Even as we celebrate generations of American soldiers past, the women and men who are making that sacrifice today in Iraq and Afghanistan receive less attention every day. There's plenty of blame to go around: battle fatigue at home, failing media resolve and a government intent on controlling information from the battlefield.
According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's News Coverage Index, coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has slipped to 3 percent of all American print and broadcast news as of last week, falling from 25 percent as recently as last September...
The tactical success of the surge should not be misconstrued as making Iraq a safer place for American soldiers. Last year was the bloodiest in the five-year history of the conflict, with more than 900 dead, and last month, 52 perished, making it the bloodiest month of the year so far. So far in May, 18 have died.
Television network news coverage in particular has gone off a cliff.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has written an unusual open letter to all those in uniform, warning them to stay out of politics as the nation approaches a presidential election in which the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be a central, and certainly divisive, issue.
"The U.S. military must remain apolitical at all times and in all ways," wrote the chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, the nation's highest-ranking officer. "It is and must always be a neutral instrument of the state, no matter which party holds sway." ...
Admiral Mullen said he was inspired to write the essay after receiving a constant stream of legitimate, if troubling, questions while visiting military personnel around the world. He said their questions included, "What if a Democrat wins?" and, "What will that do to the mission in Iraq?" and, "Do you think it's better for one party or another to have the White House?"
Juliette N. Kayyem, the Massachusetts homeland security adviser, was in her office in early February when an aide brought her startling news. To qualify for its full allotment of federal money, Massachusetts had to come up with a plan to protect the state from an almost unheard-of threat: improvised explosive devices, known as I.E.D.'s.
"I.E.D.'s? As in Iraq I.E.D.'s?" Ms. Kayyem said in an interview, recalling her response. No one had ever suggested homemade roadside bombs might begin exploding on the highways of Massachusetts. "There was no new intelligence about this," she said. "It just came out of nowhere."
More openly than at any time since the Sept. 11 attacks, state and local authorities have begun to complain that the federal financing for domestic security is being too closely tied to combating potential terrorist threats, at a time when they say they have more urgent priorities...
The demand for plans to guard against improvised explosives is being cited by state and local officials as the latest example that their concerns are not being heard, and that federal officials continue to push them to spend money on a terrorism threat that is often vague.
Early in President Bush's second term, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice convened a series of strategy sessions on how to persuade North Korea to surrender its nuclear weapons programs. One key official, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill, remained largely silent, four participants said, except to pipe up periodically with the same refrain.
"If you just let me go to Pyongyang, I'll get you a deal," the career Foreign Service officer said, prompting others to roll their eyes and move on.
In the twilight of the Bush presidency, the nuclear agreement that Hill has tirelessly pursued over the past three years has emerged as Bush's best hope for a lasting foreign policy success. In the process, Hill has become the public face of an extraordinary 180-degree policy shift on North Korea, from confrontation to accommodation.
The Rockefeller family built one of the great American fortunes by supplying the nation with oil. Now history has come full circle: some family members say it is time to start moving beyond the oil age.
The family members have thrown their support behind a shareholder rebellion that is ruffling feathers at Exxon Mobil, the giant oil company descended from John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust. Three of the resolutions, to be voted on at the company's shareholder meeting on Wednesday, are considered unlikely to pass, even with Rockefeller family support.
The resolutions ask Exxon to take the threat of global warming more seriously and look for alternatives to spewing greenhouse gases into the air.
... The Villarreal investigation is among scores of corruption cases in recent years that have alarmed officials in the Homeland Security Department just as it is hiring thousands of border agents to stem the flow of illegal immigration.
The pattern has become familiar: Customs officers wave in vehicles filled with illegal immigrants, drugs or other contraband. A Border Patrol agent acts as a scout for smugglers. Trusted officers fall prey to temptation and begin taking bribes.
