Today, Muammar Qaddafi’s forces induced a pan­icked rebel retreat from Brega, pep­pering the town – home to one Libya’s largest petro­chem­ical com­plexes – with rocket and mortar fire.

Before the pres­i­dent was deposed, Elvin Santos seemed likely to win November’s elec­tion. Now protesters pelt him with insults and eggs. (...)

A mil­lion and a half Palestinians are learning the hard way that democ­racy isn’t so good if you vote the wrong way. In 2006, they elected Hamas when the US and Israel wanted them to sup­port the more-mod­erate Fatah. As a result, having long ago lost their homes and prop­erty, Gazans have endured three years of embargo, crip­pling short­ages of food and basic neces­si­ties, and total eco­nomic col­lapse.
We spoke again Saturday with three of our long­time Gazan con­tacts. They and their fam­i­lies, all Fatah sup­porters, were in their eleventh day without elec­tricity, run­ning water, or heat. (...)

President Bashar al-Assad’s eco­nomic lib­er­al­iza­tion poli­cies have spurred many Syrian-Americans, like Habbal, to leave their com­fort­able American lives and return to Syria. “There are tremen­dous oppor­tu­ni­ties right now in Syria. Things eco­nom­i­cally are accel­er­ating rapidly and every day there are new unor­ga­nized oppor­tu­ni­ties,” Habbal says.
New laws are easing over 40 years of pri­vate invest­ment restric­tions, opening up most eco­nomic sec­tors to pri­vate cap­ital, dra­mat­i­cally loos­ening Syria’s tight for­eign exchange reg­u­la­tions, and rational­izing tax rates. (...)

Thursday’s tri­umphant return is a reminder that much of Pakistani pol­i­tics is per­son­ality and pageantry. And charisma alone might be enough for Bhutto. It is a cal­culus born of expe­ri­ence, banking on her ability to turn decades-old alle­giances to her family name and home state into votes. But heading into the cam­paign season for January par­lia­men­tary elec­tions, the strategy car­ries new risks, experts say: Pakistan is changing, becoming more polit­i­cally sophis­ti­cated as a raft of news chan­nels plays an increas­ingly impor­tant role in shaping public opinion. (...)

In Djibouti, US forces combat ter­rorism with civil affairs work. Will this be a model for a future US mil­i­tary com­mand in Africa?
When Petty Officer Samson James Hathaway and his US naval con­struc­tion team arrived in the vil­lage of Hol-Hol three months ago, they stood in the 100-degree heat and looked at the camels padding through the boul­ders and dust.
“We’ve got our work cut out for us here,” thought Petty Officer Hathaway. (...)

A recent murder indi­cates a back­lash by some against women as their rights and oppor­tu­ni­ties increase.
Working for the public was a gift from God for Zille Huma Usman, Punjab’s provin­cial min­ister for social wel­fare.
But two weeks ago, Muhammed Sarwar vio­lently dis­agreed, killing her before a crowd because, he said, God does not allow women to work. He later told police that he felt no remorse for his crime.
Ms. Usman’s death, which shocked the country, comes at a moment of vio­lent flux over the role of women in Pakistan. (...)

An iden­tity crisis between the Nepalese majority and the Madheshi people has fueled the protests, which have killed 19.
KATHMANDU, NEPAL - After the induc­tion of Maoist law­makers into a 330-member interim par­lia­ment on Jan. 15, many Nepalis thought they were near the end of a decade-long insur­gency that had claimed 14,000 lives. But vio­lent demon­stra­tions in Nepal’s low­lands have threat­ened to derail the country’s fragile peace pro­cess that only one month ago looked full of promise. (...)

Karina, a Filipina migrant, was drawn, like thou­sands of poor Asians, by the prospect of good pay as a maid in a wealthy Qatari home. She and another maid live in a shoebox-size room in a house (shown) where Karina’s job is to clean and drive cars.

By almost any mea­sure, Salam Mohsin has set him­self up well to suc­ceed in India. He has com­pleted his pri­mary edu­ca­tion, he speaks a little English, and he is now attending busi­ness col­lege. Yet every time he has looked to a future beyond the rick­shaws and repair shops of Hyderabad’s Old City, he has seen only closed doors.
When Mr. Mohsin applied for his retired father’s old gov­ern­ment job, not only was he rejected, but his father’s pen­sion was cut. Banks have repeat­edly denied him loans for his plan to buy and reopen a dere­lict fac­tory.
This, he says, is the life of a Muslim in India, And per­haps for the first time, this Hindu nation is begin­ning to believe him. For the past 60 years, Indian Muslims have more often been the sub­jects of blame - for ter­rorism and the 1947 par­ti­tion with Pakistan - than sym­pathy. (...)

