CalNews.com reports: Religion of Peace?

Well, you're joking of course, right President Bush? Let's look at the facts. Explore with us if you will, Mr. President, the latest reports on the practitioners of the "Religion of Peace"

Terrorism case baffles remote Alaska town
The FBI says the weatherman in tiny King Salmon, aided by his wife, had an assassination list and was an adherent of Islamic extremism
By Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times
He was the local weatherman, sending up weather balloons twice a day above this remote community of 450 full-time residents near Bristol Bay and preparing short-term forecasts for pilots and fishermen. She was a stay-at-home mom who drove their 4-year-old to preschool, sang in the town choir and picked berries with her girlfriends. She took part in the community play, in which she portrayed a fairy godmother who acted as a prosecutor in court, confronting the Big Bad Wolf for his crimes against Little Red Riding Hood, the Three Little Pigs and the Boy Who Cried Wolf. So beloved were Paul Rockwood Jr. and his wife, Nadia, that when they left King Salmon in May to move to England, where Nadia was born, more than 30 people — pretty much their entire circle of friends — showed up at the airport. The choir sang "Wherever You Go," and "people were just bawling," said Rebecca Hamon, a friend of the couple. What none of them could have known was that FBI agents were meeting the small turboprop plane in Anchorage to question the Rockwoods on suspicion of domestic terrorism-related crimes. This week, Paul and Nadia Rockwood pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Anchorage to one count of willfully making false statements to the FBI; in Paul Rockwood's case, it was a statement about domestic terrorism. The plea agreements state that Rockwood, 35, had become an adherent of extremist Islam who had prepared a list of assassination targets, including U.S. service members. And, though no plot to carry out the killings was revealed, he had researched methods of execution, including guns and explosives, the agreements say.

Afghan bombing kills 5 U.S. service members
By Laura King, Chicago Tribune
Bombings in the country's tinderbox south killed five American service members on Saturday, four of them in the same blast, military officials said. Multiple troop deaths in a single incident are becoming more common as insurgents plant larger numbers of homemade bombs and as the explosive payload of these crude weapons increases. For Western troops in Afghanistan, IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, pose the greatest threat to life and limb. That is despite a major Pentagon push this year to reduce such casualties with better technology, more training and what military officials describe as greater cooperation from Afghan villagers in pointing out where buried bombs are. NATO's International Security Assistance Force, which announced the latest deaths, did not specify where they occurred. American troops are heavily concentrated in the provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, both longtime Taliban strongholds. Both provinces have been the focus of large-scale military efforts this year. A long-delayed operation in and around Kandahar city, the urban hub of the south, is finally gathering momentum. In announcing Saturday's fatalities, the NATO force did not release the nationalities of the five dead, but U.S. officials confirmed all were Americans. U.S. troop deaths have reached their highest levels of the nine-year war. Last month a record 60 Americans were killed in Afghanistan; the most recent fatalities bring the tally for July to more than 50.

Behind the mosque
Wahhabism -- whether in the form promoted by Saudi money around the globe, or in the more openly nihilist brand embraced by terrorists -- is a totalitarian ideology comparable to Nazism or, closer still, the "state Shintoism" of imperial Japan
By ANDREW G. BOSTOM, New York Post
Imam Feisal Rauf, the central figure in the coterie planning a huge mosque just off Ground Zero, is a full-throated champion of the very same Muslim theologians and jurists identified in a landmark NYPD report as central to promoting the Islamic religious bigotry that fuels modern jihad terrorism. This fact alone should compel Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg to withdraw their support for the proposed mosque. In August 2007, the NYPD released "Radicalization in the West -- The Homegrown Threat." This landmark 90-page report looked at the threat that had become apparent since 9/11, analyzing the roots of recent terror plots in the United States, from Lackawanna, NY, to Portland, Ore., to Fort Dix, NJ. The report noted that Saudi "Wahhabi" scholars feed the jihadist ideology, legitimizing an "extreme intolerance" toward non-Muslims, especially Jews, Christians and Hindus. In particular, the analysts noted that the "journey" of radicalization that produces homegrown jihadis often begins in a Wahhabi mosque. At least two of Imam Rauf's books, a 2000 treatise on Islamic law and his 2004 "What's Right with Islam," laud the implementation of sharia -- including within America -- and the "rejuvenating" Islamic religious spirit of Ibn Taymiyyah and al-Wahhab. In short, Feisal Rauf's public image as a devotee of the "contemplative" Sufi school of Islam cannot change the fact that his writings directed at Muslims are full of praise for the most noxious and dangerous Muslim thinkers. Wahhabism -- whether in the form promoted by Saudi money around the globe, or in the more openly nihilist brand embraced by terrorists -- is a totalitarian ideology comparable to Nazism or, closer still, the "state Shintoism" of imperial Japan.

Man linked to 'South Park' internet warning is charged with supporting Somali extremists
By Reuters, Chicago Tribune
A 20-year-old Virginia man linked to internet warnings to the creators of the animated show "South Park" was arrested Wednesday on charges of providing material support to Shabab, an extremist group based in Somalia with ties to Al Qaeda, the U.S. Justice Department said. The defendant, Zachary Adam Chesser, a U.S. citizen living in Fairfax County in Virginia, told federal agents that he attempted twice to travel to Somalia to join Shabab as a foreign fighter, the department said. After he was prevented from boarding a flight from New York to Uganda on July 10, Chesser admitted to the agents that he intended to travel from Uganda to Somalia, according to an FBI affidavit filed in federal court in Virginia. Chesser said he had planned to join Shabab, but that he had a change of heart after learning about the deadly bombings in Uganda earlier this month for which the group has claimed responsibility. One American was among the 73 that were killed in the attack. In 2008, the U.S. State Department designated Shabab as a foreign terrorist organization, describing it as a violent extremist group.

Terrorists in the ranks...
Suspected Afghan army trainer opens fire on fellow instructors
By Joshua Partlow, Washington Post
A suspected Afghan army trainer on a shooting range in northern Afghanistan opened fire on his fellow instructors Tuesday, killing two American civilian trainers and one other Afghan soldier before being killed himself, NATO officials said. On a day when world diplomats gathered in Kabul for an international conference intended to further a transition to Afghan security responsibility, the violence showed the risks and setbacks that can come with a rapid expansion of Afghan military forces. The shooting, at a weapons training base near the city of Mazar-e Sharif, comes just one week after another rogue Afghan soldier killed three British soldiers at a base in Helmand province.

"It is almost impossible to obtain a public service in Afghanistan without paying a bribe"
End Afghanistan's bribe system? Good luck, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
By RICHARD SISK, Los Angeles Daily News
Not even her best pals gave Secretary of State Clinton much of a shot at putting a dent in Afghan corruption as she headed for Kabul on the first stop of a week-long Asia swing. Clinton will preside at a donors conference of more than 35 nations beginning tomorrow with United Nations Secretary Ban Ki-moon. At the meeting, Afghan President Hamid Karzai will push for getting half of the aid money funneled through his feeble government. But Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), possibly Clinton's best friend on Capitol Hill, warned against letting Karzai and his cronies anywhere near the money. At a hearing of her House Appropriations Subcommittee, Lowey, who has slapped a hold on $3.9 billion in U.S. funds for Afghanistan, cited "rampant corruption and theft of U.S. government assistance" and "concerns with billions in cash leaving Kabul Airport." Donald Gambatesa, inspector general for the State Department's Agency for International Development, agreed that "it is almost impossible to obtain a public service in Afghanistan without paying a bribe."

Dozens Killed in Iraq Suicide Attacks
By TIM ARANGO, New York Times
In the latest high-profile attack against former insurgents who switched sides to fight alongside American forces here, more than 40 were killed Sunday morning after a man detonated himself outside an Iraqi Army base as Awakening members lined up to receive their paychecks. The bomber struck around 8 a.m. on Sunday — the first day of the work week here — in Radwaniya, a largely Sunni neighborhood southwest of central Baghdad. The latest casualty figures from an official at the Ministry of the Interior was 43 killed and 40 wounded. The dead also included Iraqi army soldiers. About two hours later another attacker blew himself up in Al Qaim, a city in western Iraq near the Syrian border, also killing Awakening members. According to a police official, a man walked in to a building where Awakening members had gathered, opened fire with a rifle and then detonated a suicide vest. According to the official, seven were killed and 11 wounded. The latest violence against members of the Sunni Awakening, now backed by the Iraqi government, follows a series of assassinations and attacks in recent months against the former members of Al Qaeda in Iraq whose decision to switch loyalties was pivotal in quelling the apocalyptic violence of 2006 and 2007.

Second terror attack may have targeted city's clubs, restaurants
The Islamic terrorists allegedly discussed conducting the attack on Dec. 25, to coincide with the Christmas holiday
By Mike Levine, New York Post
The failed bombing attempt over Detroit on Christmas Day may not have been the only attack that extremists planned for the 2009 holiday, with intelligence from overseas indicating three weeks earlier that a plot targeting New York City on the same day may have been in the works, according to an FBI report. "The final target of the attack was not known, but extremist members had allegedly discussed restaurants and night clubs located in New York City," the FBI's assistant legal attache in London wrote in a so-called threat report exactly three weeks before Christmas. The Dec. 4 report, sent to U.S. and British counterterrorism officials, warned that "extremists allegedly planned to conduct a test run" that evening, hiding components for an improvised explosive device in a shipment of khat, a plant often chewed like tobacco that is a tradition for many in East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.

Release of Lockerbie bomber was a mistake, British government says
It was a mistake to release convicted Lockerbie bomber Britain's ambassador to the United States said Friday
By the Chicago Tribune
It was a mistake to release convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbeset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, Britain's ambassador to the United States said Friday. The British government believes it was wrong to let Al Megrahi out of prison and return home to Libya in August 2009, Ambassador Nigel Sheinwald said in a statement. The government at the time also felt the same way, he said. The decision to release Al Megrahi, however, was up to the devolved Scottish executive and the British government therefore had no power to stop it, Sheinwald said.

Somali Islamists claim Uganda carnage
Officials warn of al-Shabaab threat with American recruits
By Shaun Waterman and Benjamin Birnbaum, Washington Times
A senior member of the Somali Islamist insurgent group al-Shabaab on Monday claimed responsibility for a pair of terrorist attacks in Uganda that left 74 World Cup viewers dead, including one American. The bombings triggered fears of a new wave of attacks in the region by al-Shabaab, although a U.S. intelligence official told the Washington Times that "this does not move the needle" on concerns about a possible strike in the United States by the group, which has recruited U.S. citizens as fighters. "We will carry out attacks against our enemy wherever they are," Sheik Ali Mohamud Rage, a senior al-Shabaab official, told the Associated Press in the Somali capital, Mogadishu. "No one will deter us from performing our Islamic duty." Ugandan investigators said from the beginning that they had suspected al-Shabaab — which has pledged loyalty to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network — was behind Sunday's blasts. They occurred within 10 minutes of each other at two locations in the Ugandan capital of Kampala, including an Ethiopian restaurant. A Ugandan police spokesman said 74 people had been killed and scores more injured, and the U.S. State Department said five Americans were among those injured.

Air France jet lands in Brazil after bomb threat
Flight 443 was on the same route as an Air France jet that crashed last June off Brazil’s northeastern coast, killing all 228 on board
By the Associated Press, New York Post
An Air France passenger jet headed from Rio to Paris made an emergency landing in northeastern Brazil due to a bomb threat. All 405 passengers and 18 crew members were safely evacuated from Air France Flight 443 on Saturday night, said Jorge Andrade, a spokesman for airport authority Infraero. A spokesman for Air France in Brazil said the bomb threat was phoned in to Rio’s international airport by a female voice about 30 minutes after the plane took off. The control tower contacted the jet and the decision was made to land in Recife, the Air France spokesman said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter. In Paris, Air France spokesman Jerome N’Guyen said a full inspection of the plane had been completed and nothing suspicious had been found. The plane could not take off immediately because of regulations on rest time for flight personnel, but was expected to leave from Recife at 6 p.m. and reach Paris Monday morning, he added. Flight 443 was on the same route as an Air France jet that crashed last June off Brazil’s northeastern coast, killing all 228 on board. While no definite cause has been determined in the crash, authorities have repeatedly ruled out foul play.

Wanted: Jihadists to Marry Widows
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS, New York Times
A snippet of news from a shadowy corner of Iraq: Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia recently issued a fatwa telling its fighters to marry the widows of those who have fallen. This may seem odd or insignificant, but it is one of the rare grains of news to emerge publicly about the inner workings of the Iraqi offshoot of Al Qaeda. So terrorism experts and others have been picking it over, hoping for clues to the strength of this group, which remains a critical part of the Iraqi insurgency. Still, trying to make sense of the directive, which has been passed down only by word of mouth so far, is a bit like reading a cloud. What you see depends mostly on who is looking at it. Not surprisingly, the terrorism analysts have an entirely different viewpoint from that of the jihadist newlyweds, who are trying to do what they see as their duty. But even among outsiders, the fatwa has different interpretations: a sign of weakness or cleverness; an act of rationality or utter cynicism about mixing affection and politics.

Suicide bombers kill more than 50 in Pakistan
By the Associated Press, Washington Times
Two suicide bombers struck outside a government office Friday in a tribal region where Pakistan's army has fought the Taliban, killing more than 50 people and wounding more than 100, officials said. The attack, one of the deadliest in Pakistan this year, indicated that militants remain a potent force in the country's tribal belt bordering Afghanistan despite army offensives. The U.S. has praised Pakistan for taking on Islamist extremists that use the tribal region to plan attacks on Western troops across the border, but the militants have often retaliated on Pakistani soil. The bombers detonated their explosives near the Yakaghund village office of Rasool Khan, a deputy administrator of the Mohmand tribal region who escaped unharmed. At least one bomber was on a motorcycle. Nearby, officials were distributing wheelchairs to disabled people and equipment to poor farmers, said Mohmand's chief administrator, Amjad Ali Khan. He said more than 50 people were killed and more than 100 were wounded. One of the bombs appeared fairly small but the other was huge, and they went off within seconds of each other, Amjad Ali Khan told the Associated Press. Some 70 to 80 shops in the area were damaged or destroyed, Rasool Khan said. A prison building also was damaged, and some 28 prisoners — ordinary criminals, not militants — had apparently escaped, he said. "After the blast, I saw destruction. I saw bodies everywhere. I saw the injured crying for help," security official Esa Khan told the Associated Press in the main northwest city of Peshawar, where he helped escort some of the wounded to a hospital.

Makeshift bombs at all-time high in Afghanistan
By Joshua Partlow, Washington Post
Use of the Taliban's deadliest weapon, crude homemade bombs, has reached an all-time high in Afghanistan, where in the last week of June more than 300 of the devices either exploded or were found before they could detonate. The number of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, in the country has risen relentlessly in recent years, up from about 50 a week during summer 2007. The bombs -- made using vast supplies of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, much of it brought in from Pakistan -- account for about two-thirds of NATO's troop fatalities in the nearly nine-year war. That figure also hit a per-month peak in June, with 102 dead. Ashton Carter, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, told reporters in Kabul on Thursday that the United States is in the process of delivering $3 billion worth of counter-IED equipment to Afghanistan, at least doubling what it now spends. That includes doubling to 64 the number of surveillance blimps that float above cities and military bases to detect Taliban activity and adding more explosive-residue detection kits and new drone aircraft.

"We love death"
Al Qaeda operatives indicted in New York plot
The indictment names new suspects in the case, including two who allegedly were planning a similar attack in Britain
By Julia Love, Los Angeles Times
An unsuccessful plan to detonate homemade bombs in the New York subway system last year was orchestrated by senior Al Qaeda leaders who were also plotting a comparable attack in Britain, according to a terrorism indictment unsealed Wednesday. "The charges announced today illustrated the coordinated and persistent attempts by our adversaries to harm American citizens," said George Venizelos, acting assistant director in charge of the FBI's New York office. Adnan Shukrijumah, a U.S. citizen who was regarded as one of Al Qaeda's best hopes to execute a plot in post- 9/11 America, is among several new alleged Al Qaeda figures charged in the botched Manhattan attempt. Two others indicted Wednesday, Abid Naseer and Tariq Ur Rehman, are also allegedly connected to the attack that was planned for English soil. "These charges underscore the global nature of the terrorist threat we face," said David Kris, assistant attorney general for national security. Three U.S. citizens have already been charged with plotting a series of suicide bombings on the New York subway during rush hour that would have taken place days after the eighth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Najibullah Zazi and Zarein Ahmedzay, both Afghan immigrants, pleaded guilty this year. The indictment alleges that after Zazi was taken into custody, Medunjanin tried again to complete a suicide attack. On Jan. 7, he crashed his car into another vehicle in Queens, N.Y., dialing 911 moments before to state his name and his motives, authorities said. "We love death," he told the 911 operator, according to the indictment.

3 arrested in Norway al-Qaida bomb plot
By the Associated Press, New York Post
Three suspected al-Qaida members were arrested Thursday morning in what Norwegian and U.S. officials said was a terrorist plot linked to similar plans in New York and England. The three men, whose names were not released, had been under surveillance for more than a year. Officials believe they were planning attacks with portable but powerful bombs like the ones at the heart of last year’s thwarted suicide attack in the New York City subway. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has called that one of the most serious terrorist plots since 9/11. On Wednesday, prosecutors revealed the existence of a related plot in Manchester, England. Officials believe the Norway plan was organized by the same top-level al-Qaida officials in charge of planning worldwide attacks. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case. The Norwegian Police Security Service said only that the three were arrested on suspicion of “preparing terror activities.”

Bin Laden chef pleads guilty in 1st terror conviction under Obama commissions
By the New York Post
A longtime associate of Osama bin Laden on Wednesday pleaded guilty at Guantanamo Bay to terror charges of conspiracy and material support, marking the first-ever conviction under the military commission system resurrected by President Obama. Al Qosi was accused of supporting terrorism by serving on a Taliban mortar crew and occasionally as bin Laden's bodyguard. While not a household name, it is alleged that al Qosi, who is Sudanese, knew bin Laden from his days in Sudan in the early '90s and ultimately followed the Al Qaeda leader to Afghanistan. Court documents claim that he served in a number of roles for his longtime friend -- from driver to accountant to cook in the kitchen at bin Laden's Afghanistan compound before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Perhaps most importantly, he allegedly facilitated bin Laden's escape from Tora Bora in late 2001.

Reporter hails terrorist as "one of Hezbollah's giants I respect a lot"
CNN fires Middle Eastern editor over tweet
By David Bauder, Washington Times
CNN has fired an editor responsible for Middle Eastern coverage after she posted a note on Twitter expressing admiration for a late Lebanese cleric considered an inspiration for the Hezbollah militant movement. Octavia Nasr later apologized for her tweet, but CNN's senior vice president for international newsgathering, Parisa Khosravi, said Wednesday that Ms. Nasr's credibility had been compromised. The Atlanta-based Ms. Nasr worked at CNN for 20 years, starting as an assignment editor on the international desk. Her job was mostly off the air, but she occasionally would appear as an onscreen analyst during discussions of Middle Eastern news. Lebanon's Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah died Sunday after a long illness. He was staunchly anti-American and linked to bombings that killed more than 260 Americans, a charge he denied. In a Twitter posting over the weekend, Ms. Nasr said she was sad to hear of Fadlallah's death. She called him "one of Hezbollah's giants I respect a lot."

Ahmadinejad: 'They know they cannot do a damn thing with sanctions'
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lashed out over the weekend in the wake of Obama signing congressional sanctions into law
By Bridget Johnson, The Hill
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lashed out over the weekend in the wake of President Barack Obama signing into law last week the toughest-ever sanctions to come out of Congress. "Bullying powers know that no room will remain for them in the world if the Iranian nation mounts its efforts," Ahmadinejad said, according to the government-owned Press TV. "They know they cannot do a damn thing with sanctions." The president encouraged a unified effort to counter Western measures taken against the Islamic Republic for its growing nuclear program. "At any juncture that Iranians were vigilant and united, even the most bullying powers were brought to their knees," Ahmadinejad said. Obama on Thursday signed the sanctions law, measures in addition to the latest round of U.N. sanctions on Iran. The Senate had approved the bill 99-0, and the House OK'd the unilateral sanctions by 408-8.

Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi still alive in Libya, despite 'terminal cancer'
By Michael Sheridan, New York Daily News
Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi remains alive and well in Libya, despite doctors' claims that he would have died within weeks after his controversial release in August 2009. Perhaps the expert's should have gotten another opinion. Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi remains alive and well in Libya nearly a year after his early release and months after several doctors said the cancer-stricken terrorist was supposed to have died. Now one of those same doctors claims Megrahi could potentially live another decade. "There was always a chance he could live for ten years, 20 years... But it's very unusual," cancer specialist Professor Sikora told London's Sunday Times. Megrahi is the only terrorist to be convicted in the 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 bombing that killed 270 over Lockerbie, Scotland. He was given a life sentence, but received an early release in August for "compassionate" reasons because doctors concluded he would be dead within three months from terminal prostate cancer. The terrorist received a hero's welcome when he returned to Libya after his release in August, and since has reportedly been on the mend. Although he was required to keep Scottish doctors apprised of his health after his release, his lawyers have kept his medical records sealed. "There was a 50 per cent chance that he would die in three months," Sikora said. "But there was also a 50 per cent chance that he would live longer." Megrahi's continued health has caused outrage among the families of those who died in 1988, many of whom were angry he had been let go at all. It was reported last year that Megrahi's release had little to do with his health, but was tied to political dealings related to the oil trade between the United Kingdom and Libya.

Muslim family of 'Harry Potter' actress charged with threatening to kill her over boyfriend
Threatened to kill her because of her relationship with an unidentified Hindu man
By ANDY SOLTIS, New York Post
The strict Muslim father and brother of "Harry Potter" actress Afshan Azad have been charged with threatening to kill her because she has a boyfriend. Azad, 22, fled the suburban English home she shared with her father, Abdul, 54, mother, Nilofar, and three brothers after the bizarre incident on May 21, authorities said. A spokesman for prosecutors said her brother Ashraf, 28, physically attacked her and both he and their father threatened to kill her because of her relationship with an unidentified Hindu man. They confronted her in her bedroom and left her "badly bruised" when she refused to stop seeing the man, the Daily Express said. Afshan, who appeared in four Potter movies is believed to have taken refuge at the London home of friends. Both of the accused men appeared in Manchester Magistrates' Court and were ordered not to travel to London while the case was adjourned until July 12. Their bail conditions also required them to observe a curfew of 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. and not to contact an unnamed man, believed to be the boyfriend. No other details of the incident were disclosed. But Ashraf told the Daily Telegraph that the family will suffer as a result of the scandal.

Suicide Bombers Strike Sufi Shrine in Pakistan
The attack was part of a pattern of increased violence in Pakistan’s heartland, the province of Punjab, a troubling expansion of the Taliban insurgency tormenting the country
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and WAQAR GILLANI, New York Times
The death toll rose to 42 on Friday after suicide bombers struck Pakistan’s most important Sufi shrine, a devastating attack by hard-line militants on the moderate, more flexible blend of Islam that is practiced by most Pakistanis. The two bombers attacked in the city of Lahore just before midnight, the peak worship time for the shrine, known as Data Ganj Baksh. Thousands of people were at the shrine at the time, according to the Pakistani police. In addition to the fatalities, about 175 people were injured, according to police officials. The strike on such a revered place of worship seemed to enrage Pakistanis, who are growing weary of violence that has spiked in the past four years. On Friday, about 2,000 demonstrators marched through Lahore, calling on the government to do more to thwart militants, according to news reports from Pakistan. The attack was part of a pattern of increased violence in Pakistan’s heartland, the province of Punjab, a troubling expansion of the Taliban insurgency tormenting the country’s western border.

Terror -- and candor in describing the Islamist ideology behind it
"One has to understand where I'm coming from . . . I consider myself a mujahid, a Muslim soldier"
By Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post
Holder's avoidance of the obvious continues the absurd and embarrassing refusal of the Obama administration to acknowledge who out there is trying to kill Americans and why. In fact, it has banned from its official vocabulary the terms jihadist, Islamist and Islamic terrorism. Instead, President Obama's National Security Strategy insists on calling the enemy -- how else do you define those seeking your destruction? -- "a loose network of violent extremists." But this is utterly meaningless. This is not an anger-management therapy group gone rogue. These are people professing a powerful ideology rooted in a radical interpretation of Islam, in whose name they propagandize, proselytize, terrorize and kill. Why is this important? Because the first rule of war is to know your enemy. If you don't, you wander into intellectual cul-de-sacs and ignore the real causes that might allow you to prevent recurrences.

Embodiment of evil: There are few degrees of separation between terrorists
By the New York Daily News
Authorities frequently try to console us that one terror attack or another is a one-off or the work of a lone wolf. By and large, it's a lie. As new revelations about the foiled bombing of New York's subways prove, seemingly disparate Islamist plots are the work of a sophisticated, interconnected network. In fact, we now know that one man is tied to four known plots against New York, including 9/11, and is sure to be planning more. Adnan Shukrijumah, Saudi-born and American-raised, is a top Al Qaeda operative with a particular interest in striking the U.S. with nukes. Meantime, he has assisted plots that would wreak smaller-scale death and havoc. Officials revealed Wednesday that Shukrijumah met at a terrorist training camp in Pakistan with Zarein Ahmedzay, who pleaded guilty with Najibullah Zazi in the subway plot. That was but the most recent emergence of a man who, in 2004, was declared an urgent threat by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Confront the Saudis for teaching hate
'The Jews worship the devil," the teachers tell 8th-graders
By ADAM ROZELL & JOSHUA HABER, New York Post
'The Jews worship the devil," the teachers tell 8th-graders. Later, in 10th-grade history class, students will learn that the Jews were responsible for the French Revolution and, of course, the Bolshevik Revolution. These are mild examples of the blatantly untrue "information" systematically taught in schools across Saudi Arabia. It is no wonder anti-Semitism is still alive and well. Every year, the Saudi education system breeds a new pool of extremists. Students are taught to hate Jews and Christians (as well as people of other religions) and encouraged to act violently against them. In a 9th-grade textbook on selected Hadiths, or sayings by the Prophet, students learn that "The [hour of judgment] will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them." It says "there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him." The Saudi curricula includes false lessons on historical events -- such as the "fact" that Jews instigated World War I. An 8th grade Saudi textbook teaches students that Jews and Christians were "punished by being turned into apes and swine" for "losing their religion" during the pre-Islamic era. These texts also instruct children that Muslims are engaged in an existential battle against both Jews and Christians in a never-ending global jihad -- which is essentially the same line as al Qaeda.

JFK bomb plot nicknamed 'The Shining,' witness tells court in testimony against alleged ringleaders
"There was talk about people getting killed. Women, children, pregnant women. Some people was saying this is a sacrifice we have to make. Some people were saying 'collateral damage.'"
By John Marzulli, New York Daily News
They called it "The Shining." That was the nickname of a plot to blow up Kennedy Airport - because the inferno would have lit up the entire borough of Queens, a cooperating witness testified Thursday. Donald Nero, 51, a Guyanese national, said he was recruited to join the conspiracy by alleged ringleader Russell Defreitas, a former airport worker with a grudge against America. "According to Mr. Defreitas when the explosion takes place, you can see the explosion of the airport throughout Queens," Nero testified Thursday in Brooklyn Federal Court. The plan to blow up fuel tanks and fuel lines in 2006 was motivated by Defreitas' hatred of the U.S. for supporting Israel, he said. "America was putting missiles, bombs, war equipment on planes to send to Israel to kill Palestinians," Nero said. "He (Defreitas) said he put those things personally on planes." Assistant U.S. Attorney Berit Berger asked the witness if the plotters were aware an attack would cause carnage beyond economic damage. "According to what was said about 'The Shining' of Queens, there was going to be destruction of a lot of buildings," Nero replied. "At the airport there's a lot of people going in and out of the airport," he added. "There was talk about people getting killed. Women, children, pregnant women. Some people was saying this is a sacrifice we have to make. Some people were saying 'collateral damage.'"

Jihad journal
Qaeda's explosive mag for terror fans
By TODD VENEZIA, New York Post
Anna Wintour just got a rival for the title of most coldblooded editor in the world. Cave-dwelling al Qaeda boss Osama bin Laden and his minions apparently are putting out an English-language magazine with stories on topics close to the jihadi heart -- such as "Make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom." The new mag, called "Inspire," marks the biggest publishing foray by a criminal since Martha Stewart Living. It reportedly was scheduled to be available Wednesday on terror Web sites before a computer glitch scuttled the plan. The magazine has all the info that today's on-the-go jihadist needs to plan his weekend of hate and mayhem, including a piece on "Sending and receiving encrypted messages," and one explaining "Open source jihad." Three pages of what's purported to be the murderous mag were obtained by The Atlantic yesterday, including a table of contents showing a piece titled "The way to save the Earth" supposedly taken from a speech by Osama himself. Another page with an "Editor's Letter" explains the magazine's purpose. "In the West, in the East . . . and elsewhere there are millions of Muslims whose first or second language is English," the editors wrote. "It is our intent to be a platform to present the important issues facing [al Qaeda] today to the wide and dispersed English speaking Muslim readership." An article called "A message to the people of Yemen" is purportedly by al Qaeda's No. 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The magazine is said to have been published out of Yemen by a group called al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula. The Atlantic reported that a US official told them the terrorist title appears genuine. The cover of this inaugural issue features a shadowy figure of what appears to be a terrorist goon holding a rifle. On Page 21, the magazine promises an article on "The Cartoon Crusade," Page 48 looks at "The schools of jihad," while Page 56 has an article purportedly penned by Anwar al-Awlaki, who has been linked to the perpetrators of the Fort Hood massacre and the failed Christmas Day airliner bombing. "May our souls be sacrificed for you!" Awlaki wrote.

The danger of an Islamized Gaza
Torture and arrests for 'morality offenses' by Hamas police, the people of Gaza are prisoners
By Bill Van Esveld, Los Angeles Times
A notorious example is the expanded role of Gaza's "morality police." Last summer, these black-uniformed police began to patrol the beaches to ensure that men and women are dressed "appropriately" — there is no written rule but a woman was punished for swimming in a T-shirt and jeans — and that unrelated men and women are not mingling. They make sure clothing stores display only modestly dressed female mannequins in their windows. They have enforced bans on women riding motorcycles and on male hairdressers working in women's hair salons. Couples walking down the street are routinely stopped, separated and questioned by plainclothes officers asking whether they're married. "You basically have to carry a copy of your marriage license on you at all times, or risk being humiliated," one young couple told us. And parents say their daughters are under pressure to dress more conservatively for school. But the problem goes beyond such invasions of privacy. In some cases, the security services use "morality offenses" to expand their authority, including punishing people for breaking rules that are not on the books.

Twin Car Bombs Kill 27 in Baghdad
By the Associated Press, New York Times
Two suicide car bombers struck a crowded area outside a state-run bank Sunday in Baghdad, killing nearly 30 people in the latest attack targeting a high-profile part of the capital. The blast, which tore the glass facade off the three-story Trade Bank of Iraq building, leaving chairs and desks exposed, occurred shortly after 11 a.m. as the area was packed with people at the start of the local work week. Iraqi officials initially said the explosives-packed cars were parked a few hundred yards (meters) apart, but later said the attacks were staged by suicide bombers. Security forces swarmed through the debris while cleanup crews used cranes to move the charred wreckage of several vehicles destroyed by the blast.

Killed for collaborating with U.S.?
Iraqi son accused of killing father
By the Associated Press, New York Daily News
An al-Qaida-linked insurgent shot and killed his own father as he slept in his bed Friday for refusing to quit his job as an Iraqi interpreter for the U.S. military, police said, a rare deadly attack on a close family member over allegations of collaborating with the enemy. The attack happened on a particularly bloody day in Iraq, with at least 27 people killed nationwide in bombings and ambushes largely targeting the houses of government officials, Iraqi security forces and those seen as allied with them.

Violence Up Sharply in Afghanistan, Report Finds
By ROD NORDLAND, New York Times
Violence in Afghanistan increased substantially over the past three months, most of it due to attacks by “anti-government forces,” the United Nations said in a report released here Saturday. Especially alarming were increases in suicide bombings and assassinations, as well as a near-doubling of roadside bombings compared to the same period in 2009, according to the quarterly report of the U.N. Secretary General to the Security Council. “The number of security incidents increased significantly, compared to previous years and contrary to seasonal trends,” the report said, adding that most of this was a consequence of military operations in the southern part of the country, particularly Helmand and Kandahar provinces where increased NATO military operations have been underway.

