Gunmen believed to be members of the extremist Abu Sayyaf group and backed by other armed groups attacked the militia detachment in the centre of the village of Tubigan on the island province of Basilan. One government-armed militiaman was killed as well as 10 civilians.

Basilan provincial police chief Antonio Mendoza said the gunmen torched several houses before escaping. He said 10 other villagers were wounded.

The attack came in the wake of the recent killing of an Abu Sayyaf commander and the arrest of two key members. Government forces had been told to be on alert for reprisal attacks.

The Bush administration introduced Ahmad Chalabi, the former U.S. ally and perennially controversial Iraqi politician, as a secular, pro-Western Mr. Fix-It who could slide right into Saddam Hussein’s old seat.

Instead, he embarrassed the Bush White House with bogus pre-war intelligence, aligned himself with Shiite Muslim extremists and got uncomfortably friendly with Iran.

Now, he’s No. 3 on an electoral ticket alongside Iraq’s biggest Shiite Muslim factions and his name is cropping up regularly as a potential prime minister. If Chalabi does finally ascend to an elected post in Iraq, Washington won’t be cheering. These days, the nimble politician’s fortunes are more closely tied to militant Shiite factions and their allies in Tehran than they are to Washington.

Chief Justice Khwaja Muhammad Sharif passed the orders on a writ petition filed by Khalid Khawaja, the chief coordinator of the Defense Human Rights Commission. “These detenues would not be moved outside Pakistan without prior permission of this court,” the CJ held in the order. The petitioner, through his counsel Tariq Asad, contended that reportedly American and Pakistani agencies conducted a joint raid on February 16 and arrested five ‘Taliban leaders’ from different parts of the country.

Politiken reached a settlement with the groups, which represent 94,923 of Muhammad’s descendants, in which it agreed to print an apology for the affront the cartoons caused. The newspaper has not given up its right to publish the cartoons and has not apologised for having printed them as part of its news coverage.

In a joint statement, the two sides said they wanted to “express their satisfaction with this amicable understanding and settlement, and express the hope that it may in some degree contribute to defusing the present tense situation”.

The collapse of the Iceland-based Icesave online bank in October 2008 hit savers in both countries.
The UK and Dutch governments are seeking repayments from Iceland after they compensated savers themselves.

However, the three governments have been unable to agree on revised payment terms after a week of negotiations.

What do AT&T, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, the Teamsters Union, U.S. Steel, Lowe’s, the NAACP, the Colorado Farm Bureau and the City of St. Louis all have in common?

Give up? They’re part of the motley crew of fewer than three-dozen entities that reported lobbying specifically on the “public option” last year.

Despite the energy and resources that have poured into the public option debate, few players actually detailed their lobbying on this high-stakes proposal, the Center for Responsive Politics has found.

Reporting requirements for lobbying activity allow for broad and ambiguous descriptions of actual lobbying activity. Organizations are required to disclose lobbying on broad, general issues (such as “health issues”), as part of the filing procedures associated with the LD-2 lobbying reports.

Labour has raised more than a trillion pounds in additional taxation since 1997. Yet, unbelievably, Gordon Brown has still managed to run up a deficit of 12.6 per cent of GDP (Greece’s is 12.7 per cent). A far lower level of taxation brought Americans out in spontaneous protest last year.

In other words: Copenhagen without the authority — yet — of Copenhagen.

The world body even has chosen a time and a place for the culmination of the process: a World Summit on Sustainable Development to be held in Rio de Janeiro in 2012, the 20th anniversary of the famed “Earth Summit” that gave focus and urgency to the world environmentalist movement.

The 2012 summit date is significant for another reason: It marks the end of the legal term of agreement for the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, which includes carbon reduction targets, and provided the legal basis for an international cap-and-trade market for carbon, centered in Europe. ...

The IPCC has been under fire from both climate sceptics and some climate scientists after it emerged that a number of mistakes had been included in its most recent report. Most notably, the report contained a claim that Himalayan glaciers could vanish by 2035, a prediction that climate scientists have subsequently confirmed is virtually impossible.

Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi has ratcheted up his campaign against Switzerland by calling for jihad, or holy war, against the European nation.
The two nations have been engaged in tit-for-tat arrests and sanctions in a dispute dating back to 2008 that has become a concern across Europe. But this is the first time the Libyan has called for jihad, a substantial heightening of the rhetoric.

The British daily the Telegraph quoted Qaddafi after he gave a “rambling” address.