Mahmoud Abbas was elected president of the Palestinian Authority. He dedicated his victory to “the soul of the brother martyr Yasir Arafat and to our people.”New York TimesEarlier in 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…
Ukraine’s Supreme Court ordered a second presidential run-off to be held by December 26 after it ruled last month’s fraud-plagued election invalid.New York TimesSupporters of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, the…
White House photo. George W. Bush named national security advisor Condoleezza Rice to replace Colin Powell as secretary of state.Washington Post A few days later,Condoleezza Rice entered the hospital for…
A kinkajou, 1886. Nobel Prize winner Rahman Abdel-Raouf Arafat Al-Qudwa, better known as Yasir Arafat, died of unknown causes at a French military hospital. He was 75.AP Samples of Arafat’s…
United States military personnel who worked at Camp Delta, the largest prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, revealed that many prisoners there were tortured by being forced to endure strobe…
A burning plain. The United Nations Security Council passed another resolution asking the Sudanese government to prevent its proxies from slaughtering people in Darfur (China, Algeria, Pakistan, and Russia abstained).…
Senator Pat Roberts, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, proposed eliminating the CIA, removing the National Security Agency from the Pentagon’s control, and creating three new spy agencies governed…
The United Nations continued to issue warnings about the ongoing genocide in Sudan, where Arab militias, known as Janjaweed, have been slaughtering and raping black farmers in Darfur; more than…
The Senate Intelligence Committee released a scathing report on the CIA’s unfounded, unjustified, and unreasonable claims about Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction; the report was oddly silent, however, about…
The wire master and his puppets, 1875. In a furtive ceremony held two days ahead of schedule in order to pre-empt violence, the United States transferred “sovereignty” to Iraq. About…