Even as American and Iraqi troops are fighting to establish control of the Sadr City section of this capital, the Iraqi government’s program to restore basic services like electricity, sewage and trash collection is lagging, jeopardizing the effort to win over the area’s wary residents.

An American expert in torture techniques has denounced his government for allowing "waterboarding" to be practised against terror suspects, just as a graphic advertisement showing the brutal reality of the technique is unveiled to British cinema-goers. 

The head of Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy, Professor David Flint, says the selection of the governance panel at the 2020 Summit was a gerrymander worthy of an African dictatorship. 

Professor Flint told a Sydney lunch celebrating the Queen's birthday that the governance panel that called for an Australian republic was stacked with pro-republican delegates. 

It’s been obvious almost from the beginning of the first Bush Administration that neither Bush nor his kitchen cabinet had much interest in or knowledge of the world outside the USA.

They blundered from one embarrassment to another, screwing up or forgetting funny foreign names, confusing Sunnis and Shiites (that’s after the penny finally dropped that the Middle East wasn’t populated by homogeneous Muslim terrorists), expressing child-like amazement at the size of Brazil on a map and so on. 

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay.

"President" Dick Cheney  - since our little boy Bush was being occupied by a dinner with a pope - attended the 2008 dinner for Radio and TV correspondents as a guest speaker.

Either he wrote his own gags or he had a team of army sergeants and neo-con neo-comics who wrote them for him, splurging on the bad taste like mouldy marmalade on toast.  

alan ramsey 

Most of us thought the country, tired of Howard's miserable mob, had elected Rudd's new mob to "get on with it" and govern with a bit of decency and policy difference. What we didn't understand was the new bloke's quaint idea of just what that means. 

Kevin Rudd's world tour might be over, but his fingerprints were everywhere this week. Clearly emboldened by his receipt of a campy faux salute from Kevin Rudd a fortnight ago in Bucharest, the American President himself this week experimented with the Rudd tactic of high-level informality - on the Pope. 

The effects of the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the downturn in the U.S. economy have cascaded into Mexico, causing a sudden, precipitous drop in the flow of money sent home by Mexican immigrants and highlighting this country's dependence on its wealthier northern neighbour. 

A wickedly funny faux-children's biography recounts Young Dick Cheney’s youthful lust for guns, oil, and the girl of his dreams. 

He was born among the big skies and cow pies of the Great American West.

And yet from these humble beginnings, he would grow to become the most famous, most powerful Dick ever to inhabit the Vice Presidency.

The war in Iraq has become "a major debacle" and the outcome "is in doubt" despite improvements in security from the build-up in U.S. forces, according to a highly critical study published Thursday by the Pentagon's premier military educational institute. 

Heavy security for torch in Delhi 

No exact times were given for the torch relay amid fears of protests. 

California is to mortgage lending what Chicago is to pork bellies. For years, that meant it was a place with soaring house values; today, the foreclosure rate across the state is twice the national average and going up fast. Riverside County, outside Los Angeles, may be the foreclosure capital of the country, with a rate close to six times the national average. And housing prices are in freefall. 

President George Bush today announced a new national goal to help tackle climate change: to stop the growth of US greenhouse gas emissions by 2025. 

Bush, in a speech devoted to climate change, said power stations would need to reduce emission levels to well below previously projected targets.