2010: The year Africa held its first World Cup

The Associated Press | Wed, 12/29/2010 8:28 AM | World

The World Cup finally made it to Africa in 2010 and plans were made to send football's showpiece to even more new destinations.

After South Africa overcame dire predictions of security problems and half-empty stadiums to stage a World Cup that united the country in celebration, FIFA voted to give future tournaments to Russia and Qatar.

South Africa's first-round exit made it the least successful host team in World Cup history, but the rest of the country mostly coped admirably with its biggest global gathering since the end of a decades-long boycott by world sport.

Fans worldwide became intimately acquainted with the incessant buzz of the vuvuzela as South Africans celebrated the World Cup and the arrival of many of the superstars they had only ever seen before on television.

But on the field, the World Cup was far from a classic. Spain's 1-0 win over the Netherlands came in the dirtiest ever final, which was an appropriate end to a tournament that promised much but delivered little.

While Germany again thrilled neutrals to take third place for a second straight tournament, Brazil was dour. Italy and England were even worse, but France took the unofficial title of tournament laughing stock - so consumed by dissent that players refused to train before a 2-1 loss to South Africa that confirmed the team's humiliating first-round exit.

Diego Maradona's presence as coach inspired his beloved Argentina to some fitfully entertaining displays, with Lionel Messi doing everything except score, but Germany dismantled the South Americans 4-0 in the quarterfinals and Maradona was fired soon after.

The fervor of home fans was quelled when five of Africa's six entrants fell in the first round. Although Ghana then beat the United States 2-1 in a game watched by 19.4 million Americans - a U.S. record beaten when 24.3 million watched the final - the remaining enthusiasm turned to anger when a deliberate handball by Uruguay forward Luis Suarez denied their adopted team a winner in the last minute of the quarterfinals.

Suarez was suspended from Uruguay's first semifinal match since 1954, but FIFA refused calls for additional punishment for a cynical act that became one of the most memorable moments of the tournament.

Even Spain disappointed despite following West Germany and France to become only the third side to hold the World Cup and European Championship trophies at the same time.

This was far from the stylish Spain that dominated Euro 2008 and cruised through World Cup qualifying with 10 wins from 10 games.

The Spaniards lost their opening match to Switzerland in the tournament's biggest shock, before 1-0 wins in each of the four knockout rounds made them the lowest scoring world champions ever, with eight goals from seven matches.

A squad dominated by homegrown Barcelona stars waited patiently for its talent to yield a goal before trusting that its technical superiority would allow it to keep the ball and deny the opposition the chance to equalize.

It worked, even against a brutal display from the Netherlands in the final at Soccer City in Johannesburg. With the teams facing a penalty shootout, Andres Iniesta scored with four minutes of extra time left to clinch his country's first World Cup.

The Dutch were handed nine of the final's record 14 yellow cards and defender John Heitinga became only the fifth man to get a red card on football's biggest stage.

It was a huge anticlimax, especially after a clearly frail Nelson Mandela had turned up to wave to fans at the stadium in Soweto where 20 years earlier he had held his first mass rally following his release from jail.

Spain coach Vicente del Bosque seemed to have tightened things up after Barcelona's shock defeat to Inter Milan in the semifinals of Europe's Champions League.

With Spain internationals Xavi Hernandez, Carles Puyol, Gerard Pique, Sergio Busquets, Pedro and Victor Valdes in its lineup, the defending champions dominated Inter with an astonishing 71 percent possession over two matches but left space on the counteratack to lose 3-2 on aggregate.

Inter's 3-1 win in the first leg owed much to the sort of precision and patience Spain would show at the World Cup, where Busquets and Xabi Alonso effectively mirrored Inter's defensive shield of Thiago Motta and Esteban Cambiasso.

Inter and Germany were just about the oly sides able to stop Messi during a year in which he made sure the repeated comparisons between him and Maradona - still Argentina's greatest ever player - ceased to become far-fetched.

Messi helped Barcelona retain the Spanish league and scored an incredible 58 club goals in 2010 to maintain his status a the world's best player, despite Cristiano Ronaldo's sparkling form for Real Madrid.

The dethroning of Barcelona - which by mid December of the following season was unbeaten in 22 matches and had scored 31 goals while conceding only one in the last seven of those - was simply the latest entry in Jose Mouinho's astounding career.

Mourinho led Inter to an unprecedented treble of Serie A title, Italian Cup and Champions League, with Bayern Munich beaten 2-0 in the final in Madrid.

Mourinho swiftly quit Inter - still with a record of not having lost a home league match with any team since February 2002 - nd went to Real Madrid. After a strong start to the 2010-11 season, Madrid was rocked by November's 5-0 mauling at Barcelona but, with his track record, Mourinho could still end the season on a high.