Beware of jihad, ex-prosecutor says
Book outlines Islamist intentions to Muslimize the West
By Michal Elseth, Washington Times
Andrew C. McCarthy, a decorated former federal prosecutor who won convictions in the 1995 World Trade Center bombings, has issued a warning to America: Beware of the Islamist intent to Muslimize the Western world through jihad. Mr. McCarthy says he wants to alert the public about the Islamist challenge to Americans' freedom in his book "The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America." The book was released last month. "While Islamists carefully execute their plans to impose Allah's law, which directly contradicts the bedrock principles of American society, President Obama and the Left are not only asleep at the wheel, but complicit in the effort. Simply put, the prognosis for liberty could not be more dire," he writes. The alliance between Mr. Obama's hard-left followers and radical political Islam, also known as Islamism, has its roots in a relationship that has been around since at least the last century, Mr. McCarthy said. He said that people are now afraid to say anything negative against Muslims or Muslim groups because they think they would be perceived as racist. A contributing editor at the National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, Mr. McCarthy, 51, is no stranger when it comes to dealing with the threat of Islamist terror. He was the lead prosecutor in the trial of "Blind Sheik" Omar Abdel-Rahman and 10 other Muslim terrorists who were convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Al Qaeda recruits in Africa
Congress hears how 'predatory' governments, strife aid terrorist groups
By Ashish Kumar, Washington Times
The Horn of Africa is becoming a major recruiting ground for al Qaeda and other terrorists as a result of oppressive governments and regional civil strife, a panel of experts told Congress on Thursday. The United States has good ties with most governments in the region but "the problem is that those governments are in fact enemies of large sections of their populations," Kenneth John Menkhaus, professor of political science at Davidson College, said during a hearing before the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa and global health. "Recruitment by al Qaeda or other radical groups is going to be in ideal conditions, where people are angry with repressive, predatory governments that are supported by the United States," Mr. Menkhaus said. Some analysts link the growth of terrorist groups such as the al Qaeda-affiliated al-Shabaab that operates in Somalia to U.S. support for the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006. Ted Dagne, an African affairs specialist at the Congressional Research Service, said the ouster of the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia at that time created a security vacuum that was quickly filled by radical Islamists. "Al Qaeda and its allies are much stronger today than they were a few years ago," Mr. Dagne said.

Militant Group Expands Attacks in Afghanistan
By ALISSA J. RUBIN, New York Times
A Pakistani-based militant group identified with attacks on Indian targets has expanded its operations in Afghanistan, inflicting casualties on Afghans and Indians alike, setting up training camps, and adding new volatility to relations between India and Pakistan. The group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, is believed to have planned or executed three major attacks against Indian government employees and private workers in Afghanistan in recent months, according to Afghan and international intelligence officers and diplomats here. It continues to track Indian development workers and others for possible attack, they said. Lashkar was behind the synchronized attacks on several civilian targets in Mumbai, India, in 2008, in which at least 163 people were killed. Its inroads in Afghanistan provide a fresh indication of its growing ambitions to confront India even beyond the disputed territory of Kashmir, for which Pakistan’s military and intelligence services created the group as a proxy force decades ago.

Red Cross: 'Several hundred' dead in Kyrgyz unrest
By the Associated Press, New York Post
The Red Cross says several hundred people have been killed in the Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan since rioting began last Thursday. The International Committee of the Red Cross says it has no precise death figures, but spokesman Christian Cardon says "we are talking about several hundreds" of people killed. The southern part of the impoverished nation has been convulsed by days of rioting targeting minority Uzbeks, which has left the country's second-largest city, Osh, in ruins and sent tens of thousands of Uzbeks fleeing toward the border with Uzbekistan.

Cleric Says Iran Should Produce Nuclear Arms
By the Associated Press, New York Times
The hard-line spiritual mentor of Iran’s president has made a rare public call for producing the “special weapons” that are a monopoly of a few nations, which represents a veiled reference to nuclear arms. The Associated Press on Monday obtained a copy of a book written by the spiritual adviser, Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, in which he wrote that Iran should not deprive itself of the right to produce these “special weapons.” Iran’s government, as well as its clerical hierarchy, has repeatedly said that the country is not seeking to develop nuclear weapons, as the United States and other Western nations suspect. The United Nations Security Council last week imposed a fourth round of sanctions in response to Iran’s refusal to halt uranium enrichment, which it maintains is only for a civilian nuclear energy program, but which could conceivably be used to produce material for nuclear weapons. The new United Nations sanctions call for an asset freeze of 40 additional companies and organizations in Iran, including 22 involved in the nuclear program or developing ballistic missiles.

"God help us! They are killing Uzbeks like animals"
Ethnic clashes in Kyrgyzstan leave 100-plus dead, more than 1,000 hurt
By the New York Daily News
Ethnic tension has boiled over into horrific violence in Kyrgyzstan, as more than 1,000 people have been wounded in rioting, with 100 or more killed. Troops were ordered by the government to shoot rioters in an effort to end the violence, but that failed to calm the upheaval. Witnesses saw bodies lying on the streets of the Central Asian republic's second largest city Osh as houses and shops in an Uzbek neighborhood burned for a third day. Snipers fired at ethnic Uzbeks fleeing for the nearby border with Uzbekistan in fighting that has spread to the city of Jalalabad and surrounding villages. "God help us! They are killing Uzbeks like animals. Almost the whole city is in flames," Dilmurad Ishanov, an ethnic Uzbek human rights worker, told Reuters by telephone from Osh. Thousands of Uzbeks have fled in panic to the nearby border with Uzbekistan after their homes were torched by roving mobs of Kyrgyz men. Some Uzbek women and children were gunned down as they tried to escape, witnesses said.

Report: Pakistani spy agency supports Taliban
By the Associated Press, New York Post
Pakistan’s main spy agency continues to train, fund and arm the Taliban despite U.S. pressure to sever ties with the group that Islamabad helped rise to power in Afghanistan in the 1990s, said a research report released Sunday. The findings could raise tensions between Pakistan and the U.S., which has provided billions of dollars in military assistance to Islamabad since 2001 to help fight the Taliban. U.S. officials believe Pakistan’s support is key to defeating the insurgency. But the country’s powerful Inter Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, continues to work closely with the Taliban and is even represented on the group’s leadership council, said the report, which was issued by the London School of Economics and is based on interviews with more than a dozen unnamed Taliban commanders. Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, spokesman for the Pakistani army, which controls ISI, rejected the report, calling it “rubbish.” “In the past, these kinds of baseless and unsubstantiated allegations have surfaced and we have rejected them,” said Abbas. Many analysts have suggested in the past that current or former ISI officials have maintained links to the Taliban. But the report offers one of the strongest cases that assistance to the group is official ISI policy, and even extends to the highest levels of the Pakistani government.

Terrorists hit the jackpot thanks to US taxyapers...
Obama pledges $400 million for Palestinians
Hamas controls Gaza and is considered a terrorist organization
By Christi Parsons, Los Angeles Times
President Obama pledged an infusion of $400 million in aid for housing, school construction and business development in the Palestinian territories Wednesday, saying after a one-on-one meeting with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that the situation in Gaza is "inherently unstable." The Obama administration's promise of aid includes money to increase access to clean drinking water, create jobs and build schools and affordable housing. State Department officials called the projects "a down payment" on the U.S. commitment to improving life in Gaza. Last year, U.S. officials pledged a total of $900 million for Gaza and the West Bank, but acknowledged the difficulty of distributing the funds, especially because Hamas controls Gaza and is considered a terrorist organization. The aid announced Wednesday may be distributed through organizations performing relief work, State Department officials said. Abbas said he saw Wednesday's aid pledge as a positive sign for Gaza and the West Bank.

Taliban hang 7-year-old boy accused of being a spy
By SEAN ALFANO, New York Daily News
A 7-year-old boy accused of being a spy was hanged by Taliban militants, according to a report Thursday. The child was allegedly put on trial by the militant group and later found guilty of working for Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai’s government, reports the Daily Mail. Karzai called the act a "crime against humanity." "I don't think there's a crime bigger than that that even the most inhuman forces on earth can commit," Karzai said. The child was publicly hanged in the Taliban stronghold of Helmand province. "A 7-year-old boy cannot be a spy," Karzai added. "A 7-year-old boy cannot be anything but a seven-year-old boy, and therefore hanging or shooting to kill a seven-year-old boy... is a crime against humanity."

Suicide bomber kills 40 at Afghan wedding
The assailant strikes during a wedding dinner in Kandahar province
By Alex Rodriguez, Los Angeles Times
A suicide bomber killed at least 40 people and wounded more than 70 late Wednesday during a wedding in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar, local officials said. A police official said Thursday that a suicide bomber went to a party in Nagahan village in Arghandab district where hundreds of people were sitting and blew himself up. The explosion came during the wedding dinner, between 9:30 and 10 p.m., reportedly striking the area where male guests were dining separately from the women. All the casualties were men or boys, village officials said, according to media reports.

Taliban Aim at Officials in a Wave of Killings
By ROD NORDLAND, New York Times
The Taliban have been stepping up a campaign of assassinations in recent months against officials and anyone else associated with local government in an attempt to undermine counterinsurgency operations in the south. Government assassinations are nothing new as a Taliban tactic, but now the Taliban are taking aim at officials who are much more low-level, who often do not have the sort of bodyguards or other protection that top leaders do. Some of the victims have only the slimmest connections to the authorities. The most egregious example came Wednesday in Helmand Province, where according to Afghan officials the insurgents executed a 7-year-old boy as an informant.

The faces of hate
The pair talked of the best ways to chop off their victims' heads
By CAROLYN SALAZAR, PERRY CHIARAMONTE and CHUCK BENNETT, New York Post
These are the faces of evil. Officials last night released the mug shots of New Jersey terror suspects Mohamed Alessa, 20, and Carlos "Omar" Almonte, 24. They were taken after the two hate-spewing terrorist wannabes were captured as they headed to Somalia, allegedly to wage holy war on Americans. Their neighbors weren't surprised -- they said jihad started early for the two. They were

terrors in their suburban communities years before they were busted last Saturday at Kennedy Airport. Not a single school could handle Alessa. He openly talked of blowing up his schools in the name of Islam. Almonte was picked up by cops several times for increasingly violent behavior. The duo are due back in Newark federal court today for a bail hearing on charges of plotting to murder, maim and kidnap people overseas. The pair talked of the best ways to chop off their victims' heads and said they'd eagerly wage jihad back home as battle-hardened veterans, according to the federal complaint. Attorneys for Alessa and Almonte didn't return calls for comment.

Jersey 'jihadi' school ordeal
By JEANE MacINTOSH and DAN MANGAN, New York Post
One of the two aspiring Islamic terrorists busted at JFK Airport over the weekend was considered so dangerous as a teenager that he was barred from attending classes in his New Jersey high school, it was revealed yesterday. Mohamed Mahmood Alessa, 20, "was placed on home instruction" three months after starting North Bergen HS in 2004, an administrator told The Post.

Two Arrested at Kennedy Airport on Terror Charges
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM, New York Times
Two New Jersey men who were bound for Somalia with the stated intention of joining an Islamic extremist group to kill American troops were arrested at Kennedy International Airport late Saturday, federal and local authorities said on Sunday. The men, Mohamed Mahmood Alessa, 20, and Carlos Eduardo Almonte, 24, were seeking to join Al Shabab, a group that claims ideological kinship with Al Qaeda and was thought to have provided a haven to Qaeda operatives wanted for bombings of United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, prosecutors said in court papers. The men were taken into custody as they prepared to take separate flights to Egypt, the first leg of their journey to Somalia to join Al Shabab, according to federal and local officials.

Brave cop nailed wanna-be jihadists
By MURRAY WEISS and LEONARD GREENE, New York Post
A fresh-faced rookie cop with ties to New York and the Middle East was the undercover who eventually brought down a pair of would-be jihadists gunning for Americans. The NYPD officer was only a couple of years out of the Police Academy when he was assigned the treacherous duty of hanging out with suspects Mohamed Alessa, 20, and Carlos Eduardo Almonte, 24. Operating out of a Jersey City apartment, the cop — who is of Egyptian descent — grew a thick beard and adopted a convincing enough demeanor to fool the two wannabe terrorists into providing him with all the details of their gruesome plot to train overseas and kill countrymen.

Israel kills 4 members of Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades in waters off Gaza
By the Associated Press, New York Daily News
Israeli naval forces shot and killed four men wearing wet suits in the waters off the coast of Gaza Monday, and a militant group said they were members of its marine unit training for a mission. The attack was the latest escalation in tensions over the 3-year-old blockade of Gaza. Vice President Joe Biden said Monday the U.S. is closely consulting with Egypt and other allies to find new ways to "address the humanitarian, economic, security, and political aspects of the situation in Gaza." He spoke in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh after meeting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Taliban Attacks Shake Afghan Peace Gathering
By ALISSA J. RUBIN and ROD NORDLAND, New York Times
President Hamid Karzai’s peace council, called a jirga, came under fire from inside and out on its first day Wednesday. Even as the Afghan president spoke, inviting the Taliban to join in peace efforts, insurgents sent a pair of potential suicide bombers, disguised in women’s clothing, in a failed attempt to disrupt it. Inside the sprawling jirga tent, a former president who led anti-Taliban warlords was appointed chairman, prompting some prominent delegates to pronounce the deliberations doomed. “This is a mistake; all the warlords were there in the front row,” said Mir Joyenda, an independent member of Parliament from Kabul. “There is no change that will come to Afghanistan,” he said, reflecting widespread disgust with the continued prominent role of former warlords in the government.

Attackers Hit Mosques in Pakistan
By WAQAR GILLANI and JANE PERLEZ, New York Times
Hafeez Malik heard the gunfire outside the mosque, then shots inside the prayer hall. “People were dying one after the other,” said Mr. Malik, a 55-year-old architect. “I could count more than 20 people dead around me.” From inside another mosque several miles away near the central train station, his brother, Abdul Rashid Malik, 65, an engineer, called his family on his cellphone. He was a hostage and had been shot in the leg, he said. He has not been heard from since, Hafeez Malik said. More than 80 worshipers of a minority Muslim sect, the Ahmadis, were killed and more than 110 wounded Friday in a coordinated assault by seven well-trained attackers on two mosques in Lahore, Pakistan’s second largest city, the authorities said. At the mosque known as Dar-ul-Zakir, near the train station, two attackers blew themselves up inside the prayer hall after spraying the congregation with bullets, police officers said. The target was the Ahmadis, a group of about two million Muslims in Pakistan who are considered heretical by many mainstream Muslims because the Ahmadis believe that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who founded their movement in 1889, was the messiah foretold by Muhammad, the prophet of Islam.

Homeland Security memo warns: Terror attacks at all time high, and will likely get worse
By MICHAEL SHERIDAN, Los Angeles Daily News
Terror attacks on the United States are on the rise, and according to the Department of Homeland Security, it's only going to get worse. An unclassified intelligence memo states "the number and pace of attempted attacks against the United States over the past nine months have surpassed the number of attempts during any other previous one-year period." Terror organizations will also target the United States with "increased frequency," the memo warned. "We have to operate under the premise that other operatives are in the country and could advance plotting with little or no warning," it said. Noted in the memo are the recent attempts to attack New York City, including the failed Times Square car bombing and Najibullah Zazi's alleged plot to blow up the city's subways. Future attacks will be more challenging to stop or prevent, because operatives will likely be more ingrained in our society, and be able to develop weapons with commonly available items which are more difficult to track. It also warns that possible terrorists would likely spend less time overseas "compared to lengthier training cycles for earlier operations, reducing our ability to detect their activities." Tehrik e-Taliban Pakistan, the terrorist group which is believed to have had a hand in the attempted Times Square attack, as well as Al Qaeda, were mentioned in the memo.

Tight pants ban takes effect in Indonesia's Aceh
Islamic police will determine whether a woman's clothing violates the dress code; During raids women's pants were confiscated
By the Associated Press, Washington Post
Authorities in a devoutly Islamic district of Indonesia's Aceh province have distributed 20,000 long skirts and prohibited shops from selling tight dresses as a regulation banning Muslim women from wearing revealing clothing took effect Thursday. The long skirts are to be given to Muslim women caught violating the dress code during a two-month campaign to enforce the regulation, said Ramli Mansur, head of West Aceh district. Islamic police will determine whether a woman's clothing violates the dress code, he said. During raids Thursday, Islamic police caught 18 women traveling on motorbikes who were wearing traditional headscarves but were also dressed in jeans. Each woman was given a long skirt and her pants were confiscated. They were released from police custody after giving their identities and receiving advice from Islamic preachers. "I am not wearing sexy outfits, but they caught me like a terrorist only because of my jeans," said Imma, a 40-year-old housewife who uses only one name. She argued that wearing jeans is more comfortable when she travels by motorbike.

Tight pants ban takes effect in Indonesia's Aceh
Islamic police will determine whether a woman's clothing violates the dress code; During raids women's pants were confiscated
By the Associated Press, Washington Post
Authorities in a devoutly Islamic district of Indonesia's Aceh province have distributed 20,000 long skirts and prohibited shops from selling tight dresses as a regulation banning Muslim women from wearing revealing clothing took effect Thursday. The long skirts are to be given to Muslim women caught violating the dress code during a two-month campaign to enforce the regulation, said Ramli Mansur, head of West Aceh district. Islamic police will determine whether a woman's clothing violates the dress code, he said. During raids Thursday, Islamic police caught 18 women traveling on motorbikes who were wearing traditional headscarves but were also dressed in jeans. Each woman was given a long skirt and her pants were confiscated. They were released from police custody after giving their identities and receiving advice from Islamic preachers. "I am not wearing sexy outfits, but they caught me like a terrorist only because of my jeans," said Imma, a 40-year-old housewife who uses only one name. She argued that wearing jeans is more comfortable when she travels by motorbike.

U.S. Is a Top Villain in Pakistan’s Conspiracy Talk
“When the water stops running from the tap, people blame America"
By SABRINA TAVERNISE, New York Times
Americans may think that the failed Times Square bomb was planted by a man named Faisal Shahzad. But the view in the Supreme Court Bar Association here in Pakistan’s capital is that the culprit was an American “think tank.” No one seems to know its name, but everyone has an opinion about it. It is powerful and shadowy, and seems to control just about everything in the American government, including President Obama. “They have planted this character Faisal Shahzad to implement their script,” said Hashmat Ali Habib, a lawyer and a member of the bar association. Who are they? “You must know, you are from America,” he said smiling. “My advice for the American nation is, get free of these think tanks.” Conspiracy theory is a national sport in Pakistan, where the main players — the United States, India and Israel — change positions depending on the ebb and flow of history. Since 2001, the United States has taken center stage, looming so large in Pakistan’s collective imagination that it sometimes seems to be responsible for everything that goes wrong here. “When the water stops running from the tap, people blame America,” said Shaista Sirajuddin, an English professor in Lahore.

Iranian author Roxana Shirazi's 'The Last Living Slut' chronicles her hot sexcapades with rock stars
"I think I would get killed if I went back to Tehran"
IBy RUSH & MOLLOY, New York Daily News
Roxana Shirazi engaged in some risky sex while hanging with rock's raunchiest hair bands. But the unrepentant groupie is courting bigger danger with her memoir, "The Last Living Slut: Born in Iran, Bred Backstage." Shirazi says several editors and agents passed on her manuscript for fear of a fatwa - the Islamic death sentence that once put "Satanic Verses" author Salman Rushdie in fear of his life. But her two champions, authors Neil Strauss and Anthony Bozza, finally persuaded HarperCollins to publish it under the new Igniter imprint. It's not hard to see what might incite the mullahs in Tehran, where Shirazi lived until she was 10. "I haven't attacked Islam itself," she tells us. "But they probably don't think I should be writing about doing sex during my Koran classes." Her later rock debauchery is so explicit as to make Pamela Des Barres' famous "I'm With the Band" read "like a nun's diary," the book warns. There's also the art: photos of a naked Shirazi, and another of her dressed in a traditional chador while making an obscene gesture with her fingers and tongue. "I think I would get killed if I went back to Tehran," says the thirtysomething Londoner, who holds a master of fine arts degree and lectures on gender and identity.

Imam planning Islamic center, mosque near Ground Zero rips Tea Party's Mark Williams, other critics
By BARRY PADDOCK AND SAMUEL GOLDSMITH, New York Daily News
The Imam planning an Islamic community center and mosque near Ground Zero says his critics are bigots and the project will stamp out terrorism - not fan the flames. "We condemn terrorists. We recognize it exists in our faith, but we are committed to eradicate it," said Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who is leading the charge to build the Cordoba House. "We want to rebuild this community," he said. "This is about moderate Muslims who intend to be and want to be part of the solution." Rauf appeared with city leaders Thursday at 45 Park Place, the future home of the Cordoba House less than three blocks from Ground Zero. The meeting came one day after Tea Party Express chairman Mark Williams called the project a monument to 9/11 attackers "for the worship of the terrorists' monkey-god." Williams later issued a ham-handed apology to the "millions of Hindus who worship Lord Hanuman, an actual Monkey God."

Taxpayers to pick up terrorist's defense tab
Bomber's 1st time before judge
By BRUCE GOLDING, New York Post
Accused Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad yesterday made his first court appearance since being nabbed trying to flee the country. The Taliban-linked suspect was brought to Manhattan federal court under extremely tight security to face five felony raps. Just before he was brought before a judge around 5:20 p.m., authorities emptied the courtroom for 15 minutes for a final security sweep. Shahzad -- who is accused of trying to detonate a car bomb in pedestrian-packed Times Square on May 1 -- appeared in a full beard and sporting a gray sweat suit. He was not handcuffed when he was brought in, surrounded by six US marshals. About 20 federal prosecutors and FBI agents also were in the courtroom. Before the hearing, the suspected terrorist sat impassively at the defense table, quietly chatting with his federal public-defender lawyer, Julia Gatto. During the proceeding, Magistrate Judge James Francis IV asked Shahzad if everything in the financial affidavit that he had filled out to qualify for a public defender was true. The suspect replied, "Yes." It was the only time Shahzad publicly spoke during the five-minute proceeding.

Suicide Car Bomber Hits U.S. Convoy in Afghanistan
By DEXTER FILKINS, New York Times
A man driving a Toyota minivan crammed with explosives steered into an American convoy Tuesday morning here, killing 18 people, including five American troops, officials said. At least 47 people were wounded, nearly all of them civilians caught in rush-hour traffic. A sixth soldier from an unidentified NATO country was also reported killed. The blast sent a fireball billowing into the air, set cars aflame and blew bodies apart. Limbs and entrails flew hundreds of feet, littering yards and walls and streets. The survivors, many of them women and children, some of them missing limbs, lay in the road moaning and calling for help.

For Car Bomb Suspect, a Long Path to Times Square
His anger toward his adopted country seemed to have grown in lockstep with his personal struggles
By ANDREA ELLIOTT, SABRINA TAVERNISE and ANNE BARNARD, New York Times
Just after midnight on Feb. 25, 2006, Faisal Shahzad sent a lengthy e-mail message to a group of friends. The trials of his fellow Muslims weighed on him — the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the plight of Palestinians, the publication in Denmark of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad. Mr. Shahzad was wrestling with how to respond. He understood the notion that Islam forbids the killing of innocents, he wrote. But to those who insist only on “peaceful protest,” he posed a question: “Can you tell me a way to save the oppressed? And a way to fight back when rockets are fired at us and Muslim blood flows? “Everyone knows how the Muslim country bows down to pressure from west. Everyone knows the kind of humiliation we are faced with around the globe.” Yet by some measures, Mr. Shahzad — a Pakistani immigrant who was then 26 years old — seemed to be thriving in the West. He worked as a financial analyst at Elizabeth Arden, the global cosmetics firm. He had just received his green card, making him a legal resident in the United States. He owned a gleaming new house in Shelton, Conn. His Pakistani-American wife would soon become pregnant with their first child, whom they named Alisheba, or “beautiful sunshine.” Four years later, Mr. Shahzad stands accused of planting a car bomb in Times Square on a balmy spring evening. After his arrest two days later, on May 3, while trying to flee to Dubai, the few details that surfaced about his life echoed a familiar narrative about radicalization in the West: his anger toward his adopted country seemed to have grown in lockstep with his personal struggles. He had lost his home to foreclosure last year. At the same time he was showing signs of a profound, religiously infused alienation.

White House adviser says authorities believe Pakistan Taliban behind Times Square bomb attempt
By ANNE FLAHERTY, Chicago Tribune
Citing newly obtained evidence, senior White House officials said Sunday that the Pakistani Taliban was behind the failed Times Square bombing. The attempt marks the first time the group has been able to launch an attack on U.S. soil. And while U.S. officials have downplayed the threat — citing the bomb's lack of sophistication — the incident in Times Square and Christmas Day airline bomber indicate growing strength by overseas terrorist groups linked to al-Qaida even as the CIA says their operations are seriously degraded. The finding also raises new questions about the U.S. relationship with Pakistan, which is widely known to have al-Qaida and other terrorist groups operating within its borders. Attorney General Eric Holder said that new evidence shows that the Pakistani Taliban was "intimately involved" in the bombing plot. John Brennan, the president's homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, made similar remarks, linking the bomber to the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP.

Times Square car bomb signals new terror focus on US targets: officials
By the Associated Press, New York Daily News
The failed bombing in New York's Times Square is a possible signal that militant leaders in Pakistan have shifted their focus to targets in the U.S. and other Western countries instead of sticking to their home base, according to U.S. counterterrorism officials. The attack, they also warned, could be only the first by terrorist groups that seek to avoid detection by using simpler methods that are more independently planned. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case publicly. U.S. investigators and intelligence agencies are trying to establish whether accused bomber Faisal Shahzad was trained or recruited for the Times Square operation by any Pakistan-based terrorist organization, including the Pakistani Taliban. Shahzad, a U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent, spent five months in Pakistan before returning to the United States in February and preparing his attack. Shahzad has told investigators that he trained in the lawless tribal areas of Waziristan, where both al-Qaida and the Pakistani Taliban operate.

Imam’s Path From Condemning Terror to Preaching Jihad
“Jihad is becoming as American as apple pie and as British as afternoon tea"
By SCOTT SHANE and SOUAD MEKHENNET, New York Times
In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, the eloquent 30-year-old imam of a mosque outside Washington became a go-to Muslim cleric for reporters scrambling to explain Islam. He condemned the mass murder, invited television crews to follow him around and patiently explained the rituals of his religion. “We came here to build, not to destroy,” the cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, said in a sermon. “We are the bridge between Americans and one billion Muslims worldwide.” At first glance, it seemed plausible that this lanky, ambitious man, with the scholarly wire-rims and equal command of English and Arabic, could indeed be such a bridge. CD sets of his engaging lectures on the Prophet Muhammad were in thousands of Muslim homes. American-born, he had a sense of humor, loved deep-sea fishing, had dabbled in get-rich-quick investment schemes and dropped references to “Joe Sixpack” into his sermons. A few weeks before the attacks he had preached in the United States Capitol. Nine years later, from his hide-out in Yemen, Mr. Awlaki has declared war on the United States.

Times Square bomb suspect had ties to key Pakistani militants
By Richard A. Serrano and David S. Cloud, Los Angeles times
Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber, grew up in a Pakistani family whose circle of acquaintances included two future militants — a Taliban leader and one of the participants in the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, India, a government source said Friday. Officials now believe this family background may help explain why Shahzad, after immigrating to the United States, grew radicalized and allegedly contacted the Pakistani Taliban via the Internet. The group would have welcomed him because as a naturalized U.S. citizen, he could easily travel to and from Pakistan. Agents interviewing Shahzad, 30, who lived in Connecticut, also learned that he was upset over repeated CIA drone attacks on militants in Pakistan, his native country. He was also troubled by marital and financial difficulties and a foreclosure on his home, said the government source, who has been briefed on the investigation. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing.

Pakistani Taliban Are Said to Expand Alliances
By CARLOTTA GALL and SABRINA TAVERNISE, New York Times
The Pakistani Taliban, which American investigators suspect were behind the attempt to bomb Times Square, have in recent years combined forces with Al Qaeda and other groups, threatening to extend their reach and ambitions, Western diplomats, intelligence officials and experts say. Since the group’s formation in 2007, the main mission of the Pakistani Taliban has been to maintain their hold on territory in Pakistan’s tribal areas to train fighters for jihad against American and NATO forces in Afghanistan and, increasingly, to strike at the Pakistani state as the military pushes into these havens. Pakistan’s military offensives and intensifying American drone strikes have degraded their capabilities. But the Pakistani Taliban have sustained themselves through alliances with any number of other militant groups, splinter cells, foot soldiers and guns-for-hire in the areas under their control.

India gives death penalty to gunman in Mumbai terrorist attack
By Rama Lakshmi, Washington Post
The lone surviving Pakistani gunman in a 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai was sentenced Thursday to die for his role in the bloody siege that killed about 166 people and strained relations between nuclear-armed neighbors India and Pakistan. Ajmal Amir Kasab, 22, convicted of killing 52 people, sat still in the courtroom looking ashen and staring at the floor. He wept as the judge, M.L. Tahiliyani, sentenced him to death by hanging for four offenses, including murder and waging war against India. Ten militants attacked a railway station, two five-star hotels, a restaurant and a Jewish outreach center in the November 2008 siege of Mumbai, India's financial nerve center. Surveillance cameras showed Kasab shooting people with an automatic weapon at the railway station before police arrested him on the first night of the attack. According to lawyers and police officers present in the courtroom, the judge said, "The common man will lose faith in the courts if this man is let loose, if death is not awarded."

Explosions inside a Somali mosque kill at least 30
By the Associated Press, San Francisco Chronicle
Two bombs exploded inside a mosque in Mogadishu's main market on Saturday in the first Iraq-style bombing inside a house of worship in Somalia. At least 30 people were killed and 70 wounded, officials said. The blasts in the Bakara market went off while people were sitting inside the Abdala Shideye mosque waiting for noon prayers. The bombings highlight the increasingly violent path Somali militants are taking following an influx of insurgents into the country from the Afghanistan conflict, fighters who are now training Somali militants. Most of the victims were worshippers, said businessman Ahmed Abdulle, a witness. "The first one occurred at the back of the mosque and the other one at the front. I saw the dead bodies of at least 11 people and 18 injured," said a businessman, Isma'il Dahir. "The blood stained the walls and human flesh was scattered everywhere." Ali Muse, the head of Mogadishu's ambulance service, said at least 30 people were killed and 70 wounded. Abdullahi Haji Ilmi, a witness, said he counted 32 bodies.

Pakistani smugglers supplying Afghan bombmakers
By Alex Rodriguez, Los Angeles Times
Twice a week, a caravan of trucks lumbers out of this volatile northwest Pakistan city in the dead of night and makes its way toward Afghanistan, loaded with one of the most coveted substances in a Taliban bombmaker's arsenal: ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Every time the illicit caravan makes its trip, it moves unhindered past a gantlet of Pakistani police checkposts along the Pak-Afghan Highway. A string of bribes paid out to police, politicians and bureaucrats ensures that the smuggled explosive agent reaches its destination, middlemen on the Afghan side of the border who sell it to insurgents, says the co-owner of a Pakistani trucking firm that dispatches the caravans. Banned in Afghanistan, ammonium nitrate is the basic ingredient of the Taliban's roadside bombs. The amounts ferried into Afghanistan are staggering. Each truck carries 130 bags, each of which contains 110 pounds of ammonium nitrate. A caravan typically has least 12 trucks, which means a single night's shipment can move 85 tons of the fertilizer. The caravans head out every third night.

Pakistan, in Shift, Weighs Attack on Militant Lair
By SABRINA TAVERNISE, CARLOTTA GALL and ISMAIL KHAN, New York Times
The Pakistani military, long reluctant to heed American urging that it attack Pakistani militant groups in their main base in North Waziristan, is coming around to the idea that it must do so, in its own interests. Western officials have long believed that North Waziristan is the single most important haven for militants with Al Qaeda and the Taliban fighting American and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Pakistan has nurtured militant groups in the area for years in order to exert influence beyond its borders. The developing shift in thinking — described in recent interviews with Western diplomats and Pakistani security officials — represents a significant change for Pakistan’s military, which has moved against Taliban militants who attack the Pakistani state, but largely left those fighting in Afghanistan alone.

Blast in Yemen Misses U.K. Ambassador
By CHIP CUMMINS, Wall Street Journal
Yemeni authorities said a suicide bomber attempted to kill Britain's ambassador in an early-morning attack Monday in the capital Sana'a, but the diplomat and his staff survived unharmed. Yemen's interior ministry said in a statement that the assassination attempt bore "the fingerprints of al Qaeda," without elaborating. It said the bomber targeted the car of Ambassador Timothy Torlot at around 8 a.m. The statement said the explosion killed the attacker. British officials in Sana'a and London confirmed a "small" explosion next to the ambassador's car, and said the U.K. had shuttered its embassy for the time being. A spokeswoman for the British embassy in Sana'a said no British embassy staff or U.K. nationals had been harmed in the attack. U.K. officials were working with their Yemeni counterparts to investigate the incident, she said. Yemen has been the focus of U.S. and U.K. antiterror efforts in recent months, particularly after the alleged Christmas Day attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound flight by a Nigerian man, who told U.S. investigators he received terrorist training in Yemen.

Bombs targeting Shiite mosques in Baghdad kill scores
By Reuters, Los Angeles Times
Bombs targeting Shi'ite areas killed at least 56 people in Baghdad on Friday in a possible backlash after Iraq touted a series of blows against al Qaeda. Eight people were also killed by bombs in the Sunni west of the country. Seven blasts hit different areas of the Iraqi capital around the time of Muslim prayers, mostly near Shi'ite mosques and at a marketplace, an interior ministry source said. Around 112 people were wounded. "Targeting prayers in areas with a certain majority," Baghdad security spokesman Maj. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi said, referring to Iraq's Shi'ite Muslim majority, "is a revenge for the losses suffered by al Qaeda. "We expect such terrorist acts to continue."

Wave of Fatal Bombs in Iraq After Killing of Qaeda Chiefs
By STEVEN LEE MYERS, New York Times
A series of bombings on Friday struck mosques, a market and a shop in Baghdad, as well as the homes of a prosecutor and police officers in western Iraq, killing dozens, only five days after a joint Iraqi-American raid killed the top two leaders of the insurgency. Iraq’s leaders had hailed the killings and arrests of insurgent leaders this week as a devastating blow to the group known as Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia but warned that retaliation was almost certain to come. It was not clear that the group, also known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, was behind the latest jolt of violence. The attacks were the worst of an intermittent wave of bombings since the parliamentary election on March 7, providing a violent backdrop to stalled efforts to finalize the results of the vote and form a new government.