Increased corruption is linked, in part, to tougher enforcement, driving smugglers to recruit federal employees as accomplices. It has grown so worrisome that job applicants will soon be subject to lie detector tests to ensure that they are not already working for smuggling organizations. In addition, homeland security officials have reconstituted an internal affairs unit at Customs and Border Protection, one of the largest federal law enforcement agencies, overseeing both border agents and customs officers.
Under pristine skies and with strong gusts, Senator Edward M. Kennedy this afternoon steered his 50-foot schooner from Nantucket to a mooring beside his beach-front compound, leading many of the sailboats in the final leg of the annual Figawi Race.
It took Kennedy only about 2.5 hours to make the journey across Nantucket Sound in a trip that many thought he wouldn't take after being diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor last week. He finished second in his division.
European Union foreign ministers gave the green light on Monday to begin talks with Russia aimed a forging a new "strategic partnership." The 27 ministers approved the talks on a deal that would replace a decade-old agreement with Moscow. The negotiations had been stalled for 18 months prior to Monday's announcement.
Negotiations will be formally launched during an EU-Russia summit at the end of June to be hosted for the first time by new Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. They aim to expand economic and political ties between Russia and the EU.
Deutsche Telekom is immersed in a deepening espionage scandal following allegations that senior executives ordered the covert monitoring of thousands of phone calls by customers, staff and journalists in an attempt to plug an information leak.
The claims, published in Der Spiegel magazine, allege that the company, part-owned by the government, conducted its spying operations for 18 months in 2005 and 2006. "Hundreds of thousands of calls" were said to have been secretly subjected to surveillance.
Rene Obermann, Deutsche Telekom's director, who was not in charge at the time, said yesterday he had sent details of the case to state prosecutors, adding that he found the allegations "shattering". "If they are confirmed, the accusations run contrary to our understanding of data protection," he said. "The consequences will be tough if misconduct is established."
A former senior manager at Siemens yesterday admitted building up an elaborate system of slush funds and shell firms at the request of his superiors to help Europe's biggest technology group win overseas contracts through bribes.
Reinhard Siekaczek told a Munich court that he had informed his entire divisional board about the system and assumed that the whole group executive board knew about it from at least 2004.
A United Nations investigation has concluded that a remotely piloted Georgian reconnaissance aircraft that was destroyed last month was struck by an air-to-air missile fired from a Russian fighter jet.
The report suggested that Russia's actions called into question its role as a credible peacekeeper in Georgia's territorial disputes, and it presented the Kremlin with a diplomatic embarrassment over its policy in the southern Caucasus and its previous statements about its military activities there.
Moreover, the report detailed a degree of military recklessness not previously reported, noting that the fighter jet's "interception took place very close to, or even inside an international airway," while civilian aircraft were flying.
In the Czech Republic, you can now see a doctor for about $1.85. A day in the hospital can verge on $4. This is not cause for celebration.
For Czechs, who visit their doctors more often than anyone else in Europe, it has led to great outrage. In fact, the idea of charging anything at all for health care can generate significant controversy, not to mention abrupt about-faces in policy, here and in other Central European countries...
For healthy people with jobs, the fees are quite literally pocket change, usually paid with the same 10 and 20 crown coins as streetcar tickets in Prague ($1 is worth around 16 crowns)... But many Czechs see it as a matter of principle that health care should be free -- though the system is financed in part through payroll deductions -- along with a strong sense of solidarity for the poor.
An opinion poll has shown that the outcome of Ireland's forthcoming referendum on the EU's Lisbon treaty is in doubt, with no confidence in official circles that a yes vote will be delivered.
After a sluggish start to the campaign, those in favour of the treaty have increased their support. But so too have those who oppose it, so that the result of the poll on 12 June is uncertain.
World leaders are to meet next week for urgent talks aimed at preventing tens of millions of the world's poor dying of hunger as a result of soaring food prices.
The summit in Rome is expected to pledge immediate aid to poor countries threatened by malnutrition as well as charting longer-term strategies for improving food production.
Hosted by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, it will hear calls for the establishment of a global food fund, as well as for new international guidelines on the cultivation of biofuels, which some have blamed for diverting land, crops and other resources away from food production.
