LAGOS, July 23: The main militant group in Nigeria's oil-producing Niger Delta said on Wednesday it would attack major oil pipelines in the next 30 days to prove it had not received payment from the government to end its campaign.

The head of the state-run oil firm NNPC was quoted in Nigerian newspapers on Wednesday as saying the company had paid militant groups $12 million to protect facilities including the Chanomi creek pipeline in Delta state.

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), whose attacks have cut Nigeria's oil output by around a fifth since early 2006, said the money had gone to criminal gangs and that genuine "freedom fighters" could not be bought off.

HAVANA - Ailing Fidel Castro said Wednesday that Cuba's president was right to adopt a "dignified silence" over a Moscow newspaper report that Russia may send nuclear bombers to the island, and said Cuba doesn't owe any explanation to Washington about the story.

In a brief, cryptic essay posted on a government Web site Wednesday night, the 81-year-old former president neither confirmed nor denied the Monday report in Izvestia newspaper.
Moscow is angry about U.S. plans for missile-defense sites in eastern Europe and Izvestia cited a "highly placed" military aviation source as saying, "While they are deploying the anti-missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, our long-range strategic aircraft already will be landing in Cuba." Izvestia said this apparently refers to long-range nuclear-capable bombers.

Barack Obama wants three things out of his tour of the Middle East and Europe. He wants people everywhere to think that he has the answers for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He wants Jewish Americans to believe that he is Israel's unquestioning supporter. And he wants Americans to notice that Europeans would vote for him by a five-to-one majority, if they could vote in US elections.

Americans will certainly notice that, although it will not do him much good among the key group of American voters whose support would make an Obama victory next November a dead certainty - the white poor in decaying rust-belt towns who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them ... as a way to explain their frustrations", as he famously put it last spring.

Those people are not impressed by the views of foreigners, and they don't automatically vote Democratic any more. Neither do Jewish Americans, and the Zionist majority among them are deeply suspicious about Obama's commitment to Israel.

In the New York Times on 14 July, in an article spun to appear as if he is ending the war in Iraq, Obama demanded more war in Afghanistan and, in effect, an invasion of Pakistan. He wants more combat troops, more helicopters, more bombs. Bush may be on his way out, but the Republicans have built an ideological machine that transcends the loss of electoral power - because their collaborators are, as the American writer Mike Whitney put it succinctly, "bait-and-switch" Democrats, of whom Obama is the prince.

Those who write of Obama that "when it comes to international affairs, he will be a huge improvement on Bush" demonstrate the same wilful naivety that backed the bait-and-switch of Bill Clinton - and Tony Blair. Of Blair, wrote the late Hugo Young in 1997, "ideology has surrendered entirely to `values'... there are no sacred cows [and] no fossilised limits to the ground over which the mind might range in search of a better Britain...".

Eleven years and five wars later, at least a million people lie dead. Barack Obama is the American Blair. That he is a smooth operator and a black man is irrelevant. He is of an enduring, rampant system whose drum majors and cheer squads never see, or want to see, the consequences of 500lb bombs dropped unerringly on mud, stone and straw houses.