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| Starting up a home based jewelry business with beading can be really fulfilling. Beading is relatively easy to learn. You do, however, require a strong interest in fashion, form and colors. The advantage of beading is that you can quickly adapt to fashions and the pearl beads seasonal colors, making jewelry pieces to enhance the latest fashions. Consequently, they will be highly desirable. When you start to make beaded jewelry, it is very important to recognize your own individual style, since this will effect the way you design. Do you prefer a classical design, working with pearls and gems and keeping your beaded designs uncluttered and clear? Do you love dramatic, interesting styles with extravagant forms and materials? Or do fun styles with unusual ideas and lots of freshwater pearl jewelry light, joyful colors appeal to you more? Once you have clearly identified your personal style of designing, you will be able to define your target market, their age group, and their style of clothes. Studying fashion magazines, collecting photos of the various styles of clothes, for which you wish to cultured pearl jewelry create your beaded jewelry, will help you refine your designing. This will also assist you in staying up-to-date, whatever style you choose. Even the classical style varies from year to year. Sometimes the emphasis is on camel and creme cashmere, sometimes on dark wine red linen and silk. If you are just starting, it would be wise to target your designs to the type of people you connect with, or intend associating with by joining various clubs. Naturally, wearing your own jewelry on the different occasions is the best business card you can have. When you receive a complement, you can instantly let them know that you make the akoya pearl jewelry jewelry and give them your card with your website address. Later you can make a list of stores that are selling clothes in your particular style and which would be suitable for selling your jewelry. You can then make connections and eventually add these businesses to your list of customers. Participating at fairs will be the next step. Again your stand should reflect clearly your personal style, since this will attract the clients whom your designs will appeal to. In fact, the more you can express your particular style in everything to pearl necklace do with your jewelry business, the easier it will be for you to build a brand, even on a small scale. This should include the design of your website. Building up a home based jewelry business with beading is a great way to get started in a small way. You require little capital to begin with, since you are not working with expensive gold and gems. Marketing your product is extremely important and you will require as much energy in learning this art, as you do for your jewelry designing and production. Since this work could involve much isolation, and isolation can be the biggest dream destroyer, it would also be important to join a good forum or group. You will meet similar minded people and continually get inspiration and encouragement | ||
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| If you think that all couples wishing to get married are choosing only modern designs for their wedding rings ... think again. This is because among them, there are many couples who are planning to have a more traditional wedding and more so because some such couples are into old-fashioned romance. It is precisely these couples who are choosing antique wedding rings to twisted pearl necklace match the overall style of the traditional wedding they have in mind. The choice of antique style wedding bands also reflect the individual personality and taste of the couple. It's true that searching for the perfect antique wedding rings, or for that matter, antique filigree wedding rings, can be a daunting task given the enormity of the range of antique style wedding rings available online, in jewelry stores or advertised. However, it is quite possible to multi-strands pearl necklace get antique wedding rings to match your old-fashioned romance as well as the old-world style of the wedding you've planned. Believe it or not, the best place to search for antique wedding bands could be your own home and that of your partner's. If both of you are lucky enough to possess family heirlooms in the form of antique style wedding rings, you could end up with authentic antique wedding rings and what's more, for free. The advantage here is that if you wish to rope pearl necklace make alterations in the size and design of such rings to suit you, these can be carried out by any professional jeweler. In case, you wish to change the gem stone settings or add other embellishments, this can also be done easily. The beauty of heirloom, antique style wedding bands and even antique filigree wedding bands is that they have the ability to exude an antique look yet appear as good as new when thoroughly cleaned and polished. To cater to the special segment of couples looking for antique wedding rings, several jewelry stores and retailers have separate sections where you and your partner can find matching antique style wedding rings. Apart from such jewelry stores, there are many specialized, mail order jewelry catalogues and online jewelry stores which feature a wide range of akoya pearl