Gordon Brown is facing a fresh tax rebellion as Labour MPs demand the repeal of a £200 increase in vehicle excise duty on environmentally unfriendly cars purchased in the past seven years.
As lorry drivers prepare to stage a slow-moving protest through London today against rising fuel duties, a ministerial aide broke ranks to brand the levy an unacceptable retrospective tax that would discredit green taxes.
More than 30 Labour MPs have signed a Commons early day motion demanding repeal of the £200 increase in duty, due to be introduced next year.
The new US Embassy in Berlin opens for business this week. But the building's design, with its focus on security, has been panned by German architectural critics, who call it a "triumph of banality" that would be more at home in Baghdad than Berlin.
The arrest for war crimes of Congo's exiled former Vice-President Jean-Pierre Bemba ends his career as a rival to President Joseph Kabila, and his supporters denounced the move as a plot to remove him from active politics.
Bemba, a former rebel warlord who was defeated by Kabila in the Democratic Republic of Congo's 2006 election, was detained in Brussels on Saturday by Belgian authorities executing an International Criminal Court warrant for his arrest for war crimes allegedly committed in the Central African Republic.
This contested town along Sudan's volatile north-south border has been obliterated.
In recent days its mud houses and thatched-roof markets, its schools, hospitals, offices and shops have been shot, shelled and burned to the ground, and late last week Sudanese government soldiers in green fatigues were still roaming the streets, looting satellite dishes, mattresses and cases of orange soda from the smoking ruins.
More than 100,000 people -- residents of Abyei and surrounding villages who only recently returned home after 20 years of war between the north and south -- are gone, chased away in the worst escalation of violence since the government and former southern rebels signed a 2005 peace deal.
After two weeks of only faint and infrequent condemnations of the anti-immigrant violence that has troubled South Africa, President Thabo Mbeki on Sunday described the wave of xenophobic attacks as an "absolute disgrace" that has blemished the country's reputation.
"Never since the birth of our democracy have we witnessed such callousness," he said in a 10-minute nationally televised speech. The president spoke after being roundly excoriated as lacking leadership during the mayhem that has left 50 people dead.
A leading newspaper here, The Sunday Times, called for his resignation in a front-page editorial on Sunday. "Throughout this crisis -- arguably the most grave, dark and repulsive moment in the life of our young nation -- Mbeki has demonstrated that he no longer has the heart to lead," it said.
The newspaper faulted him for leaving the country as the violence raged and for not visiting any of the squatter settlements where the attacks had occurred. "Mr. President, it is clear you have lost interest in governing the Republic," it said. "We appeal to you: Stand down in the interests of your country."
This was the kind of place that was not supposed to exist in the new South Africa. All black. All poor. Dense, squalid, dirty, angry -- with charred patches of earth where men once stood.
The violence that flared here, and in communities like it all over the Johannesburg area during two weeks of mob attacks that have left at least 56 people dead, has carried echoes of this nation's notorious past. But the rage is not old. It is new, born of the broken dreams of South Africa's post-apartheid era... These places became crucibles of poverty and, it is now clear, hatred.
Here at the bottom of the nation's notoriously rigid social hierarchy, poor, black South Africans complain they are falling behind Zimbabweans and Mozambicans, who always seemed to get the best jobs, the nicest houses, the most desirable women.
Marxist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam to death yesterday. Mengistu, who lives in Zimbabwe, had previously been sentenced to life in prison. Between 1974 and 1991, Mengistu's regime killed tens of thousands of people. He was found guilty in absentia of genocide and sentenced to life after a 12-year trial that ended in 2006.
Desta Gebru, the supreme court judge, said he had increased the sentence to death because Mengistu had tortured and executed thousands of people for political reasons, which under Ethiopian law amounts to genocide. The trial is not internationally recognised.
In addition to a growing insurgency, clan warfare and the lack of a functioning government since 1991, Somalia's fragile economy is now disintegrating amid hyperinflation and the local effects of a global food crisis that sparked riots this month.