As Kim Jong Il con­tinues to elude efforts to con­strain his nuclear pro­gram, a grudging regard for the North Korean leader’s tac­tical skills is rising.
Mr. Kim was once thought to be over his head as a leader. But 12 years after the death of his father, Kim Il Sung, the son is showing bril­liance as a dic­tator. Some experts say that Kim, in his own way, may be shrewder than the father who built the nation.
“Kim was in many ways dealt a weaker hand than his father, but he has played it better,” says Brian Myers, a North Korea spe­cialist at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea. (...)

The policy was for­mal­ized in 1970 between then-Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and President Richard Nixon, who agreed to accept Israel’s nuclear status on con­di­tion that it observe a rig­orous vow of silence. In order not to dis­rupt the US drive to gain non­pro­lif­er­a­tion com­mit­ments from other coun­tries, Israel com­mitted to remain mum about its nuclear pro­gram, to avoid tests, and not to threaten other coun­tries with attack.
Israel’s nuclear deter­rent is cred­ited by ana­lysts with con­vincing Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to abandon hopes of a mil­i­tary defeat of Israel, and with dis­suading Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from fit­ting the Scuds he fired at Israel in the 1991 Gulf War with non­con­ven­tional war­heads. (...)

Alongside “neolib­eral” eco­nomics and President Bush, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has another enemy on his list: beer trucks.
On his road to Sunday’s pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, which pits the former mil­i­tary colonel turned pres­i­dent against Manuel Rosales, a con­ser­va­tive can­di­date backed mostly by Venezuela’s middle and upper class, Mr. Chávez has ordered the National Guard to stop delivery trucks from selling beer in the streets of poor neigh­bor­hoods.
Only licensed estab­lish­ments can sell alcohol legally here. (...)

Odalys Ibarra has lived in the same home - a decrepit, two-bed­room brick house that she shares with 10 others - her entire life.
Yet these days, on her walk home up the steep slope of El Valle, one of the poorest neigh­bor­hoods in this cap­ital city, she passes a free med­ical clinic staffed with Cuban doc­tors, a super­market that sells dis­counted rice and tomato sauce, and a state-funded kitchen that pre­pares and gives out free meat stew and cookies - pro­grams called “mis­sions” that are the corner­stone of President Hugo Chávez’s domestic policy. (...)

Before the Iraq war started, Bashir Al-Zubi had plans to grad­uate from the ranks of renter to Jordanian home­owner.
However, housing prices have soared since the war ignited in the spring of 2003, and thou­sands of Iraqis fled to Jordan. An apart­ment that would have cost Mr. Zubi $42,000 before the war now costs closer to $70,000. But the increases have affected not just the real estate market, but the daily cost of living as well. (...)

All but a few civil­ians have fled this town in Sudan’s trou­bled Darfur region. Instead, Tine’s mar­ket­place is filled with feared jan­jaweed fighters sporting flip-flops, assault rifles, and a mish­mash of uni­forms and T-shirts. African Union (AU) com­man­ders say more than 1,000 jan­jaweed mili­ti­amen arrived in town just over two weeks ago to back up 3,000 gov­ern­ment troops.
Under a peace agree­ment signed last May, Sudan’s gov­ern­ment was sup­posed to disarm the jan­jaweed and inform the AU com­man­ders of any troop move­ments. They have done nei­ther. (...)

With his graying beard, shalwar chemise tunic, and madrassah-style cap, Sheikh Raed Salah looks more like a Pakistani mullah than most of the “Palestinians inside,” his term for the 1.4 mil­lion Arabs like him­self who live in Israel.
Other terms that Sheikh Salah speaks in would easily make most Israelis uncom­fort­able.
The charis­matic leader of the Islamic Movement of the North warns sup­porters, as he did through the holy month Ramadan, that the Al-Aqsa Mosque - Islam’s third-holiest place - is more in danger every day. The threat: Israel. (...)

In some ways, it looks as if the gen­erals that deposed elected prime min­ister Thaksin Shinawatra in a blood­less coup last month want to insti­tute a com­pletely new eco­nomic doc­trine.
Retired General Surayud Chulanont, the junta-appointed premier, ini­tially wor­ried the busi­ness com­mu­nity when he told reporters his one-year gov­ern­ment would focus on “suf­fi­ciency economy” and “indi­ca­tors of hap­pi­ness” instead of eco­nomic growth. (...)