necklace antique wedding rings as well as antique filigree wedding rings. However, it is important to be fully convinced of the legitimate status of such stores, the specification of the antique wedding rings you may order and the authenticity of the gem stones, should they form part of your rings. Photographs of antique style wedding rings in jewelry catalogues or online directories can be deceptive, therefore, you must be careful and exercise some caution. If you and your partner have mutually agreed on an idea or design that you've created yourselves for your antique wedding bands but not sure what they will look like when finished, you can get a professional designer at any reputed jewelry store to silver pearl necklace come up with a more realistic illustration or an actual prototype. If you succeed, this will be one more precious memory, among the many others, of your contribution to the creation of your own antique wedding rings and all the other events that made your old-fashioned wedding a big success | ||
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| One of the hottest trends in weddings these days is to use elements that feel organic and natural. For a design element that can feel both earthy and Zen, check out river rocks. These smooth little stones can be used in a surprising number of ways to pearl strand wholesale add a wonderfully natural feeling to your wedding. River rocks are a terrific addition to many types of pearl earrings wholesale wedding décor. Of course they are perfect if you are being married by a river or stream, but they are equally at home in rustic lodges, backyards, and city lofts. An opulent ballroom is about the only type of wedding venue where the natural stones may look out of place. You can begin introducing the river rocks right in your marriage ceremony. There is a charming ritual that some couples are choosing instead of the traditional unity candle. At the start of the ceremony, each guest is handed a river rock to hold. They are then asked to say a blessing or make a wish over the rock, and at the conclusion of the ceremony, the pearl necklace wholesale assembled wishes of the congregation are placed into a special vessel. You can make the rite even more special by writing something on the rocks, such as your initials and wedding date or a short line from a favorite romantic poem. The river rock unity ceremony is a perfect addition to an outdoor wedding. It will fit right in with the type of wedding where the bride is wearing a simple flowing gown and handmade jewelry. The naturally free-form style of handmade keishi pearl wedding jewelry is a wonderful complement to the earthy stones. You can also think about using a row of cultured pearl jewlery river rocks down each side of the aisle to define the walkway. A very pleasing and easy idea for your escort cards is to use a metallic pen to write the name of each guest on a smooth stone. It is the ultimate DIY project; just be sure that whoever wields the pen has good handwriting. Give the escort card table more flair by arranging the river rocks over a bed of wheatgrass or a woven mat. It is a low-key and yet elegant way to display your escort cards. The centerpieces will lend themselves to the river rock idea wonderfully. You can use a bunch of the smooth stones to anchor the floral arrangements in blister pearl clear vases. Another idea is to let the river rocks themselves stand alone as a decorative element. Arrange a trio of low clear or white vessels in the center of each table. Fill one with river rocks and the other two with natural elements such as moss or sand. It is a very chic Zen centerpiece design. There are certain types of flowers and other items that combine with the river rocks in a very harmonious way. Look for things with an earthy and natural feeling, such as branches and twigs, vines, moss, and berries. Low flowering succulent plants look fantastic when paired with smooth stones. You can also think about cherry blossoms, pussy willows, and even orchids arranged in a loose and unstructured way. It is actually pretty amazing that something as basic as a smooth stone can be used in so many ways to decorate your wedding. The humble river rock is right in line with the organic and "green" wedding trend, and it is also nice because it can easily be arranged to look great with no prior experience. For any bride hoping to give her wedding a modern earthy feeling, smooth river rocks are the perfect addition. | ||
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| Body piercing is thought to be an expensive affair. Many people think that it involves a lot of money. This is not true. You can get body piercing done at a cheaper rate too. You need not spend a lot of money for body piercing. You must know whom to approach to freshwater pearl jewelry get body piercing done. You can get them at the best price. Find the hottest new body jewellery styles in the world at best prices online. No matter what kind of body piercing you are looking for, you can get them all at any body piercing store or even online. Belly button rings, navel jewellery, tongue rings, nose rings or lip labrets, are different types of body piercings available at various stores. You can choose from a wide range of body piercing rings - sexy body jewellery, captive bead rings, ear plugs, tunnels, belt buckles, and gay