"We are very close to collapse," said Hassan Rage, a sugar vendor in Mogadishu who earns about $2 a day. Until recently that was enough for his family to survive. But with Somalia's shilling losing half its value in the last year, he can no longer afford water, lamp oil or charcoal for cooking...
Attacks by insurgents worsen by the day. After a short-lived Islamist government was defeated in 2006, its armed forces shifted to guerrilla tactics, striking government and Ethiopian forces and launching hit-and-run attacks in various southern cities.
A U.S. airstrike May 1 killed a top insurgent commander whom American officials accused of having links to Al Qaeda. His followers are vowing to step up their assaults, targeting any Westerners in the region.
Two U.S. soldiers were killed in a pair of roadside bombings over the weekend, the U.S. military announced Monday. One soldier died in a bomb blast Sunday night in Salahuddin province, north of Baghdad, that left two other soldiers wounded, the military said. No further information was immediately provided...
The second bombing occurred Sunday afternoon in Qadisiya province in southern Iraq. One soldier was killed and two others wounded when the blast ripped into a patrol just west of the province's capital, Diwaniya, the military said...
The U.S. Army also announced that a third soldier died Saturday of noncombat-related causes. The military gave no further information.
The end of the school year in Baghdad is similar to those in other countries. Final examinations, graduation parties, playing some catch up. But for all its similarities, many of these schools also contend with the sobering realities of being in a war zone.
Students are absent for long periods because of violence. Parents keep their children home because they fear kidnappings or other threats. Schools shut down for days and weeks at a time when violence surges, meaning courses can never really be completed...
When American forces invaded Iraq more than five years ago, rebuilding the country's education system was a massive priority. U.S. officials touted the thousands of schools that had been repaired and repainted. Hundreds of millions of U.S. government dollars went to companies to provide support and training to Iraqi educators.
But whatever progress Americans had hoped for vanished as first the Sunni Muslim insurgency and then sectarian warfare between Sunnis and Shiites exploded. A recent visit to schools in different Baghdad neighborhoods shows the price the violence has taken.
More than 1,000 people have died in Sadr City since fighting erupted in late March, and hospital and police officials say most have been civilians. As the violence continues, public tolerance for the Mahdi Army, and by association the Sadr movement, seems to be shifting toward the same sort of resentment once reserved for U.S. and Iraqi forces.
"People are fed up with them because of their extremism and the problems they are causing," said Rafid Majid, a merchant in central Baghdad. Like many others interviewed across the capital, he said the good deeds the group performs no longer were enough to make up for the hardships endured by ordinary Iraqis who just want to go to work and keep their families safe.
With provincial elections scheduled for October, a public perception that Sadr loyalists were to blame for the violence could hinder the cleric's hopes of broadening his power and influence in the oil-rich south. It also could extend the violent power struggle between the Mahdi Army and the rival Badr Organization tied to Prime Minister Nouri Maliki -- a conflict that has played out from the southern city of Basra to Baghdad's Shiite neighborhoods.
After 18 months of grinding political conflict, Lebanon's Parliament elected a new president on Sunday, in the first formal step toward enacting a new power-sharing pact among the country's bitterly divided political factions.
Wild bursts of celebratory fireworks echoed across the capital as the deputies gathered to vote in Gen. Michel Suleiman as president, a post that had been unfilled since November. The vote is to be followed in the coming days by the creation of a new cabinet, according to the agreement reached last week.
Although that deal was a clear victory for the Shiite militant group Hezbollah and its allies in the opposition, many Lebanese across the political spectrum have greeted it with relief and even joy, preferring a compromise at almost any cost to the resumption of a conflict that crippled the government and brought Lebanon to the brink of civil war.
If you want to make peace with a nation, it's probably not a good idea to have a street named after the assassin of its leader.
