[source]
The United States plans to withdraw an army brigade based in South Korea and deploy the 4,000 troops in Iraq, the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper reported on Monday.
Washington had recently notified Seoul of the plan, which left open the possibility that the brigade would not return to South Korea after its mission in Iraq, the paper quoted a South Korean government official as saying.
About time. South Korea is easily capable of defending against any conventional attack by the North and in any nuclear attack our troops won’t help anyway. Does anyone seriously believe we wouldn’t defend South Korea even if none of our troops were killed? Oh wait - there’s that South Vietnam in 1975 thing … is that why successive South Korean governments want boots on the ground?
If Daniel Sumner’s actions be treason, as some of his critics contend, then he is glad the most has been made of it.
Sumner, an agricultural economist at the University of California at Davis, played a key role in an international trade case that is shaping up as one of the most significant defeats the United States has ever suffered on the trade front. An analysis that he wrote helped frame a preliminary decision issued two weeks ago by a World Trade Organization panel, which held that the federal subsidies paid to U.S. cotton farmers violate WTO rules because they cause overproduction, drive down world prices and impoverish farmers in developing countries.
What’s clear from the article is that the objection is about Sumner speaking up and not much about his being wrong.
The U.S.-backed investigation into alleged abuses of the United Nations’ Oil for Food program in Iraq has already collected more than 20,000 files from Saddam Hussein’s old regime and hired an American accounting firm to conduct the review. Documents obtained by The Associated Press show the U.S.-backed, Iraqi-run Board of Supreme Audit selected the Ernst & Young firm this week to oversee the audit of the documents gathered from at least 16 former ministries of Saddam’s government.
The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority also is trying to head off a separate investigation launched by former Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi, now an influential member of the Iraqi Governing Council, in hopes that a single, independent investigation will have more credibility.
Chalabi took an early lead in exposing alleged abuses by the U.N.-backed program and has been trying to force the coalition government to give him the $5 million in Iraqi funds set aside for the probe to pay for his effort. The move was strongly resisted by L. Paul Bremer III, who runs the governing Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA.
While it’s good that this is being investigated, I have to agree with some of the commentators about the need to have a single investigation and that might well be an indication of the data getting buried.
Flirting with young women and breaking into houses, Reza is not the sort of figure Iran’s clerical regime would like to celebrate. But he’s rapidly turning into a folk hero.
The Lizard is a comic film that tells the story of Reza, a thief who escapes prison by posing as a cleric. Well on the way to becoming the most popular movie in Iranian history, The Lizard is shown at 2am to meet demand, and cinemas are still having to turn away customers.
[…]
“The movie is part of a series of efforts to weaken the Islamic system and the clerical establishment, and the judiciary must confront such measures,” wrote the daily Jomhuri Islami, an ultra-conservative newspaper.
It’s not the mocking as much as the openness of the mocking. That’s never a good sign for an oppressive regime.