Inter won December's Club World Cup to end 2010 with an Italian record five trophies in a calendar year. Ier beat TP Mazembe in the final after the African champion had shocked Copa Libertadores holder Internacional in the previous round, but that was a rare high point under Mourinho's successor Rafa Benitez.

Benitez's former club Liverpool was embroiled in a lengthy and convoluted dispute over its ownership at was only resolved when Britain's High Court forced American businessmen Tom Hicks and George Gillett Jr. to sell up.

Liverpool remained in American hands as Boston Red Sox owners New England Sports Ventures bought the club, but the team was way behind England's elite on the field.

Officiating of te game continued to evolve as football's rule-making body agreed to reopen discussions on the use of goal-line technology after mistakes helped eliminate Mexico and England from the World Cup.

In Europe, UEFA expanded its experimental use of additional assistant referees into the Champions League.

Butthere could be more trouble ahead for FIFA after its decision to award the 2018 World Cup to Russia and '22 edition to Qatar.

World football's ruling body said it was trying to spread the game into new territory by giving the tournament to Europe's largest country and then the Middle East, but the move was overshadowed by allegations of corruption and a lack of transparency in FIFA.

European anarchists grow more violent, coordinated

The Associated Press | Wed, 12/29/2010 7:58 AM | World

A loosely linked movement of European anarchists who want to bring down state and financial institutions is becoming more violent and coordinated after decades out of the spotlight, and may be responding to social tensions spawned by the continent's financial crisis, security experts say.

Italian police said Tuesday that letter bombs were sent to three embassies in Rome by Italian anarchists in solidarity with jailed Greek anarchists, who had asked their comrades to organize and coordinate a global "revolutionary war."

Identical package bombs exploded at the Swiss and Chilean embassies in Rome on Dec. 23, badly wounding the two people who opened them. A third bomb was safely defused at the Greek Embassy on Monday.

"We're striking again, and we do so in response to the appeal launched by our Greek companions," the Italian group known as the Informal Anarchist Federation wrote in a claim of responsibility for the third bomb that was released by police here Tuesday.

Extreme left-wing and anarchist movements have existed for decades in Europe - waging deadly attacks across the continent in the 1960s and 1970s that trailed and became sporadic in recent decades. Officials, meanwhile, focused far more intensely on the threat of Islamist terrorism.

But the European Union's police agency, Europol, reported this year that attacks by far-left and anarchist militant groups jumped by 43 percent in 2009 compared to the previous year, and more than doubled over 2007, with most of the incidents in Italy, Spain and Greece. Spain and Greece have been hit particularly hard by government cutbacks and unemployment resulting from a continentwide debt crisis. Italy has also been growing tense in recent months in response to austerity measures and a political duel between Premier Silvio Berlusconi and a former ally that for weeks threatened the government's survival.

Last month, 14 letter bombs were mailed to embassies in Athens by a Greek group that urged stepped-up attacks by anarchists worldwide. Two of the devices exploded, causing no injuries.

"Anarchists-insurrectionists work to try to raise the level of clashes when there are problems" said Marco Boschi, a criminologist who teaches a course on terrorism at the University of Florence and has written about anarchists. "They exploit every occasion."

A Greek group calling itself the Conspiracy Nuclei of Fire claimed responsibility for sending the 14 mail bombs in Athens. Panagiotis Argyros, 22 and Gerasimos Tsakalos, 24, were arrested on Nov. 1 in connection with the mailings and were charged with terrorism-related offenses. At least a dozen suspected members of their group are due to go on trial Jan. 17 for other offenses.

The Conspiracy Nuclei of Fire called on militants around Europe to step up their actions before the trial.

"We will organize internationally and take aim at the enemy. We can't wait to see the subversive elements flooding the streets and the guerrilla groups striking again and again," the group wrote.

But European anarchists are not always in step.

The solidarity boasted by the Italian anarchists who targeted the Rome embassies apparently irritated a Greek militant group, whose membership included Lambros Foundas, who was killed in a shootout with police in Athens earlier this year.

Three imprisoned members of Revolutionary Struggle claimed in a communique Tuesday evening that their group never carries out actions "that would result in the injury of someone, like a random embassy official." The Italian anarchists, in their claim of responsibility for the embassy bombs, said their cell was named after Foundas.

Italian officials have said the Swiss Embassy was targeted by the latest attack in Italy because intensified Swiss-Italian cooperation led to two well-known arrests of anarchists.

