RIGHTS-US: When Guantanamo Is Safer Than Home

Abdul Ra'ouf Omar Mohammad Abu Al-Qassim has been held without charge at the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay for more than five years.

POLITICS: U.N. Accused of Undermining Palestinian State

When Ban Ki-moon was asked about the scathing remarks by his former Middle East envoy denouncing the strongly partisan U.N. role in the ongoing peace talks, the U.N. secretary-general appeared more distressed with the public revelation of a confidential document than with the strong views articulated by his Under-Secretary-General Alvaro de Soto.

LABOUR-IRAQ: A Dramatic Nighttime Escape

First Kuwaiti has been accused repeatedly by dozens of workers from the Philippines and Nepal of forcing them to work in Iraq over the past three years, including by Ramil Autencio who recounted his tale last November while sitting in front of his home - a two-room shack assembled with old wood and sheet metal in metropolitan Manila.

LABOUR-IRAQ: Caught in Trafficking

Trained as an air conditioning repairman and technician, Ramil Autencio says his recruiter in the Philippines agreed to place him in a two-year job at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Kuwait for 450 dollars a month - maybe more with overtime.

POLITICS-US: Iranian "Terror" Expert Has Hardcore Resume

Alireza Jafarzadeh first burst onto the Washington political scene in 2003 when he exposed Iran's clandestine uranium enrichment facility in the small township of Natanz.

IRAQ: Report Calls on U.N. to End “Complicity of Silence”

The U.S. Coalition is the principal cause of Iraq's current woes, charges a report released Wednesday by the Global Policy Forum (GPF), a New York-based watchdog group.

POLITICS-US: A New General for God’s Army?

In recent appearances on two U.S. cable news networks, he was slinging and zinging - the well-rehearsed pitchman for the Biblical "End Times" was dead certain that "Iran is going to have to be attacked" before 2008.

HEALTH-US: Surviving War, Slowly Dying at Home

The U.S. Vets Westside Residence Hall is a hulking eight-story structure a few blocks from Los Angeles International Airport. It's the largest transitional housing and employment centre for homeless veterans in the country, hosting 700 veterans annually.

US-IRAN: New War Rhetoric Undercuts Iraq Talks

U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman's call for cross-border raids into Iran appears to be the culmination of a two-week long campaign by proponents of war to put the military option centre-stage in the U.S. debate over Iran once more.

POLITICS-US: Gates Overhauls Rumsfeld’s Pentagon

Friday's announcement that Gen. Peter Pace will not be nominated for a second term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. Armed Forces marks the latest in a series of moves by Pentagon chief Robert Gates to transform the leadership of the Pentagon and consign his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, to distant memory.

POLITICS-US: Cheney&#39s Iran-Arms-to-Taliban Gambit Rebuffed

A media campaign portraying Iran as supplying arms to the Taliban guerrillas fighting U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, orchestrated by advocates of a more confrontational stance toward Iran in the George W. Bush administration, appears to have backfired last week when Defence Secretary Robert Gates and the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Dan McNeil, issued unusually strong denials.

IRAQ: Blood, Sweat and Tears at New U.S. Embassy

The U.S. Justice Department is actively investigating allegations of forced labour and other abuses by the Kuwaiti contractor now rushing to complete the sprawling 592-million-dollar U.S. embassy project in Baghdad, numerous sources have revealed.

POLITICS: Is JFK Terror Plot for Real? West Indians Wonder

Until U.S. federal and state officials called a press conference in New York last weekend to tell the world that four Caribbean nationals were implicated in an alleged plot to bomb fuel tanks and infrastructure at New York's JFK Airport, most people in the tourism-dependent region saw terrorism as a U.S. problem, but perhaps not anymore.

POLITICS-US: Could al Qaeda Attack Trigger War With Iran?

Following revelations of a George W. Bush administration policy to hold Iran responsible for any al Qaeda attack on the U.S. that could be portrayed as planned on Iranian soil, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksi warned last week that Washington might use such an incident as a pretext to bomb Iran.

RIGHTS: Groups Sue U.S. Over Fate of 39 “Disappeared”

Three human rights groups sued the U.S. government Thursday to force it to disclose what it knows about the fate of more than three dozen detainees in the "global war on terror" who are believed to have been held by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in secret prisons at some point over the past five years and who remain unaccounted for.

POLITICS: Is U.S. Eyeing U.N. as Dumping Ground for Iraq?

Faced with an unwinnable five-year war in Iraq, the United States may be looking towards the United Nations to extricate it out of the growing military quagmire, according to diplomats and political analysts.

IRAQ: Broken Lives and Broken Hearts

With the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq in its fifth year, one leading study estimates that more than 655,000 Iraqis have been killed - with no end to the violence yet in sight. Left behind are loved ones who continue to mourn their loss, as well as what might have been.

EDUCATION-US: A Rough Road From Boot Camp to College

Derek Adams played with his two-year-old son on the grounds of Veterans Upward Bound, an outreach and education programme for former U.S. military service members outside the campus of California State University, Humboldt.

POLITICS-US: Aide’s Sentence Caps Star-Crossed Year for Cheney

Tuesday's sentencing to 30 months in prison of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby by a federal judge for lying to government investigators about his role in leaking the identity of a CIA operative marks the latest in a series of blows to Vice President Dick Cheney.

RIGHTS-US: Guantanamo Courts Hit Setback

The military tribunal system designed to prosecute terrorist suspects detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba hit a major snag when a U.S. military judge dismissed charges in cases against a man accused of being Osama Bin Laden's driver and another defendant who was 15 years old at the time he was detained by U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

MIDEAST: U.S. Peace Plans Limp Toward Bethlehem

Four decades ago, as the United States was embroiled in a cold war battle in Southeast Asia, Israel fought its Arab neighbours in a six-day clash that helped shape the modern Middle East.