Iranian MPs have approved the first woman minister in the 30-year history of the Islamic republic.

She was one of 18 nominations for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's new cabinet to be approved. Two other women were among three rejected nominees.

The president's choice for defence minister, Ahmad Vahidi, who is wanted by Argentina over a deadly 1994 bombing of a Jewish centre, won strong backing.

The vote follows months of wrangling after disputed elections in June.

Correspondents say Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi, the female health minister-designate, is a hard-line conservative who has in the past proposed introducing segregated health care in Iran, with women treating women and men treating men.

USAID probes the possibility that contractors give a cut to the Taliban.

KABUL -- The United States Agency for International Development has opened an investigation into allegations that its funds for road and bridge construction in Afghanistan are ending up in the hands of the Taliban, through a protection racket for contractors.

And House Foreign Affairs Committee member, Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.) vowed to hold hearings on the issue in the fall, saying: "The idea that American taxpayer dollars are ending up with the Taliban is a case for grave concern."

U.S. officials confirmed that the preliminary investigation and the proposed hearings were sparked by a GlobalPost special report on the funding of the Taliban last month that uncovered a process that has been an open secret in Afghanistan for years among those in international aid organizations. 

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- As many as a dozen men armed with automatic weapons stormed into a drug rehab center in this violent border city Wednesday night, lined up the recovering drug addicts and alcoholics against a wall and opened fire at point-blank range, killing 17 people.

The attack, within sight of the United States border, set a revolting new low in the unremitting wave of vicious crimes Mexico has suffered since President Felipe Calderon launched a frontal assault on the nation's drug cartels in December 2006. Rehab clinics have been a special target, with cartels hunting for rivals hiding or recruiting in them.

[...]

The upsurge of violence in Juarez, where rival cartels have been battling amongst themselves for the lucrative smuggling route to the United States, seems to be an open challenge to Mr. Calderon's government, which has sent 10,000 troops and federal police to patrol the streets and take back the city from the criminals.

Despite the reinforcements, Juarez experienced the most violent month in its history in August, according to local media, with at least 326 homicides. That represented almost half the death toll in all of Mexico. And Juarez, which was Mexico's most violent city in 2008, with 1,600 homicides, is on pace to exceed that figure this year.

In the last two years, gunmen suspected of being tied to drug cartels have now barged into Juarez rehab clinics on four separate occasions and started shooting. With the latest incident, the death toll from clinic attacks now hovers around 32.

President Barack Obama's plan to address the nation's students during the school day Tuesday has polarized parents over whether it's OK for their kids to listen to the speech.

On one side are parents who say the webcast speech to K-12 students is "political recruiting" and "spreading the liberal agenda."

On the other are those who say listening to presidential speeches is an important part of American culture and the education process.

The White House officially announced the speech Wednesday morning, and the U.S. Department of Education followed up with a letter to school principals and a lesson plan for discussing the talk. The White House said the speech will address the importance of studying and staying in school.

"Infant mortality." This sounds clinical and antiseptic - who feels moved when they hear it? - when what we are in fact talking about is dead babies. Here's an example. In Malawi in southeast Africa, the country's soil became badly depleted by overuse, so the democratic government there adopted a sensible policy of subsidising fertiliser. The nation's hungry farmers were given sacks of it at a third of its real cost - and the country bloomed. Then the World Bank damned this as a "market distortion" and said that if Malawi wanted to keep receiving loans it had to stop them at once. So the subsidies stopped, and the country's crops failed. A famine began - and "infant mortality rose".

That's the dull phrase. What we mean is - lots of babies died, totally needlessly. Three years ago, the Malawian government finally told the World Bank to stick its loans, and subsidized fertiliser again. Now nobody there is starving, and the country is the single biggest exporter of corn to the World Food Programme in southern Africa. When on some rare occasion this is mentioned in the news, they might say in passing, "Infant mortality fell." The phrase that tells the truth is: hundreds of thousands of babies stopped dying.

Up to now, Obama has not responded well to this onslaught of unreason. He has had a two-pronged strategy: conciliate the elite economic interests, and joke about the fanatical fringe they are stirring up. He has (shamefully) assured the pharmaceutical companies that an expanded healthcare system will not use the power of government as a purchaser to bargain down drug prices, while wryly saying in public that he "doesn't want to kill Grandma". Rather than challenging these hard interests and bizarre fantasies aggressively, he has tried to flatter and soothe them.

This kind of mania can't be co-opted: it can only be overruled. Sometimes in politics you will have enemies, and they must be democratically defeated. The political system cannot be gummed up by a need to reach out to the maddest people or the greediest constituencies. There is no way to expand healthcare without angering Big Pharma and the Republicaloons. So be it. As Arianna Huffington put it, "It is as though, at the height of the civil rights movement, you thought you had to bring together Martin Luther King and George Wallace and make them agree. It's not how change happens."

However strange it seems, the Republican Party really is spinning off into a bizarre cult who believe Barack Obama is a baby-killer plotting to build death panels for the grannies of America.