News & Politics Blog 1328 items | updated May 17 2013

Pakistani jets bombed militant targets in the main insurgent stronghold along the Afghan border Tuesday ahead of an expected ground offensive there, while the army killed 26 insurgents elsewhere in the northwest, authorities said.

The army says 80 percent of the militant attacks plaguing nuclear-armed Pakistan are planned from South Waziristan, while the United States says insurgent leaders blamed for spiraling violence in Afghanistan are also based in the lawless, remote area.

Militants are holding up to 15 soldiers hostage inside Pakistan’s army headquarters today after they and others attacked the complex earlier in the day, killing at least six soldiers.

Army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas says no army or intelligence leaders are among those being held.

The militants, armed with assault rifles and grenades and wearing military uniforms, stormed the heavily guarded compound in the city of Rawalpindi.

"I remember when the British rulers attacked Waziristan," said Hazrat Hussein, a farmer aged 70 who has shouldered a rusty Kalashnikov to join the fight. "The British could not control these tribes," he added with pride.

This is an odd award. You'd expect it to come later in Obama's presidency and tied to some particular event or accomplishment. But the unmistakable message of the award is one of the consequences of a period in which the most powerful country in the world, the 'hyper-power' as the French have it, became the focus of destabilization and in real if limited ways lawlessness. A harsh judgment, yes. But a dark period. And Obama has begun, if fitfully and very imperfectly to many of his supporters, to steer the ship of state in a different direction. If that seems like a meager accomplishment to many of the usual Washington types it's a profound reflection of their own enablement of the Bush era and how compromised they are by it, how much they perpetuated the belief that it was 'normal history' rather than dark aberration.

Barack Obama's critics have long accused him of being a man of "just words," rather than concrete actions and accomplishments. The stunning decision to award him the Nobel Peace prize for, basically, his rhetoric, will almost certainly infuriate his detractors in America more than it will delight his supporters.

Obama isn't the first American president to win the Nobel Peace Prize, but he's the first to win it without having accomplished anything. In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt (five years on the job) had encouraged international arbitration and helped mediate peace between Russia and Japan. In 1919, Woodrow Wilson (six years on the job) helped end the First World War through American intervention and then worked for peace afterward — the Versailles Conference was a disaster, but nobody understood quite how at the time and Wilson, for all his faults, was certainly well intentioned. In 2002, Jimmy Carter (more than two decades after the job) was recognized, rightly or wrongly, for a variety of humanitarian efforts. They all had track records. Obama's award is simply the projection of wishful thinking.

On the eve of the National Equality March expected to draw thousands to the nation's capital this weekend, President Obama is scheduled to deliver the keynote speech at the biggest black-tie, seen-and-be-seen dinner of the Human Rights Campaign, the country's largest gay organization.

Assaulting people because of their sexual orientation would become a U.S. hate crime in legislation the House is set to vote on Thursday. The bill would significantly expand the hate crimes law enacted in the days after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. With the expected House passage and eventual approval by the Senate, federal prosecutors will for the first time be able to intervene in cases of violence perpetrated against gays based on their sexual orientation.

President Barack Obama plans to nominate an openly gay lawyer as the United States' ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa, an administration official said Wednesday.

David Huebner was the lawyer who would be announced for the post, said an official who would speak only on condition of anonymity ahead of an announcement.

If confirmed by the Senate, Huebner would the administration's first openly gay ambassador. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both had openly gay ambassadors during their terms.

Dr. Roger Browne was once one of Kentucky's most popular pain doctors.

His office, however, was 850 miles away, in Broward County, Florida.

When federal agents raided Browne's Coral Springs clinic, Americare Health and Rehabilitation, last year, they found medical files on nearly 500 Kentucky residents who had received painkillers from the doctor.

Browne was just one part of a vast pill-trafficking industry stretching from Broward County, in South Florida, through rural Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio and West Virginia.

Squads of traffickers dispatched from those states descend on the Fort Lauderdale area almost daily to buy oxycodone, methadone and other narcotics from doctors at local pain clinics and resell them in Appalachia, according to interviews with police and court records.

Cars from Kentucky loaded with passengers can be seen clogging the parking lots of some Broward clinics. One discount airline flying from West Virginia to Fort Lauderdale is so popular with drug dealers that police have dubbed it the "O.C. Express."

"We're inundated with it. Florida is killing us," said Sheriff Bill Lewis of Lewis County, Ky., population 14,000. "There's a carload that leaves here so often — hell, every week or so — to go to Florida."

Iranian media said he was an expert on radioactive isotopes for medical uses at Malek Ashtar University, in Tehran. "We've obtained documents about the US involvement in Shahram Amiri's disappearance," Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, said, according to the semi-official Fars news agency. "We hold Saudi Arabia responsible for Shahram Amiri's situation and consider the US to be involved in his arrest."

