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by Dan Restrepo
Bush's swing through Latin America should have helped the cause for immigration reform here at home. Unfortunately, events in Washington suggested the path forward was becoming more complicated, not less
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by Daffodil Altan and Elena Shore
Newspapers carried the story of his visit on their front pages, often creating multimedia packages with photos, videos and several reports. But in the editorial pages writers seemed irritated by the hoopla and disruption caused by his motorcades. Many editors were disappointed that talks between Bush and their country's president often yielded nothing tangible when it came to their gravest concerns: immigration, trade and drug trafficking
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Um Abdallah, 41, has a difficult task ahead of her -- she has to learn how to use a gun and begin preparing for a day she believes is going to be one of God's forgiveness and revenge against foreign forces occupying her country
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by Zofeen Ebrahim
On Mar. 16 television audiences in Pakistan were stunned when cameras panned from lawyers demonstrating in front of the Supreme Court in Islamabad, against the Mar. 9 suspension of Pakistan's chief justice, to a police raid on the nearby premises of GEO Television. Widely-aired footage showed policemen smashing furniture and glass panes and roughing up the staff
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by Aaron Glantz
Rep. Sam Farr, a Democrat from the hippie college town of Santa Cruz, originally voted against the Iraq war and has voted against proposals to fund it each of the last four years. This time, though, he's singing a different tune -- and critics say his change of heart has more to do with the spinach industry than anything else
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Analysis by Sanjay Suri
Military forces from Western powers are fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, but it is the policies of these very governments that is boosting the Taliban. Western powers 'praise the democracy in India on the one hand and support dictatorship in Pakistan on the other'
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by Eli Clifton
So-called 'guest workers' in the United States are routinely forced to handover the deeds to their homes to recruiters, cheated out of wages, held captive by employers who seize their passports and visas, and denied basic standards of living conditions and health care, according to report released March 12 in Washington
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by Bill Berkowitz
While the Bush administration and beltway neo-conservatives doggedly crank up the volume against Iran, they are again being joined by a number of significant conservative Christian evangelicals. Hagee, pastor of the 18,000-member San Antonio, Texas-based Cornerstone Church and head of a multi-million-dollar evangelical enterprise, seems to believe such a conflict is both inevitable and necessary, The Jewish Week noted
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by Antoaneta Bezlova
In Beijing where the government is proudly preparing to host the 2008 Olympic games, the building boom is blamed for depriving thousands of people of their land. As the capital is expanding its airport, building a new futuristic terminal to enable it to handle 60 million travellers annually, peasants on the city outskirts have been forced out of their land and cheated of their compensation
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by Antoaneta Bezlova
China has invested in developing its lunar program, government officials often like to emphasize the fact that many of its milestones were achieved single-handedly. The stress on doing it alone is because for years the United States has barred China from participating in any space launch that involves U.S. technology and from work involving the International Space Station
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by Alvaro Vargas Llosa
While mainstream America is discussing how acceptable the black candidate has become in the eyes of so many whites, other countries, particularly in Europe and Latin America, are keenly interested, for their own domestic reasons, in how difficult many American blacks are finding it to identify with Sen. Obama
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In his ruling, Judge Chambers determined that stream destruction caused by mountaintop removal coal mining cannot be fixed through mitigation. The Corp's witnesses ... conceded that the Corps does not know of any successful stream creation projects in the Appalachian region, the judge wrote
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Unease is mounting in South Africa after reports that patients with the deadly strain of extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) are not being isolated in hospitals. The public health risk is staggering: anybody coming into contact with patients with XDR-TB is at risk of infection, but people living with the HIV virus are even more vulnerable
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by Ali al-Fadhily
Iraqis in the volatile al-Anbar province west of Baghdad are reporting regular killings carried out by U.S. forces that many believe are part of a 'genocidal' strategy
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by Emad Mekay
The alleged operation involved bulldozing soil and organic debris on top of waste pits rather than cleaning them of poisonous toxins in the 1990s. The letter asserts that both lawyers oversaw this remediation. Later, Chevron tried to use the action as a defense in various lawsuits arising out of the ecological disaster in Ecuador
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by Earl Ofari Hutchinson
NAACP leaders are sandwiched between the shifting upward fortunes of the black middle-class, and downward of the black poor. A tilt by them toward a hard-edged activist agenda runs the risk of alienating the corporate donors and the Democratic politicians that the NAACP leaders carefully cultivate
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by Aaron Glantz
Peace activists entered their 10th day camped outside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco home March 21, the latest in an almost daily barrage of demonstrations, vigils and local government votes designed to convince Pelosi to refuse President Bush's 100-billion-dollar war funding request
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by Camille Taiara
Immigrant advocates suspect that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement is deporting a growing number of unaccompanied minors who've been caught trying to reunite with their parents already in the U.S., even when the parents have status, as in the case of one 9 year-old Honduran girl. The child is under deportation orders as an undocumented alien
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by Rene P. Ciria-Cruz
Is the Bush administration trying to slow down the surge in potential new Democratic voters by tightening access to U.S. citizenship through drastically higher application fees?
