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TEHRAN - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's 1977 Peugeot 504 has received a one million dollar bid after the car was put on an international auction Saturday, state media reported.

Iran's official IRNA news agency quoted Ahmad Esfandiari, the head of Iran's Welfare Organisation, as saying the bid had come from an Arab country. He did not offer details.

Ahmadinejad on Saturday launched a website (www.ahmadinejad-car.com) to invite international bids for his car, with the proceeds to fund a project to build 60,000 homes for the disabled and to needy women who are providing for their families.

The website will accept bids for a period of one month, the report said.

Ahmadinejad has always cultivated an image as a "people's president" and friend of the poor.

After his election to his first term as president in 2005, he was required by law to make an asset declaration and he listed a then 40-year-old 175-square-metre (1,900-square-foot) house in a lower-middle class part of east Tehran, the contents of two bank accounts and the ageing white Peugeot.

Following his controversial re-election last year, he vowed to put "housing, employment and economic reform" at the top of his agenda after house prices soared during his first term of office.

The chief of the Revolutionary Guard angrily slapped Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in early 2010, as Tehran was still dealing with the fallout from last year's election, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable.

The cable, written in February, said Revolutionary Guard Chief of Staff Mohammed Ali Jafari blamed Ahmadinejad for the post-election "mess" in 2009, which saw the country roundly criticized by the West amid allegations of fraud and tough crackdowns on large-scale protests in Tehran.

The guard was founded after the Islamic revolution in 1979 to prevent dissident activity and is a strong internal force within the country, with economic and military wings.

Jafari is seen as close to the most conservative Iranian elements, but Ahmedinejad himself is also deemed a stalwart hawk.

The cable, titled "He who got slapped," quotes an Iran watcher in Baku, Azerbaijan, who related that Ahmedinejad felt that in the aftermath of the post-election street protests, which turned violent, "people feel suffocated."

In a meeting with his national security council, the president "mused that to defuse the situation it may be necessary to allow more personal and social freedoms, including more freedom of the press," according to the source.

This provoked an angry retort from Jafari, according to the cable:

"You are wrong! (In fact) it is YOU who created this mess! And now you say give more freedom to the press?!"

The top guard then slapped the president in the face "causing an uproar and an immediate call for a break in the meeting" which did not resume for another two weeks, the cable said.

It took the intervention of Ayatollah Ahmad Janati, a senior member of the top oversight body, the Guardian Council, to get Jafari and Ahmedinejad back to the table, according to the cable.

The source cited in the cable released by WikiLeaks "predicted that events are trending towards major developments and a new phases" during 2010.

Manama: Senior officials in several Arab countries have close links with the CIA and many people keep visiting US embassies in their countries to establish links with the US intelligence agency, Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks whistle-blowing website, said.

?These officials are spies for the US in their countries,? Assange told pan-Arab Al Jazeera channel in an interview on Wednesday evening.

The interviewer, Ahmad Mansour, said during the second part of the interview, that Assange had shown him the files that contained the names of some top Arab officials with alleged links with the CIA, Qatari daily The Peninsula reported on Thursday.

However, neither Assange nor Mansour however divulged the names of these officials.

According to the WikiLeaks founder, US embassies around the world are very anxious about Israel, Iran, labour unions, arms dealings, mainly selling of American arms, and spying through high-tech devices.

Assange said he feared he could be killed, but added that there were 2,000 websites that were ready to publish the remaining files that are in possession of WikiLeaks after ?he has been done away with."

?If I am killed or detained for a long time, there are 2,000 websites ready to publish the remaining files. We have protected these websites through very safe passwords,? Assange told the Doha-based network.

Currently, the whistle-blowing website is exposing files in a ?responsible? manner, he said.

"But if I am forced, we could go to the extreme and expose each and every file that we have access to," he said. "We must protect our sources at whatever cost. This is our sincere concern."

