Middle East

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Excerpt: Clashes broke out in Baghdad after police arrested a local Sahwa leader and his aide. Overall, at least six Iraqis were killed and 16 more were wounded across the country. Also, the Iraqi government is threatening to deprogram Iranian refugees they would like to see leave the country.

Excerpt: Updated at 6:01 p.m. EDT, Mar. 27, 2009 Only three Iraqi deaths were reported on a particularly quiet prayer day. One more Iraqi was reported wounded. However, a number of politically important stories came out: Iraq is planning to move residents out of Camp Ashraf to encourage them to leave Iraq altogether. Meanwhile, provincial election results are now considered final. Also, an important Sunni cleric was killed in a Kurdish district of Diyala and a former Baand#8217;athist was killed in Karbala.

Excerpt: Good news is in short supply. The economy remains bleak. The war in Iraq entered its seventh year last week, and violence reaches new pinnacles in Afghanistan. But there is one bright light amid all this gloom. Real progress is being made to ban cluster munitions. These are canisters of different sizes that release hundreds of bomblets on detonation, scattering deadly devices over an area as large as several football fields.

Excerpt: I grew up in the 1970s on reruns of the original Star Trek with Captain James Tiberius Kirk at the helm, backed by that ever logical Vulcan, Mr. Spock, Dr. "Bones" McCoy, and the rest of the intrepid, space-faring crew of the USS Enterprise. During the tumultuous 1960s, that sci-fi series -- before being canceled -- had pointed to a more promising future in which humanity would be united...

Excerpt: Human rights lawyers are proving to be a major headache for the new administration of President Barack Obama, stepping up court challenges on issues of prisoner abuse to test the reality of the president's pledge to create a "an unprecedented level of openness" in government.

Excerpt: NATO has been irrelevant for two decades, since its raison d'etre -- to keep the Red Army from driving to the Rhine -- disappeared. Yet Obama is headed to Brussels to celebrate France's return and the 60th birthday of the alliance. But why is NATO still soldiering on?

Excerpt: There were once 22 Uighur prisoners in Guantanamo. Muslims from China's oppressed Xinjiang province, they had all been swept up as human debris during "Operation Enduring Freedom," the US-led invasion of Afghanistan that began in October 2001. The majority of these men were seized after fleeing to Pakistan from a run-down settlement in Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains, which had been hit in a US bombing raid. Initially welcomed by Pakistani villagers, they were then betrayed and sold to US forces, who were offering $5000 a head for "al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects."�

Excerpt: America's coming confrontation with Israel has been foreshadowed for quite some time by several under-the-radar signals, but the media has been too invested in the "special relationship" narrative to notice, at least until the Obama administration took the reins.

Excerpt: Updated at 3:53 p.m. EST, Mar. 26, 2009 At least 28 people were killed and 51 more were wounded in the latest attacks. A significant bombing took place in northern Baghdad. Also, a U.S. soldier died of non-combat injuries. Meanwhile, the U.S. military found themselves forced to quickly inspect more than 90,000 facilities in Iraq.

Excerpt: In November 1963, the US-sponsored president of southern Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, was murdered by members of that country's military...

Excerpt: Ten years ago today, on March 24, 1999, the Atlantic Empire chose to reveal itself to the world by demonstrating the unchecked power of a fully operational military alliance...

Excerpt: Contrary to the views of the likely incoming right-wing government of Israel, most U.S. Jews favor peace negotiations with a Palestinian unity government that would include Hamas, according to a new poll released here Tuesday by the year-old, pro-peace Jewish lobby group, J Street.

Excerpt: Despite President Barack Obama's statement at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina Feb. 27 that he had "chosen a timeline that will remove our combat brigades over the next 18 months," a number of Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs), which have been the basic U.S. Army combat unit in Iraq for six years, will remain in Iraq after that date under a new non-combat label.

Excerpt: A legal battle being waged by Palestinian families to stop the takeover of their neighborhood in East Jerusalem by Jewish settlers has received a major fillip from the recent souring of relations between Israel and Turkey.�

Excerpt: A newly-formed and still obscure neoconservative foreign policy organization is giving some observers flashbacks to the 1990s, when its predecessor staked out the aggressively unilateralist foreign policy that came to fruition under the George W. Bush administration.

Excerpt: Updated at 5:31 p.m. EST, Mar. 25, 2009 At least eight Iraqis were killed and 21 more were wounded in the latest attacks, but no Coalition deaths were reported. U.S. authorities admitted that there has been an uptick in violence as they hand over security operation to their Iraqi counterparts. Meanwhile, Turkey and Iran shelled locations in northern Iraq in their separate campaigns against Kurdish rebel groups.

Excerpt: Is your representative speaking out against escalation of the Afghanistan war?

Excerpt: The Transportation Security Agency (TSA) recently announced that it was re-instituting random screening of passengers at gates.

Excerpt: Tuesday marked the tenth anniversary of the bombing of the nation formerly known as Yugoslavia -- an act of aggression that prefigured America's post-9/11 rampage and set the stage for our endless "war on terrorism" in many more ways than are at first apparent.