pride jewellery. It is very easy to akoya pearl jewelry find a range of piercing jewellery at clearance prices. Body piercing involves a new set of piercing equipment for each customer. Hence, it may cost slightly high. While getting body piercing done, one must opt for the best quality of piercing. The kind of metal that is used for piercing must be sterilised. It is slightly painful. Piercing stings, like a quick jab. The healing takes hardly any time. A good choice of metal (e.g. Titanium), can help recover fast. Many women find belly bars very attractive. You can also get cheap belly bars. Choose from belly bars, navel rings & belly button jewellery from various stores. Opt for pearl necklace rings made of sterling silver & surgical steel jewellery for navel piercings. You can also get amazing belly ring designs, high quality body jewellery and also a wide range of other jewellery including tongue bars, labrets & belly rings. Belly bars, body jewellery and sterling silver belly jewellery designs include dangling silver heart belly bars which make an ideal choice for pearl earrings valentines day gifts, jewelled flower design belly bars, chandelier belly bars, diamond & square crystal belly bars, crystal belly bars, dropper and dangling belly bars with beautiful and unusual designs, also new tongue jewellery added including tongue bars & tongue studs as well as jewelled tragus studs & eyebrow bars. The range is unlimited. You are free to choose the one you wish to have. You can choose from a comprehensive range of piercing rings which are very easy to use. Look outstanding with these body piercing ring | ||
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| The underlying problem is that workless households get caught in the benefits trap. If an adult takes a low-paying job, most of the earnings will be offset by the cultured pearl swift withdrawal of benefits and the imposition of income tax and national-insurance contributions. The “highly influential word of mouth message”, says Mr Duncan Smith, is freshwater pearl that “progression into work simply isn’t worth the hassle”. The solution, says the think-tank, is to increase the reward for getting a job. Eight main benefits would be merged into just two, which would be withdrawn less swiftly and at a less onerous rate for freshwater pearl jewelry claimants who find work. That should free many people from the benefits trap. These proposals have their merits, not least their emphasis on tackling the barriers that keep so many in a workless limbo. But there are two snags. First, the welfare system may appear wilfully complicated, but that does not mean simplifying it will be simple. One reason is pearl jewelry wholesale that the circumstances of claimants, ranging from lone parents to the newly unemployed to those on incapacity payments, vary greatly. Any government will tread carefully in clearing a path through this minefield. “Simplifying benefits looks easier from outside rather than inside government,” says Mike Brewer of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Second, the proposal comes with a price tag. The reform would add £3.6 billion ($5.9 billion) to the benefits bill. The think-tank argues that the overhaul would eventually save money. But a Treasury drowning in red ink is likely to score the costs as actual and the savings as notional. The Conservatives have responded cautiously to pearl jewelry the report, saying merely that it raises “interesting questions”. If the Tories do win the election, they will have an even more compelling question to answer, namely how to mend Britain’s ravaged public finances. That may crowd out costly efforts to fix a “broken society”. | ||
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| IN THAT foreign land of Britain before the credit crisis, the Conservative opposition party started to fret about a “broken society”. The new Tory mission, now that Thatcherite remedies carried forward by Blairite Labour had saved the economy, was to pearl necklace tackle the outlands of a prospering society—the bleak estates where too many people were marooned, out of work, luck and hope. If that ambition cost money in the pearl jewelry wholesale short-term, a Conservative government could draw upon the “proceeds of growth”—tax revenues generated by a never-ending economic expansion. Now it is Britain itself that is broke, and any plan for repairing social breakdown that comes with a bill attached is likely to get a dusty reception. That may well be the fate for wholesale pearl jewlery some bold proposals for reforming welfare from the Centre for Social Justice, a right-leaning think-tank established by Iain Duncan Smith, a former Tory leader. Its new report argues that a malfunctioning benefits system lies at the root of many social evils. For one thing, it helps to gemstone jewelry explain why no adult works in 16.9% of working-age households, a rate virtually unchanged from a decade ago despite Labour’s attempts to move people off welfare and into employment. For another, it tends to undermine the family. According to the think-tank, 1.8m low-earning couples are worse off because they live together. That penalty encourages couples to split up, which is often bad for children. Add to this the bewildering complexity of pearl jewelry an array of different benefits, and you get a welfare system that is not working. | ||
