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To Smother Chechen Insurgency, A Campaign of House Burning - NYTimes.com : "In the case of Ms. Basargina, she and her relatives said her family had no connections to the insurgency, but had been under police scrutiny since last year. Before the attack, Ms. Basargina and 11 relatives had lived together in several small buildings behind a wall; the building was badly damaged and is no longer habitable. Their troubles began, they said, when a car formerly owned by her nephew was used by a rebel in an attack last year. The rebel escaped after a skirmish, but abandoned the vehicle, which the police traced back to her nephew, Abubakar Musliyev, 31, the father of five. Mr. Musliyev had sold the car long before, the family said, but the police did not believe him. He was summoned repeatedly to the police station during the ensuing year and was beaten several times, they said. On Aug. 8, he disappeared. His relatives said they did not know where he went; their accounts of his activities ca...

Fatah official admits U.S. vetoes national Palestinian dialogue_English_Xinhua : "RAMALLAH, Sept. 28 (Xinhua) -- A leader from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement on Sunday admitted that Washington vetoes talks between Fatah and its rival Hamas movement. Azzam al-Ahmad, the head of Fatah parliamentary bloc, said that he doesn't deny 'a consistent American veto and interference in the internal Palestinian affairs.' However, al-Ahmad accused Hamas of 'boosting and strengthening that veto' by rejecting to start immediate talks and give up control on the Gaza Strip. The Gaza takeover by force last year complicated ties between Hamas and Fatah, the biggest Palestinian factions. Hamas tightened its grip on Gaza while Fatah responded by consolidating the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) rule in the West Bank. Egypt mediates between the Palestinian factions to launch a national Palestinian dialogue to end the split between the Ga...

Tit-for-tat Kurds reverse Saddam's 'ethnic cleansing' - Yahoo! News by Amal Jayasinghe Sun Sep 28, 2:22 PM ET KHANAQIN, Iraq (AFP) - For Iraqi Kurdish mathematics teacher Mohammed Aziz, two wrongs can make a right. After decades of forced exile by the Baath party of Saddam Hussein, he is back with a vengeance. Aziz was just four years old in 1975 when his family was evicted from Bawaplawi village, near the northern city of Khanaqin, and Arab settlers grabbed their home. Now schoolteacher Aziz is back and has done to the Arabs what they did to him. "Our homes were taken over by the Arabs without paying us any compensation," Aziz, 37, said at the modest single-storey brick house which he has occupied since the fall of Saddam's regime in 2003. "We moved in and took any house that was empty. The Arabs who were here had fled." Saddam's "Arabisation" campaign sought to change the demography of Khanaqin, which originally had a vast majority ...