Source: www.ipsnews.net/rss/iraq.xml
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| Iraq: Beyond the Green Zone - INTER PRESS SERVICE
Unlike most other international news media, who report on Iraq from inside the heavily-fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, IPS's Iraqi correspondents spread across the country to bring you some of the boldest reporting about this war-torn nation. To this IPS adds incisive coverage from the international centres of power where the future of Iraq is being moulded.
"I'd say there are around 5,000 of us in the country, but if you ask me next
week we may well be under 3,000. After twenty centuries of history in
Mesopotamia, we Mandaeans, are about to vanish." Anxiety about the future of
his people is more than evident in the figures given by Saad Atiah Majid,
chairman of Basra's Mandaean Council.
Hundreds of protesters, dozens outfitted in orange jumpsuits
and black hoods, took to the streets outside the White House
on Wednesday to demonstrate against torture and indefinite
detention on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the U.S.
prison facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The recent escalation in Iranian threats to blockade oil
shipments and attack U.S. Navy vessels are meant to push up
the price of oil and divert domestic opinion from an economic
crisis but are not likely to lead to a war in the Persian
Gulf, in the view of Iran experts.
The so-called "Arab Spring" led U.S. network television
evening news coverage during 2011, comprising a total of about
10 percent of all the news coverage provided by the three
major commercial networks during 2011, according to the latest
annual review by the authoritative Tyndall Report.
The Barack Obama administration and the United Nations are
struggling to convince the leadership of the Mujaheddin-e
Khalq (MEK), an Iranian opposition group with cult-like
characteristics, to vacate a camp in Iraq and allow residents
to move to another location in the country or risk the lives
of as many as 3,200 people.
Hundreds of people gathered today outside a U.S. military base where evidence against Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of leaking classified information to the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, is being presented before a military judge for the first time since Manning's arrest.
Defence Secretary Leon Panetta's suggestion that the end of the U.S. troop presence in Iraq is part of a U.S. military success story ignores the fact that the George W. Bush administration and the U.S. military had planned to maintain a semi-permanent military presence in Iraq.
When the United States formally ended its eight-and-a-half year military adventure in Iraq on Thursday with a flag-lowering ceremony presided over by Defence Secretary Leon Panetta Baghdad, hardly anyone here seemed to notice, let alone mark the occasion in a special manner.
As the United States withdraws the last of its 50,000 troops after a nearly nine-year military occupation of Iraq, visiting Iraqi President Nuri al-Maliki had one final request: billions of dollars worth of U.S. weapons for his ragtag armed forces.
A new book on the influential New York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman sets out to debunk his hawkish, neoliberal views,
accusing him of overt racism, factual errors and skewed
judgments on issues ranging from the U.S. invasion of Iraq to
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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