"WikiLeaks is receiving sensitive files from Afghanistan, Kenya, Russia and China, among other countries. For nine years the US and Nato forces have failed to silence people in Afghanistan because the people there are loyal and truthful. The US marines fighting in Afghanistan are not happy being there and don?t really know why they are there and fighting for what," said Assange.

The US is trying to use latest technology to disrupt his website but in vain. ?Washington is also projecting me as a terrorist and wants to convince the world that I am another Osama bin Laden,? he said.

Assange said that he would be put on a trial for his various exposes from January 11 in a special court that deals with terror-related cases.

?If the UK, where I am based right now, decides to hand me over to Sweden for alleged cases of sexual abuse, Stockholm will hand me over to the US,? he said.

The Australian national said he feared that the US might slap laws declaring him as a spy who had been acting against Washington. The Pentagon has set up a ?war room? manned by 120 officials and their job is just to disrupt and destroy WikiLeaks, he said.

?We have more files dealing with defense issues of Central Europe, but I or my staff didn?t have the time to go through all of them. What is being published by the five media partners of WikiLeaks are only those details which they think are interesting for their readers," he said, quoted by the Qatari daily.

DUBAI - A housewife has saved her husband from the clutches of a wolf in rural Saudi Arabia, local daily Arab News reported on Saturday.

The woman went out to look for her husband after he did not return from tending their goats to find him being attacked by the wolf, according to the newspaper.

The woman ran back to their house and returned with a kitchen knife and stabbed the animal to death, Arab News reported.

The husband, in his 70s, had been fending off the wolf for more than an hour before his wife turned up, according to the newspaper. The report did not give wife's age.

The family have hung the wolf?s body from a tree in front of the house to scare off other wolves, a custom in rural areas, Arab News reported.
Women power

DUBAI - Muslims can take part in religious festivals of other faiths if the purpose of their attendance is to attract non-Muslims to Islam, a senior Saudi scholar said in remarks published on Thursday in the run-up to Christmas.

Dr Ghaith bin Muhammad al-Sheikh al-Mubarak, member of the Council of Senior Ulema (scholars), said by attending festivals of other faiths Muslims could help to ?pacify their souls?, according to local daily the Saudi Gazette.

The scholar said when a Muslim rejects an invitation to attend such a festival it could alienate non-Muslims and divert them from the right path, the newspaper reported.

Saudi King Abdullah earlier this year issued a decree stating that only members of the Council of Senior Ulema were allowed to issue fatwas.

The limitation was imposed following a number of fatwas by individual clerics that caused disputes and dissent among Muslims, decree said.

Manama: Western papers have been reluctant to publish diplomatic cables containing information about Israel, WikiLeaks site founder has said.

?There are 3,700 files related to Israel and the source of 2,700 files is Israel,? Julian Assange told Qatar-based Al Jazeera TV.

?The Guardian, El-Pais and Le Monde have published only two percent of the files related to Israel due to the sensitive relations between Germany, France and Israel. Even New York Times could not publish more due to the sensitivities related to the Jewish community in the US,? Assange said in the interview telecast live from the UK on Wednesday evening.

http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/qatar/western-media-reluctant-to-publish-wikileaks-cables-about-israel-1.734817

RIYADH - Private Saudi girls' high schools are being investigated by the education ministry for holding an "illegal" sports tournament, the Arab News reported Tuesday.

The groundbreaking December 8 event involving 200 females from six Jeddah private high schools broke ministry rules against girls' sports in schools, a ministry official told the newspaper.

"We don't have any regulations that say that it's okay for girls' schools to hold sports classes or training," said Ahmed Al-Zahrani, director of girls' education in Jeddah.

"This tournament was held by these schools, something that has now led us to know about their illegal activities," he said.

Women's access to sports overall is tightly constricted in Saudi Arabia, which is governed according to an ultra-strict version of Islam. Women cannot participate in the Saudi Olympics team, and are not allowed to attend public football matches.

While a few women-only private clubs and private women's universities offer sporting possibilities, sports are prohibited at primary and secondary schools for girls.