A suicide bomb exploded outside the Indian embassy in Kabul this morning, killing 17 people and wounding dozens.

The force of the rush-hour blast flattened walls and rattled windows up to a mile away. Television news footage showed soldiers and passersby pulling a severed leg from a destroyed vehicle.

The Afghanistan interior ministry, which is based in the same road as the Indian embassy, confirmed that 15 civilians and two Afghan police officers were killed. Officials said at least 76 people were wounded.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the explosion and confirmed that the embassy was the target.

The U.S. Army is looking to battle the improvised explosive device (IED) threat with new armored vehicles, increased surveillance in the sky, and… advertising. Mad Men versus militias, if you will.

Late last month, the Information Operations division of the Army’s Combined Joint Task Force 82 sent out a call for proposals for a “comprehensive strategic marketing and information campaign” for eastern Afghanistan. “The over arching objective of this media and advertising campaign is to influence the Afghanistan people at all levels (strategic, operational and tactical) [that] will directly translate in the reduction of the number of IED devices used against the Afghanistan people and Coalitional [sic] forces.”

When Mohammed Warda first took his bride in his arms she looked "as if she had just stepped out of a grave that was filled with earth." He had spent an hour sitting nervously by a big hole in the ground in the Gaza Strip, while May crawled backwards through the tunnel, keeping her eyes closed because of the sand that trickled from the roof. Her groom had to pay $1,500 (€1,021) for her to be smuggled through a tunnel from the Egyptian side of the border to the Gaza Strip. And 23-year-old May knew the whole time that the risky undertaking could cost her her life.

Mr. Obama seemed to be searching for some sort of middle ground, saying he wanted to “dispense with the straw man argument that this is about either doubling down or leaving Afghanistan,” as White House officials later described his remarks.

"We had and have no plan of harming countries of the world, including those in Europe ... our goal is the independence of the country and the building of an Islamic state," the Taliban said in a statement on the group's website www.shahamat.org.

"Still, if you (NATO and U.S. troops) want to colonize the country of proud and pious Afghans under the baseless pretext of a war on terror, then you should know that our patience will only increase and that we are ready for a long war."

Sixty-five percent of US voters "are willing to have American soldiers 'fight and possibly die' to eliminate the threat of terrorists operating from Afghanistan," according to the Quinnipiac University poll. Only 28 percent said otherwise.

Three guards stood around him as two nurses tried to insert needles into his arms. "The female nurse tried three separate times to access veins in the middle of my left arm. The male nurse tried three separate times to access veins ... in the middle of my right arm," Broom said in the affidavit. The nurses worked for 30 minutes without success and then took a break. "After the break, the female nurse tried twice to access veins in my left arm. She must have hit a muscle because the pain made me scream out loud," Broom said. "The first time the male nurse successfully accessed a vein in my right arm. He attempted to insert the IV, but he lost it and blood started to run down my arm."

Eventually the female nurse decided she could not go on and walked out of the room. A second break was called.

When the attempt to execute him resumed Broom said he was in such pain: "I tried to assist them by helping to tie my own arm." The male nurse massaged Broom's left arm and laid hot towels across it in an attempt to make a vein stand out, but it proved futile and a third break was called.

"At that point I became very upset. I began to cry because I was in pain and my arms were swelling," said Broom. "I requested that they stop the process and I requested to speak with my attorney."

But the attempt to kill him did not stop. A third nurse entered the room and hunted for a vein in Broom's right ankle. The needle hit the bone and he screamed.

After two hours the prison director, Terry Collins, contacted Strickland who called off the execution.

In August, sudden storms flooded many of the vast camps, submerging toilets and contaminating water.

Thousands of makeshift homes were also damaged in the rainfall.

Now the Sri Lankan government says it is rapidly installing drainage systems in the camps ahead of the monsoon.

About 10% of refugees have been allowed to leave, and the government says it intends to resettle most of the others by the end of this year.

The announcement came after the UK Development Minister Mike Foster visited the biggest camp at Menik Farm.

He said 70% of people should be able to leave and stay with host families.

Refugees say conditions are poor, with inadequate drinking water and drains, and illness due to the hot conditions. Many are pleading to be allowed home.

On Monday, minor clashes broke out at the mosque, although tens of thousands of Jewish worshippers attended a blessing ceremony at the Western Wall for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot without major incident.

Police said they closed the mosque to male worshippers under 50 after finding wheelbarrows full of stones inside the complex.

Elsewhere in Jerusalem, an Israeli policeman was stabbed in the neck while carrying out an inspection on a bus.

Reports said youths began throwing stones after a Palestinian was arrested in connection with the attack.