THEY ARE THE 99! 99 Mystical Noor Stones carry all that is left of the wisdom and knowledge of the lost civilization of Baghdad. But the Noor Stones lie scattered across the globe - now little more than a legend. One man has made it his life’s mission to seek out what was lost. His name is Dr. Ramzi Razem and he has searched fruitlessly for the Noor Stones all his life. Now, his luck is about to change - the first of the stones have been rediscovered and with them a special type of human who can unlock the gem’s mystical power. Ramzi brings these gem - bearers together to form a new force for good in the world. A force known as ... the 99! THE STORY SO FAR : Jami the Assembler’s new machine doesn’t work -- which should be impossible! New member Hamid the Praiseworthy tries to help Aleem and Mujiba to find out why... but then Aleem cries out in alarm... www.the99.org The 99 ® and all related characters ® and © 2012, Teshkeel Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 31, 2012 Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan delivers the keynote address during the third day of the 2012 Republican national Convention at the Tampa Bay <strong>Times</strong> Forum Wednesday in Tampa, Florida. — AFP Ryan picks up bullhorn By Andy Sullivan Paul Ryan built his reputation as a fearless wonk who wasn’t afraid to put specific numbers on his small-government ideals. Now that he is the Republican Party’s vice presidential nominee, the devil lies in the details. In a speech that marked his ascension onto the national stage, Ryan spelled out his conservative vision in the broad brush strokes of the presidential campaign, rather than the pointillistic data sets of the House of Representatives Budget Committee. But the core message at the Republican National Convention was the same. Ryan said he and his boss, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, must place the federal government on a crash diet and overhaul popular benefit programs in order to avoid a European-style debt crisis. “The choice is whether to put hard limits on economic growth or hard limits on the size of government, and we choose to limit government,” Ryan said. The take-no-prisoners stance has made Ryan a hero to conservatives, but it carries risks with a broader electorate. While Americans may back the idea of spending cuts in the abstract, they tend to balk when presented with specifics. Polls show that more voters prefer keeping the Medicare health insurance plan for the elderly in place, rather than overhauling it as Ryan proposes. “As rhetoric, it was an excellent speech in going over those broad principles. Likewise as rhetoric, it glossed over the hard realities of how you would achieve what he was talking about,” said Charles Franklin, a professor at Marquette Law School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that Ryan used personal stories to illustrate complex economic issues: the shuttered General Motors plant in his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin, the small business his mother started at age 50, and the importance of Medicare to his mother, who smiled from the audience. There were sins of omission. Ryan slammed Obama for ignoring a presidential debt panel, but failed to note that he himself served on the panel and voted against its findings. He also failed to mention that the GM plant closed before Obama took office. Left unsaid were the tradeoffs Ryan and Romney would make in order to scale back the government to the level they envision. “He didn’t say what the tough choices are,” said Steven Schier, a political science professor at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. “You get into that in a convention speech, you lose the crowd, you lose the TV audience.” As a vice presidential candidate, Ryan now must play second fiddle to a man who has often been reluctant to provide details of his own economic policies. Romney has declined to say which tax loopholes he would close in order to lower income tax rates by 20 percent, and his own proposal for Medicare reforms lacks the specifics that would allow independent experts to determine how much they would cost taxpayers and beneficiaries. Democrats, of course, are happy to fill in the blanks as they argue that Romney and Ryan would gut programs that benefit the middle class and the poor in order to cut taxes for the wealthy. With Ryan’s long voting record in Congress and several years of detailed budget proposals, they have plenty of material to work with. Though Ryan is revered in Washington for his deep knowledge of fiscal policy, his skills as a salesman may be underappreciated. Only eight of his fellow Republicans in the House of Representatives backed his plan to overhaul the Medicare prescription drug program when he introduced it in 2008. Within three years, nearly all of them supported it. He has won reelection in his Democratic-leaning district by wide margins. And he sounded like he was ready for his biggest sales job yet. “Ladies and gentlemen, our nation needs this debate,” he said. “We want this debate. We will win this debate.” — Reuters By Lawrence Bartlett Opinion Afghanistan insider attacks roil NATO The scale of insider attacks by Afghan troops against their NATO allies is unprecedented in modern warfare and threatens to derail the West’s carefully laid withdrawal plans, analysts say. August has been the worst month for so-called green-on-blue attacks in Afghanistan in more than 10 years of war, with nearly one in three international coalition deaths caused by Afghan allies. Most of the dead are Americans, but the latest to die were three Australian troops killed by a member of the Afghan security forces in southern Uruzgan province on Wednesday. The assaults have spiked this year, with more than 30 incidents claiming the lives of 45 coalition troops, making up about 14 percent of the overall death toll in the war for 2012. Analysts and officers agree that no other modern war, including those in Vietnam and Iraq, has seen so many cases of allies turning their weapons on international troops, but wrestle with the reasons for the phenomenon. Taleban insurgents claim responsibility for many of the attacks, saying their fighters have infiltrated the Afghan army and police, but NATO says the majority of the incidents are due to cultural differences and personal animosities. The spike in attacks has alarmed the US-led NATO force to the extent that all soldiers have been ordered to be armed and ready to fire at any time, even within their tightly protected bases. That level of distrust undermines NATO’s plans to work increasingly closely with Afghan forces as they prepare to hand over responsibility for security ahead of the withdrawal of their 130,000 troops by the end of 2014. “I believe (the scale of the insider attacks) is unprecedented in the history of war,” Fabrizio Foschini of the Afghanistan Analysts Network told AFP. “It is one of the developments that ISAF is most concerned about because it represents both a military setback on the ground and it conveys a very negative perception to home public opinion.” Foschini agrees with NATO’s assessment that most attacks are due to cultural differences, and points out that many Afghans say they got on better with Russian soldiers during the Soviet Union’s 10-year occupation in the 1980s. The religious divide is also part of the picture, Foschini says, and some observers have linked the increase in attacks to the burning of Qurans at a US military base in February this year. But “the polarisation between who is a foreigner and who is an Afghan is becoming bigger because of the prolonged war and prolonged foreign presence, which is raising some hostility”, he says. Apart from the Quran burning, the image of US troops has taken a battering this year through pictures and videos showing soldiers abusing the bodies of the dead and a massacre of civilians by a rogue American trooper. Nick Mills, an associate professor of journalism at Boston University who served as a combat photographer for the US Army in Vietnam, also said he believed the green-on-blue attacks “have no parallel in recent military history”. “The Afghans know that once the Western troops leave, they are going to have to choose sides - the Kabul government or the Taleban - and the Kabul government has little respect or credibility,” he told AFP. NATO has tried to play down the importance of the attacks, pointing out that they are carried out by a tiny proportion of the Afghan forces that work with the International Security Assistance Force. But US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has acknowledged that he is “very concerned” about the attacks and the impact they are having on cooperation with Afghan allies. Afghan opposition leader Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister and potential presidential candidate in 2014 elections, also pointed to problems within the government as a reason for the attacks. Abdullah takes President Hamid Karzai to task for what he calls his “vague” message in which he regularly calls the Taleban “brothers”, urging them to talk peace, and criticises the United States. “Sometimes you don’t know who he calls the enemy - the Taleban or the Americans,” Abdullah said. — AFP
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