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 THE loudest one in the room, as on-screen mafia men like to say, is usually the weakest. This week’s Trades Union Congress (TUC), an annual gathering of organised labour, was a cacophony of truculence. On September 14th delegates voted to pearl earrings back strikes to prevent public-sector job cuts. Brendan Barber, the TUC’s leader, noted that spending cuts once caused “riots on the streets”. And on the eve of the congress, Derek Simpson, joint general secretary of Unite, the largest private-sector union, described some on the right of freshwater pearl jewelry the Labour Party as “thick” and even as “Tories”. But beneath the bluster, the unions face tough times. Unemployment has reached almost 2.5m, and will keep rising. A Conservative government is likely to emerge from the pearl jewelry wholesale general election that must be held by June 3rd. And reductions in spending will be sought by whichever party wins. In his speech to the TUC on September 15th Gordon Brown, the prime minister, finally joined the Tories in using the word “cut”. He insists that he will protect “front-line services”, but the “inefficiencies” and “lower-priority budgets” he says he will target are likely to affect union members too. Meanwhile the Liberal Democrats, not long ago to the left of Labour on fiscal issues, have gone further than the two main parties in specifying what spending they would cut (see article). Even weakened, the unions could make life hard for a Tory government, whose market-based reforms for schools will provoke no less union ire than its as-yet-vague spending plans. But their influence will be greater on Labour in opposition. The financial whip hand that union barons have over the party is of little use now for if they withhold donations, as bolshier elements wish, a Tory victory becomes more certain. But after the election, the party could be shaped by its pearl jewelry paymasters. The unions are also using their muscle to install placemen as Labour parliamentary candidates. And, as the unions make up one-third of the party’s electoral college, those who aspire to be the next Labour leader must court them assiduously. All this may herald a leftward drift as dramatic as the last time Labour entered opposition in 1979. The unions have been itching for the old religion since the turn of the decade, when strike action began rising slightly (see chart) and left-wingers such as Mr Simpson, Mark Serwotka of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) and Bob Crow of Rail, Maritime and Transport became general secretaries. Yet the unions’ improving relations with the Conservatives suggest a degree of political realism. Mr Barber has met David Cameron and may yet invite the Tory leader to cultured pearl speak at next year’s TUC congress. For the first time in a decade, the PCS will hold a fringe event at the Tories’ annual conference next month. Richard Balfe, a former Labour MEP who defected to the Tories in 2002, is Mr Cameron’s envoy to the union world. And 18 years in the cold under the previous Tory government—and the decline in union membership that came with it—taught most unionists the futility of uncompromising militancy. It may also have taught them the folly of favouring ideological purism over electability when choosing the next Labour leader. Mr Simpson has named Ed Miliband as his favoured candidate to replace Mr Brown. The energy secretary is slightly to the left of freshwater pearl his brother, David, the foreign secretary, and well to the left of Blairites such as Lord Mandelson, the first secretary of state. But he has fewer socialist bona fides and union contacts than other possible candidates, such as Harriet Harman, the party’s deputy leader, or the thoughtful backbencher Jon Cruddas. Pragmatism, not decibels, may end up being the unions’ way of dealing with their weakness. | ||
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| And terrorists with large explosive devices are not the only folk disturbing the peace, for at a less dramatic level there is much to pearl jewelry wholesale suggest that this remains an unsettled society. Police statistics show that, in a region of around 1.8m people, over 1,500 sectarian incidents and attacks were logged in the year through March, with more than 60 emergency evacuations since then. Many parts of Northern Ireland are as tranquil as any in Britain, but in others stone-throwing, street attacks and even petrol-bombing of Protestant and Catholic homes and buildings are not infrequent. Much of this violent vandalism is generated by bitter controversies over loyalist marches, which continue to cause problems in pearl jewelry out-of-the-way villages such as Rasharkin in County Antrim. Such incidents rarely result in deaths, though in May Kevin McDaid, a Catholic father of four, perished after street clashes over the display of flags in the normally peaceful town of Coleraine, County Londonderry. And to these sectarian confrontations must be added a further 1,000 or so racist incidents of the type which in June caused scores of Romanians to flee from Belfast. Though rising immigration has provoked tensions elsewhere in Britain too, that episode demonstrated that the Troubles have left behind in Northern Ireland an inarticulate underclass that all too readily