That dilemma speaks to the wider tensions and recriminations between Egypt and Iran, whose relations ruptured when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat granted asylum to the deposed Iranian shah and signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979. Sadat was gunned down in 1981 by a group of Islamists led by Khalid Islambouli, an Egyptian soldier who was later memorialized with a street in Tehran.
Iran has made a series of overtures in recent months to overcome the bruised past and restore full diplomatic relations with Egypt. Cairo has remained coolly noncommittal. The sensitivity surrounding whispers of detente comes as Iran has risen as a power in the Middle East while Egypt, an American ally with severe domestic problems, has slipped from its stature as the leading voice in the Arab world.
Israel has "150 or more" nuclear weapons, former US president Jimmy Carter said at a press conference over the weekend, a spokesman for the literary festival at which he was speaking confirmed.
Asked how a future US president should deal with the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, the 83-year-old said: "The US has more than 12,000 nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union (sic) has about the same; Great Britain and France have several hundred, and Israel has 150 or more."
The International Atomic Energy Agency, in an unusually blunt and detailed report, said Monday that Iran's suspected research into the development of nuclear weapons remained "a matter of serious concern" and that Iran continued to owe the agency "substantial explanations."
The nine-page report accused the Iranians of a willful lack of cooperation, particularly in answering allegations that its nuclear program may be intended more for military use than for energy generation.
Part of the agency's case hinges on 18 documents listed in the report and presented to Iran that, according to Western intelligence agencies, indicate the Iranians have ventured into explosives, uranium processing and a missile warhead design -- activities that ordinarily would be associated with constructing nuclear weapons.
"There are certain parts of their nuclear program where the military seems to have played a role," said one senior official close to the agency, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under normal diplomatic constraints. He added, "We want to understand why."
A wealth of new information about the way of life of early man in the eastern Mediterranean, long before the invention of the wheel, is likely to be uncovered after the startling discovery of a cave inhabited by hunter-gatherers between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago.
Workers constructing a sewage line through a forest in northern Israel stumbled across a large cave containing stalactites and strewn with discarded fragments of prehistoric tools and the burnt bones of animals which have long been extinct in the region, including red deer, fallow deer, buffalo and even bears.
A top Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud has rejected reports that al-Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden, and other leaders are hiding in his region.
"The al-Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden is dead, and the Afghan Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, are not in our territory," he said in an interview broadcast by a satellite television network. Funeral prayers have been said for Osama bin Laden over the years with one reported by a Pakistani news organisation, and another in an Egyptian newspaper as far back as December 2001.
This report quoted an official of the Taliban saying that he had suffered serious complications in the lungs and died a natural and quiet death. The news has been reported that he died of heart and kidney disorders. Americans and Pakistani leaders have suggested that he was one, killed in the US bombing of Afghanistan, died of illness later, or just died.
The pro-Taliban leader who is based in Pakistan's tribal area of South Waziristan denied hosting the Saudi leader in local villages, as US intelligence officials suspect.
NATO in Afghanistan spoke out against Pakistan's moves to reach peace deals with Taliban militants on its side of the border as new violence left 16 people dead, including a US-led soldier.
Visiting US congressman also said they were concerned that Islamabad's peace talks with militants could preclude a rise in attacks in Afghanistan, where 70,000 foreign soldiers are helping to fight a Taliban-led insurgency.
NATO spokesman Mark Laity urged Pakistan to avoid agreements that "put our troops and our mission under threat," and said Islamabad must take the alliance into account when it makes such deals.
For two years British troops staked out a presence in this small district center in southern Afghanistan and fended off attacks from the Taliban. The constant firefights left it a ghost town, its bazaar broken and empty but for one baker, its houses and orchards reduced to rubble and weeds.
But it took the Marines, specifically the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, about 96 hours to clear out the Taliban in a fierce battle in the past month and push them back about 6 miles...
This time, the performance of the latest unit of marines, here in Afghanistan for seven months to help bolster NATO forces, will be under particular scrutiny. The NATO-led campaign against the Taliban has not only come under increasing pressure for its slow progress in curbing the insurgency, but it has also been widely criticized for the high numbers of civilian casualties in the fighting.