Killings Rattle Pakistan’s Swat Valley
By SABRINA TAVERNISE, New York Times
A number of anti-Taliban political leaders in the valley of Swat in northern Pakistan have been murdered in the past two weeks, residents there said, raising fears that the Taliban forces that once ruled the area are regrouping. Unknown gunmen shot and killed at least five pro-government leaders in three separate cases starting on April 13, residents of the valley said in telephone interviews on Thursday. It was not clear who the killers were, but all the victims had been central to peace talks in the valley, the residents said, raising suspicions that the Taliban may had been involved. The Swat Valley was the site of a major military operation against Taliban militants last spring and has been relatively peaceful since then. Now, a year later, the killings, first reported in The Daily Times, a Pakistani newspaper, are raising fresh fears that the Taliban, whose top leader is still at large, are trying to reassert themselves.

Iran's Shiite clerics predict deadly quake as punishment from God
By Thomas Erdbrink, Washington Post
Iran's influential Shiite clerics have a warning: The country's sprawling capital is about to be hit by a killer earthquake. Millions will perish. The reason for the coming apocalypse, the clerics say, is simple: Vice has spread through Tehran, and God intends to punish the sinners. "Go on the streets and repent for your sins," Ayatollah Aziz Khoshvaqt, one of the country's highest clerics, told worshipers during a recent sermon in northern Tehran. "A holy torment is upon us. Leave town." Even among the many urbane inhabitants of this capital of 12 million, the warning of imminent doom has not been taken lightly. Tehran is one of the most earthquake-prone capitals in the world, built upon the intersection of two major tectonic plates. There are more than a hundred fault lines beneath the city. A quake in the city of Bam, in eastern Iran, killed tens of thousands in 2003. Fears about Tehran being hit by "the big one" are not new. But the increased seismic activity worldwide -- from earthquakes in remote China to Baja California, to say nothing of the volcanic eruption in Iceland -- has only heightened fears. Never mind that scientists say the exact timing of a quake is nearly impossible to predict. "If it is vice that causes earthquakes, there should be floods and volcano eruptions as well in Tehran, because all sins are committed in this huge city," said an unemployed resident who gave his name only as Maysam.

Gunmen kill Kandahar official praying in mosque
The deputy mayor is not the first area dignitary to be targeted
By Laura King, Los Angeles Times
Taliban gunmen burst into a mosque and gunned down the deputy mayor of Kandahar at his prayers, officials said Tuesday -- a brazen attack that underscored the immense challenges faced by Western forces as they push to restore law and order in the volatile southern city. Kandahar and its surrounding districts are the focus of an expected drive this spring and summer to try to expel the Taliban and establish credible governance in Afghanistan's second-largest population center. The operation is already in its early stages. In the meantime, serving as a municipal or provincial official in Kandahar has become one of the country's most hazardous occupations. Azizullah Yarmal, the deputy mayor killed Monday night, was the latest in a roll call of local dignitaries marked for death in recent months by insurgents.

Iran bans the country's two remaining official opposition parties
By Thomas Erdbrink, Washington Post
Iranian authorities banned the country's two remaining official opposition parties Monday after two of their leaders received prison sentences. The move, subject to confirmation by Iran's judiciary, effectively silences the last parties legally permitted to promote political change in Iran and prevents foes of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from gaining power through elections. The parties, the Islamic Iran Participation Front and the Mujaheddin of the Islamic Revolution Organization, advocated more civil liberties and changes in Iran's system of Shiite religious rule. Together they formed one of the country's main political blocs. The action follows the sentencing Sunday of two of the parties' leading ideologues -- Mohsen Mirdamadi of the Front and Mostafa Tajzadeh of the Mujaheddin -- to six years in prison. They were also banned for 10 years from political activities after being found guilty of illegal assembly, conspiring against national security and propagating falsehoods against the state. Both were among the leaders of young militants who seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and held 53 Americans hostage for more than a year. They backed Ahmadinejad's main challengers in Iran's presidential election last June.

White House Quietly Courts Muslims in U.S.
Emergency directive, enacted after a failed Dec. 25 bombing plot, has been replaced
By ANDREA ELLIOTT, New York Times
When President Obama took the stage in Cairo last June, promising a new relationship with the Islamic world, Muslims in America wondered only half-jokingly whether the overture included them. After all, Mr. Obama had kept his distance during the campaign, never visiting an American mosque and describing the false claim that he was Muslim as a “smear” on his Web site. Nearly a year later, Mr. Obama has yet to set foot in an American mosque. And he still has not met with Muslim and Arab-American leaders. But less publicly, his administration has reached out to this politically isolated constituency in a sustained and widening effort that has left even skeptics surprised. Muslim and Arab-American advocates have participated in policy discussions and received briefings from top White House aides and other officials on health care legislation, foreign policy, the economy, immigration and national security. They have met privately with a senior White House adviser, Valerie Jarrett, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to discuss civil liberties concerns and counterterrorism strategy. The impact of this continuing dialogue is difficult to measure, but White House officials cited several recent government actions that were influenced, in part, by the discussions. The meeting with Ms. Napolitano was among many factors that contributed to the government’s decision this month to end a policy subjecting passengers from 14 countries, most of them Muslim, to additional scrutiny at airports, the officials said. That emergency directive, enacted after a failed Dec. 25 bombing plot, has been replaced with a new set of intelligence-based protocols that law enforcement officials consider more effective. Also this month, Tariq Ramadan, a prominent Muslim academic, visited the United States for the first time in six years after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reversed a decision by the Bush administration, which had barred Mr. Ramadan from entering the country, initially citing the U.S.A. Patriot Act. Mrs. Clinton also cleared the way for another well-known Muslim professor, Adam Habib, who had been denied entry under similar circumstances. Arab-American and Muslim leaders said they had yet to see substantive changes on a variety of issues, including what they describe as excessive airport screening, policies that have chilled Muslim charitable giving and invasive F.B.I. surveillance guidelines. But they are encouraged by the extent of their consultation by the White House and governmental agencies. “For the first time in eight years, we have the opportunity to meet, engage, discuss, disagree, but have an impact on policy,” said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute in Washington. “We’re being made to feel a part of that process and that there is somebody listening.”

Suicide bombers kill 41 at refugee camp in northwest Pakistan
By Alex Rodriguez and Zulfiqar Ali, Los Angeles Times
Two suicide bombers attacked a refugee camp in northwest Pakistan on Saturday, killing at least 41 people and injured 64 others in what appeared to be retaliation for the military's latest military offensive against Taliban militants in the volatile tribal areas' Orakzai region. The dead and wounded were all Orakzai tribespeople who had been queueing up for food at a refugee camp in the Kohat region, said North-West Frontier Province Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain. Police said a suicide bomber dressed in a burqa rushed up to the line and blew himself up. As other tribespeople and rescue personnel rushed to the blast site to help the wounded, a second bomber, also dressed in a burqa, detonated his explosives. "The second explosion was more devastating than the first," said Dilawar Khan Bangash, a senior Kohat police officer. Bangash said the death toll was likely to rise.

Taliban targets U.S. contractors working on projects in Afghanistan
By Joshua Partlow, Washington Post
The Taliban has begun regularly targeting U.S. government contractors in southern Afghanistan, stepping up use of a tactic that is rattling participating firms and could undermine development projects intended to stem the insurgency, according to U.S. officials. Within the past month, there have been at least five attacks in Helmand and Kandahar provinces against employees of U.S. Agency for International Development contractors who are running agricultural projects, building roads, maintaining power plants and working with local officials. The USAID "implementing partners," as they are known, employ mainly Afghans, who are overseen by foreigners. The companies' role is becoming increasingly important as more aid money floods into southern Afghanistan as part of a dual effort to generate goodwill and bolster the Kabul government. A suicide car bomb that exploded Thursday evening outside a compound used by Western contractors in Kandahar City was the latest and deadliest attack. The 9:30 p.m. blast killed at least four Afghan security guards and wounded 16 other people, including at least two Americans, along with South African and Nepalese employees.

In Turkey, military's power over secular democracy slips
By Janine Zacharia, Washington Post
Since the Turkish republic's founding 87 years ago, the military has stood as unquestioned guardian of secular democracy, intervening when it deemed necessary to keep religion out of politics in this overwhelmingly Muslim nation. But now, battered by allegations of corruption and scandal, the authority of the once-unchallenged military is being whittled away by an increasingly assertive and confident public. The critics are a diverse array of democracy advocates, head-scarf-wearing Muslim women, journalists and others who complain that the military's grip on power has largely benefited wealthy and secular elites.

Life illustrates challenge radical Islam poses in Russia
By Philip P. Pan, Washington Post
He had been a bright but lonely child from a sleepy city near the Mongolian border, in a Buddhist region of Russia far from the nation's Muslim centers. But by the time he was killed last month, thousands of miles away in the volatile North Caucasus, Alexander Tikhomirov had become the face of an Islamist insurgency. After two young women blew themselves up on the Moscow subway last week, killing 40 people in the city's worst terrorist attack in years, investigators said they suspected that Tikhomirov had recruited and trained them, and perhaps dozens of other suicide bombers. How the schoolboy whom neighbors called Sascha became the tech-savvy militant known as Sayid Buryatsky remains a question wrapped in rumor and speculation. But the outline of Tikhomirov's journey from the Siberian steppes to the mountains of Chechnya provides a sense of the challenge that radical Islam poses in Russia and the speed with which the insurgency in the nation's southwest is changing.

Iraq Bombings Raise Fears of Resurgent Violence
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS and YASMINE MOUSA, New York Times
A series of explosions shook Baghdad on Tuesday for the second time in three days, security officials said, deepening fears that the country was teetering on the edge of a new outbreak of insurgent and sectarian violence. The bombings, in residential areas of the city, killed at least 28 people and injured more than 90 and came against a backdrop of continuing political instability after Iraq’s March 7 parliamentary elections, which rendered a fractured result that has left no single group with the ability to form a government. A similar political void in 2005 preceded Iraq’s bloody sectarian warfare, which engulfed the country in 2006 and 2007 and from which it has only begun to emerge. The explosions on Tuesday came two days after at least 30 people were killed and more than 240 people were injured during attacks on diplomatic buildings in Baghdad, including the Iranian Embassy.

Blasts Shake U.S. Consulate in Peshawar
By TOM WRIGHT, Wall Street Journal
Suspected Islamist militants attacked the U.S. consular office in the Pakistani city of Peshawar Monday, the latest strike against a U.S. government installation in the war-wracked country. The U.S. embassy in Islamabad said at least two Pakistani security personnel guarding the consulate were killed and a number of others seriously wounded. The coordinated attacks involved a suicide bomber in a vehicle followed by militants attempting to enter the building using grenades and weapons fire, the embassy said ina a statement. Security forces repelled the attacks. There was no mention in the statement of any American deaths. Bashir Bilour, a senior local government official, said officials recovered the bodies of at least four people presumed to be among the attackers. The bodies of three other people—two of them identified as security officials—were recovered, he added. Police said the attackers were disguised in paramilitary uniforms to allow them to get inside the heavily-guarded area of government buildings where the consular office is located. Two of the bodies presumed to be those of the attackers were wearing unexploded suicide vests, police officials said.

Car bombs kill at least 30 in Baghdad
By Leila Fadel and Aziz Alwan, Washington Post
Suicide attackers detonated three car bombs near diplomatic missions in Baghdad on Sunday, killing at least 30 people and wounding scores, security officials said. The attacks, the deadliest in the capital since the March 7 parliamentary elections, come as Iraq's political factions are locked in a dispute over the outcome of the vote. Analysts say the violence could trigger a more intense round of fighting among the rivals that threatens to spill into the streets. The strikes against the Iranian, German and Egyptian diplomatic missions appeared to be a continuation of attacks that began in August against government and high-profile buildings that killed hundreds. But accusations started soon after Sunday's bombings, with former prime minister Ayad Allawi's Iraqiya bloc calling on the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to "restore security" and blaming security forces for failing to prevent the attacks. "This is a serious crime in which the Iraqi people are being consumed in the process of what we can call the conflict over who should have the upper hand in Iraq," political analyst Ibrahim al-Sumaidaie said.

35 dead as back-to-back explosions rock Baghdad
By the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times
Suicide attackers detonated three car bombs near foreign embassies in Baghdad on Sunday, killing at least 35 people and wounding more than 185, authorities said. The attack deepened fears that insurgents will seize on the political turmoil after last month's parliamentary elections to sow further instability. The blasts went off within minutes of each other -- one near the Iranian embassy, and two others in an area that houses several foreign embassies, including the Egyptian and German embassies, said Maj. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, a spokesman for the city's operations command center. It was not immediately clear whether anyone from the embassies was among the dead or wounded. "These explosions targeted diplomatic missions," al-Moussawi told The Associated Press. "It's a terrorist act. We expect the death toll to rise." He said all three explosions were suicide car bombs. Multiple, coordinated bombings in the capital have become a hallmark of al-Qaida in Iraq.

Gunmen in Uniform Kill 25 in Sectarian Slaughter Near Baghdad
By MUHAMMED AL-OBAIDI and TIMOTHY WILLIAMS, New York Times
The killers came at night, speaking passable English and wearing uniforms and carrying weapons that resembled those of the American military. By the time they left the village of Hawr Rajab on Friday evening, they had fatally shot or slit the throats of 25 members of an extended family, Iraqi officials said Saturday, in a chilling episode of violence reminiscent of the worst days of the country’s sectarian warfare in 2006 and 2007. Most of the 19 male victims were members of Iraqi security forces or of Awakening Councils, groups that now partner with American forces and are employed by the Iraqi government to protect Sunni neighborhoods, but whose members had once been allied with Sunni extremist groups like Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia during fighting against American troops.

Moscow suicide bomber was teenage widow of Islamist rebel leader, Russian authorities say
By Philip P. Pan, Washington Post
Russian authorities said Friday that one of the two suicide bombers who struck the Moscow subway system this week was the 17-year-old widow of an Islamist rebel leader, and officials circulated unsettling photos of the cherub-faced teenager brandishing a handgun and a grenade. Citing genetic evidence, law enforcement agencies said the young woman, Dzhanet Abdullayeva, set off the second of the two explosions that killed 40 people and injured more than 80 during Monday morning's rush hour.

Chechen Rebel Says He Planned Attacks
Umarov announced an ideological sea change, declaring himself the emir of the Caucasus Emirate, which aimed to establish a Shariah-based state
By ELLEN BARRY, New York Times
A former Chechen separatist who reinvented himself as a proponent of global jihad stepped out of the shadows on Wednesday to take responsibility for two suicide bombings on Moscow’s subway, and to offer himself as the face of an increasingly lethal pan-Caucasus insurgency. The separatist, Doku Umarov, last year revived a suicide battalion believed to be behind some of the most notorious attacks of the past decade, and then issued a warning in February that he was planning attacks in central Russia. In the recording released Wednesday, Mr. Umarov seemed to take pleasure in thrusting the bloody violence of the Caucasus upon the comfortable residents of the capital. “You Russians hear about the war on television and the radio,” Mr. Umarov said on the video, apparently made hours after the subway blasts. “I promise you the war will come to your streets, and you will feel it in your own lives and on your own skin.” In 2007, Mr. Umarov announced an ideological sea change, declaring himself the emir of the Caucasus Emirate, which aimed to establish a Shariah-based state independent of Russia. With him came many of the former separatist fighters. Last April, Mr. Umarov took another decisive step by announcing the revival of Riyadus-Salikhin, or the “Garden of Martyrs,” a suicide formation once led by Shamil Basayev that had lain dormant for five years. The battalion took responsibility for a 2002 hostage-taking at a Moscow theater.

Russia Mourns Attack Victims and Considers Its Response
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY, New York Times
Russians held impromptu memorial services on Tuesday at two subway stations in Moscow where suicide bombers conducted brazen attacks a day earlier that killed 39 people and stirred fears of a revival of terrorism. The city’s entire subway system was open for the morning rush hour, but it was less crowded than usual as some nervous commuters delayed trips to work or stayed home altogether. At the landmark stations that were bombed within 40 minutes of one another during the Monday morning rush, people deposited candles and flowers to honor those who died. “The mood of the city is evident on people’s faces,” said Maria Anzhaurova, 21, a student, at the Lubyanka station, the site of the first attack on Monday. “People are watching each other closely. It is clear that people are afraid, very afraid.” The authorities offered no new information on Tuesday on the search for the organizers of the attacks, carried out by two women, but they said they continued to suspect Muslim extremists in the Caucasus region of southern Russia, which includes Chechnya.

E.U. Expands Airline 'Blacklist' on Safety Concerns
By NICOLA CLARK, New York Times
The European Union on Tuesday banned all airlines from the Philippines and Sudan from flying into the region’s airports, citing “serious safety deficiencies” found by the United Nations and U.S. aviation authorities. The European Commission, which manages the airline “blacklist,” acknowledged recent efforts by Philippine regulators and by two carriers — Philippine Airlines and Cebu Airlines — to improve safety standards. But the commission said it would bar those airlines and 45 others from flying into the 27-country bloc as a precaution until its remaining concerns could be addressed. It added that Brussels was prepared to send a delegation of safety experts to visit the country. “We are ready to support countries that need to build up technical and administrative capacity to guarantee the necessary standards in civil aviation,” the European transport commissioner, Siim Kallas, said in a statement. “But we cannot accept that airlines fly into the E.U. if they do not fully comply with international safety standards.” The new measures go into effect Thursday, said Helen Kearns, a spokeswoman for the transport commission.

Suicide bombers hit two Moscow subway stations
At least 38 people are killed and many hurt as two female suicide bombers blow themselves up during rush hour
By Megan K. Stack, Los Angeles Times
Two female suicide bombers blew themselves up on packed subway cars in Moscow's bustling downtown early Monday morning, officials said, killing at least 38 people and injuring dozens more. The massive explosions roared through the underground at rush hour, just as the city's commuters jam the metro system on their way to work and school. The first strike came just before 8 a.m., when a woman set off a suicide bomb just as the doors of the subway carriage slammed shut at Lubyanka station. Set just a few blocks from the Kremlin, Lubyanka holds a deep and unsettling place in the Russian consciousness as the headquarters of the Soviet KGB, and now its successor, the FSB. Less than an hour later, a second explosion hit Park Kultury, another iconic station alongside Gorky Park, where Russian children flock for roller coasters, sprawling gardens and ice skating. The bombings come amid a quiet but intensifying war of attrition between the government and rebels in Russia's southern, largely Muslim republics. Amid increased fighting and instability in Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan, Russia has stepped up abductions and assassinations of Islamist leaders. The Islamists, in turn, have vowed to visit bloodshed on cities in the heart of Russia.

Afghan corruption: How to follow the money?
By Karen DeYoung, Washington Post
Hamed Wardak, the soft-spoken Georgetown University-educated son of an Afghan cabinet minister, has a Defense Department contract worth up to $360 million to transport U.S. military goods through some of the most insecure territory in Afghanistan. But his company has no trucks. Instead, Wardak sits atop a murky pyramid of Afghan subcontractors who provide the vehicles and safeguard their passage. U.S. military officials say they are satisfied with the results, but they concede that they have little knowledge or control over where the money ends up. According to senior Obama administration officials, some of it may be going to the Taliban, as part of a protection racket in which insurgents and local warlords are paid to allow the trucks unimpeded passage, often sending their own vehicles to accompany the convoys through their areas of control.

Bombs Kill Five Near House of Iraqi Candidate
By the Associated Press, Wall Street Journal
Several bombs exploded Sunday near the home of a prominent Sunni figure who ran in this month's parliamentary elections in Iraq, killing five people and wounding 26 others, a police official said. The attack adds to fears of serious postelection violence as bitter rivals enter what are expected to be drawn out talks on forming the government that will rule Iraq as U.S. troops leave by the end of 2011. Sunday's blasts took place in the town of Qaim, about 200 miles west of Baghdad and on the border with Syria, the police official said. The first bomb, planted at a house under construction, went off at 7 a.m. in a busy area of Qaim. As onlookers gathered, four more bombs hidden in trash littered around the site detonated, causing the casualties. The official said the house belongs to Sheik Murdhi Muhammad al-Mahalawi, a Sunni candidate who ran on the Iraqiya list led by former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, the top vote-getter in the March 7 balloting.

Agencies Suspect Iran Is Planning Atomic Sites
By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD, New York Times
Six months after the revelation of a secret nuclear enrichment site in Iran, international inspectors and Western intelligence agencies say they suspect that Tehran is preparing to build more sites in defiance of United Nations demands. The United Nations inspectors assigned to monitor Iran’s nuclear program are now searching for evidence of two such sites, prompted by recent comments by a top Iranian official that drew little attention in the West, and are looking into a mystery about the whereabouts of recently manufactured uranium enrichment equipment. In an interview with the Iranian Student News Agency, the official, Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had ordered work to begin soon on two new plants. The plants, he said, “will be built inside mountains,” presumably to protect them from attacks.

Kandahar, a Battlefield Even Before U.S. Offensive
By CARLOTTA GALL, New York Times
American forces have begun operations to push back Taliban insurgents in this most important southern province, the birthplace and spiritual home of the Taliban, and a full-scale offensive is expected in coming weeks. But the Taliban have already turned this city into a battlefield as they prepare for the operation, which American officials hope will be decisive in breaking the insurgency’s grip on southern Afghanistan. When American forces all arrive, they will encounter challenges larger than any other in Afghanistan. Taliban suicide bombings and assassinations have left this city virtually paralyzed by fear. The insurgents boldly walk the streets, visit shops and even press people into keeping guns and other supplies in their houses for them in preparation for urban warfare, residents say. The government, corrupt and ineffective, lacks almost any popular support. Anyone connected to the government lives in fear of assassination. Its few officials sit barricaded behind high blast walls. Services are scant. Security, people say, is at its worst since the fall of the Taliban government in 2001.

American Terror Suspect Traveled Unimpeded
By JANE PERLEZ, New York Times
An American charged with helping plan the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, moved effortlessly between the United States, Pakistan and India for nearly seven years, training at a militant camp in Pakistan on five occasions, according to a plea agreement released by the Justice Department last week. The odyssey of David C. Headley, 49, included scouting targets in several cities in India and meeting with a senior operative of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas. These and other new details of Mr. Headley’s activities, contained in the plea agreement, raise troubling questions about how an American citizen could travel for so long undetected from his home base in Chicago to well-established terrorist training camps in Pakistan. The document shows that Mr. Headley made two trips to North Waziristan, the heart of Qaeda operations in the tribal area where the United States is still pushing Pakistan for a military offensive to clear out militants. His handlers, the document reveals, included a former Pakistani military commander with ties to a Pakistani extremist group and even Al Qaeda. From there, Mr. Headley not only helped plan the Mumbai attack, it says, but he was put in contact with a Qaeda cell in Europe that may still be operative.

Bin Laden warns US not to kill alleged 9/11 chief
By the Associated Press, Washington Post
Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has threatened to kill any captured Americans if the U.S. executes the alleged mastermind of Sept. 11. In a new audio message aired on Al-Jazeera TV Thursday, bin Laden said if the U.S. executes Khalid Sheik Mohammed that it would mean a "death sentence" for Americans captured by al-Qaida. Mohammed is currently in U.S. custody. The Obama administration is still debating where to hold his trial.

Somali Backlash May Be Militants’ Worst Foe
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN, New York Times
For the past three years, the Shabab, one of Africa’s most fearsome militant Islamist groups, have been terrorizing the Somali public, chopping off hands, stoning people to death and banning TV, music and even bras in their quest to turn Somalia into a seventh-century-style Islamic state. At the same time, they have drawn increasingly close to Al Qaeda, deploying suicide bombers, attracting jihadists from around the world and prompting American concerns that they may be spreading into Kenya, Yemen and beyond. But could Somalia finally be reaching a tipping point against the Shabab? Not only is Somalia’s transitional government gearing up for a major offensive against the Shabab — with the American military providing intelligence and logistical support — but Mogadishu’s beleaguered population, sensing a change in the salt-sticky air, is beginning to turn against them.

Contractors Kill Somali Pirate, Prompting Fears of Rise in Violence
By the Associated Press, Wall Street Journal
Private security guards shot and killed a Somali pirate during an attack on a merchant ship off the coast of East Africa in what is believed to be the first such killing by armed contractors, the EU Naval Force spokesman said Wednesday. The death comes amid fears that increasingly aggressive pirates and the growing use of armed private-security contractors aboard vessels could fuel increased violence on the high seas. The handling of the case may have legal implications beyond the individuals involved in Tuesday's shooting. The guards were aboard the MV Almezaan when a pirate group approached it twice, said EU Naval Force spokesman Cmdr. John Harbour. During the second approach on the Panamanian-flagged cargo ship which is United Arab Emirates owned, there was an exchange of fire between the guards and the pirates. An EU Naval Force frigate was dispatched to the scene and launched a helicopter that located the pirates. Seven pirates were found, including one who had died from small caliber gunshot wounds, indicating he had been shot by the contractors, said Cmdr. Harbour. The six remaining pirates were taken into custody.

Iranians train Taliban to use roadside bombs
By Miles Amoore, Sunday Times
Taliban commanders have revealed that hundreds of insurgents have been trained in Iran to kill Nato forces in Afghanistan. The commanders said they had learnt to mount complex ambushes and lay improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which have been responsible for most of the deaths of British troops in Helmand province. The accounts of two commanders, in interviews with The Sunday Times, are the first descriptions of training of the Taliban in Iran. According to the commanders, Iranian officials paid them to attend three-month courses during the winter. Instructors in plain clothes provided daily exercises in live firing. The first month was devoted largely to teaching the Taliban how to attack convoys and how to escape before Nato forces could respond. During their second month they were shown how to plant IEDs in sequence so that the rescuers of soldiers wounded in one blast would be caught in further explosions. The third month was spent on storming bases and checkpoints. A hilltop fort was among the locations used for practice by a Taliban platoon.

Explosives Found on Indian Plane
By the Associated Press, Wall Street Journal
A newspaper-wrapped package containing explosive material was found Sunday in the cargo hold of a passenger aircraft after it landed in the southern Indian state of Kerala, police said. Police were investigating how the powder got on board the flight from Bangalore, India's information technology hub, to Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala's capital, despite stringent security measures. "It was explosive material which is commonly used in firecrackers, but can also be used to make a crude bomb," city police commissioner Ajith Kumar said by telephone from Thiruvananthapuram. The package was found by airline staff during a routine check of the Kingfisher Airlines aircraft after passengers disembarked at Thiruvananthapuram, Mr. Kumar said. Airports across India have been on high alert since January after reports that al Qaeda-linked militants planned to hijack a plane. Security checks at Thiruvananthapuram airport were tightened further after the explosive material was found, with more checks of passengers and staff at the airport, police said.

Religious tensions flare in Malaysia
Canings and church firebombings have some wondering whether the nation's Muslims are becoming more conservative and less tolerant of Christians and other minority groups
By Mark Magnier, Los Angeles Times
The Metro Tabernacle Church, a storefront with metal shutters, sits gutted, black smoke stains on the concrete pillars bearing witness to the intense fire that destroyed the property. The attacks on this and more than a dozen other houses of worship in January, followed in February by the caning of three Muslim teenagers for extramarital sex and a kerfuffle this month over an insulting act during a Christian service have prompted some soul-searching in Malaysia. Though religious tensions have occasionally simmered in this multicultural society, these were the first attacks in recent memory, and left some Malaysians wondering how committed their nation remains to its relatively tolerant brand of Islam and what the cost could be to its global image, foreign investments and tourism trade.

CIA director says secret attacks in Pakistan have hobbled al-Qaeda
By the Washington Post
Aggressive attacks against al-Qaeda in Pakistan's tribal region have driven Osama bin Laden and his top deputies deeper into hiding and disrupted their ability to plan sophisticated operations, CIA Director Leon Panetta said Wednesday. So profound is al-Qaeda's disarray that one of its lieutenants, in a recently intercepted message, pleaded with bin Laden to come to the group's rescue and provide some leadership, Panetta said. He credited improved coordination with Pakistan's government and what he called "the most aggressive operation that CIA has been involved in in our history," offering a near-acknowledgment of what is officially a secret war. "Those operations are seriously disrupting al-Qaeda," Panetta said. "It's pretty clear from all the intelligence we are getting that they are having a very difficult time putting together any kind of command and control, that they are scrambling. And that we really do have them on the run."

Why glorify the murderers?
Dalal Mughrabi helped kill 38 innocent men, women and children in Israel...Palestinians named a square after her
By Ron Kehrmann, Yossi Mendelevich and Yossi Zur, Los Angeles Times
Vice President Joe Biden took umbrage last week when Israel announced during his visit that it had approved new housing construction in East Jerusalem. But another contentious incident that took place during Biden's visit got far less scrutiny. March 11 marked the 32nd anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attack in Israel's history, and this year the Palestinian Authority decided to honor the 19-year-old leader of the attack, Dalal Mughrabi, by naming a square in a town outside Ramallah after her. The commemoration was scheduled for the anniversary. The official ceremony was ultimately canceled to avoid antagonizing Biden during his visit, but the square was nevertheless named for Mughrabi, and several dozen Palestinian students from President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement gathered in her honor for an unofficial dedication.

Pakistan indicts 5 Americans on terror charges
By Alex Rodriguez, Los Angeles Times
A Pakistani court Wednesday indicted five young Americans from the Washington, D.C., area on charges of plotting terrorist attacks in Pakistan. The men have been held in the eastern city of Sargodha since their arrests in December. If convicted, they could be sentenced to life in prison. The five men, ages 18 to 24, are U.S. citizens of Pakistani, African and Egyptian descent. They lived within blocks of each other in Alexandria, Va. Police say the men left their homes in late November and flew to Pakistan with the hope of waging jihad, or holy war, against American forces in Afghanistan. Khalid Khawaja, one of the lawyers representing the men, said they were also charged with plotting attacks in Afghanistan, and with funding banned Pakistani extremist organizations.

Suicide attack in northwest Pakistan kills 13
By the Associated Press, Washington Post
A suicide bomber driving a motorized rickshaw blew himself up at a security checkpoint in northwestern Pakistan on Saturday, officials said, killing at least 13 people, injuring 52 and underscoring the nation's relentless security threat. The blast in the small town of Saidu Sharif in Pakistan's violence-battered Swat Valley was the second major attack in the country in less than 24 hours, raising fears of a new wave of violence by anti-government militants. Suicide bombers killed 55 people in near-simultaneous blasts Friday in the eastern city of Lahore.

Suicide bombers kill 39 in Pakistan
The attack leaves nearly 100 wounded and sparks fear of a new wave of violence
By Alex Rodriguez and Aoun Sahi, Los Angeles Times
Two suicide bomb blasts spaced just 15 seconds apart rocked the eastern city of Lahore Friday, killing at least 39 people and sparking fears of a new wave of militant violence in major cities following a period of relative calm. The attacks targeted two Pakistani military vehicles near a crowded market known as the RA bazaar. The bombers detonated vests filled with explosives after walking up to the vehicles, said Lahore police official Chaudhry Shafiq. More than 95 people were injured in the explosions. The twin blasts come just four days after a suicide car bomb attack at a building that houses terrorism investigations in Lahore killed at least 13 people and wounded 80 others.

Massacres Shake Uneasy Nigeria
By WILL CONNORS, Wall Street Journal
The attackers came at night and surrounded this small farming village, firing shots in the air to scare residents from their homes. Men, women and children were hacked with machetes as they rushed out. Several houses were set on fire with residents still inside. Details are beginning to emerge from attacks Sunday on four villages in central Nigeria, where witnesses say members of the predominantly Muslim Fulani ethnic group targeted villages that were home to members of the mostly Christian Berom ethnic group. On Monday, local officials counted 378 bodies in the villages of Dogo Nahawa, Rasat, Zot and Shen. The dead, in a freshly dug mass grave, included a pregnant woman and at least one infant. A few miles away in Jos, a city of a half-million at the crossroads of Nigeria's Muslim north and predominantly Christian south, troops patrolled the outskirts and set up checkpoints. There was a light police presence in Dogo Nahawa. "I was sleeping at night next to my husband when I heard shooting," said villager Nomi Dung, 38 years old, her eyes red. "My husband told us to run, but I said, 'No I will not run—even if I die, let me die in my home.' My husband ran, and entered into the [attackers'] hands. My children ran outside because they were afraid from the shooting." Ms. Dung could not finish. A relative said her three children, ages 8, 5 and 3, had been killed.

A nasty attempt to coerce Danish newspapers into apologizing for the cartoons of Muhammad
By Christopher Hitchens, Slate
I have just finished reading one of the most astoundingly stupid and nasty documents ever to have landed on my desk. It consists of a letter from a law firm in Saudi Arabia, run by a man named Ahmed Zaki Yamani, to a group of newspapers in Scandinavia. I quote directly from its main paragraphs:

Ethnic Violence in Nigeria Kills 500, Officials Say
The victims were Christians killed by rampaging Muslim herdsmen
By ADAM NOSSITER, New York Times
Officials and human rights groups in Nigeria said Monday that about 500 people had died in weekend ethnic violence near the central city of Jos, considerably more than what had initially been reported. A government spokesman said Sunday that the dead numbered more than 300. The victims were Christians killed by rampaging Muslim herdsmen. The head of a leading Nigerian rights group, Shehu Sani of the Civil Rights Congress, said in a telephone interview on Monday that his organization had counted 492 bodies, mainly in the village of Dogo Nahawa. A spokesmen for the government of Plateau State, Gregory Yenlong, said the number of dead was about 500. “Those that were injured have been dying,” he said. “The communities are taking inventory.” Those figures, however, did not seem to represent the final tally. Shamaki Gad Peter of the League for Human Rights, who was in the Dogo Nahawa area, put the provisional death toll at around 250. In Abuja, the Nigerian capital, the International Committee of the Red Cross said it could not yet give an estimate of the number of dead as its representatives had not been able to reach all of the villages that were attacked. The killings took place in Plateau State near the city of Jos, for years a hotbed of ethnic and religious violence near the dividing line between the country’s mainly Christian south and Muslim north. Hundreds on both sides were killed as recently as January, though the victims this time were Christians, according to the information commissioner for Plateau, Gregory Yenlong, and a local human rights organization. Many appeared to have been cut down with machetes after being driven from homes set ablaze by attackers in the predawn darkness, said Shamaki Gad Peter of the League for Human Rights, a Nigerian group. Mr. Yenlong said the attackers were “hoodlums, Fulani herdsmen” — Muslims from a neighboring state, Bauchi, who were going after Christian members of Plateau’s leading ethnic group, the Berom, in the villages of Ratt and Dogo Nahawa. “They attacked those villages and killed well over 300 people, mostly women, children and the aged,” Mr. Yenlong said. “They killed them unprovoked. Innocent people were massacred.” Witnesses, including Mr. Peter, spoke of bodies littering the streets of Ratt. One victim was less than 3 months old, he said.