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Analysis by Dad Noorani
A new law granting amnesty and legal protection from prosecution to Afghan commanders accused of committing war atrocities has shifted the burden of proof for the two and a half decades of grave abuses to the Afghan public
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by Mohammed A. Salih
A new threat of war is looming in this mountain range in the north of Iraq, cutting into Turkey and Iran. All three countries have large Kurdish populations, and the governments of all three are worried about a Kurdish uprising for a separate homeland. Only in Iraq do Kurds have an autonomous region of their own
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by Joe Conason
The Whitewater case didn't save the first President Bush, although it was later revived as a costly pseudo-scandal. More pertinent today is what happened to Banks and Lewis -- and the U.S. attorney's office in Little Rock
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by Tom Barry
Tancredo has nothing to lose and everything to gain from a presidential bid. Although the firebrand politician from an affluent Denver suburb hasn't managed to make restrictionism the core principle of U.S. immigration policy, he and other nativists in Congress have over the past several years shifted the immigration debate toward their terms -- national security, cultural unity, and border control -- at the national, state, and local levels
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Deputy Interior Secretary James Steven Griles pleaded guilty March 23 in federal court to one count of obstruction of justice in the Jack Abramoff corruption investigation. Griles, a former lobbyist for mining and oil industries, is the highest ranking Bush administration official caught in the Washington lobbying scandal
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by Chip Ward
Although the public may not have caught on, ask any urban library administrator in the nation where the chronically homeless go during the day and he or she will tell you about the struggles of America's public librarians to cope with their unwanted and unappreciated role as the daytime guardians of the down and out. In our public libraries, the outcasts are inside
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by Dahr Jamail and Ali al-Fadhily
International media were invited to show that the meeting was intent on bringing security to Iraq. That plan backfired after mortar shells landed within 50 metres of the conference center, shattering glass panes in the building
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by Khody Akhavi
As the Western media turns its attention to the fate of 15 Britons detained for allegedly trespassing into Iranian waters over the weekend, the status of five Iranian officials captured in a U.S. military raid on a liaison office in northern Iraq on Jan. 11 remains a mystery
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by Diego Cevallos
Most analysts saw Bush's tour as an attempt to counteract the influence in the region of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who seemed to see the visit in a similar light. On Tuesday, Chavez said he dealt Bush a 'knockout' blow with his own simultaneous tour in the region, which took him to Argentina, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Haiti
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by Jim Lobe
'Although Chavez is not scheduled on the tour, he's the reason why the trip is being made,' said Birns. 'After years of neglect, the administration finally realized it had a rather durable enemy in Chavez and began to upgrade the attention it was giving to the region. But it has really all come too late'
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by Eli Clifton
The new Democratic-led U.S. House of Representatives passed a $124 billion war spending bill with an explicit deadline for U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq, in one of the most vocal challenges yet to the Bush administration's policy in the country
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by Diego Cevallos
Even before the U.S. leader arrived, Calderon had called on the U.S. government to do more about drug trafficking, lashed out at the new fencing along the border, and said he would never be used as a 'battering ram' against left-leaning governments in Latin America that have less than warm relations with Washington
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by Praful Bidwai
The crisis precipitated by Musharraf's summary sacking of Supreme Court chief justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry shows no sign of abating. The resignations of a number of judges and of deputy attorney general Nasir Saeed Sheikh seem to have strengthened the agitation launched by Pakistani lawyers. This is Musharraf's biggest domestic political crisis since October 1999. It comes on top of heightened tensions in his relations with the United States as a result of his ambivalence in combating the Taliban in Pakistan's border region abutting Afghanistan
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by Eli Clifton
