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At Least 40 Civilians Killed as US Strikes Afghan Wedding Party | News From Antiwar.com Afghan officials and local residents say that a US air strike struck an Afghan wedding party on Monday, killing at least 40 civilians and wounding 28 others (including the bride). The strike occurred in the Shah Wali Kot district of Kandahar Province. Reporters on the scene say that villagers are still search the debris for survivors, and the toll is expected to rise even further. Afghan President Hamid Karzai warned that bombings were not the way to win the war on terrorism, and said he hoped President-elect Obama would make it a priority to stop killing Afghan civilians. US spokesman Commander Jeff Bender said an investigation is ongoing, and “if innocent people were killed in this operation, we apologize and express our condolences.” This is the largest incident of US-inflicted civilian casualties in Afghanistan in over two months. In late August, a US air strike in Herat Province killed 90 civil...

The punditocracy's Seven Biggest Blunders of the 2008 election | Salon News Oct. 23, 2008 | This has been a campaign season when the conventional wisdom has fared about as well as Bob Barr's prospects for moving into the Oval Office. During the primaries, the political prediction business -- all those glib quasi-certainties spouted by TV talking heads and embedded in the opening paragraphs of newspaper and magazine articles -- gave us such fantasies as Rudy Giuliani masquerading as a serious presidential candidate and mistakenly consigned John McCain to the GOP dust heap. Remember when Hillary Clinton was prematurely anointed as the nominee or the dire warnings that a protracted Clinton-Obama primary fight would, in a typical burst of Democratic self-destructiveness, cost the party the White House? Of course, that was all long ago and everyone involved in these bum calls has been sent to their rooms without supper. But what about the errors of the last two months -- the equally...

Moscow Removes Ingushetia President - Yahoo! News : "Spontaneous dancing broke out in the streets Thursday night in the tiny Russian republic of Ingushetia, which borders the troubled Chechnya region. The reason for the celebration was that Moscow had accepted the 'voluntary resignation' of Ingush President Murat Zyazikov. No part of the Russian Caucasus today has a political situation hotter than Ingushetia's, and no leader in the volatile region has been less effective and more embattled than Zyazikov. Moscow had picked Zyazikov, a general of the FSB (the state security body that succeeded the KGB), in 2002 to replace then-Ingush President General Ruslan Aushev, whose 'fault' had been immensely popularity among his people and his opposition to the war in Chechnya. But under Zyazikov's tenure, Ingushetia has supplanted Chechnya as the permanent hub of anti-Moscow Islamist resistance in the Caucasus. Chechen rebels now wage hit-and-run attacks from the Ingu...

US still the villain in Iraq's former rebel bastion - Yahoo! News : "Anti-American sentiment and distrust for Washington runs deep even among senior Iraqi officials in Fallujah. 'I want to see the Americans leave as early as possible,' said Mayor Saad Awwad Rashid, a man well respected in Fallujah for his pro-active approach to ease the daily problems of his constituents. 'People hate Americans, especially when they come to arbitrary arrests, including of women. I want the Americans to go out of Iraq. It does not matter who wins US elections. It is of no interest to us.' The Sunnis of Fallujah, who have to carry special identity cards to move in and out of the city, also have no patience towards Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki or the security deal he is negotiating with Washington. 'We don't need Americans for three more years. We don't need SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement),' said Abdullah, referring to the security pact that will determine the p...

Top Obama Adviser Has Long Ties to Neocons - by Michael Flynn : "When Wolfowitz was tapped to head the State Department's Policy Planning Staff after the election of Ronald Reagan, he included Ross in his team of assistants, which, according to Mann, would go on to become, over the next two decades, 'the heart of a new neoconservative network within the foreign policy bureaucracy.' Other Wolfowitz team members from that time included I. Lewis Libby, a Washington lawyer who later became notorious as the disgraced former chief aide to Vice President Dick Cheney; James Roche, President George W. Bush's Air Force secretary who resigned after being implicated in the Boeing tanker leasing scandal; Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. ambassador to the UN and post-invasion ambassador to Iraq; Alan Keyes, the perennial Republican presidential candidate; and Francis Fukuyama, the 'end of history' theorist and erstwhile neoconservative ally who turned against the faction after the...

Sixty refugees found dead on beach - Yahoo! News UK Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said the latest victims of the perilous smuggling route across the Gulf of Aden had set off from the Somali port city of Bosasso, fleeing war and poverty in their homelands. In one of two incidents that caused the deaths, smugglers tipped the refugees into the sea at night after noticing lights on land and fearing they would be spotted by the coastguard, MSF quoted survivors as saying. "They forced us into the sea, even if the water was too deep. Several people did not know how to swim and they drowned," one survivor said. An eight-months pregnant woman was injured by the boat's propellor after being forced overboard. In a second incident, MSF workers discovered a group who had made it to shore after their boat capsized. They said they had buried 23 fellow passengers. "The boat was stuck almost upside down in the sand, not far from the beach. The fishermen were trying to find survivors...

Al Jazeera English - Africa - Somali fighters stone 'rape victim' A Somali girl who said she had been raped has been stoned to death in Somalia after being accused of adultery, a human rights group has said. Amnesty International said in a press release on Friday that the victim, Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, had been 13 years old - not 23 as earlier reports had suggested. Duhulow was stoned to death on October 27 by dozens of men in a stadium packed with 1,000 spectators in the southern port city of Kismayo, Amnesty International and Somali media reported, citing witnesses. The armed group in charge of Kismayo had accused her of adultery after she reported that three men had raped her, Amnesty said. "This child suffered a horrendous death at the behest of the armed opposition groups who currently control Kismayo," David Copeman, Amnesty International's Somalia campaigner, said in a statement. Initial local media reports said Duhulow was 23, but her father told Amnesty I...