'American al Qaeda' apprehended
By the Associated Press, Washington Times
The American-born spokesman for al Qaeda has been arrested by Pakistani intelligence officers in the southern city of Karachi, two officers and a government official said Sunday as video emerged of him urging U.S. Muslims to attack their own country. The arrest of Adam Gadahn is a major victory in the U.S.-led battle against al Qaeda and will be taken as a sign that Pakistan, criticized in the past for being an untrustworthy ally, is cooperating more fully with Washington. It follows the recent detentions of several Afghan Taliban commanders in Karachi, including the movement's No. 2 commander. U.S. officials did not immediately confirm Gadahn's capture. Gadahn has appeared in more than half a dozen al Qaeda videos, taunting and threatening the West and calling for its destruction. A U.S. court charged Gadahn with treason in 2006, making him the first American to face such a charge in more than 50 years. He was arrested in the sprawling southern metropolis of Karachi in recent days, two officers who took part in the operation said. A senior government official also confirmed the arrest, but said it happened Sunday. The discrepancy could not immediately be resolved. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information. The intelligence officials said Gadahn was being interrogated by Pakistani officials. Pakistani agents and those from the CIA work closely on some operations in Pakistan, but it was not clear if any Americans were involved in the operation or questioning. In the past, Pakistan has handed over some al Qaeda suspects arrested on its soil to the United States. His most recent video was posted Sunday, praising the U.S. Army major charged with killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, as a role model for other Muslims. The video appeared to have been made after the end of the year, but it was not clear exactly when. Al Qaeda has used Gadahn as its chief English-speaking spokesman. In one video, he ceremoniously tore up his American passport. In another, he admitted his grandfather was Jewish, ridiculing him for his beliefs and calling for Palestinians to continue fighting Israel. The last person in the U.S. convicted of treason was Tomoya Kawakita, a Japanese-American sentenced to death in 1952 for tormenting American prisoners of war during World War II.

Explosions Hit Baghdad as Iraqis Vote in Pivotal Election
At least 38 people were killed and dozens more wounded in Baghdad alone by the time polls officially closed there
By STEVEN LEE MYERS, New York Times
A concerted wave of attacks struck Baghdad and other cities across the country on Sunday as Iraqis voted to elect a new parliament and possibly a new prime minister. Explosions reverberated across the capital moments before the polls opened and continued through the morning haze for the first hours of voting. At least 38 people were killed and dozens more wounded in Baghdad alone by the time polls officially closed there, the Interior Ministry reported. Insurgents in Iraq had vowed to disrupt the election, and the attacks appeared timed to frighten voters away from polling sites. If that were the intent, it did not succeed entirely. By late morning the attacks — dozens of mortars, rockets and bombs — had tapered off, and Iraqis lined up to vote, many of them expressing anger and determination. "Everyone went," Maliq Bedawi, 45, who works at Baghdad International Airport, said as he waved his purple-stained finger. He stood outside the rubble of an apartment building that was struck and destroyed by what the police said was a Katyusha rocket. "They were defiant about what happened. Even people who didn’t want to vote before, they went after this rocket." Iraqis, he went on, "are not afraid of bombs anymore." At the White House, President Obama said Sunday that he mourned the victims of violence but praised “the resilience of the Iraqi people who once again defied threats to advance their democracy.” “I have great respect for the millions of Iraqis who refused to be deterred by acts of violence, and who exercised their right to vote today,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “Their participation demonstrates that the Iraqi people have chosen to shape their future through the political process.”

Tehran's master of clandestine operations, Qassem Suleimani, could hold the key to Iraq's future—if he were not so busy back in Iran
By Christopher Dickey, Newsweek
The text message was cryptic and sent through an intermediary, but its spookiness has become legendary among the Americans tasked with trying to stabilize Iraq. The moment was May 2008, and once again all hell was breaking loose. Shiite militias had gone to battle against each other. The fighting threatened to spread to Baghdad. Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker were scrambling to find somebody to broker a truce. Then the text message was passed to the American commander. "General Petraeus," it began, "you should know that I, Qassem Suleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan." Within days it was Suleimani who brokered the truce. What surprised Petraeus and Crocker was not the Iranian's role. They knew that already. It was the blunt confidence with which Suleimani stated it. As the head of the infamous Quds Force, he commands all the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) operations outside Iran's borders—whether covert, overt, or outright terrorist. In the fractious politicking almost certain to follow Iraq’s parliamentary elections on Sunday, this 53-year-old Iranian general could pull the strings that make or break the new government in Baghdad.

Turkey: The Fethullah Gulen movement streghens
By IAC.com
With the last arrests within the army of opponents of AKP’s not-very-well-hidden Islamism, the power of the Fethullah Gulen movement, an Islamist, hard-line movement grows stronger, that, if wins, can destroy Ataturk legacy. And it looks it can actually win. All shots against the military are now fair game, including those below the belt. The force behind this dramatic change is the Fethullah Gulen Movement (FGH), an ultraconservative political faction that backs the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). The FGH was founded in the 1970s by Fethullah Gulen, a charismatic preacher who now lives in the United States but remains popular in Turkey. It is a conservative movement aiming to reshape secular Turkey in its own image, by securing the supremacy of Gulen’s version of religion over politics, government, education, media, business, and public and personal life. To some, it might appear that the newfound freedom to criticize the military proves that Turkey is becoming a more liberal democracy. But the truth is that Turkey has replaced one “untouchable” organization for another, more dangerous, one. Criticizing the Gulen movement, which controls the national police and its powerful domestic intelligence branch, and which exerts increasing influence in the judiciary, has become as taboo as assailing the military once was. Today, it is those who criticize the Gulen movement who get burned.

Al Qaeda breeds terror in Sahara
By Lolita C. Baldor, Washington Times
Al Qaeda's terrorism network in North Africa is becoming increasingly active and attracting more recruits, threatening to further destabilize the continent's already vulnerable Sahara region, U.S. defense and counterterrorism officials said. The North African faction, which calls itself al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, is still small and largely isolated, numbering a couple of hundred militants based mostly in the vast desert of northern Mali. But signs of stepped-up activity and the group's advancing potential for growth worry analysts familiar with the region. The rapid rise of the al Qaeda group in Yemen — which spawned the attempted attack on an airliner on Christmas — is seen by U.S. officials and counterterrorism analysts as evidence that the North African militants could just as quickly take on a broader jihadi mission and become a serious threat to the U.S. and European allies. The Mali-based militants have yet to show a capability to launch such foreign attacks, but are widening their involvement in kidnapping and the narcotics trade, reaping profits that could be used to expand terrorism operations, officials and analysts said.

Suicide bomber blows himself up in a ambulance full of wounded people
Triple suicide blasts in Iraqi city kill 30
By the Associated Press, Washington Times
A string of three deadly suicide bombings killed 30 people in the former insurgent stronghold of Baqouba on Wednesday, including a blast from a suicide bomber who rode in an ambulance with the wounded before blowing himself up at a hospital, police said. The bombings -- Iraq's deadliest in weeks -- come as Iraq is preparing for March 7 parliamentary elections. The crucial balloting will decide who will oversee the country as U.S. forces go home and help determine whether Iraq can overcome the deep sectarian tensions that have divided the nation since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. U.S. and Iraqi officials have warned repeatedly that insurgents were expected to launch such attacks in an attempt to disrupt the crucial vote. A man purporting to be Abu Omar al-Baghdadi -- the leader of an al-Qaida front group in Iraq -- has vowed to violently disrupt the vote. The bombings could also affect the candidacy of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who came to power in 2006 and oversaw a return to relative stability in 2008 and 2009. Al-Maliki has continued to bill himself as the best candidate to assure security in Iraq.

Farrakhan speaks to faithful, warns America
By the Chicago Tribune
Calling this weekend's earthquake in Chile a divine precursor to his planned speech, controversial Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan predicted on Sunday that America will face its own imminent disaster and must prepare. Delivering a message titled "The Time and What Must Be Done," Farrakhan addressed thousands at Chicago's United Center as part of an annual celebration of Saviours' Day, marking the birth of W. Fard Muhammad, who founded the faith 80 years ago. "It's not an accident that a great earthquake took place in Chile," Farrakhan, 76, said an hour into his three-hour address. "It was a precipitate of what I have to tell you today of what's coming to America. You will not escape." "I will speak to the kings and rulers of the world. I will speak to the pope and the religious leaders because you have to know that your time has come," he said. "I desire to guide you and warn you of things that are coming that you must try to prepare yourselves for because we are absolutely living in the change of worlds." Though some of Farrakhan's past remarks have been labeled anti-Semitic and racist, his supporters say he has been misunderstood and misrepresented by the media. In his speech on Sunday, he recounted events in the 1980s where he was barred from hotels and other destinations after declaring support for Libya, implicated at the time in acts of state-sponsored terrorism. On Sunday, he blamed the international cold shoulder on the "reach of the Zionists."

Karadzic blames Islamic militants for war
By Arthur Max, Washington Times
Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, charged with the worst genocide in Europe since the Holocaust, testified Monday that his people were simply defending themselves against Islamic fundamentalists who he claimed were seeking to take over Bosnia. In his opening defense statement at the U.N. war crimes tribunal, Mr. Karadzic denied any intention to expel non-Serbs from their homes and said the Serb objective was to protect their own lives and property during the violent 1990s breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The Serb "cause is just and holy," Mr. Karadzic said as he began his two-day statement, relying only on sparse notes. "We have a good case. We have good evidence and proof." Mr. Karadzic, 64, faces two counts of genocide and nine other counts of murder, extermination, persecution, forced deportation and the seizure of 200 U.N. hostages. He faces possible life imprisonment if convicted.

Muslims “had blood up to their shoulders” and “their conduct gave rise to our conduct.”
In Trial, Karadzic Calls His Cause ‘Just and Holy’
By ALAN COWELL, New York Times
Calling his cause “just and holy,” Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, began to testify in his own defense on Monday against charges of war crimes and genocide as his trial resumed in The Hague, ending a long delay in the proceedings. The former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic speaking at his trial at the Hague on Monday Mr. Karadzic, 64, has rejected efforts by the United Nations war crimes tribunal to impose a lawyer and is conducting his own defense. “What I’m going to present here is the marble truth,” Mr. Karadzic said in an opening statement, according to Reuters, saying that conflicts in the 1990 following the break-up of the former Yugoslavia resulted from Serbs, Croats and Muslims fighting for land. “Everything that Serbs did is being treated as a crime,” Mr. Karadzic said, Reuters reported. He appeared before the tribunal in a dark suit and often referred to himself in the third person as “Karadzic.”

Village Attack Leaves 11 Dead in Philippines
Children murdered by the militant group Abu Sayyaf
By CARLOS H. CONDE, New York Times
Eleven people, at least three of them children, were killed in an attack believed to have been carried out by the militant group Abu Sayyaf in retaliation for the recent arrests and deaths of several of its members, officials said Sunday. About 70 members of Abu Sayyaf strafed several houses early Saturday in the southern village of Tubigan, on Basilan, an island province in Mindanao where the group got its start, the police said. The 11 dead included a year-old child, and 17 others, including four children, were seriously wounded. The attackers also burned down several houses. The attack was among the worst against civilians in nearly a decade, officials said. Abu Sayyaf, also known as al-Harakat al-Islamiyya, is one of several military Islamist separatist groups based in and around the southern Philippines. For almost 30 years various Muslim groups have been engaged in an insurgency. The name of the group is derived from the Arabic abu ("father of") and sayyaf ("Swordsmith').

Al-Qaida growing in strength and numbers in Africa
By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Miami Herald
Al-Qaida's terror network in North Africa is growing more active and attracting new recruits, threatening to further destabilize the continent's already vulnerable Sahara region, according to U.S. defense and counterterrorism officials. The North African faction, which calls itself Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), is still small and largely isolated, numbering a couple hundred militants based mostly in the vast desert of northern Mali. But signs of stepped-up activity and the group's advancing potential for growth worry analysts familiar with the region. The rapid recent rise of the al-Qaida group in Yemen - which spawned the Christmas airliner attack - is seen by U.S. officials and counterterrorism analysts as evidence that the North African militants could just as quickly take on a broader jihadi mission and become a serious threat to the U.S. and European allies. The Mali-based militants have yet to show a capability to launch such foreign attacks, but are widening their involvement in kidnapping and the narcotics trade, reaping profits that could be used to expand terror operations, officials and analysts said. Several senior U.S. defense and counterterrorism officials spoke about AQIM on condition of anonymity to discuss internal analysis. Those advances have set off alarms within the counterterrorism community, which watched as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula quickly transformed over the past year from militants preoccupied with internal Yemeni strife to a potent group recruiting and training insurgents for terror missions inside the U.S.

Marjah Marines move in on thugs
By the Associated Press, New York Post
US Marines and Afghan soldiers advanced through poppy fields near Marjah yesterday under withering gunfire from Taliban terrorists shooting from mud-brick homes and compounds where families huddled in terror. President Hamid Karzai urged NATO to do more to protect civilians during combat operations to secure Marjah, a southern Taliban stronghold and scene of the biggest allied ground assault of the eight-year war. NATO forces have repeatedly said they want to prevent civilian casualties but acknowledge that it is not always possible. Yesterday, the alliance said its troops killed another civilian in the Marjah area, bringing the civilian death toll to at least 16.

Just weeks before elections, specter of sectarian violence resurfaces in Iraq
By Leila Fadel, Washington Post
It was only one killing, but it unleashed the demons of a bitter and perhaps unfinished past. The victim was a Sunni man in the mostly Shiite neighborhood of Hurriyah, in northwest Baghdad. The death and the aftermath were reminiscent of the prelude to the sectarian war, which began in late 2005 with a smattering of killings and threats and culminated with 100 bodies a day being dumped in the streets of the capital. With the imminent departure of American forces and fierce competition for power ahead of general elections on March 7, many here say sectarian strife is reigniting. But this time, there will be no outsider acting as a buffer between the warring sects. U.S. military officials acknowledge that as Iraq regains sovereignty, their influence is waning. A senior U.S. military official who has spent years in Iraq said he fears that as the drawdown begins, American forces are leaving behind many of the same conditions that preceded the sectarian war. "All we're doing is setting the clock back to 2005," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a stark assessment. "The militias are fully armed, and al-Qaeda in Iraq is trying to move back from the west. These are the conditions now, and we're sitting back looking at PowerPoint slides and whitewashing." The violence goes both ways: Last month, as Shiites commemorated one of their holiest days, bombings killed scores of pilgrims. And Sunni extremists have been blamed for audacious attacks on targets associated with the Shiite-dominated government, including key ministries. Such violence widens the sectarian rift, and Sunni civilians fear that Shiites may once again turn to militias for protection when Iraqi security forces fail.

Afghan Suicide Attacks Seen as Less Effective
By ROD NORDLAND, New York Times
The Taliban’s suicide bombers have been selling their lives cheaply of late. A suicide car bombing in Kandahar, Afghanistan, on Feb. 4 was aimed at a coalition convoy, but killed three civilians instead. From Jan. 24 to Feb. 14, a total of 17 suicide bombers took aim at one coalition member after another but failed to kill any of them, according to a compilation of reports from Afghan police and military officials, and from the American-led International Security Assistance Force. The latest failures were three suicide bombers who attacked an Afghan headquarters outside Marja on Sunday; local people reported them to the authorities, who shot them before they could set off their explosives, according to a spokesman for the Helmand Province governor. ISAF officials credit better training of Afghan forces, and disruption of the bomb-makers’ networks by NATO-led raids. Analysts say the Taliban no longer have foreign expertise in preparing suicide bombers, and have a hard time finding competent recruits in a society that until recent years had little history of suicide attacks. According to a New York Times tally, at least 480 people were killed in 129 suicide bombings in Afghanistan in 2007, not counting the bombers themselves. That death toll dropped to 275 in 2009, even though the number of bombings had increased. A spokesman for ISAF, Maj. Steve Cole, said bombings in recent months have averaged 15 or 16 a month. In three episodes during the last three weeks, the bombers killed innocent bystanders instead of their coalition targets. Six of the last 17 suicide bombers did not wound anyone beyond themselves. In all, those 17 bombers wounded 23 members of NATO or Afghan security forces, while killing 6 civilians and wounding 27 others.

Taliban Fighters Said to Flee Under Coalition Pressure
By ROD NORDLAND and C. J. CHIVERS, New York Times
A large number of Taliban fighters have fled the city of Marja, their former stronghold in Helmand Province, under pressure from United States and Afghan forces and may have crossed the border into Pakistan, the Afghan interior minister said on Monday. At a news conference held by senior Afghan officials and Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the United States commander in Afghanistan, the officials said some Taliban fighters remained in Marja, largely in the southern part of the city. “We are not facing any threat now except in South Marja, where there is a slight resistance, not enough to be an obstacle to our forces, “ Gen. Sher Mohammed Zazai, the Afghan National Army commander in Helmand, said in the televised press conference. A bazaar in the south of Marja had previously been a stronghold of the Taliban within the city.

Turning the Taliban
Pacifying insurgents with jobs and money is central to our strategy in Afghanistan...It's also misguided
By Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai, Newsweek
Huddled in the unheated, mud-walled room that serves as the dormitory of their madrassa, not far from the Pakistani city of Quetta, four religious students are talking about the war across the border. They've heard about U.S. plans for luring away thousands of Taliban with offers of jobs and money and persuading the rest to make peace. But the young men say it won't work. "I've lost one of my brothers and 10 other close relatives in the jihad," says Mohammad Salim Akhund, a 21-year-old fighter from Kandahar province. "Any thought of surrendering for money, or entering into any negotiations with our enemies, would dishonor these sacrifices." His young schoolmate Jama-luddin speaks up: "If you're committed to jihad, you won't leave for a mountain of money." At 18, he's the only one of the four who hasn't already fought in Afghanistan, but he expects to go in about two months, as soon as his religious studies are completed. "I want to die in the jihad," he says. "Not as a sick old man under a blanket at home."

Afghan and Allied Forces Begin to Secure Taliban Stronghold
By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS And MATTHEW ROSENBERG, Wall Street Journal
U.S., Afghan and British troops were in the early stages of securing the town of Marjah Saturday, with thousands of infrantrymen moving in on foot after helicopter-born soldiers seized two central shopping bazaars. The airborne troops landed before dawn, opening the first major military push in the latest surge of U.S. and allied forces into Afghanistan. So far, the troops have encountered only hit-and-run resistance from Taliban fighters, who have been taking potshots from compounds before moving out as the allied troops returned fire. Afghan officials said five Taliban had been killed; there was no word on coalition casualties. The ground troops took several hours to breach the town limits, with an exercise that included constructing two tank-mounted bridges to cross a canal and sweeping for improvised explosive devices, or IEDS, the major threat to allied troop. Commanders believe the town is wired with booby traps and mines. "The operation went without a single hitch," British Maj. Gen Nick Carter, the top North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander in southern Afghanistan, told reporters hours after the assault began. A new offensive against the Taliban in Marjah could be a turning point in the war in Afghanistan. But WSJ's Paul Beckett says the military push is also a big test for Afghan President Hamid Karzai and fraught with peril for U.S. and Afghan troops. "We've caught the insurgents on the hoof, and they're completely dislocated," he said in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province, where Marjah is located.

Ahmadinejad says Iran is now a 'nuclear state'
By the New York Post
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed Thursday that Iran has produced its first batch of uranium enriched to a higher level, saying his country will not be bullied by the West into curtailing its nuclear program a day after the U.S. imposed new sanctions. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reiterated to hundreds of thousands of cheering Iranians on the anniversary of the 1979 foundation of the Islamic republic that the country was now a "nuclear state." It was not clear how much enriched material had actually been produced just two days after the process was announced to have started. The United States and some of its allies accuse Tehran of using its civilian nuclear program as a cover to build nuclear weapons but Tehran denies the charge, saying the program is just geared toward generating electricity. "I want to announce with a loud voice here that the first package of 20 percent fuel was produced and provided to the scientists," he said.

Ayatollah: Iran's military will 'punch' West
By Eli Lake, Washington Times
The Iranian government on Monday stepped up military threats in advance of an anniversary celebration as major powers continued talks on a new round of sanctions. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in Tehran that his country would stun the Western world on Thursday, the 31st anniversary of Iran's Islamic revolution. Iran's defense minister announced on Monday that its forces had conducted successful tests on new armed unmanned aircraft and advanced air defenses. "The Iranian nation, with its unity and God's grace, will punch the arrogance [Western powers] on the 22nd of Bahman [Feb. 11] in a way that will leave them stunned," Ayatollah Khamenei was quoted as saying by Agence France-Presse. The anniversary is expected to produce a new round of anti-government demonstrations as Iranian opposition groups continue to protest the June 12 presidential election that resulted in acts of civil disobedience. Former prime minister and opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi has called for anti-government demonstrations timed to coincide with the nationwide commemoration of the revolution on Thursday.

Army warned about jihadist threat in '08
By Bill Gertz, Washington Times
Almost two years before the deadly Fort Hood shooting by a radicalized Muslim officer, the U.S. Army was explicitly warned that jihadism — Islamic holy war — was a serious problem and threat to personnel in the U.S., according to participants at a major Army-sponsored conference. The annual Army anti-terrorism conference in Florida in February 2008 included presentations on the threat by counterterrorism specialists Patrick Poole, Army Lt. Col. Joseph Myers and Terri Wonder. The meeting was organized by the Army's provost marshal general and included more than 350 force protection and anti-terrorism professionals who came from major Army installations and commands from around the world, according to participants. Mr. Poole, a counterterrorism specialist and adviser to government and law-enforcement agencies, said his presentation and that of the other two counterterrorism experts "attempted to instruct these anti-terrorism and force protection professionals not just in the indicators of Islamic jihadism, but also the strategic deficiencies in the military comprehension of the overall jihadist threat."

Blasts in Pakistan Kill Shiite Worshipers
By SALMAN MASOOD, New York Times
A huge bomb blast tore apart a bus carrying Shiite Muslims to a religious procession in the southern port city of Karachi on Friday afternoon, and barely two hours later another lethal explosion struck a hospital where many of the wounded had been taken, police and hospital officials said. At least 22 people were killed and 40 more were wounded in the two attacks, which heightened fears of sectarian strife during an annual Shiite religious observation. The sectarian violence comes at a time when Karachi is already gripped by a deepening sense of political crisis. More than three dozen people have been killed recent weeks in what are known here as “targeted killings,” in which workers and supporters of competing political parties are fatally shot in tit-for-tat killings.

Pakistanis protest Terror Mom verdict
A Manhattan federal jury convicted Siddiqui on Wednesday of two counts of attempted murder
By the Associated Press, New York Post
Pakistanis shouted anti-American slogans and burned the Stars and Stripes on Thursday in protest of a New York jury’s conviction of a Pakistani woman accused of trying to kill Americans while detained in Afghanistan. The protests drew thousands in at least four cities, demonstrating the widespread distrust, and even hatred, of the U.S. in this country whose cooperation Washington needs to stabilize neighboring Afghanistan. They also showed the fierce passions surrounding the bizarre tale of Aafia Siddiqui, a 37-year-old U.S.-educated scientist who disappeared along with her three children for five years until she was picked up by Afghan police in 2008. The U.S. says Siddiqui shot at American security personnel who came to interrogate her after her arrest in Afghanistan’s central Ghazni province. But many Pakistanis believe the U.S. has fabricated the charges. Some suspect the Americans had long held the thin neuroscience specialist in a secret prison — allegations the U.S. denies. A Manhattan federal jury convicted Siddiqui on Wednesday of two counts of attempted murder, though it found the act was not premeditated. Siddiqui was also convicted of armed assault, using and carrying a firearm, and assault of U.S. officers and employees.

Pakistan: 3 U.S. soldiers killed in blast
By the Associated Press, Washington Times
Three U.S. soldiers traveling with Pakistan security force members were killed Wednesday and one wounded in a roadside bombing in northwest Pakistan that also injured dozens of schoolgirls, officials said. The soldiers were in the region as part of a small, little-publicized U.S. mission to train members of the paramilitary Frontier Corps to better fight al Qaeda and Taliban militants, Pakistan's army said. The U.S. Embassy declined to comment. If the deaths are confirmed by American authorities, they would represent a major victory for militants close to the Afghan border who have been hit hard in recent months by a surge in U.S. missile strikes and a major Pakistani army offensive.

Bomber hits pilgrims in Baghdad
By Bushra Juhi, Washington Times
A female suicide bomber mingling among Shi'ite pilgrims in Baghdad detonated an explosives belt Monday, killing at least 54 people, officials said. The bombing was the first major strike this year against pilgrims making their way to the southern city of Karbala to mark a Shi'ite holy day. It came as a security official warned of a possible increase in attacks by insurgents using new tactics to bypass bomb-detection methods. The bombing raises fears of an escalation of attacks as hundreds of thousands of Shi'ites head to Karbala to mark on Friday the end of 40 days of mourning following the anniversary of the death Imam Hussein, a revered Shi'ite figure.

Shiite pilgrimage rocked by deadly blast in Baghdad; 46 killed, 122 wounded by female suicide bomber
By Michael Sheridan, New York Daily News
A Shiite pilgrimage became a road to hell on Monday after a female suicide bomber blew herself up, Iraqi police report. According to the Associated Press, 46 people were killed in the blast, another 122 wounded. The explosion took place near the Shiite neighborhood of Shaab. The woman was reportedly disguised as one of the pilgrims, hiding the deadly device beneath an abaya, a dark cloak covering her from head to toe, according to Maj. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, Baghdad's top military spokesman. The female had cleared a security check shortly before detonating her bomb, al-Moussawi said. Thousands of Shiite pilgrims have been making the march to Karbala in Iraq to mark the end of the forty-day mourning period after the anniversary of the seventh century martyrdom of Imam Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad's grandson. Despite an overall decline in violence in Iraq, al-Qaida and other Sunni extremists have routinely targeted pilgrims in an attempt to stoke sectarian strife and weaken the Shiite-dominated government.

Suicide bomber kills 2 at Iraqi restaurant
By Chelsea J. Carter, Washington Times
A suicide bomber detonated an explosives belt Saturday at a restaurant popular with Iraqi security forces in a city that was once a flash point for sectarian slaughter, killing at least two people, authorities said. The attack came the same day an al Qaeda front group in Iraq claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing Tuesday at Baghdad's main crime lab that killed 22 people. The bombings appeared aimed at rattling and embarrassing the U.S.-backed Iraqi leadership before national elections in March. In Saturday's attack, a suicide bomber blew himself up inside a falafel restaurant near a famed Shiite shrine in the Sunni-dominated city of Samarra, 60 miles (95 kilometers) north of Baghdad, a police official said. The bomber appeared to have targeted the restaurant because it is popular with police and members of Sunni Awakening Councils, also known as Sons of Iraq -- ex-fighters who turned against al Qaeda and joined forces with the U.S. Twenty-five people, including 10 policemen and six Sons of Iraq, were wounded, he added. A medical official at the Samarra hospital confirmed the casualties, saying at least five of the wounded were in critical condition. Shiite tradition says the Askariya shrine is near the place where the last of the 12 Shiite imams, Mohammed al-Mahdi, disappeared. Shiites believe he is still alive and will return to restore justice to humanity. In February 2006, a huge explosion destroyed the Askariya shrine's golden dome and ignited fierce fighting between Sunnis and Shiites that killed tens of thousands across Iraq and pushed the country to the brink of civil war. In June 2007, another bombing brought down the twin minarets on the mosque's compound. Saturday's attack came just hours after the al Qaeda claim, which was posted on militant Web sites. It was the second claim this week from the Islamic State of Iraq. The group previously said it carried out suicide car bombings at three Baghdad hotels on Monday that claimed at least 41 lives.

WTF? Global Warming?
Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden blasts U.S. in audiotape spewing hate for... global warming
By Brian Kates, New York Daily News
In a new taped rant, Osama bin Laden blames the U.S. for global warming and calls for the world to boycott American goods in order to "liberate humanity from slavery and dependence." Released Friday, the tape shows bin Laden blaming America and the West for hunger, drought and floods across the globe, and called for "drastic solutions" to global warming. The fugitive al-Qaida leader called for a boycott of U.S. products as a way to bring "the wheels of the American economy" to a halt. He argued that such steps would also hamper Washington's war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. "We should stop dealings with the dollar and get rid of it as soon as possible," bin Laden said. "I know that this has great consequences and grave ramifications, but it is the only means to liberate humanity from slavery and dependence on America."

Osama bin Laden: Climate change is US' fault
By the Associated Press, New York Post
Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has called for the world to boycott American goods and the U.S. dollar, blaming the United States and other industrialized countries for global warming, according to a new audiotape released Friday. In the tape, broadcast in part on Al-Jazeera television, bin Laden warned of the dangers of climate change and says that the way to stop it is to bring "the wheels of the American economy" to a halt. He blamed Western industrialized nations for hunger, desertification and floods across the globe, and called for "drastic solutions" to global warming, and "not solutions that partially reduce the effect of climate change." Bin Laden has mentioned climate change and global warning in past messages, but the latest tape was his first dedicated to the topic. The al Qaeda leader also targeted the U.S. economy in the recording, calling for a boycott of American products and an end to the dollar's domination as a world currency.

Bloomberg: try 9/11 mastermind somewhere else
By TOM TOPOUSIS and DAVID SEIFMAN, New York Post
Responding to growing pressure from downtown residents and business leaders, Mayor Bloomberg yesterday said the trial for 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his fellow terrorists should be moved out of the city. "It would be great if the federal government could find a site that didn't cost $1 billion, which using downtown will, and it will also impact traffic and commerce and people's lifestyles," Bloomberg said. "And it would be great if we didn't do it." Bloomberg agrees with a resolution from Community Board 1 this week calling on US Attorney General Eric Holder to move the trial out of the city. The board suggested another federal site, possibly West Point, an Air National Guard base at Stewart Airport, the federal prison in upstate Otisville, or White Plains federal court. "The suggestion of a military base is probably a reasonably good one, relatively easy to provide the security," Bloomberg said. "They tend to be outside of cities, so they don't disrupt other people."

Al Qaeda terror leaders have eye on chemical, biological or nuclear attack on U.S. soil: report
By Ethan Sacks, New York Daily News
Al Qaeda planners are lying in wait, plotting another major attack on U.S. soil involving weapons of mass destruction, according to a dire new report. Osama bin Laden's terror network has made several attempts to acquire large-scale biological, chemical or nuclear weapons in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks, according to a new report. Former high-ranking CIA official Rolf Mowatt-Larssen reported in a paper for Harvard's Kennedy School that al Qaeda operatives are desperate to launch the most devastating terror attack yet. "We have done things that have made the country safer," Mowatt-Larssen told the News. "But we have to ask ourselves does that mean they can't mount another attack like 9/11 with 19 core, well-trained terrorists? "It doesn't require a giant organization to pull off a spectacular terrorist attack like that. We have to be careful that we don't become complacent." Mowatt-Larssen, who led the U.S.'s probe into whether or not Al Qaeda had aquired WMDs in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, speculates that the lack of another major attack is due in part to luck. "If Osama bin Ladin and his lieutenants had been interested in employing crude chemical, biological and radiological materials in small scale attacks, there is little doubt they could have done so by now," wrote Mowatt-Larssen in his report. The report, released Monday, comes ahead of a congressional meeting to assess the country's preparedness for the type of major attack Mowatt-Larssen is warning about, the Washington Post reported. That commission released a sobering report in December 2008 that predicted a major attack involving WMDS by 2013.

Blast Hits Central Baghdad as Attacks Accelerate
By JOHN LELAND and ANTHONY SHADID, New York Times
A day after bombs rocked three hotels in central Baghdad, another suicide bomber detonated explosives Tuesday outside the forensics department of the Interior Ministry. A source at the ministry said the bomb killed 17 and injured 80. The attack on the forensics department, which is separate from the Interior Ministry’s main offices, was aimed at one of the more exposed government buildings here. A police source said the bomb exploded on a traffic circle near a security checkpoint on Al Taharyiat Square. Many of those feared killed or wounded were police officers. The timing of the attack generated fears that the insurgents were accelerating their salvos against touchstones of Iraq’s political and civic life, undermining faith in the government’s ability to preserve security. The previous attacks were followed by lulls of up to two months, which American generals attributed to diminishing capacity on the part of the insurgents.

