JERUSALEM – Israel's outgoing prime minister Ehud Olmert is risking a crisis of confidence with Egypt by insisting that a prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas precede any Egyptian-mediated ceasefire arrangement to end the Gaza war. Olmert overrode the...
BAGHDAD – "We only want a normal life," says Um Qasim, sitting in a bombed out building in Baghdad. She and others around have been saying that for years. Um Qasim lives with 13 family members in a brick shanty on the edge of a former military...
*with Khushal Arsala One of the first difficult foreign policy decisions of the Obama administration will be what the United States should do about Afghanistan. Escalating the war, as National Security Advisor Jim Jones has been encouraging, will likely make matters...
Joan Walsh, the Salon.com political editor who appears often on MSNBC with Chris Matthews, is emblematic, for me, of a type I know all too well: the well-meaning Bay Area liberal. Her politics exemplify the psychology of our opinion elites who got behind Barack Obama...
First, the good news. Adel Abdul Hakim, one of five Uighurs (Muslims from China's oppressed Xinjiang province), who was released from Guantánamo in May 2006, has had his asylum claim accepted by the Swedish government. The Uighurs' story It has been a long journey for...
The name search took a year, while the company became persona non grata in Iraq, but now it's a reality. The notorious Blackwater Worldwide has officially rebranded itself Xe. According to a company memo, "Xe will be a one-stop shopping source for world class...
Updated at 7:12 p.m. EST, Feb. 19, 2009At least 20 Iraqis were killed and 31 more were wounded in renewed violence across the country. No Coalition deaths were reported, but a U.S. soldier confessed to the "execution style" killing of an Iraqi detainee in his care....
Praise by the U.S. State Department for Sunday's referendum in Venezuela suggests that President Barack Obama is hoping to ease long-strained relations with President Hugo Chávez, according to regional experts here. While State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid...
U.S. President Barack Obama announced Tuesday that he is sending two additional combat brigades to Afghanistan, marking the start of what many believe will be an escalation that will ultimately see the U.S. forces there double. There are some 36,000 U.S. troops...
This week, the self-proclaimed state of Kosovo celebrated the anniversary of the Albanian provisional government declaring "independence" from Serbia. On February 17, 2008, following two years of sham negotiations and diplomatic farce, the institutions ostensibly...
