Hillary Rodham Clinton announced that she will run for President in 2008, and Barack Hussein Obama released a video on the Internet announcing that he has formed a presidential exploratory committee. It was reported that Obama had concealed that he was raised as a Muslim and had attended a madrassah as a child.BBCWashington PostSeventy Iraqis died and 170 were injured when two bombs exploded at a university in Baghdad.CNNThe United Nations announced that 34,452 civilians were killed in Iraq last year, a number nearly three times higher than previous estimates by the Iraqi interior ministry.BBC“I think,” said President George W. …

The Cloaca Maxima, 1872 The 110th Congress convened on Capitol Hill, and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California kicked off her tenure as America’s first female speaker of the House with four days of parties dubbed “Pelosi-Palooza.” The festivities included a performance by singer Tony Bennett and an honorary street-naming in Pelosi’s hometown of Baltimore. Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia disrupted the Congress’s opening prayer with shouts of “Yes, Lord!” and “Mmmhmmm!” and Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts mimed tipping a bottle to his mouth. Congress’s first Muslim member took his oath on a Koran once owned by Thomas Jefferson, …

In Iraq car bombs killed 24 people,BBC Newsand a British helicopter was shot down over Basra, killing all five crew members.The GuardianIn Anbar, at a ceremony for new Iraqi soldiers, the graduates were told that they would be sent outside of their home province to serve, leading several soldiers to tear off their clothes in protest.The Washington PostIraqipoliceshot a 14-year-old boy named Ahmed Khalil in the head for being a gayprostitute.Gay.comIn Afghanistan the power of the Taliban was growing.The New York TimesAnalysts found that President George W. Bush had claimed exemption from 750 laws,The Boston Globeand Bush said that the …

Weighing the soul, 1875. A suicide bomber set off a bomb at a mess tent on a U.S. base in Mosul, killing 22 and wounding 69. Among the dead were 13 American soldiers and four employees and subcontractors of Halliburton. A spokeswoman for Halliburton called for a full investigation into the attack. South of Kirkuk, insurgents set an oil well on fire,AP and south of Baghdad, an explosives-rigged gas tanker blew up, killing at least eight.AP Families returned to the bombed-out city of Falluja and found little clean water.APAPDonald Rumsfeld made a surprise trip to Mosul on Christmas Eve.New York …

North Korea began removing United Nations monitoring devices from its Yongbyon nuclear reactor and from its stockpile of plutonium; experts said that North Korea could potentially build a small nuclear arsenal within a year. Russia’s deputy foreign minister blamed George W. Bush for the crisis: “How should a small country feel when it is told that it is all but part of forces of evil of biblical proportions and should be fought against until total annihilation?” Secretary of State Colin Powell declared that Iraq has already committed a “material breach” of the latest Security Council resolutions by failing to disclose …

President Bush sent an envoy to Israel with the aim of restarting peace talks with the Palestinian Authority. Hamas proved that it still has the power to prevent such negotiations by sending a wave of suicide bombers into Israel, which culminated in a double bombing on a crowded Jerusalem street that left at least 10 people dead. Body parts littered the neighborhood. Yasir Arafat declared a state of emergency and arrested 110 suspected Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants. Israel retaliated by bombing Gaza City with cruise missiles. Prime Minister Sharon “declared war on terror.” A paper in the scientific journal …

Liberal political groups were attempting to rally SenateDemocrats to oppose the nomination of John Ashcroft to be attorney general of the United States, though few seriously believed that members of the Democrat Party were brave or principled enough to do what it would take to defeat the right-wing Christian extremist.Afghanistan’s chief mullah decreed that encouraging a Muslim to convert to Christianity was a capital crime; Mullah Muhammad Omar also let it be known that selling any kind of anti-Islamic literature would be punished by five years in prison.An Iranian court sentenced several people, including a prominent journalist, to long prison …