3 blasts strike Baghdad hotels; 11 dead
By Chelsea J. Carter, Washington Times
Iraqi police say three blasts have struck near three hotels in downtown Baghdad, killing at least 11 people. The officials say the blasts wounded at least 20 people. The first blast struck at about 3:40 p.m. near the Sheraton Hotel along Abu Nawas Street, just across the Tigris River from the Green Zone. The officials say two others struck near the Babylon Hotel and al-Hamra Hotel, which is popular with Western journalists. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

"We love death more than you love life!"
Queens 'terrorist' spilled his guts: feds
By JANON FISHER, New York Post
The Queens man accused of training with al Qaeda to kill US soldiers in Afghanistan willingly spilled his guts to the FBI after crashing his car on the Whitestone Expressway two weeks ago, according to federal prosecutors. Adis Medunjanin, 24, "made clear to the agents that he desired to cooperate with the government, and provided very detailed information about terrorist-related activities," Assistant US Attorney Jeffrey Knox wrote in a letter to Brooklyn federal Judge Raymond Dearie. The prosecutors filed the letter to shoot down defense attorney Robert Gottlieb's plan to ask the judge to throw out any incriminating statements that Medunjanin made without the lawyer present. Medunjanin, who allegedly traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan to train and to kill American service members, is expected to be charged next month with Najibullah Zazi, a former schoolmate who allegedly drove to the city from Colorado with the intent to kill New Yorkers with homemade bombs. The Bosnian national had called 911 and shouted, "We love death more than you love life!" before deliberately crashing his car on Jan. 7, 2010, according to the prosecutor.

Pope shooter free, predicts 'the end'
By SUZAN FRASER, New York Post
The Turk who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981 was released from prison yesterday after more than 29 years behind bars, and proclaimed that he was a messenger of God and that the world will end this century. Mehmet Ali Agca, 52, waved as he left in a convoy of vehicles. Turkish authorities plan to monitor him closely because of long-standing questions about his mental health. Agca shot John Paul on May 13, 1981, as the pope rode in an open car in St. Peter’s Square. Agca was pardoned and released in 2000 at the pope’s request, but was immediately jailed on his return to Turkey for the 1979 murder of a journalist. Following his release yesterday, Agca sat calmly between two plainclothes policemen in the back seat of a sedan that took him to a military hospital. In the statement distributed outside the prison, Agca declared, “I proclaim the end of the world. All the world will be destroyed in this century. Every human being will die in this century.” He ended the long, rambling text by signing off as “the Christ eternal,” in keeping with past outbursts and claims that he was the Messiah.

Muslim question persists in Army shooting
By Bill Gertz, Washington Times
Fear of offending Muslims or being insensitive to religion was likely a key factor to why Army supervisors missed signs that the suspect in the deadly Fort Hood shooting rampage was a Muslim extremist, according to national security experts. Senior Pentagon officials last week sought to play down or sidestep questions about why Army supervisors and FBI counterterrorism officials missed warning signs or failed to take action against Army Maj. Nidal Hasan before the Nov. 5 attack, which killed 13 people — all but one them soldiers. Rep. Ike Skelton, Missouri Democrat and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a C-SPAN interview Sunday that committee hearings set for Wednesday will examine the two "disconnects" related to Army personnel reports: that Maj. Hasan was promoted despite signs that he had become radicalized, and that intelligence reports indicating the major had terrorism links apparently were ignored.

France eyes ban on all-encompassing Muslim garb
Widely viewed as a gateway to radical Islam
By Elaine Ganley, Washington Times
In a country whose national emblem is Marianne, a bare-chested woman, there is deepening concern over the all-encompassing garb, often black or brown and worn with gloves, attire typical in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states. Here, it is widely viewed as a gateway to radical Islam, an attack on gender equality and other French values, and a gnawing away at the nation's secular foundation. French President Nicolas Sarkozy opened the door to a possible ban in June, telling a parliament session in Versailles that such dress "is not welcome" in France. A parliamentary panel set to work in July on a six-month mission gathering information on the garments. On Tuesday, the head of Mr. Sarkozy's conservative UMP party in parliament's lower house, Jean-Francois Cope, jumped the gun before the panel's report was finished, and filed draft legislation on a ban. "No one may, in spaces open to the public and on public streets, wear a garment or an accessory that has the effect of hiding the face," the draft text reads. The document cites public security concerns, thus includes all face-covering clothes, in a bid to head off challenges from those who might claim such a law would violate constitutional rules on individual rights — a major concern along with how such a law would be enforced. It foresees fines for those who break the law. The initiative, unlikely to go to debate before spring, would be the second time France targets Muslim dress. A 2004 law born in acrimony bans Muslim head scarves and other "ostentatious" religious symbols in the classrooms of French public schools. Mr. Sarkozy's party dominates parliament, and the president reiterated Wednesday his wish for a law on full veils, though it's too early to say whether it will pass.

Al Qaeda Threatens New Strikes
By MARGARET COKER and CHIP CUMMINS, Wall Street Journal
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula issued fresh threats Monday against the U.S. and its Mideast allies, promising to retaliate against a surge of strikes launched in the past month against its leaders and safe havens in Yemen. The terrorist group also denied statements made by Yemeni authorities late last week that six of al Qaeda's senior leaders in the country, including the man identified as the leader of the group's military operations, had been killed in an air strike. "The Yemeni government has been making many false claims ... against the Mujahedeen leaders in the Arabian Peninsula. The latest of these claims is that it killed six of them," the group said, according to a statement posted online on Islamist Web sites. "We assure our Muslim nation that none of the mujahedeen were killed in that unjust and insidious raid; rather, some brothers were slightly wounded." The al Qaeda statement couldn't be independently verified, but Yemeni opposition news outlets also cited local tribal leaders saying they had seen the al Qaeda figures alive after the air strike on Friday.

Pope's failed assassin released from prison
God told him to kill the Pope
By the Associated Press, New York Post
The Turk who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981 was released from prison on Monday after more than 29 years behind bars and proclaimed that he was a messenger of God and that the world will end in this century. Mehmet Ali Agca, 52, waved to journalists as he left the prison in a convoy of several vehicles. Turkish authorities plan to monitor him closely because of long-standing questions about his mental health. Agca's hair was gray and he wore a blue sweatshirt. Agca shot John Paul on May 13, 1981, as the pope rode in an open car in St. Peter's Square. The pontiff was hit in the abdomen, left hand and right arm, but the bullets missed vital organs. John Paul met with Agca in Italy's Rebibbia prison in 1983 and forgave him for the shooting. Following his release, he sat calmly between two plainclothes policemen in the backseat of a sedan that took him to a military hospital. There, doctors concluded that he was unfit for compulsory military service because of "severe anti-social personality disorder," said his lawyer, Yilmaz Abosoglu.

Militants Launch Coordinated Attack on Afghan Capital
By Jyoti Thottam, Time
The heart of Kabul was under siege for several hours Monday as Taliban insurgents launched their biggest assault on the capital in months, with gunmen opening fire outside the presidential palace and at least two suicide bombs being detonated. The attack seemed intended to send a message to Afghan President Hamid Karzai that his government's plan to try to bring Taliban fighters over to its side with an incentive package of jobs and education programs — in addition to the surge of 30,000 additional U.S. soldiers being deployed to the country — will be met with fierce resistance by the militant group.

Judge throws the book at Islamic psychopath
Jewish Federation killer gets life without parole plus 120 years
By LEVI PULKKINEN, Seattle Post Intelligencer
Whether Haq conducted the brazen attack on the Belltown center was not at issue during the trial. Video and Haq's own statements clearly showed he forced his way into the center at gunpoint before opening fire on employees Carol Goldman, Layla Bush, Christina Rexroad, Cheryl Stumbo, Waechter and Klein. Haq's attorneys argued that a lifelong mental illness -- not hatred of Jewish people, as prosecutors alleged -- drove the Tri-Cities man to kill. The argument held sufficient sway in an earlier trial to prevent a jury from reaching a verdict; the second trial, though, resulted in a unanimous conviction on all counts. As they had throughout the trial, Haq's attorneys again argued that he was driven by a "broken mind," not hate. They requested that Haq received exceptionally short sentences on his five attempted murder convictions, as well as his convictions on unlawful imprisonment and malicious harassment; Kallas instead imposed the maximum standard penalty on each count.

Report on Fort Hood Said to Fault Army Officers
Gates to pin the rap on midlevel officers
By the Associated Press, New York Times
As many as eight Army officers could face discipline for failing to do anything when the alleged shooter in the Fort Hood rampage displayed erratic behavior early in his military career, two officials familiar with the case said. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was expected to refer findings on the officers to the Army for further inquiry and possible punishment. The report on what went wrong in the case of Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, who is accused in the shootings that killed 13 people at the Texas Army base on Nov. 5, is expected to be released Friday. Several midlevel officers overlooked or failed to act on red flags in Hasan's lax work habits and fixation on religion, the officials said Thursday. Hasan was an odd duck and a loner who was passed along from office to office and job to job despite professional failings that included missed or failed exams and physical fitness requirements, the review found.

2 U.S. troops, 4 Afghan soldiers killed
By the Associated Press, Washington Times
Two U.S. service members died and four Afghan soldiers were killed in separate explosions Wednesday in eastern Afghanistan, an area of the nation rife with violence, officials said. Nine members of the Afghan National Police were injured Wednesday in other incidents. NATO said the two American troops died in a bomb blast, but disclosed no other information. Their deaths bring to 12 the number of American troops killed in Afghanistan so far this month; 16 other soldiers from the international coalition have died this month.

Intelligence experts warn of increased recidivism rates for former Guantánamo Bay detainees
Saudi transfers from Gitmo on hold
By Susan Crabtree, The Hill
The Obama administration has no plans to transfer Guantánamo Bay detainees to Saudi Arabia in the wake of the Christmas Day bombing attempt and bipartisan criticism about its policy of transferring detainees to countries hosting terrorist activity. No detainees are set to be sent to Saudi Arabia in the “near term,” an administration official told The Hill. The official also defended the administration’s decision to transfer three Guantánamo Bay detainees to Saudi Arabia in June 2009, noting that the trio were under Saudi “judicial review” after their transfer. “There are no Saudis slated for transfer in the near term,” the official said. “The three Saudis that were transferred in 2009 were subject to judicial review in Saudi Arabia following their transfer.” The official did not define the term “judicial review” or say whether the detainees are in prison or have been prosecuted in Saudi courts.

Bomb kills Iran physicist tied to Mousavi
By the Associated Press, Washington Times
A nuclear physics professor who publicly backed Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi in the disputed June presidential election was killed Tuesday when a remote-controlled bomb rigged to a motorcycle blew up outside his home. State media identified the victim as Masoud Ali Mohammadi, 50, a professor at Tehran University, which has been at the center of recent protests by student opposition supporters. Before the election, pro-reform Web sites published Mr. Ali Mohammadi's name among a list of 240 Tehran University teachers who supported Mr. Mousavi. The government blamed the bombing on an armed Iranian opposition group that it said operated under the direction of Israel and the United States. Iran often accuses both countries of meddling in its affairs -- both when it comes to postelection unrest and its nuclear program. Israel's Foreign Ministry had no comment. Reflecting the internal tension that grew out of the election, hard-line government supporters called at recent street rallies for the execution of opposition leaders.

Islamic terrorist killing spree...
Six Allied Troops Die in Afghanistan
By ROD NORDLAND, New York Times
Six Western soldiers, at least three of them Americans, on Monday became the latest fatalities in a steadily escalating toll in Afghanistan. The military said three Americans were killed in a firefight in southern Afghanistan Monday afternoon, but gave no further details in a news release from the International Security and Assistance Force. A second release reported a single coalition service member was also killed in southern Afghanistan. And in eastern Afghanistan, the security force reported that two of its service members died in a different engagement Monday. In both those cases, it did not identify the victims’ nationalities, but the French government confirmed that at least one of the dead belonged to its forces. The French soldier was killed in an attack on a joint patrol of French and Afghan forces northeast of Kabul, President Nicolas Sarkozy announced in Paris. France has some 3,750 troops in Afghanistan and, according to icasualties.org, an independent organization that tracks military casualties, it had lost 36 soldiers killed before the latest fatality.

Reporter, Marine Die in Afghan Blast
By ROD NORDLAND, New York Times
An embedded British journalist and an American Marine accompanying him were killed in Ghazni province when the vehicle they were traveling in struck a roadside bomb, the British Ministry of Defense announced Sunday. The journalist killed Saturday was Rupert Hamer, a defense correspondent from the British newspaper the Sunday Mirror who was accompanying a U.S. Marine patrol near the village of Nawa. The American soldier was not identified pending notification of next of kin. A photographer traveling with Mr. Hamer, Philip Coburn, was seriously wounded but was in stable condition. Mr. Hamer was the first British journalist killed while covering the Afghanistan conflict in recent years, but the second Western journalist to die in the past two weeks. A Canadian journalist, Michelle Lang, died along with four Canadian soldiers in Kandahar province on Dec. 30. In Saturday’s incident, an Afghan soldier was also killed in the blast, and four U.S. Marines were wounded as well, according to the British ministry statement.

Yemenis Consider Sending al Qaeda to Rehab
By MARGARET COKER and CHARLES LEVINSON, Wall Street Journal
As Yemeni security forces mobilize against al Qaeda, Hamoud Al Hitar, minister of Islamic Endowment, is advocating what he says is a better way of curing the country of its Islamist militants: rehab. Mr. Hitar ran a government-sponsored militant-rehabilitation program from 2002 to 2005, with mixed results. He says he successfully pacified hundreds of militant Islamist detainees by using the Quran to teach the fallacies of extremist ideology. U.S. officials, however, criticized the program's effectiveness after American forces in Iraq started detaining some Yemeni graduates. Nasser al Bahri, a management consultant who was once a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden and spent more than a decade in the ranks of al Qaeda, was a graduate of Mr. Hitar's program. He says a beefed-up program could do good, but the version Mr. Hitar ran was ineffective -- in part because many fellow prisoners pretended to have changed their ways simply to be let out of jail.

3 Malaysian churches attacked in 'Allah' dispute
"Islam is above all...Every citizen must respect that"
By the Associated Press, Washington Times
Three churches in Malaysia were attacked with firebombs, causing extensive damage to one, as Muslims pledged Friday to prevent Christians from using the word "Allah," escalating religious tensions in the multiracial country. Many Malay Muslims, who make up 60 percent of the population, are incensed by a recent High Court decision to overturn a ban on Roman Catholics using "Allah" as a translation for God in the Malay-language edition of their main newspaper, the Herald. The government says Allah, an Arabic word that predates Islam, is exclusive to the faith and by extension to Malays. It refuses to make an exception, even though the Herald's Malay edition is read only by Christian indigenous tribes in the remote states of Sabah and Sarawak. At Friday prayers at two main mosques in downtown Kuala Lumpur, young worshippers carried banners and gave fiery speeches, vowing to defend Islam. "We will not allow the word Allah to be inscribed in your churches," one speaker shouted into a loudspeaker at the Kampung Bahru mosque. About 50 other people carried posters reading "Heresy arises from words wrongly used" and "Allah is only for us." "Islam is above all. Every citizen must respect that," said Ahmad Johari, who attended prayers at the National Mosque. "I hope the court will understand the feeling of the majority Muslims of Malaysia. We can fight to the death over this issue."

Yemen Says Plane Bomb Suspect Met Radical Cleric
By STEVEN ERLANGER, New York Times
A senior official here confirmed on Thursday that the young Nigerian man accused of attempting to bomb an airliner approaching Detroit on Christmas Day had met with Al Qaeda operatives and with Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American-born Internet preacher, in Yemen before setting out on his journey. But the official, Rashad al-Alimi, the deputy prime minister for national security and defense, cited Yemeni investigations and said that the Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, had acquired the explosives used in the failed attack over Detroit not in Yemen, which he left on Dec. 4, but in Nigeria, where he had spent about four hours in the Lagos airport on Dec. 24 before boarding a flight to Amsterdam and then Detroit.

Bombings Kill at Least 7 in Iraq
By REUTERS, New York Times
Three bombs exploded in a residential area near Ramadi in Iraq's western Anbar province on Thursday, killing seven people including relatives of an Iraqi Army anti-terrorist special forces commander, police said. The bombs were planted overnight at the home of the officer, Waleed al-Hiti, and adjacent homes, police said. Hiti was seriously wounded and his father, mother, two sisters, brother and sister-in-law, as well as the lawyer, were killed, police said. The bombing occurred in the town of Hit, about 130 km (80 miles) west of Baghdad.

"America is a legitimate target"
Former bin Laden bodyguard is among ex-guerrillas in Yemen
By Sudarsan Raghavan, Washington Post
When he served in the Afghan mountains as Osama bin Laden's bodyguard, Nasser al-Bahri said, he was known as "The Killer." Today, Bahri is a business consultant in Yemen who favors Western-style pinstriped shirts, crisp slacks and black loafers. But his ideas are still radical: Ask him whether jihadists should kill Americans on U.S. soil and he replies without hesitation, "America is a legitimate target." The arc of Bahri's life helps to explain why Yemen was an attractive place for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian who allegedly tried to bomb a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day, to be indoctrinated into the Islamist world of jihad. Thousands like Bahri, who have returned from wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and other Muslim lands, are disengaged from the fight against the West, yet express sympathy for al-Qaeda's violent core philosophies. As the United States steps up its engagement here, it faces the delicate task of fighting terrorism without alienating Yemen's highly tribal and religiously conservative society. Like Pakistan and Afghanistan, Yemen has abundant weapons and men experienced in guerrilla warfare who resent U.S. policies and have tribal, social and inspirational ties to al-Qaeda. Many fear that such men could become perfect recruits, especially if anti-American sentiments grow or Yemen plunges deeper into chaos.

Al Qaeda’s Pandora
Osama bin Laden's 17-year-old daughter is trying to get out of Iran -- her story could expose ties between the mullahs and her father's terror networks
By Christopher Dickey, Newsweek
She has spent almost half her life in chadors and hidden away behind closed doors, so we do not know exactly what she looks like. But if the 17-year-old girl who showed up unexpectedly outside the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Tehran last November resembles her father, she is tall and lissome, with angular features that would be hard to mistake. In any case, the Saudis quickly let Iman bint Osama bin Laden into their embassy compound, and she has been there ever since, waiting for a guarantee of safe passage out of the country. That may be a long time coming. Already the story she has told has far-reaching implications. At a minimum, it complicates the on-again-off-again dialogue that Washington has tried to pursue with Tehran. And it could put Tehran right in the middle of the Obama administration's fight to wipe out Al Qaeda’s leadership. Iman's case is only the latest, most dramatic bit of evidence showing just how hard the mullahs' intelligence services have tried to turn Al Qaeda to their will, by carrot or stick. If they have not succeeded—and the jury is out on that question—it's not for want of trying. "This is a real Pandora's box for the Iranians," says an Arab intelligence analyst familiar with details of the case who did not want to be more closely identified because of the many sensitive issues involved.

Colombian FARC rebels, al-Qaeda joining forces to smuggle cocaine into Europe, says DEA
By Neil Nagraj, New York Daily News
Al Qaeda thugs and drug-dealing Colombian guerillas have formed “an unholy alliance” to traffic cocaine through Africa into Europe, a Drug Enforcement Administration official said. In an alarming move, the Revolutionary Armed forces of Colombia, or FARC, have enlisted the aid of Muslim terrorists - including Al Qaeda – to smuggle cocaine through increasingly unstable West Africa, as European countries have become more adept at intercepting and disrupting smuggling operations through their ports. "In the mid- to late-1990s when the Europeans became better at maritime interdiction, off the coasts of Portugal and Spain for example, traffickers started moving their routes southward. So the next progression was to Western Africa," Jay Bergman, the DEA director for the Andean region of South America, told Reuters. "As suggested by the recent arrest of three alleged Al Qaeda operatives, the expansion of cocaine trafficking through West Africa has provided the venue for an unholy alliance between South American narco-terrorists and Islamic extremists," he said. The three alleged Qaeda henchmen were arrested in December after plotting to smuggle drugs to raise money for jihad. One of the suspects was caught bragging on tape that "without him, [Al Qaeda] could not eat." The three were brought from Africa to New York where they were charged with terrorism-related offenses. In addition to the Colombian cartels using Africa to reach Europe, Mexican drug gangs are using the same routes to ship raw ingredients for producing methamphetamine.

Americans held in Pakistan deny terror plot
By the Associated Press, Washington Times
Five Americans detained in Pakistan are denying they planned to carry out terrorist attacks. The young Muslim men from Washington's Northern Virginia suburbs appeared in court Monday in Sargodha, in eastern Pakistan. Their defense lawyer said the court granted police two weeks to prepare terrorism charges against them. The attorney, Ameer Abdullah Rokri, said the men denied they had ties with al Qaeda or other militant groups. The men, ages 19 to 25, were arrested in Sargodha in early December in a case that has spurred fears that Westerners are traveling to Pakistan to join militant groups.

U.S. Closes Embassy in Yemen Over Qaeda Threats
By STEVEN ERLANGER, New York Times
The United States shut its embassy in Yemen’s capital on Sunday, citing unspecified but “ongoing threats by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” the regional branch responsible for the failed Christmas Day effort to blow up an airliner headed to Detroit. The closure came a day after a quiet visit to Yemen’s President by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American regional commander, who hand-delivered a message from President Obama of support for Yemen’s unity and counterterrorism efforts. In his weekly address on Saturday, Mr. Obama blamed the Al Qaeda branch for the bombing attempt and said that those responsible “will be held to account.” Mr. Obama said he had made it “a priority to strengthen our partnership with the Yemeni government, training and equipping their security forces, sharing intelligence and working with them to strike Al Qaeda terrorists.” In September 2008, Al Qaeda attacked the embassy with a car bomb, and 19 people were killed — including an 18-year-old American woman, Yemeni security forces and six militants. It was after that attack that the United States began to step up its military and security aid to Yemen, with some $70 million spent in 2009, a figure that General Petraeus said would more than double in 2010. Last January, gunmen in a car exchanged fire with police at a checkpoint near the embassy, hours after the embassy received threats of a possible attack by Al Qaeda, according to The Associated Press. No one was injured. And in July, security was upgraded in Sana after intelligence reports warned of attacks planned against the embassy. In December, the Yemen government said that it had attacked Al Qaeda meetings in which the group had been planning an attack on the British Embassy here.

Iran warns West it will make its own nuclear fuel
Defiantly announced it intends to build 10 new uranium enrichment sites
By the Associated Press, San Francisco Chronicle
Iran set a one-month deadline Saturday for the West to accept its counterproposal to a U.N.-drafted nuclear plan and warned that otherwise it will produce reactor fuel at a higher level of enrichment on its own. The warning was a show of defiance and a hardening of Iran's stance over its nuclear program, which the West fears masks an effort to develop a nuclear weapons capability. Tehran insists its program is only for peaceful purposes, such as electricity production, and says it has no intention of making a bomb. "We have given them an ultimatum. There is one month left and that is by the end of January," Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said, speaking on state television. Even if Tehran started working on the fuel production immediately, it would likely take years before it could master the technology to turn uranium enriched to the level of 20 percent into the fuel rods it needs for a medical research reactor. Still, any threat to enrich uranium to a higher level is likely to rattle the world powers that have been trying to persuade Iran to forgo enrichment altogether. Enrichment is at the center of the West's concerns because at high levels it can be used in making nuclear weapons. At lower levels, enriched uranium is used in the production of fuel for nuclear power plants. Iran currently has one operating enrichment facility that churns out enriched uranium at a level of 3.5 percent. The country needs fuel enriched to 20 percent to power the Tehran medical research reactor. For nuclear weapons, uranium needs to be enriched to 90 percent or more. The U.N. has demanded Iran suspend all enrichment, a demand Tehran refuses to meet, saying it has a right to develop the technology under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran has also defiantly announced it intends to build 10 new uranium enrichment sites, drawing a forceful rebuke from the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency and warnings of the possibility of new U.N. sanctions.

Danish Cartoonist Calls Home Attack ‘Really Close’
By JOHN F. BURNS, New York Times
A heavily bandaged 28-year-old Somali man was wheeled into a Danish court on a stretcher on Saturday and charged with attempting to kill a Danish artist whose 2005 cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad ignited outrage and riots across the Muslim world. A man who is to be charged with attempted murder of a Danish cartoonist was carried into court on a stretcher in Denmark on Saturday. The suspected assailant was wounded by police gunshots to the knee and hand when he resisted arrest after breaking into the home of the artist, Kurt Westergaard, on Friday night, according to a statement issued immediately after the attack by Jakob Scharf, head of the Danish intelligence service, known as PET. The attack followed years of threats to kill Mr. Westergaard by Islamic militant groups, and appeared to have come perilously close to succeeding. The 74-year-old artist told his employer, the newspaper Jyllands-Posten, that he had taken refuge from the attack in a fortified bathroom built into his home by the intelligence service, and was there with his 5-year-old granddaughter as the assailant, armed with an ax and a knife, tried to break in.

Islamic shakedown on the high seas
2 ships reported hijacked off Somali coast
By Gregory Katz, Washington Times
A cargo ship and a chemical tanker have both been hijacked by pirates in the perilous waters off the coast of Somalia, officials said Saturday. The seizures bring to four the number of ships hijacked in the past week and indicate that piracy remains a serious problem, a year after an international naval armada began deploying off Somalia to protect shipping. The British-flagged Asian Glory was taken late Friday roughly 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) east of Somalia, said Commander John Harbour, a spokesman with the European Union task force charged with combating piracy off Somalia. The same day, the Singaporean-flagged Pramoni, a chemical tanker with a crew of 24, was seized by pirates in the heavily defended Gulf of Aden, one of the world's busiest waterways. Harbour said the Asian Glory's crew of 25 -- from Ukraine, Bulgaria, India and Romania -- appeared to be safe and that the pirates had not yet made contact with the ship's owner, Zodiac Management Agencies. "The standard procedure for the pirates is to get the ship back to their stronghold and then contact the owner," he said. "I don't know yet where the ship is bound." Somali pirates have hijacked more than 80 ships in the past two years, with many of the hijackings earning the pirates multi-million-dollar ransoms. Pirates now hold 14 vessels and close to 300 crew members.

Gloom, fury as Pakistan death toll nears 100
Tribal elders vow to defy Taliban
By the Associated Press, Salon
Tribal elders in a Pakistani village where a suicide car bomber killed nearly 100 people insisted Saturday that residents will keep defying the Taliban, even as the bloodshed laid bare the risks facing the citizens' militias that make up a key piece of Pakistan's arsenal against extremism. The New Year's Day attack on the northwest village of Shah Hasan Khel was one of the deadliest in a surge of bombings that has killed more than 600 across Pakistan since October. Police believe the attacker meant to detonate his 550 pounds (250 kilograms) of explosives at a meeting of tribesmen who supervise an anti-Taliban militia. Instead, the blast went off at a nearby outdoor volleyball court, killing at least 96 people.

Wacky jihad therapy failed to 'cure' plane-bomb plotter
By CHUCK BENNETT, New York Post
A cushy Saudi Arabian "rehab" center where terrorists are encouraged to express themselves through crayon drawings, water sports and video games is under scrutiny after one of its graduates re-emerged as a leader in the al Qaeda branch claiming responsibility for trying to blow up an airliner on Christmas. Said Ali al Shihri -- a former Guantanamo Bay detainee who now heads the terror group al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula -- obviously didn't get to the bottom of his America-hating issues while undergoing the controversial rehab for jihadists. Inmates like Shihri are supposed to while away the days playing ping-pong, PlayStation and soccer in hopes that the peaceful environment will help them cope with their jihadist rages. Bomb-makers and gunmen participate in art therapy to help them explore their feelings non-violently. In between tasty picnic-style meals of rice and lamb and snacks of Snickers along with dips in the pool, participants practice Arabic calligraphy, produce dizzying Jackson Pollack rip-offs and imagine the aftermath of car bombings in crayon. Some 1,500 al Qaeda terrorists have "graduated" from the program, including 108 former Guantanamo Bay detainees, the Washington Post reported. "The Saudis talk about a success rate of 80 to 90 percent, but when you look at what those numbers mean in reality, it all falls down. There is no criteria for evaluation," John Horgan, a Department of Homeland Security consultant, told the New York Post.

Suicide bombing at CIA camp in Afghanistan likely revenge attack by Taliban warlord - a former ally
By James Gordon Meek, New York Daily News
The suicide-bomb slaughter at a tiny CIA Afghanistan border camp was likely vengeance from a local Taliban tribal warlord who was once the agency's ally. Forward Operation Base Chapman in Khowst,

where seven CIA officers died Wednesday, is a few miles from the ruins of Al Qaeda camps obliterated by U.S. missiles in a failed 1998 attempt to kill Osama Bin Laden. "This will be avenged through aggressive counterterror operations," an official said Thursday as drones blew up Al Qaeda goons in warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani's territory across the border in Pakistan. "People at Langley are galvanized." The CIA backed Haqqani in the 1980s war against Afghanistan's Soviet occupiers. Despite aligning with the CIA as a mujahedeen leader to fight the Soviets, Haqqani refused its overtures after 9/11 and sided with his old friend Bin Laden, whom he has sheltered on both sides of the Afganistan-Pakistan border.

U.S.-born cleric linked to airline bombing plot
FBI and intelligence officials say Anwar al Awlaki, a cleric in Yemen with a popular jihadist website and ties to Sept. 11 hijackers, may have had a role in the attempted bombing
By Josh Meyer, Los Angeles Times
U.S. counter-terrorism agencies are investigating whether an American-born Islamic cleric who has risen to become a key figure in the Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen played a role in the attempted Christmas Day airplane bombing over Detroit, intelligence and law enforcement officials said Wednesday. Intercepts and other information point to connections between terrorism suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and Anwar al Awlaki -- who also communicated with the accused U.S. Army gunman in last month's attack on Ft. Hood, Texas, that left 13 people dead. Some of the information about Awlaki comes from Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian charged with attempting to detonate a hidden packet of PETN explosive aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day, the officials said.

Iran in ‘Serious Crisis’
By REUTERS, New York Times
The anti-government protests, which have flared repeatedly since the election, have plunged Iran into the most serious internal crisis in the Islamic Republic's 30-year history. Iranian opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi supporters have defied government warnings against holding "illegal rallies," using Muslim festivals and official days of commemoration as a cover for street gatherings. Opposition leaders say the presidential vote was rigged to secure Ahmadinejad's re-election. The country's highest authority, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said it was the healthiest in three decades. Hardline cleric Ahmad Khatami criticized Mousavi's statement, saying "he is repeating his past mistakes," state radio reported. The political turmoil has entered a new phase since Sunday, marked by bloody confrontations, arrests and hardline demands for stronger suppression of opponents of the government.

Pakistan: Bomb kills 32 at volleyball site
By the Associated Press, Washington Times
A suicide bomber set off an explosives-laden vehicle on a field during a volleyball tournament Friday in northwest Pakistan, killing at least 32 people and wounding more than 70, police said. The blast occurred near Pakistan's tribal belt, and was the latest bloodshed to rattle the country since the army launched a military offensive against Taliban fighters in the South Waziristan tribal region. The operation has scattered insurgents but provoked apparent reprisal attacks that have killed more than 500 people since October. Police said Friday's bombing in Lakki Marwat city, not far from South Waziristan, was possible retaliation for local residents' efforts to keep militants out of the area. "The locality has been a hub of militants. Locals set up a militia and expelled the militants from this area. This attack seems to be reaction to their expulsion," local police chief Ayub Khan told reporters. He said the bomber drove onto the field, which lies in a congested neighborhood, during the volleyball contest. Some nearby houses collapsed, and "we fear that some 10 or so people might have been trapped in the rubble," Khan said.

Somalis in Yemen: Dangerously Intertwined Basket Cases
By Abigail Hauslohner, Time
There is little doubt that the steady push of refugees from the Horn of Africa into Yemen is proving taxing for a country on the brink of becoming the world's next failed state. Yemen simply doesn't have the resources to deal with multiple insurgencies, a water crisis, development woes, unemployment, widespread poverty and a refugee issue all at once. The country's foreign minister, Abubaker Abdullah al-Qirbi, told TIME in an interview in his office in early December: "The challenge is enormous . . . [The refugees] pose a lot of problems, both [security-related] and also pressure on our education and health services."

U.S. Probes Cleric's Tie to Jetliner Bomb Plot
By EVAN PEREZ, MARGARET COKER, SIOBHAN GORMAN, Wall Street Journal
Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American-born Yemeni cleric who has surfaced in multiple terror probes, is emerging as a central part of the Christmas Day airline bomber investigation, as authorities focus attention on a network of extremists in Yemen who may have helped radicalize the young Nigerian accused in the failed plot. U.S. investigators have uncovered intelligence "chatter" indicating contacts between Mr. Awlaki, who has been under U.S. intelligence scrutiny for years, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a wealthy Nigerian who is accused of trying to down Northwest Airlines Flight 253 with explosives hidden in his underwear. While Mr. Awlaki had been suspected of having contacts with Mr. Abdulmutallab, the evidence firms up those links. The type and extent of the contacts detected between the two couldn't be learned. It isn't clear what direct role, if any, Mr. Awlaki played in the plot. Al Qaeda's branch in Yemen, with which Mr. Awlaki is associated, has claimed responsibility for the attack.