Although part of the Bush administration's rationale for the RRW is a need to have a more flexible arsenal to engage and deter so-called rogue states, such as North Korea and Iran, the DTRA report concludes that Russia and China's future decisions about their nuclear arsenals will be dependent on 'their perceptions of U.S. strategic intent, plans, and commitments'
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by Ashfaq Yusufzai
The district of Tank, located on the border with South Waziristan Agency has slipped into the control of the Taliban. There is a total collapse of the civil administration. Police stations remain closed after sundown, and the Taliban fighters patrol the streets and the bazaars riding on their favorite Datsun pickups
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Analysis by Ricardo Grassi
The Taliban accusation might be a ploy to justify a far more elaborate political operation, as the voice presumed to be Dadullah's said on the tape that Westerners gave freedom to their own media, but not to the Taliban's, showing that they wanted unilateral press freedom, which the Taliban rejects: 'either it is total, or it is forbidden.' The speaker said it was unacceptable that Taliban reporters were in jail while Westerners were free
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by Ali al-Fadhily
Many Iraqis are now looking to local political leadership to fill wide gaps in a fractured government that is failing to provide security and basic needs
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by Emad Mekay
The U.S.-backed Iraqi cabinet approved a new oil law Monday that is set to give foreign companies the long-term contracts and safe legal framework they have been waiting for, but which has rattled labor unions and international campaigners who say oil production should remain in the hands of Iraqis
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by J.R. Pegg
White House documents released Monday by a House committee offer further evidence that Bush administration officials with no scientific training edited federal scientific reports to inflate uncertainty about humanity's role in global warming
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by Joe Conason
The credibility of Gonzales -- which was never very great -- is diminishing further as the facts behind the controversial round of firings continue to emerge. While his excuses and explanations for those dismissals evaporate under scrutiny, what can be seen instead is a familiar pattern of partisan misconduct
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by Joe Conason
Responsibility for the Iraqi quagmire rests squarely with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who have spent nearly four years, thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars to create catastrophe. Today every policy alternative, including a phased withdrawal, is likely to impose costly consequences on us, on the Iraqis and on the world. So perhaps the Democrats deserve more than a month or two to determine how best to extricate our troops from that complex and perilous trap
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by Joe Conason
The Washington press corps is just as remote from American views and values as when it was howling for President Clinton's head. By now, the Democrats should know that when these soothsayers warn against your present course, it is best to keep going straight ahead
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by Robert Scheer
The family points out that Rumsfeld was very familiar with the case. He had written Tillman a personal letter thanking him for enlisting. Rumsfeld was obviously aware that this was the most high-profile death in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The family noted it is inconceivable that the Pentagon would have been able to coordinate a carefully orchestrated campaign of lies converting Tillman's death as a result of friendly fire into a Rambo-like assault on Taliban guerrillas, while keeping the secretary of defense and the White House in the dark
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by Robert Scheer
According to an authoritative poll sponsored jointly by ABC, BBC and USA Today: Only 38 percent of Iraqis believe that the country is better off today than under Hussein, while nearly four out of five oppose the presence of coalition forces in Iraq
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by Robert Scheer
The argument for troop withdrawal is that, after four years of occupation, the presence of U.S. troops on every street corner in Baghdad is part of the problem, not the solution. As the French learned in Algeria, the Russians in Afghanistan and the Israelis in the Palestinian territories, foreign occupation is the mother's milk of terrorism
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by Robert Scheer
No wonder Coulter hates him: Edwards is a Democrat who believes in the progressive heritage of his party and is not afraid to tell the world
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by Robert Scheer