A mas­sive slab of rein­forced con­crete pokes from the stony earth of this des­o­late hill­side like a broken tooth. It’s all that remains of a dyna­mited Hizbullah bunker built just 100 yards from the Israeli border.
From this sprawling net­work of bunkers and tun­nels, Hizbullah fighters with­stood mas­sive Israeli airstrikes during the recent war. It allowed the Lebanese guer­rillas to fire rockets at northern Israel right up to the Aug. 14 cease-fire.
But the deploy­ment of up to 15,000 for­eign troops and another 15,000 Lebanese sol­diers into south Lebanon, as well as tight­ened restric­tions at Lebanon’s sea and land entry points, sug­gests that Hizbullah will be unable to revive its well-entrenched mil­i­tary pres­ence along the border with Israel, casting into doubt a future role for its vaunted mil­i­tary wing. (...)

A blood­less coup in Thailand has upended the country’s fragile democ­racy, to the delight of many middle-class activists who had cam­paigned for months for the removal of Thaksin Shinawatra, the pop­ulist prime min­ister. But the manner of his removal by Army offi­cers loyal to the Thai monarch exposes the shallow roots of the demo­cratic insti­tu­tions that grew in the shadow of past mil­i­tary regimes.
Mr. Thaksin, whose party has won three elec­tions since 2001, had repeat­edly accused his oppo­nents of plot­ting a coup. Wednesday, Thailand’s king endorsed the mil­i­tary coup leaders, who have pledged to restore civilian rule within weeks. (...)

A gov­ern­ment min­ister in the Palestinian Authority, who was arrested and held by Israeli author­i­ties for more than six weeks this summer, says that during his inter­ro­ga­tion he was tied for hours in a painful posi­tion known as the shabah. The tech­nique, which Israeli secu­rity offi­cials had argued was an effec­tive way to put pres­sure on a sus­pect, was banned by Israel’s Supreme Court in 1999.
An East Jerusalem lawyer says that two other top-level offi­cials in the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority, who were arrested in the after­math of the June 25 kid­nap­ping by Hamas mil­i­tants of an Israeli army cor­poral, have been sub­jected to the same treat­ment. (...)

When the top Marine com­mander in Iraq addressed crit­i­cism that US forces appeared to be losing the polit­ical, if not the mil­i­tary, fight in Anbar Province recently, he said that suc­cess rests as much on restoring a mea­sure of eco­nomic sta­bility and basic ser­vices as it does on ending Iraq’s sec­tarian blood­shed.
“Economic devel­op­ment and the estab­lish­ment of social order and public ser­vices ... are the con­di­tions which must be set that will result in the sup­port of the local people, and ulti­mately cause the defeat of this ter­rorist-backed insur­gency,” Maj. Gen. Richard Zilmer said ear­lier this week.
But Iraq’s economy is weaker than at any point since the US inva­sion. (...)

When vil­lagers in this restive corner of India real­ized that an offi­cial was siphoning off food and fuel meant for the poor, they had a choice. They could go to the author­i­ties, or turn to Maoist rebels.
Worried the gov­ern­ment would get bogged down in bureau­cracy and the Maoists would only invite blood­shed, the vil­lagers chose a new route: They broad­cast their case on com­mu­nity radio. (...)

A sprawling, yet largely hidden, war is raging in India’s rural coun­tryside, and after years of ignoring it, Delhi is sig­nalling a mil­i­tary coun­terof­fen­sive.
India’s Maoist insur­gents, also called Naxalites, have expanded their area of oper­a­tions from just four states 10 years ago to half of India’s 28 states today. In 165 dis­tricts, they claim to run par­allel “People’s” gov­ern­ments. This year alone, fighting between rebel and gov­ern­ment forces has claimed more than 500lives - many civilian.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh turned heads recently by calling the Naxalites, “The single biggest internal secu­rity chal­lenge ever faced by our country.” (...)

Jill Carroll, a free­lance reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, was kid­napped by Sunni Muslim insur­gents in Baghdad on Jan. 7, 2006.
Over the next 82 days, she was shut­tled blind­folded among at least six safe houses and had closer con­tact with Sunni insur­gents than any American who has lived to tell the tale.
She cooked with the women. She played with the chil­dren. She was locked away in rooms to the sound of cocking guns. (...)