resorts to pearl jewelry wholesale violence. In that instance it was young loyalists who were so balefully xenophobic. Undereducated and generally unemployed, they have seen no peace dividend and feel little identification with the political process or its participants. The Stormont administration frequently condemns both sectarian and racist violence but has done little to combat the divisions that produce them. Instead it has concentrated on making devolution work and learning to run the public services. In doing so it has been curiously sheltered from the effects of the downturn, even though the local economy is freshwater pearl jewelry unhealthy. Unemployment has risen but, at 6.7% in the three months to July, it is still less than the British average (7.9%), largely because a bloated public sector pays the wages of more than a third of the workforce. House prices, which shot up in the mid-2000s, were 22.2% lower in July than a year earlier, on figures from the Department for Communities and Local Government—a far steeper fall than in England, Wales or Scotland. Many think prices have touched bottom, however, and Northern Ireland seems to freshwater pearl have avoided the worst of the recession. Will its luck hold as Britain’s public finances continue to deteriorate? Some in Northern Ireland complacently assume that the province will remain a protected political species, safe in the expectation of generous central-government support. But senior politicians suspect this state of affairs will end next year. Whoever wins the general election due by June 3rd will surely look to reducing the flow of money from Whitehall to Belfast. The threat is not likely to disrupt power-sharing fundamentally; it may well unite all parties against a common enemy—the Treasury. Much of the partisan rowing these days—over the devolution of policing to Stormont, for example, which republicans want now and loyalists are less keen on—seems designed to make London think the settlement is more precarious, hence more in need of subsidy, than it is. Though many issues remain unresolved, and the emotions from decades of conflict are still raw for many, power-sharing has so far proved flame-proof against all challenges. Belfast politics used to resemble trench warfare; in the new dispensation the main protagonists have ended up in the same trench. | ||
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 POLITICIANS trooped back to the Assembly at Stormont this week, their mild partisan sabre-rattling little more than a ritual greeting after the summer break. In its two and a half years of pearl jewelry existence, power-sharing has, against all expectations, provided a considerable degree of political harmony, even though gunmen and bombers have not entirely vanished from the scene. Many predicted that this government of ancient foes, dominated by the loyalist Democratic Unionist Party and republican Sinn Fein, would produce a battle a day, yet the deal has so far proved surprisingly resilient. The funerals have practically stopped. Nearly all the guns and nearly all the paramilitary groups have gone. Most of the political action now takes place in the pearl pendant Assembly rather than on the streets. Peace is overwhelmingly popular, for one thing, and the big republican and loyalist parties are working closely with each other, both determined to stay in power. But not everywhere is as harmonious as Stormont. The transformation in Northern Ireland is not yet a complete one, for there are still many problems to test the pearl necklace fledgling devolved government. Terrorism, for example, has not disappeared. Though the IRA is effectively defunct and extreme Protestant groups have promised to junk their remaining weaponry within months, small but deadly splinters remain. Most notable are the republican micro-groups, which include some mainstream IRA veterans but are mostly composed of impressionable youths. In January these dissidents attempted to attack an army base in County Down, abandoning a 300-pound bomb nearby. Two months later they caused a security and political crisis when they killed two soldiers in Antrim and a police officer in Armagh. In the pearl earrings past few weeks they tried to wipe out a police patrol with a 600-pound bomb near the south Armagh border, and planted devices at the homes of relatives of a police officer in Londonderry. No one was injured in the most recent episodes, and Catholics and Protestants united to condemn those in March. But the 1998 Omagh bomb, when the so-called Real IRA killed 29 people, is in the communal memory as an example of what even a small and relatively disorganised gang can do. Sinn Fein rightly denounces the wholesale pearl jewelry dissidents as “minuscule and unrepresentative”, but the police are also correct in saying that the threat they pose is “severe”. The persistence of such small but potentially lethal groups creates big problems, not least for the newish Police Service of Northern Ireland. With the British army no longer on active service, the police are now in charge. The activities of these destructive remnants inevitably hinder progress towards the creation of a civilian force geared to community policing. | ||