Demonstrations by one of India's lower castes over demands to be categorised as lower today spread as government forces tried to disperse mobs in the west of the country.
Four days of bloody demonstrations by the Gujjars have so far claimed 37 lives in Rajasthan state, the epicentre of the violence. Road and rail traffic was disrupted across a wide area of western and northern India, Rohit Kumar Singh, Rajasthan's information commissioner, said.
The Gujjars are demanding to be formally declared one of the lowest castes so they can qualify for the government jobs and university places reserved for such groups. Government officials have refused, insisting the Gujars remain among the second to lowest official classification.
In response to inquiries from grieving relatives, local officials announced Monday that parents whose only child was killed or grievously injured in the May 12 earthquake would be exempt from the country's one-child policy.
The exception, issued by the Chengdu Population and Family Planning Committee in Sichuan Province, said qualified parents could apply for legal permission to have another child...
Thousands of parents have openly challenged the government over why so many schools collapsed during the earthquake. An estimated 10,000 students are believed to have died.
The Chinese government warned Monday that as many 1.2 million residents might have to be evacuated because they could be inundated by a swelling "barrier lake" formed by the May 12 earthquake.
The notice was issued hours after a Russian helicopter transported heavy machines over mountains in the northern part of Sichuan province and hundreds of Chinese soldiers carried in 10 tons of dynamite to contend with the barrier lake at Tangjiashan, about two miles upstream from the town of Beichuan.
A top politician from Taiwan arrived in China on Monday for a six-day visit amid hope for warmer relations between the longtime foes.
The head of the island's ruling party will meet with Chinese President Hu Jintao during a groundbreaking trip that follows the May 20 inauguration of a new Taiwanese president, Ma Ying-jeou, who is eager to fulfill a campaign pledge to improve ties. For China, the visit provides an opportunity ahead of the Beijing Olympic Games in August to project itself as a superpower committed to world peace.
Wu Poh-hsiung, who is chairman of Taiwan's Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, said upon his arrival Monday in the eastern city of Nanjing that the visit could "create a win-win situation."
Almost lost in the clamor over Myanmar's devastating cyclone, the house arrest of the charismatic pro-democracy leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, reaches a deadline for its annual renewal on Tuesday.
Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, 62, has been detained at home on and off for 12 of the last 18 years and the year-to-year extension of her term has become routine. Most analysts expect the detention to be extended again this year.
The roads of the ravaged Irrawaddy Delta are lined these days with people hoping to be fed. After lifetimes living off the land, poor farmers have abandoned their ruined rice paddies, setting up makeshift bamboo shelters, waiting for carloads of Burmese civilians who have taken it on themselves to feed those who lost everything to Cyclone Nargis. Few of those who wait say they have received anything from the government, other than threats.
"They said if we don't break our huts and disappear, they will shoot us," one man in the village of Thee Kone said over the weekend before a police jeep approached. "But as you can see, it's raining now. We are pleading to the police to give us one more day and we will be gone far, far from the road, as they wish." ...
On Sunday, donors from more than 50 countries and international agencies meeting in Yangon promised they would deliver more than $150 million in aid to help the country recover from the May 3 storm, The Associated Press reported, but only if they could get access to hard-hit areas like the delta. It remained unclear if Myanmar's rulers were willing to meet that demand.
The Japanese faith in cats as harbingers of good fortune is paying off along one suburban railway line.
When passengers arrive at Kishi station in western Japan they are greeted by a tortoiseshell cat named Tama, whose feline charms are bringing the sleepy Kishigawa line back to life. But Tama is not the ticket collector's pet. The nine-year-old moggy sports the formal black cap worn by all employees of Wakayama Electric Railway and is addressed by her official title of stationmaster... Since her appointment as stationmaster last year she has seen passenger numbers rise 10% to 2.1 million a year.
