be just

Sunni Patients Fear Baghdad Wards : "Last December, a Sunni surgeon was quoted in The Sunday Times as saying that in some hospitals porters and cleaners who support the Mahdi army, a militia loyal to the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, offered doctors 300 US dollars to identify Sunni patients. 'I found that many patients were dying. Most were well and ready to walk out of the hospital. Instead, they left in wooden boxes,” the surgeon told the newspaper. "

The Crime Against Debbie Almontaser -- In These Times On Aug. 20, at a Debbie Almontaser rally held outside the old Tweed Courthouse near City Hall, demonstrators tried to understand how a right-wing newspaper in a city like New York could force the resignation of a respected community figure by tarring her with the “terrorist” brush. Deborah Howard, who worked with Almontaser to get the Khalil Gibran academy off the ground, asked, “Once the tabloids came out with their smear campaign”—the neo-conservative New York Sun also played its part—”where was the counter-media? If this is a Department of Education school, why aren’t they standing behind Debbie?”

Free Iraq: Repugnant Black Water ... سـِيـَان

NPR : U.S. Military Surge Faces Challenges in Sadr City

allAfrica.com: Congo-Kinshasa: Government Forces Commit Worst of Widespread Abuses - UN Report (Page 1 of 1) : "Government soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) remain responsible for the country's worst human rights abuses, carrying out arbitrary executions and raping, robbing or extorting civilians, according to the latest report by the United Nations peacekeeping mission."

'Shiite Taliban' rises as British depart Basra | csmonitor.com : "Basra, Iraq - The billboard in Umm al-Broom Square was meant to advertise a cellphone service. Instead, it has become a message to those who dare to resist the rising tide of fundamentalist Islam in Iraq's second largest city. The female model's face is now covered with black paint. Graffiti scrawled below reads, 'No! No to unveiled women.'"

It is the death of history : "2,000-year-old Sumerian cities torn apart and plundered by robbers. The very walls of the mighty Ur of the Chaldees cracking under the strain of massive troop movements, the privatisation of looting as landlords buy up the remaining sites of ancient Mesopotamia to strip them of their artefacts and wealth. The near total destruction of Iraq's historic past – the very cradle of human civilisation – has emerged as one of the most shameful symbols of our disastrous occupation."