Five years and an outlaw nuke test after President Bush blew up the peace process with Pyongyang so he could look tougher than his predecessor, he capitulated completely earlier this month in accepting a negotiating framework that tacitly accepts the huge surge in the communist state's estimated nuclear arsenal
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by Roberto Lovato
The recent scandal involving the firing of eight U.S. attorneys by U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has yielded mostly silence from the country's pre-eminent Latino organizations
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Increasing levels of air pollution from Asia are affecting global weather patterns by intensifying clouds and storms over the Pacific Ocean, according to new research published March 6. The findings are more worrying news for the Arctic, which the authors of the research contend will warm more quickly due to the stronger Pacific storms
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by Michael Winship
The executive used a provision of the Patriot Act allegedly designed to keep our legal system running during 9/11-like acts of terror to attempt petty partisan gain. Because the White House and Justice Department were rating U.S. attorneys -- including Scooter Libby prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald -- not on the basis of their skill and effectiveness but their obeisance to the administration (Fitzgerald was ranked beneath 'strong U.S. attorneys... who exhibited loyalty')
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by Tom Barry
Rather than regarding his overwhelming electoral defeat last November as an indicator that his own extreme notions about domestic and foreign policy were misguided, Santorum concluded that Americans are slumbering while at the gates gather barbarians
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by J.R. Pegg
Lawmakers should stop bickering about the science of global warming and take aggressive action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, former Vice President Al Gore told members of Senate and House committees March 21. There is a clear scientific consensus that human activities are changing the climate, said Gore, who characterized global warming as a planetary emergency
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by Trita Parsi
Rather than an act of desperation resulting from the onslaught of Western pressure, as some in Washington have interpreted Iran's actions, the arrest of the British sailors may have been a calculated measure to fight fire with fire -- but without targeting the U.S. directly (which surely would have caused things to escalate out of control)
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by Najum Mushtaq
Bush's Pakistan policy is based on two dubious and misplaced assumptions. One, that Pakistan's military -- and therefore General Musharraf -- is the only viable option to govern the country. Musharraf and the military remain indispensable in the Bush administration's war on terror. Two, American policymakers tend to put an excessive emphasis on al-Qaeda and the Taliban: capture and kill so-called al-Qaeda operatives and Taliban leaders, and the war on terrorism will have been half won. This simplistic approach ignores other strands of religious extremism in Pakistan that run parallel to, and often in concert with, the international network of terrorism
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Analysis by Jim Lobe
In a move that has surprised many foreign policy analysts here, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has appointed a prominent neo-conservative hawk and leading champion of the Iraq war to the post of State Department Counselor
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by Bill Berkowitz
Most of the pieces for a rejuvenated conservative movement were already in place by 1994, including a highly-functional infrastructure of right-wing foundations, think tanks, advocacy organizations, media outlets -- conservative talk radio and Christian television -- and an army of grassroots volunteers. But a little over a decade later, youngish conservatives are again restless. Embittered by defeat at the hands of the Democratic Party in November, which they attribute to the Republican leadership 'selling conservatives out,' these new activists are calling for a new conservative movement
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by Joe Conason
Each year he assures us that we are making progress, even if we don't seem to have gotten anywhere except deeper into the sectarian quicksand. And each year he promises that we will see more such progress in future months, if only we possess the steely character required to send other people's children to war
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by Jim Lobe
Two weeks after making major concessions for a nuclear accord with North Korea, the Bush administration said Tuesday it was prepared to sit down with Iran and Syria as part of a regional conference to stabilize Iraq
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Analysis by Jim Lobe
One Democratic election landslide later, Rumsfeld's departure, and the longest-running record of sustained low public approval ratings for any U.S. president in more than 50 years, conventional wisdom has again concluded that the realists have indeed taken the reins of power