Fresh street protests in Thailand between supporters of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his opponents could drag the army back into the forefront of politics and scare off foreign investors, analysts said.
Five months after a general election meant to return a deeply polarised nation back to democracy, about 5,000 opponents of the coalition government, which backs Thaksin, held a rally in the capital on Sunday.
About two dozen people were wounded in clashes between anti-Thaksin protesters and his supporters at the rally, which organisers said was a bid to stop the government from amending the 2007 army-designed constitution to benefit Thaksin.
The United States sent Australian terror suspect Mamdouh Habib to be interrogated in Egypt in defiance of repeated pleas from Canberra not to do so, Australia's top spy has revealed.
ASIO director-general Paul O'Sullivan said the US was told several times that Australia opposed sending Mr Habib to another country for interrogation -- a process known as rendition -- after his arrest in Pakistan in 2001.
Mr O'Sullivan told a Senate hearing he believed Australia's concern at the time was that Mr Habib would be tortured, a fear later backed up by Mr Habib, who says he was brutally treated in Egypt.
America's disregard for Canberra's pleas about Mr Habib came despite the fact that Australian troops were fighting alongside the US in Afghanistan at the time, and preparing to help the US in the invasion of Iraq. Mr O'Sullivan said Australian officials in Pakistan formed the view on October 22, 2001, that Mr Habib might be "rendered" -- transferred to a third country for interrogation -- and conveyed concerns to Canberra.
A Swedish-born tycoon who acts as a deforestation adviser to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has stirred up controversy in Brazil for reportedly claiming all the Amazon could be bought for $US50 billion ($A52 billion).
Johan Eliasch, the 46-year-old boss of the Head sports equipment company, is under investigation by Brazilian police and intelligence services for the alleged comments and for 160,000 hectares of Amazon forest he is believed to have bought, the newspaper O Globo reported today...
The issue is a sensitive one for Brazil, which has been offended by statements by British politicians suggesting that the Amazon is too important to all of mankind to be left to the management of Brazil's government alone. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva today stated that "the Brazilian Amazon has an owner, and that owner is the Brazilian people".
One of Argentina's most feared former military leaders goes on trial Tuesday on charges of kidnapping, torturing and killing left-wing militants during the 1976-83 dictatorship.
Former army chief Luciano Benjamin Menendez will be tried in the northern city of Cordoba, where he commanded the regional Third Army Corps for five years.
Menendez and seven other former army officers are being prosecuted for the killing of Hilda Palacios, Humberto Brandalisi, Carlos Laja and Ruben Cardozo, who were kidnapped in November 1977. Prosecutors say they were taken to the clandestine prison and torture center known as La Perla on the outskirts of Cordoba.
In a region where nationalism often trumps cross-border cooperation, the engineering marvel known as Itaipu was a triumph of teamwork: Paraguay and Brazil collaborated on a colossal project to reroute the mighty Parana River, dam its waters and create the world's largest hydroelectric plant.
Thirty-five years after the neighboring nations began the project, Itaipu is a vital source of cheap electricity and patriotic pride, especially in Paraguay, a landlocked nation better known abroad for contraband, corruption and crooked politics. The plant provides more than 90 percent of the country's electricity and about 20 percent of Brazil's.
But resentment toward Brazil has grown since Fernando Lugo was elected in April as Paraguay's president. He accuses Brazil of benefiting from a sweetheart deal that yields power at cut-rate prices. Brazilians in turn say they are being unfairly painted as profiteers, their early financial and technical contributions to the project ignored.
The dispute pits Lugo, a former Roman Catholic bishop, against Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a former factory hand supported by the same progressive wing of the church that produced Lugo.
Colombia's largest rebel group pledged Sunday to carry on in its decades-long war against the U.S.-backed government after confirming that the group's legendary commander had died of natural causes. The Defense Ministry had said the day before that Manuel Marulanda, who led one of the world's oldest insurgencies in a brutal if quixotic battle against the state, had died in March.