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| BEIRUT, Lebanon — A powerful former president in Iran who supports its opposition movement has been barred from speaking at a major commemorative rally there on Friday, in inflatable bouncer a striking break from precedent that suggests the country’s hard-line leaders fear the event could turn into an opposition rally. The former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, has delivered the Friday Prayer sermon for almost 25 years on Quds Day, an annual occasion of Iranian solidarity with the Palestinian movement. But this year he is being replaced by a hard-line cleric, Ahmad Khatami, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will also speak, Iran’s state-run Press TV reported Wednesday, citing the prayers commission. Opposition supporters have called for a huge turnout, hoping to turn the event into a broad show of public support for their protest against the presidential election in June and its violent aftermath. Two presidential candidates, Mir Hussein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi, who rejected Mr. Ahmadinejad’s election victory as fraudulent, also plan to attend, according to opposition Web sites. The protesters appeared to gain a prestigious backer on Wednesday when Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of the founder of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, announced that he would participate on Friday and made a blunt comment about the day’s current significance. “Quds Day is international; it is inflatable castles not exclusive to Quds,” Mr. Khomeini said in a clear rebuke to conservatives’ repeated demands that the day be devoted exclusively to the Palestinians. “It is a day for the oppressed to resist against the oppressors.” Also on Wednesday, a representative of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, hinted strongly that Mr. Moussavi and Mr. Karroubi would not be arrested, despite calls for their prosecution by many hard-line figures. “If the system prosecutes these individuals, they will become heroes,” said Mojtaba Zavalnour, who represents Ayatollah Khamenei in the inflatable slides Revolutionary Guards, according to the semiofficial Mehr news service. Many opposition supporters responded defiantly to the news that Mr. Rafsanjani was being pushed aside, calling on Web sites for protesters to attend the rally but skip the speeches. For days, conservative figures have been warning about the danger of “politicizing” the Quds Day march, and last Friday Ayatollah Khamenei urged vigilance “so that no one can use this day to create differences and rifts between us.” Mr. Rafsanjani has delivered the Friday Prayer sermon only once since the election. His sermon on July 17, in which he warned of a “crisis” and called for inflatable water games jailed protesters to be released, provided an important boost for the opposition, bringing vast crowds into the streets of Tehran, the capital, in a protest against Mr. Ahmadinejad. Although he is more cautious than opposition leaders like Mr. Moussavi and Mr. Karroubi, Mr. Rafsanjani’s impeccable credentials — he is a founding figure of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and was close to Ayatollah Khomeini — also make him a more difficult target for conservatives. The sidelining of a major figure like Mr. Rafsanjani underscores the deep rift in Iran’s clerical elite that has widened since the election and the inflatable tent unrest that followed. It may also signal that moderate figures are losing ground, as the hard-line Revolutionary Guards gain power within Iran’s political firmament. | ||
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| BOGOTÁ, Colombia — President Álvaro Uribe, the top ally of the United States in Latin America, is enmeshed in a scandal over growing evidence that his main intelligence agency carried out an extensive illegal spying operation focused on his leading critics, including members of the Supreme Court, opposition politicians, human rights workers and journalists. Skip to inflatable next paragraph Related Times Topics: Colombia The scandal, which has unfolded over months, intensified in recent weeks with the disclosure of an audio intercept of a top official at the United States Embassy. Semana, a respected news magazine, obtained an intercept of a routine phone call between James Faulkner, the embassy’s legal attaché, and a Supreme Court justice investigating ties of Mr. Uribe’s political supporters to paramilitary death squads. Other recordings obtained in investigations by journalists and prosecutors point to resilient multiyear efforts to spy on Mr. Uribe’s major critics by the Department of Administrative Security, a 6,500-employee intelligence agency — possibly South America’s largest — that operates directly under the authority of the president’s office. The agency, known widely by the acronym DAS, has been the focus of accusations of illegal spying before. But this case is sowing fear among Mr. Uribe’s critics in the political elite, coming as the president, a conservative populist, presses ahead with a project to secure a third term. While Mr. Uribe is ideologically isolated on inflatable castles a continent that has shifted to the left, he is following the example of neighbors who have changed their constitutions to remain in office, like Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, and Ecuador’s, Rafael Correa. “Uribe is seriously weakening Colombia’s democracy,” said Ramiro