Abdulmutallab's teachers, classmates at Yemen school say he became more religious
"Islam is the only true way, if you want to go to heaven, you should accept it"
By Sudarsan Raghavan, Washington Post
The young Nigerian man had visited Yemen once before, in 2005. But by the time Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab returned this past August, again to study Arabic, he appeared to have become a very different person, more deeply religious, more of a loner, and forsaking Western clothing in favor of a long, white traditional Islamic tunic. Abdulmutallab also expressed an inner confidence and a certainty of purpose, according to former teachers, classmates and housemates. The 23-year-old seemed to be on a mission, spending long hours in a mosque, often missing classes, and even ordering a classmate to stop smoking in front of him. In more than a dozen interviews on Wednesday, those who know him shared impressions of the man who joined them for language school in Yemen this summer only to vanish in October and emerge on Christmas Day on a Detroit-bound flight from Amsterdam with chemical explosives allegedly sewn into his underwear. At a dinner in September, Abdulmutallab demanded that classmate Sigurd Sorensen walk behind him as he said his evening prayers. "What faith are you?" Abdulmutallab demanded. "Christian," Sorensen replied. "Islam is the only true way," Abdulmutallab then declared, according to Sorensen. "If you want to go to heaven, you should accept it."

Suicide bomber attacks CIA base in Afghanistan, killing at least 8 Americans
By Joby Warrick, Washington Post
A suicide bomber infiltrated a CIA base in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing at least eight Americans in what is believed to be the deadliest single attack on U.S. intelligence personnel in the eight-year-long war and one of the deadliest in the agency's history, U.S. officials said. The attack represented an audacious blow to intelligence operatives at the vanguard of U.S. counterterrorism operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, killing officials whose job involves plotting strikes against the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other extremist groups that are active on the frontier between the two nations. The facility that was targeted -- Forward Operating Base Chapman -- is in the eastern Afghan province of Khost, which borders North Waziristan, the Pakistani tribal area that is believed to be al-Qaeda's home base.

Provincial Governor Survives Iraq Bombings
By JOHN LELAND and MARK McDONALD, New York Times
Attacks by two suicide bombers on Wednesday in the city of Ramadi killed at least 10 people and wounded more than 30, a police commander said. Initial reports said the governor of Anbar Province, Qasim Abed al-Fahadawi, had been killed but hospital officials said he had been wounded but survived. Anbar Province, the embattled region west of Baghdad, has been a bellwether for Iraq’s fortunes. In 2004, the killing of four American contractors in Falluja signaled the hardening of the insurgency. In 2006, when tribal leaders in Anbar turned against the insurgency in the Sunni Awakening Council, their efforts brought the first turn toward peace in the country.

Worried Yemeni minister warns of more Qaeda attacks
Two freed Guantanamo Bay prisoners had helped hatch the plot
By CHUCK BENNETT, New York Post
There are hundreds of al Qaeda-trained operatives in Yemen plotting more attacks on US airliners, the foreign minister of the embattled Gulf state warned yesterday. "Of course there are a number of al Qaeda operatives in Yemen and some of their leaders. We realize this danger," Abu Bakr al-Qirbi said. "They may actually plan attacks like the one we have just had in Detroit. There are maybe hundreds of them -- 200, 300," he told the BBC. Al-Qirbi said he briefed the FBI on the threat from his country -- home to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which claimed responsibility for the attempted bombing. Meanwhile, one day after it was revealed that two freed Guantanamo Bay prisoners had helped hatch the plot, the name of a third former Gitmo detainee has emerged as a key figure in AQAP.

Airliner suicide mission blessed by imam
By Victor Morton, Washington Times
The Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner had his suicide mission personally blessed in Yemen by Anwar al-Awlaki, the Muslim imam suspected of radicalizing the Fort Hood shooting suspect, a U.S. intelligence source has told The Washington Times. The intelligence official, who is familiar with the FBI's interrogation of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, said the bombing suspect has boasted of his jihad training to the FBI and has said it included final exhortations by Mr. al-Awlaki. "It was Awlaki who indoctrinated him," the official said. "He was told, 'You are going to be the tip of the spear of the Muslim nation.' "

Somali arrested at airport with chemicals, syringe
By the Associated Press, Washington Times
A man tried to board a commercial airliner in Mogadishu last month carrying powdered chemicals, liquid and a syringe that could have caused an explosion in a case bearing chilling similarities to the terrorist plot to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner, officials told the Associated Press on Wednesday. The Somali man -- whose name has not yet been released -- was arrested by African Union peacekeeping troops before the Nov. 13 Daallo Airlines flight took off. It had been scheduled to travel from Mogadishu to the northern Somali city of Hargeisa, then to Djibouti and Dubai. A Somali police spokesman, Abdulahi Hassan Barise, said the suspect is in Somali custody. "We don't know whether he's linked with al Qaeda or other foreign organizations, but his actions were the acts of a terrorist. We caught him red-handed," Barise said.

Al Qaeda Takes Credit for Plot
By PETER SPIEGEL, JAY SOLOMON and MARGARET COKER, Wall Street Journal
Al Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen claimed responsibility for the attack on Northwest Flight 253, and U.S. officials said the claim appears valid -- the clearest indication yet that the attempted takedown wasn't just the work of a lone radical inspired by Islamist rhetoric, as some investigators initially believed. Al Qaeda claims credit for an attempted plane bombing, more aggressive help for housing again and more in the News Hub. The development came as evidence mounted that the U.S. didn't pursue potential leads that might have brought alleged Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to the attention of authorities, according to Congressional investigators and U.S. officials. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano backtracked Monday from comments she made in televised interviews over the weekend, in which she said the U.S.'s security systems had worked. President Barack Obama, in his first public comments about the incident, promised the government would do everything it can to keep travelers secure. "We will not rest until we find all who were involved and hold them accountable," Mr. Obama said in remarks broadcast on television from Hawaii, where he is on vacation. A statement attributed to the group "al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula" claimed it was retaliating for what it says was the U.S.'s role in a recent Yemeni military offensive on al Qaeda, according to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute. The statement, accompanied by a photo of the suspect, said the "high-tech device" Mr. Abdulmutallab carried had had a "technical" problem. "The claim at this point appears valid," said one U.S. counterterrorism official. However, the depth of the relationship between the terror group and Mr. Abdulmutallab is still unclear.

Explosive in Detroit terror case could have blown hole in airplane, sources say
By Carrie Johnson, Washington Post
A dangerous explosive concealed by Nigerian student Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in his underwear could have blown a hole in the side of his Detroit-bound aircraft if it had been detonated, according to two federal sources briefed on the investigation. Authorities said they are still analyzing a badly damaged syringe that Abdulmutallab allegedly employed as a detonating device on Christmas Day. But preliminary conclusions indicate that he allegedly used 80 grams of PETN -- almost twice as much of the highly explosive material as used by convicted shoe bomber Richard C. Reid. A day after Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said there was "no indication" the incident was connected to a larger plot, there were increasing signs that the failed bombing may have represented one of the most serious terrorist threats in the United States since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. President Obama interrupted his vacation in Hawaii to declare that authorities "will not rest until we find all who were involved and hold them accountable." He also said he had ordered a review of the nation's terrorist watch-list system. In a statement, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a group based in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, asserted responsibility for the attempt to destroy the Northwest Airlines jet, saying it was a response to U.S.-backed airstrikes against the group in Yemen. Meanwhile, Yemen's government confirmed that Abdulmutallab was in the country from early August to early December after obtaining a visa to study Arabic at a language institute, and said that he had previously studied at the school.

Death Toll Climbs in Attack on Pakistani Shiites
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and SALMAN MASOOD, New York Times
The death toll from a suicide bomber’s attack on a Shiite religious procession in Karachi was reported to have risen to 40 on Tuesday, as the city reeled from rioting overnight amid fears that extremist groups already waging a multifront war against the government were now trying to foment sectarian violence against the country’s minority Shiite Muslims. A suicide bomber attacked a Shiite Muslim procession in Karachi on Monday. The GEO television network, citing hospital sources, said at least 40 people had been killed and more than 100 had been injured in the attack, which struck the procession as it made its way along Muhammad Ali Jinnah Road on Monday afternoon. The attack, the third against Shiites in three days, appeared to deeply unsettle the Pakistani government, which ordered the director general of the Rangers, a paramilitary force under the control of the Interior Ministry, to take control of Karachi. The interior minister, Rehman Malik, also asked Shiite clerics to postpone religious processions , especially in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, to avoid “providing soft targets to militants,” according to the state-run news agency. Government leaders urged people not to take the law into their own hands.

Somali pirates seize two more vessels
By Reuters, Washington Post
Somali pirates seized a chemical tanker and a cargo vessel on Monday, underlining the continued risk to shipping in some of the world's busiest maritime trade routes. Somalia has been mired in chaos with no effective central government since 1991 and pirate gangs operating from coastal havens in the failed Horn of Africa nation have flourished over the past few years. The gangs have made tens of millions of dollars from seizing ships for ransom in the Gulf of Aden linking Europe to Asia and are also hunting far into the Indian Ocean to evade foreign navies sent to protect commercial shipping. On Monday, pirates seized the British-flagged chemical tanker St James Park in the Gulf of Aden and the Panama-flagged bulk cargo ship Navios Apollon, taking the number of vessels they hold to more than 10, maritime officials said. On the same day, pirates released the Singaporean-flagged container ship Kota Wajar, saying they received a $4 million ransom for the vessel seized in October way into the Indian Ocean near the Seychelles archipelago.

Bomb Hits Procession in Pakistan
By the Associated Press, New York Times
Police say a bomb blast at a major Shiite Muslim procession has killed three people and wounded several more in Pakistan's largest city of Karachi. Live television footage showed an explosion striking the procession on a main road, and ambulances rushing to and from the scene. Shiites are marking Monday the holy day of Ashura. Police officer Maqsood Ahmad said the bomb killed three people and wounded several more. Another police offcer, Raja Umer Khatab, said some in the crowd began firing shots into the air in protest. Security has been tightened across Pakistan for Ashura, which is the 10th day of the holy month of Muharram, a month of mourning often marred by bombings and fighting between Pakistan's Sunni Muslim majority and its Shiite minority.

Terrorist was listed in terror database after father alerted U.S. officials
Abdulmutallab was granted a two-year tourist visa by the U.S. Embassy in London
By Dan Eggen, Karen DeYoung and Spencer S. Hsu, Washington Post
A Nigerian man charged Saturday with attempting to blow up a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day was listed in a U.S. terrorism database last month after his father told State Department officials that he was worried about his son's radical beliefs and extremist connections, officials said. The suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was added to a catch-all terrorism-related database when his father, a Nigerian banker, reported concerns about his son's "radicalization and associations" to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a senior administration official said. Abdulmutallab was not placed on any watch list for flights into the United States, however, because there was "insufficient derogatory information available" to include him, another administration official said. Abdulmutallab was granted a two-year tourist visa by the U.S. Embassy in London in June 2008. He used the visa to travel previously to the United States at least twice, officials said.

Bomber was on U.S. watch list
Authorities have known for months that the al Qaeda-linked Nigerian had terrorist ties
By ANGELA MONTEFINISE, New York Post
US authorities have known for months that the al Qaeda-linked Nigerian who tried to blow up a passenger jet before it landed in Detroit had terrorist ties -- and his own father even alerted them to his extremist behavior, it was revealed yesterday. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, who was charged in federal court with attempting to destroy Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day, remained hospitalized with burns suffered in the failed attempt. He was read the charges at a hearing, where he appeared smiling in a medical gown and a wheelchair. Abdulmutallab was added to the 550,000 suspects on a watch list kept by the US National Counterterrorism Center in November and had been on government radar for months. Yet there wasn't enough negative information about him to put him on the no-fly list. Red-faced authorities were attempting to figure out how Abdulmutallab managed to get a visa and elude security in two countries despite the fact that British officials just last May denied him a student visa after he brazenly applied using a fake college name.

Terrorist led life of luxury in London before attack
He quickly acquired a reputation as a devoted Muslim
By Rich Schapiro, New York Daily news
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab lived a life of extraordinary privilege before he turned to terror. The son of a wealthy Nigerian banker, Abdulmutallab was educated at top schools in Africa and Britain - and dwelled in homes worth millions. The baby-faced extremist's last known address was a $4 million flat in one of London's poshest neighborhoods. Police in London scoured the swanky apartment Saturday in search of clues as to what - or who - might have led Abdulmutallab, 23, to try to blow up a packed jet over Detroit. The flat, in London's West End, is surrounded by several of the city's best-known tourist haunts, including Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square. Historic theaters, expensive hotels and exclusive retail stores are all within walking distance of Abdulmutallab's former pad. As a teen, Abdulmutallab attended the British International School in Lome, Togo, a Nigerian paper reported. There, he quickly acquired a reputation as a devoted Muslim.

Search for answers, tighter security after attack
By LARRY MARGASAK and COREY WILLIAMS, Chicago Tribune
The U.S. government tightened airline security as it searches for answers to how a 23-year-old Nigerian man eluded extensive systems intended to prevent attacks like his botched Christmas Day effort to blow up a Northwest flight from overseas. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who claimed ties to al-Qaida, was charged Saturday with trying to destroy a Detroit-bound airliner, just a month after his father warned U.S. officials of concerns about his son's religious beliefs. Airports worldwide tightened security a day after the passenger tried to detonate a device that contained a high explosive on a flight into Detroit. After that attack, passengers have had to contend with extra pat-downs before boarding, staying in their seats without blankets or pillows for the last hour of the flight and more bomb-sniffing dogs. Aides to President Barack Obama are pondering how terror watch-lists are used after the botched attack, according to officials who described the discussions Saturday on the condition of anonymity so as not to pre-empt possible official announcements.

At Least 4 Dead as Iranians Fight Police in Streets
By ROBERT F. WORTH, New York Times
Iranian police opened fire on protesters in Tehran on Sunday, killing at least four people, including a nephew of the opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi, as vast crowds of demonstrators flooded the streets of cities across Iran and fiercely fought security forces, according to witnesses and opposition Web sites. The protests, taking place on the holiday marking the death of Shiite Islam’s holiest martyr, were the bloodiest — and among the largest — since the uprisings that followed Iran’s disputed presidential election last June, with hundreds of thousands of people thronging Tehran alone, witnesses said. There were reports of hundreds of injured people and numerous arrests. In Tehran, thick crowds marched down a central avenue in mid-morning, defying official warnings of a harsh crackdown on protests as they chanted, “Death to the dictator!”

Bomber Kills Five in Kashmir
By the Associated Press, Wall Street Journal
A police official says a suicide bomber has detonated his explosives outside a Shiite Muslim gathering in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, killing five people. Police officer Tahir Qayum says 60 others were wounded in the attack Sunday in Muzaffarabad, the capital of the region. Mr. Qayum says the attacker blew himself up as police tried to search him at a checkpoint set up outside the gathering, which is part of the annual monthlong mourning of the seventh century death of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson. Mr. Qayum says two police were among the dead, and most of the wounded were Shiites attending the event. Minority Shiites in Pakistan have often been targeted by radical Sunnis during such commemorations in the Islamic holy month of Muharram.

Islamic terrorist tries to blow up airliner bound for Detroit
Nigerian arrested in failed plane attack claims links to al-Qaeda
By Michael Leahy and Spencer S. Hsu, Washington Post
A Nigerian man, claiming to be linked to al-Qaeda, tried to set off an incendiary device aboard a transatlantic airplane Friday as it descended toward Detroit's airport in what the White House called an attempted act of terrorism. The man was quickly subdued after another passenger leapt on top of him, others on the plane said, and Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam landed safely around 1 p.m. Friday. The suspect was being treated at a hospital for burns he suffered while igniting the device, the Transportation Security Administration said. The suspect is Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, a federal official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing. ABC News and NBC News reported that Abdulmutallab, 23, attends University College London, where he studies engineering. Although not on the TSA's "no-fly" list, Abdulmutallab's name appears to be included in the government's records of terrorism suspects, according to a preliminary review, authorities said.

Israelis kill 3 Fatah activists on West Bank
By the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times
Israeli soldiers today shot dead three Palestinians who the military says were involved in a roadside ambush that killed an Israeli settler earlier in the week. The operation in the West Bank city of Nablus targeted three activists of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement. Palestinian witnesses said troops, many of them masked, opened fire while storming the homes of the men. The West Bank has been relatively calm in recent months. Roadside ambushes and army raids targeting Fatah gunmen, common just a few years ago, are now rare. This week's sudden spike in violence could undercut the security coordination forged by Abbas and Israel's military as they try to clamp down on a shared foe, the Islamic militant group Hamas. The three men killed today were identified as members of Fatah's violent Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a group that carried out many shootings during the second Palestinian uprising, which erupted in 2000. The deputy governor of Nablus, Anan Attireh, said one of the men -- Anan Subeh -- had been accepted in Israel's amnesty program for Fatah gunmen, while two others, Ghassan Abu Sharah and Raed Suragji, were still on Israel's wanted list.

Twin Bombings Kill 10 South of Baghdad
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS, New York Times
Two bombs exploded within minutes of each other near a bus station south of Baghdad on Thursday, killing 10 people and wounding 110 others, according to the Iraqi authorities, adding to the rise in violence around the nation this month. The bombings occurred in Hilla, the capital of Babil Province, about 65 miles from Baghdad. The first bomb had been attached to a minibus near the entrance of Hilla’s main bus terminal and exploded about 2 p.m., said Fadhil Radad al-Sultani, the chief of the provincial police. As officers rushed to the scene, a car bomb was detonated just outside the bus station, the police said. The bus terminal is in one of the busiest sections of Hilla, near a public market and government offices. About the same time as the explosions, Neima al-Bakri, a member of the Babil provincial council, was fatally shot by a police officer in Hilla at a checkpoint about a mile from the bus station, the police said.

Bombings in Iraq Kill 13 Ahead of Shiite Rite
By the Associated Press, New York Times
Staggered explosions apparently targeting Shiite Muslim pilgrims killed at least 13 people and injured 74 on Thursday, authorities said, raising fears of further sectarian attacks at the approach of Shiite Islam's most solemn holiday. The deaths come three days before the climax of Ashoura. The holiday's observers have frequently been attacked in the past. Police Maj. Muthana Khalid said a first bomb exploded around 2 p.m. Thursday in Hillah, the capital of Babil province, about 60 miles (95 kilometers) south of Baghdad. He said the second explosion came as police rushed to the scene 15 minutes later. The bombs apparently targeted Shiite pilgrims observing Ashoura who had gathered near a bus station in downtown Hillah. A wrecked car lay at the attack site, and a pair of blood-covered slippers could be seen near damaged storefronts.

Iran warns that it will deal 'fiercely' with protesters
By Thomas Erdbrink, Washington Post
Iran's national police commander said demonstrators will face a fierce crackdown if their "illegal" activities continue, the semi-official Fars news agency reported Wednesday, following several days of anti-government protests and officials calling for the arrest of the political leaders of the opposition. Eyewitnesses reported protests and clashes Wednesday in Qom, Isfahan and Najafabad, where supporters of dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who died Sunday, battled police and plainclothes paramilitary forces. "Sometimes you have to approach people with physical action, for others non-physical action is necessary," Hojjatoleslam Mojtaba Zolnour said while meeting with members of the paramilitary Basij organization Tuesday night in Bushehr. "If we throw all three heads of the green sedition into prison, nothing will happen at all," Zolnour said, warning the Basij forces not to act independently toward the two leaders, whose movement uses the color green. "But if we take any physical action against them, it is possible that the flames of these issues will spread." State authorities have long been contemplating the arrest of the opposition leaders, but some officials have publicly said they fear such a move would only cause more protests. The funeral Sunday for Montazeri, which attracted tens of thousands and possibly more anti-government demonstrators, again showed the opposition is able to rally large groups of people. More anti-government protests are expected in the coming days. The protests and clashes in the provincial towns of Isfahan, Qom, and Najafabad have been the fiercest outside of Tehran since the unrest that followed Ahmadinejad's disputed election victory in June.

Suicide bomber in Pakistan kills 3 in attack on Peshawar Press Club
By the Associated Press, New York Daily News
A suicide bomber detonated his explosives outside a press club in the northwestern city of Peshawar on Tuesday, leaving three people dead in an attack that comes at a time of growing violence and political turmoil in Pakistan. A policeman tried to search the attacker as he approached the press club's gate, but the man resisted and was able to trigger his explosives, killing the officer and an accountant who worked for the organization, said Peshawar's police chief, Liaquat Ali Khan. A woman who was at the site of the attack died of a heart attack caused by the shock of the bombing, said Sahib Gul, a doctor at a hospital in Peshawar where the three bodies were brought. Adil Khan, a local photographer who was inside the press club when the attack occurred, said he heard the police officer at the gate, Muhammad Riaz, trying to force the bomber to submit to a search. "Suddenly a big explosion occurred and smoke made me unable to see immediately what happened," said Khan. "After a while, I saw Riaz and accountant Mian Iqbal lying dead in a pool of blood and there were some scattered body parts."

Long Firefight With Militants Immobilizes Afghan City
By ALISSA J. RUBIN, New York Times
A provincial government official said that Afghan security forces and American troops killed five heavily armed men who attacked a police headquarters in the center of Gardez, the capital of the southeastern province of Paktia Province. The firefight immobilized the city for about four hours, said the official, Rahullah Samon, a spokesman for the governor’s office. But he said that only two of the attacker’s bodies had been recovered, raising the possibility that several had in fact escaped. Four police officers and three civilians were wounded, Mr. Samon said. A Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, said that five suicide bombers entered the Gardez police headquarters around 9 a.m. and attacked a class of police recruits while foreign mentors were taking daily attendance.

Radical Islam meets a buffer in West Africa
Signs of conservative Islam, such as schoolgirls wearing burqas, are common
By Karin Brulliard, Washington Post
The Saharan sands stretching north from this fabled outpost have long been a trade route and cultural crossroads, and this past year has brought worrying signs that the desert might also help bring a violent brand of Islam to moderate parts of West Africa. An increase in attacks has included the killing of an American teacher and a suicide bombing in Mauritania, the kidnapping of two Canadian diplomats in Niger, and the executions of a British tourist and a Malian colonel in Mali. All were attributed to an al-Qaeda branch made up mostly of Algerians that has ranged southward to hit in urban Mauritania and establish a rear base in the Malian desert. Mali remains proudly moderate, and most people here dismiss extremist ideology as too foreign and brutal to be accepted. But Mali in some sense has become a test case as its government has accepted tens of millions of dollars in American aid intended to stave off what U.S. officials say could be a growing threat of radicalism in parts of Africa where Muslims make up the majority.

Israel’s deadly mistakes
Few Israeli policies have been as counterproductive or morally questionable as the lopsided prisoner exchanges
By Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe
In 1983, Israeli authorities arrested Ahmed Yassin, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza. He was convicted of unlawfully stockpiling weapons and establishing paramilitary jihadist organizations, and sentenced to 13 years in prison. Just two years later, however, he was set free in the now-infamous “Jibril deal’’ - the release of 1,150 security prisoners held by Israel in exchange for three Israeli soldiers held by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist group headed by Ahmed Jibril. Yassin soon launched Hamas, a murderous organization committed to Israel’s liquidation. Over the years, Hamas terrorists have killed hundreds of Israelis, and maimed or wounded thousands more. Few Israeli policies have been as counterproductive or morally questionable as the lopsided prisoner exchanges it has entered into with terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. Time and again, Israel has paid for the freedom of a few POWs - sometimes just the remains of a few POWs - by releasing hundreds of violent detainees, many of them complicit in the deaths of civilians. And time and again, the newly freed terrorists have picked up where they left off.

Deadly Bomb Blast Near Mosque in Pakistan
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, New York Times
A suicide car bomber detonated his explosives near a mosque inside a police compound in northwestern Pakistan on Friday, killing 10 people in the latest attack by suspected Taliban militants waging war against the government. It was the third such strike in North Waziristan in the past 24 hours. Most of the 10 people killed in the attack in the Lower Dir region were police leaving the mosque after Friday prayers, said the area's police chief, Feroze Khan. The blast wounded another 28 people, also mostly police, said a local hospital official, Ghulam Mohammed.

Pakistan Reported to Be Harassing U.S. Diplomats
By JANE PERLEZ and ERIC SCHMITT, New York Times
Parts of the Pakistani military and intelligence services are mounting what American officials here describe as a campaign to harass American diplomats, fraying relations at a critical moment when the Obama administration is demanding more help to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The campaign includes the refusal to extend or approve visas for more than 100 American officials and the frequent searches of American diplomatic vehicles in major cities, said an American official briefed on the cases. The problems affected military attachés, C.I.A. officers, development experts, junior level diplomats and others, a senior American diplomat said. As a result, some American aid programs to Pakistan, which President Obama has called a critical ally, are “grinding to a halt,” the diplomat said.

Homeland Security rescinds Nation of Islam intelligence analysis
By Sebastian Rotella, Los Angeles Times
The Department of Homeland Security issued but recalled a 2007 intelligence analysis about the Nation of Islam after deciding the document dealing with the black Muslim group broke rules on intelligence activity in the United States, officials said Wednesday. The U.S. government long has been interested in leaders of the religious movement that melds black nationalism with the Islamic faith, said Zaheer Ali, a Columbia University researcher who focuses on the Nation of Islam. He said Wednesday's revelation recalled FBI probes in the 1960s and '70s. "As a historian, it's not surprising that the federal agencies under a new name -- in this case Homeland Security -- would be so interested," Ali said. Though no investigation has produced evidence suggesting the Nation of Islam poses a threat, such concerns linger, he said. "In the minds of many, Islam poses a threat. Black people pose a threat. And the combination of black people and Islam pose a threat in the imagination of people," Ali said. "I don't think our intelligence community is immune to these kinds of perceptions."

Iran Test Fires Long-Range Missile
By the Associated Press, Wall Street Journal
Iran said Wednesday it successfully test-fired an upgraded version of its longest-range missile, which it said is now faster and harder to shoot down. The test of the missile -- which is capable of hitting Israel and parts of Europe -- is Iran's latest show of military strength at a time when it is locked in a standoff with the West over its nuclear program. Tehran has been intent on demonstrating it can retaliate against any military strike on its nuclear facilities by the U.S. or Israel. Wednesday's test was for the latest version of Iran's most advanced missile, the Sajjil-2, with a range of about 1,200 miles. That range places Israel, Iran's sworn enemy, well within reach, as well as U.S. bases in the Gulf region and parts of southeastern Europe. The two-stage Sajjil-2 is powered entirely by solid fuel while the older, long-range Shahab-3 missile uses a combination of solid and liquid fuel in its most advanced form. State television broke the news in a one-sentence report accompanied by a brief clip of the test, showing the missile rising from the launch pad in a cloud of smoke.

Iranian Dealings Lead to a Fine for Credit Suisse
By CLAUDIO GATTI and JOHN ELIGON, New York Times
Credit Suisse is expected to pay a fine of $536 million to settle accusations by the United States government and New York State authorities that it violated sanctions by helping Iran and other countries secretly funnel hundreds of millions of dollars through American banks, people involved in the negotiations said Tuesday. Investigators found that the bank, the second-largest in Switzerland, removed information from American-bound wire transfers that would have signaled that the money originated in Iranian banks, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the case. Two of the organizations that Credit Suisse facilitated transactions for, the official said, were the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and the Aerospace Industries Organization, both of which are designated as proliferators of weapons of mass destruction by the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control. Both are barred from doing business with the United States.

Iranian bombshell
Chilling report documents work on nuke trigger
By the New York Daily News
Just when you thought Iran couldn't get any scarier, get a load of this stunning discovery. According to The Times of London, Iran is working on a neutron initiator - the part of a nuclear bomb that triggers an explosion. This technology has no civilian use and no military use aside from detonating a nuclear weapon. The revelation was gleaned from what appear to be Iranian intelligence documents obtained by the newspaper, dated early 2007. We must caution: It's always possible that such documents could prove inauthentic. But all who have scrutinized the papers so far believe them to be legitimate. The evidence has since been seen by several Western intelligence agencies and has been turned over to the UN's nuclear watchdog. Iran will deny, distract and do whatever possible to change the subject. Because that's how Iran's leaders conduct business.

Programmed to kill
By Richard Cohen, Washington Post
At the World Economic Forum some years ago, I attended a panel discussion on robots. One of the experts -- everyone's an expert at Davos -- predicted that robots would take over the world. Another said this was nonsense. A robot couldn't even scratch its own back. Now we see the second expert was wrong. Robots killed more than 160 people in Mumbai. It's hard not to call the 10 young men who did the killing (nine of them died) anything other than robots. They did not know the people they killed. They did not care about the people they killed. They took orders over the phone from a controller in Pakistan. When he told them to kill, they killed. When he told them to die, they died. "Be brave, brother. Don't panic," the controller said to one gunman, called Brother Fahadullah. "For your mission to end successfully, you must be killed. God is waiting for you in heaven." Fahadullah died soon afterward.

Somalia stoning horror
By CATHY BURKE, New York Post
In a scene straight out of the Dark Ages, a Somali man accused of adultery was stoned to death by Islamic thugs while horrified villagers were forced to watch. Mohamed Abukar Ibrahim, 48, was buried in a hole up to his chest and then pelted with rocks by fighters from the rebel group Hizbul Islam on Saturday in Afgoye, about 20 miles from the capital, Mogadishu. A rebel judge announced that Ibrahim, along with a man who had been accused of murder, had both confessed to their crimes. The alleged murderer got a more merciful punishment -- he was shot to death. "The lady who had been with the second man was only given 100 lashes because she said she had never married." The executions marked the first time that Hizbul Islam guerrillas had dealt out the type of punishments usually associated with the more hard-line al Shabaab rebel group in Somalia. The United States says al Shabaab is al Qaeda's proxy in the failed African state.

Al-Qaida No. 2 blasts Obama, honors 9/11 suspect
By SALAH NASRAWI, San Francisco Chronicle
Al-Qaida's deputy leader said Barack Obama has deceived Arabs about his efforts to restart Mideast peace talks, and claimed in a message posted Monday that the American president has done nothing for the region so far. Ayman Al-Zawahri also vowed the terror network will not forget militants held in American prisons — including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Qaida's mastermind of the September 11 bombings. Mohammed and four others, held for years at the military base in Guantanamo Bay, are due to stand trial on charges they plotted the September 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. Last month's announcement of the trial, which will be held just blocks from where the World Trade Center towers were destroyed, has sparked concerns about the security risks involved.

31 Inmates Freed as Militants Attack Philippine Jail
By the Associated Press, New York Times
Scores of suspected Islamic militants burst through a concrete wall then barged into a jail in the volatile southern Philippines on Sunday, freeing 31 inmates in a nighttime attack that sparked a gunbattle in which two people were killed. Vice Governor Al Rasheed Sakalahul of Basilan island said 70 heavily armed men cut through padlocks with boltcutters after using a sledgehammer to destroy the wall at the provincial jail in Isabela city to free several detained Muslim guerrillas. Other inmates also dashed to freedom, he said. The daring assault sparked a brief clash that killed one attacker and a jail guard. The attackers and prisoners fled in several vehicles toward Basilan's jungle-covered mountainous heartland, Sakalahul said.

Al Qaeda looking to Yemen as next base
Officials say move already underway
By Bryan Bender, Boston Globe
As the United States steps up the hunt for Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, some of the terrorist network’s veteran operatives are leaving the region and flocking to Yemen, where an escalating civil war is turning the nearly lawless Arab nation into an attractive alternative as a base of operations, according to US and foreign government officials. Citing intelligence reports and intercepted communications, officials said they believe dozens of battle-hardened followers of Osama bin Laden have recently traveled to Saudi Arabia’s poor southern neighbor, joining other Al Qaeda sympathizers there who are attempting to make the remote mountainous province of Ma’rib, west of the capital of Sana, a new sanctuary. A senior defense official said US military and intelligence officials, who have armed drones and special operations forces based in nearby Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, are devising new ways to combat the threat, but declined to provide details. “There is, indeed, concern about the establishment of Al Qaeda elements in Yemen,’’ said the official, who is directly involved in counterterrorism operations in the Middle East.

N.Va. men allegedly tried to join jihadists
By Jerry Markon and Shaiq Hussain, Washington Post
Five men from Northern Virginia who were arrested Tuesday in Pakistan traveled abroad hoping to work with jihadist groups and battle U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Pakistani officials said Thursday. The men contacted extremist organizations, including two with links to al-Qaeda, and proudly told their Pakistani interrogators, "We are here for jihad," said Usman Anwar, the local Pakistani police chief whose officers interrogated the men, all Muslims from the Alexandria area. Anwar said police recovered jihadist literature, laptop computers and maps of parts of Pakistan when the men were arrested near Lahore. The maps included areas where the Taliban train. The men first made contact with the two extremist organizations by e-mail in August, officials said, but the groups apparently rejected their overtures because they couldn't find people to vouch for them.

Five U.S. Muslims detained in Pakistan tried to join Taliban, officials say
By the Associated Press, New York Daily News
Five young American Muslims detained in Pakistan wanted to join militants in the country's Taliban-ruled tribal region, battle U.S. troops in neighboring Afghanistan and die as martyrs, police officials said Thursday. The men initially tried to contact jihadist groups in Pakistan via YouTube and other Web sites, then traveled to Pakistan to attempt personal meetings, said the police chief in this eastern Pakistani city, Usman Anwar. One of their fathers was also detained when police raided two locations this week in Sargodha, a city on the main road to the Afghan border region that is home to a major air force base and is known as a hotbed of militant activity.

Gunmen abduct 75 in Philippine village raid
Many of those kidnapped are children
By Al Jacinto and John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times
Gunmen raided a remote village before dawn today and abducted at least 75 people -- most of them children -- in a restive southern province, a Philippine army spokesman said. The incident was the second recent mass abduction in the Philippines. Last month, 57 people, including 30 journalists, traveling in an election convoy were massacred in southern Maguindanao province. The mass killings, believed to involve battling warlords, led to the imposition of martial law in the province. Today, police and army forces converged on the town of Prosperidad, in the southern province of Agusan del Sur, after reports of attackers swarming the village, said Maj. Michelle Anayron, a spokesman for the 4th Infantry Division. At least 15 armed mountain tribesmen stormed the village and rounded up two forest rangers, teachers and several parents who were present during the 6 a.m. attack, authorities said. Police said the attackers initially abducted 125 people, but 50 hostages were able to escape.