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by Jim Lobe
The measure, which will take the form of an amendment to a pending $100 billion supplemental defense appropriations bill, also requires Bush to begin such a withdrawal as early as July of this year unless he certifies that the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is making progress toward achieving national reconciliation and ending sectarian violence there
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Analysis by Jim Lobe
Accounts of a Feb. 28 'literary luncheon' at the White House suggest that President Bush's reading tastes -- until now a remarkably good predictor of his policy views -- are moving ever rightward, even apocalyptic
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by Suvendrini Kakuchi
Dubbed 'cradle-of-storks,' the baby hatch would allow infants to be deposited anonymously. It was proposed by the Jikei Hospital, a Catholic facility that does not perform abortions and is located in Kumamoto city, southern Japan. Opposition is based mostly on the grounds that a baby hatch might encourage an increase in the number of babies abandoned by parents
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by Kimia Sanati
Whether or not the 15 British Royal Marines in Iranian custody actually trespassed into the country's territorial waters, the incident has provided Tehran with an opportunity to build up an image of a peaceful, non-aggressive nation set upon by Western predators
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by Gareth Porter
The administration's decision last month to increase U.S. military strength in Iraq by at least 22,000 troops is related more to a strategy of increased pressure on Iran than to stabilizing the situation in Baghdad. The troop decision was described as putting the U.S. military in a better position to respond to attacks by Shiite forces on U.S troops in retaliation against a possible U.S. strike against Iran
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by Earl Ofari Hutchinson
The killing of unarmed African American Sean Bell in a hail of 50 bullets by New York City police officers has resulted in indictments against three police detectives. But going from indictment to conviction of police officers will be an uphill struggle, if history is any indication
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by Haider Rizvi
Despite cold temperatures, at least 40,000 people took part in the New York rally, with women's participation more visible than ever before at anti-war events. Elsewhere outside the United States, huge rallies also took place in many European cities and Australia. Some estimates suggest that the turnout in Spain was close to 100,00
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by Michael Winship
A comparison between Ms. Coulter and Mrs. Roosevelt Longworth is risible at best (although Mrs. L was a lifelong Republican and in her youth, her bursts of sour petulance were legendary). There's a genuine wit and a certain acuity to Longworth's barbs lacking not only in Coulter's words but the pettiness of Hume and Gingrich as well. Where's nuance, where's flair, where's, well, style?
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Since 'Operation Imposing Law' was launched by U.S. and Iraqi forces on February 14, the number of those thought to be victims of Shia death squads has dropped dramatically in Baghdad, but there has been no respite in violence blamed on Sunni insurgents
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by Stephen Zunes
Tribal leaders maintain this practice averts the kind of blood feuds between rival clans seen all too often in the region -- and consequently saves hundreds of lives. However, the women involved are often treated as little more than slaves in the homes of their in-laws, facing constant humiliation as a reminder that they are there to pay for a crime committed by their fathers, uncles or other relatives. In some cases, they are murdered
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by Dr. Nadje Al-Ali
By 2007, the threat posed by Islamist militias as well as the mushrooming Islamist extremist groups has gone far beyond imposed dress codes and calls for gender segregation at universities. Despite -- or even partly because of the U.S. and U.K. rhetoric about liberation and women's rights -- women have been pushed back even more into the background and into their homes. Women who have a public profile, either as doctors, academics, lawyers, NGO activists or politicians, are systematically threatened and have become targets for assassinations
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by Eli Clifton
On Sept. 6, 2006, President Bush said that all CIA prisoners have either been released or sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but HRW claims that many other prisoners were simply 'disappeared' by the CIA
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Albion Monitor Issue 155 (http://www.albionmonitor.com)
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