Bejarano, a lawyer and opposition leader who was a director of DAS in the 1990s. Earlier this year, Semana obtained recordings, transcripts of intercepts and other files from current and former DAS employees that showed that Mr. Bejarano was among several senior opposition leaders whose phones were illegally tapped by DAS. Five appointees have led DAS since Mr. Uribe came to power in 2002. The first four resigned amid claims of illegal surveillance and are being formally investigated by Colombia’s attorney general. The accusations against Mr. Uribe’s first DAS director, Jorge Noguera, are the most serious. He is charged with organizing the murders of three trade union activists and a well-known sociologist, Alfredo Correa d’Andreis. The charges are based on reports that under his leadership, DAS gave paramilitary leaders their names on an assassination list. Mr. Noguera stepped down in 2005, when Mr. Uribe appointed him consul in Milan. Mr. Noguera has since left that position, and the inflatable pools government has distanced itself from him. But all of Mr. Noguera’s successors — including the current director, Felipe Muñoz, are under scrutiny over reports of irregularities, notably wiretaps, which are illegal in Colombia without a court order. Some of the most recent disclosed intercepts were recorded just weeks ago. Others were made over several years earlier this decade. For instance, the Special Intelligence Group, a secret DAS unit also known as G-3, operated into 2006 and focused on monitoring human rights groups critical of Mr. Uribe’s government, like the Colombian Commission of Jurists and the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers’ Collective. “Chills went down my spine when I discovered the inflatable moving cartoon lengths that DAS went through to watch my every movement,” said Alirio Uribe, a human rights lawyer (no relation to President Uribe) for the José Alvear Restrepo Collective who, through prosecutors’ investigations and congressional testimony, gained access to part of the file that G-3 kept on him and his wife and children. He compared what he saw in the file, which included photos of his children, transcripts of phone and e-mail conversations, details on his finances and evidence that DAS agents rented an apartment across from his home to monitor him, to “The Lives of Others,” the Academy Award-winning 2006 German film about Stasi surveillance in East Germany. “The DAS was searching for evidence that we received money from the guerrillas, and of course they found none because there was none to find,” Mr. Uribe said. “What does this say about our society and our form of government if the president’s own intelligence service deems NGO’s its enemies and fit for violations of this kind?” A spokesman for Mr. Uribe declined to comment, referring queries to Mr. Muñoz, a former urban planning official who became director of DAS this year. In an interview near Bogotá’s old center at DAS’s bunkeresque headquarters, which were rebuilt after being gutted in a 1989 bombing attack by drug traffickers, Mr. Muñoz grimly acknowledged the possibility that surveillance irregularities had occurred earlier this decade. He said he was leading the most profound reorganization of DAS since its founding in the 1950s, with plans to cut the agency’s work force by as much as half to focus on intelligence, counterintelligence and border control. Reflecting the legacy of presidents who strengthened DAS at the expense of other institutions, the agency still carries out a broad range of activities, including registration of foreigners, providing bodyguards to 500 people considered at risk of assassination and serving as Interpol’s headquarters in Colombia. DAS’s secret police unit also competes with other Colombian intelligence agencies, including the Finance Ministry’s financial crimes division, in carrying out investigations. The sprawling nature of DAS’s operations may have allowed some of its agents to sell intelligence to the private armies that have plagued Colombia during its four-decade war, or otherwise be infiltrated by paramilitary and guerrilla operatives. In one case investigated by Semana, a computer that had been used last year by rebels from the National Liberation Army held detailed information collected by DAS on the military plans against the group. Mr. Muñoz said he preferred to comment on claims of inflatable air dancer irregularities since he took over the agency. He said an investigation of the recent intercepts was under way, and suggested that rogue agents might be seeking to thwart his overhaul. “There may be people interested in countering the reforms,” he said. For the United States, which works closely with DAS on many intelligence-gathering issues, the scandal complicates its warm relations with Mr. Uribe’s government, the recipient of more than $5 billion in security aid from Washington this decade. Ian C. Kelly, a State Department spokesman, said last week that the accusations of illegal wiretapping were “troubling and unacceptable.” But in the same statement, he said Colombia’s human rights record was satisfactory enough to meet standards allowing Mr. Uribe’s government to receive all of the military assistance included in the $545 million in American aid that Colombia was set to receive this year. | ||
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