Coordinated Bombings Kill at Least 101 in Baghdad
By STEVEN LEE MYERS, New York Times
In what appeared to be a coordinated assault, a series of car bombings across Baghdad on Tuesday killed at least 101 people and wounded scores more, according to preliminary accounts by police and hospital officials. Smoke from the bombings billows in the Baghdad sky on Tuesday. Five bombs, including at least one suicide attack, struck near a university, a court, a mosque a market and in a neighborhood near the Interior Ministry. The blasts began shortly after 10 A.M. and reverberated through the city for the next 50 minutes, sending enormous plumes of black smoke into the air. American helicopters, drones and airplanes circled the city in the immediate aftermath, while sporadic gunfire could be heard at one of the sites, near the main courthouse for western Baghdad and Zawra Park, which includes the city’s zoo and amusement areas.

Coordinated car bombings at government facilities in Iraq kill scores
By the Associated Press, New York Daily News
A series of coordinated attacks struck Baghdad Tuesday, including three car bombs that blew up near government sites. At least 94 were killed and 120 wounded in the worst wave of violence in the capital in more than a month, authorities said. A total of four attacks, which also included a suicide car bomb on a police patrol, showed the ability of insurgents to strike high-profile targets in the heart of Baghdad. It was another embarrassment to Iraqi forces in their expanding role as front-line security as U.S. forces plan their withdrawal. The blasts came as Iraqi officials prepared to announced the date for next year's parliamentary elections — a move the security forces worry could bring an escalation in attacks seeking to discredit the pro-Western government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The core of the attacks hit central Baghdad with three bomb-rigged cars exploding in the span of a few minutes. The targets were the latest assaults directed at Iraqi authorities: the Labor Ministry building, a court complex near the Iraqi-protected Green Zone and the new site of the Finance Ministry after its previous building was destroyed in major attacks in August.

Local man cited in India attack
Prosecutors say terror suspect scoped out targeted Mumbai sites months before '08 raid
By Jeff Coen and Josh Meyer, Chicago Tribune
Months before a team of terrorists killed 170 people in coordinated attacks in Mumbai, a Chicago man was conducting surveillance of the hotels and other locations that would come under assault, prosecutors here said Monday. David Coleman Headley, a shadowy figure who changed his name from Daood Gilani in 2006 in an effort to ease his travel, was charged by federal authorities with conducting key surveillance that helped plan the November 2008 attacks in the Indian city. Headley, a Pakistani American, allegedly made a number of trips over two years to visit locations including the Taj Mahal Hotel, which was stormed by terrorist gunmen. The criminal complaint said Headley concealed his missions by purporting to represent a business owned by another Chicagoan. He allegedly took his pictures and videotapes to Pakistan, where he met with leaders of the terrorist organization blamed for the Mumbai attacks, Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Suicide bombers kill 40 at Pakistan mosque
Taliban blamed for bombings that have killed hundreds of people
By Augustine Anthony, Washington Post
Three suicide bombers fired on worshipers then blew themselves up at a mosque near Pakistan's military headquarters after Friday prayers, killing 40 people, including many army officials, police said. The mosque is frequented by military officials in the town of Rawalpindi, home to Pakistan's military establishment and only a 30-minute drive from the capital Islamabad. The brazen attack in what should be one of the most secure areas of Pakistan was the latest challenge by militants against the writ of the state. A local television station said people were executed in cold blood. Pakistan is fighting Taliban fighters blamed for bombings that have killed hundreds of people since an offensive was launched on their stronghold South Waziristan in October. The nuclear-armed country faces mounting U.S. pressure to root out Islamist militants operating along forbidding border areas to help in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. "They were three. They first opened fire and then blew themselves up," Rao Iqbal, Rawalpindi police chief, told Reuters. Witnesses said earlier that attackers hurled grenades then opened fire on the mosque. A policeman said the militants arrived in a grey Toyota car. The cleric had just finished his sermon with the phrase "Allahu akbar" (God is greatest) when an explosion shook worshippers in the Parade Lane mosque.

Mosque Hit by Attackers; 30 Killed, 40 Wounded
Attackers threw grenades into the women’s section of the mosque
By SALMAN MASOOD, New York Times
Attackers lobbed grenades and opened fire at worshippers, mostly serving retired military officials, at a mosque in the garrison city of Rawalpindi during Friday prayers. At least 30 people were reported to have been killed and more than 40 wounded, according to the interior minister, Rehman Malik. A witness, Nasir Ali, said the attackers also threw grenades into the women’s section of the mosque. “I could only hear the shouting of the people. We couldn’t help each other at all,” Mr. Ali told Dawn television, describing how he hid from the attackers. “It was a hopeless situation. About 30 or 35 people were lying dead in front of me.” Rescue officials said the death toll could be around 40, with 45 wounded in an attack that sent shock waves across a land battered by bombings, even as its army seeks to move against militant hideouts in the lawless tribal region along the border with Afghanistan.

Suicide Bombing Kills Somali Ministers, Students
At Least 22 Die in Attack Showing al Qaeda's Growing Influence
By ABDINASIR MOHAMED and SARAH CHILDRESS, Wall street Journal
A suicide blast at a university graduation in Mogadishu killed several Somali government ministers and an estimated 19 students, a sign of al Qaeda's efforts to establish the troubled east African country as a base from which to attack Western targets. The bombing -- at an event representing the country's efforts to rebuild -- was a blow to the government of President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, whom the U.S. has hailed as the best hope for stability in Somalia after 15 years of chaos. The chief suspect in the attack was al Shabaab, a U.S.-designated terrorist group that U.S. and Somali officials say has been receiving training from al Qaeda. A recent influx of foreign fighters with al Qaeda connections has intensified fears of Somalia becoming a haven for global terrorism. The largely lawless country is already a haven for pirates, who have increased attacks on ships in a widening area off the East African coast.

Islamist blast Kills 3 Somali Cabinet Ministers
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and MOHAMED IBRAHIM, New York Times
In a devastating blow to Somalia’s fragile transitional government, a suicide bomber disguised as a veiled woman struck at a graduation ceremony on Thursday, killing at least 10 people, including 3 government ministers, Somali officials said. The bomber struck in a part of Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, that was thought be relatively safe, though many Somalis fear hard-line insurgents have infiltrated the government’s security forces. According to witnesses and government officials, dozens of medical students gathered on Thursday morning for a graduation ceremony at the Shamo Hotel, which was often where the few Westerners who visit Mogadishu would stay. About five high-ranking government officials, including the ministers of health and higher education and another cabinet member, were attending the ceremony, and witnesses said three ministers were killed along with several Somali journalists and at least two surgeons in a country desperately short of doctors. The attack, said Mohammed Aden, a Somali diplomat in Nairobi, “is very, very serious, really.” Somalia is embroiled in civil war between a weak but internationally-backed transitional government and an extremist Islamist insurgency with ties to Al Qaeda. The country has been lawless and violent since 1991, when the central government collapsed.

Iranian Crackdown Goes Global
By FARNAZ FASSIHI, Wall Street Journal
His first impulse was to dismiss the ominous email as a prank, says a young Iranian-American named Koosha. It warned the 29-year-old engineering student that his relatives in Tehran would be harmed if he didn't stop criticizing Iran on Facebook.
Green in Berlin Rapper Jay-Z and U2 brightened Berlin's Brandenburg Gate with green lighting during a performance of "Sunday, Bloody Sunday," a U2 song inspired by a 1972 altercation between British troops and protesters in Northern Ireland. During the performance, Jay-Z rapped in support of the Iranian protesters. Two days later, his mom called. Security agents had arrested his father in his home in Tehran and threatened him by saying his son could no longer safely return to Iran. "When they arrested my father, I realized the email was no joke," said Koosha, who asked that his full name not be used. Tehran's leadership faces its biggest crisis since it first came to power in 1979, as Iranians at home and abroad attack its legitimacy in the wake of June's allegedly rigged presidential vote. An opposition effort, the "Green Movement," is gaining a global following of regular Iranians who say they never previously considered themselves activists. The regime has been cracking down hard at home. And now, a Wall Street Journal investigation shows, it is extending that crackdown to Iranians abroad as well.

Suicide Bomber Kills Naval Official in Pakistan
By SALMAN MASOOD, New York Times
A suicide bomber on foot detonated his explosives while trying to enter the headquarters of the Pakistan Navy in Islamabad Wednesday, killing one naval official and injuring two, officials said. “The bomber was a very young boy, sixteen to seventeen years of age,” said Fazeel Asghar, the chief commissioner of Islamabad. The bomber got out of a car and tried to enter the headquarters through one of the main gates , officials and witnesses said. “Three officials of Pakistan Navy stopped him and asked to remove his coat. While removing his coat, the bomb detonated. As a result, one official was martyred while two others were wounded. They have been taken to a naval hospital”, Mr. Asghar said. The heavily barricaded headquarters is on a busy intersection known as Zafar Chowk. Haseeb Asif, 22, a witness, said he was waiting at a traffic signal when he saw the bomber getting out of a car. “The driver of the car that brought the bomber got nervous and drove his car in the wrong direction and hit my car, badly damaging it,” Mr. Asif said. The attack caused panic in nearby commercial and residential neighborhoods.

Swiss Ban on Minaret Building Meets Widespread Criticism
Ministers were forced to admit they had failed to quell popular anxieties about the impact of “creeping Islamization”
By NICK CUMMING-BRUCE, New York Times
Switzerland’s political leaders faced a chorus of criticism at home and abroad on Monday over a ban on the construction of minarets that passed overwhelmingly by referendum on Sunday. The ban has propelled the country to the forefront of a European debate on how far countries should go to assimilate Muslim immigrants and Islamic culture. Government ministers trying to contain the fallout voiced shock and disappointment with the result, which the Swiss establishment newspaper Le Temps called a “brutal sign of hostility” to Muslims that was “inspired by fear, fantasy and ignorance.” The country’s justice minister, Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, said that the vote was not a rejection of the Muslim community, religion or culture, but that it reflected fears among the population. With support for the ban from 57.5 percent of voters, however, ministers were forced to admit they had failed to quell popular anxieties about the impact of what right-wing parties have portrayed as “creeping Islamization.” Ms. Widmer-Schlumpf acknowledged that the vote was “undeniably a reflection of the fears and uncertainties that exist among the population — concerns that Islamic fundamentalist ideas could lead to the establishment of parallel societies.”

Iranian official says decision to expand nuclear program is response to IAEA rebuke
10 uranium-enrichment sites announced after international rebuke
By Thomas Erdbrink, Washington Post
A top Iranian nuclear official said Monday that the country's decision to build 10 more uranium-enrichment sites is a direct response to last week's censure by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The facilities will be built inside mountains, the official added, to secure them from military attack. "We had no intention of building many facilities like the Natanz site," Ali Akbar Salehi told state radio, referring to an enrichment plant that was launched in the 1990s but is still not fully operational. "But apparently the West doesn't want to understand Iran's peaceful message." The head of Iran's parliament, former nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, accused Western nations of "haggling," "lying" and "cheating" during talks over Iran's nuclear program. Larijani also questioned the usefulness of the IAEA, the U.N. international watchdog agency, and the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which calls for curbing the spread of nuclear weapons but encourages member countries to share peaceful nuclear technology.

Swiss Ban Building of Minarets on Mosques
Vote displayed a widespread anxiety about Islam
By NICK CUMMING-BRUCE and STEVEN ERLANGER, New York Times
In a vote that displayed a widespread anxiety about Islam, the Swiss on Sunday overwhelmingly imposed a national ban on the construction of minarets, the prayer towers of mosques, a referendum opposed by the government. The referendum passed with a clear majority of 57.5 percent of the voters and in 22 of Switzerland’s 26 cantons. Because the ban gained a majority of votes and passed in a majority of the cantons, it will be added to the Constitution. The Swiss Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but the rightist Swiss People’s Party, or S.V.P., and a small religious party had proposed inserting a single sentence banning the construction of minarets, leading to the referendum. Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, the justice minister, said the result “reflects fears among the population of Islamic fundamentalist tendencies.” The Swiss vote reflected a growing anxiety about Islam, especially its more fundamentalist forms, in many countries of Western Europe. France, for example, has been talking about banning the full Islamic veil as a way to stop the influence of the more fundamentalist Salafist forms of Islam, popular among some of the young and also converts. In a recent televised debate, Ulrich Schlüer, a member of Parliament said minarets were a symbol of “the political will to take power” and establish Shariah, or religious law.

Traumatized Russians View Their Dead After Luxury Train Bombing
Authorities focusing on Muslim extremists
By ELLEN BARRY and CLIFFORD J. LEVY, New York Times
All day on Sunday, families from Moscow and St. Petersburg arrived at the salmon-colored morgue here where their dead had been laid out. They clutched one another’s hands on the way in, and on the way out they looked different, whether from relief or dread, it was not always clear. Valentina G. Dybina went to identify her 41-year-old cousin, one of 25 people killed in the bombing of a luxury train on Friday night, but she was so flustered by the bodies and body fragments shown to her that she walked out, planning to return later in the day when the number of corpses would be smaller. As he left the building, Renat Urusov, 24, said his brother-in-law’s body was intact — but somehow, after the violence of the train wreck, his face was gone. “He took the train because he was afraid of flying,” said Mr. Urusov, who had driven some 500 miles trying to locate his brother-in-law in rural hospitals. “The man who was sitting next to him stood up and walked away on his own.” A day after the authorities determined that the crash was caused by a homemade bomb on the tracks, relatives had identified the bodies of nearly all the victims at the morgue in Tver, a regional capital midway between Moscow and the crash site. Across the country on Sunday, in churches, sports stadiums and other public places, Russians prayed and held moments of silence for the victims. There were reports of people canceling travel plans over fears of more attacks, but in a sermon in Moscow, Patriarch Kirill I, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, urged the public not to be intimidated by terrorists. “Russia is a peaceful country,” he said, “but when the hand of the enemy is raised up against our way of life, we will ably protect our fellow citizens.”

A Defiant Iran Vows to Build Nuclear Plants
By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM F. BROAD, New York Times
Iran angrily refused Sunday to comply with a demand by the United Nations nuclear agency to cease work on a once-secret nuclear fuel enrichment plant, and escalated the confrontation by declaring it would construct 10 more such plants. The response to the demand came as Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said his cabinet would also order a study of what it would take for Iran to further enrich its existing stockpile of nuclear fuel. On Monday, Russia, a co-sponsor of the nuclear agency’s resolution, said it was “seriously concerned by the latest statements from the Iranian leadership,” according to news reports. France, which also supported the resolution by the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna last week, said Iran should be given a “last chance” to discuss the future of its nuclear program, Reuters reported. But, referring to the agency by its initials, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said Monday, “The fact that Iran persists in ignoring the demands of a big independent agency like the I.A.E.A., that’s very dangerous.” It is unclear how long it would take Iran to enrich the fuel to the levels needed for the medical reactor, or whether it has the technology to fabricate that fuel into a form that could be put into the reactor. But the declaration appeared intended to convince the West that Iran was prepared to move closer to bomb-grade quality. The White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, said of Iran’s declaration: “If true, this would be yet another serious violation of Iran’s clear obligations under multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions, and another example of Iran choosing to isolate itself.”

Saddam Hussein is alive and kicking - on TV!
Mysterious 'Saddam Channel' hits Iraqi television
By the Associated Press, New York Daily News
Turning on their TVs during the long holiday weekend, Iraqis were greeted by a familiar if unexpected face from their brutal past: Saddam Hussein. The late Iraqi dictator is lauded on a mysterious satellite channel that began broadcasting on the Islamic calendar's anniversary of his 2006 execution. No one seems to know who is bankrolling the so-called Saddam Channel, although the Iraqi government suspects it's Baathists whose political party Saddam once led. The Associated Press tracked down a man in Damascus, Syria named Mohammed Jarboua, who claimed to be its chairman. The Saddam channel, he said, "didn't receive a penny from the Baathists" and is for Iraqis and other Arabs who "long for his rule." Jarboua has clearly made considerable efforts to hide where it's aired from and refuses to say who is funding it besides "people who love us." Iraqis surprised to find Saddam on their TVs responded with the kind of divided emotions that marked his reign. "Iraqis don't need such a satellite channel because it has hostile intentions," said Hassan Subhi, a 28-year-old Shiite who owns an Internet cafe in eastern Baghdad. Others said they felt a nostalgic sorrow at the sight of their late leader, a Sunni Arab. "All my family felt sad," said Samar Majid, a Sunni high school teacher in western Baghdad, mentioning images shown from Saddam's execution, and pictures of his two sons and grandson.

Iran Earmarks $20 Million to Support Militants
By the Associated Press, Wall Street Journal
Iran's parliament passed a law on Sunday earmarking $20 million to support militant groups opposing the West and investigate alleged U.S. and British plots against the Islamic Republic. The legislation is widely seen as a response to Western criticism of Iran's violent crackdown against protesters following the disputed June presidential election. Lawmakers started debating the outline of the bill in August when Iran's hardline leaders were fending off allegations that security forces had tortured opposition activists detained during the demonstrations. The text of the legislation says the money is to "support progressive currents that resist illegal activities by the governments of the U.S. and Britain." Iranian officials often use such terms to describe militant groups. It wasn't immediately clear which groups would receive funding from Iran, but Tehran already backs the Islamic militants Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The bill also taps funds to "confront plots and unjust restrictions" by Washington and London against Tehran and to disclose "human rights abuses by the two countries."

Bomb Causes Derailment of Russian Train, Killing 25
Muslim separatists from Chechnya in the North Caucasus region made passenger trains and subways a target
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY and ELLEN BARRY, New York Times
A luxury express train carrying hundreds of passengers from Moscow to St. Petersburg derailed on Friday night after a bomb detonated on the tracks in a rural area, killing more than 25 people and injuring more than 100 others, officials said. The force of the crash crumpled parts of the train, propelling several of its 14 cars well off the rails, trapping passengers in smashed compartments and scattering luggage into the nearby woods. People on the train, called the Nevsky Express, perhaps the most illustrious in Russia, reported a scene of panic and devastation. The investigative wing of the prosecutor general’s office said on Saturday that it had discovered remnants of a bomb at the site that left a crater five feet deep. Vladimir Yakunin, head of the Russian railway system, said, “The basic version that it is being investigated by the lead investigators is that it was an unknown device, by unknown persons. Simply put, a terrorist act.” The explosion was the worst terrorist attack in Russia in years, outside the volatile North Caucasus region.

Afghan governor survives assassination attempt
The province is considered a key battleground as the Obama administration prepares to announce the deployment of more troops
By Laura King, Los Angeles Times
The governor of the violent southern province of Kandahar escaped an assassination attempt today, even as President Hamid Karzai renewed his calls to insurgents to lay down their weapons. A remote-controlled roadside bomb exploded beneath a convoy carrying the governor, Turyalai Wesa, as he was on his way to prayers on the first day of Eid al-Adha, the holiest Muslim holiday of the year. Wesa was unharmed, but a policeman helping guard him was injured, the governor's office said. Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city and the hub of the country's south, is considered a key battleground as the Obama administration prepares to announce the deployment of tens of thousands more American troops.

Soul-Searching in Turkey After a Gay Man Is Killed
Dozens of neighbors watched the killing from their windows, but refused to come forward
By DAN BILEFSKY, New York Times
For Ahmet Yildiz, a stocky and affable 26-year-old, the choice to live openly as a gay man proved deadly. Prosecutors say his own father hunted him down, traveling more than 600 miles from his hometown to shoot his son in an old neighborhood of Istanbul. Mr. Yildiz was killed 16 months ago, the victim of what sociologists say is the first gay honor killing in Turkey to surface publicly. He was shot five times as he left his apartment to buy ice cream. A witness said dozens of neighbors watched the killing from their windows, but refused to come forward. His body remained unclaimed by his family, a grievous fate under Muslim custom. His father, Yahya Yildiz, whose trial in absentia began in September, is on the run and believed to be hiding in northern Iraq.

Toll Rising in Philippines Massacre
The southern Philippines has been plagued for years by Islamists
By CARLOS H. CONDE, New York Times
The death toll in Monday’s election violence rose to 57 on Wednesday, the Philippine authorities said, as 11 more bodies were recovered. The regional police commander in Maguindanao Province, Josefino Cataluna, said the bodies were dug out from a shallow pit near a grassy hilltop where police officers and troops had found 46 others after Monday’s attack, The Associated Press reported. He said the victims included the family of a gubernatorial candidate and 18 Filipino journalists who accompanied his relatives in filing his election papers. President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo on Tuesday declared a state of emergency in the contiguous provinces of Maguindanao and Sultan Kudarat and in the city of Cotabato on the southern island of Mindanao. The measure gives the police and army the authority to apprehend and detain those who carried out the slaughter.

Terrorism probe casts scrutiny on Minneapolis' Somali immigrant enclave
By Bob Drogin, Los Angeles Times
Barely a block from the Mississippi River sits a neighborhood Mark Twain could not have imagined. Men with henna-streaked beards and women in full-body hijabs streamed Tuesday past the Maashaa Allah Restaurant, the Alle Aamin Coffee Shop, the Kaah Express Money Wiring stall, the storefront Al-Qaaniteen Mosque and other similar structures. For the FBI, Little Mogadishu has become the center of an intense investigation into a recruiting network that sent young men to fight in Somalia for a radical Islamist group known as Shabab, or "the Youth." Investigators say the poverty, grim gang wars and overpacked public housing towers produced one of the largest militant operations in the United States since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Federal officials announced terrorism charges Monday against eight local men, seven of whom remain at large. That brought the total to 14 Minneapolis men who have been indicted or pleaded guilty this year for allegedly indoctrinating, recruiting or training local youths to join a Muslim militia waging war in Somalia against the U.S.-backed government.

"We are waging war on the enemies of Islam"
A Year After Mumbai Attack, Militants Thrive
By MATTHEW ROSENBERG, Wall Street Journal
The Islamist militant group behind the deadly attack in Mumbai one year ago remains a potent force determined to strike India and the West, and a source of acrimony between South Asia's nuclear-armed rivals, say officials and members of the militant faction. Indian officials and experts say at least six new plots against Mumbai by the Pakistan-based group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, have been disrupted in the 12 months since 10 gunmen wrought three days of havoc on India's financial capital, killing 166 people. Lashkar's infiltration of India's part of Kashmir is again on the upswing, the officials say; and a U.S. citizen with alleged ties to Lashkar was recently arrested in Chicago, evidence of the group's reach, U.S. officials say. "Our aims are the same today as they were 10 years ago," said a man who identified himself as a former Lashkar militant now working with its charity arm. "We are waging war on the enemies of Islam." U.S. officials and experts say hitting India remains the primary focus for Lashkar, which was nurtured in the 1990s by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency for use as a proxy against Indian forces in the divided Himalayan region of Kashmir. Pakistan banned the group in 2002 and officials here say they cut ties with it at the time.

Fort Hood probe brings mosque unwanted attention
Investigators look into shooter's place of worship
By Philip Rucker, Washington Post
FBI agents in blue gloves recently converged on a single-story brick mosque on the rural outskirts of town here and pillaged through the giant green trash bin outside in search of evidence. Texas Rangers and news reporters have been an almost constant neighborhood presence, questioning the Muslim families who live on streets with names such as Hamza Circle and Omar Drive. The Fort Hood shootings have brought unwelcome attention to the band of a few dozen Muslim worshipers, many with military connections, who prayed alongside the suspect, Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, at the only mosque in this central Texas Army town. With the law enforcement and media scrutiny, some regulars at the Islamic Center of Greater Killeen have not been seen, including an 18-year-old who dined frequently with Hasan and promoted jihadist views on the Internet. As the inquiry continues into the Nov. 5 massacre on the nation's largest military installation, in which 13 people were killed and at least 38 others injured, the FBI's quest for clues has led to this mosque where Hasan prayed regularly in the four months since his July transfer from Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

U.S. youths recruited to fight in Somali militia, authorities say
Young Somali Americans, many in Minneapolis, were lured to fight with an Al Qaeda-affiliated group
By Josh Meyer, Los Angeles Times
Federal authorities unsealed criminal charges Monday against eight suspects alleged to be part of a U.S. recruiting network that sent young men to fight in Somalia -- one of the largest militant operations uncovered in this country since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The court documents disclosed how some older members of the Somali American community in Minneapolis are believed to have lured younger ones to fight in Somalia -- some as suicide bombers -- with an Al Qaeda-affiliated group known as Al Shabab, or "The Youth." The charges include providing financial support to fighters who traveled to Somalia, attending Al Shabab training camps and fighting with the group against the U.S.-backed transitional government there, as well as against Ethiopian government forces and African Union troops. The recruitment of young people from Minneapolis and other U.S. communities "has been the focus of intense investigation for many months," said David Kris, the assistant attorney general for national security. The new charges bring the number of men accused in connection with the case in Minnesota to 14. Several of the newly disclosed defendants are believed to be outside the United States.

Germans weasel in on 9/11 trial
By ADAM NICHOLS, New York Post
Fearing for the lives of the 9/11 fiends, the German government will send a team of observers to the New York terror trials to make sure evidence by its agents doesn't lead to the death penalty. Germany, which bans the death penalty, will have a team at the trial of admitted atrocity mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed (right) and four of his al Qaeda henchmen. The evidence gathered by German investigators could lead to death sentences. In fact, it's unlikely US prosecutors have any chance of convicting the 9/11 monsters without the Germans' proof, an attorney for one of the suspects said yesterday. A conviction "would scarcely be possible without evidence from Germany," the lawyer, who represents Ramzi Binalshibh, told the German broadcast network Deutsche Welle. The network did not identify the lawyer. Three of the four pilots who carried out the 9/11 attacks had formed a cell while living in Hamburg, Germany. German investigators handed over evidence for the trial on the condition that it could not be used to support a death sentence -- which the US government has said it intends to seek if the five are found guilty. President Obama last week said that he expects Mohammed will be put to death.

Islam in the Philippines
30 kidnapped, slain in apparent political violence; More than a dozen women are among the victims
By Al Jacinto and John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times
Authorities discovered the bodies of at least 30 people kidnapped early today in the southern Philippines and called the incident a politically motivated slaughter. The victims -- including at least 13 women -- reportedly included a dozen journalists as well as lawyers and a woman who had planned to file her husband's nomination for elections next year. Many victims had been beheaded and buried, authorities said. "This is a gruesome massacre of civilians unequalled in recent history," said Jesus Dureza, a Mindanao province official. "There must be a total stop to this senseless violence and carnage." The convoy of political activists was hijacked by an estimated 100 gunmen as they rode in several vans near the town of Ampatuan, said Army Col. Jonathan Ponce, a spokesman for the 6th Infantry Division. The bodies were later found about three miles away. Philippine military troops were still searching for at least a dozen more victims who had also been among the group.

2 bomb blasts leave 7 dead, 52 wounded in India
By the Associated Press, Washington Post
Suspected Islamic militants set off two bombs outside a police station in India's restive northeast on Sunday, killing seven people and wounding more than 50, police said. Five people died instantly after two blasts went off within minutes of each other outside the station in Nalbari town near the Assam state capital, Gauhati, a local police official said. Two people died later in a hospital, he said. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity as he is not authorized to speak to the media, said what officials had earlier reported was a third bomb in a market a few miles (kilometers) away, turned out to be a firecracker. At least 52 people were wounded in the two blasts, said Bhaskar Mahanta, Assam's inspector general of police. India's northeast is beset by scores of conflicts. More than 10,000 people have died in separatist violence over the past decade. The region is home to dozens of separatist groups that accuse the government of exploiting the area's natural resources while doing little for the indigenous people. Mahanta said authorities suspect the militant separatist group United Liberation Front of Asom is behind the blasts. No group claimed responsibility.

Muslim pirates hijack Greek-owned bulk carrier off Yemen
By Reuters, Washington Post
Pirates hijacked a Greek-owned bulk carrier on Thursday in the Gulf of Aden near Yemen, a Kenyan maritime official said on Sunday, but Greek officials said the attack may have been unsuccessful. The vessel was taken 36 nautical miles off the Yemeni port of Balhaf and news of the seizure only emerged on Saturday, said Andrew Mwangura, coordinator of the Kenya-based East African Seafarers' Assistance Programme. "Red Sea Spirit was taken by gunmen off the Yemeni coast last Thursday. She is flying the Panama flag," Mwangura said. "She is a Greek-owned bulk carrier." Somali pirates have continued to defy foreign navies patrolling the waters off the Horn of Africa and are holding at least 13 vessels and more than 200 crew. There was a pause in hijackings during monsoon rains, but the sea gangs have stepped up attacks in the past two months, extending their range to as far as the Seychelles, to evade the naval vessels. Piracy attacks around the world numbered 324 during the year to October 20, according to figures from the ICC International Maritime Bureau's Piracy Reporting Center. Attacks by Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden and the east coast of Somalia, numbered 174, with 35 vessels hijacked and 587 crew taken hostage. Nearly 20,000 ships pass through the Gulf of Aden each year, heading to and from the Suez Canal.

Hasan had intensified contact with cleric
Fort Hood suspect raised prospect of financial transfers
By Carrie Johnson, Spencer S. Hsu and Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post
In the months before the deadly shootings at Fort Hood, Army Maj. Nidal M. Hasan intensified his communications with a radical Yemeni American cleric and began to discuss surreptitious financial transfers and other steps that could translate his thoughts into action, according to two sources briefed on a collection of secret e-mails between the two. The e-mails were obtained by an FBI-led task force in San Diego between late last year and June but were not forwarded to the military, according to government and congressional sources. Some were sent to the FBI's Washington field office, triggering an assessment into whether they raised national security concerns, but those intercepted later were not, the sources said. Hasan's contacts with extremist imam Anwar al-Aulaqi began as religious queries but took on a more specific and concrete tone before he moved to Texas, where he unleashed the Nov. 5 attack that killed 13 people and wounded nearly three dozen, said the sources who were briefed on the e-mails, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the case is sensitive and unfolding. One of those sources said the two discussed in "cryptic and coded exchanges" the transfer of money overseas in ways that would not attract law enforcement attention.

Rocket Targets Luxury Hotel in Kabul
By the Associated Press, Wall Street Journal
A rocket hit outside the luxury Serena Hotel in Afghanistan's capital late Saturday, wounding two people, the Interior Ministry said. The heavily guarded Serena regularly houses visiting diplomats, officials and international workers. It has been the target of attacks before, most recently in late October when a rocket slammed into a courtyard. In Saturday's attack, a rocket hit low on the outside of a compound wall that rings the hotel, just behind a guardhouse, according to an Associated Press reporter who saw the impact spot. Rubble surrounded the area, but there was no large crater. Dozens of police and army officers worked to secure the site as ambulance sirens wailed. The rocket wounded two people, Interior Ministry spokesman Zemeri Bashary said. He did not say how serious their injuries were.

Islamists Murder Russian Priest in Church
"Father Daniil periodically received e-mails stating that if he didn’t stop his theological polemics with Islam, then he will be dealt with like an infidel”
By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY, New York Times
The Rev. Daniil Sysoyev, a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church who was known for promoting missionary work among Muslims, was shot and killed in his parish church late Thursday night, the RIA Novosti news agency reported. Father Sysoyev, 35, died at a Moscow hospital of gunshot wounds to the head and chest, RIA Novosti said. The Web site of the Moscow patriarchate confirmed his death. The parish’s choir director was wounded in the shootings at the Church of St. Thomas by the unidentified assailant. A Moscow Patriarchate official called Father Sysoyev a “talented missionary” whose work among Muslims, including Tatars, might have been the motive for the shooting. “I don’t exclude that the murder is connected to the fact that he preached among and baptized those who belong to Muslim culture,” the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk with the news media, said in a telephone interview. Father Sysoyev had spoken out in opposition to Islam and had warned Russian women against marrying Muslim men. Anatoly Bagmet, an official of the prosecutor’s office, said there was reason to believe that the shooting took place “on religious grounds,” the news agency reported. “Over the course of two, three years Father Daniil, who was famous for his active missionary work, periodically received e-mails stating that if he didn’t stop his theological polemics with Islam, then he will be dealt with like an infidel,” Mr. Frolov told the Interfax news agency.

Suicide bomber kills 16 in Afghanistan
Two children are among the dead
By the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times
A suicide bomber riding a motorcycle killed 16 people, including two children and a policeman, and wounded at least 23 others Friday in a busy city square in western Afghanistan, officials said. Afghan police shouted "Stop! Stop!" at the motorcyclist before he detonated the explosives, provincial police chief Gen. Mohammad Faqir Askar said. It was unclear what the bomber was targeting. Amin said the 16 killed included two children. Dr. Shir Agh Asas at the hospital in Farah city said several children also were among the wounded. A police officer also died. The violence comes a day after Afghan President Hamid Karzai, in his second inaugural address, said he has placed national reconciliation with insurgents at the top of his peace-building agenda. "We invite dissatisfied compatriots, who are not directly linked to international terrorism, to return to their homeland," he said.

Born in U.S., a Radical Cleric Inspires Terror
By SCOTT SHANE, New York Times
In nearly a dozen recent terrorism cases in the United States, Britain and Canada, investigators discovered the suspects had something in common: a devotion to the message of Anwar al-Awlaki, an eloquent Muslim cleric who has turned the Web into a tool for extremist indoctrination. Mr. Awlaki, 38, the son of a former agriculture minister and university president in Yemen, has never been accused of planting explosives himself. But experts on terrorism believe his persuasive endorsement of violence as a religious duty, in colloquial, American-accented English, has helped push a series of Western Muslims into terrorism. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist charged with killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., on Nov. 5, is only the latest suspect accused of perpetrating or plotting violence to be linked to the cleric.