The tournament was hosted by the private Effat University and included basketball, badminton, swimming and athletics.

"I was surprised to receive a letter from the Ministry of Education questioning me about the competition and the reason why it was held in the first place," Farida Farsi, chairwoman of Al-Hamra Schools, told Arab News.

"I also received a huge number of letters and telephone calls from conservative Saudi men and sheikhs who said that I should've known better and advised me not to hold such competitions in the future because it?s not lady-like," she said

http://gulfnews.com/news/region/iraq/former-soldier-talks-about-slaying-of-iraqi-family-1.733025

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange surrendered to London police Tuesday as part of a Swedish sex-crimes investigation, the latest blow to an organization that faces legal, financial and technological challenges after releasing hundreds of secret U.S. diplomatic cables.

Assange was due at Westminster Magistrate?s Court later Tuesday. If he challenges his extradition to Sweden, he will likely be remanded into U.K. custody or released on bail until another judge rules on whether to extradite him, a spokeswoman for the extradition department said on customary condition of anonymity.

Since beginning to release the diplomatic cables last week, WikiLeaks has seen its bank accounts canceled and its web sites attacked. The U.S. government has launched a criminal investigation, saying the group has jeopardized U.S. national security and diplomatic efforts around the world.

The legal troubles for Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, stem from allegations leveled against him by two women he met in Sweden over the summer.

Assange is accused of rape and sexual molestation in one case and of sexual molestation and unlawful coercion in another.

Assange denies the allegations, which his British attorney Mark Stephens says stem from a ?dispute over consensual but unprotected sex.?

Assange and Stephens have suggested the prosecution is being manipulated for political reasons ? a claim that Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny has rejected. Ny was not commenting on the Assange arrest until later Tuesday.

A spokesman for WikiLeaks called Assange?s arrest an attack on media freedom and said it won?t prevent the organization from releasing more secret documents.

?This will not change our operation,? Kristinn Hrafnsson said.

But Hrafnsson also said the group had no plans at the moment to release the key to a heavily encrypted version of some of its most important documents ? an ?insurance? file that has been distributed to supporters in case of an emergency.

Hrafnsson said that will only come into play if ?grave matters? involving Wikileaks staff occur ? but did not elaborate on what those would be.
Beginning in July, WikiLeaks angered the U.S. government by releasing tens of thousands of secret U.S. military documents.

That was followed by the ongoing release of what WikiLeaks says will eventually be a quarter-million cables from U.S. diplomatic posts around the world. The group provided those documents to five major newspapers, which have been working with WikiLeaks to edit the cables for publication.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40496218/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/gt1=43001

PESHAWAR, Pakistan ? A hardline cleric in northwest Pakistan on Friday offered a reward of 6,000 dollars to anyone who kills a Christian mother sentenced to death for insulting the Prophet Mohammed.

Maulana Yousuf Qureshi issued the call in Peshawar, the capital of northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, at a rally against moves to pardon the woman.

Asia Bibi, a mother of five, was sentenced on November 8 to death by hanging, under controversial blasphemy laws that human rights activists say encourage Islamist extremism.

The government attempted to pardon Bibi after an international outcry over the case, but a Pakistani court on Monday prevented it from granting her a swift pardon.

"We demand that the government should hang her to death under the law. If it does not do so, we will offer a reward of 500,000 rupees (6,000 dollars) to anyone killing her," Qureshi said.

"There are hundreds of thousands of people including mujahedin (warriors) and Taliban who are ready to sacrifice their lives for the honour of the Prophet Mohammed. Anyone of them could finish her," Qureshi said.

About 200 people attended the rally after the weekly Friday prayers at the historic 17th century Mahabat Khan mosque in central Peshawar. Qureshi is the prayer leader at the mosque but does not have a large following.

He has offered rewards for killings in the past -- including an offer in 2006 of one million dollars and a car for the deaths of artists whose controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed appeared in Danish newspapers.

