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The USG Open Source Center excerpts and paraphrases editorials in the major Urdu-language Pakistani newspapers concerning the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Pakistan: Urdu Press Roundup on Reaction to Benazir Bhutto AssassinationPakistan — OSC SummarySaturday, December 29, 2007 Note: I decided to file the full text of this report at the Global Affairs blog (click on […]

Mike Huckabee is a smooth-talking, fanatical country preacher who has learned to make himself likeable on camera but who spews all kinds of hateful nonsense when among like-minded devotees. The dark side of Huckabee, the anti-science and anti-gay side of Huckabee, and the anti-Palestinian genocidal side of Huckabee, are all much more dangerous than the […]

Benazir Bhutto was buried in her ancestral village near Larkana in Sindh Province on Friday. Her widower, Asif Ali Zardari and 19-year-old son Bilawal helped lower her coffin into the grave. The Pakistani government predictably blamed the assassination on “al-Qaeda,” but Hillary Clinton and other US politicians rightly called for an independent United Nations commission […]

My column, “With Bhutto gone, does Bush have a Plan B?” is online at Salon.com. Excerpt: ‘ Pakistan’s future is now murky, and to the extent that this nation of 160 million buttresses the eastern flank of American security in the greater Middle East, its fate is profoundly intertwined with America’s own. The money for […]

Benazir Bhutto, the leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, has been assassinated at a rally held Thursday evening near Islamabad. She appears to have been shot by the assassin, who was wearing a suicide bomb belt, which he then detonated to make sure he had finished the job. The Bhuttos are sort of the Kennedys […]

There was no midnight mass among Christians in Iraq again this year. Too dangerous. And of the estimated 800,000 Christians in the country in 2002, as few as half, 400,000, may be left. Many have fled to Syria, joining the 1.5 million Iraqi refugees there. Even some Christians still in the country have been internally […]

Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani on Monday lashed out at Turkey for its air strikes on Iraq. Turkey says it hit terror bases. Bush strongly backed Turkey with a call to PM Erdogan. The US had depended heavily on the Kurds in Iraq. Is this the beginniing of a major rift? Turkey says that its […]

Zogby has just released a national new poll that shows that the proportion of voters who are undecided on both sides of the aisle has fallen dramatically. The chief beneficiaries of the voters making up their minds have been Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee. From there, the story differs dramatically in the two parties, however. […]

Now that all those ‘famous quotes of 2007’ are coming out, people are replaying the answer of Caitlin Upton, a contestant for Miss Teen USA from South Carolina to a question during her pageant. The exchange went like this: Question: Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the United States on a […]