Analysis by Jim Lobe*

WASHINGTON, Mar 13, 2010 (IPS) - "Condemn" is not a word that rolls trippingly off the tongue of a U.S. politician addressing anything having to do with actions, however objectionable, by Israel.

So it was no surprise that close observers of U.S. Middle East policy sat up a lot straighter in their seats when Vice President Joseph Biden used the word not once, but twice, during his visit to Israel this week in reference to the Israeli Interior Ministry's announcement that it intends to build 1,600 new housing units for Jews in an Arab neighbourhood of East Jerusalem.

"I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem," said Biden, considered among Israel's staunchest supporters during his several decades in Congress.

"The substance and timing of the announcement, particularly with the launching of (U.S.-mediated) proximity talks (between Israel and the Palestine Authority), is precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now...," noted Biden.

In a remarkable show of displeasure, he subsequently kept Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu waiting 90 minutes before joining him for an official dinner and, according to Israeli press accounts, gave top Israeli officials a private tongue-lashing over how such actions by the Jewish state incite Islamic extremism across the Arab world and beyond.

Forty-eight hours later, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, clearly rejecting Netanyahu's apology over the unfortunate coincidence of the Ministry's announcement with Biden's arrival, joined the fray.

ast Easter, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, a 31-year-old mom with a $30,000-a-year job as a medical assistant, announced to her family that she had converted to Islam. A few months later, she began posting to Facebook forums whose headings included "STOP caLLing MUSLIMS TERRORISTS!"

On Sept. 11, she suddenly left Leadville, Colo., a small town in the Rocky Mountains, for Denver, then for New York, to meet and marry a Muslim man she connected with online, her family says. Ms. Paulin-Ramirez, who is 5-foot-11 and blonde, phoned her mother and stepfather in Leadville, providing them with an address in Waterford, Ireland, they say.

By Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Mar 8, 2010 (IPS) - For weeks, the U.S. public followed the biggest offensive of the Afghanistan War against what it was told was a "city of 80,000 people" as well as the logistical hub of the Taliban in that part of Helmand. That idea was a central element in the overall impression built up in February that Marja was a major strategic objective, more important than other district centres in Helmand.

It turns out, however, that the picture of Marja presented by military officials and obediently reported by major news media is one of the clearest and most dramatic pieces of misinformation of the entire war, apparently aimed at hyping the offensive as a historic turning point in the conflict.

Marja is not a city or even a real town, but either a few clusters of farmers' homes or a large agricultural area covering much of the southern Helmand River Valley.

"It's not urban at all," an official of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), who asked not to be identified, admitted to IPS Sunday. He called Marja a "rural community".

"It's a collection of village farms, with typical family compounds," said the official, adding that the homes are reasonably prosperous by Afghan standards.

At least 30 people have been killed and 40 wounded in four suspected suicide bombings in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, hospital officials say.

The first blast happened at about 2000 (1530 GMT). Police said the attackers struck near a prison, a hotel, a mosque and at a city centre road junction.

Kandahar, a former Taliban stronghold, is one of Afghanistan's largest cities.

The US has hinted that the volatile area could be one of the next targets for operations against the Taliban.

The BBC's Quentin Sommerville, in Kabul, says Kandahar is the Taliban's "spiritual home".

Partial results from Iraq's election show Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's coalition ahead in Baghdad, which accounts for 20% of parliament's seats.

Although there are still no results from seven of Iraq's 18 provinces, partial counts released so far this week show Mr Maliki leading in five.

He is followed closely by the former prime minister, Iyad Allawi, who heads a coalition of Sunni and Shia groups.

There have been complaints about the pace of the count for the 7 March poll.

Final results are not expected for another fortnight, after which there is expected to be a long process of coalition-building.

At least 14 people have been killed and 50 others wounded in a suicide attack in Pakistan's Swat valley.

The blast on Saturday at a security checkpoint  in Saidu Sharif town comes just a day after a twin suicide attack on a military convoy in the city of Lahore killed at least 49 people.

Speaking about Saturday's blast, Qazi Jamil, a senior police official, said the attacker was trying to get into a government building used by police and security forces.

The Reuters news agency reported another official as saying the bomber had been travelling in a rickshaw when he detonated his explosives.