But no one has yet attempted to claim his rewards.

Bibi can be executed only if the Lahore high court upholds her sentence, which she has appealed. No date has so far been set for the appeal hearing.

Most of those convicted of blasphemy in Pakistan have their sentences overturned or commuted on appeal through the courts.

Bibi was arrested in June 2009 after Muslim women said that she had made derogatory remarks about the Prophet Mohammed. She was set upon by a mob, then arrested by police and sentenced on November 8 this year.

Rights activists and pressure groups say it is the first time that a woman has been sentenced to hang in Pakistan for blasphemy.

A report commissioned by the government recommended a pardon, saying that "the blasphemy case against Asia Bibi has been registered on grounds of personal enmity".

Her family said they had been forced to go into hiding after they received death threats.

Only around three percent of Pakistan's population of 167 million are estimated to be non-Muslim.

Updated at: 0008 PST,  Saturday, November 27, 2010
MADRID: After billions of years the Sun finally has an owner -- a woman from Spain's soggy region of Galicia said Friday she had registered the star at a local notary public as being her property.

Angeles Duran, 49, told the online edition of daily El Mundo she took the step in September after reading about an American man who had registered himself as the owner of the moon and most planets in our Solar System.

There is an international agreement which states that no country may claim ownership of a planet or star, but it says nothing about individuals, she added.

"There was no snag, I backed my claim legally, I am not stupid, I know the law. I did it but anyone else could have done it, it simply occurred to me first."

The document issued by the notary public declares Duran to be the "owner of the Sun, a star of spectral type G2, located in the centre of the solar system, located at an average distance from Earth of about 149,600,000 kilometres".

Duran, who lives in the town of Salvaterra do Mino, said she now wants to slap a fee on everyone who uses the sun and give half of the proceeds to the Spanish government and 20 percent to the nation's pension fund.

She would dedicate another 10 percent to research, another 10 percent to ending world hunger -- and would keep the remaining 10 percent herself.

"It is time to start doing things the right way, if there is an idea for how to generate income and improve the economy and people's well-being, why not do it?" she asked.

Updated at: 2232 PST,  Saturday, November 27, 2010
WASHINGTON: Governments around the world on Saturday braced for the release of millions of potentially embarrassing US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks as Washington raced to contain the fallout.

The whistle-blower website is expected to put online three million leaked cables covering US dealings and confidential views of countries including Australia, Britain, Canada, Israel, Russia and Turkey.

US diplomats skipped their Thanksgiving holiday weekend and headed to foreign ministries hoping to stave off anger over the cables, which are internal messages that often lack the niceties diplomats voice in public.

The top US military commander, Admiral Mike Mullen, urged WikiLeaks to stop its "extremely dangerous" release of documents, according to a transcript of a CNN interview set to air Sunday.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had contacted leaders in Germany, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Britain, France and Afghanistan over the issue, he added.

In London, the government urged British newspaper editors to "bear in mind" the national security implications of publishing any of the files.

British officials said some information may be subject to DA-Notices -- voluntary agreements between the government and the media to withhold sensitive data -- governing military operations and the intelligence services.

Russia's respected Kommersant newspaper said that the documents included US diplomats' conversations with Russian politicians and "unflattering" assessments of some of them.

WikiLeaks has not specified the documents' contents or when they would be put online, but Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan said officials were expecting a release "late this week or early next week."

The website has said there would be "seven times" as many secret documents as the 400,000 Iraq war logs it published last month.

Turkish media said the release includes papers suggesting that Ankara helped Al-Qaeda militants in Iraq, and that the United States helped Iraq-based Kurdish rebels fighting against Turkey -- potentially explosive revelations for the two allies.

US officials have already contacted Ankara over the leaks.

The US embassy "gave us information on the issue, just as other countries have been informed," a senior diplomat in Ankara, who declined to be named, told AFP.

Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Turkey did not know what the documents contained.