Swiss anarchist and environmentalist Marco Camenisch, a hero to many anarchists, was arrested by Italian police in 1991 and imprisoned over the 1989 murder of a Swiss border police officer. After serving nine years in an Italian maximum-security prison, he was extradited in 2002 to Switzerland, where he was later sentenced for the murder.

In April 2010, Swiss police with the help of Italian authorities arrested two men and a woman who idolized Camenisch and were members of an Italian eco-terrorist group. They were suspected of planning to bomb an IBM Corp. research facility near Zurich.

Chile, meanwhile, was targeted because a Chilean anarchist, Mauricio Morales, was killed when a bomb in a backpack he was carrying blew up in Santiago in 2009, Italian officials have said.

Alessandro Ceci of the Center of Superior Studies for the Fight Against Terrorism and Political Violence theorized the Italian anarchists may be trying partly to take advantage of the political climate in Italy: Premier Silvio Berlusconi has seen his parliamentary majorityfall and just barely survived a no-confidence vote this month. In addition, protests against university budget cuts turned violent on Dec. 14, thanks in part to anarchist infiltration of student demonstrators.

"If I were an Italian (police) investigator, I'd be worried," Ceci said, comparing the highly carged atmosphere to that of the late 1960s, just before the Red Brigades leftist domestic terror group launched into action.

But political science professor Franco Pavoncello at Rome's John Cabot University said he didn't foresee a return to that era of leftist terror.

"If this were the anarchists' gal, they would not be focusing on embassies," he said.

He noted that no one really knows how many people are behind the group that claimed responsibility.

"They are surely not of an international level, maybe European, but I would better describe them as the result of pathological behaviors often ofan individual nature, and very domestic," he said.

Another Italian anarchist group, the Italian Anarchist Federation, which happens to use the same acronym as the one behind the letter-bomb campaign, discounted the possibility of highly coordinated and organized anarchist offensives in the future.

"narchism by its own nature is not a hierarchal organization, and all the participants enter in a confederation on the same level and act freely," said Donato Randini, who edits the group's periodical.

Jakarta to see 11 rallies today

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Wed, 12/29/2010 10:30 AM | Jakarta

According to the Jakarta Police Traffic Management Center (TMC), up to 11 rallies have been scheduled to take place in Jakarta this morning.

The first rally would start at 9 a.m. in front of the Presidential Palace on Jl. Merdeka Utara in Central Jakarta.

At 10 a.m., rallies have been scheduled to be held at five different locations including the Mayor's office on Jl. Yos Sudarso in North Jakarta; Tanjung Priok Harbor in North Jakarta; the Jakarta legislative council on Jl. Kebun Sirih in Central Jakarta, the State-Owned Enterprise Ministry on Jl. Merdeka Selatan in Central Jakarta and the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) office on Jl HR Rasuna Said in South Jakarta.

Another rally has been scheduled to be held in front of the National Land Agency (BPN) in Depok, West Java, at 10.30 a.m.

Then at 11 a.m., rallies have been scheduled for in front of the Jakarta High Prosecutors Office on Jl. HR Rasuna Said, South Jakarta, and at the city hall on Jl. Merdeka Selatan, Central Jakarta.

This afternoon demonstrations have been scheduled to commence at 1 p.m in front of the Attorney General's Office (AGO) on Jl. Sultan Hasanuddin in South Jakarta and the Supreme Court on Jl. Merdeka Selatan in Central Jakarta.

Because of the 2010 AFF Suzuki Cup final being held at Bung Karno stadium in Senayan this evening, commuters are encouraged to avoid roads near the stadium, especially prior to and after the game.

Outflows of Rp 1.1 trillion seen throughout last week

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Wed, 12/29/2010 10:49 AM | Business

According to Bank Indonesia’s latest data, around Rp 1.1 trillion worth of foreign funds were withdrawn from Indonesia’s stock and debt markets in the fourth week of December.

The outflows were mainly the result of profit-taking in government bonds (SUN) and BI certificates (SBI), BI spokesman Difi Johansyah said Wednesday.

“Amid improving global sentiment, foreign investors tend to reduce their fund placements while repositioning their assets ahead of the year end," Difi said in a statement sent to reporters.

Foreign investors sold Rp 1.07 trillion worth of SBIs last week (Dec. 18 to 23), leaving a slight dent in foreign ownership which declined to 27 percent from 27.5 percent in the previous week.

“Despite year-end repositioning, the decline in foreign ownership of SBI has been happening since the middle of October this year, as a result of BI's policy to reduce the supply of these certificates," Difi said.

Foreign investors also sold Rp 290 billion in government bonds, but the proportion of foreign ownership was stable at 30.8 percent as of Dec. 23.