With goat­like agility, Yussef Jaafar scram­bles over the rubble that, until a few hours ear­lier, had been the home of his aunt, Im Suheil Qudsi.
Somewhere beneath that tangle of con­crete, twisted steel rods, and thick gray dust - the after­math of an Israeli airstrike - lay the remains of Mrs. Qudsi and her 30-year-old daughter-in-law and her three chil­dren, ages 4 to 11. “They are under the rubble but no one will help me,” Mr. Jaafar says.
His is but one example of the human­i­tarian crisis that is unfolding in south Lebanon, where, since last Wednesday, Israel has been pounding the scruffy vil­lages that dot these stony hills and val­leys. (...)

Israel dra­mat­i­cally esca­lated its con­fronta­tion with Lebanon over the fate of two cap­tured sol­diers in a series of tar­geted airstrikes Thursday, killing more than 50 civil­ians.
At the same time, Israeli airstrikes kept the pres­sure on Gaza, seeking to release another sol­dier cap­tured by Hamas-linked mil­i­tants on June 25.
The seizing of the sol­diers and Israel’s response have sparked the most trou­bling crisis between Israel and its neigh­bors in more than a decade. Israel’s sharp esca­la­tion, cou­pled with uncom­pro­mising rhetoric from all three sides, leaves little room for vio­lence to sub­side (...)

New study takes into account long-term costs of health­care for wounded sol­diers.
By Tom Regan | csmon­itor.com
A new study by Columbia University economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize in eco­nomics in 2001, and Harvard lec­turer Linda Bilmes con­cludes that the total costs of the Iraq war could top the $2 tril­lion mark. Reuters reports this total, which is far above the US admin­is­tra­tion’s prewar pro­jec­tions, takes into account the long term health­care costs for the 16,000 US sol­diers injured in Iraq so far. (...)

BAGHDAD - Iraqi spe­cial forces sol­diers Ali Jabbar and Mohammed Ali insist they mete out jus­tice fairly. They beat only the pris­oners they know did some­thing wrong, not the inno­cent ones.
In March, when a rocket attack on one of their bases missed the target but angered the sol­diers, they searched the area and found two sus­pects.
“You want to know the truth? My arms are still tired from hit­ting those guys,” laughs Mr. Jabbar in an inter­view along with Mr. Ali in Baghdad.
Throughout the war in Iraq, the bru­tality of the bat­tle­field has occa­sion­ally spilled into inter­ro­ga­tion rooms and prisons. The cen­tral figure in the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal, Pfc. Lynndie England, pleaded guilty Monday to seven counts of mistreating pris­oners. (...)

For US forces in Iraq, the good news is that they appear to be making pro­gress in their battle against an entrenched insur­gency. The bad news is that the insur­gents are far from defeated - and it will be some time before Iraqi gov­ern­ment forces can fight the rebels on their own. (...)

Across Europe,the con­flicting cur­rents of sec­u­larism, Christianity, and Islam are com­pelling Europeans to wrestle with their values as never before. In this first install­ment of a three-part series, the Monitor exam­ines the forces that are shaping European iden­tity - and explores why the Continent is debating what role, if any, reli­gion should play in public life. (...)

Pol Pot’s social exper­i­ment killed 20 per­cent of Cambodia
By Clayton Jones
Reading the biog­raphy of a 20th-cen­tury tyrant takes courage. The tales of atroc­i­ties can be numbing, the motives unclear, and the lessons uncer­tain. Evil seems like a lurking char­acter in such books, either in one man, the body politic, or for­eign players, and is even­tu­ally exposed as, well, a rather stupid mis­take. (...)

Every day for the past year, Los Angeles County jail offi­cials, who oversee the largest local jail system in the world, have been releasing pris­oners before their sen­tence is up: as many as 600 in a day, and 47,000 in a year - nearly enough to fill Dodger Stadium.

The Associated Press reports that the US gov­ern­ment is still financing research to create pow­erful soft­ware tools that could mine mil­lions of public and pri­vate records for infor­ma­tion about (...)

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Ascherman, an immi­grant from Erie, Pa., is the head of Rabbis for Human Rights, an orga­ni­za­tion of 90 rabbis, almost all of them immi­grants from Western coun­tries, who bring alleged human rights (...)

Dressed in army fatigues, his black beret tucked onto his shoulder, he joined a protest this week of more than a thou­sand Ethiopian Israelis. They demanded that their rel­a­tives be brought to (...)