Six men have been arrested and charged in connection with a terrorist plot to attack American soldiers at the Fort Dix Army base in the northeastern U.S. state of New Jersey. VOA correspondent Meredith Buel has details from Washington.

U.S. law enforcement officials say the men planned for more than a year to attack Fort Dix with the goal of killing at least 100 American soldiers using rocket propelled grenades and automatic weapons.

The men were arrested after they tried to buy AK-47 automatic rifles and semi-automatic M-16s from an undercover informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

U.S. officials say four of the men were born in the former Yugoslavia, one in Jordan and one in Turkey. All have been living in the United States for a long time, some legally in the country while others are illegal immigrants.

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If you think the price of gas is high now, imagine what might have happened if this plot succeeded.

Police in Saudi Arabia have arrested 172 suspected militants in an alleged plot to blow up the country’s oil fields.

The apparent plan, which has echoes of classic al-Qaida moves, is said to have involved training pilots to fly aircraft into buildings and facilities to wreak as much havoc as possible. Among the targets were some as yet unspecified places outside the country.

Saudi authorities also claim public figures were set as targets for assassination, and the plot was about to have a start date set when authorities swooped in.

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The peak output of the Burgan oil field will now be around 1.7 million barrels per day, and not the two million barrels per day forecast for the rest of the field’s 30 to 40 years of life, Chairman Farouk Al Zanki told Bloomberg.

He said that engineers had tried to maintain 1.9 million barrels per day but that 1.7 million is the optimum rate. Kuwait will now spend some $3 billion a year for the next year to boost output and exports from other fields.

However, it is surely a landmark moment when the world’s second largest oil field begins to run dry. For Burgan has been pumping oil for almost 60 years and accounts for more than half of Kuwait’s proven oil reserves. This is also not what forecasters are currently assuming.

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A rights watchdog has launched a scathing attack on a motion tabled in Bahrain’s lower house to ban migrant bachelors from living in residential areas, saying that it amounted to creation of ghettos.

“This motion is discriminatory and promotes derogatory and racist attitudes towards migrant workers. To relocate labour camps to industrial areas, where few Bahrainis would choose to live, appears as the first step towards building a ghetto where migrant workers will be segregated from Bahraini residents,” Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR) Vice-President Nabeel Rajab yesterday said in a statement, a copy of which was sent to Gulf News.

Citing concerns about the erosion of traditional social values, several deputies have called for the relocation of migrant bachelors away from Bahraini families.

Their allegations culminated last week when Islamist deputy Nasser Al Fadhala said that many migrant bachelors used their houses to make alcohol, run prostitution rings or to rape children and housemaids.

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The dialogue between the German government and the country’s Muslim community is heating up shortly before the second leg of an integration conference.

Maria Boehmer, Germany’s envoy for integration matters and a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives, has harshly criticized a demand made by the German Muslim community to separate girls and boys in the physical education classroom.

“We will not allow that a small minority of backward people wants to install (in Germany) the rules of their grandfathers,” she told the Neue Osnarbruecker Zeitung newspaper.

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[Would she have been allowed to stand in Saudi Arabia beign a female and all-ed]

COPENHAGEN, Denmark — A Muslim woman denounced and ridiculed by nationalists for wearing an Islamic head scarf announced Friday she was running for Parliament — a move bound to rekindle heated debate about Islam in Denmark.

The next election is not expected until 2009, but the mere thought of Asama Abdol-Hamid entering the legislature has revived fears of clashing cultures that emerged last year when Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad sparked riots in Muslim countries.

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I decided to write this essay following the riots in Malmö this weekend. Malmö is Sweden’s third largest city and by far the worst city in Scandinavia when it comes to Muslim aggression. I read recently that an Arab girl interviewed in Malmö said that she liked it so much there, it felt almost like an Arab city. Native Swedes have been moving away from the city for years, turned into refugees in their own country by Jihad, not too different from the non-Muslims in some regions of the Philippines, southern Thailand or Kashmir in India, or for that matter Christian Serbs in Kosovo.

Jonathan Friedman, an American living outside Malmö, mentions that the so-called Integration Act of 1997 proclaimed that “Sweden is a Multicultural society.” Notes to the Act also stated that “Since a large group of people have their origins in another country, the Swedish population lacks a common history. The relationship to Sweden and the support given to the fundamental values of society thus carry greater significance for integration than a common historical origin.”

Native Swedes have thus been reduced to just another ethnic group in Sweden, with no more claim to the country than the Kurds or the Somalis who arrived there last Thursday. The political authorities of the country have erased their own people’s history and culture.

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Sweden is a country that has virtually no public debate about mass immigration, which continues at full speed. The Swedish political and media elites congratulate themselves for their Multicultural goodness. If sacrificing your own children is the definition of good, then exactly what constitutes evil?

From The Local, January 25, 2007: “Staff at Gustav Adolf School in the southern town of Landskrona have now retracted a controversial ban on the use of languages other than Swedish on school premises. Just days after its introduction the principal has downgraded the ban to a “main rule”. Consequently pupils will now be allowed to speak their native languages during breaks. But, in a new measure, pupils will have to pass two security guards when entering the school. On Saturday it was revealed that the management of the school had decided that only Swedish could be spoken on school premises. Almost half of the pupils at the school come from an immigrant background. The ban was introduced following a number of incidents in which staff and pupils felt they had been insulted in languages they did not understand.”

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“THE country’s growing Polish community will soon be able to speak to local gardai in their native tongue.

Members of the force around the country have undertaken “basic Polish” language classes, according to the Garda Press Office.

There are over 130,000 Polish people now living here and the efforts of the gardai will help to improve communication, particularly with Polish people who have little English. In one case, almost a dozen Donegal gardai are in the middle of a basic Polish language course at Letterkenny Vocational School.

Letterkenny Sergeant Christy Galligan, who is one of the students, said the course would last 10 weeks and participating gardai would then have the option of progressing to a higher standard of the language. “The course is very good. We are being taught by a Polish guy and he is learning some English from us. “There are more than 3,000 Polish nationals living in the county and the course will help us have a better understanding of each other. It is useful for greetings, asking for names and addresses and for giving directions. We also learn about their country and their customs.”

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Providers are called on to do more against “hate pages” on the Web

Internet providers will be expected to do more against violence- and hate-extolling pages on the Internet. A declaration of the European Parliament, which will be submitted to a plenary session in Strasbourg next week, is designed to give a decisive push in this direction. The draft of the declaration, which heise online has seen, calls on providers in somewhat vague language to make provisions against “hate pages” part of their standard terms and conditions. The ultimate object of the push by five EU Members of Parliament, Glyn Ford and Claude Moraes of the UK’s Labour Party, the Hungarian Liberal Party member Viktória Mohácsi and the two German European Members of Parliament Bernd Posselt (Christian Social Union; CSU) and Feleknas Uca (The Left Party), is to banish racism and hate propaganda from the Internet altogether. The preamble to the declaration mentions anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and anti-Romany campaigns. Should the providers refuse to act more forcefully the five initiators of the declaration have vowed to pressure the European Commission into drafting appropriate legislation.

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