Meanwhile, in the stock market a slight increase in foreign funds was also seen. Foreigners bought a net Rp 250 billion last week, totaling in Rp 19.63 trillion of inflows throughout the year.

As of Dec. 23, capital inflows reached Rp 116.2 trillion in stocks, government bonds and SBIs, BI data shows. (est)

Tornado warning for Jakarta until New Year’s

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Tue, 12/28/2010 9:15 PM | Jakarta

The Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) announced that tornadoes were possible this week, and asked Jakarta residents to prepare for the possibility.

BMKG head of climate change and air quality Elvin Aldrian said the agency predicted the potential for tornadoes because of low air pressure around the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north of Australia that would draw masses of air from the west toward Jakarta.

“The air masses traveled across the mountains in Banten, forming wavy winds that will travel down to Jakarta, like what happened at 5.10 p.m. on Tuesday,” Edvin said, as quoted by Antara news.

The air masses, which travel in the form of cumulo nimbus clouds, are the seeds of tornodoes, he said.

According to Edvin, the cumulo nimbus clouds, which can move up to 30 knots, are now in the air above the Java Sea, and are expected to later move toward Sumatra.

“There is still the potential for tornadoes in Jakarta this week until the beginning of the new year,” he said.

Heavy rains and small tornadoes hit Jakarta on Tuesday afternoon, causing more than a dozen trees to collapse on a number of streets in Jakarta’s five municipalities.

SKorea calls for urgency in NKorean disarmament

Becky Bohrer, Associated Press, Seoul, South Korea | Wed, 12/29/2010 11:15 AM | World

South Korea's president is calling for urgency in dismantling North Korea's atomic weapons program, saying the country's nuclear disarmament must be achieved through diplomacy.

President Lee Myung-bak made the remarks Wednesday. He cited as a reason for urgency the North's push to build a powerful nation in 2012 during the 100th year after the birth of the country's founder, Kim Il Sung.

Lee says there must be "big progress" in the North's denuclearization next year, and says it must be done through the now-stalled six-party disarmament talks.

It was not clear if Lee's comments reflected a new flexibility on when to resume the talks. Seoul previously has been hesitant to restart them until Pyongyang shows a firm commitment to denuclearization.

US can't seal Afghan-Pakistan border: commander

The Associated Press | Wed, 12/29/2010 8:14 AM | World

There's no practical way for U.S. troops to seal Afghanistan's vast border with Pakistan and stop all Taliban fighters from slipping through, so they are focusing on defending vulnerable towns and fighting insurgents on Afghan soil, a U.S. military commander said Tuesday.

Army Col. Viet Luong said that "to secure the border in the traditional sense" would "take an inordinate amount of resources." He said it also would require far more cooperation from the tribes inside Pakistan who often provide Taliban fighters safe passage.

Other senior U.S. military officials have said they hope the Pakistan military does more to shut down Taliban hideouts. But the U.S. has denied reports that American forces are pushing to expand special operations raids inside Pakistan's tribal areas to target militants.

"It's naive to say that we can stop ... forces coming through the border," said Luong, who oversees troops in a part of eastern Afghanistan that includes the volatile Khost province and 162 miles (260 kilometers) of border.

Instead, Luong said, he is choosing to fight insurgents outside Afghan villages where they are more vulnerable anyway.

Luong said troops under his command are still working to control the border. But he recently shut down one platoon-sized checkpoint known as "Combat Outpost Spera." Luong said he thought the platoon would be more useful protecting more populated areas.

Khost province has been the site of frequent enemy attacks, including a high-profile suicide bombing at a remote CIA outpost last year.

The area's proximity to Pakistan puts it on the front lines of the U.S. fight for control in Afghanistan. Pakistan is host to the Taliban-linked Haqqani network, a militant movement based in its North Waziristan region that carries out operations in Afghanistan.

Luong said he has seen "subtle signs of hope" for Khost after the U.S. and Afghanistan stepped up operations against the Haqqani network. The number of operations and patrols increased four-fold, up to 12,000 in the past year, while the effectiveness of enemy fire has been cut in half, he estimated.

"Local atmospherics are indicating that the people of Khost are beginning to feel that security is much, much better," he said. "And more importantly, for the first time, they're feeling that the provincial government is now working for the people."

Pakistan's government is believed to give the Haqqani group some degree of freedom as a way of securing Islamist support against archrival India. Islamabad also faces other problems, including massive flooding this year and government instability. In the latest sign of trouble, a key party in Pakistan's ruling coalition said it would quit the cabinet on Tuesday.

This year has been by far the deadliest in the nearly 10 years for coalition troops in Afghanistan, with 700 killed so far, according to an Associated Press count. Last year, 504 were killed.