"With immense sadness, we inform that our commander in chief, Manuel Marulanda Vélez, died March 26 of a heart attack in the arms of his companion and surrounded by his personal guard," Rodrigo "Timochenko" Londoño, one of seven members of the guerrilla directorate, said in a video provided to a Venezuelan state television station, Telesur. "Our struggle continues without rest until we reach the objective of a new Colombia, a great Latin American fatherland and socialism."
The announcement closes a long chapter in the history of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and raises the possibility that the new rebel leadership may consider peace negotiations in the face of a military offensive that has recently resulted in the deaths of top commanders and the desertions of thousands of fighters.
Haitian President Rene Preval has named a new choice to be his prime minister: adviser and confidante, Robert "Bob" Manuel. Manuel previously served as state secretary for public security in 1996 during Preval's first presidential term, before resigning from the post.
According to sources close to the president, Preval informed the presidents of both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate late Sunday night of his nomination. The decision came after a week tensed with speculation and consultations with lawmakers and political party leaders over who the next nominee would be.
Haiti has been without a working government or prime minister ever since the Haitian senate fired Prime Minister Jacques-Edouard Alexis following a week of deadly food riots in the Caribbean nation.
The assassination was an inside job. The federal police commander kept his schedule secret and slept in a different place each night, yet the killer had the keys to the official's apartment and was waiting for him when he arrived after midnight.
When the commander, Commissioner Édgar Millán Gómez, the acting chief of the federal police, died with eight bullets in his chest on May 8, it sent chills through a force that had increasingly found itself a target.
The police say the gunman had been hired by a disgruntled federal police officer who worked for a drug cartel in Sinaloa State, and the inside nature of the killing underscored just how difficult it is for President Felipe Calderón to keep his vow to clean up police corruption and end the drug-related violence racking Mexico.
Eager to boost tourism, Hildalgo State came up with a novel idea: an advertising campaign featuring a well-known actress wearing Hidalgo's most eye-popping sites on her body.
"Hildalgo, under my skin" was the catch phrase for the ads, which featured the soap opera actress Irán Castillo covered with computer-generated images of mountains, waterfalls and monuments.
But federal officials were unimpressed. They did not object to Ms. Castillo's lying seminude on the grass with hot-air balloons displayed on her body or lounging in a forest with images of rock faces on her flank or even sprawled on a beautiful mosaic wearing nothing but a beautiful mosaic. "We're not moralistic," insisted Benito Taibo, an executive with Mexico's National Institute for Anthropology and History. "We don't have an issue with her. She's a pretty girl."
But the institute did have an issue with Ms. Castillo's wearing Mexico's patrimony on her curvaceous form. Whether it was the stone Atlantes in Tula de Allende or the old aqueduct in Padre Tembleque or the former convent in San Nicolás Tolentino, imprinting one of Mexico's treasures on a soap opera star was deemed a violation of the law.
The Making of "Hidalgo, Under My Skin" campaign with Irán Castillo.
The Conservative government was shaken to the core Monday after Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier resigned over a security breach involving classified documents.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper told an extraordinary evening news conference on Parliament Hill that Mr. Bernier's controversial relationship with a woman linked to the Hells Angels was not a factor in the decision.
He said it was prompted by an error involving classified documents and sources say they included briefing material for his trip to the NATO summit where Canada announced it would remain in Afghanistan...
The resignation announcement came a scant two hours before Julie Couillard was broadcast on French-language television network TVA telling viewers her former lover left documents at her house.
Ground operations began today at the Phoenix landing site at Mars' north pole, with the latest images from the robotic lander showing a bizarre, checkerboard landscape apparently shaped by the movement of ice lying only inches beneath the surface.
Employing a "follow the water" philosophy, NASA's Phoenix spacecraft has gone to the pole to search for carbon-containing organic molecules that could indicate Mars' potential as a home for some forms of life.
The first images beamed back to Earth show a complex of polygonal features bordered by narrow troughs. At first glance, they don't appear particularly gripping. Some observers have likened the scene to a lumpy parking lot.