At least 35 people have been killed after a dam broke in southern Kazakhstan, unleashing a flood that destroyed a village, officials said.

Torrential rains and rising temperatures triggered the reservoir's burst that left hundreds of homes in ruins on Friday in the village of Kyzyl-Agash near Almaty, Kazakhistan's biggest city.

According to a state news agency, the disaster sparked the evacuation of around 1,000 people to nearby cities.

Hundreds of emergency personnel have reached the region to provide tents for the evacuees along with other much needed aid, authorities said. 

Karim Masimov, Kazakhistan's prime minister, travelled to the region in order to personally supervise the relief efforts.

"We need to have understanding for the situation of the victims ... they have suddenly been left without homes, money and documents,'' Masimov said. 

Israeli soldiers have used tear gas against Palestinian women protesting at the Qalandiya crossing in the occupied West Bank near Jerusalem.

Scuffles broke out on Saturday when dozens of women tried to push through one of the crossing's gates.

The women had gathered at the crossing chanting "Jerusalem is Arab, our eternal capital", briefly planting a Palestinian flag on one of its gates.

Israel has imposed a 48-hour closure of the West Bank, not letting anyone in or out before Sunday dawn.

The Israeli military said four protesters were detained but no one was injured.

Investigators looking into corruption involving reconstruction in Iraq say they have opened more than 50 new cases in six months by scrutinizing large cash transactions -- involving banks, land deals, loan payments, casinos and even plastic surgery -- made by some of the Americans involved in the nearly $150 billion program.

Some of the cases involve people who are suspected of having mailed tens of thousands of dollars to themselves from Iraq, or of having stuffed the money into duffel bags and suitcases when leaving the country, the federal investigators said. In other cases, millions of dollars were moved through wire transfers. Suspects then used cash to buy BMWs, Humvees and expensive jewelry, or to pay off enormous casino debts.

Some suspects also tried to conceal foreign bank accounts in Ghana, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Britain, the investigators said, while in other cases, cash was simply found stacked in home safes

CIA drones are killing terrorists -- and civilians -- in Pakistan almost every day. The unmanned aircraft are becoming the weapon of choice in the fight against al-Qaida and its allies. But the political, military and moral consequences are incalculable. SPIEGEL ONLINE has investigated Barack Obama's remote-controlled campaign against terrorism.

What is the cost of rendering a terrorist harmless once and for all by killing him? During the course of 14 months, the CIA used unmanned and heavily armed small aircraft known as drones to stage 15 strikes against the presumed locations of the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. On Aug. 5, 2009, on the 16th try, the drones finally managed to kill Baitullah Mehsud.

On that day, a Predator drone was hovering about three kilometers (2 miles) above the house of Mehsud's father-in-law, somewhere in the Pakistani province of South Waziristan. The drone's infrared camera sent remarkably sharp images in real time to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The images showed the Taliban leader sitting on the roof of his house, in the company of his wife, his uncle and a doctor.

REYNOSA, Mexico -- The big philosophical question in this gritty border town does not concern trees falling in the forest but bodies falling on the concrete: Does a shootout actually happen if the newspapers print nothing about it, the radio and television stations broadcast nothing, and the authorities never confirm that it occurred?

As two powerful groups of drug traffickers engaged in fierce urban combat in Reynosa in recent weeks, the reality that many residents were living and the one that the increasingly timid news media and the image-conscious politicians portrayed were difficult to reconcile.

"You begin to wonder what the truth is," said one of Reynosa's frustrated and fearful residents, Eunice Peña, a professor of communications. "Is it what you saw, or what the media and the officials say? You even wonder if you were imagining it."

Angry residents who witnessed the carnage began to fill the void, posting raw videos and photos taken with cellphones.

"The pictures do not lie," said a journalist in McAllen, Tex., who monitors what is happening south of the border online but has stopped venturing there himself. "You can hear the gunshots. You can see the bodies. You know it's bad."

About 2,000 protesters from the hardline Muslim group Hizbut Tahrir, which aims to establish a Muslim caliphate, shouted "Islam united will not be defeated! Reject Obama!" and tore printouts of the American flag in Makassar, the capital of  South Sulawesi province.
 
In Solo, in central Java, 500 Hizbut Tahrir supporters carried posters saying "Expel Obama, leader of coloniser!" and "America, the real terrorist!"