Islamo Pirates attack U.S.-flagged Maersk Alabama - for 2nd time this year
By the Associated Press, New York Daily news
Somali pirates attacked the Maersk Alabama for the second time in seven months on Wednesday, but guards on board the U.S.-flagged cargo ship repelled the takeover attempt, the EU's naval force said. Pirates hijacked the Maersk Alabama last April and took ship captain Richard Phillips hostage, holding him at gunpoint in a lifeboat for five days. Navy SEAL sharpshooters freed Phillips while killing three pirates in a daring nighttime attack. Somali pirates attacked the ship with automatic weapons early Wednesday about 350 nautical miles east of the Somali coast, but guards on board the craft fired back and thwarted the attempted hijacking. Cmdr. John Harbour, a spokesman for the EU Naval Force, called it "pure chance" that the Maersk Alabama had been targeted a second time. "It's not the first vessel to have been attacked twice, and it's a chance that every single ship takes as it passes through the area," Harbour said. "At least this time they had a vessel protection detachment on board who were able to repel the attack."

Crew packing heat when pirates attack
By the Associated Press, New York Post
Islamic pirates attacked the Maersk Alabama for the second time in seven months this morning, but guards on board the U.S.-flagged cargo ship repelled the takeover attempt, the EU's naval force said. Pirates hijacked the Maersk Alabama last April and took ship captain Richard Phillips hostage, holding him at gunpoint in a lifeboat for five days. Navy SEAL sharpshooters freed Phillips while killing three pirates in a daring nighttime attack. Somali pirates attacked the ship with automatic weapons early Wednesday about 350 nautical miles east of the Somali coast, but guards on board the craft fired back and thwarted the attempted hijacking. Pirates have greatly increased their attacks in recent weeks after seasonal rains subsided. On Monday, a self-proclaimed pirate said that Somali hijackers had been paid $3.3 million for the release of 36 crew members from a Spanish vessel held for more than six weeks — a clear demonstration of how lucrative the trade can be for impoverished Somalis.

Inspectors Fear Iran Is Hiding Nuclear Plants
By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD, New York Times
International inspectors who gained access to Iran’s newly revealed underground nuclear enrichment plant voiced strong suspicions in a report on Monday that the country was concealing other atomic facilities. The report was the first independent account of what was contained in the once secret plant, tunneled into the side of a mountain, and came as the Obama administration was expressing growing impatience with Iran’s slow response in nuclear negotiations. In unusually tough language, the International Atomic Energy Agency appeared highly skeptical that Iran would have built the enrichment plant without also constructing a variety of other facilities that would give it an alternative way to produce nuclear fuel if its main centers were bombed. So far, Iran has denied that it built other hidden sites in addition to the one deep underground on a military base about 12 miles north of the holy city of Qum. The inspectors were given access to the plant late last month and reported that they had found it in “an advanced state” of construction, but that no centrifuges — the fast-spinning machines needed to make nuclear fuel — had yet been installed.

Pirates Sieze North Korean Ship
By ANDRÉS CALA and ALAN COWELL, New York Times
Somali pirates released 36 crew members of a Spanish fishing vessel Tuesday after the government paid a ransom of nearly $3.5 million as a European Union naval force patrolling off Somalia said that a chemical tanker with 28 North Korean crew members had been commandeered off the Seychelles Islands. Juan Vieites, a Spaniard who heads Eurotuna, the European umbrella group representing the tuna industry, confirmed a group of about 60 pirates left the Alakrana, captured Oct. 2 while in international waters with a crew including 16 Spaniards. The pirates threatened to kill the Spanish crew members unless Spain agreed to release two pirates captured by the Spanish Navy a day after the 100-meter Alakrana was seized. A Spanish court on Monday indicted the two pirates for kidnapping and armed assault, charges which could allow Spain to deport them.

Afghan Official: Attack Underscores Taliban Threat
By the Associated Press, New York Times
The deaths of 14 civilians in a rocket attack presumably aimed at military officials and local leaders underscores the inability of NATO to successfully defeat the Taliban in eastern Afghanistan, an official said Tuesday. Monday's attack in Tagab missed the meeting but the rockets hit in the crowded market area, killing 14 Afghan civilians and wounding dozens more, said Afghan Gen. Paikan Zamaray. His tally adds two more deaths than previously reported. About 15 people were so seriously injured that they were evacuated to NATO hospitals for treatment, provincial Police Chief Matiullah Safi said. French Brig. Gen. Marcel Druart the meeting, known as a shura, continued despite the attack to show that the Taliban cannot disrupt NATO's plans in a tense valley where both sides are competing for influence. ''I think it was a kind of desperate course of action because they are not in the situation where they can fight against us and they can't prevent us from freedom of movement along the Tagab valley,'' Druart told reporters in Kabul.

U.S. troops battle both Taliban and their own rules
By Sara A. Carter, Washington Times
Army Capt. Casey Thoreen wiped the last bit of sleep from his eyes before the sun rose over his isolated combat outpost. His soldiers did the same as they checked and double-checked their weapons and communications equipment. Ahead was a dangerous foot patrol into the heart of Taliban territory. "Has anyone seen the [Afghan National Army] guys?" asked Capt. Thoreen, 30, the commander of Blackwatch Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment with the 5th Stryker Brigade. "Are they not showing up?" A soldier, who looked ghostly in the reddish light of a headlamp, shook his head. "We can't do anything if we don't have the ANA or [the Afghan National Police]," said a frustrated Capt. Thoreen. "We have to follow the Karzai 12 rules. But the Taliban has no rules," he said. "Our soldiers have to juggle all these rules and regulations and they do it without hesitation despite everything. It's not easy for anyone out here." "Karzai 12" refers to Afghanistan's newly re-elected president, Hamid Karzai, and a dozen rules set down by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, to try to keep Afghan civilian casualties to a minimum. "It's a framework to ensure cultural sensitivity in planning and executing operations," said Capt. Thoreen. "It's a set of rules and could be characterized as part of the ROE," he said, referring to the rules of engagement. Dozens of U.S. soldiers who spoke to The Washington Times during a recent visit to southern Afghanistan said these rules sometimes make a perilous mission even more difficult and dangerous.

Could take decades to execute Fort Hood massacre suspect Nidal Hasan
By Thomas M. Defrank, New York Daily News
The slaughter took just seven minutes, but the wheels of justice will grind on for years or even decades if Maj. Nidal Hasan is sentenced to die. No matter how heinous his crimes, the Army psychiatrist is entitled to two separate appeals to the Supreme Court. Under the rules of military justice, his execution would require the personal approval of the commander in chief. "He's got an array of protections which in some respects exceed those he'd get from a civilian court," said Yale Law School Prof. Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice. The cost to taxpayers of his incarceration and legal appeals might reach $30 million, various legal analyses show.

Cleric says he was confidant to Hasan
By Sudarsan Raghavan, Washington Post
In his first interview with a journalist since the Fort Hood rampage, Yemeni American cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi said that he neither ordered nor pressured Maj. Nidal M. Hasan to harm Americans, but that he considered himself a confidant of the Army psychiatrist who was given a glimpse via e-mail into Nadal's growing discomfort with the U.S. military. The cleric said he thought he played a role in transforming Hasan into a devout Muslim eight years ago, when Hasan listened to his lectures at the Dar al-Hijra mosque in Northern Virginia. Aulaqi said that Hasan "trusted" him and that the two developed an e-mail correspondence over the past year. The portrait of the alleged Fort Hood shooter offered by Aulaqi provides some hints as to Hasan's mind-set and motivations in the months leading up to the Nov. 5 rampage, in which 13 were killed. Aulaqi's comments also add to questions over whether U.S. authorities, who were aware of at least some of Hasan's e-mails to Aulaqi, should have sensed a potential threat. U.S. intelligence agencies intercepted e-mails from Hasan, but the FBI concluded that they posed no serious danger and that an investigation was unnecessary, said federal law enforcement officials.

A diatribe defense
Pros say Khalid Shaikh Mohammed will act as his own lawyer in WTC terror case
By Alison Gendar and Rich Schapiro, New York Daily News
Now that the venue is finally set, a sinister question looms over the case of confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed: Will he use the court as a platform to spew his sickening diatribes? Experts say the terror thug will likely resist legal representation, opting instead to turn Manhattan Federal Court into his bully pulpit. "The chances are excellent that he represents himself," said Ron Kuby, a defense lawyer known for taking on controversial clients. "[Mohammed's] goal in the legal system is not to beat the rap. His goal is to use the legal system as a forum for his own ideas and to embrace martyrdom through that system." As Mohammed and his underlings languished in Guantanamo Bay, a fleet of lawyers have worked to protect their rights.

Texas congressman: Fort Hood shooter had Pakistan 'connection'
By Michael O'Brien, The Hill
The suspected shooter at last week's Ft. Hood massacre had a "connection" to Pakistan, a Texas lawmaker said Friday. Rep. Mike McCaul (R) suggested a financial relationship between Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan and Pakistan, a country long plagued by terror groups, including al-Qaeda. "There appears to have been a Pakistan connection," McCaul said in a statement provided to The Hill. "It raises more red flags about this case and demonstrates why it’s important for Congress to exercise its oversight authority.” In an earlier statement to the Dallas Morning News, McCaul described "communications and wire transfers" between Hasan and Pakistani sources. McCaul's revelation comes as Hasan's actions have been characterized as terrorism by some lawmakers and as President Barack Obama has ordered a review of intelligence about Hasan existing before his rampage last Thursday on the Army base. Hasan, a devout Muslim, had been under investigation by federal authorities for having allegedly tried to contact representatives of terrorist groups.

Militants Hit Pakistan Spy Agency in Escalation
By SABRINA TAVERNISE, New York Times
Militants stepped up their fight against the Pakistani government on Friday, ramming a truck bomb into a regional office of the country’s main intelligence agency. The early-morning blast in the northwestern city of Peshawar killed at least nine people and wounded more than 50, authorities said, in what has become a grimly familiar cycle of violence. An attack on a police station in a different area left as many as six dead. There was no doubt about the target or the motive of the bombing on Friday: Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, is a prominent symbol of military power, and militants have struck at it in different cities in Pakistan. The military is conducting a campaign against insurgents in the western mountains of Waziristan, an offensive that has led to a sharp increase in reprisals by militants.

One of two missing U.S. soldiers found dead in Afghan river
By Reuters, Los Angeles Times
A military diving team has found the body of an American soldier, one of two who went missing last week, in a river in western Afghanistan, NATO-led forces and the U.S. military said today. Afghan and international forces were still searching for the other missing soldier, the U.S. military said in a statement. The disappearance of the two paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division during a resupply mission last Wednesday triggered a search by NATO and Afghan forces in Badghis province, near the border with Turkmenistan.

Bomb Kills at Least 15 in Pakistan
By the Associated Press, Wall Street Journal
A bomb near a crowded market in northwest Pakistan has killed 15 people, a police officer said. The bombing was the third attack in as many days in or close to Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province. Police officer Riaz Khan said Tuesday's bombing in Charsadda city also wounded at least 25 people. The city is some 25 north of Peshawar. Local TV footage showed a destroyed car and several badly damaged stalls and shops. Ambulances ferried the dead and injured to the hospital along roads littered with debris.

Police: Suicide bomb in Pakistan market kills 12
By the Associated Press, Washington Post
A suicide bomber apparently targeting an anti-Taliban mayor struck a crowded market Sunday in northwest Pakistan, killing the mayor and 11 other people and injuring dozens, police said. The morning attack took place in the town of Adazai, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) south of the main northwest city of Peshawar. The market was crowded with shoppers and goats being sold to celebrate the upcoming Muslim festival of Eid. The mayor, Abdul Malik, who was initially reported to have survived, died in the attack, said Sahibzada Anis, the top official in Peshawar. Malik, who had once been a Taliban supporter, had later switched sides and formed a local militia to help fight the militants.

The enemy within shakes military
Victims from Fort Hood shooting arrive at Dover Air Force Base
By Matthew Lysiak and Corky Siemaszko, New York Daily News
The 13 victims of the Fort Hood massacre were flown Friday night to Dover Air Force Base, the transit point for generations of soldiers slain by foreign enemies. Only these were victims of an enemy from within. As the coffins bearing 12 soldiers and a civilian base worker were loaded on an Air Force aircraft for the long flight to Delaware, the feds were trying to fathom why a U.S. Army shrink opened fire on his fellow soldiers. There were reports that Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan - a Muslim opposed to the war in Iraq who once posted a comment sympathetic to suicide bombers on the Internet - hollered "Allahu Akbar!" before firing Thursday. Hasan, 39, told relatives he'd been harassed by other soldiers for his faith. Last month, soldier John Van de Walker, 30, was arrested for scratching Hasan's Honda with a key, police said. The manager of the Killeen, Tex., apartment complex where Hasan lived said the vandal had returned from Iraq and targeted Hasan because he of a Muslim bumper sticker. "No one should have to deal with that kind of hate. Maybe he snapped," said Alice Thompson, 53. Gen. George Casey, the Army chief of staff, said investigators haven't pinned down the motive for the massacre, only that it caught them completely by surprise.

Islamo-Dad held in 'honor killing' try
Outraged because his daughter had become too "Westernized"
By the Associated Press, New York Post
An Iraqi immigrant has been arrested on charges of running down his daughter because she was becoming "too Westernized." Police in the Phoenix suburb of Peoria released few details, but said 48-year-old Faleh Almaleki was arrested in Georgia and is in custody. They would not say where he is being held. Noor Faleh Almaleki, 20, was hospitalized and is in serious condition. Police said that Faleh Almaleki, who immigrated in the mid-'90s, was outraged because his daughter had become too "Westernized" and was straying from Islamic tradition. He allegedly aimed his car at her Oct. 20 in a Peoria parking lot.

Feds: Leader of radical Islam group killed in raid in Michigan
It was their "duty to oppose the FBI and the government
By the Associated Press, New York Daily News
Federal authorities on Wednesday arrested several members of a radical Sunni Islam group in the U.S., killing one of its leaders at a shootout in a Michigan warehouse, the U.S. attorney's office said. Agents were trying to arrest Luqman Ameen Abdullah, 53, at a Dearborn warehouse on charges that included conspiracy to sell stolen goods and illegal possession and sale of firearms. Authorities also conducted raids elsewhere to try to round up 10 followers named in a federal complaint. Abdullah was "advocating and encouraging his followers to commit violent acts against the United States," FBI agent Gary Leone said in an affidavit filed with the 43-page criminal complaint unsealed Wednesday. FBI spokeswoman Sandra Berchtold said Abdullah refused to surrender, fired a weapon and was killed by gunfire from agents. In the complaint, the FBI said Abdullah, also known as Christopher Thomas, was an imam of a Black Muslim radical group named Ummah whose primary mission is to establish an Islamic state within the United States. He told them it was their "duty to oppose the FBI and the government and it does not matter if they die," Leone said.

Bomb kills 105 in Pakistan market
By the Associated Press, New York Post
A car bomb struck a busy market in northwestern Pakistan yesterday, killing 105 people -- mostly women and children. More than 200 people were wounded in the blast in this city -- the deadliest in a surge of attacks by terrorists this month. The government blamed terrorists seeking to avenge an army offensive launched this month against al Qaeda and the Taliban in their stronghold close to the Afghan border. The bombing was the deadliest since explosions hit homecoming festivities for former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in Karachi in October 2007, killing about 150 people. Bhutto was later slain in a separate attack. Yesterday's bomb destroyed much of the Mina Bazaar in Peshawar's old town, a warren of narrow alleys clogged with stalls and shops selling dresses, toys and cheap jewelry that drew many female shoppers and children in the conservative city. The blast collapsed buildings, including a mosque, and set scores of shops ablaze. The wounded sat amid burning debris and body parts as a huge plume of gray smoke rose above the city.

Clinton Arrival in Pakistan Met by Fatal Attacks
By MARK LANDLER and ISMAIL KHAN, New York Times
Militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan punctuated Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s arrival here with deadly attacks on Wednesday, underscoring their ability to cause chaos even in the face of offensives on both sides of the border. In Pakistan, a devastating car bomb tore through a congested market in the northwest city of Peshawar, killing as many as 101 people, many of them women and children. Pakistani authorities said the attack was the country’s most serious in two years, and the deadliest ever in Peshawar, which has become a front line for Taliban efforts to destabilize the government through violence. In the Afghan capital, Kabul, Taliban militants stormed a guesthouse, killing five United Nations employees and three other people in a furious two-hour siege. The attack was meant to scare Afghans away from voting in a runoff election on Nov. 7 between President Hamid Karzai and his challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, a Taliban spokesman said. The violence cast a shadow over the visit of Mrs. Clinton, who was meeting with government ministers in Islamabad, 90 miles southwest of Peshawar, when news of the Peshawar explosion came over television screens. Mrs. Clinton immediately condemned the bombing, which in killing women and children in Peshawar seemed aimed at the very constituencies she has championed in her travels to other developing countries.

Car Bomb Kills Scores in Pakistan
By ISMAIL KHAN, New York Times
A huge car bomb tore through a congested market of narrow alleys and crowded stalls in Peshawar’s old town on Wednesday, killing more than 80 people, many of them women, while 160 more were injured, many of them seriously, local authorities said. The explosion came about three hours after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, a 90 minute drive away, underscoring the challenges facing American policy in a nation that has become skeptical of Washington’s long-term commitment. Mrs. Clinton was in closed-door meetings with senior government officials in Islamabad at the time of the explosion in Peshawar. “These attacks on innocent people are cowardly; they are not courageous; they are cowardly,” she declared later.

6 U.N. employees killed in assault on Kabul guesthouse
By Alexandra Zavis, Los Angeles Times
Militants armed with automatic rifles, grenades and suicide vests attacked a guesthouse in central Kabul at dawn today, killing six U.N employees, including an American, U.N. and U.S. Embassy officials said. Three Afghans and the three attackers were also killed, said Sayed Abdul Ghafar Sayedzada, the Kabul criminal investigation police chief. Later, two rockets slammed into the grounds of the Serena Hotel, said Interior Ministry spokesman Zamarai Bashari. Only one of the rockets detonated, and it did not cause any casualties. The Taliban insurgency claimed responsibility for the attack on the Bakhtar guesthouse, which is used by foreigners working for U.N. agencies in the capital.

Extremism Spreads Across Indonesian Penal Code
By NORIMITSU ONISHI, New York Times
Under Islamic law, or Shariah, the religious police have administered public canings for such things as gambling, prostitution and illicit affairs. But under a new Islamic criminal code that goes into effect this month, the Shariah police will be wielding a new and more potent threat: death by stoning for adulterers. Most of Indonesia still lives up to its reputation for a moderate, easygoing brand of Islam, and Islamist parties suffered heavy losses in this year’s national elections. But how Aceh went from basic Islamic law to endorsing stoning in a few short years shows how a small, radical minority has successfully pushed its agenda, locally and nationally, by cowing political and religious moderates. Though extreme, Aceh is not an isolated case. In recent years, as part of a decentralization of power away from the capital, Jakarta, at least 50 local governments have used their new authority to pass Shariah-based regulations regarding conduct and dress, though none have gone as far as Aceh to deal with criminal matters.

Al Qaeda-linked group claims responsibility for Baghdad attacks that killed at least 155 people
By the Associated Press, New York Daily News
Al Qaeda's umbrella group in Iraq has claimed responsibility for the twin suicide bombings in Baghdad that killed at least 155 people this week. The group, known as the Islamic State of Iraq, says in a statement posted on the Internet that its "martyrs ... targeted the dens of infidelity." The authenticity of the statement, posted late Monday on a Web site commonly used for militant messaging, could not be independently confirmed. The same group also claimed responsibility for August bombings of two government ministries in Baghdad, when more than 100 people were killed. Three major government buildings were destroyed or severely damaged in Sunday's blasts. The dead included two dozen children trapped in a bus leaving a day care center.

Saudi king waives 60 lashes for woman involved with sex talk TV show
By the Associated Press, New York Post
The Saudi king has waived a 60 lashes punishment for a female journalist charged with involvement in a TV show in which a Saudi man publicly talked about sex, a government official said Monday. King Abdullah’s decision followed intense media attention sparked by Saturday’s sentencing of journalist Rozanna al-Yami, who was ordered flogged by a judge in the western city of Jiddah. Al-Yami had been charged with involvement in the preparation of a sex talk show and advertising the segment on the Internet. Public talk about sex is taboo in this ultraconservative country, where the sexes are segregated. Al-Yami — believed to be the first Saudi woman journalist to get a flogging punishment — said Saturday that although the charges against her were dropped, the judge sentenced her “as a deterrence.” On Monday, Information Ministry spokesman Abdul-Rahman al-Hazza told The Associated Press that the king waived the sentence and ordered al-Yami’s case and that of another journalist — a pregnant woman also accused of involvement in the program — be referred to an Information Ministry committee. The same judge at the Jiddah court also sentenced Abdul-Jawad earlier this month to five years in jail and 1,000 lashes. Three other men who appeared on the show were also convicted of discussing sex publicly and sentenced to two years imprisonment and 300 lashes each.

Bombings rock Iraq's political landscape
By Anthony Shadid, Washington Post
Twin car bombs that devastated three government buildings Sunday and killed more than 150 people illustrate a new strategy in Iraq's contest for power ahead of January elections: spectacular blows aimed at destroying faith in Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's ability to secure the country as the United States withdraws, officials and residents said. Sunday's attack, cutting through snarled traffic during the morning rush hour, was the worst in Baghdad since 2007. With an attack Aug. 19 that killed about 100 people, insurgents have now wrecked an array of pillars of the state's authority: the Foreign, Finance, Justice, and Municipalities and Public Works ministries, along with the Baghdad provincial headquarters, which are all gathered in a fortified swath of downtown. Unlike the carnage unleashed by attacks in crowded mosques, restaurants and markets, aimed at igniting sectarian strife, these blasts appeared to rely on a distinctly political logic.

Iraq Ministries Targeted in Car Bombings; Over 130 Dead
By ROD NORDLAND, New York Times
A pair of suicide car bombs exploded almost simultaneously in downtown Baghdad on Sunday, targeting two government buildings and killing at least 136 people and wounding 520, according to the Ministry of the Interior. The official said the toll may rise even more. The blasts came just over two months after suicide truck bombs exploded outside the Finance and Foreign Ministries in Baghdad, killing 122 people, many of them ministry employees. The high death tolls then were blamed at least in part on the removal of blast-proof walls from outside the ministries. “This is another terrorist message added to what we have gotten before from the Bloody Wednesday explosion,” Kamel al-Zaidi, chairman of the Provincial Council, told al-Iraqiya state television, referring to the Aug. 19th attacks on the two ministries.

106 killed as two car bombs rock Baghdad
The blasts, which leave more than 600 wounded
By Ned Parker and Raheem Salman, Los Angeles Times
Car bombs exploded in Baghdad this morning by two key government buildings, killing at least 106 people, as political leaders were set to meet to try to resolve a fierce dispute that could delay national elections, ranked as pivotal to Iraq's long-term stability. The car bombs, at least one of them a suicide bombing, according to police, blew up by the justice ministry and the Baghdad provincial council, two sites separated by one broad city block. The attacks -- which wounded 625 -- shattered windows, sent debris flying, tore down parts of buildings and hit at the very nerve center of Baghdad's national and local governments. The attackers struck as politicians milled around inside the Green Zone, home of the main Iraqi government offices and foreign embassies, just hours before political blocs were set to try to compromise on an election law delayed in the parliament that would regulate national elections planned for January.

Karzai rules out sharing power
Fraud fears linger over disputed election
By Joshua Partlow and Pamela Constable, Washington Post
President Hamid Karzai's team shifted aggressively into campaign mode Saturday and ruled out any possibility of a power-sharing deal with challenger Abdullah Abdullah ahead of a runoff election in two weeks. "In our view there is no alternative to a second round. This is the only constitutional way to establish a new government" and "put an end to the current crisis," said Karzai's campaign spokesman, Wahid Omar, at a news conference. "All our energy is now focused on preparations for the second round." Abdullah, however, has renewed concerns about the credibility of the Independent Election Commission and wants its leadership replaced before the Nov. 7 vote, according to officials in his campaign. He does not want a repeat of the rampant electoral fraud found in the August first round -- much of it favoring Karzai. Abdullah fears nothing will change unless officials he considers loyal to Karzai are removed, the sources said.

Iranian site prompts U.S. to rethink assessment
Tehran set to open Qom nuclear facility to inspectors amid concerns over its role
By Joby Warrick, Washington Post
Early Sunday, if all goes as planned, U.N. nuclear inspectors will travel to a military base near Qom, Iran, for a first look at one of the country's most closely guarded nuclear secrets. Inside bunkers dug into the side of a mountain, the visitors will be escorted through a nearly completed uranium plant that Iran's president has termed "very ordinary." But less than a month after its existence was publicly revealed, many U.S. and European intelligence officials say they are increasingly convinced that the site was intended explicitly for making highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. The Qom site has undermined one of the U.S. intelligence community's key assessments of Iran's nuclear program: the assumption that Tehran had abandoned plans to enrich uranium in secret, according to two former senior U.S. officials involved in high-level discussions about Iran. A landmark U.S. intelligence assessment in 2007 concluded that any secret uranium-processing activities "probably were halted" in 2003 and had not been restarted. Other key judgments of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, including the view that Iran has suspended research on nuclear-warhead design, are also being reevaluated in light of new evidence, the two former officials said. "Qom changed a lot of people's thinking, especially about the possibility of secret military enrichment" of uranium, said one of the former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the assessments remain classified.

Iran Guard Commanders Are Killed in Bombings
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN, New York Times
At least five commanders of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps were killed and dozens of others left dead and injured in two terrorist bombings in the restive region of the nation’s southeastern frontier with Pakistan, according to multiple Iranian state news agencies. The coordinated attacks appeared to mark an escalation in hostilities between Iran’s leadership and one of the nation’s many disgruntled ethnic and religious minorities, in this case the Baluchis. The southeast region, Sistan-Baluchistan, has been the scene of terrorist attacks in the past, and in April the government put the elite Guards Corps in control of security there to try to stop the escalating violence. Iranian officials have accused foreign enemies of supporting the terrorist insurgents and repeated that charge Sunday. By midday, official news reports from Iran said that 31 people were killed and at least 28 injured.

Militants Killed in Saudi Shootout Were Local
By the Associated Press, New York Times
The two al-Qaida militants killed in a recent shootout sneaked into Saudi Arabia from Yemen and were planning to carry out a massive attack, the Interior Ministry spokesman said Sunday. Four explosive belts -- three of them ready to use -- were found in the car used by the militants in Tuesday's shootout which suggests that at least four people were going to take part in the attack, ministry spokesman Brig. Gen. Mansour al-Turki told The Associated Press. He said six Yemeni accomplices who were coordinating with the two militants -- Youssef al-Shihri and Raed al-Harbi -- were also arrested. ''The whole group was planning one terror attack and each of them had a specific role to play,'' said al-Turki. ''The presence of the extra belts indicates they were working with people inside the kingdom,'' he added. Al-Shihri and al-Harbi were disguised as women as they drove across the border Tuesday with a third militant, who was later arrested.

Pakistan claims 60 militants killed in offensive
By the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times
Pakistan's army claimed today to have killed 60 militants on the first day of an operation against an Al Qaeda and Taliban sanctuary close to the Afghan border that residents said was meeting stiff resistance from insurgents. The army said six soldiers had also been killed in the opening salvos of the push into South Waziristan. It was not possible to independently verify those figures because reporters have been stopped from getting close to the battlefield. The operation in South Waziristan follows repeated requests from the U.S. to take on the jihadists behind soaring terrorist attacks in the nuclear-armed nation, as well as Al Qaeda and other extremists believed to be plotting strikes in the West. It involves mostly poorly equipped Pakistani soldiers trained to fight conventional wars, not counterinsurgency operations, who have failed in three other campaigns in the mountainous region since 2004. Much of the region is under total Taliban control. Accounts from residents and those fleeing today suggested that the 30,000 troops were in for a bloodier time than in the Swat Valley, another northwestern region that the army successfully wrested away from insurgents this year.

Karzai May Reject Recount Results
By ANAND GOPAL, Wall Street Journal
Afghan President Hamid Karzai may not accept the results of a recount of the summer's general election votes, adding a further twist to the already fraught post-poll political environment, and his supporters began mass demonstrations against "foreign interference" in the elections. As they await the results of a recount to adjust for widespread fraud, officials from the Karzai campaign began to cast aspersion on the process and centered their criticisms on the United Nations-backed Electoral Complaints Commission, which is re-tallying the numbers. If Mr. Karzai is found to have less than 50% of the vote, it could force a run-off with his top challenger Abdullah Abdullah. Karzai campaign spokesman Waheed Omar said the recount process is being "politically manipulated" by outsiders and that the results may not be acceptable. "The ECC is pretty much controlled by foreigners, and its foreign commissioners intervene in the process," added Maeen Mirstyal, a lawmaker and chief advisor to the Karzai campaign. The commission denies the charge.

Pakistan hits Taliban, Al Qaeda strongholds
Government has widespread support within the Pakistani population
By Alex Rodriguez, Los Angeles Times
Pakistani troops launched a long-awaited ground offensive into the Taliban and Al Qaeda stronghold of South Waziristan today, beginning what experts say will be the country's most challenging chapter yet in the ongoing war on terror. For months, the military has been getting ready for an upcoming offensive by hitting Taliban hideouts, training camps and weapons caches with air strikes from fighter jets and helicopter gunships, and by blocking the militant group's supply and escape routes. The Taliban has claimed responsibility for the recent wave of attacks across Pakistan, and has warned the violence would be ramped up if the government went ahead with the offensive in Waziristan. Previous offensives waged by the Pakistani military against Waziristan's militants sputtered. Operations in 2003 and 2004 were followed by cease-fires that merely allowed Taliban militants to regroup and consolidate their authority in the region. Analysts say the government currently has widespread support within the Pakistani population to launch the offensive.

Islam's "Death to America" policy claims 3 more lives...
Bombs kill 3 U.S. troops in Afghanistan
By the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times
The NATO-led coalition says bomb attacks have killed three American troops in Afghanistan. The international force says two U.S. troops were killed Friday in an explosion in the nation's east. Another U.S. service member was killed the same day in a bombing in the south. The coalition announced the deaths today in a statement. No further details were released. The deaths bring to 28 the number of American service members killed in Afghanistan this month, according to an Associated Press count.

Pakistan Attacks Show Tightening of Militant Links
By JANE PERLEZ, New York Times
A wave of attacks against top security installations over the last several days demonstrated that the Taliban, Al Qaeda and militant groups once nurtured by the government are tightening an alliance aimed at bringing down the Pakistani state, government officials and analysts said. More than 30 people were killed Thursday in Lahore, the second largest city in Pakistan, as three teams of militants assaulted two police training centers and a federal investigations building. The dead included 19 police officers and at least 11 militants, police officials said. Nine others were killed in two attacks at a police station in Kohat, in the northwest, and a residential complex in Peshawar, capital of North-West Frontier Province.

Suicide car bomb strikes mosque, blasts police station in Peshawar, Pakistan; 11 dead
By the Associated Press, New York Daily News
Three suicide attackers, including a woman, attacked a police station in northwestern Pakistan, killing 11 people Friday. The bombing in Peshawar city was the latest in a surge of terrorist attacks over the last 11 days that has killed more than 150 people and underscored the power of the Taliban, who have warned the army against launching any operation in their base close to the Afghan border. One attacker drove a car filled with explosives to the main gate of the police station, as a motorcycle carrying a man and a woman pulled up behind it, Peshawar police chief Liaquat Ali Khan said. The woman jumped off and ran toward a nearby housing complex where army officers live, while the man smashed the motorcycle into the car, which exploded into a huge fireball, he said. Police shot at the woman, who detonated explosives she was wearing.

Car bomb kills 41 in Pakistan
By the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times
A suicide car bombing targeting Pakistani troops killed 41 people today, the fourth grisly militant attack in just over a week, as the Taliban pledged to mobilize fighters across the country for more strikes. The Taliban also claimed responsibility for the 22-hour weekend attack on the nation's heavily fortified army headquarters, saying a cell from Pakistan's most populous province carried out the raid. A suicide bomber detonated a car packed with explosives near an army vehicle in a market in the northwest Shangla district, provincial Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain said. The attack killed 41, including six security officers, and wounded 45 other people, he said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

Tehran Plans to Execute 3 Protesters of Election
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN, New York Times
Iranian officials have sentenced to death three protesters who participated in demonstrations following the nation’s disputed presidential election in June, according to ISNA, Iran’s semiofficial news agency. The news service quoted an unnamed spokesman for the Tehran prosecutor’s office saying that the three were sentenced to be hanged and that they had been part of what Iran considered terrorist organizations. The death sentences are the first to be made public in cases involving the hundreds charged in the vast protests that followed the government’s declaration of a landslide victory for the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in the June 12 presidential election.

Iran Seeks Deal for Reactor
U.S. Sees Diplomatic Benefit in Helping Medical Treatment
By Glenn Kessler, Washington Post
Iran four months ago discreetly contacted the United Nations-affiliated agency for nuclear energy to outline a worrisome situation: A research reactor in Tehran that produces medical isotopes that detect and treat the diseases of about 10,000 patients a week will run out of fuel by the end of 2010. Iran also had a request: Can you help us find a country that will sell us new fuel? On the face of it, Iran's query was a plaintive plea from a c