By David D. Kirkpatrick, New York Times, March 24, 2012

CAIRO — As it prepares to take power in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood is overhauling its relations with the two main Palestinian factions in an effort to put new pressure on Israel for an independent Palestinian state.

Officials of the Brotherhood, Egypt’s dominant Islamist movement, are pressing its militant Palestinian offshoot, Hamas, which controls Gaza, to make new compromises with Fatah, the Western-backed Palestinian leadership that has committed to peace with Israel and runs the West Bank [....]

Brotherhood officials say that they are pulling back from their previous embrace of Hamas and its commitment to armed struggle against Israel in order to open new channels of communications with Fatah, which the Brotherhood had previously denounced for collaborating with Israel and accused of selling out the Palestinian cause. Brotherhood leaders argue that if they persuade the Palestinians to work together with a newly assertive Egypt, they will have far more success forcing Israel to bargain in earnest over the terms of statehood.

“Now we have to deal with the Palestinian parties as an umbrella for both of them, and we have to stand at an equal distance from each,” said Reda Fahmy, a Brotherhood leader who oversees its Palestinian relations and is now chairman of the Arab affairs committee in Egypt’s upper house of Parliament. “Any movement of the size of the Muslim Brotherhood, when it is in the opposition it is one thing and then when it comes to power it is something completely different.” [....]

Columbia legal scholar Philip Bobbitt just sent in this fascinating article on the constitutionality of the individual mandate as justified by biosecurity. If that sounds like a bit of a non-sequitur, well, take a look at the piece.

By Tariq Ramadan, special to Gulf News, March 20, 2012

The strategic alliance with the literalists is critical for the West in order to keep the Middle East under control

New York Times, March 22, 2012

Staff Sgt. Robert Bales will be charged on Friday with 17 counts of murder and various other charges, including attempted murder, in connection with the March 11 shooting deaths of Afghan civilians, a senior United States official said on Thursday [.....]

Also see:

Robert Bales to be charged with 17 counts of murder, Associated Press, March 22

US soldier accused of gunning down civilians in Afghanistan also faces six counts of attempted murder and assault

Now here's some facts and information that hopefully some will research and post a blog (or two, three, four....)

WASHINGTON — One accusation long directed at Congress is that lawmakers come to this capital city not just to serve the American people but also to enrich themselves and their families.       

For the House of Representatives, at least, there is now an encyclopedia of sorts that reinforces this suspicion.       

Read the whole article and use the link within to see the report, with names and amounts - sad, but some say most is 'legal'. 

The politician who helped start the Iraq War is afraid to go to Canada in April, they have 'demonstrators', so the trip is canceled:

Ryan Ruppert, president of promotions company Spectre Live Corp., which scheduled Cheney's April 24 appearance at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, said Cheney and his daughter, Elizabeth, canceled citing safety concerns...Ruppert lashed out at the demonstrators, saying they have only succeeded in blocking what could have been a frank talk with Cheney about U.S. foreign policy.

Cheney fans in Canada will have to travel somewhere out of country if they want to listen to the Vietnam draft dodger, or hear his latest theory on which country we need to bomb or invade next to save freedom.

Residents of an Afghan village near where an American soldier is alleged to have killed 16 civilians are convinced that the slayings were in retaliation for a roadside bomb attack on U.S. forces in the same area a few days earlier.

In accounts to The Associated Press and to Afghan government officials, the residents allege that U.S. troops lined up men from the village of Mokhoyan against a wall after the bombing on either March 7 or 8, and told them they would pay a price for the attack. ...

The shootings have further strained ties between the U.S. government and President Hamid Karzai who has accused the U.S. military of not cooperating with a delegation he appointed to investigate the killings.

Karzai's investigative team is not convinced that one soldier could have single-handedly left his base, walked to the two villages, and carried out the killings and set fire to some of the victims' bodies. ...

Ghulam Rasool, a tribal elder from Panjwai district, gave an account of the bombing at a March 16 meeting in Kabul with Karzai in the wake of the shootings.

"After the incident, they took the wreckage of their destroyed tank and their wounded people from the area," Rasool said. "After that, they came back to the village nearby the explosion site.

"The soldiers called all the people to come out of their houses and from the mosque," he said.

"The Americans told the villagers 'A bomb exploded on our vehicle. ... We will get revenge for this incident by killing at least 20 of your people,'" Rasool said. "These are the reasons why we say they took their revenge by killing women and children in the villages."

[According to this Examiner article, Afghan massacre: Reports in U.S. and overseas media vastly different, foreign media has been going against the single shooter explanation.]

Five years ago, Debbie Lum set out to investigate a phenomenon that she says has “haunted” her — and some other Asian women — her entire life.

“I’m talking about yellow fever!” she says. “If you’re Asian, you know exactly what I mean. It’s Asian American Issues 101.”

If you’re not Asian, what Lum is referring to is the targeted attraction that some non-Asian men have toward Asian women — an obsession, in some cases, that takes the creepy plunge into sexual fetish: “Living in the Bay Area, if I had a dollar for every time a guy with yellow fever tried to hit on me in Chinese, I could have funded ‘Seeking Asian Female‘ on my own,” she says.

Seeking Asian Female Trailer from Seeking Asian Female on Vimeo.

By Charles M Blow, New York Times Op-Ed, March 16/17, 2012

[....] This case has reignited a furor about vigilante justice, racial-profiling and equitable treatment under the law, and it has stirred the pot of racial strife.

As the father of two black teenage boys, this case hits close to home. This is the fear that seizes me whenever my boys are out in the world: that a man with a gun and an itchy finger will find them “suspicious.” That passions may run hot and blood run cold. That it might all end with a hole in their chest and hole in my heart. That the law might prove insufficient to salve my loss.

That is the burden of black boys in America and the people that love them: running the risk of being descended upon in the dark and caught in the cross-hairs of someone who crosses the line [....]

For detailed coverage see:

Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog @ The Atlantic, for his posts on it dated March 13 through today, March 19; his titles, in chronological order:

• Florida's Self-Defense Laws and the Killing of Trayvon Martin
• Trayvon Martin, Cont.
• Stand Your Ground and Trayvon Martin
• More on the Killing of Trayvon Martin
• The Town Where Trayvon Martin Was Killed
• The Killing of Trayvon Martin: 911 Tapes Released
• On the Police 'Investigating' the Killing of Trayvon Martin
• Sanford's Police Chief Is the Real Victim of Racism
• Obama Press Secretary Asked About Trayvon Martin

By Brook Larmer, New York Times Sunday Magazine, March 16/18, 2012

[....] “We’d never get away with this in the U.S.,” Gillen said with a nervous laugh.

From the roof, Gillen and I gazed out at a vast new city that didn’t exist two years ago. Row after row of 20-story apartment towers radiated out in every direction, in regimented monotony as far as we could see. There were hundreds of towers, almost all of them empty. “When I first came here two years ago, this area was just a bunch of fields covered with construction cranes,” said Gillen, who is 32. Now the farmlands outside Harbin have been transformed into one of the dozens of insta-cities rising around China. “Standing here,” Gillen said, “you just have to be in awe of what China can accomplish.”

The building beneath Gillen’s black leather boots inspired a different sort of wonder [....] Over the past three years, foreign architects and designers have poured into China, fleeing economic crises at home and pinning their hopes on this country’s explosive growth [....]

Global Exchange will award one People’s Choice honoree in 2012. The People’s Choice honoree will receive $1,000 in honor of their work and will be recognized at this year’s Human Rights Awards celebration on May 10, 2012.