Day: September 18, 2006

By LIZ SIDOTI

Used boots fetch $3 and old salt-and-pepper shakers bring in a buck at a makeshift flea market along Highway 27, presumably not what President Bush and Republicans have in mind when they herald a vibrant economy.

Times are "very good for the rich and very, very bad for the poor" who "can’t afford to live," laments Larry Mitchell, 43, a now-and-then merchant peddling his wares recently in a submarine sandwich shop parking lot. He says the middle class is "having a hard time."

With her overhyped CBS Evening News Show not yet three weeks old, perky Katic Couric is in a ratings free fall.

By PATRICK QUINN

In the few short years since the first shackled Afghan shuffled off to Guantanamo, the U.S. military has created a global network of overseas prisons, its islands of high security keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established law.

Disclosures of torture and long-term arbitrary detentions have won rebuke from leading voices including the U.N. secretary-general and the U.S. Supreme Court. But the bitterest words come from inside the system, the size of several major U.S. penitentiaries.

"It was hard to believe I’d get out," Baghdad shopkeeper Amjad Qassim al-Aliyawi told The Associated Press after his release — without charge — last month. "I lived with the Americans for one year and eight months as if I was living in hell."

Captured on battlefields, pulled from beds at midnight, grabbed off streets as suspected insurgents, tens of thousands now have passed through U.S. detention, the vast majority in Iraq.

The U.S. military has been holding an Iraqi photographer working for The Associated Press since April, and the agency asked on Sunday that he either be charged or released.

In the movie "Rules of Engagement," written by James Webb, a wounded Vietnam veteran-turned-lawyer beats seemingly hopeless odds to win a case defending a comrade in arms.

By JOHN HALL
Media General News Service

Insurgents killed at least 30 people and aggravated Iraq’s hostile ethnic divide with a string of bombs in the northern city of Kirkuk, as well as attacks in volatile Anbar province and in Baghdad on Sunday.

The White House and Senate Republicans who revolted against the president’s proposal on tough CIA interrogations of terrorism suspects said on Sunday a compromise was possible to heal a party rift over treatment of prisoners.

Pope Benedict said on Sunday he was deeply sorry Muslims had been offended by his use of a medieval quotation on Islam and violence, but failed to quell the fury of some Islamic groups demanding a full apology.