BAGHDAD — A recent spate of killings and intimidation aimed at gay Iraqis and teenagers who dress in brash Western fashions is sending waves of fear through Iraq's secular circles while casting doubt on the government’s will to protect some of its most vulnerable citizens.
By Pir Zubair Shah, Foreign Policy, March/April, 2011
American drones have changed everything for al Qaeda and its local allies in Pakistan, becoming a fact of life in a secret war that is far from over
[....] This is how it has gone with the drone war, a beat I have covered for six years, first for Newsdayand then the New York Times. By the time I left Pakistan in the summer of 2010, the job had become nearly impossible, though it had always been a dauntingly difficult story to tell [....]
By Edward Helmore in Blythe, California, guardian.co.uk, 11 March 2012
Presence of horned toads and desert tortoises are holding up production at multimillion-dollar sites in California
Of the many projects commissioned by the Obama administration to showcase its commitment to renewable energy, few are as grandly futuristic as the multibillion-dollar solar power projects under construction across broad swaths of desert on the California-Arizona border.
The Obama administration believes that executive branch reviews of evidence against suspected al-Qaeda leaders before they are targeted for killing meet the constitution’s “due process” requirement and that American citizenship alone doesn’t protect individuals from being killed, Attorney General Eric Holder said in a speech Monday.
A most excellent simple interactive tool at nytimes.com showing Romney vs. Santorum demographic voting groups in each state primary held so far.
The Times currently has it at the top of its home page.
Has some surprising results contrary to "conventional wisdom" (such things as Catholics not going for Santorum except in TN, Tea Partiers only going for him in three states, results not differing very much by sex and fairly strong support for Santorum in the "Under 30" group.)
By Ramu Al-Shaheibi, Associated Press, March 6, 2012
BENGHAZI, Libya - Tribal leaders and militia commanders declared oil-rich eastern Libya a semiautonomous state on Tuesday, a unilateral move that the interim head of state called a "dangerous" conspiracy by Arab nations to tear the country apart six months after the fall of Moammar Gadhafi.
By Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight @ nytimes.com, March 5, 2012, 2:13 pm
Rick Santorum got a rough result in the Washington caucuses on Saturday, finishing third in a state he had seemed to have a reasonable shot of winning. Now, Mr. Santorum’s slump is carrying over into the polls in crucial Super Tuesday states.
By Paul Harris in New York, Guardian.co.uk, March 3, 2012
New shows such as Revenge, Ringer, GCB and Downwardly Mobile win viewers with stories of inequality, covering ground where US politicians fear to tread
Reporting from Washington -- Israeli President Shimon Peres will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom this spring, President Obama announced at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference in Washington. [....]
By China Melville for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, March 4, 2011
On "Apocalyptic London." Just published, already has 38 comments, many blasting the article because, as one says, The .journalist is a Marxist member of the Socialist Workers Party and others calling it an Excellent piece. I haven't read it yet, but based on the "reviews" already there, seems it's a "people are going to be talking about this" must read.
By Alex Perry, Global Spin blog @ Time Magazine, March 1, 2012
The African National Congress’ expulsion of its enfant terrible, Julius Malema, answers one question: Yes, the party of Nelson Mandela, the party which overthrew apartheid, still finds racism and hate speech intolerable. But it also poses another: Who now proposes to lead South Africa’s millions of poor, young and unemployed?
Far from spying on terrorists, more than a dozen high-tech surveillance drones, which together cost the U.S. government more than $3 billion, could soon be sitting in a storage facility gathering dust after top Air Force officials admitted this week the birds still are not as good as the half-century-old spy planes they were designed to replace.
Chinese village goes to the polls to elect new leaders after running authorities out of town over land grabs
Chinese villagers in Wukan who staged a rebellion against local officials they accused of stealing their farmland voted for new leaders on Saturday in a much-watched poll that reformers hope will set a standard for resolving similar widespread and protracted disputes.
[....] In a country with tightly controlled TV and few independent newspapers and radio stations, the internet is a vital space for alternative opinion. Almost all of it appears on the blogging platform LiveJournal, known in Russian as Zhivoy Zhurnal, or simply ZheZhe.
Set up by US developer Brad Fitzpatrick in 1998, as a way to communicate online with his friends, LiveJournal - complete with its mascot "Frank the goat" - may seem at first sight a strange medium for Russia's new-found political vibrancy.
By Suzanne Daley, New York Times, Feb. 28/29, 2012
HIGUERA DE LA SERENA, Spain — It didn’t take long for Manuel García Murillo, a bricklayer who took over as mayor here last June, to realize that his town was in trouble. It was 800,000 euros, a little more than $1 million, in the red. There was no cash on hand to pay for anything — and there was work that needed to be done.
