left at home. Like high end doggy-carriers. Or traffic-blocking, chauffeured Escalades; can't everyone fit into a chauffeured four door sedan comfortably? Oh, and the private jets can probably go too.

You know how there was always that one kid in school whose parents packed him a lunch of Ritz crackers and celery sticks? And so you always gave him half of your turkey sandwich or Oreo cookies and downplayed the cost of your new sneakers?

Well, it seems that New York's upper class is experiencing a similar sense of guilt--"Status Guilt," as it is described in the December issue of Details magazine. All over Manhattan, your friends and co-workers are apparently lying to you about the price of their designer handbags, where they had dinner the previous night and where they plan to vacation this year, so as not to make you feel bad.

Pierce Mattie, a CEO of a PR company quoted in the piece, took off his one-carat pendant diamond necklace before party guests—many employed world of warcraft gold by Lehman Brothers—arrived at his Fire Island home in September.
“Their jobs were in jeopardy,” he told the magazine. “I didn’t want them to say ‘How can you wear that?’”