"This is speculation," he said on CNN Turk. "But as a principle, tolerating or ignoring any terrorist action that originates in Turkey and targets a neighboring country, particularly Iraq, is out of the question."

Israel has also been warned of potential embarrassment from the latest release, which could include confidential reports from the US embassy in Tel Aviv, Haaretz newspaper said, citing a senior Israeli official.

The US ambassador in Canada telephoned Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon about the leak, a ministry spokeswoman said, adding that the Canadian embassy in Washington was "engaging" with the State Department on the matter.

In Rome, the government said that it was alarmed about "possible negative repercussions for Italy" from the release of the cables.

Officials in Australia, Britain, Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Sweden also said they had been contacted by US diplomats regarding the release.

Australia on Saturday condemned the whistle-blower website, saying the planned release could be a national security risk.

"The reckless and large-scale exposure of classified material by WikiLeaks could put at risk individuals named in these documents and harm the national security interests of the United States and its partners," an Australian foreign affairs spokesman said.

US officials have not confirmed the source of the leaked documents, but suspicion has fallen on Bradley Manning, a former army intelligence agent.

He was arrested after the earlier release of a video showing air strikes that killed civilian reporters in Baghdad.

Wired magazine said Manning confessed to the leaks during a webchat in May. He was quoted as saying he acted out of idealism after watching Iraqi police detain men for distributing a "scholarly critique" against corruption.

Lebanese police on Sunday arrested radical Islamic preacher Omar Bakri, just days after the formerly British-based cleric boasted he would ?not spend one day? of a life sentence behind bars.

?He was arrested by a patrol of intelligence agents from the Internal Security Force in his home in (the main northern city of) Tripoli,? a security official said. ?He is currently being transferred to Beirut.?

An AFP correspondent at the scene said police had fired in the air to disperse curious onlookers who had gathered around Bakri?s home.

Bakri, who has praised the September 11, 2001 attacks and hailed the hijackers as the ?magnificent 19?, was sentenced to life by a Lebanese military court on Thursday.

The 50-year-old, who lived in Britain for 20 years, was found guilty, along with more than 40 other Lebanese, Palestinians, Syrians and Saudis, of ?incitement to murder, theft and the possession of arms and explosives?.

The day after the sentence was handed down he vowed he would ?not spend one day in prison?.

?I will not hand myself in to any court. I do not believe in the law in Britain as in Lebanon,? he told AFP at his home.

Bakri, who failed to show up for sentencing on Thursday, said he had not been formally told the court would issue a verdict and insisted he was innocent. The Syrian-born cleric, a holder of Lebanese nationality, also denied he had any links to Al Qaeda. ?I have no ties to Al Qaeda, direct or indirect, other than the fact that I believe in the same ideology,? he said at his home in Tripoli?s Abi Samra neighbourhood, a hub for radical Islamist groups.

Bakri was banned from Britain in 2005 as part of government measures following the London underground and bus bombings that year.

He sparked outrage in Britain in the wake of the bombings for saying he would not hand over to police Muslims planning to launch attacks.

He also called Britain?s former prime minister John Major and Russia?s former president Vladimir Putin ?legitimate targets?.

Upon his arrival in Beirut in 2005, Bakri was detained but freed the next day. No charges were pressed against him at the time.

Born in 1960 to a wealthy Syrian family, Bakri began studying Islam at the age of five and at 15 joined the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.

He later abandoned the Brotherhood and joined the Hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation).

He split with Hizb ut-Tahrir in 1983 and founded his own group, Al Muhajirun (The Emigrants), in Jeddah that year.

When expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1986, he moved to Britain and gained a following as a preacher before his expulsion. Al Muhajirun has also been proscribed under the UK Terrorism Act 2000.

Bakri has two wives ? British and Lebanese ? and seven children. He is expecting an eighth child with his Lebanese wife. ?

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle09.asp?xfile=data/middleeast/2010/November/middleeast_November305.xml&section=middleeast